Like a Holy Crusade. Mississippi 1964—the Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

MILLS, Nicolaus.

$400.00

Item Number: 119669

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

First edition of historian Mills’ “moving account” of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign for Black voting rights. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page to fellow writer William Heath on the title page. Heath is the author of The Children Bob Moses Led. With Heath’s marginalia, near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert McCament.

"During what has come to be known as Freedom Summer, white college students from the North worked under veteran Black organizers" under the sponsorship of the Council of Federated Organizations, which "was dubious about inviting white outsiders." Historian Nicolaus Mills' account of that dangerous time is especially important in the book's focus on the participants who "speak for themselves… with a touching eloquence" (New York Times). Mills also offers valuable context by including input from Black leaders such as John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and post-1964 responses to the murder of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. In Like a Holy Crusade, Mills "avoided the comfort of myth and reminded us that the struggle was terrifying, ugly, magnificent… a moving account" (Chicago Tribune). The book's title comes from a quote by Lewis that is highlighted on an opening page. There John Lewis recalls: "I have often been asked what it felt like to participate in such a movement. I can remember many emotions… most of all, there was an all-pervading sense that one was involved in a movement larger than oneself, almost like a Holy Crusade, an idea whose time had come."