When the Movement Moves On: Black Women Way-Makers in the Mississippi Delta

This paper is an excerpt from my book manuscript in progress, Signed, Sealed, Delivered: How Black and White Mothers Used the Box Project and the Postal System to Fight Hunger and Feed the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Using letter correspondence from the antipoverty program the Box Project, this paper centers ordinary Black women after Freedom Summer 1964. First, the paper argues that rural, poor Black women’s letter-writing was a political act. Writing to distant allies who sent material goods, Black women explicitly discussed their bold personal steps toward actualizing freedom at that ballot box and their continued fight for food justice, all while recalcitrant local whites grew more determined to keep Black Mississippians hungry, poor, and uninformed after Freedom Summer. Black women notably wrote of unsolved racial violence they witnessed throughout the decade. In their letters to sympathizing white outsiders, some women were direct about the violence, naming the culprits outright, while others deployed euphemisms or spliced retellings over multiple letters. The threat of violence due to real or rumored civil rights involvement was omnipresent. Despite fears, within the space of a sealed letter, black mothers ensured their voices and experiences were heard. Additionally, the paper discusses how Black women lived out legislative victories such as the Voting Rights Act in their daily lives. After the passage of civil rights legislation, life for many rural Black women in many ways proceeded usual - an uneven mix of heartache and joy, ongoing encounters with an oppressive local government that “won’t let us have nothing.” However, many women took new legislation and federal antipoverty initiatives, no matter how delayed, ill-implemented, or ill-enforced, as a mandate to live as if democracy had come to the Magnolia State. Navigating with dignity an old south with new federal laws, rural Black women claimed their freedom.