A Small Town Rises

Download or read book A Small Town Rises written by Lee Anna Sherman and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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 measures.