Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964

by Nicholas von Hoffman

One of those who watched and was watched in the turbulent summer of 1964 was Chicago Daily News reporter Nicholas von Hoffman.
Through ten tense weeks and over 6000 miles of dusty roads and highways, from the Delta to the piney hills to the Gulf, von Hoffman studied the state of mind of the State of Mississippi.
Mississippi Notebook is his vivid and entirely honest record of that summer, a summer that was marked by murder, violence, and intimidation on a scale that is difficult to grasp for any but those who witnessed it, or--and worse--for those who were made to suffer it.
Sometimes it is the way people talk, how they look, the small but illuminating incident overlooked in the broad sweep of the news that really tells the story and makes a complex social crisis understandable.
Such is the case with Mississippi Notebook. It is a finely detailed and deeply disturbing report on a state and its people, white and black, who are playing a major role in the greatest domestic crisis now facing the nation.

154 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 4, 2016

About the author

Nicholas von Hoffman was an American journalist and author. He first worked as a community organizer for Saul D. Alinsky in Chicago for ten years from 1953 to 1963. Later, Von Hoffman wrote for The Washington Post, and most notably, was a commentator on the CBS Point-Counterpoint segment for 60 Minutes, from which Don Hewitt fired him in 1974. von Hoffman was also a columnist for The Huffington Post.