Why read I've Got the Light of Freedom?

Book cover of I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle

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This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South with new material that situates the book in the context of subsequent movement literature.

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked I've Got the Light of Freedom as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

David J. Garrow

Author

Outside cities like that famous Alabama trio, most of the civil rights movement’s actual work took place in rural counties and small towns where combatting segregation could be even more dangerous than in Birmingham. Leading that charge was SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Mississippi was the centerpiece of SNCC’s courageous local organizing. Charles Payne powerfully and poignantly captures the beauty and the perils of that work while also painfully reporting how in subsequent decades memories of that bravery too quickly faded. Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle remains the best organizational history of SNCC, and Francoise N. Hamlin’s Crossroads at…

From David's list on U. S. Black freedom struggle of the 1950s & 1960s.