Civil Rights Childhood

This heartfelt chronicle of a black family's courageous desire to remain in Mississippi from the 1930s to the mid-1960s despite the oppressive Jim Crow laws draws on the reminiscences of Andrew L. Jordan, the son of sharecroppers and a former executive director of the NAACP in Greenwood, Miss., who kept a diary that his daughter has lovingly framed with her own insights. Tracing her father's beginnings, Shakoor accurately describes the brutal exploitation of sharecroppers by their white overseers in the land of King Cotton. She unsparingly depicts the harsh traditions of Jim Crow and the evil fury of the Ku Klux Klanm as well as the strict code of legalized segregation that held black residents captive. One surprising anecdote introduces two white men of conscience, Mr. Jeff and Mr. Cole, who broke ranks and treated their black workers as equals. In some of the book's most evocative entries, Jordan conveys the grievous price exacted from those who put their lives on the line to dismantle segregation. Other standout sections deal with the vicious lynching of Emmitt Till in nearby Money, and the fearless leadership of Medgar Evers. Avoiding tearjerker prose, Shakoor describes the overwhelming pressures that finally forced her battered yet proud father to leave his beloved state for the dream of a better life in the North, though this coda lacks the power of earlier episodes. Readers seeking a view from the ground of one of the bloodiest civil rights battlefields will find this account by a pair of survivors engrossing and vital. (Sept.)