Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust

by Mary Stanton

Overview

Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust by Mary Stanton In 1963, the streams of religious revival, racial strife, and cold-war politics were feeding the swelling river of social unrest in America. Marshaling massive forces, civil rights leaders were primed for a wide-scale attack on injustice in the South. By summer the conflict rose to great intensity as blacks and whites clashed in Birmingham. In Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust, Mary Stanton chronicles deeply influential events that occurred outside the massive drive. Before the tumultuous summer of 1963, Bill Moore, a white mail carrier, made his own assault on racial injustice. Jeered and assailed as he made a solitary civil rights march along the Deep South highways, he was ridiculed by racists as a "crazy man." His well-publicized purpose was to walk from Chattanooga to Jackson and hand deliver a plea for racial tolerance to Ross Barnett, the staunchly segregationist governor of Mississippi. Moore had kept a journal that detailed his goal. Using it, along with interviews and extensive newspaper and newsreel reports, Mary Stanton has documented this phenomenal freedom walk as seen through his eyes. On April 23, on a highway near Attalla, Alabama, this one crusader was shot dead. Floyd Simpson, a grocer and member of the Gadsden, Alabama, chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, was charged with Moore's murder. A week later a white college student named Sam Shirah led five black and five white volunteers into Alabama to finish Moore's walk. They were beaten and jailed. Four other attempts to complete the postman's quest were similarly stymied. Although Moore was not a nobly ideal figure handpicked by shapers of the movement, inadvertently he became one of its earliest martyrs and, until now, part of an overlooked chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust tells the complicated, interwoven stories of Moore, Shirah, and Simpson. Though all three shared a deep love of the South, their strong feelings about who was entitled to walk its highways were in deadly conflict. Mary Stanton, an assistant public administrator of the town of Mamaroneck, New York, is the author of several books and articles about the civil rights movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604735406
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mary Stanton, an assistant public administrator of the town of Mamaroneck, N.Y., is the author of From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. Her work has appeared in Southern Exposure, Gulf South Historical Review, and Government Executive.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction: Shadow History	xiii
Part I	The Postman's Walk
	Walker	3
	Student	10
	Outsider	20
	Patient	26
	Activist	33
	Crusader	42
	Native	56
	Agitator	61
	Mixer	65
	Victim	73
	The Suspect	76
	White Americans React	82
	Black Americans React	91
	The Civil Rights Establishment Reacts	93
Part II	The Freedom Walk
	Passing the Torch	99
	Day One	104
	Day Two	112
	Day Three	119
	Alabama Reacts	128
	Freedom Now!	135
	Without Remorse	140
	Danville	145
	Cognitive Dissonance	149
	Another Direction	156
	White Shadow of SNCC	167
	Freedom Summer	171
	Moving On	183
	A March against Fear	195
	Epilogue: Highway 11 Revisited	201
Appendix 1	The Walks and the Walkers	209
Appendix 2	Timeline	211
	Notes	223
	Bibliography	235
	Index	243

Editorial Reviews

Stanton, who restored Viola Liuzzo to history in From Selma to Sorrow (1998), offers a moving, well-written portrait of another overlooked civil-rights warrior: mail carrier Bill Moore. Moore launched a now-forgotten one-man campaign for African-American equality with his own two feet: having previously walked from Baltimore to Washington to hand-deliver a letter to President Kennedy pleading for an end to segregation, he set out from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in April 1963 carrying a signboard reading "Equal Rights for All (Mississippi or Bust)." His plan was to walk along US Highway 11 through lower Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northern Alabama on to Mississippi, where he intended to deliver another letter to Governor Ross Barnett, appealing for tolerance "as white southerner to white southerner." Along the way, Stanton writes, Moore met a few more or less enlightened white folks, some of whom shook his hand, some of whom were somewhat sympathetic but nonetheless opposed. (One woman told him, "Look, I'm a Christian and I don't wish the niggers no harm, but you're dead wrong about this integration business.") A few days into his long walk, Moore was shot dead by an Alabama grocer and Klansman who was eventually acquitted of the murder. He was the first civil-rights worker to die in the line of duty, but not the last. Retracing his steps and quoting liberally from the diary he kept, Stanton honors Moore and his brave efforts while examining his troubled life as "an economic failure, a loner, and an atheist in a society which distrusted all three." (He'd been treated for schizophrenia as well.) She also traces the post-1963 trajectory of Moore's murderer, who "learned to live with alocal reputation of being 'the man who'd gotten away with murder,' a dubious distinction which caused him to be admired by some of his neighbors and avoided by others." A fine contribution to the literature of the civil-rights movement and to Southern history.

Kirkus Reviews