Product Description: A collection and examination of the creative literary work of Freedom School students discovering pathways to racial justice

Product Description: Created in 1964 as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Schools were launched by educators and activists to provide an alternative education for African American students that would facilitate student activism and participatory democracy...read more

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality.   During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy.   Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.    Instructor's Guide

Product Description: As Mississippi’s attorney general from 1956 to 1969, Joe T. Patterson led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launch of the Sovereignty Commission―charged “to protect the sovereignty of Mississippi from encroachment thereon by the federal government”―which made manifest a century-old states’ rights ideology couched in the rhetoric of massive resistance...read more

Product Description: In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around...read more

Lauren Wilde struggles to escape her overprotective father, Victor, one of San Francisco's wealthiest men, and find a job and a man on her own

Product Description: Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer features more than forty unpublished black-and-white photographs and substantial writings by the prominent civil rights activist Reverend Ed King. The images and text provide a unique perspective on Mississippi during the summer of 1964...read more

Product Description: During the summer of 1964, over one thousand people, including many college students went to Mississippi as part of a state wide effort to register African-American voters and to establish teaching centers that became known as "Freedom Schools...read more

Product Description: In David L. Jordan's earliest memories, he is lying in the fields, the black earth beneath him and the sky and sun above, filtered through the leaves of the cotton plants. The youngest of five children in a family of sharecroppers, he was nursed and grew up in those fields, joining his family in their work as soon as he was old enough to carry a sack...read more

Civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, a place and time known for the brutal murders of Emmett Till, Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, and others. Nonetheless, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings, and lynching's of black Mississippians and reported the horrid incidents to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson as the NAACP's first full-time Mississippi field secretary. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn state-supported school segregation, and devoted himself to a career that cost him his life. This biography of a lesser-known but seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder. Selfless dedication marked the life of Medgar Evers, and while this remains his story, it is also a testament to the important role that grassroots activism played in exacting social change during some of America's most turbulent and violent times.

Product Description: In 1960, Mississippi society still drew a sharp line between its African American and white communities. In the 1890s, the state had created a repressive racial system that ensured white supremacy by legally segregating black residents and removing their basic citizenship and voting rights...read more

Product Description: Once in a great while, a photograph captures the essence of an era: Three people--one black and two white--demonstrate for equality at a lunch counter while a horde of cigarette-smoking hotshots pour catsup, sugar, and other condiments on the protesters' heads and down their backs...read more

Product Description: The world's eyes were on Mississippi during the summer of 1964, when civil rights activists launched an ambitious African American voter registration project and were met with violent resistance from white supremacists. Sue Sojourner and her husband arrived in Holmes County, Mississippi, in the wake of this historic time, known as "Freedom Summer...read more

Product Description: In May 1964, Bill McAtee became the new minister at Columbia Presbyterian Church, deep in the Piney Woods of south Mississippi. Soon after his arrival, three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered outside Philadelphia, Mississippi...read more

Product Description: In the Segregated Deep South, When Lynching and Klansmen and Jim Crow laws ruled, there stood a line of foot soldiers ready to sacrifice their lives for the right to vote, to enter rooms marked 'White Only,' and to live with simple dignity...read more

Product Description: Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues...read more

Presents the life of the assassinated NAACP leader as revealed through his correspondence, notes, and transcribed speeches, describing his strong commitment to the cause of civil rights despite threats to his personal safety.

Lauren Wilde struggles to escape her overprotective father, Victor, one of San Francisco's wealthiest men, and find a job and a man on her own