Customer Reviews

A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi

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Growing up in Port Gibson, Mississippi, during the era of civil rights struggles and the crippling economic boycott of the 1960s, I often wondered if this would ever be objectively chronicled and who would write the story. Emilye Crosby has done an excellent job in her research, and with the exception of a few minor errors (such as contraditory mileage between Port Gibson and Fayette and the implication that no white churches other than the Catholic welcomed blacks to worship in the 1960s when St. James Episcopal church did--though no blacks attended St. James at that time), this is probably the best overall account of the civil rights situation in Claiborne County I have ever read. The lengthy footnotes and bibliography are proof that the author did her homework with accuracy and caution. While it is a story many of us would like to forget and in which some white merchants from the era who are still alive are not portrayed in a flattering way, the fact remains that those things DID happen, and the fact that many of the principals themselves were cooperative and willing to be quoted brings to light some progress made toward racial reconciliation in recent years. While the author could have shown less personal bias against the Main Street program and the author of the Port Gibson bicentennial history in her concluding pages, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in civil rights history and what can happen when merchants of ANY color don't treat their customers or townspeople right. That the U S Supreme Court sanctioned the behavior of the NAACP by ruling in their favor when the case against them launched by the while merchants was decided is both a chilling tale AND a cautionary message about the power of economic boycotts.

Professor Crosby delivers both a gripping narrative on the black freedom struggle in a single county of Mississippi and a nuanced argument that the movement happened locally, even though little acts of protest and boycott could have huge reverberations. Especially valuable is her synthesis of white and black perspectives on local events, and continual analysis of the stakes involved in who tells "the story" of the "stormy" 60s in Mississippi. Highly reccommended to anyone interested in freedom movements, African American history, or studies of race relations.