Review, Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, by the youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (Westview Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, September 8, 1991

History is much too important to be left to the historians. As cultural critic Dwight Macdonald once said, “A people which loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic.” Yet academic historians have largely abdicated their responsibility to educate the public, choosing instead to engage in esoteric debates of interest to few people except other historians.

Minds Stayed on Freedom represents an attempt by a group of young people to recapture their own history and make it relevant to their lives. Eighth- and ninth-grade black students in Holmes County, Mississippi, enrolled in a summer project sponsored by the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center in which they conducted a series of interviews with veterans of the civil rights movement in their home county. Several of the activists are relatives of the students, and yet a sense of discovery marks the interviews as the youths realize for the first time the courage and commitment necessary to gain the basic rights they take for granted.

This dialogue between generations goes both ways. Just as the students are amazed at the sacrifices of an earlier generation, the former activists are thrilled that these youths understand the importance of the civil rights movement. As one woman says, “I’m so proud of these young peoples because I have always wanted young people to get involved so they could know the struggles we came through to get them where they are today. . . . I really feel like shouting just to know these young peoples really interested in the movement and to carry on after we have gone to glory.”

For most Americans, images of the civil rights movement center on a few key events and figures. The Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the confrontations between police and demonstrators at Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.’s rousing speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his assassination in 1968 largely constitute the popular memory of the movement. But this focus on a handful of major events and leaders oversimplifies the history of the civil rights struggle and minimizes the fundamental grass-roots nature of the movement.

In the book’s introduction, project director Jay MacLeod places the story of the Holmes County civil rights movement in the context of local history from the time of the region’s first white settlement in 1833. Even under slavery, Holmes County blacks developed a tradition of resisting white domination. Though the experiences of emancipation and Reconstruction failed in the long run to fundamentally change the plantation system, they provided blacks with a brief taste of political power. Even in the century after the re-establishment of white supremacy, blacks in Holmes County continued to make some economic advances—notably the creation of a black landowning class—that were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement.

As MacLeod says, events that gained national coverage, like King’s 1963 campaign in Birmingham, represent the entire black community mobilizing large numbers of people. On the other hand, the events in Holmes County represent the local community organizing. This process began in 1963 when a small group of independent black farmers invited representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help them organize. Throughout the state, SNCC helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated organization to challenge the dominance of the all-white regular Democratic party. In Holmes County, the MFDP was extremely effective, winning in 1967 the election of the first black state representative since Reconstruction.

This community study indicates the diversity of the civil rights movement by showing how local interests and tactics often differed from national ones. In Holmes County, for example, unlike in the national movement, the church and its ministers did not play a major role. Rather, the lead was taken by black landowners. Despite the fact that many were barely subsistence farmers, landowners had achieved a degree of independence from white society that gave them the economic freedom and personal courage to withstand white resistance to the movement.

When northern civil rights workers came to Holmes County to help organize, they stayed with these independent farmers. As one landowner remembers, being a private property owner allowed him to stand up to whites who resented his housing a white female civil rights worker. “I say, ‘What you go to do with this here?’ This ain’t none of your place is it? I’m tellin’ you right now, that house belongs to me. I don’t owe nobody nothin’ on it. If I get a bunch of white-faced cows and put ‘em in there, it’s nobody’s business. If I want to sleep with them, if I want ‘em to stay with me, nobody have nothing to do with it.’”

The crucial, early role played by landowners created resentment when, as the movement grew, the more educated classes stepped in to take over leadership roles. As one farmer says, “It was the so-called dumb people. Up from the grass roots, they call it. But now, the school teachers, the educated people, they ain’t did a damn thang! The preachers ain’t neither. The so-called dumb people open the way for everybody. See, the table was set. Yeah, and when the table got set with cake and pie, school teachers and everybody come in helping eat it up.”

Activists in Holmes County also differed from some leaders of the national movement in their view of armed self-defense. While the Holmes Countians express admiration for King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, they did not believe they had the luxury of strict nonviolence. Faced with regular confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan and other threats of force by whites, most black civil rights workers in Holmes County kept loaded rifles on hand.

Violence pervaded the history of race relations in Mississippi and Holmes County was no exception. Most of this violence was carried out by whites against blacks, often in the form of lynchings. But occasionally blacks resisted violently. The most famous such local episode was that of Eddie Noel, a young black Holmes Countian who, in 1954, shot and killed a white store-owner in an argument, then escaped from a large manhunt, killing two more whites in the process, before eventually turning himself in. Noel was a folk hero to blacks in Holmes County by the time of the civil rights movement a decade later. One civil rights veteran says Noel’s experience gave “some of the black peoples the idea that they didn’t have to take the beatin’ and runnin’ and the abusement like they had been. I’ve heard a lot of ‘em say it was good that somebody had the courage and the nerve to stand tall like a man than be treated like an animal.”

Similarly, Hartman Turnbow, an early movement leader who once fired into a crowd of whites that had set fire to his house, became a hero to local civil rights activists. Holmes Countians never defined such self-defense as violence. As Robert Cooper Howard, another black who once fired into a crowd of Klansmen outside his house, said, “I don’t figure that I was violent. All I was doin’ was protectin’ myself.”

In conducting the interviews, the students leave gaps of information that more experienced interviewers would have filled. For example, several people are mentioned as having been important to the local movement, yet their specific roles are not clearly explained either by those interviewed or the editors.

But such faults are overshadowed by the book’s virtues. Most notably, the students’ enthusiasm is contagious. In talking to their relatives and neighbors, these young Holmes Countians learned that history is not solely an impersonal process made by great leaders, but also can be made when ordinary people join together to display extraordinary courage.