The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi ed. by Ted Ownby (review)

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1 The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi ed. by Ted Ownby (review) Erin Boade The Southern Quarterly, Volume 52, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp (Review) Published by College of Arts and Letters, University of Southern Mississippi For additional information about this article Access provided at 15 Apr :40 GMT with no institutional affiliation

2 VOL. 52, NO. 1 (FALL 2014) 227 BOOK REVIEW The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Ted Ownby (ed.). Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, Pp $54.00 (cloth). ISBN: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi should interest both teachers and scholars. This multi-disciplinary 2013 collection of essays grew out of the eponymous 2010 Porter Fortune, Jr. History Symposium sponsored by the University of Mississippi. While the main focus of the collection is historical, scholars from a variety of disciplines political science, religious studies, sociology make contributions here, revealing the range and scope of scholarship about the movement. The editor, Ted Ownby, outlines four directions in contemporary civil rights movement scholarship: a move from the national to the local; an intentional scholarly broadening of the movement s scope prior to the mid- 1950s and beyond the late 1960s; an increased attention to what constitutes the political ; and a focus upon the contours of white resistance and African American responses to it. The essays here reflect these trends, and the collection is organized into three pairs and two trios of essays that address these concerns. The first trio about local organizing opens the volume, followed by three pairs devoted to education, religion, and self-defense. The final three usher its readers into the near-present by discussing the politics of how the civil rights movement is remembered and potentially enacted currently. Wesley Hogan s essay on organizing begins the volume, and it questions the basic premises of grassroots organizing using the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee s (SNCC) work in Mississippi in 1963 leading up to Freedom Summer and its work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as exemplars of grassroots organizing, which she argues depends on local rather than outside leadership. She rightly emphasizes the grassroots nature of the Mississippi movement, but more attention to the tactics organizers used and less to laying out, defining, and defending her terms would be helpful. Francoise Hamlin investigates Aaron Henry s activist and later political career in light of what she terms flexible alliances, those that could be pragmatically useful yet ultimately detrimental. Henry acted as a liaison between the NAACP and the Congress of Federated Organizations (COFO) during Freedom Summer; when the former withdrew its support from the latter that summer, Henry proved more and more willing to concede principles to white moderates as well as those to their political right. This chapter provides welcome explanation of the conflicts among Mississippi organizations and the tensions between retaining the moral high ground in re-

3 228 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY fusing to compromise and making realpolitik concessions. Michael William s biographical discussion of Medgar Evers completes this trio, and the most interesting part of this piece is the author s recounting of Evers May 1963 response to Jackson s mayor Allen Thompson s then-contemporary public pronouncement of rosy race relations in that city. In Evers s response, the NAACP leader connected the struggle in Mississippi with African nations separate pushes for independence, and that act likely cost him his life almost exactly a month later when he was killed in his driveway by the sniper fire of Byron De La Beckwith. These three essays have limitations, but they do offer welcome understandings of the complications of local organizing. Their differing perspectives and emphases invite other scholars to continue excavating the Mississippi movement s multiple contours. The next two sets of essays address education and religion, both undeniably important aspects of the Mississippi movement(s). Jelani Favors discusses the generation of students between the 1920s New Negroes and the militant African Americans of the 1960s, focusing on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and what she terms a second curriculum, hidden spaces that taught race consciousness and resistance to white supremacy behind the curtain of state control at Jackson State University as well as other HBCUs throughout the South. In spite of this hidden curriculum, though, administrators at state-funded HBCUs faced enormous pressure to curtail and punish student activism. In contrast, Robert Luckett s essay focuses on the state s persecution of the Ole Miss white and tenured professor James Silver, who, at a professional conference, called Mississippi a closed society and who was subsequently forced out of public education in the state through a series of complicated legislative and gubernatorial maneuvers that at one point threatened the University of Mississippi s accreditation. In the next essay, Carter Lyon investigates the 1963 church visit campaign, an effort by African American students and a few white clergymen to integrate Sunday worship spaces. This particularly illuminating piece reveals the tensions about segregationist ideas among black and white Christians, the latter of whom believed that segregation was both religiously ordained and divinely sanctified. Joseph Reiff next analyzes Born of Conviction, a 1962 statement signed by twenty-eight newly-minted and Mississippi-based Methodist ministers trained throughout the US This group embraced an ideal of color-blindness while rejecting Communism that last bit becomes understandable once one realizes the extent to which segregationists engaged in red-baiting throughout the civil rights movement, dating back to the 1920s. (Jeff Woods Black Struggle, Red Scare offers good background about this topic.) This section of the volume underscores not only the obvious role of

