What do you think?
Rate this book
Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986
In the middle of the Mississippi Delta lies rural, black-majority Sunflower County. J. Todd Moye examines the social histories of civil rights and white resistance movements in Sunflower, tracing the development of organizing strategies in separate racial communities over four decades.
Sunflower County was home to both James Eastland, one of the most powerful reactionaries in the U.S. Senate in the twentieth century, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the freedom-fighting sharecropper who rose to national prominence as head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Sunflower was the birthplace of the Citizens' Council, the white South's pre-eminent anti-civil rights organization, but it was also a hotbed of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organizing and a fountainhead of freedom culture.
Using extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Moye situates the struggle for democracy in Sunflower County within the context of national developments in the civil rights movement. Arguing that the civil rights movement cannot be understood as a national monolith, Moye reframes it as the accumulation of thousands of local movements, each with specific goals and strategies. By continuing the analysis into the 1980s, Let the People Decide pushes the boundaries of conventional periodization, recognizing the full extent of the civil rights movement.
Sunflower County was home to both James Eastland, one of the most powerful reactionaries in the U.S. Senate in the twentieth century, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the freedom-fighting sharecropper who rose to national prominence as head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Sunflower was the birthplace of the Citizens' Council, the white South's pre-eminent anti-civil rights organization, but it was also a hotbed of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organizing and a fountainhead of freedom culture.
Using extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Moye situates the struggle for democracy in Sunflower County within the context of national developments in the civil rights movement. Arguing that the civil rights movement cannot be understood as a national monolith, Moye reframes it as the accumulation of thousands of local movements, each with specific goals and strategies. By continuing the analysis into the 1980s, Let the People Decide pushes the boundaries of conventional periodization, recognizing the full extent of the civil rights movement.
296 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2004
4 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 16, 2024
Useful read alongside From the Mississippi Delta
September 8, 2015
I finished this a while ago, I'm just behind on updating my Goodreads account. :( I blame the start of a new school year.
Bits of this book were assigned for a research trip I went on in early June, but as OCD as I am, I can't read just part of something so I had to read the whole book. It was definitely worth it. It was interesting to see a book go so in-depth into a snapshot of the Civil Rights Movement. It was just Sunflower County, not the Movement as a whole, or even really Mississippi as a whole, although it did put some things in context. While the material relating to most of the 50's, 60's, and 70's was solid and great, I felt like the stuff that happened after wasn't of the same caliber. I also realize that, as a historian, these things are more difficult to get good testimony or oral history on because they are so much more recent. People are less likely to be honest about such because not enough time has passed or they may say things that could come back to bite them because most of those people are still living.
Overall, the Fannie Lou Hamer area was done wonderfully, probably because there is already such a wealth of information to dwell upon. But I wish he would have spent more time on some of the later pieces of the book, filling them out more before publication. But I realize publishers and deadlines are ever looming, so it was still a good read, filling in some holes in my previous knowledge. A very solid strength of this book was some of the personal stories it was able to tap into.
Bits of this book were assigned for a research trip I went on in early June, but as OCD as I am, I can't read just part of something so I had to read the whole book. It was definitely worth it. It was interesting to see a book go so in-depth into a snapshot of the Civil Rights Movement. It was just Sunflower County, not the Movement as a whole, or even really Mississippi as a whole, although it did put some things in context. While the material relating to most of the 50's, 60's, and 70's was solid and great, I felt like the stuff that happened after wasn't of the same caliber. I also realize that, as a historian, these things are more difficult to get good testimony or oral history on because they are so much more recent. People are less likely to be honest about such because not enough time has passed or they may say things that could come back to bite them because most of those people are still living.
Overall, the Fannie Lou Hamer area was done wonderfully, probably because there is already such a wealth of information to dwell upon. But I wish he would have spent more time on some of the later pieces of the book, filling them out more before publication. But I realize publishers and deadlines are ever looming, so it was still a good read, filling in some holes in my previous knowledge. A very solid strength of this book was some of the personal stories it was able to tap into.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews