In Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, John Dittmer traces the history of Civil Rights in Mississippi from late World War II through the late 1960s. He writes, “The World War II veterans and traditional black leaders were facing a seemingly impossible task in Mississippi, for despite the wartime upheavals, whites were determined to maintain their supremacy by denying blacks political, educational, and economic opportunity and by maintaining racial segregation in all walks of life” (pg. 19). Discussing class, he writes, “Using the race issue to keep the white lower classes in their place, the men who ran Mississippi unabashedly proclaimed an economic conservatism that would preserve and widen the gap between rich and poor” (pg. 22-23).
Dittmer writes, “In the wake of Brown white Mississippians had developed a siege mentality so pervasive it encompassed virtually every citizen and institution…As the Red Scare of the fifties was abating in the rest of the country, a homegrown McCarthyism took hold in the Magnolia State. Books were banned, speakers censored, and network television programs cut off in midsentence. To be certain that subversives did not operate underground, the legislature created the State Sovereignty Commission, a secret police force that owed its primary allegiance to the Citizens’ Council” (pg. 58). He continues, “What it all comes down to is that in the mid-1950s white supremacists in Mississippi had a specific program: to maintain the status quo in race relations, whatever the cost. Moderates, on the other hand, could offer only cautionary admonitions – to blacks, to go slow, and to northern whites, to stop meddling. The result was a bankruptcy of both moral and political leadership at the most critical point in Mississippi’s history since Reconstruction” (pg. 69).
Dittmer writes, “Much of the middle class was under severe economic constraints and could not be counted on to support the assault against segregated institutions. SNCC workers learned that although officials of the Justice Department listened to their grievances, the activists could not rely on the Kennedy administration to enforce the First and Fifteenth amendments in Mississippi” (pg. 115). He continues, “Until his death John Kennedy tried to maintain good relations with Mississippi’s segregationist congressional delegation. The president went out of his way to avoid conflict, observing the amenities of senatorial courtesy in federal appointments even though it meant undercutting the handful of loyal white Democrats in the state” (pg. 197). On the other hand, “In its final days the Kennedy administration did more visibly identify with the black struggle in the South. After initially opposing the March on Washington, fearing it would alienate support for the administration’s civil rights bill, John Kennedy eventually embraced it, enhancing the movement’s status in the eyes of many skeptical northern whites” (pg. 198).
Dittmer continues, “In Jackson, the unbending resistance of local whites had for a time united blacks across lines of class and age, but as the level of violence intensified, the more conservative black ministers and businessmen became willing to settle on terms that stopped far short of the movement’s original goals” (pg. 168). He writes, “The year 1963 witnessed an explosion of civil rights activity and brutal white repression across the South. Direct action protests rocked Birmingham, Greensboro, Atlanta, Danville, and more than 100 other cities in eleven southern states, with over 200,000 people arrested. In Mississippi the Winona beatings, followed by Evers’s murder, were the opening salvos in a summer campaign of white lawlessness unmatched since 1955” (pg. 173).
Dittmer concludes, “The ambiguity of the phrase ‘black power’ and the subsequent lack of a clearly defined program enabled Mississippi activists to interpret the slogan broadly, enlisting it in behalf of boycotts, voter registration drives, and economic self-help endeavors such as the cooperatives. As far back as the fall of 1964 FDP leaders had been open to the ideas of Malcolm X, who had addressed an FDP rally in Harlem and introduced Fannie Lou Hamer at his Harlem mosque…The strident black nationalism of Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, however, with its underlying theme that whites had no role to play in a black movement, did not attract a large following among local people” (pg. 411). Further, “By the end of 1968 it was clear that the movement had won significant victories in Mississippi. More than 250,000 blacks were now registered to vote, 60 percent of those eligible. Although such numbers did not immediately transfer into political power, the level of political discourse was now changing, and over race-baiting was strikingly absent in campaign oratory. The War on Poverty was by then falling apart, but Head Start, reforms in food stamp allocation, and Medicare and Medicaid brought some improvement in the lives of the black poor” (pg. 425). ( )

Dittmer chronicles the grass roots politics of the Magnolia State, the home of the South's most virulent form of White Supremacy. Focusing on both the local Blacks of Mississippi and the activists from outside the state in SNCC and CORE, he adds complexity to the picture of the Civil Rights Movement in documenting the interplay between "outside agitators" and native protest. Outsiders from SNCC and CORE could never have survived without the support of local people. He also helps us understand the class undercurrents of a movement that often pitted the black middle class against the rural poor. The trajectory he maps is one that follows native protest from the cauldron of WWII and its aftermath through the 50s and into the 60s. Men who returned from the war and were denied the vote became activists in the 40s and 50s within the NAACP. The 60s are really the focal point of his story and here his focus begins with SNCC and ends with the demise of the MFDP. To move beyond this demise in local activism after 1968 is not the project of this book. Dittmer's conclusion is that the radical demands of the MFDP, like the radical demands of other movements in American history (the Populists?) were not met. Though much of their reform program was indeed enacted. We inhabit an America shaped by the egalitarian strivings of local people from Mississippi as much as we do one shaped by the National Government's halting progress toward equal rights.

