Minds stayed on freedom : the civil rights struggle in the rural South : an oral history

the long version

Minds Stayed on Freedom is a vivid portrait of the civil rights struggle in one Mississippi county. The teenagers who conducted this oral history project strike a rare balance between poignant prose and pathbreaking research. The detailed picture that emerges from their interviews brings into sharp relief issues that remain hazy in studies of national scope: the crucial resource of black land ownership, the limited extent of church involvement, the commitment to armed self-defense, the role of women, divisions of social class within the Movement, the range of white response and retaliation, and the interplay between direct action and legal tactics. Minds Stayed on Freedom provides plenty of fodder for academic analysis, but the interviews retain a raw, dramatic power. As heir to the grassroots activism of the Civil Rights Movement, the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (ROCC) is dedicated to combating poverty and racism in Holmes County, Mississippi. ROCC developed this oral history project as part of its effort to foster pride in local history and to develop youth leadership. The authors of Minds Stayed on Freedom are eighth- and ninth-grade students, most from low-income households, who spent thousands of hours researching the local Movement, honing their questioning techniques, conducting interviews, transcribing tapes, editing their texts, and mastering the other tasks that went into the production of this book. Their success shows that ordinary people not only can make history, they can also best record it. (Back cover).