A Small Town Rises

A Sharecropper and a College Girl Join the Struggle for Justice in Shaw, Mississippi

By: Lee Anna Sherman

Narrated by: Dasha Kelly Hamilton

"A story of daring in a time of great danger....of two unknown heroes working for justice." (Dennis Flannigan, Washington State Representative, 2002-2010)

Part biography, part history, part love story, A Small Town Rises chronicles the lives of two civil rights activists who met in the tiny cotton town of Shaw at the tail end of the Mississippi Summer Project, the voting-rights campaign known as Freedom Summer. Shaw was, like countless segregated towns across the South, a pressure cooker of violent white resistance to the growing civil rights movement. The two young freedom fighters - sharecropper Eddie Short and recent college grad Mary Sue Gellatly - joined forces in 1964 with local Black activist Andrew Hawkins and a host of courageous townspeople to challenge and disrupt the status quo in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Their struggle brought triumph and tragedy to Shaw in equal measure.

©2020 Lee Anna Sherman (P)2020 Mary Susan, Eddie Short

A reminder of the horrible past racism

A tale of two young idealists fighting peacefully for the equal treatment of black people in Mississippi and by extension all those in the United States. They worked to have black people accepted in society and to allow them to achieve success in the same way others in the nation had done through fair treatment, hard work, and personal responsibility.