Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

== Summary ==
Payne’s
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom is a
social history (“bottom up”) of the civil rights movement (specifically SNCC)
and the local people of the Mississippi Delta. These local activists, rather
than the national leaders and organizations that has dominated historical
scholarship, were the key mobilizing force and impetus of the civil rights
movement. This book also examines the young leaders who adopted and adapted a
particular organizing tradition of social struggle rooted in the Delta.
Different from the community mobilizing tradition more popularly remembered in
such events as Selma and the march on Washington, the organizing tradition
(personified by Bob Moses and Ella Baker) emphasized the long-term development
of leadership in ordinary men and women. Ultimately, the young activists of the
1960s brought “back to the rural Black South a refined, codified version of
something that had begun there, an expression of the historical vision of
ex-slaves, men and women who understood that, for them, maintain a deep sense
of community was itself an act of resistance.” (405) Payne’s book builds off of
what Steve Lawson sees as three generations of scholarship: the early work was
top-down (national orgs., legislative acts, and judicial decisions); this was
followed by (late 1970s) a generation of studies taking local communities and
grassroots work as their focal point; more recently a third generation of work
attempts to link the local with the national, social with the political
(interactive – e.g. Aldon Morris). Payne’s work and bibliographic essays thus
calls for a new age of scholarship that links the local and the national. As an
interactive link, new scholarship can shed light on gender dynamics, leadership
styles, and the importance of local people as part of the national movement. Payne
writes (and argues powerfully throughout the book and essay) that the
traditional view of the movement, popular or scholarly, “has failed to help us
appreciate the persistence of a George Greene, the sustained courage of the
McGhees, the growth of a Lula Belle Johnson or a Mary Lane, or Mr’s Hamer’s
sense of community or humanity, or the strengthening faith of an Aaron
Johnson.” (441) This book, as a whole, tells a story of racial terrorism, black
women, civil rights workers, and the willingness and bravery of local people to
defend themselves.