Greater Freedom

The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina

By (author) Charles W. McKinney

Publication date:

23 September 2010

Length of book:

314 pages

Publisher

UPA

ISBN-13: 9780761852308

Greater Freedom offers a groundbreaking long-term community study of Wilson County, North Carolina. Charting the evolution of Wilson's civil rights movement, Charles McKinney argues that African Americans in Wilson created an expansive notion of freedom that influenced every aspect of life in the region and directly confronted the state's reputation for moderation. Through exhaustive research and a compelling narrative, McKinney chronicles the approaches and perspectives that blacks in this eastern North Carolina county utilized to confront white supremacy. In the face of violence, intimidation, and marginalization, voting rights activists, educational reformers, the collaboration of union members, students, and working class black women activists in Wilson built a grassroots movement that helped shape the course of the national civil rights movement in America.

Chapter 1 List of Abbreviations
Chapter 2 Acknowledgements
Chapter 3 Map of Wilson County
Chapter 4 Introduction
Chapter 5 1. Building Freedom from the Ground Up
Chapter 7 2. The Idea of Citizenship Was Never Greater: Organizing the Foundations of a Movement
Chapter 8 3. "A Little Too Much for a Self-Respecting White Man to Swallow": Brown and its Aftermath
Chapter 9 4. We Began to Question Where We Never Questioned Before: The Struggle to Build a Movement
Chapter 10 5. Somewhere Down the Line We Decided to Organize: Integration, Housing and the Ascendancy of "Lower Income Negro Citizens"
Chapter 10 Conclusion: Race, Class, Memory and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom
Chapter 11 Selected Bibliography
Chapter 12 Index

McKinney’s book is meticulous in its research and is a welcome treatment, in language and assessment, of the vitality of local civil rights struggles to a unified national movement that changed America.