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
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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.
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