David Lucander's Reviews > Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi

I'm so glad that this book came in time for me to read just days before a week-long seminar about women in the Civil Rights Movement. I've been looking forward to this since seeing the author do a talk at a conference and reading her chapter in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Struggles in America several years ago.

The author discloses the fact that she is the product of an activist family and her favorable assessment of the people she writes about borders on hagiography. That said, this is an engaging story about the kind of women we don't usually imagine about when thinking about the Civil Rights Movement in the dungeon that was Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer, the poverty witnessed by Robert Kennedy in "Eyes on the Prize," and the closed society that made Stokely Carmichael's call for "Black Power" be so well received dominate the state's image. Morris enriches the story by telling about how solidly respectable middle aged and middle class women advanced the cause through community building, embracing quality of life issues, and making a difference in the lives of whoever would let them. These aren't peasants in overalls, radical SNCC organizers, or theoretically sophisticated proto Ella Bakers - they are regular people who care about their community.

This book joins Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, and Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi as mandatory reading for anyone interested in Black women's activism or the story of civil rights in a state with the reputation of being America's most notoriously racist place.