Letter from Mississippi, 1965, Click here to read
This book was written by Florence Howe and me during our time in Mississippi, summer of 1965. We had returned to Mississippi after serving as volunteers in summer, 1964, "Mississippi Summer." We were supposed to lead workshops for 1965 volunteers, but the funding did not come through. We had been in touch with William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, who expressed interest in having a "Letter from Mississippi." For various reasons, it did not then get published, and the carbon (remember them?) lay round among Florence's papers for the intervening years. When she died, it came to me, and I thought it might be of interest to others—partly because of its account of local people's lives and civil rights efforts in violent SW Mississippi, esp Natchez, in those fraught days, and partly because it focused on nascent anti-Vietnam War ideas and activity among Black Mississippians in those very early times. We would no doubt have written it somewhat differently—e.g., with respect to reproducing some dialect—were we writing it today. So you might wish to see it as a document of its time, 60 years ago. - Paul
Our Sixties: An Activist's History
By Paul Lauter
What is my book about?
My memoir, Our Sixties, is a social history of the 1960s activities in which I was lucky enough to participate: for instance, Mississippi Summer in 1964, the Selma-Montgomery March, Students for a Democratic Society, draft counseling, demonstrating, and resistance to oppose the war on Vietnam, the founding of Resist in 1967 and of The Feminist Press in 1970, the GI anti-war movement. While I received my Ph.D. (in literature) in 1958, I got my political education working in the Movement I describe—with all its joys and warts—in Our Sixties. I came to these challenges ill-prepared, often scared and ignorant, but Movement people taught me unstintingly and well. My book is an effort to share their wisdom and hopes.
