"A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg: SNCC and Local Voting Rights Activism in Southwestern Mississippi, 1928-1964

Abstract

This thesis tells the story of McComb, Mississippi, a rural town that for four months during the summer and fall of 1961 rose up in support of black residents’ right to vote against a local government and white society that for decades had denied them any progress towards political and social equality. A movement emerged out of a coalition activists from McComb and elsewhere in Southwestern Mississippi and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a South-wide civil rights organization of student activists, to engage every segment of the black community through a broadly based voter registration drive. While these two groups did not always agree on tactics, they built an organizing infrastructure with the knowledge, capacity, and credibility to mount the most serious challenge to white supremacy that this town had ever seen.