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Part 1 Becoming Part of Holmes County You need to tell how it was before the movement, what led up to it. Write about back before the movement come and how life was for a Negro in Mississippi. Take the man on the plantation, how he get up at five in the morning and get behind that mule and work in the field until they ring that bell at twelve o’clock noon and he stop for dinner. Then he go back to work at one o’clock when they ring the bell again, but then they don’t ring that bell no more after that because he know to stay out working ’til the sun go down. You gotta tell all that and how they was lynching and beating on Negroes and just what life was like down here. And then how it built up to the movement that come. The reason that Negroes have stood up is they’s not scared. The lynchings and killings frightened the Negro and kept them scared for a long time. But the lynchings were different from now. A lynching was just one Negro dead. Each one that got lynched was just one Negro gone. But this now, this is something that we is in together. We was all together trying to do something. So every time they come shooting or bombing it just made us all mad and more determined to go on. —Hartman Turnbow, as told to Sue Lorenzi, September 1967 ...

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