Abstract
Sunflower County is justly famous in Mississippi’s civil rights history. The county seat, the small town of Indianola, was the birthplace of the White Citizens’ Council, a segregationist organization that opposed the school desegregation ordered by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954. The councils quickly became a South-wide network of organizations, and drew their members from property-owning and politically powerful whites; council leaders included planters, businessmen, judges, and other officials. But Sunflower County was also the home of a vigorous poor people’s movement that fought for voting and rights of economic equality despite terrorism and violence from hostile whites. The tiny towns of Ruleville and Drew were the homes of sharecropper activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Mae Bertha Carter, women who displayed considerable courage and determination despite evictions, job losses, and threats to their families. The town of Indianola itself was the home of grassroots African American activists Cora Fleming, Alice Giles, and McKinley Mack.
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Notes
For a detailed study of the sharecropping system in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, see Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003);
see also James C. Cobb, “The Most Southern Place on Earth”: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989);
Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London & New York: Verso Press, 1998);
Stewart E. Tolnay, The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms (Urbana & Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937); Tolnay, The Bottom Rung;
Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999);
Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1995).
Arthur Kleinman, “The Violences of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social Violence,” in Veena Das, Maphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 226–241.
David Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 112–113.
W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900–2000 (New York & London: Routledge, 2002), 156–159.
Dorothy Dickins, “A Nutrition Investigation of Negro Tenants in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta,” Bulletin, Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station, A&M College; no. 254 (State College: Mississippi: Mississippi State University, 1928), 30–33.
Howard Odom, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 51–59.
See Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey, 235; Kim Lacy Rogers, “Lynching Stories: Family and Community Memory in the Mississippi Delta,” in Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Grahan Dawson, eds., Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 113–130;
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: The Modern Library, 2002);
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 199–240.
See Nan Woodruff, American Congo, for a vivid description of the violent suppression of the STFU in the Arkansas Delta during 1936 and 1937.
Wilhelm Mader, “Emotionality and Continuity in Biographical Contexts,” in James E. Birren, Gary M. Kenyon, Jan-Erik Roth, Johannes Schroots, and Tobjorn Svensson, eds., Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development (New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1996), 39–60.
See Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) on the problematic need to justify in memory the conditions of care and survival, even when those conditions included exposure to abuse or neglect.
See Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class (New York: The Free Press, 1988);
see also Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
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© 2006 Kim Lacy Rogers
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Rogers, K.L. (2006). Conditions of Life and Death. In: Life and Death in the Delta. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982957_2
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