Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change by Kim Lacy Rogers (review)

Perhaps no state has received more scrutiny from historians of the civil rights movement than Mississippi. Certainly, the black-majority Delta region has received a disproportionate share of that scholarly attention. Finding new things to say about the Delta and its racial past is a daunting prospect for even the most seasoned of specialists, but Kim Lacy Rogers and her research partners were clearly equal to the task. In Life and Death in the Delta, Rogers not only deepens our understanding of the region's lived civil rights saga but also expands the chronological and interpretive framework for future studies of the unfinished freedom struggle.

Few scholars have done more to broaden the possibilities and refine the practice of oral history than Rogers. A former president of the Oral History Association, Rogers authored a pioneering oral history of New Orleans civil rights activists, edited a collection that probed the impact of trauma and survival on narrators' life stories, and contributed valuable insights on theory and practice through contributions to various publications. In Life and Death in the Delta, Rogers weaves together the threads that bind this impressive body of work—struggle and social change, suffering and trauma, and a methodological commitment to preserving and interpreting life stories. The result is a work that pushes against the temporal boundaries of civil rights historiography and the triumphal narrative that a neatly contained movement narrative imposes.

If Rogers's methodology and research interests are uniquely suited to crafting narratives of an unfinished revolution, her choice of setting is equally fitting. No corner of the South is more representative of America's unfulfilled promise than the Mississippi Delta, a black-majority region that continues to battle poverty and its attendant ills. Fittingly, Life and Death in the Delta opens with an evocative scene of the region in the mid-to-late 1990s—when Rogers, Jerry R. Ward, and Owen Brooks conducted the ninety-five oral history interviews that compose the core of the book's source base. The brainchild of New Orleans writer and oral historian Thomas C. Dent, the Delta Oral History Project (DOHP) interviews found a home at Tougaloo College and at Dickinson College, Rogers's institutional home.

The life stories that comprise the collection provide insight into the Delta's transformation over the twentieth century, yet one does not have to be a historian to observe that the region continues to suffer from many of the indignities the civil rights movement sought to overcome. That tension—between trauma and triumph, surviving and success—permeates not only the history of the region but also the life histories of its most seasoned activists and community leaders. We may marvel that their freedom dreams have survived decades of suffering and setbacks, but Rogers reminds us that the scars of struggle persist as well. Through three chapters, she emphasizes the brutality and deprivation of life under Jim Crow, the risks and long-term costs of defying this regime, and the individual and collective gains that African Americans in the Delta reaped. In chapter 4, Rogers—certainly benefitting from the extensive contacts of her collaborator and former Delta Ministry director Owen Brooks—focuses on the freedom struggle forged by local War on Poverty initiatives in the late 1960s and beyond.

Rogers uses the life story approach to foreground this collective narrative in the trauma of the Jim Crow era and the mixed legacy of the civil rights struggle, but this structure also yields keen insights about activists' dreams and disappointments in recent decades. The fifth and final chapter, "The Limits of Political Power," emphasizes not only the persistent structural inequalities that plague the Delta but also activists' own sense of success and failure. Attentive to the ways in which "the vantage point of the 1990s" and "the perspectives of midlife and late life" structured the life stories and "remembered struggles...