Algonquin Books, 1995

From title to last page, Constance Curry’s book offers testimony to the ingenuity and resourcefulness, the moral imagination of certain hard-pressed black people in the rural South. These individuals stood up to the overwhelming power of landowners and sheriffs and politicians, enduring slurs and threats and bullets and clubs so that a legacy of forced submission and segregation would at least be confronted, challenged in the courts and in schoolrooms, in voting booths and on college campuses. All of that, we know, took place in the 1960s, three decades ago. Yet, what is now history very much needs the substantive kind of telling that this documentary narrative provides: a witness to a hugely important moment in the South and in our nation.