Prologue: Looking Out from Slavery Part I: "The Jacobins of the Country" 1. Of Chains and Threads 2. "The Choked Voice of a Race at Last Unloosed" 3. Of Rumors and Revelations Part II: To Build a New Jerusalem 4. Reconstructing the Body Politic 5. "A Society Turned Bottomside Up" 6. Of Paramilitary Politics Part III: The Unvanquished 7. The Education of Henry Adams 8. Of Ballots and Biracialism 9. The Valley and the Shadows Epilogue: "Up, You Mighty Race" Appendix: Black Leaders Data Set Notes Acknowledgments Index

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Arkansas in October 1962 at the request of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, the state affiliate of the Southern Regional Council. SNCC efforts began with Bill Hansen, a young white Ohioan--already an early veteran of the civil rights movement--who traveled to Little Rock in the early sixties to help stimulate student sit-in movements promoting desegregation. Thanks in large part to SNCC's bold initiatives, most of Little Rock's public and private facilities were desegregated by 1963, and in the years that followed many more SNCC volunteers rushed to the state to set up projects across the Arkansas Delta to help empower local people to take a stand against racial discrimination. In the five short years before it disbanded, the SNCC's Arkansas Project played a pivotal part in transforming the state, yet this fascinating branch of the national organization has barely garnered a footnote in the history of the civil rights movement. This collection serves as a corrective by bringing articles on SNCC's activities in Arkansas together for the first time, by providing powerful firsthand testimonies, and by collecting key historical documents from SNCC's role in the region's emergence from the slough of southern injustice.

Based on extensive archival work, private paper collections, and oral history, this book includes eight of John Kirk's essays, two of which have never been published before. Together, these essays locate the dramatic events of the crisis within the larger story of the African American struggle for freedom and equality in Arkansas, in the South, and in the nation. Examining key episodes in state history from before the New Deal to the present, Kirk covers a wide range of topics that include the historiography of the school crisis; the impact of the New Deal; early African American politics and mass mobilization; race, gender, and the civil rights movement; the role of white liberals in the struggle; and the intersections of race and city planning policy. Kirk unearths many previously neglected individuals, organizations, and episodes that shed powerful new light on the subject, and he provides a thought-provoking analytical framework for understanding them.