With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders next week in Jackson, I thought I would share a couple of books with you about the Civil Rights Era here in Mississippi and nationwide.

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders by Eric Etheridge

Eric, a native Mississippian, has put together a fantastic book with the mugshots, current photos and interviews with over 80  Freedom Riders of 1961.  These brave people came to Jackson in the spring and summer of 1961 determined to bring civil rights to the state by challenging the segregation laws that were in place.

Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge ‘breach of peace’.  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission whose purpose was to “perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi” recorded the name, mug shot and personal details of each Freedom Rider that was arrested.  Of course, by doing so they unintentionally but luckily for us, created a treasure trove of information about these heroes of the Civil Rights Movement here in Mississippi.  This information is collected here in Breach of Peace and is a wonderful source of information about a chapter in Mississippi and U.S. history that has yet to find closure.

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer

John Dittmer, who was a professor of history at Tougaloo College from 1967-1979, has written a history of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in shocking detail.  While he does mention the national figures, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he mainly focuses on the largely forgotten grass root civil rights workers.  Dittmer’s point is that these national leaders were forced to act because of the determination of the ‘local people’ and their refusal to give up the struggle for racial justice.

If you would like to know more about the reunion events for the Freedom Riders, check out their website.

Willie McGee’s story wouldn’t have been very unusual were it but for a few factors.  After all, he was black, and it was Mississippi, and it was 1945, and he was accused – then quickly convicted – of raping a white woman. There were allegations of an affair, with the woman pointing the finger in the courtroom suspected of actually being McGee’s lover…yes, yes, it sounds lots like the plot for To Kill A Mockingbird, doesn’t it?  Typically he would’ve waited a short while, been executed, and then lost amongst the many many many other similar sad cases of his day.

But!  Here are some curveballs about Willie McGee’s story that have led to The Eyes of Willie McGee: well, first of all, a lawyer from New York was hired for him by the Civil Rights Congress and so he got loads of attention.  His case was actually pleaded – and Americans like William Faulkner and Norman Mailer began speaking out about it.  This was the budding (if that) Civil Rights movement, though, and despite going all the way to the Supreme Court and being investigated by the FBI, Willie McGee still faced the death sentence.  He was executed in Mississippi’s ‘Travelling Electric Chair” in 1951.  It was – another curveball – recorded by a 20-year-old college student named Jim Leeson, who wasn’t at the execution but rather recorded it off of the radio.  Leeson was later a professor at Vanderbilt, and played the recording for some of his students – among them Alex Heard.  Twenty-five years later, Heard began investigating a bit more into McGee’s story, found out nobody had ever spent too much time investigating it, and began working on what is now his book.  It’s a fascinating story, unusual but familiar in so many sad ways.  NPR did a feature on McGee’s story recently – read about it here.

Susie

There’s a tricky and special type of book out there that I don’t often completely trust; a certain type of nonfiction, the kind that recounts real-life events with a little too much zeal.  It’s a fine line to walk, that one between historical fiction and dramatic nonfiction, and I guess that makes me skeptical of ‘nonfiction’ that reads as smoothly as a novel.  It makes me sound curmudgeonly but I must be honest – when it comes to certain subjects, I am reluctant to give nonfiction authors much creative license.

And so when Hellhound on His Trail came out, I was excited but also a bit nervous, because all I heard about was how easy it was to read, and how it read just like a novel, and all the rest of it.  That nervousness, however, was tempered by the fact that Hampton Sides has written two highly acclaimed works of nonfiction before: Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers.  So I focused on that and bought the book and was pleased to note the reassuring tone in Sides’s note to readers:

“The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had ’employed the novelists’s methods without his license,’ and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here.  Thought I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction.”

And sure enough, it DOES read fluidly. Sides’s chronicling of how James Earl Ray (a.k.a. Eric Galt) escaped prison, lived his life down in Mexico for a while, drifted up to L.A., the whole time dreaming of how one day he’d be a director of porn films – it’s fascinating, and well-written, and, most importantly for this reader, not overdone.  I haven’t yet encountered language that made me feel uneasy about this being classed as ‘nonfiction’.

James Earl Ray aside, however, perhaps the most interesting thing to me about Hellhound on His Trail is reading about the absolute hatred J. Edgar Hoover had for Martin Luther King, and the resulting relationship the FBI had with him – both before and after his death.

Here’s an interesting article about how, with the help of history buff Vince Hughes, Sides researched much of this book.

Susie

Gene Dattel will be signing his new book, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power, today, November 4, at 5 pm.

