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I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.
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1996
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Momentous WorkBlack ExperienceAfrican American HistorySocial SciencesActivismOrganizing TraditionMovement LeadershipCivil LibertyAfrican American StudiesAmerican IdentityCivil RightsCivil Rights HistoryBlack Social MovementsCharles PayneAfrican American FreedomMississippi Freedom StruggleAmerican Civil Rights LawSocial MovementsBlack ProtestBlack PoliticsAfrican American SlaverySociologyBlack FeminismPolitical ScienceSocial Justice
The book chronicles the early civil rights movement in the South, emphasizing grassroots organizing by ordinary women and men who built the struggle locally, drawing on the legacy of earlier activists such as Ella Baker and Medgar Evers. Using extensive archival research and interviews with participants, Payne reconstructs the local, grassroots nature of the movement in places like Greenwood, Mississippi. Payne reveals that Mississippi’s civil rights activism was driven by working‑class rural Blacks and women, challenging the male‑centric, ministerial narrative, and shows that Black churches were late supporters rather than front‑line leaders.
This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and mensharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmerscommitted to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.