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For background on the civil rights struggle in Mississippi, see:

Payne, Charles M. (1995) I’ve Got The Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Dittmer, John (1994) Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press).

Payne’s I’ve Got The Light of Freedom also addresses the important theme of the relative significance of the ‘national’ and the ‘local’ in the struggle. See also:

Lawson, Steven F. and Payne, Charles (1998) Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

Martin Luther King Online Encyclopedia

This is an excellent website to use as a search engine for Civil Rights issues. To find articles on civil rights, Freedom Summer, the participants in those events, and a great range of different issues, one only needs to type the keywords into the search to generate a list of articles.

Links: Jim Crow

The History of Jim Crow

'The History of Jim Crow is a wonderful web site that provides a wealth of historical and pedagogical materials on the segregation and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans from Reconstruction through the modern civil rights movement.' Joseph Crespino

Remembering Jim Crow

American Radio Works in cooperation with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and its 'Behind the Veil' oral history project.

'The strength of Remembering Jim Crow is in the quality and accessibility of the oral history audio excerpts... [O]ne hears the actual voices of men and women recounting their own tales of hardship and struggle.' Joseph Crespino

'Walter Cronkite remembers'

'Famed journalist reflects on the lessons of recent history.' National Public Radio

'Civil Rights Era Almost Split CBS News Operation'

‘Mississippi 1964: Civil Rights and Unrest’

Jim Crow in America: A Library of Congress Primary Source Set for teachers.

Historical context, teaching suggestions, links to online resources, and more.

Mississippi, the Civil Rights Struggles

Mississippi History Now: An Online Publication of the Mississippi Historical Society

Austin, Curtis J. 'On Violence and Nonviolence: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi'

McMillen, N. R. 'Street Theater and the Collapse of Jim Crow: How the Black Freedom Movement Outsmarted Mississippi Segregationists'

Davis, Dernoral 'When Youth Protest: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1970'.

Civil rights in McComb, MS

The McComb Legacies sites from McComb, MS includes taped oral history interviews with a number of community members involved in the events in McComb during 1961 and 1964 (and later).

McCombLegacies.com is a joint project of the schools and citizens of McComb and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

Civil Rights collections, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries

This is a site put together by the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries. The site contains a link to their Civil Rights Collections which contains different manuscript collections. There is also a direct link to oral histories of the Civil Rights movement. There are transcripts and a few have audio.

Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement

'This website is of, by, and for Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement during the years 1951–1968.... With a few minor exceptions, everything on this site was written or created by Movement activists who were direct participants in the events they chronicle.'

The site contains a history and timeline of the Southern Freedom Movement, 1951–1968, discussions and photographs of Freedom Summer events, discussions of the concept and organization of the Freedom Schools by Staughton Lynd and of the schools themselves by Liz Fusco, their coordinator.

Freedom Schools

Lynd, Staughton, 'The Freedom Schools: Concept and Organization'

Lynd, Staughton 'The Freedom Schools, An Informal History'

Staughton Lynd was the director or co-ordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. There were 41 Freedom Schools and more than 2,000 students.

Freedom Schools curriculum

Edited and introduced by Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Reid Gold

'In this website we attempt to assemble all the curriculum material that was written for and during Mississippi Freedom Summer. We have written an introduction to put the curriculum and the schools in historical context. Embedded in the introduction are links to supporting documents about Freedom Summer and the schools.'

CORE

This is the official website of the Congress on Racial Equality, CORE. The website offers information on who they are and the history of their organization. It also describes the major programs in which they are involved.

SNCC

This website focuses on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, from 1960–1966. It contains RealAudio files and biographies of the people involved. There is also a detailed timeline of SNCC's involvement in the Civil Rights movement.