"Mississippi. 1966. On a hot June afternoon an African-American man named James Meredith set out to walk through his home state, intending to fight racism and fear with his feet. A seemingly simple plan, but one teeming with risk. Just one day later Meredith was shot and wounded in a roadside ambush. Within twenty-four hours, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and other civil rights leaders had taken up Meredith's cause, determined to overcome...

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission compiled secret files on more than 87,000 private citizens in the most extensive state spying program in U.S. history. Its mission: to save segregation.

Using in-depth interviews with participants and residents, Watson brilliantly captures the tottering legacy of Jim Crow in Mississippi, while vividly portraying: the chaos that brought such national figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Pete Seeger to the state, the courageous black citizens and Northern volunteers who refused to be intimidated in their struggle for justice, and the white Mississippians who would kill to protect a dying way of life....

When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the...

"Cassie Logan, first met in Song of the Trees and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a young woman now, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from Toledo to California, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, in the 60s, home to Mississippi to participate in voter registration. She is witness to the now-historic events of the century: the Great Migration north, the rise of the civil rights movement, preceded and precipitated...

"Loretta, Roly, and Aggie B., members of the Little family, each present the vivid story of their young lives, spanning three generations. Their separate stories -- beginning in a cotton field in 1927 and ending at the presidential election of 1968 -- come together to create one unforgettable journey. Through an evocative mix of fictional first-person narratives, spoken-word poems, folk myths, gospel rhythms and blues influences, Loretta Little Looks...

"The killing of Emmett Till is widely remembered today as one of the most famous examples of lynchings in America. African American children in 1955 personally felt the terror of his murder. These children, however, would rise up against the culture that made Till's death possible. From the violent Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-ins in Jackson to the school walkouts of McComb, the young people of Mississippi picketed, boycotted, organized, spoke out,...

This tightly constructed tale by PEN/Faulkner finalist Steve Yarbrough tells the story of a Mississippi history teacher who's determined to unravel the truth about one tragic day in 1962. Even as he pursues an affair with a long-lost friend, he wonders if she could hold the missing piece to this racially charged puzzle.

A moving and dramatic coming-of-age memoir of Charles Evers, one of the most colorful civil rights pioneers and brother of Medgar Evers, slain hero of the Movement. Evers led a biracial coalition which unseated an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic Convention and was the first African American to run for governor of Mississippi and to be elected mayor in that state since reconstruction. His story is riveting and, working with...

In the summer of 1964, the turmoil of the civil rights movement reached its peak in Mississippi, with activists across the political spectrum claiming that God was on their side in the struggle over racial justice. This was the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when...