| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movement in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986. By J. Todd Moye (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xi plus 281 pp.).
Sunflower County in Mississippi underwent tremendous economic and social change between 1940 and 1980. During these years, the mechanization of agriculture brought a important shift in the labor market. As the need for sharecroppers declined, it became more difficult for Afro-American to find jobs in the county. As a conseuqence, the black population decreased from 43,500 in 1940 to 21,500 in 1980. While many Afro-Americans chose to leave the county to find work in Northern or Western cities, others chose to stay and join a forty-year struggle for the right to make decisions that would influence their lives.	1
Before 1954, nobody, neither whites nor Afro-Americans, dared to challenge directly the Jim Crow system. Even moderate racists were charged with being either communists or subversives. However, the war had changed the views of some white veterans who were impressed by the way that Afro-Americans had fought for their country. Moreover, many Afro-American veterans felt more confident and were more willing to join the civil rights fight. Todd Moye's study not only unveils the cultural background of white resistance to civil rights, but it also reveals much about the changing Afro-American mentality; which went from compliance with white values to militantism and affirmation of their civil rights. In the process, Afro-Americans were able to redefine the world in which they lived. The most paradoxal element unveiled by Professor Moye is the fact that Sunflower County, which had been at the heart of the oppressive racial regime in Mississippi, became the birthplace of a powerful resistance movement.	. . .

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