This is a marvelous book of important history and anecdotes about what is called the Freedom Rides of 1964. In 2011 it's hard to imagine that this summer in Mississippi really happened.
We're talking about the acme of the modern civil rights movement which started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955/56. Mississippi was already inflamed with the Emmitt Till muder in 1955 and the bloody integration of Ole Miss in 1963. The state was the epitome of the apartheid---rigid segregation, the "Southern way of life"--that existed in the Confederate South.
Led by a truly heroic man named Bob Moses, a bunch of lily white Ivy League type of college students were recruited to go into Mississippi and register African Americans to vote in a state where less than 3% of Blacks were registered to vote.
The violence of that summer is amazing in retrospect. The most celebrated violence was the murder of 3 those college students in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964. Justice was never done. Five of the alleged perps were convicted of violating the students's consitutuional rights, a federal charge, and the only other conviction was one of the murders for manslaughter. It took many years for these charges to be tried. It was a travesty of justice.
During that summer, the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The voting rights act came the following year. The South was changed forever.
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