Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer ed. by Rev. Ed King, Trent Watts (review)

Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer is a unique photographic documentary chronicling Freedom Summer through the camera of Rev. Ed King, a white Mississippi minister and activist. Historian Trent Watts, a native white Mississippian himself, provides helpful historical context, including information about King’s leadership in the Freedom Vote and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

At the heart of the book, and its contribution to the field, are forty-two of King’s personal photographs and the accompanying narratives, which allow readers to see Freedom Summer as he saw it. What unfolds is a fascinating mixture of images and text ruminating on youth activism, grassroots organizing, interracial cooperation, violence, and sacrifice. The book recounts the amazing bravery of activists who were “willing to suffer, to risk death,” for their cause (p. 131). King was at great personal risk. He was under constant police surveillance, and his name appeared with other activists on Ku Klux Klan target lists.

King honestly discusses the Mississippi movement, admitting that there were tensions between different civil rights groups, a lack of involvement by most black churches, and divisions within the black community. He insists that Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in Mississippi should get more credit, which runs counter to historiographical shifts away from a MLK-centric narrative. Pictures of MLK dominate the book, but readers will also see John Lewis, Andrew Young, C. T. Vivian, and Robert Moses. There are no photographs of Ed King, the rare white Mississippi liberal risking everything for black rights. However, the book highlights his bravery, eloquence, and faith, as well as his self-proclaimed paranoia. He makes frequent, damning condemnations of the federal government for what he believes was complicity in the Neshoba murders, laying bare his bitterness: “Their government did not help them. And so they died,” and “My government let my friends be killed” (pp. 110, 114).

This book is an important addition to our understanding of Freedom Summer. It is not merely another collection of civil rights photographs (of which there are many), because it offers a unique perspective from within the movement. Ed King was not a journalist but an activist himself, which makes this book, as Watts argues, akin to a family photo album of Freedom Summer. It offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse with oral histories (most conducted by Watts) and King’s unpublished writings. Published to coincide with Freedom Summer’s fiftieth anniversary, the book brings attention to a critical year and a critical man. Scholarship on Ed King is insufficient, a problem that this book begins to address. The sources are equally important, and Watts’s rich oral histories will join King’s photographs in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. They are the book’s backbone and can serve as critical sources until King’s memoir is published. King and Watts have written a significant book, but King’s forthcoming memoir will be the true tribute to his work, his vision, and the state he is still helping to heal.