Description: Shocking testimonials of the brutality committed against those fighting for freedom
Brief description: Jason Morgan Ward is associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. He is author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century and Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965.
Review Quotes: When it came out, official white Mississippi angrily denied Mississippi Black Paper's itemized record of unremitting brutality aimed at the Freedom Summer volunteers, while most other whites simply ignored it. But facts were facts; the violence was real, unremitting, and condoned by officialdom when it was not perpetrated by men with badges. Why bring it all up again? Because white officials across the nation are back at their old stand, justifying unnecessary white violence against black folks. Because young people are not adequately taught the disgusting record of the 1960s. Because many are still trying to deny the facts of history.
It's true that things have improved since 1964. But there was no way things could have been much worse, and there is no way to deny--except with lies--that black lives still don't matter as much as white. That's what Mississippi Black Paper was all about in 1964. Someone could write a pretty solid contemporary version in 2017. In the meantime, University Press of Mississippi has performed a public service by reissuing the old one.--Hodding Carter III was a reporter and editor for the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, and is professor emeritus of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.