Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Summary
Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom is a social history (“bottom up”) of the civil rights movement (specifically SNCC) and the local people of the Mississippi Delta. These local activists, rather than the national leaders and organizations that has dominated historical scholarship, were the key mobilizing force and impetus of the civil rights movement. This book also examines the young leaders who adopted and adapted a particular organizing tradition of social struggle rooted in the Delta. Different from the community mobilizing tradition more popularly remembered in such events as Selma and the march on Washington, the organizing tradition (personified by Bob Moses and Ella Baker) emphasized the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women. Ultimately, the young activists of the 1960s brought “back to the rural Black South a refined, codified version of something that had begun there, an expression of the historical vision of ex-slaves, men and women who understood that, for them, maintain a deep sense of community was itself an act of resistance.” (405) Payne’s book builds off of what Steve Lawson sees as three generations of scholarship: the early work was top-down (national orgs., legislative acts, and judicial decisions); this was followed by (late 1970s) a generation of studies taking local communities and grassroots work as their focal point; more recently a third generation of work attempts to link the local with the national, social with the political (interactive – e.g. Aldon Morris). Payne’s work and bibliographic essays thus calls for a new age of scholarship that links the local and the national. As an interactive link, new scholarship can shed light on gender dynamics, leadership styles, and the importance of local people as part of the national movement. Payne writes (and argues powerfully throughout the book and essay) that the traditional view of the movement, popular or scholarly, “has failed to help us appreciate the persistence of a George Greene, the sustained courage of the McGhees, the growth of a Lula Belle Johnson or a Mary Lane, or Mr’s Hamer’s sense of community or humanity, or the strengthening faith of an Aaron Johnson.” (441) This book, as a whole, tells a story of racial terrorism, black women, civil rights workers, and the willingness and bravery of local people to defend themselves.