227 NOTES Foreword 1. Qtd. in Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 297. 2. Ibid., 473n21. 3. Staff meeting minutes, June 9–11, 1964, SNCC Papers, roll 3, frames 975–92. I wish to thank Wesley Hogan for making these minutes available to me. I was invited to one session of this meeting but not to the session from the proceedings of which I quote above. 4. Casey Hayden, “Fields of Blue,” in Constance Curry et al., Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens, Ga., 2000), 357. I believe that such maneuvering took a toll. By the time of the Waveland conference in November 1964, Casey felt “uninterested in electoral politics” (“Fields of Blue,” 367). 5. Quoted in Letters from Mississippi, edited and with a new preface by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez (Brookline, Mass., 2002), 250–51. 6. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), 394–95; Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York, 1998), 469–75. 7. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York, 2009), 243. 8. Boycotts “became the focal point of movement activity in Greenwood in the middle and late sixties. . . . Most Greenwood activists feel strongly that the immediate cause of real change, change that they could feel in their daily lives, came in response to economic pressure. It is a point worth noting, because most histories of the movement . . . pay little attention to economic pressure .” Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 323, 328. What appears to have been the most successful boycott was in the city of Natchez and surrounding Claiborne County, led by Charles Evers of the NAACP (Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005]). 9. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 339–48. 10. Qtd. in Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 221, 375n8. 11. Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes, 213. 228 notes to pages 1–9 Introduction Epigraph 1: Qtd. in Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York, 1967), 48. Epigraph 2: James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York, 1966), 151; see also Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (New York, 2006), for life of fear and oppression in the Delta. 1. Michael Dorman, We Shall Overcome: A Reporter’s Eyewitness Account of the Year of Racial Strife and Triumph (New York, 1964). 2. Interviews with James Farmer and Marvin Rich, 1965; National CORE files. 3. COFO, “Mississippi: Handbook for Political Programs,” Jackson, Miss., 1964. 4. Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston, 1968); Moses, taped talk, June 20, 1963; see Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago, 1982), 146–80. 5. Marion Barry Jr. interview with author, December 18, 1965. 6. Zinn, SNCC; interviews with Bob Moses by author, 1990; Tim Jenkins interview with author, December 18, 1965; Barry interview. Chapter One Epigraph: Lowenstein interview. 1. See V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1962); Silver, Mississippi; Patricia Moseley, “ A Reminiscence,” in Susie Erenrich, ed., Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Montgomery, Ala., 1999), 9–11. 2. See W. Haywood Burns, The Voices of Negro Protest in America (London, 1963); James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York, 1972); see introduction, note 3. 3. See Louis E. Lomax, The Negro Revolt (New York, 1962). 4. See Zinn, SNCC; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Law Enforcement (Washington, D.C., 1965). 5. See Avery Leiserson, ed., The American South in the 1960s (New York, 1964); Silver, Mississippi ; Walter Lord, The Past That Would Not Die (New York, 1965); Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom , 29–66, for civil rights activities in Mississippi in the 1950s and White Mississippi’s violent response. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, Ill., 1994), talks about the early civil rights work around voter registration by the NAACP and other groups such as the Regional...