Mississippi

"In 1964, sociologist William McCord, long interested in movements for social change in the United States, began a study of Mississippi's Freedom Summer, in which many thousands of African Americans and summer volunteers campaigned for the expansion of voting rights and other civil rights in the state. Described by his wife as 'an old-fashioned liberal, ' McCord himself, a 'great adventurer, ' believed that he should both examine and participate in events in Mississippi. He accompanied student workers and black Mississippians to courthouses and Freedom Houses, and attracted police attention as he studied the mechanisms of white supremacy and the black non-violent campaign against racial segregation. His book, Mississippi : The Long, Hot Summer, is one of the first examinations of the events of 1964 by an academic. It also provides a compelling, detailed account of Mississippi people and places, including the thousands of student workers who found in the state both opportunities and severe challenges. McCord sought to communicate to a broad audience both the depth of repression in Mississippi and the need for federal action to address what he recognized as national as well as Southern failures to secure civil rights for black Americans. His field work and activism in Mississippi offered a perspective that few other academics or other white Americans had shared. Historian Françoise Hamlin provides a substantial introduction that sets McCord's work within the context of other narratives of Freedom Summer and explores McCord's broader career that combined respected scholarship and social activism"--