Nestled within the dense forests of the Piney Woods, the vibrant town of Laurel, Mississippi, stands out. Derrion Arrington examines the past social struggles regarding civil rights, worker rights, and white resistance. He follows how African Americans and whites in Laurel formed their own ways of organizing from the 1940s onwards. Laurel is recognized for both infamy and heroism, being the home of Klan zealot Sam Bowers and the valiant civil rights advocate, Benjamin Murph, of the Laurel-Jones County NAACP chapter. While the town fostered the notorious White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, it also thrived as a center for national civil rights organization's efforts and as a hotbed for civil rights promotion.
Through oral histories and archival research, Arrington links Laurel's democratic struggles to the grander scale of the national civil rights quests. He argues that the movement was a tapestry of numerous individual local fights, each with its distinct mission and tactics. Arrington's research pushes past established historical timeframes, showing that the fight for civil rights extended well into the modern era.
In this well-researched debut, historian Arrington succeeds in “lift[ing] the veil of anonymity” that he argues has “long hidden” the civil rights gains achieved by residents of the small town of Laurel, Miss. Beginning in 1832 with the town’s establishment as a lumber camp and preceding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the 1960s civil rights movement to the present day, Arrington spotlights how Laurel’s Black community has come together to fight organized white supremacy (including a local Klan outpost established at the turn of the 20th century). These efforts included pushing for voting rights and the right to unionize in the 1950s and ’60s; battling for school desegregation, which extended well into the ’70s and ’80s; and challenging a corrupt legal system in the ’80s and ’90s. Arrington highlights how often Laurel was visited by national figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr., who saw the community as fertile ground for combatting segregation, and how the town saw many of its young people go on to leadership positions within the movement at the state and national levels. While the huge amount of minutiae might be difficult to sift through for outsiders, Mississippians will find this a thorough and enlightening overview of local civil rights history. (Self-published)
