PDF Climate Change and Public Health by Barry Levy; Jonathan Patz in History

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During Freedom Summer 1964; three young civil rights workers who were tasked with registering voters at Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County; Mississippi were murdered there by law enforcement and Ku Klux Klansmen. The murders were hardly noticed in the area; so familiar had such violence become in the Magnolia State. For forty-one days the bodies of the three men lay undetected in a nearby dam; and for years afterward efforts to bring those responsible to justice were met only with silence. In One Mississippi; Two Mississippi; Carol V.R. George links the history of the Methodist Church (now the United Methodist Church); with newly-researched local history to show the role of this large denomination; important to both blacks and whites; in Mississippi's stumble toward racial justice. From 1930-1968; white Methodists throughout the church segregated their black co-religionists; silencing black ministers and many white ministers as well; locking their doors to all but their own members. Finally; the combination of civil rights activism and embarrassed Methodist morality persuaded the United Methodists to restore black people to full membership. As the county and church integrated; volunteers from all races began to agitate for a new trial for the chief conspirator of the murders. In 2005; forty-one years after the killings; the accused was found guilty; his fate determined by local jurors who deliberated in a city ringed with casinos; unrecognizable to the old Neshoba.In one sense a spiritual history; the book is a microhistory of Mt. Zion Methodist Church and its struggles with white Neshoba; as a community learned that reconciliation requires a willingness to confront the past fully and truthfully. George draws on interviews with county residents; black and white Methodist leaders; civil rights veterans; and those in civic groups; academia; and state government who are trying to carry the flag for reconciliation. George's sources--printed; oral; and material--offer a compelling account of the way in which residents of a place long reviled as "dark Neshoba" have taken up the task of truth-telling in a world uncomfortable with historical truth.