I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

by Charles M. Payne

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South with new material that situates the book in the context of subsequent movement literature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, American History, Social Justice, African American

525 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 1995

About the author

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, where he is also an affiliate of the Urban Education Institute.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the minds of untold numbers of Americans, for example, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was the civil rights movement. Thought it up, led it, produced its victories, became its sole martyr. Schoolchildren- including Black schoolchildren- are taught this."
-Fred Powledge

Charles Payne's 'I've Got the Light of Freedom' reconstructs a history that holds a more accurate depiction of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He devotes his book to the working class people who were mostly responsible for giving the movement its leadership and vitality. Payne steers away from popular mythology and the popular figures that have exploited the movement. Although he focuses on the organizing process in Mississippi, his research speaks a universal language about the nature of the fight in all parts of the South in the 1960's.

The victories won against racial terrorism are always produced by the soldiers on the lines. I am reminded by the stories that Leo Tolstoy breathes into life in his book War & Peace. Tolstoy points out that Napoleon's strategies are given way too much credit. The morale, the courage, and the defiance of the soldier is what determines the outcomes of battle. The same principles apply to the freedom struggle in the American South. The outright violence shivered the souls of many African American during this period. This systemic violence justified possession of fear and complacency. This battleground in Mississippi was dark, gloomy and depressing. The author does a great job in projecting an obscurity that made any kind of progress seem impossible.

Lastly, Charles Payne is an expert at articulating the sociological dynamic of a mass movement. He goes into the details about the patience and hard work that needed to be cultivated. He, unlike most scholars, does not leave out the tremendous influence that local leaders had in their small communities. I didn't realize the amount of canvassing that took place with this movement. The top-down approach to getting things done was actually the least productive model. Southern Blacks responded to intimate relationships more than they did charisma. It took a lot of relationship building to give this movement life. All in all, Payne demystifies how social change happens in our world. His work serves as a revelation that change usually happens through the power of community.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 273 (my book)
Residents of the Delta may have seen the civil rights movement as a sign that God was stirring.

Page 124
For SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee], the Kennedy administration increasingly came to symbolize a callous and cynical preference for political expediency over law and common decency. At Herbert Lee’s funeral, his wife came up to Bob Moses and Chuck McDew [both of SNCC] and shouted at them “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” She was saying what they already felt. The lives the government couldn’t find legal grounds for protecting – not in the Constitution, not on the Fourteenth Amendment, not in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 or 1960 -were lives that SNCC workers felt personally responsible for.

Page 321 Ella Baker
“until the killing of black mothers’ sons is as important as the killing of white mothers’ sons, we must keep on.”

This is a thoroughly engaging account of this remarkable period in American history. We come to admire the stolid black folks of Mississippi who stood up to their oppressors and fought, sometimes physically, for their rights. Their right to vote, their right to walk down a street, go to a store, a restaurant; to be treated as a human being. Their right to a decent paying job - to be a full citizen.

What is superlative in this book are the stories of native black Mississippians’ in their struggle for racial equality. We are given many passionate and harrowing examples. This book deals with the people at the bottom – how they were motivated, became members of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and the newly formed SNCC.

The author explains at length how SNCC integrated (I do not mean black-white integration, I mean SNCC volunteers from outside Mississippi, most of whom were black) joined and participated with the small rural communities of the Mississippi Delta, particularly in the early formative years in the 1960’s. They networked with people who knew how to get things done, who fed them and provided shelter – often under violent and threatening circumstances as in drive-by shootings and physical assaults. These locals had knowledge of contacts and of people to avoid. SNCC was character and personality based – in a sense an anti-organization – using personal relationships, instead of an ideological stance, to work for change. Bob Moses exemplified this outstanding quality of the anti-leader letting the local people take the initiative. Together small groups of determined citizens would go to register to vote. Gaining the right to vote was a pathway to full citizenship and one in which initially SNCC felt they would have the cooperation and protection of the federal government.

There is also an analysis of the central role of women in the struggle – how they, more than men, were more involved and persistent (Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker are fine examples). It was the women who took the civil rights workers into their homes and fed them – at great peril. They were more active in demonstrations and in registering to vote.

The author is correct that even with government legislation passed (the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act) these need to be tested. The powers that be in Mississippi did not want citizenship rights for its black constituents – only after prolonged and agonizing trials was this granted.

