Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986.

Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. By J. Todd Moye. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. [xii], 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5561-8; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2895-5.)

Sunflower County, Mississippi, was home for two of the most important figures in twentieth-century United States history: Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the bravest and most powerful voices of the African American freedom struggle, and U.S. senator James O. Eastland, one of the most powerful and ignominious politicians in a field that contained some awful men and women. The history of the twentieth-century Delta, which included the violence and terror associated with white supremacy and the plantation economy and the struggle against it, can be told through the lives of these two figures. In Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, J. Todd Moye describes the African American struggle for freedom and social justice in this Delta county from 1945 until 1986. He sees three phases of the civil rights movement during these years, the first of which was led by a tiny group of black professionals and farm owners during the years surrounding the 1954 Brown decision. The second was the more familiar movement of the early and mid-1960s, led by young black and white organizers and centered around Hamer. And the third phase was a cross-class movement that emerged in the 1980s around the leadership of Indianola's public school system.

Much of the story up to the 1980s will sound familiar with its focus on massive resistance and the struggle against it as well as the important years of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As the title suggests, Moye's study of a Delta county follows in the tradition of the major work of John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994) and Charles M. Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995). What Moye's study adds to this scholarship is a level of detail about life and work in the Delta and the ways in which black people sought to change their circumstances. There are many familiar figures such as Charles McLaurin and the family of Mae Bertha Carter. Less known is the struggle to elect Robert Merritt as superintendent of Indianola's public schools in the mid-1980s. Black people organized Concerned Citizens and launched a major economic boycott that forced former members of the Citizens Council to adopt a moderate strategy to include black people in the political structure. In Moye's view, this was a prime example of allowing local people to decide their issues and ways of resolving them. Moye concludes with a postscript that carries the narrative into more recent years and offers a fine discussion of the Delta Pride catfish workers' strike. Let the People Decide adds to a growing literature that illuminates the daily details of life and struggle of black people in communities throughout the South.

NAN ELIZABETH WOODRUFF

Pennsylvania State University