ABSTRACT
This book is a collection of oral histories from one of the Movement's most active battlegrounds—Holmes County, Mississippi. African Americans in Holmes County have always resisted white domination. Even when they were bought and sold like cattle, blacks found ways through cultural resistance to defy white will and to create their own world in which human dignity and autonomy flourished. Sometimes their resistance was overt. African Americans, of course, were the real victims of organized racism. Like blacks across the nation, Holmes Countians followed the national Civil Rights Movement as it was born in Montgomery, as it gathered momentum from the student sit-ins, and as it hit Mississippi with the freedom rides. The Civil Rights Movement has transformed Holmes County. Today, Mississippi boasts the largest number of black elected officials in the nation, and Holmes County has the largest bloc of any county in the state.