Page 264
We also have to consider simple persistence. Our collective memory of the movement does not include George Greene returning to talk to some frightened farmer for the tenth time or a Mary Lane, taking the registration test eleven times before she is allowed to pass, or Donaldson and Cobb returning at night to a town they were run out of that day.
Over-emphasizing the movement’s more dramatic features, we undervalue the patient and sustained effort, the slow respectful work that made the dramatic moments possible.

Page 398
Vernon Dahmer’s death may have carried the heaviest weight of symbolism... In 1966 in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 he continued to push blacks to vote. Over the radio, he offered to collect poll taxes...to pay poll taxes for anyone who couldn’t afford to do so. The night of the broadcast his home was shot-gunned and firebombed. Dahmer returned the gunfire while his family escaped. His home and nearby store were destroyed, his ten year old daughter was badly burned. From his hospital bed, he continued to urge people to register: “People who don’t vote are dead beats on the state.” He died the next day.

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recommended this to me and she was right: it's a really important work of oral history and a history of civil rights organizing, among groups like SNCC, COFO during the 1960s, and the NAACP in the 1950s.

What was so stark to me, was that a simple, and non-radical idea, the idea of people being able to cast votes for whom they wanted to represent them, was held as such a radical and destructive idea by the white south (and north, for that matter). Payne did extensive work to uncover the reality of this organizing style and its origins. He did it in a way that both told an important story of US history and made it compelling and fascinating at the same time. This book is not dry academese.

Organizing isn't glamorous, but the courage, persistence, and dedication of the people involved in these stories is amazing.

Not only that, but Payne does a great job of really getting into what the nitty gritty of organizing was in the Mississippi Delta and all the accompanying dangers of such organizing. Everything from citizenship schools (that not only spoke about the founding documents of this country but made illiterate people literate) to door knocking, to mutual aid networks.

For instance, it was fascinating to read that a SNCC worker could come to a town in order to organize it, with nothing in their pocket, and by the end of the week the community is feeding, clothing, and housing them as they did the organizing work. If this happens today, it is not talked about. And if people think organizing involves only facebook, this book blows that assumption out of the water.

I wish I had read this about 20 years ago. Better later than never though. Don't make my mistake. If you are an activist or want to get involved in issues, this is an amazing and very important book to read.

Enjoy!

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much as any single book, I've Got the Light of Freedom sounded the keynote for "the new Civil Rights history." Part of its importance is that Payne forced the issue of label: from the perspective of the "local people" at the center of the Movement in Mississippi (and throughout the South in the first half of the Sixties), it was clear that, while they supported the drive for "equal rights," the more basic struggle was for freedom, understood as fundamental changes in the nature of everyday experience. As a result, I shifted my standard phrasing to the "African American Freedom Movement," which began long before the Brown decision or Montgomery and continues a half century after the legal landmarks of 1964 and 1965.

Drawing on deep archival work and many dozens of interviews with activists, Payne emphasized that while "leadership" (think Martin Luther King) was a part of the movement, the deepest currents lay with the "organizing" tradition grounded in the folk culture of the black South and shaped by the political brilliance of Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer and many others. It's no accident that many of the key voices were those of women who understood the pitfalls of individualism, hierarchy, and playing to the media.

Payne writes beautifully, keeping the narrative flow and offering incisive reflections on the political lessons to be learned from the collaboration between SNCC and COFO (the alliance at the center of the Mississippi Movement.) In many ways, I've Got the Light of Freedom remains about as good an introduction to community-based political action as anything written more recently.

Other scholars--Barbara Ransby, Danielle McGuire, Tim Tyson, Peniel Joseph among them--have added to the story since Payne's pioneering work. But it still remains the place to start for readers who take the legacy and potential of the Freedom Movement seriously.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. It focuses is on the community organizing tradition – as opposed to the more high profile community mobilization tradition of King and others – and its importance to the civil rights movement. It's centered around Greenwood, Mississippi and the role that SNCC (though others such as CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP) played, in the face of repression (both violent and not) from whites and what was at first reluctance from black locals (though many SNCC organizers were Southerners if not Mississippians themselves). Crucial to the development and successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the activism of the 1940s and 1950s, which is often overlooked. The ideas of Ella Baker, who helped found SNCC, have a prominent role in this book, as well as others who believed that organizing was about building local leadership and distrusted large, bureaucratic, centralized organizations. Despite popular belief, ministers, at least in Mississippi, were not at the forefront of this movement and often had to be pushed into it. Similarly, non-violence played a much smaller role in the beliefs of rural blacks, who were often very willing to defend themselves against white violence. As much as the book is about the successes of the organizing tradition and SNCC, it is also about the downfall of SNCC, which the author attributes to multiple factors, amongst them a large influx of newcomers to the organization after its initial successes, the development of dogmatic perspectives, and a loss of focus on the slow but crucial work of organizing and education.