4 VOL. 52, NO. 1 (FALL 2014) 229 education and religion in the movement, but also the vexed matters of interpretation, power, and control facing movement leaders, would-be proponents, and their varied antagonists. The penultimate pair of essays addresses questions of violence and self-defense that the movement both faced and embraced, complicating popular and scholarly notions of the civil rights movement s uniform nonviolence. David Cunningham examines various manifestations of the KKK in Mississippi, arguing for the organization s protean nature: depending on the circumstances, local members adopted more or less violent reactions to African American resistance. Just as the civil rights movement was and is not monolithic, so too is what we often refer to as the Klan, which we too often dismiss with stereotypes that foreclose careful analysis. Akinyele Umoja next offers an analysis of the Louisiana-bred Deacons for Defense as a paramilitary organization that had distinct hierarchical features and that took root in Mississippi to protect civil rights workers. This group of armed men rose to national prominence during James Meredith s March Against Fear and Intimidation in June These two essays emphasize the ever-complicated relationship between white supremacist violence and resistance on the one hand and black activism and resistance on the other; both these pieces illustrate that complexity. While the first sets of essays engage the Mississippi movement s complexity and context, the final set of essays treats its officially recognized aftermath, whether that aftermath is understood through the lens of politics, constraints and opportunities on how students are taught about the movement and drawn into it, or how local white and black people remember it. Byron Orey examines the impact that black legislators have had in Mississippi since 1965; because of gerrymandering in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, it became historically difficult for such lawmakers to be elected, and when they were, their legislation had scant chance of making it out of committee for a variety of reasons, including outright snubs by congressional leadership on both chambers floors. This climate for black-sponsored legislation is improving, albeit slowly, and Orey rightly reminds us that we have the MFDP s 1964 hardline stance in Atlantic City to thank for that. Chris Asch s essay reminds us of the treacherous paths we tread as teachers of the movement in the Deep South, where there is pressure to focus on the Magnolia State s 1990s motto, only positive Mississippi is spoken here (251). Upon being discouraged from using Eyes on the Prize in his lesson plans, he proceeded to do just that, and subsequently co-founded the Freedom Project in 1998 in Mississippi s rural Sunflower County, a project that seeks to carry the Freedom Schools promise into a new generation. Finally, eminent historian Emilye Crosby details the widely divergent perspectives of black and white

5 230 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY people in Claibourne County, Mississippi, in the movement s wake; in general, white people there think that there was too much fuss over not much of a problem, while black people are convinced that much more change needs to happen. Her piece is a fitting ending to this volume, as her point is crucial: many white Mississippians as well as the white nation at large continue to mis-hear their black counterparts, remaining unable to hear the entailments of centuries of black oppression that all Americans bear. While some of the essays I have discussed here have weaknesses, taken together, they do an admirable job of sounding the cacophony of the Mississippi movement. Readers looking for a unified and coherent picture of it will be disappointed by the variety of arguments and approaches offered within. But this seeming shortcoming is one of this collection s strengths: the history of the movement in Mississippi continues to be fraught, heavy, and dissonant. The most compelling of the essays Lyon s, Reiff s, Cunnin gham s, Omoje s, and Crosby s do so by introducing new approaches to and ways of seeing the Mississippi movement and its local and national reception, broadly conceived. If the Mississippi movement can teach us anything, and indeed it should, it is that its local and everyday actors on the ground needed to respond to vastly different situations that changed with incredible speed and fluidity. Our histories and analyses need to continue to develop along the avenues Ownby points out in this volume, and I would urge others to take up the multidisciplinary approaches that this volume contains. Erin Boade The University of Southern Mississippi