A Small Town Rises: A Sharecropper and a College Girl Join the Struggle for Justice in Shaw, Mississippi

"A story of daring in a time of great danger ... of two unknown heroes working for justice."--Dennis Flannigan, Washington State Representative, 2002-2010

Part biography, part history, part love story, A Small Town Rises chronicles the lives of two civil rights activists who met in the tiny cotton town of Shaw at the tail end of the Mississippi Summer Project, the voting-rights campaign known as Freedom Summer. Shaw was, like countless segregated towns across the South, a pressure cooker of violent white resistance to the growing civil rights movement.

The two young freedom fighters--sharecropper Eddie Short and recent college grad Mary Sue Gellatly--joined forces in 1964 with local black activist Andrew Hawkins and a host of courageous townspeople to challenge and disrupt the status quo in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Their struggle brought triumph and tragedy to Shaw in equal measure.

A native northwesterner, Lee Anna Sherman worked as a reporter, feature writer, and editor for various publications after earning a master's degree from the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon. In the late 1990s, she helped launch the nationally recognized magazine Northwest Education, which she edited for eight years. Most recently, she was a founding staff member of Terra magazine, Oregon State University's award-winning research magazine, serving as research writer and associate editor for more than a decade. She is co-author with Betsy Ramsey of The Reading Glitch: How the Culture Wars Have Hijacked Reading Instruction (Lanham, Maryland: Roman and Littlefield, 2006). Her work has received recognition from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, the Oregon Society of Professional Journalists, the Alliance of Area Business Publications, the Association of Educational Publishers (EdPress), and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband, Bill Gellatly.