mississippi

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature"--.

A murder trial brings a small Mississippi town's racial tensions to the flashpoint. Amid a frenzy of activist marches, Klan terror, media clamor and brutal riots, an unseasoned but idealistic young attorney mounts a stirring courtroom battle for justice.

In Stillwater, Missippi, in 1955, thirteen-year-old African American Rose Lee Carter looks to her family and friends to understand her place in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

BB Wolf, a farmer and family man who fancies himself a blues musician by night, is forced into action when Mr. Littlepig tries to use a legal technicality to take his land.

When her grandfather registers to vote while living in segregated Mississippi, an Afro-American girl begins to understand why he insists that she attend school.

In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves ?the Emmett Till generation? launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till?s lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.

The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years.

"In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of a clinic that served the poor population for miles around. But ultimately it was not Ivester's father but her mother, a stay-at-home mother of four who became a high school English teacher when the family moved to the South, who made the most enduring mark on the town"--Amazon.com.

Describes the events surrounding the Freedom Summer Project in 1964, during which volunteers from northern states traveled to Mississippi to attempt to prove to local politicians that African Americans wanted their right to vote enforced and encouraging African Americans to make that desire known. Also discusses the resistance and violence the volunteers encountered.

A comprehensive account of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago lynched for a flirtation with a white woman at a country store in the Mississippi Delata.