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This article examines the history of the all-female, interracial, interfaith, upper- and middle-class civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), active from 1964 to 1970. Unlike more well-known, mass-mobilized, visible, and outspoken civil rights activism, WIMS sought to work behind the scenes to build personal relationships with southern women beginning during Freedom Summer and working through the War on Poverty. The participants of WIMS believed that they were equipped with a special ability as women to create interpersonal bridges between racially, religiously, and regionally diverse individuals. They hoped that creating these links would lead to stronger southern support for civil rights efforts. While limited in its ability to create large-scale change in fostering interracialism, WIMS was able to offer aid to Southerners and transform the racial consciousness of its over 100 northern members. In many ways this consciousness-raising was a precursor to feminist efforts of the mid-1960s.

Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS) was an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization formed in 1964 to aid in the Freedom Summer voter registration project. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) sponsored this organization, with participants hailing from major national liberal women's organizations such as the Young Women's Christian Association, National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of Catholic Women, Church Women United, and the NCNW. These women sought to counteract southern whites' negative stereotypes of civil rights workers by promoting themselves as an older generation of activists sympathetic to their cause. By wearing white gloves, pearls, and dresses, they employed gendered performances of respectability, membership in national women's organizations, and ties to major business and political leaders to change the hearts and minds of white southern moderates resistant to integration. In that first summer, 48 WIMS members in teams of five to seven women flew to Jackson, Mississippi on Tuesday, visited a smaller Mississippi town on Wednesday, and flew back on Thursday. Teams returned in the summer of 1965 to work with Head Start initiatives. In 1966 the organization became Workshops in Mississippi and shifted its focus to supporting anti-poverty initiatives, such as a pig farm, day care centers, and low-income home ownership projects, in Mississippi. This dissertation explores the ways that middle-aged, middle class black and white women engaged in activism during the 1960s. Unlike more radical feminist and black power activists, these women sought to be unobtrusive and inoffensive in their efforts, working behind the scenes to foster social and economic justice. Their activism depended on individual transformation and on building connections between local activists and national officials and organizations. Their quiet strategy has been largely responsible for the lack of attention given them by historians. Yet they offer an important and largely overlooked form of middle class liberal activism through which women influenced local civil rights campaigns; forged ties between black and white women, North and South; and used their connections to bring federal resources to poor southern communities. Ultimately, WIMS efforts also served as a model for NCNW projects in Africa.

In the nearly twenty years since Steven F. Lawson's original chapter on women's role in the civil rights movement in the first edition of the Companion, there has been a dramatic increase in scholarship highlighting the centrality of women to it, and to black liberation more broadly. This chapter begins with the 1930s Popular Front, a mass movement that united liberals, leftists, and communists in the fight for legal and economic equality and fostered African American leadership that emerged in the later, Southern‐led, modern civil rights movement. While Washington, DC feminists did not always agree, Anne Valk argues that efforts focusing on a single goal, such as challenging sexual violence, could unite diverse groups that drew upon the previous work of advocates for welfare rights, women's liberation, black liberation, and lesbian separatism.

The first case study examines the history of the 1962-1963 Greenwood Food Blockade, in which the all-white Leflore County board of supervisors used economic reprisals and food deprivation in retribution for local Black peoples efforts to register to vote by withholding the countys federal surplus commodities program for needy sharecroppers (p. 27). The second case study discusses the successful efforts of the Delta-based, white-owned Lewis Grocer Company, the largest wholesale retailer in Mississippi, to pressure the state to implement a food stamps program statewide. The final case study brings the struggle for emancipatory food power to the present by examining the North Bolivar County Good Food Revolution (NBCGFR) in the Mound Bayou-Winstonville-Shelby area, a program that empowers youth and the larger community to plant, harvest, and learn about healthy food in Delta counties that currently lack access to fresh vegetables and fruit.

Drawing extensively on local newspapers, city directories, census records, interviews, local archival collections, and secondary works from many disciplines, she attempts to show how cooperatives contributed to the city's modernization by helping build flood-control infrastructure, consumer programs, and cooperative food markets. According to Gessler, this cooperative drew on French republican ideals, utopian socialism, \"Caribbean and African diasporic survival politics,\" and the traditions of local creole of color mutual aid societies, as it called on the city to develop a public works plan that would give jobs to the unemployed and upgrade municipal flood control (p. 180). [...]although Gessler argues that all these cooperatives were \"internationally inspired,\" more sustained evidence on the ways that New Orleans cooperatives drew on global ideas and philosophies would be helpful (p. 183).