Marks, Martin and the Mule Train

Marks, Martin and the Mule Train
Author: Hilliard Lawrence Lackey
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2014-02-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1493114972

Marks, Martin and the Mule Train is a third person chronicle of Marks, Mississippi as the origin of the Mule Train component of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. The book begins with the backdrop of living conditions in Marks, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, mired in abject poverty during the transition period when farm implements displaced field hands. More than half of area residents had left the cotton fields to work in factories up north. But those that stayed home were devoid of jobs and many were hungry. It was this pervasive sense of hopelessness and widespread hunger that struck Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his two visits to Marks in 1966. His first visit was made to preach the funeral of a marcher who had suffered a heart attack while engaged in the James Meredith March Against Fear from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS. Allegedly, Dr. King asked some black junior youth what they were going to be when they grew up. Their responses drew tears from the Civil Rights leader when summarily they acknowledged no future because of their skin color. The second visit also aroused tears empathy when Dr. King and Dr. Ralph David Abernathy watched a teacher feed her students four apples and a box of crackers for lunch. Southern public schools declined to accept federal aid for free and reduced meals to sidestep integration. These observations in Marks convinced Dr. King to follow the suggestion of Marian Wright Edelman to lead a Poor Peoples Campaign for jobs and justice. Dr. Abernathy writes in his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, that Dr. King wanted the Poor Peoples Campaign to begin at the end of the world, in Marks, Mississippi. And so it did. Even though Dr. King was assassinated on April 14, 1968, his inspired Mule Train left Marks on May 14, 1968. The 1, 000 mile journey took a month to complete but 28 wagons pulled by 56 mules paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue on Juneteenth (June 19)1968 as the centerpiece of the Poor Peoples Campaign. The Mule Train fulfilled one of Dr. Kings dreams.

Civil Rights History from the Ground Up

Civil Rights History from the Ground Up
Author: Emilye Crosby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820329630

After decades of scholarship on the civil rights movement at the local level, the insights of bottom-up movement history remain essentially invisible in the accepted narrative of the movement and peripheral to debates on how to research, document, and teach about the movement. This collection of original works refocuses attention on this bottom-up history and compels a rethinking of what and who we think is central to the movement. The essays examine such locales as Sunflower County, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Wilson, North Carolina; and engage such issues as nonviolence and self-defense, the implications of focusing on women in the movement, and struggles for freedom beyond voting rights and school desegregation. Events and incidents discussed range from the movement's heyday to the present and include the Poor People's Campaign mule train to Washington, D.C., the popular response to the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and political cartoons addressing Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The kinds of scholarship represented here--which draw on oral history and activist insights (along with traditional sources) and which bring the specificity of time and place into dialogue with broad themes and a national context--are crucial as we continue to foster scholarly debates, evaluate newer conceptual frameworks, and replace the superficial narrative that persists in the popular imagination.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968
Author: Robert Hamilton
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820358290

This book introduces new audiences to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final initiative, the multiracial Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968. Robert Hamilton depicts the experience of poor people who traveled to Washington in May 1968 to dramatize the issue of poverty by building a temporary city, Resurrection City. His narrative allows us to hear their voices and understand the strategies, objectives, and organization of the campaign. In addition, he highlights the campaign's educational aspect, showing that significant social movements are a means by which societies learn about themselves and framing the PPC as an initiative whose example can teach and inspire current and future generations. The study thus situates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and teachings in relation to current events and further solidifies Dr. King’s cultural and sociopolitical relevance. In the decades since 1968, we have seen increasing global inequality leading to greater social polarization, including in the United States. Hamilton offers the insight that the radical politics of Dr. King—as represented in the civil rights and human rights agendas of the PPC—can help us understand and address the challenges of this polarization. Hamilton highlights Dr. King’s commitment to ending poverty and explains why Dr. King’s ideas on this and related issues should be brought to the attention of a wider public who often view him almost exclusively as a civil rights, but not a human rights, leader.

