As tensions mounted before Freedom Summer, one organization tackled the divide by opening lines of communication at the request of local women: Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). Employing an unusual and deliberately feminine approach, WIMS brought interracial, interfaith teams of northern middle-aged, middle- and upper-class women to Mississippi to meet with their southern counterparts. Sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), WIMS operated on the belief that the northern participants' gender, age, and class would serve as an entrée to southerners who had dismissed other civil rights activists as radicals. The WIMS teams' respectable appearance and quiet approach enabled them to build understanding across race, region, and religion where other overtures had failed. The only civil rights program created for women by women as part of a national organization, WIMS offers a new paradigm through which to study civil rights activism, challenging the stereotype of Freedom Summer activists as young student radicals and demonstrating the effectiveness of the subtle approach taken by "proper ladies." The book delves into the motivations for women's civil rights activism and the role religion played in influencing supporters and opponents of the civil rights movement. Lastly, it confirms that the NCNW actively worked for integration and black voting rights while also addressing education, poverty, hunger, housing, and employment as civil rights issues. After successful efforts in 1964 and 1965, WIMS became Workshops in Mississippi, which strived to alleviate the specific needs of poor women. Projects that grew from these efforts still operate today.

Filled with serendipitous connections and contrasts, this volume of Mississippiana covers four hundred years. It begins with a selection from "A Gentleman from Elvas," written in 1541, and ends with an essay the novelist Ellen Douglas wrote in 1996 on the occasion of the Atlanta Olympic games. In between is a chronology of some one hundred nonfictional narratives that portray the distinctiveness of life in Mississippi. Most are reprinted, but some are published here for the first time. Each section of this anthology reveals an aspect of Mississippi's past or present. Here are narratives that depict the settlement of the land by pioneers, the lasting heritage of the Civil War, the pleasures and the pastimes of Mississippians, their food, art, rituals, and religion, the terrain and the travelers, and the conflicts that brought enormous changes to both the landscape and the population. In its wide cultural perspective, A Place Called Mississippi includes an early description of the Chickasaws, a narrative of a former slave, "Soggy" Sweat's famous "Whiskey Speech" on Prohibition, and an account of how W. C. Handy discovered the blues in a deserted train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi. Among the selections are narratives by Jefferson Davis, Belle Kearney, Walter Anderson, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Craig Claiborne, Richard Ford, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. Written by and about blacks, whites, Native Americans, and others, these fascinating accounts convey a variety of impressions about a real place and about real people whose colorful history is large, ever-changing, and ever-mystifying.

The award-winning biography of black civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of this beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family. “This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club For thirty-five years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967. These “Wednesday Sisters” seem to have little in common: Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of both literature—Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens–and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year. As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers circle to express their hopes and dreams through poems, stories, and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making: Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves, while at the same time supporting one another through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. Humorous and moving, The Wednesday Sisters is a literary feast for book lovers that earns a place among those popular works that honor the joyful, mysterious, unbreakable bonds between friends.

In Resisting Equality Stephanie R. Rolph examines the history of the Citizens’ Council, an organization committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. In the first comprehensive study of this racist group, Rolph follows the Citizens’ Council from its establishment in the Mississippi Delta, through its expansion into other areas of the country and its success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national politics, to its formal dissolution in 1989. Founded in 1954, two months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of Mississippi. Initially, the organization relied on local chapters to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that activism through economic and sometimes violent means. As the decade came to a close, however, the Council’s influence expanded into Mississippi’s political institutions, silencing white moderates and facilitating a wave of terror that severely obstructed black Mississippians’ participation in the civil rights movement. As the Citizens’ Council reached the peak of its power in Mississippi, its ambitions extended beyond the South. Alliances with like-minded organizations across the country supplemented waning influence at home, and the Council movement found itself in league with the earliest sparks of conservative ascension, cultivating consistent messages of grievance against minority groups and urging the necessity of white unity. Much more than a local arm of white terror, the Council’s work intersected with anticommunism, conservative ideology, grassroots activism, and Radical Right organizations that facilitated its journey from the margins into mainstream politics. Perhaps most crucially, Rolph examines the extent to which the organization survived the successes of the civil rights movement and found continued relevance even after the Council’s campaign to preserve state-sanctioned forms of white supremacy ended in defeat. Using the Council’s own materials, papers from its political allies, oral histories, and newspaper accounts, Resisting Equality illuminates the motives and mechanisms of this destructive group.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, no state fought longer or harder to preserve segregated schools than Mississippi. This massive resistance came to a crashing halt in October 1969 when the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes Board of Education that "the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools." Thirty of the thirty-three Mississippi districts named in the case were ordered to open as desegregated schools after Christmas break. With little guidance from state officials and no formal training or experience in effective school desegregation processes, ordinary people were thrown into extraordinary circumstances. However, their stories have been largely ignored in desegregation literature. Based on meticulous archival research and oral history interviews with over one hundred parents, teachers, students, principals, superintendents, community leaders, and school board members, Natalie G. Adams and James H. Adams explore the arduous and complex task of implementing school desegregation. How were bus routes determined? Who lost their position as principal? Who was assigned to what classes? Without losing sight of the important macro forces in precipitating social change, the authors shift attention to how the daily work of "just trying to have school" helped shape the contours of school desegregation in communities still living with the decisions made fifty years ago.

In the United States, homeownership is synonymous with economic security and middle-class status. It has played this role in American life for almost a century, and as a result, homeownership's centrality to Americans' economic lives has come to seem natural and inevitable. But this state of affairs did not develop spontaneously or inexorably. On the contrary, it was the product of federal government policies, established during the 1930s and developed over the course of the twentieth century. At the Boundaries of Homeownership traces how the government's role in this became submerged from public view and how several groups who were locked out of homeownership came to recognize and reveal the role of the government. Through organizing and activism, these boundary groups transformed laws and private practices governing determinations of credit-worthiness. This book describes the important policy consequences of their achievements and the implications for how we understand American statebuilding.

Winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred mother weren’t close. She knew little of her mother’s early life as a sharecropper during the Great Depression, but whenever she brought up the subject, her taciturn mother would snap, “You ask too many questions, young’un.” Nicholas left Mississippi to attend college, then settled in New York to work in the hard-driving world of commercial book publishing. Twenty-five years later, eager for a change, she and her husband decided to shift careers to writing, trading their home in the New York suburbs for a casita in the Mexican Highlands. But as her mother’s health deteriorated, Nicholas found herself spending more time in the small town she thought she had left behind. Over long afternoons in front of Turner Classic Movies, she grew closer to her mother, coaxing stories from her about her hardscrabble past—until a major stroke threatened to silence her mother's newfound voice. Torn between her new home in Mexico and her old home in Mississippi, Nicholas struggled to find her place in the world. She discovered that the past isn’t always the way we remember it, and as the years ticked by, that she and her mother could grow closer still. The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir is a funny and poignant account of a mother-daughter relationship and, ultimately, a meditation on acceptance and what it means to call a place home.

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height's careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri's work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.