Silver rights

About this book

Silver Rights is a true story of clear-eyed determination, down-home grit, and sweet triumph. It's the story of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi, African-American sharecroppers on a cotton plantation who, in 1965, sent seven of their thirteen children to desegregate an all-white school system. Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter had a dream for their children: to get them out of the cotton fields. And they knew of only one way to make it come true: to get them the best available education. So, when white school and county officials cynically met the letter (but not the spirit) of the new civil rights laws with a "Freedom of Choice" policy, the Carters bravely took them up on it and chose the best local schools - the white ones. They were the only Sunflower County blacks who dared. Before long, the Carters' shack was riddled with bullets in the middle of the night. The plantation owner canceled their credit at his store and threw them off the plantation. At school, the Carter children were tormented by white students - and by some of the teachers. For three terrible years, they were all alone in "the lion's den.". The story of the Carter children's long, difficult road to high school, college, and a way out of the Delta, comes to life in Constance Curry's firsthand account. And Mae Bertha Carter's letters to the author resonate with this family's fierce determination to win those shining, tantalizing rights that novelist Alice Walker has called "silver."