I try to go through a couple of books each evening as part of my research, putting a sticky note on anything interesting, then copying those pages and returning the books the next day. (Thank God for Inter Library Loan!)

Last night I read John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.  While much has been written on the better-known Freedom Fighters in the Delta, it was the local tenet farmers who suffered most of the violence and endured most of the terror. Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s bore little resemblence to a democracy — for poor black OR poor white.

And yet W.E.B. Du Bois was fighting for Civil Rights decades before Birmingham and Selma and Danbury and Albany — without the slightest protection from the federal government (which, admittedly, wasn’t much in the ’50s or ’60s, either!).

That’s why when Dittmer includes this quote by Du Bois it is so startling:

“We return from the slavery of the uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civilian garb … We sing:  This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches … It disfranchises its own citizens … It encourages ignorance … It steals from us … It insults us … We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, Crisis, 19 (May 1919), 13-14.

Thank you, John Dittmer, for reminding me that this war is not yet won.