368 pages | 18th March, 2003 | Non-fiction | History
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND LITERARY AWARD WINNER
They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in Life magazine or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club.
More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlety that tracks the movement of racism across three generations and bears witness to its ravages among both black and white Americans.
"A beautiful, poetic book about an ugly time in America’s South. . . . Meticulously researched, exquisitely written and piercingly poignant."
Los Angeles Times
"Profound. . . . Shattering [the] silence was Hendrickson’s goal. Filling it with a meaningful, searching record is his tremendous accomplishment."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Hendrickson is a talented writer, with an eye for the telling detail and a comfortable voice that is both personal and lyrical in the style of a James Agee or W. J. Cash."
Washington Post Book World
"Ambitious. . . . Vivid. . . . Treats the civil rights revolution and resistance not as dusty history but as the best and worst of American culture."
USA Today
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.
US: Knopf