Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods by Patricia Michelle Boyett (review)

Patricia Michelle Boyett’s local history Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods examines one of the most historiographically underappreciated yet pivotal sites of the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Boyett focuses on the southeastern Mississippi towns of Hattiesburg and Laurel and their respective Forrest and Jones Counties, whose “violent trajectories . . . routinely paralleled each other and often intersected in brutal paths toward wretched ends” (p. 4). Lynchings in this region in the early twentieth century attracted larger mobs than any others in the state and were so brutal that they often gained widespread national attention. Laurel became the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in the 1960s, while white supremacists studied Hattiesburg for its success in derailing black protest through both violent and nonviolent means. In response, local African Americans framed their struggle for equality as a morality play of martyrdom in hopes of attracting national support for and intervention on behalf of their struggle. Boyett shows how their activism, the product of great sacrifice, eventually led to significant social and political gains in the region, though much work remains to be done.

Boyett’s research is exhaustive. She mines over eighty archival collections, including the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files, FBI files, court records, and local and national newspapers. She has also conducted interviews with nearly fifty black and white residents of the Central Piney Woods, many of whom had never before been interviewed. These oral histories, which Boyett has deposited at the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage (COHCH) at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), add a significant amount of material to an already rich collection. She also draws on forty-one other interviews, mostly housed at the COHCH. This tremendous attention to the voices of the people on the ground is admirable and even more impressive considering that she has condensed this information into highly readable and engaging narrative.

Boyett organizes her book chronologically, starting with the creation of a vanguard of local black civil rights leaders who were politicized by World War II; by the brutal wartime lynchings of Howard Wash, Ernest Green, and Charlie Lang; and by the execution of Willie McGee. She shows how this vanguard inspired a revolutionary period of black protest directly before, during, and after Freedom Summer, and she ends with an exploration of a “post–civil rights” fight for black political representation and protection from police brutality (p. 4). Boyett shows that there were repercussions for political activism, highlighting how Mississippi’s white leadership framed, imprisoned, and fatally neglected Clyde Kennard, a decorated army veteran and former University of Chicago student, who tried to enroll in Mississippi Southern College (now USM). The Klan assassinated Forrest County NAACP president Vernon Dahmer in early 1966. The subsequent FBI investigation and trials of Dahmer’s accused killers served as a major turning point in the freedom struggle as the federal response helped deflate the Klan’s power. One of Boyett’s major contributions is her detailed attention to the inner workings of the Klan; corrupt police forces; and crooked prosecutors, judges, and jurors who committed, facilitated, and enabled violence against black activists.

Yet violent intimidation did not snuff out the indomitable spirit of black citizens in the Central Piney Woods. Instead they engaged in some of the nation’s most important challenges to white supremacy as they filed suit against Hattiesburg registrar Theron Lynd, the first to be convicted for voter discrimination under the 1960 Civil Rights Act; led the highly publicized Freedom Day march in January 1964; organized one of the largest and most successful Freedom Summer sites in the state; and fought for greater political representation. In Right to Revolt, Patricia Boyett has written the definitive regional history of their struggle.