Standing Firm in Dixie: The Freedom Struggle in Laurel, Mississippi

In 1962, in a church near Laurel, a Black leader named Benjamin Murph told his neighbors, “We want bread to go along with ballots.” The vote meant little, he argued, without wages and security, and the people of Jones County would keep demonstrating even if it took fifty years. This talk tells the story behind that vow.

Laurel was a town of opposed extremes. It was the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the most violent Klan organization of the era, and it was home to a Black freedom struggle that refused to bend to it. From church gatherings and a mobilized younger generation through Freedom Summer and the long fight for the ballot, ordinary Black men and women organized, endured reprisal, and pressed for both the bread and the vote.

Drawing on oral histories and archival records, the presentation follows that struggle across generations, from the early twentieth century into recent memory. Laurel’s story is local and singular, and it reframes a familiar question—where the civil rights movement actually happened, and how much longer it lasted than the textbooks allow.

Speakers Expertise:

Derrion Arrington is a historian of Black political power and institutional life in Mississippi. He holds a B.S. from Tougaloo College and an M.A. in history from Tulane University, and has conducted archival research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Mississippi Library Commission. He is the founder of the Laurel Black History Project and the author of three volumes of community history—Standing Firm in Dixie (2024), The Poultry Plantation (2025), and The Full Wagon (2026)—and a 2025 recipient of the Mississippi Historical Society’s Award of Merit. He is at work on two biographies: a life of the soprano Leontyne Price for Yale University Press and a study of the legislator Robert G. Clark Jr. for the University of Illinois Press.