Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story - Hardcover

Evers, Charles; Szanton, Andrew

4.29

14 ratings by Goodreads

9780471122517: Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471122513 ISBN 13: 9780471122517

Publisher: Wiley, 1996

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"Have No Fear reminds us what it meant to live under a system where segregation was important enough to kill for and where being treated with dignity and respect was a whites-only entitlement." --The New York Times Book Review

"A gutsy, American patriot and treasure . . . an important slice of American history."--Dan Rather

"Charles Evers has given us one of the most extraordinary memoirs about race in America that I know. This holy sinner of the civil rights era, who kept company with mobsters, bootleggers, call girls, Kings, Kennedys, and Rockefellers has produced, with Andrew Szanton, a salient one-man's history of Mississippi and the United States before and after Brown v. Board of Education. The fascinating interplay of racial nihilism and political sagacity is reminiscent of the early Malcolm X and the mature Frederick Douglass." --David Levering Lewis

"Truly spellbinding . . . relives the fear, desperation, and confrontation that marked the civil rights struggle." --The seattle times

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Review:

Brother of Medgar Evers, who was murdered in 1963 in Jackson, Miss., for his civil rights activities, Charles Evers was also an activist in his own right. He succeeded his brother as head of the Mississippi NAACP, and became the first black mayor in Mississippi since Reconstruction. But he was also a complicated, quixotic figure, a man historian David Levering Lewis calls a "holy sinner of the civil rights era." Charles Evers helped finance Medgar Evers's work with profits made running numbers in Chicago and at various times in his life, as he chronicles in this book, made money bootlegging liquor and arranging call girls. Nonetheless, it is moving when Evers calls for an end to hate.

From the Publisher:

A moving and dramatic coming-of-age memoir of Charles Evers, one of the most colorful civil rights pioneers and brother of Medgar Evers, slain hero of the Movement. Evers led a biracial coalition which unseated an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic Convention and was the first African American to run for governor of Mississippi and to be elected mayor in that state since reconstruction. His story is riveting and, working with a gifted collaborator, he has created a strong sense of time and place. Reveals new information about the Kennedys, especially Bobby who was a very close friend, and offers an up close perspective on Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

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