Writing in Black and White: The Box Project, Rural Black Women and New Narratives of the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, 1962 – 1968

• In Event: Creating Space for Survival and Resistance in Narratives of the Post-War African American Experience

Abstract

In the summer of 1964, nearly one thousand, freedom workers descended on Mississippi to “shake loose the fear” that plagued “rural southern blacks from wholeheartedly organizing and acting on their own behalf.” Ann Moody, a black Freedom worker and Mississippi native, recalled canvassing in the Delta only to encounter local blacks desiring “no part of voting.” While memoirs of Moody and others offer valuable perspectives of the Mississippi freedom movement from self-proclaimed civil rights activists, the perspectives of those they sought to “liberate” has gone largely unexamined. This paper places the experiences of everyday rural black women and mothers, in their own words, at the center of the civil rights narrative. Exploring letter correspondence of the Box Project, a grassroots, interracial postal-benevolence organization meant to alleviate poverty of over 3000 southerners, this paper asks how the day-to-day experiences of rural black women informed their responses to Jim Crow and civil rights. At the nexus of survival and resistance, this paper also asks how rural poor women imagined freedom for themselves and their families when the reality of black life was so precarious.

Author

• Pamela Walker, Rutgers