[M.M. Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping narrative about how grassroots movements are built and (sadly) how they can fall apart. The Civil Rights Movement’s heroes were normal people willing to suffer terribly and literally lose everything. An inspiring read that makes me question how much I would give up for justice. Also an important book about racism and Mississippi—I learned a lot about the state and its history reading this.

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

To my mind, one of the best books in the enormous field of civil rights history. It has the unfortunate, distinct "gender" chapter. But Payne's primary research, historiographical framework, and final chapter, "The Rough Draft of History," on media and the narrativizing of the Movement, make this a stellar book.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bottom up, local history that reaches back to the roots, gives credit where it is due, includes women like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer but also Laura McGhee, and goes beyond SNCC. Payne's interviews allow his work to stick with the struggle after the media leaves and tell us the story from before they got there. If Payne quotes people, then he doesn't "correct" their speech, which I appreciate because there are subtle layers of meaning that get lost otherwise. When I first started reading this, it was like returning to a familiar setting and characters, but there is so much more in here than the usual suspects, delightful as they are. I loved this book.

[A. Roots · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Kinda abandoned my Goodreads for a minute lol)

I really loved the writing of this book and it gave me a greater admiration of Ella Baker than just reading her speeches. It is so interesting listening to/reading the works of legends that are so humble in their own self-assessments before reading their stories in a book like this. The book is long and dense as well as being, at times, difficult to follow as it cuts between different people and movements. As a lover of narrative and narrated nonfiction, it wasn't one of my top favorites but still a really good book. Would recommend for the history of community organizing

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really outstanding book. Easily the best work of US history I've read in several years.

Manages to provide deep local context in Greenwood, while also linking to broader trends, and providing a needed update to the historiography of the Black Freedom Movement in the deep south.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful and detailed descriptions of the organizing model developed through experimentation, especially in Greenwood. Thought that some of the later chapters on the dissolution of SNCC could have benefited from a clearer "who benefits" analysis rather than generalizations about "community." Thanks Virginia for the recommendation!

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped me understand that my ideas about a slow, movement-building approach to organizing, and the best of what I learned from my activist mentors in my 20s, is not just a valid way of doing activism, it's really the smartest way in the long run. I had always felt uneasy about the way so many groups these days are focused on how to most quickly get to "winnable goals" while compromising their relationships with people in the communities directly affected by the issues they're working on, as if putting real time and energy into building those relationships and listening to people and sharing activist skills takes too much time.

What about finding the leadership already in those communities, and helping to build the work around what's important to them? What about being flexible about campaigns and creative ideas, trying new things to see what works, and letting the community build the movement around its own needs, not demanding people change their whole lifestyle to join your organization?

This book offers very practical lessons on how to do social justice work in a truly empowering and lasting way, which is really needed when what most of us are force-fed is the Midwest Academy/Saul Alinsky style of community organizing, which I think takes shortcuts that undermine opportunities for communities to build their power and change the relations of power.

The flaw of the book is that it brushes aside the concept of Black Power and sort of dismisses it as a turn toward ideological thinking and away from community organizing, which I don't think is true, especially given the deeply rooted Serve the People programs that the Black Panthers did, for example. But this is only at the tail end of the book. I'd highly recommend reading it. My study group got a whole lot out of it.

[Niki · Rating 5 out of 5]

In light of the NAACP's 100th anniversary, I thought it was important to write a quick review of this important book, which in essence describes the decades of work by NAACP and other civil rights organizations in setting the foundation for the Mississippi Freedom Movement. That movement animated so many people's courage and animus: dispossessed sharecroppers in the Delta region fearful an attempt to vote would threaten their livelihood; college kids from white suburbia set upon contributing to the expansion of liberty; moderate town mayors who contorted their political stances to the shape of the emerging white supremacist voices. What I like most about this book is the window into the daily determination of young workers, such as Sam Block, and the wisdom of their mentors, such as Ella Baker and Bob Moses.

Change is made by so many individual acts of courage and tests of conviction. This book contains so many of those stories, but it also describes how difficult it is to maintain a movement. Now is a good time to read this history and to recommit ourselves to work for the equality of our fellow human beings.

