The forgotten keys

I found this in a used bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up. It consists of letters written to friends and family by white student volunteers who traveled to Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" of 1965 to support the drive for voter registration by African Americans.

The letters

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give a visceral sense of what it was like to plunge from the position of privileged and safe lives into the Civil Rights struggle. Reading the students' accounts of violence, intimidation, and disregard for the law makes the era immediate in a way that a formal history cannot. For a moment you feel what it is like to *live* history, to be in the midst of momentous events and not know what the outcome will be. And to fear for your life in very real and practical terms.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in personal accounts of one moment in the Civil Rights movement. But I also want to emphasize that "Letters from Mississippi" only provides perspectives from whites. People who -- however passionately devoted to the cause -- are outsiders facing the brutal effects of racism for a few weeks. You'll need to turn to other books for the perspective of African Americans for whom the "Freedom Summer" was not just a three-month journey into a world of hatred, but a lifetime struggle. The book was tattered and clearly much read by the time I purchased it. I often wonder who turned the pages before me and what they thought as they read these letters.

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