Silver Rights - Hardcover

Curry, Constance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565120957 ISBN 13: 9781565120952

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1995

Synopsis

With an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman. This is a true story from the front lines of the civil rights struggle--the story of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi. African-American sharecroppers and the parents of thirteen children, Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter accepted their school district's 1965 "Freedom of Choice" offer at its face value and enrolled their seven school-age children in the formerly all-white schools of tiny Drew, Mississippi. SILVER RIGHTS tells what happened to them next. As noted civil rights activist and Children's Defense Fund president, Marian Wright Edelman says in her introduction, "This deeply moving book chronicles the pain and poverty in the lives of sharecroppers, their extraordinary grit, courage, and endurance." "We should be grateful to and inspired by the lives of the Carter family."--Booklist; "A book teeming with loud voices and heat and faith, and backbreaking work and timeless courage and honor."--Melissa Fay Greene, author of PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK. A LITERARY GUILD SELECTION.

About this title

About the Author

Constance Curry is a writer, activist, film producer, and a fellow at the Institute for Women's Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She has a law degree from Woodrow Wilson College. Curry did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bordeaux in France. She earned her B.A. degree in History, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She was a Fellow at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute, Center for Civil Rights, Charlottesville, 1990-91.

Curry is the author of several works, including her first book, "Silver Rights" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995; Paper--Harcourt Brace, 1996), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction in 1996 and was a finalist for the 1996 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The book was named the Outstanding Book on the subject of Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. With an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman, "Silver Rights" tells the true story of Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter and her family's struggle for education in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The Carters were Mississippi Delta sharecroppers living on a cotton plantation in the 1960's and dared to send seven of their thirteen children to desegregate an all-white school system in 1965. Curry wrote "Mississippi Harmony" with Ms. Winson Hudson, published fall 2002 by Palgrave/St. Martin's press, which tells the life story of Mrs. Hudson, a civil rights leader from Leake County, Mississippi, who also challenged segregation in the 1960s. Curry collaborated in and edited "Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement" (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and the book "Aaron Henry: the Fire Ever Burning" (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). "The Wrong side of Murder Creek," released Nov. 1, 2008, is the memoir of Bob Zellner, the first male white field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961-67, and is co-written by Curry. They received the Lillian Smith book award for Non-fiction in September 2009.

From 1957 to 1959, she was Field Representative, Collegiate Council for United Nations. From 1960 to 1964, she was the Director of the Southern Student Human Relations Project of U. S. N. S. A., Atlanta, developing programs for black and white college students to organize. During that period, she was the first white woman on the executive committee of SNCC and was often their "designated observer" for sit-ins and other demonstrations. From 1964 to 1975, Curry was Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). From 1975 to 1990, she was appointed by the mayor to serve as director of the City of Atlanta's Bureau of Human Services Director.

Curry is the producer of the award winning film "The Intolerable Burden," based on "Silver Rights," but showing today's resegregation in public schools and the fast track to prison for youth of color. In Feb., 2009, she was given the Living Legend Award by the Seventh Day Adventist church in Baltimore, the first white person to receive it. An activist/participant and a writer/intellectual holding a law degree, Connie Curry has helped illuminate the struggle for justice.

Reviews

Part narrative, part oral history, this book reclaims a little-known but compelling story about America's uneven progress toward racial justice. The title refers to the locution used by black country folk for "civil rights," an elusive goal in the Mississippi Delta town of Drew, where sharecroppers Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter were the only black parents brave enough to send their kids to newly desegregated schools. Curry, a white field-worker for the American Friends Service Committee, visited the Carters between 1966 and 1975 and monitored their struggle; she here blends her own reflections with Mae Bertha's stories of courage and her children's tales of endurance. Edelman, as an NAACP Defense Fund lawyer, sued the local school district for maintaining segregated facilities despite the law. What emerges most clearly is the Carters' earnest, almost naive belief in justice: when the plantation overseer advised them to return their kids to the black schools, Mae Bertha played a record of President Kennedy's speech supporting the Civil Rights Act. The family endured much harassment, but seven of the 13 Carter children attended the better-equipped white schools and graduated from the only slightly less hostile University of Mississippi. Now daughter Beverly, the only Carter child to return home, is helping her mother fight for black political power. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Alice Walker has observed that the expression civil rights when pronounced by older black country people becomes silver rights and that she always felt that those older blacks imparted "music" to the term. This idea is the backdrop Curry uses in this study about the Carters, a Mississippi family of sharecroppers. Matthew and Mae Bertha demonstrated great courage in their involvement in the civil rights movement, most importantly by defying the odds for survival when they enrolled 7 of their 13 children in the Drew, Mississippi, school system. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated that states integrate their schools. Mississippi's interpretation of that law was "freedom of choice" papers, which allowed parents to designate the schools they wanted their children to attend. The Carters' determination to ensure that their children would receive a top-notch education was the beginning of their long, hard, and initially lonely road to integrating the schools and playing an important role in the Mississippi civil rights movement. We should be grateful to and inspired by the lives of the Carter family, particularly since the civil rights agenda is increasingly under attack. Lillian Lewis

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565120957
• ISBN 13: 9781565120952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288