One Mississippi, Two Mississippi

In One Mississippi, Two Mississippi , church historian Carol V. R. George offers a complex and timely examination of race, religion, and the construction of memory and history in America. She does this through her longitudinal study of Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a small congregation at the heart of a rural African American community in Neshoba County, Mississippi; the racially trifurcated communities of Neshoba County (Choctaw, African American, and white); and the denominational history of the Methodist church. Starting her story in the 1830s, George's three-hundred-year journey takes the reader through the familiar landmarks of the history of race in the United States: the displacement of Native Americans from the land, slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, the nadir, the great migration, and the civil rights movement. The journey also takes in a signal incident in the civil rights movement. In 1964, the Ku Klux Klan beat members of Mount Zion and burned their building. This was an act of intimidation intended to stop the church working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to open a Freedom School. The church burning was also part of a successful Klan conspiracy involving the Neshoba County Sheriff and police officers to murder civil rights worker Michael Schwerner. They killed Schwerner along with his colleagues James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. While the trip's itinerary is very familiar to the historian of religion and race, the route George takes does not follow the well-travelled highways; instead, she takes the reader along seldom-travelled back roads. The result is fascinating and compelling.

Art history · Civil rights · Economic Justice · Emancipation · George (robot) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Supreme court · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies