Reviews for Of long memory

The average rating for Of long memory based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-11 00:00:00 Jeffery Paetz Mississippi Goddamn……-Nina Simone If you read about the Civil Rights movement for any length of time, some horrific event that happened in Mississippi eventually pops up. From the murder of 3 young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to the brutal murder of 14 year old Emmet Till, to perhaps the most notorious of all Mississippi murders, that of Medgar Evers, shot in the back as he walked up his driveway. It is ostensibly that story which is told here in Adam Nossiter’s “Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evans”. It is Evers’s story. It is the story of his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith. It is the story of Evers’s brother Charles. It is the story of politicians, businessmen, and everyday people come and gone whose lives were and continue to be inalterably changed by the events of that day. These are the memories of the people and events in Evers’s orbit. Whose memory though? Any traumatic event such as this one inevitable create unreliable memories as time passes. Was MLK attempting to build a colorblind society? Was Malcom X renouncing violence toward the end of his life? Was Richard Nixon really not as bad as we once thought? In the same way Evers, for those who remember him, have turned him into a demigod of sorts. This he was not. He was not on the front lines of any large protests. He generally disapproved of such activity in favor of NAACP style legal challenges. He was not what one would call in the Civil Rights movement, a radical. What he was however was a lone soul, tirelessly walking the backwoods of backwoods in rural Mississippi attempting to get Black Mississippians to register to vote with very little support from anyone else and at constant risk to his life. Ultimately there is no need to romanticize Evers or make him into something he was not, as what he was was a beacon of courage to thousands of disenfranchised people who he gave a voice to. Enough of a force of personality to be murdered by the contemptible Byron De La Beckwith. In something that could only occur in Mississippi, Beckwith would be the beneficiary of two hung juries (though never acquited) and shamelessly feted by White Mississippians for years after the act (including the odious governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, coming to one of his trials and shaking his hand in front of the jurors). And yet Beckwith’s fame would be somewhat fleeting. As Mississippi started to feel shame (never enough however) over its past and its reputation around the country as a hotbed for racists, Beckwith would become ostracized, Blacks would begin to be represented in government, and change slowly began to be on the march, culminating perhaps in a third trial for the elderly Beckwith in the early 90’s where he was finally convicted. This is the story of Mississippi. For long stretches of its history, it was not a place where justice dared to rear its head. And yet I’m reminded of the words of MLK when I feel like things are beyond hope for some places: “The arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice”.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-19 00:00:00 Thomas Chang I don't think Medgar Evers is a terribly well-known figure today -- I know him best from the Bob Dylan song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" -- but this book captures the racial life of the Mississippi that countenanced his assassination in 1963, as well as the Mississippi that finally brought his killer to justice in 1994. It offers a good look at how race in the Deep South both was and is.