Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962. Preceded by a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and violent, deadly rioting, Meredith’s admission constituted a pivotal moment in civil rights history. At the time, Harkey was editor of the Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he published pieces in support of Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after firmly articulating his advocacy of change. Originally published in 1967, this book is Harkey’s memoir of the crisis and what it was like to be a white integrationist editor in fiercely segregationist Mississippi. He recounts conversations with University of Mississippi officials and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to intimidate him and muzzle his work. The memoir’s title refers to a burning cross set on the lawn of his home, which occurred in addition to the shot fired at his office. Reprinted for the fifth time, this book features a new introduction by historian William Hustwit.

Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.

Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962. Preceded by a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and violent, deadly rioting, Meredith’s admission constituted a pivotal moment in civil rights history. At the time, Harkey was editor of the Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he published pieces in support of Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after firmly articulating his advocacy of change. Originally published in 1967, this book is Harkey’s memoir of the crisis and what it was like to be a white integrationist editor in fiercely segregationist Mississippi. He recounts conversations with University of Mississippi officials and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to intimidate him and muzzle his work. The memoir’s title refers to a burning cross set on the lawn of his home, which occurred in addition to the shot fired at his office. Reprinted for the fifth time, this book features a new introduction by historian William Hustwit.

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

The definitive account of the Emmett Till lynching, based on never-before-heard accounts by those involved, by an award-winning author.

In 1960, students supporting civil rights moved into Mississippi and challenged white supremacy by encouraging African Americans to reassert the rights guaranteed them under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The ensuing social upheaval changed the state forever. The author, a former civil rights activist, tells the story of the quest for racial equality in Mississippi. Using a variety of sources as well as his own memories, he weaves together an astonishing account of student protestors and local activists who risked their lives by fighting against southern resistance and federal inaction. Their efforts, and the horrific violence inflicted on them, helped push many non-southerners and the federal government into action, culminating in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act - measures that destroyed legalized segregation and disfranchisement. -- Publisher's description.

Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.

The third and final book about Kristin Lavransdatter, finds her increasingly estranged from her husband, and worried about the future of their sons; it chronicles the trials and losses Kristin must bear, and how she finds the strength to endure them.

They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in Life magazine or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club. More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlely that tracks the movement of racism across three generations and bears witness to its ravages among both black and white Americans.

"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --