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"The inside story of the great grass roots civil rights upsurge of 1962-63 that culminated in the murder of Medgar Evers." - Cover of dust jacket. This is the first fully detailed report of any major southern civil rights struggle of the sixties. In these pages, John R. Slater, Jr., one of its key organizers and leaders, recounts the inside story of what is now know as the Jackson Movement - the first massive nonviolent direct-action protest in Mississippi, which culminated in the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. Beginning with a mere handful of dedicated, courageous people, the Jackson Movement took shape in the increasingly perilous atmosphere of Mississippi in 1962-63, first as an effective consumer boycott, then as a massive upsurge involving thousands of black Mississippians and their too few non-black allies. Their visibility and passive defiance in the face of bloody repression, characterized by mob violence, night-riding terrorists and assassins, court injunctions, and mass arrests, are not part of history. In what can only be considered a betrayal, the previously remote national office of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People, together with the hitherto distant federal government, sought first to retard ,then, apparently, to suppress the burgeoning movement. In the view of those who were on the scene, the conduct of the NAACP and the government at that time did much to precipitate the high factionalism and bitter divisions that have since marked the freedom movement. From all appearances, in 1963, civil rights politics took precedence over civil rights action. No one who reads this book will ever forget the account of the murder of Medgar Evers and its aftermath on the emotions of his co-workers. No one will ever read a more moving portrayal of human tragedy and destruction. This is the story of the Jackson Movement, but it is also the story of John Salter and his family, of Medgar Evers, of Edwin King, and all the rest who - against terrible odds and against the primitive power struggle of Mississippi, considered by many to have been at the time the most closed and repressive of all the southern states –-fought the war for civil rights. They may have lost their particular battle, but their struggle, along with the others in the 1960s, will surely go down in American history with the grandeur and tragedy akin to that other most traumatic experience - the Civil War of the century before. - Dust jacket.