San Antonio College Library

The world's eyes were on Mississippi during the summer of 1964, when civil rights activists launched an ambitious African American voter registration project and were met with violent resistance from white supremacists. Sue (Lorenzi) Sojourner and her husband, Henry Lorenzi, arrived in Holmes County, Mississippi, in the wake of this historic time, known as Freedom Summer. From her arrival in September 1964 until her departure in 1969, Sojourner amassed...

In June 1964, over one thousand volunteers--most of them white, northern college students--arrived in Mississippi to register black voters and staff "freedom schools" as part of the Freedom Summer campaign organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Within ten days, three of them were murdered; by the summer's end, another had died and hundreds more had endured bombings, beatings, and arrests. Less dramatically, but no less significantly,...

"When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter. From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system...

"Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African Americans, no books for them to read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights...

""Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband." Myrlie Evers said this in 1967 when her brave book was first published. In 1994, at long last after three controversial trials, justice was served when the killer was convicted and given a life sentence." "At thirty-seven Medgar Evers, field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, died in a horrifying act of political violence. Outside his home, in the summer of 1963, he was gunned down...

A fierce warrior in his own right, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers fought on the front lines of the greatest struggle for America's heart and soul since the Civil War. Now, in a work of uncompromising honesty and power, Charles Evers re-creates the raw emotions of those times, conveying all of the rage and hope of a people rising against injustice and demanding equality. Have No Fear is charged with the passion, conviction, and...

In 1964, a mob of Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers in the small Mississippi county of Neshoba (a crime that came to be known as the "Mississippi Burning" murders). These young men, two Jews from New York and an African-American from Mississippi, were in the Deep South helping register African-American voters during what became known as "Freedom Summer." Although the Klansmen bragged about what they did, no one was held accountable for...

Civil rights activist and playwright Endesha Holland relates her poverty-stricken childhood in Greenwood, Mississippi, her chance meeting with Robert Moses and subsequent involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, her tours in the North to publicize atrocities in the South, her pursuit of a Ph. D., and her discovery of her talents as a playwright.

"Lance Hill offers the first detailed history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, who grew to several hundred members and twenty-one chapters in the Deep South and led some of the most successful local campaigns in the civil rights movement. In his analysis of this important yet long-overlooked organization, Hill challenges what he calls "the myth of nonviolence"--The idea that a united civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent...