One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County - Hardcover

George, Carol V. R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190231084 ISBN 13: 9780190231088

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

During Freedom Summer 1964, three young civil rights workers who were tasked with registering voters at Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi were murdered there by law enforcement and Ku Klux Klansmen. The murders were hardly noticed in the area, so familiar had such violence become in the Magnolia State. For forty-one days the bodies of the three men lay undetected in a nearby dam, and for years afterward efforts to bring those responsible to justice were met only with silence.

In One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Carol V.R. George links the history of the Methodist Church (now the United Methodist Church), with newly-researched local history to show the role of this large denomination, important to both blacks and whites, in Mississippi's stumble toward racial justice. From 1930-1968, white Methodists throughout the church segregated their black co-religionists, silencing black ministers and many white ministers as well, locking their doors to all but their own members. Finally, the combination of civil rights activism and embarrassed Methodist morality persuaded the United Methodists to restore black people to full membership. As the county and church integrated, volunteers from all races began to agitate for a new trial for the chief conspirator of the murders. In 2005, forty-one years after the killings, the accused was found guilty, his fate determined by local jurors who deliberated in a city ringed with casinos, unrecognizable to the old Neshoba.

In one sense a spiritual history, the book is a microhistory of Mt. Zion Methodist Church and its struggles with white Neshoba, as a community learned that reconciliation requires a willingness to confront the past fully and truthfully. George draws on interviews with county residents, black and white Methodist leaders, civil rights veterans, and those in civic groups, academia, and state government who are trying to carry the flag for reconciliation. George's sources--printed, oral, and material--offer a compelling account of the way in which residents of a place long reviled as "dark Neshoba" have taken up the task of truth-telling in a world uncomfortable with historical truth.

About this title

About the Author:

Carol V.R. George is Research Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Review:

"In One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, church historian Carol V. R. George offers a complex and timely examination of race, religion, and the construction of memory and history in America....This account of the persistent witness of Mt. Zion to justice and equity
over nearly two centuries, combined with the hard work of the Philadelphia Coalition in Neshoba County, offers both a hopeful and sobering case study for those confronting systemic racism and seeking justice and reconciliation."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"[George's] work will always be a useful resource. However, in this particular season of American life and politics, her words not only evoke a time gone by but can hint at a future that may be filled with its own sinister developments."--Journal of Southern Religion

"Flannery O'Connor wrote about the value of 'reading a small history in a universal light.' In writing her extraordinary analytic history of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Carol V.R. George has taken O'Connor's injunction to heart. The result is an exceptional book that uses the history of a single church, albeit a historically resonant one, as the lens through which to interrogate the enduring American dilemma of race. An altogether exemplary work that humanizes and localizes the dilemma as few other works ever have."--Douglas McAdam, author of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America

"Carol V. R. George skillfully employs the best traditions of storytelling and micro-history to illuminate the African-American freedom struggle in Neshoba County, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. While her focus is on the struggles and triumphs of a single church--the Mt. Zion Methodist Church of Longdale--George's greatest contribution is a searching exploration of the complex connections between both history and memory and myth and reality."--Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

"By taking religion seriously, Carol V.R. George, vividly recounts why African Americans stayed in Mississippi despite the horrors of segregation, why some whites fought tenaciously to preserve their privilege, and how blacks and whites from a variety of backgrounds implicated the Methodist Church in the fight for civil rights. Read this book to better understand 1964 and the slow, non-linear march toward progress, reconciliation and inclusion."--Earl Lewis, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0190231084
• ISBN 13: 9780190231088
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328