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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, edited by Susie Erenrich. Montgomery, Alabama: Black Belt Press, 1999. xv, 543 pp. $28.95 paper.
LITERATURE ON MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER has not been lacking. Whether journalistic reports, memoirs by participants, or scholarly investigations, the "long hot summer" has figured prominently in the history of the Southern civil rights movement. At their best, these accounts document how Americans from a variety of social, ideological, and economic backgrounds came together to transform the Jim Crow South and expose the contradictions of American democracy. At their worst, they overemphasize the dramatic moments of confrontation to the exclusion of earlier generations of grassroots organizers that laid the foundation for change. "The result," writes civil rights scholar Charles Payne, "is a history more theatrical than instructive."
Freedom is a Constant Struggle purports to cover the civil rights movement in Mississippi but fits best as a collection of documents about Freedom Summer. Proposed and edited by Susie Erenrich, the founder, executive director, and treasurer of the Cultural Center for Social Change, the volume celebrates and commemorates the Mississippi struggle as emblematic of other campaigns for social change around the world. "Too often, these social change initiatives are forgotten or presented in ways that distort their significance and mislead the public," Erenrich writes. To counter such perversion, Erenrich tracked down movement participants, native Mississippians, journalists, songwriters, artists, and photographers...