I've got the light of freedom : the organizing tradition and the Mississipi freedom struggle

This is an excellent book. It focuses is on the community organizing tradition – as opposed to the more high profile community mobilization tradition of King and others – and its importance to the civil rights movement. It's centered around Greenwood, Mississippi and the role that SNCC (though others such as CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP) played, in the face of repression (both violent and not) from whites and what was at first reluctance from black locals (though many SNCC organizers were Southerners if not Mississippians themselves). Crucial to the development and successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the activism of the 1940s and 1950s, which is often overlooked. The ideas of Ella Baker, who helped found SNCC, have a prominent role in this book, as well as others who believed that organizing was about building local leadership and distrusted large, bureaucratic, centralized organizations. Despite popular belief, ministers, at least in Mississippi, were not at the forefront of this movement and often had to be pushed into it. Similarly, non-violence played a much smaller role in the beliefs of rural blacks, who were often very willing to defend themselves against white violence. As much as the book is about the successes of the organizing tradition and SNCC, it is also about the downfall of SNCC, which the author attributes to multiple factors, amongst them a large influx of newcomers to the organization after its initial successes, the development of dogmatic perspectives, and a loss of focus on the slow but crucial work of organizing and education.

This is an excellent book. It focuses is on the community organizing tradition – as opposed to the more high profile community mobilization tradition of King and others – and its importance to the civil rights movement. It's centered around Greenwood, Mississippi and the role that SNCC (though others such as CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP) played, in the face of repression (both violent and not) from whites and what was at first reluctance from black locals (though many SNCC organizers were Southerners if not Mississippians themselves). Crucial to the development and successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the activism of the 1940s and 1950s, which is often overlooked. The ideas of Ella Baker, who helped found SNCC, have a prominent role in this book, as well as others who believed that organizing was about building local leadership and distrusted large, bureaucratic, centralized organizations. Despite popular belief, ministers, at least in Mississippi, were not at the forefront of this movement and often had to be pushed into it. Similarly, non-violence played a much smaller role in the beliefs of rural blacks, who were often very willing to defend themselves against white violence. As much as the book is about the successes of the organizing tradition and SNCC, it is also about the downfall of SNCC, which the author attributes to multiple factors, amongst them a large influx of newcomers to the organization after its initial successes, the development of dogmatic perspectives, and a loss of focus on the slow but crucial work of organizing and education.