White Lawyer, Black Power

White Lawyer, Black Power

A Memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South

  • Author: Jelinek, Donald A.; Dittmer, John
  • Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
  • ISBN: 9781643361178
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781643361192
  • Place of publication:  South Carolina , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2020
  • Month: November
  • DDC: 340.092 B
  • Language: English

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years.

In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and an attorney for the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jelinek arrived in the Deep South at a pivotal moment in the movement's history as frustration over the failure of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to improve the daily lives of southern blacks led increasing numbers of activists to question the doctrine of nonviolence.

Jelinek offers a fresh perspective that emphasizes the complex dynamics and relationships that shaped the post-1965 black power era. Replete with sharply etched, complex portraits of the personalities Jelinek encountered, from the rank-and-file civil rights workers who formed the backbone of the movement to the younger, more radical, up-and-coming leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. "Rap" Brown, White Lawyer, Black Power provides a powerful and sometimes harrowing firsthand account of one of the most significant struggles in American history.

John Dittmer, professor emeritus of American history at DePauw University and author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, provides a foreword.

  • Cover
  • WHITE LAWYER BLACK POWER
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • CONTENTS
  • List of Illustrations
  • Foreword
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • List of Abbreviations
  • A Note on the Text
  • ONE “Black and White Together, We Shall Overcome”
    • 1. Going South
    • 2. Lawyers for the Movement
    • 3. On the Road
    • 4. Mississippi’s Newest Civil Rights Worker
    • 5. Novice County Leader
    • 6. Time to Leave . . . and Return
    • 7. Full-Time Civil Rights Lawyer
    • 8. The “Rape” of the Plantation Owner’s Wife
  • TWO Black Power Selma
    • 9. A Crack in the Movement
    • 10. White Lawyer in Black Power Selma
    • 11. The Cotton Wars
    • 12. Black versus Black in the 1966 Elections
    • 13. The Dark Side of Two Federal Judges
    • 14. No Blacks on Southern Juries
    • 15. Fired and Banished
    • 16. Unsung Heroes of Selma: The Fathers of St. Edmund
    • 17. The Unimaginable Poor
    • 18. The Fight for Food
    • 19. Goodbye to SNCC . . . and the South
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Subjects

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