Dattel grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta and studied history at Yale and law at Vanderbilt.  He then embarked on a twenty-year career in financial capital markets as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and at Morgan Stanley.  Mr. Dattel is now an independent scholar who lectures widely.  He lives in New York City.

For more than 130 years, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, cotton was the leading export crop of the United States.  And the connection between cotton and the African-American experience became central to the history of the republic.  American’s most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown.  Both before and after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century, blacks were relegated to work the cotton fields.  Their social and economic situation was aggravated by a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion that caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South.

Gene Dattel’s pioneering study explores the historical roots of these central social issues.  In telling detail, Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly unappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America’s rise to economic power.  Cotton production became a driving force in U.S territorial expansion and sectional economic integration and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States.  Without slave-produced cotton, the South could have never initiated the Civil War.  Cotton continued to exert a powerful influence on both the American economy and race relations in the years after the Civil War.

This story has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of international finance.

A few reviews:

“This is a book not just for those who grew up in the cotton fields of Mississippi as I did, but a challenging and compelling account of the complex role that cotton has played in the economic, racial, and political history of our nation.”–William F. Winter, former governor of Mississippi
“Two themes, one explicit, one implicit, compete in this exploration of the link between the development of American capitalism and the devastation of the African-American community. The price of cotton as the determinant of America’s destiny, influencing and even overcoming individual will and ethical behavior’ is the fully explicit one . . . The secondary and competing theme is Northern complicity in the slave trade, the cotton economy, segregation, racism and the development of the `black underclass in the North and South, with its destructive behavioral characteristics.” –Publishers Weekly

“Gene Dattel has written a very important and necessary book, by locating the expansion of cotton production as a driving force not only in the antebellum South, but in the economy at large. He exposes slave-produced cotton’s central role in causing the Civil War and as the global economic engine that prolonged slavery. Cotton was coveted by New York merchants and the textile barons of England and New England. He shows that after the Civil War cotton and race remained linked until technology finally displaced black labor. He devastatingly critiques the complicit role of the racist North in containing African Americans in the cotton fields. The legacy of this vital crop was economic growth and the social tragedy of slavery and segregation. No examination of American heritage is complete without an understanding of the force that cotton wrought upon its economic and social landscape. America’s racial dilemma cannot be sequestered to one part of the country.” –Roger Wilkins, Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emeritus, George Mason University

by Kelly Pickerill

For those of you who came up to Lemuria when Alex Alston and James Dickerson were here, there are several events coming up involving civil rights issues that you might be interested in.  Charles Eagles will be here tonight at five o’clock, signing his book The Price of Defiance.  After he signs, we’ll all head down to the Dot.com building to a reading and discussion of his book.  The event will be taped for C-SPAN’s BookTV!  Come join us for what is sure to be a very interesting evening!

TONIGHT’S EVENT, signing @ 5, reading @ 5:30
[reserve]
After fighting a protracted legal battle, James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962 as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. The riot that followed his arrival on campus seriously wounded scores of U.S. Marshals and killed two civilians, more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. To restore order, the Kennedy administration dispatched thousands of soldiers to Oxford.

In The Price of Defiance, Charles Eagles shows that the stunning eruption of violence resulted from the “closed society’s” long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law. Using many previously untapped sources, including FBI and U.S. Marshal files, army and university records, and Meredith’s personal papers, Eagles provides invaluable background for understanding the historic moment by demonstrating the University’s–and Mississippi’s–history of aggressive resistance to desegregation from the post-World War II years on, including the deliberate flouting of federal law. Ultimately, the price of such behavior–the price of defiance–was not only the murderous riot that rocked the nation and almost closed the university but also the nation’s enduring scorn for Ole Miss and Mississippi. Eagles paints a remarkable portrait of Meredith himself by describing his unusual family background, his personal values, and his service in the U.S. Air Force, all of which prepared him for his experience at Ole Miss.

Based on extraordinary research, Eagles vividly portrays the culture of segregation and the eventual desegregation of one of the last bastions of racial segregation, Ole Miss.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd, signing @ 5, reading @ 5:30
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More than a decade before the media reported on the disturbing events surrounding James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a different story of interaction between the races was quietly taking place on that same campus. The Education of Mr. Mayfield describes the friendship between the school’s first art department chairman, Stuart Purser, and the artist, M.B. Mayfield. Purser offered Mayfield a job as a custodian and secretly gave the artist one-on-one art lessons and arranged for classroom doors to be open so Mayfield could listen to class lectures, while sitting in the nearby broom closet. David Magee tells the story of how M.B. Mayfield overcame many of the obstacles placed in his way by racism, but he also tells of the quiet acts of courage displayed by some white Southerners who found ways to defy the injustices of that time and place.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24th, signing @ 5, reading @ 5:30
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Without T.R.M. Howard, we would have probably never heard of Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou and quite possibly Rosa Parks.  Civil rights leader, wealthy entrepreneur, showman and promoter, or unconventional surgeon–Howard was one of the leading renaissance men of twentieth century black history.

