Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Blacks in the New World)

Rating:
Summary: Written with energy and passion.
Review: If you have any interest in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, this is the work you should turn to. It has great depth and is written with an enthusiastic flair that is not often found in similar works. I echo the comment....you won't be able to put it down until the last page is read.

Rating:
Summary: This Book is the way History should be Written
Review: In my opinion this work looks at the civil rights movement in a way that all historians shoud take note of. Dittmer's in-depth bottom up look at the way movements happen allows a deeper understanding of the incredible struggles that local Mississippians went through for a few small steps toward racial equality. It also knocks the national leaders (JFK, LBJ, MLK) off the pedestals that mainstream history has placed under them and shows the truly peripheral role that they played in the struggle.

Rating:
Summary: This Book is the way History should be Written
Review: In my opinion this work looks at the civil rights movement in a way that all historians shoud take note of. Dittmer's in-depth bottom up look at the way movements happen allows a deeper understanding of the incredible struggles that local Mississippians went through for a few small steps toward racial equality. It also knocks the national leaders (JFK, LBJ, MLK) off the pedestals that mainstream history has placed under them and shows the truly peripheral role that they played in the struggle.

Rating:
Summary: An essential book on civil rights movement history
Review: Much of our common knowledge of U.S. civil rights movement's history comes from books and films portraying the nationally known struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. This book tells a different story - the struggles of the largely African American activists who, working without the benefit of the national spotlight, sought to open up the closed society of Mississippi to equal treatment for its African American citizens. It was a tremendous and extremely dangerous task. Mississippi was the toughest nut to crack among the Southern states. It was the most impoverished state in the union, where subjugation of African Americans was strictly enforced through intimidation, violence, disenfranchisement, job firings and economic ruin. Any sympathetic whites who dared to even question Mississippi justice were financially ruined and all but run out of the state. In this seemingly impossible to change social, political, and economic climate, a movement of local Mississippi African Americans emerged, with the help of activists from other states, who challenged the situation head-on by attempting to empower African Americans through voter registration drives, by attempting to set up cooperatives in order to gain economic power, and through education. The emphasis was not so much on organizing for desegregation of public facilities as it was on changing the power structure of Mississippi, to enfranchise its African American citizens and gain for them political and economic justice. Working from the bottom up, these activists had few allies, were largely ignored by the national media, and faced life threatening dangers on a daily and nightly basis. Many were savagely beaten, shot at, and repeatedly jailed. Several were murdered. They persisted, working diligently and out of the spotlight. Local People details the successes and failures of these every day struggles, and by doing so, lifts this aspect of the movement from obscurity to its rightful place in history. Prof. Dittmer is a first-rate writer - this book is very hard to put down once you start reading it. What emerges is a portrait of some of the most courageous people in our nation's history, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, and Bob Moses, and the local people who responded to the activists efforts. Local People is essential reading for any true understanding of the civil rights movement.