A Small Town Rises: A Sharecropper and a College Girl Join the Struggle for Justice in Shaw, Mississippi

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.