Mississippi Zion

Mississippi Zion: The Struggle for Liberation in Attala County, 1865-1915 uses Attala County as its focal point to provide an in-depth examination of Mississippi as a struggle between concurring and intersecting liberation and redemption agendas between its African American and White citizens that resulted as African Americans asserting themselves as equals to their white counterparts. The book's six chapters detail how African American liberation efforts prompted the need for anti-Black apparatuses to thwart the race's individual and collective black power. The book asserts that the emergence of the county's 20th century Jim Crow society, and to a more considerable degree, the state itself resulted from the need to control and curtail African American power in the interconnected areas such as land, labor, education, voting, and progressive race relations. Rather than segmenting history into the typical Reconstruction, Nadir, and Jim Crow periods, the book frames the post-Civil War era as a Liberation Era that spanned from emancipation to the commencement of the 20th century, thus examining history through the African American agent, a continued and active presence, that shaped Southern society beyond federal occupation.