The Early Reviews Are In!

Here are some early reviews of Greater Freedom:

"Historians have longed for granular and detailed local studies of the epochal Civil Rights Movement. Now with the publication of this beautifully written, adroitly researched and brilliantly argued book, their prayers have been answered resoundingly.”

Gerald Horne, author, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s.

"The scholarly 'master narrative' and misguided popular memory of the civil rights movement, a triumphalist tale that begins with a weary seamstress in Montgomery and ends on a blood balcony in Memphis, takes a telling blow in Charles McKinney's GREATER FREEDOM: THE EVOLUTION OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE IN WILSON, NORTH CAROLINA. McKinney unearths forty years of local organizing, revealing the violence beneath Jim Crow's racial caste system and the generations of patient labors and impatient politics that toppled that oppressive social order without escaping its grasp entirely. Here the long struggle for African American citizenship in the South, culminating in a radical, mass-based Black Power movement led by black women, comes out of history's shadows and walks in the light. Electoral politics and battles over education, labor, housing, and poverty all take their place here, held together by a deep, generational understanding of the local nature of the movement. McKinney's deep insights into the local dynamics of African American freedom politics defy conventional understandings of 'civil rights' and "Black Power,' revealing a hardscrabble landscape that historians of regional, national and international approaches must incorporate as we move towards any valid new synthesis of the movement in the South. This is an important and much-needed contribution to African American and Southern history."

Timothy B. Tyson, author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power and Blood Done Sign My Name.

"Greater Freedom renders plainly visible the people of Wilson County, North Carolina and lays bare the place they called home. It also shows exactly how African Americans organized to secure such basic rights as quality education and decent housing and explains why they fought for these rights with such fervor for so many years. It is a masterful work of local history and an equally marvelous work of movement history."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt

In Greater Freedom, Charles W. McKinney, Jr. creates a vivid and engaging study of the unfolding of local civil rights struggles in rural North Carolina. With an impressive use of rare archival research, interviews and secondary sources, this study focuses on a wide cross-section of local black activists who confront violent and recalcitrant forces of white supremacy, more associated with the Deep South than North Carolina. His special attention to the centrality of women and working class African Americans broadens our understanding of local freedom struggles and the dynamics of class, gender and “progressive” politics in the four decades leading up to the 1970s. This is a valuable and original contribution to the corpus of civil rights scholarship.”

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

“With a compelling, storytelling style, Charles McKinney paints a vibrant, complex portrait of the civil rights struggle in the eastern North Carolina community of Wilson. He details African-American networks and movement centers, making visible the long-term commitment and small steps that served as the base for the more dramatic, visible moments. McKinney digs past North Carolina's progressive image, analyzing the various ways white supremacy manifested, but he pays particular attention to the internal dynamics of the black community. Here he makes a major contribution, bringing to life the ways class and gender played out in the community and movement. McKinney offers an engaging story, while weighing in on the major historiographical debates of the day. In the process, he expands our sense of movement goals and actors in the ongoing quest for ‘Greater Freedom.’”

Emilye Crosby, author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi

Is this compelling or what? Go ahead and pre-order your copy today!