Striggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Dittmer, et. al.

Archives 1996
From the 1996 Archives of
Black Issues In Higher Education

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
- book reviews

by Julian Bond

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1994. $29.95 hard, $14.95 paper

These three excellent books represent a developing and welcome trend in civil rights historiography.

Previous histories have described the modern-day 20th-century civil rights movement from the top down -- as a story whose main characters are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most have also described the development of the movement within a restricted time line -- from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that introduced King and his espousal of nonviolent resistance to the passage of important civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

Under that time-bound restriction, the movement began suddenly out of nowhere in the middle 1950s; by the middle 1960s it had triumphed. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the active cooperation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, segregation had been vanquished. The battle had been won.

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Blogging across Mississippi; Birdia Keglar Highway Dedicated

Birdia Keglar Highway Dedication
June 1, 2007
Charleston, Miss.

Photos from the highway dedication that took place June 1 are posted. You can view (and download) from here.