Healing the Racial Divide

Healing the Racial Divide
Author: Lincoln Rice
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630875643

Healing the Racial Divide retrieves the insights of Dr. Arthur Falls (1901-2000) for composing a renewed theology of Catholic racial justice. Falls was a black Catholic medical doctor who dedicated his life to healing rifts created by white supremacy and racism. He integrated theology, the social sciences, and personal experience to compose a salve that was capable of not only integrating neighborhoods but also eradicating the segregation that existed in Chicago hospitals. Falls was able to reframe the basic truths of the Christian faith in a way that unleashed their prophetic power. He referred to those Catholics who promoted segregation in Chicago as believers in the "mythical body of Christ," as opposed to the mystical body of Christ. The "mythical body of Christ" is a heretical doctrine that excludes African Americans and promotes the delusion that white people are the normative measure of the Catholic faith.

Terror and Truth

Terror and Truth
Author: Stephen A. King
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2023-08-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1496846575

Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet examine how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through civil rights tourism. Mississippi’s civil rights memorials include a vast constellation of sites and experiences—from the humble Fannie Lou Hamer Museum in Ruleville to the expansive Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson—where the state’s collective memories of the movement are enshrined, constructed, and contested. Rather than chronicle the history of the Mississippi Movement, the authors explore the museums, monuments, memorials, interpretive centers, homes, and historical markers marketed to heritage tourists in the state. Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement is the first book to examine critically and unflinchingly Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry. Combining rhetorical analysis, onsite fieldwork, and interviews with museum directors, local civil rights entrepreneurs, historians, and movement veterans, the authors address important questions of memory and the Mississippi Movement. How is Mississippi, a poor, racially divided state with a long history of systemic racial oppression and white supremacy, actively packaging its civil rights history for tourists? Whose stories are told? And what perspectives are marginalized in telling those stories? The ascendency of civil rights memorialization in Mississippi comes at a time when the nation is reckoning with its racial past, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, Mississippi’s adoption of a new state flag, the conviction of former members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the South. Terror and Truth directly engages this national conversation.

Weep with Me

Weep with Me
Author: Mark Vroegop
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2020-06-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433567628

Today, racial wounds from three hundred years of slavery and a history of Jim Crow laws continue to impact the church in America. Martin Luther King Jr. captured this reality when he said: “The most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday.” Equipped with the gospel, the evangelical church should be the catalyst for reconciliation, yet it continues to cultivate immense pain and division. Weep with Me by Mark Vroegop is a timely resource that presents lament as a bridge to racial reconciliation in the world today. In the Bible, lament is a prayer that leads to trust, which can be a starting point for the church to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). As Vroegop writes: “Reconciliation in the church starts with tears and ends in trust.”

The Mississippi Encyclopedia

The Mississippi Encyclopedia
Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 1461
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1496811593

Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

Judgment Days

Judgment Days
Author: Nick Kotz
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2005-01-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0547884583

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s up-close account of how a white president and a black minister ultimately came together to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They were the unlikeliest of partners: a white Texan politician and an African American minister who led a revolution. But together, President Lyndon Johnson and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. managed to achieve a common goal. In Judgment Days, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nick Kotz provides a behind-the-scenes look at the complicated working relationship that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—some of the most substantial civil rights legislation in American history. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, including telephone conversations, FBI wiretaps, and communications between Johnson and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Kotz examines the events that brought the two influential men together—and the forces that ultimately drove them apart. “[A] finely honed portrait of the civil rights partnership President Johnson and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. forged. . . . A fresh and vivid account.” —TheWashington Post Book World

The Complete Soul Trilogy

The Complete Soul Trilogy
Author: Stuart Cosgrove
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1788856325

Spanning three different cities across the United States, Stuart Cosgrove's bestselling Soul Trilogy blends history, culture and music to paint a vivid picture of social change through the last years of the 1960s. Strap in for a journey through urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam, police corruption, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the rise of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, the arrest of the Black Panther members and their controversial trials, and much, much more. Award-winning and critically acclaimed, these are books that no soul music enthusiast should be without. 'Cosgrove's lucid, entertaining prose is laden with detail, but never at the expense of the wider narrative' – Clash Magazine Titles included in this bundle are: Detroit 67 Memphis 68 Harlem 69

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement
Author: John A. Kirk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317607325

Martin Luther King, Jr is one of the iconic figures of 20th century history, and one of the most influential and important in the American Civil Rights Movement; John Kirk here presents the life of Martin Luther King in the context of that movement, placing him at the center of the Afro-American fight for equality and recognition. This book combines the insights from two fields of study, seeking to combine the top down; national federal policy-oriented approach to the movement with the bottom up, local grassroots activism approach to demonstrate how these different levels of activism intersect and interact with each other.