Like a holy crusade : Mississippi, 1964--the turning of the civil rights movement in America /

The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, formally sponsored by a coalition of civil rights groups but actually dominated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), brought 1,000 northern white college students to Mississippi to teach in Freedom Schools, to conduct voter registration drives, and to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The SNCC leaders fiercely debated the use of white volunteers, torn between the fear that whites might take over the project and the realization that the federal government and the white population would not pay any attention to a small, all-black movement. The significance of that debate is illustrated by the fact that the Summer Project is best remembered for the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, two whites and a black. Drawing from a variety of sources, including the wealth of letters and memoirs by white participants, Mills emphasizes the tensions between white volunteers and local black leaders, culminating in the frustrating rejection of the MFDP at the Democratic convention of 1964. That, Mills suggests with regret, marks the point at which many young African American leaders abandoned the integrated Civil Rights Movement to move toward separatist and black power goals. General; undergraduate. T. H. Baker; University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Like a romance novel of the "had I but known" variety, this overview of the development, operation, and aftermath of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 is a "had they but known" history. Mills, coeditor of Dissent and an American studies professor at Sarah Lawrence, declares both his purpose ("to see what meaning the Summer Project has for us at a time when conservatives and liberals seem united in their gloom about race relations") and his conviction that "the real tragedy of the Mississippi Summer Project is not that it failed but that so many of its participants gave up on it before its triumphs became clear." As they planned for the movement of 1,000 white, northern college students to Mississippi; trained volunteers; coped with the sudden disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner; set up Freedom Schools, voter registration programs, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; and evaluated the project's effectiveness, the SNCC members who staffed it were driven by events. With the benefit of hindsight, they (and the volunteers, and even the Democratic Party) might have made some decisions differently. A thoughtful and fascinating addition to larger 1960s and race relations collections. ~--Mary Carroll

In 1964, 1000 white college students were recruited, chiefly by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to travel to Mississippi and register African Americans to vote. In this taut, well-researched history of the summer project, as it came to be called, Mills ( The Great School Bus Controversy ), drawing on interviews with participants, brings to life the spirit of that idealistic time when, despite tensions between the well-off white volunteers and the poor black project staff, all worked together for social justice. The summer began tragically with the murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, and closed with the rejection of the Mississippi Freedom Party by the 1964 Democratic National Convention, effectively ending an integrated SNCC and leading to the Black Power movement. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Mills (American studies, Sarah Lawrence Coll.) has written a readable, compelling account of Mississippi Freedom Summer. He argues convincingly that the summer of 1964 was a turning point in the Civil Rights movement in two senses. First, the combination of interracial cooperation and white violence helped speed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and create widespread Northern support for the movement. Secondly, and ironically, the Democratic Party's failure to fully seat black Mississippi delegates at the 1964 convention confirmed and exacerbated many black civil rights workers' suspicions of whites. This marked the real beginning of a split between white liberals and black activists. Still, the coalition between blacks and whites that summer serves as an example of racial common ground. An excellent work; highly recommended for all libraries.-- Anthony O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.