[Thomas Rush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Civil Rights History, if it's true to its calling, is poignant and eerie, recalling a time in our nation's history that was, in many ways, incredibly subtle, nuanced and haunting. History, by its very nature, is contextual, a product of a unique space and time, all with its own peculiar dynamics. Charles Payne's book may well go down as the most sensitive, honest, sagacious, complex and comprehensive analysis of the Movement period that has ever been written. Payne manages to pull all of this off while remaining lucid to the average, lay reader, a remarkable fete in and of itself. If you truly want to get in the huddle of The Civil Rights Movement, you will need to purchase this book. It's a profound historical punch in the face, coming at you with all of the intensity and emotion that the period deserves. Professor Payne is a cosmopolitan, ubiquitous, and wise person of the world. His wisdom appears again in another book called "Reality's Pen: Reflection On Family, History & Culture" by Thomas D. Rush. Professor Payne appears on page 61 and in the piece "My Meeting With Malcolm X" on page 90 of the work.

[stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite part of this book is its reliance on primary source material and its willingness to include it in the text. it's really quite brilliant and points out a lot of ways that the civil rights movement of the 60s was more than what we know of from our basic history classes. there's also the element of incorporating what the movement meant to people that you don't necessarily think of - union workers, etc.

it's grand in its ambition and scope, and i'm happy to say, it's basically successful. if i ever taught a course on social movements, this would be on my reading list, and i've recommended it to loads of people who want to know more.

[Nick Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've learned more from this book on organizing & building power than from any other. I look to it for inspiration when I'm feeling discouraged and for lessons when I'm out of ideas. The most incredible part about this book is that it starts decades before the civil rights movement as we know it began - showing how the groundwork was laid for a powerful social movement years and years before SNCC came into Mississippi. Must read for anyone doing basebuilding / community organizing work.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was the bravery and determination of countless community organizers across Mississippi who made a sustained civil rights movement possible. A memorable account of how ordinary people fought white supremacy, empowered themselves, and changed the country.

[Mdot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cant even articulate how much this book means to me. As a young organizer, it helped shape and develop me more than any training or workshop ever has or will!

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I understand why everyone raves about this book! It really changed the way I understood SNCC and the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

[Sharhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

would suggest reading chapters 3 & 8 only if you're crunched for time.

[David Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book was a game changer for me

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Payne seeks to illustrate the slow build organizing style of the Mississippi Freedom movement over the course of nearly thirty years that altered the racial power relations of Mississippi. Payne argued that it make its most headway in the early 1960s as the organizers built upon earlier traditions of activism that challenged the racial regime of terror and order. Beginning with descriptions of lynchings of the 1930s, he notes that public executions of black people in Mississippi began to change to covert killings as Mississippi became aware of its public image as backward as they sought to attract industry, but the same racial order still persisted. SNCC would join with small rural communities of the Mississippi Delta to organize voter registration drives, as only 2% of all black adults were registered as of 1960, using personal relationships built over years to make headway. This “Slow build” organizing style built communities of activists amongst rural towns that could house organizers easily, and did. Despite the image of out of town college students, the majority of the organizers were in fact of similar backgrounds to the sharecroppers themselves, many the first generation of college students. Payne illustrates how this network of activists was decentralized and focused on local matters, letter the communities build to organize themselves. Payne also argued that black nationalists did not care about the slow build organizing style and wanted more immediate results, even if it was centralized and not caring about personal relationships (which I’m not sure I totally agree is what happened.)
Key Themes and Concept
-Movements do not arise out of nowhere and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle was the result of years of work by groups like the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC, led by ground level organizers like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and others who emphasized empowering ordinary people. They used registering people to vote as a means to empower communities as opposed to an end goal.
-The dramatic public displays of protest, like marches, lunch counter sit-ins, and speeches, are remembered well, but the slow build organizing is what made them possible in challenging real power.

[Sam Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

*I've Got the Light of Freedom* is a remarkable book.

While Professor Payne, a sociologist, is understandably a critic of "normative histories" that read the civil rights movement as purely consequence of the moral genius of its spiritual leaders, his ever-meticulous and ever-intelligent study of the social structures and personal commitments which led ordinary Mississippians to challenge that state's system of racial terror and seek to *lead* the society which would follow it enables him to endow forgotten activists and anonymous citizens with a Romantic grandeur. I could have read a hundred pages of his ninth chapter, "A Woman's War."

