Letters From Mississippi

“From Mississippi the rest of the United States seems unreal,” Bob Moses, director of the Mississippi Summer Project, remarked to a group of volunteers at our orientation session at Oxford, Ohio. At that time my own mental picture of the state contained nothing but an unending series of swamps, bayous, and dark, lonely roads. Of course the real Mississippi is nothing like that—but there was a certain logic behind my misconception. It had, quite simply, been impossible for me to believe that the skein of uncivilized atrocities that one knew had covered this state, could have spread through an area whose exterior is as modern and developed as the places one had left.

A white lady with whom I dined one night in Vicksb...