"At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared to descend on the state for the 1964 Summer Project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) compiled hundreds of statements from activists and everyday citizens who endured police abuse and vigilante violence. Fifty-seven of those testimonies appeared in Mississippi Black Paper. Originally published in early 1965 by Random House, the Black Paper exposed what prominent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described as "a society in which the instruments of justice are tools of injustice." The collection of statements recount assassinations, beatings, harassment, and petty meanness by white officials and everyday citizens opposed to any change in the state's segregated status quo ... This new edition includes the original foreword by famed theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and the original introduction by Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter III, as well as a brilliant new introduction by historian Jason Ward that places the book in its context as a critical document in the history of the civil rights movement"--