Just off Interstate 65 south of Nashville, a small private park bedecked with Confederate flags surrounds a nearly thirty-foot-tall statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his horse and waving a pistol. “He’s crying, ‘Follow me!’” explained the sculptor of the controversial artwork, Jack Kershaw, who would later brush off criticism about the piece by asserting that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”

I first met musician-organizer Guy Carawan in the early 1970s at a gathering at Highlander Center, when it was located for a time in Knoxville, Tennessee (its current home is in the country, in New Market). Guy was in his mid-forties and I was in my early-twenties. For the rest of my life until now, I have been listening to, learning from, and drawing inspiration from Guy, and indeed from his whole artistic family, including his wife and singing and song-gathering partner Candie, and their two children Evan and Heather.

On May 25, 1981, an estimated three thousand people convened at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to protest the slayings of black Atlanta youths. Rally organizers framed the demonstration as part of the March on Washington tradition.

In recent years, Mississippi has become a sort of totem for historians of the black freedom struggle, much as it was for the civil rights workers of the early-to-mid-1960s. Movement supporters once believed that if unregenerate Mississippi, the ultimate "closed society," could be brought to heel then black freedom in the United States was surely just down the road apiece. Similarly, many Movement scholars have focused on the Magnolia State in the belief that unraveling the complexities of the freedom struggle there is important, not just as a worthy end in itself, but as a means to understand the very nature of the southern civil rights struggle.