Long before Martin Luther King, Jr. came on the scene, Howard successfully organized a grassroots boycott against Jim Crow, played a central role in the search for evidence and witnesses in the Emmett Till murder case, and founded a hospital that provided care to thousands of low-income blacks.   Well known for his benevolence, fun-loving lifestyle, and fabulous parties attended by such celebrities as Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, he kept the secrets of the white elite but was armed to the teeth “just in case.”

With this remarkable biography, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito secure Howard’s rightful place in African American history. Drawing from dozens of interviews with Howard’s friends and contemporaries, as well as FBI files, court documents, and private papers, the authors present a fittingly vibrant portrait of this iconoclastic businessman and tireless activist.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7th, signing @ 5, reading @ 5:30
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Early in 1966, African Americans in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, aided by activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), established an all-black, independent political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group, whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther, was formed in part to protest the barriers to black enfranchisement that had for decades kept every single African American of voting age off the county’s registration books. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most African Americans in this overwhelmingly black county remained too scared even to try to register. Their fear stemmed from the county’s long, bloody history of whites retaliating against blacks who strove to exert the freedom granted to them after the Civil War.

Amid this environment of intimidation and disempowerment, African Americans in Lowndes County viewed the LCFO as the best vehicle for concrete change. Their radical experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael who used the Lowndes County program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California-based activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the LCFO panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This party and its adopted symbol went on to become the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, yet long-obscured is the crucial role that Lowndes County–historically a bastion of white supremacy–played in spurring black activists nationwide to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways.

Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells, for the first time, the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.

Alex A. Alston, Jr., former president of the Mississippi State Bar Association and long time friend and journalist James L. Dickerson will be signing their new book, Devil’s Sanctuary: An Eyewitness History of the Mississippi Hate Crimes this afternoon, Thursday, July 9, at Lemuria.

Having had a chance to peruse this informative and challenging book, I can say personally that these two men have penned an accurate and informative account of civil rights era in Mississippi. For an honest portrayal few could do better with this sordid history than two native Mississippians who have both been in the thick of things for the last several decades. Come get your book signed at 5 p.m. today, read it, and then come back on Tuesday, August 4, at 5 p.m. when the authors will read selections from the book and take questions.

As an added note:
“The New York Post” gave the book a thumbs up this week in a review! This will be a book talked about for some time to come by movers and shakers in Mississippi. An autographed copy should be wanted!

-Nan

Mississippi native Eric Etheridge has recently published a coffee table book of photography called Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders which portrays the historic summer of 1961 through interviews of the former freedom riders, and their current portraits alongside their mugshots from the time.

Having grown up in Jackson, I can’t remember the first time I was made aware of segregation, or the role our state played in the civil rights movement. Though I can’t remember when I learned about this part of our history, I’ve always been sensitive to the attitude of some people in our community: that these events happened in our past, and though they are an important and controversial part of history, we ought not dwell upon them but instead, continue to move forward and distance ourselves from the past. Thus, it came as quite a shock in college when my sociology class read Doug McAdams’ book, Freedom Summer.

Reading Freedom Summer forced me to come face to face with this reality: I grew up believing that a great temporal and physical distance existed between me and my culture’s not so distant past when, in fact, the people in Freedom Summer filled the streets of my hometown in the not so distant past. The images depicting that summer were filled with tanks, policemen and rioters. It was at this point that I finally understood that these are people I pass in my neighborhood and stand in line behind in the grocery store.

Many of the documents and mug shots from that summer remain forever in posterity in the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History where Etheridge discovered them and came up with the idea to use them to recreate this history. In his introduction to Breach of Peace, Etheridge mentions that he found no evidence that the Sovereignty Commission used the mug shots after they were filed, but expresses his belief of their importance today, saying: “… they’re invaluable to us today. They give us the chance to take the measure of these men and women in the very heat of battle, and perhaps to take measure of ourselves in their responding gaze. Here they are, four decades later, patiently and urgently awaiting our reply,” (29). In my humble opinion, through his interviews and the creation of Breach of Peace, forty years later Etheridge attempts to respond to their gazes.

Mr. Etheridge will be at Lemuria signing Breach of Peace on Friday, May 30 at 5:00 and giving a short talk at 5:30… we hope to see you all there to celebrate this beautiful book!