Local people
Subtitle: the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi
By: John Dittmer.
Series: Blacks in the New World
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 530
Subjects: African Americans -- Mississippi -- Politics and government; African Americans -- Suffrage -- Mississippi; Civil rights movements -- Mississippi -- History -- 20th century; Mississippi -- Race relations; Mississippi -- Politics and government -- 1865-1950; Mississippi -- Politics and government -- 1951-
Description: For decades the most racially repressive state in the nation fought bitterly and violently to maintain white supremacy. John Dittmer traces the monumental battle waged by civil rights organizations and by local people, particularly courageous members of the black communities who were willing to put their lives on the line to establish basic human rights for all citizens of the state.

Local People tells the whole grim story in depth for the first time, from the unsuccessful attempts of black World War II veterans to register to vote to the seating of a civil rights-oriented Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Particularly dramatic - and heartrending - is Dittmer's account of the tumultuous decade of the sixties: the freedom rides of 1961, which resulted in the imprisonment at Parchman of dozens of participants; the violent reactions to protests in McComb and Jackson and to voter registration drives in Greenwood and other cities; the riot in Oxford when James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss; the cowardly murder of long-time leader Medgar Evers; and the brutal Klan lynchings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [439]-512) and index.