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The University of North Carolina Press
296 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 10 illus., 2 tables, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
Published: October 2004
Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986
In the middle of the Mississippi Delta lies rural, black-majority Sunflower County. J. Todd Moye examines the social histories of civil rights and white resistance movements in Sunflower, tracing the development of organizing strategies in separate racial communities over four decades.
Sunflower County was home to both James Eastland, one of the most powerful reactionaries in the U.S. Senate in the twentieth century, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the freedom-fighting sharecropper who rose to national prominence as head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Sunflower was the birthplace of the Citizens' Council, the white South's pre-eminent anti-civil rights organization, but it was also a hotbed of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organizing and a fountainhead of freedom culture.
Using extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Moye situates the struggle for democracy in Sunflower County within the context of national developments in the civil rights movement. Arguing that the civil rights movement cannot be understood as a national monolith, Moye reframes it as the accumulation of thousands of local movements, each with specific goals and strategies. By continuing the analysis into the 1980s, Let the People Decide pushes the boundaries of conventional periodization, recognizing the full extent of the civil rights movement.
"[Moye] provides a splendid, original, and balanced account of the form and function of civil rights in one of the most racist [counties] in Mississippi. . . . This gracefully written study covers all aspects of the civil rights movement while shedding valuable lights on the racist mentality that prevailed during the period. For all these reasons, Let the People Decide adds significantly to the growing body of literature on the civil rights movement."
--Journal of Social History
"Let the People Decide adds to a growing literature that illuminates the daily details of life and struggle of black people in communities throughout the South."
--Journal of Southern History
"Contemporaneous news coverage of the civil rights movement and subsequent histories largely ignored rural hot spots like Sunflower [County] while lavishing attention on big cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala. Now those long-standing oversights are gradually being corrected as books like Let the People Decide, J. Todd Moye's valuable history of black activism in Sunflower, begin to add new richness and complexity to what otherwise seems like an all-too-familiar story."
--Chicago Tribune
"Let the People Decide is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the civil rights movement. Well written and thoroughly researched, its poignant analysis demonstrates how blacks in Sunflower County, Mississippi, built and sustained a successful challenge to white supremacy and Jim Crow. Moye provides a much-needed perspective on race and politics, not only in the South, but in the nation as a whole."
--Curtis Austin, University of Southern Mississippi
"Sunflower County evokes powerful memories for all veterans of the black freedom struggle in Mississippi. Todd Moye has journeyed into the heart of darkness that is the Delta, returning with inspiring stories of courage and hope. Let the People Decide is an outstanding local study, an important addition to the historiography of the civil rights movement."
--John Dittmer, DePauw University
"Let the People Decide reveals in intimate detail the battle for civil rights in Sunflower County. This important and well-written book not only illuminates events in a single county but also resonates with events across the South and the nation."-Pete Daniel, author of Lost Revolutions
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Cloth: $59.95
Paper: $19.95
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