Like a Holy Crusade

Nicolaus Mills’ other books include Culture in an Age of Money (also published by Ivan R. Dee), The New Journalism, and The Crowd in American Literature. He teaches American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

• Part 1 Acknowledgements 9Part 2 Introduction: Like a Holy Crusade 15Part 3 Burn Jim Crow to the Ground 27Part 4 Tremor in the Iceberg 42Part 5 Nobody's Cannon Fodder 66Part 6 Open the Eyes of the Nation 77Part 7 There May Be More Deaths 94Part 8 The Magnolia Jungle 105Part 9 Pinto Beans and Politics 120Part 10 No Two Seats 139Part 11 Loose Ends 165Part 12 Mississippi Revisited 184Part 13 A Note on Sources 194Part 14 Notes 196Part 15 Index 217

Like a romance novel of the 'had I but known' variety, this overview of the development, operation, and aftermath of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 is a 'had they but known' history. Mills...declares his purpose ('to see what meaning the Summer Project has for us at a time when conservatives and liberals seem united in their gloom about race relations') and his conviction that 'the real tragedy of the Mississippi SUmmer Project is not that it failed but that so many of its participants gave up on it before its triumphs became clear.' As they planned for the movement of 1,000 white, northern college students to Mississippi; trained volunteers; coped with the sudden disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner; set up Freedom Schools, voter registration programs, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; and evaluated the project's effectiveness, the SNCC members who staffed it were driven by events. With the benefit of hindsight, they (and the volunteers, and even the Democratic Party)might have made some decisions differently. A thoughtful and fascinating addition to larger 1960s and race relations collections.