Mississippi in the age of "Grand Expectations" was a very violent place, and most of that violence was exercised by white supremacists against blacks. Dittmer catalogs this violence in near numbing detail. As Kim Lacey Rodgers points out in her review, he also " shows the craven role played by the federal government, as the administrations of both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson ignored the segregationist violence in the state in hopes of placating men such as Senators John Stennis and James O. Eastland." As Alan Draper points out in his review for the Journal of Negro History, Dittmer's archetype for local people is Fannie Lou Hamer. But she is an archetype, indeed, and in giving credit to the local people in Mississippi he chronicles the lives of people who braved the terror of the South's worst state. In Draper's apt summary, credit here goes

to the people in Ruleville who braved economic reprisals and police violence to register to vote; to the people in Jackson who desegregated public facilities; to the people in McComb who withstood Klan terror to build a community center; to the people in Cleveland who distributed food when the county withdrew from federal support programs; to the people in Clarksdale who boycotted white merchants; and tot the people of Hattiesburg who waited in line for hours to take the voter registration tests. (p. 203)

Granting this, however, Draper takes issue with the way Dittmer uses class. Trying to demonstrate the class politics of the movement, Draper believes Dittmer misrepresents the struggle. Teachers and preachers certainly belonged to the middle class, but so too did business people and independent farmers. And more generally, one is left arguing if the radical democracy represented the larger Mississippi Black population better than the more "moderate" program of the NAACP. Against the class politics of the MFDP, Draper urges a consideration of the mass mobilization around voter registration. I would submit, however, that Dittmer's consideration of Great Society Politics in Mississippi is a lasting contribution to the historiography.

I just want to ditto bcquinnsmom's review - this is the finest history of the Civil Rights Movement ever written. Mississippi really had its own Movement separate from the rest of the South - The workers had their own forceful and original ideas about what they were fighting for, and the forces of evil stacked against them possessed a particular malevolence unseen anywhere else. I'm still haunted by the description of civil rights workers from the SCLC going "undercover" as field hands on sharecropping farms, whispering to the locals while they tilled the cotton fields in disguise. And I still consider Unita Blackwell to be my hero - and she's someone I never would have known about without this book. After reading this book, my father went to Issaquena, Mississippi, where Ms. Blackwell is serving as mayor, and introduced himself to her. He says she's every bit as tough and fascinating as Dittmer portrayed her.

This book lit such a fire in me that I went to the National Archives in College Park, Md., and pulled the document files he cites in his footnotes. All his old bookmarks were still there! I read the documents he found and flagged as important, and made my own astonishing discoveries there. So I can attest that his research is impeccable, and his eye for historical significance is flawlessly honed.

This is my all-time favorite book. Nothing will ever top it. I'm so grateful to Dittmer for writing it. ( )

probably the best book on the civil rights movement I have ever read in my life.

If you are at all interested in this topic, by all means, buy, borrow or steal a copy of this book.

On page 423, the author notes the following:
"Blacks had struggled for their freedom in Mississippi since the earliest days of slavery an continue to fight for their rights as citizens down to the present. Still, the period beginning with World War II and ending with the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 encompasses the most intensive and comprehensive period of grass-roots organization and protest in that state's history; as a result of that campaign, Mississippi experienced more sweeping changes in the area of race relations during those three periods than at any time since the end of the Civil War."

The book's title says it all; it is the story of black Mississipians who often gave their lives in the ongoing fight for civil rights & freedom over the above-mentioned time period.

My book is filled with post-it notes, well dispersed throughout the book's 400+ pages but I will only make brief comments on my impressions of this book.

What I did not realize before reading this book was that the Mississipi government's (state/local) methods of dealing with anyone connected with Mississippi civil rights programs were virtually totalitarian in nature, called by one journalist "something akin to NKVD among the cotton patches." (60). The State Sovereignty Commission, created in 1956, kept tabs on everyone through wiretapping, bugging, keeping dossiers of anyone who might even be suspected of belonging to or working for any kind of civil rights group. Locally, Citizens' councils began right after the Brown v. Board of Education decision was made in 1954, when talk of desegregating began. But the Citizens' councils went beyond the question of desegregation: it served to promote & ensure white supremacy through whatever means possible -- be it through violence, economic intimidation, whatever. In order to begin to try to secure basic human rights, as well as those afforded to them through the US Constitution, black Mississippians began to fight back. While other blacks had been killed & lost property in their early struggles, it was (as the author notes) the killing of Emmett Till in 1955 which garnered the attention of the country, making an "indelible impression on black teenagers eerywhere." (425) With the help of various organizations (SNCC, CORE) that came into Mississipi to volunteer to help in the fight for civil rights & freedom, the local people were able to organize more of the black population and get them to freedom schools to become more literate to be able to pass the tests set up to block them in their attempts to register to vote or to demand better conditions as human beings. The personal commitments and sacrifices these people had to make are the focus of the book. It sheds light on the Freedom Summer, the various marches for freedom, the hard work of the volunteers, demonstrations & mass movements, but also serves to enlighten its readers on the political plays going on in the background, between the groups helping the locals to fight for their rights, as well as at the top levels of national government, where getting the Federal Government to do anything was often impossible even after numerous deaths & media exposure showing the harsh realities of black life under a white supremacist regime in Mississippi. The politics and power plays among the civil rights activists also gave rise to the "Black Power" movement, something else I did not know.

I could go on, but you really should just read this book for yourself. I do have to say that I was reading this book over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and wondered why no one ever thought to make a holiday for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a REAL African-American hero in the fight for civil rights. Not to belittle Dr. King's efforts, but this woman deserves to have a day of her own. And Fannie Lou Hamer knew when she died that the struggle wasn't over when she noted "...we ain't free yet. The kids need to know their mission."

Local People is an outstanding work, and I know I'm going to come back to it again. It takes a while to read, but it is worth every second. ( )

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