A (Race and) Mississippi Reading List

A (RACE AND) MISSISSIPPI READING LIST Curated by Dr. B. Brian Foster

GULF COAST (COASTAL MISSISSIPPI, INCLUDING BILOXI AND HATTIESBURG)

• Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White by William Sturkey
• Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
• Fiction: Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• Fiction: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

DELTA (NORTHWEST MISSISSIPPI, INCLUDING CLARKSDALE AND GREENVILLE)
• Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning by Aaron Henry
• Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers by John Jung
• Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II by Françoise Hamlin
• Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta by Clyde Woods • Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta by Robert Palmer
• Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class by Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner
• Delta Jewels: In search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom by Alysia Burton Steele
• Down on Parchman Farm: The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta by William Taylor
• Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark by Katherine Charron
• I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life by Brian Foster
• Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 by Todd Moye
• Marks, Martin and the Mule Train: Marks, Mississippi – Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Origin of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train by Hilliard Lackey
• The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax
• The Most Southern Place on Earth by James Cobb (MS Delta)
• You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta De Jong
• Documentary: Lalee’s Kin (HBO, YouTube)
• We Ain’t What We Was: Civil Rights in the New South by Frederick Wirth

“HILL COUNTRY” (NORTH/NORTHEAST MISSISSIPPI, INCLUDING OXFORD)
• An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, MS by William Doyle
• The Band Played Dixie: Race and the Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss by Cohodas Nadine
• Docu-Series: Last Chance U (Netflix)

“PINEY WOODS” (CENTRAL/SOUTH MISSISSIPPI, INCLUDING JACKSON)
• A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi by Emilye Crosby
• Black Boy by Richard Wright
• Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody • Heavy by Kiese Laymon
• Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya
• Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods by Patricia Michelle-Boyett
• Fiction: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Podcast: In the Dark, Season 2 (The Story of Curtis Flowers)

WHOLE STATE
• Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination by Richard Mizelle, Jr.
• Devil’s Sanctuary: An Eyewitness History of Mississippi Hate Crimes by Alex Alston and James Dickerson
• In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution by Joseph Crespino
• Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Robert Moses and Charles Cobb
• We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja
• Documentary: Freedom Summer (Amazon Prime)