"Part of the problem, she maintained, was simple class snobbery. Like Septima Clark and Myles Horton, Miss [Ella] Baker was sensitive to the way in which such class antagonisms, real or imagined, could undermine everything. An important part of the organizer's job was to get the matron in the fur coat to identify with the winehead and the prostitute, and vice versa. Significantly, she adds:

*'And so you have to break that [inability to identify] down without alienating them at the same time. The gal who has been able to buy her minks and whose husband is a professional, they live well. You can't insult her, you never go and tell her she's a so-and-so for taking, for not identifying. You try to point where here interest lies in identifying with that other one across the tracks who doesn't have minks.'*

Everyone has a contribution to make. The organizer has to be aware of class exploitation, sensitive to class snobbery, without losing sight of the potential contribution to be made by those who do succumb to it. Just as one has to be able to look at a sharecropper and see a potential teacher, one must be able to look at a conservative lawyer and see a potential crusader for justice." (p. 87)

[Devin Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Payne details a detailed account of the dangerous, determined community organizing that the SNCC did in the Delta of Missisippi in the 60's to register the local black population to vote and to form institutions of power for themselves. It is a model of activism focused on local empowerment and set in a rural, murderously violent region. History tends to aggrandize celebrity figures Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and organizations associated with them like SCLC, while ignoring vanguard organizations like SNCC and the locals who fought and died for their rights. This has an invisibalizing and diminishing effect on the student of movement history, who comes to believe that only deceased figureheads or saviors can address their struggle, rather than a rote system of organized, community struggle.

Payne challenges what he describes as "Normative" history, the history that assumes all celebrity figures and institutions simply behaved as advertised. Removing complexity from figures like King and a complex dissection of the SNCC and SCLC, studying what worked, what needed more investment and what led organizations and heroic figures to distraction.

Thought-provoking history that should be required reading in elementary and middle school and among the histories that all organizers study.

[Jake Sheridan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides essential and under-shared narratives and ideas from the Civil Rights Movement, broader struggle for Black freedom and general history of social movements.

SNCC is surely among the most important CRM institutions, and there is no one better source to understand SNCC through than this book (though supplemental reading on Freedom Summer would add a lot to an understanding of the org).

The organizing tradition is largely missing when we discuss the CRM. Because of that loss, our conception of democracy and the power of communities is inaccurate. This book looks hard at organizing as a tool of the CRM.

I loved this. I lived in the Mississippi Delta for a summer and spent a good time learning about SNCC and the Movement then, but felt like I knew almost none of the hard-earned truths shared here. It had pretty solid narrative and structure, and for what it doesn't have in flow, it easily makes up for in the web of interpersonal connections it paints.

[Ricky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! So fantastic to read a detailed, bottom-up analysis of the civil rights movement from the 1950s through early 1960s in Mississippi. I particularly loved reading about Ella Baker’s organizing style, and comparing that to work I’ve been involved with or witnessed. She’s awesome, and I aspire to do more to follow her tradition. I also hope to read more about her specifically.

More generally, reading this book made me realize how little I knew about the civil rights movement. The discussions of other historians’ work went a little over my head, but also made me realize how little I knew about the act of telling history. It’s a long book and was a little hard to follow in a few places, as well as really difficult to read about so much racist violence, but very worth it

[biped4 · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 - this was a read for work & as someone who rarely reads history, i got so much out of this! every time i am pushed learn about the roots of the organizing tradition in mississippi i feel like i’m reading american history for the first time. it is cliche, but one of the most powerful parts of the oral histories in this book are the ways it positions every day people alongside leaders who have come to be well-known as prophets, experts & freedom fighters. sigh. like mariame kaba says - “anything worthwhile is done with other ppl.” how energizing & humanizing. maybe i should read more history lol

[Jacob Bernhart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charles Payne's research is extraordinarily beneficial in understanding the complexities of Civil Rights in the United States. A bottom-up approach to activism is exactly the historiographies that have been neglected over the past several decades from scholars. While the work itself is to be applauded, the stylistic choices of writing and arrangement of historical actors themselves is where it becomes more difficult to comprehend and enjoy. Overall, it comes down to the reader's favorite way of learning in-depth history.

[Brooke]

176:2033
I started this one several weeks ago and I'm just not making progress. It's not bad at all. It is, however, a big thick book that is a DEEP DEEP dive on the civil rights area, very specific to Mississippi.
I might come back to this one, but currently a less targeted area of focus would be better for me.

[Torry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real History

I wish this history was taught in school. This is one of the best books to describe the truth of organizing and mobilizing of the south from a bottom up perspective than a top down. A must read!!!