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I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. By Charles M. Payne. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xiv, 525 pp. $28.00, ISBN 0-520-08515-3.)
During the Black freedom movement, Mississippi stood apart as a uniquely brutal bastion of white supremacy. Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked that nonviolence might not work there; he and his organizers steered clear. Charles M. Payne's opening chapter, which vividly recounts the state's thirty-three known lynchings of Blacks between 1930 and 1350 (out of more than 533 since Reconstruction), shows why the Magnolia State instilled such terror even among the brave.
This remarkable study of the Mississippi movement--more specifically, of the grassroots "organizing tradition" that animated it--delves deeper into the interior of the Black movement than does any other to date, historical sociology at...