Civil Rights Memoir Resonates with Today’s Call for Racial Justice
Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written extensively about civil rights and civil liberties. In Taking the Fight South, Ball’s candid and beautifully written memoir, he focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he taught in the political science department at Mississippi State University. With breathtaking historical authority, Ball narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. From refereeing football games and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South.…
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