Greater Freedom offers a groundbreaking long-term community study of Wilson County, North Carolina. Charting the evolution of Wilson's civil rights movement, Charles Mckinney argues that African Americans in Wilson created an expansive notion of freedom that influenced every aspect of life in the region and directly confronted the state's reputation for moderation. Through exhaustive research and a compelling narrative, Mckinney chronicles the approaches and perspectives that blacks in this eastern North Carolina county utilized to confront white supremacy. In the face of violence, intimidation, and marginalization, voting rights activists, educational reformers, the collaboration of union members, students, and working class black women activists in Wilson built a grassroots movement that helped shape the course of the national civil rights movement in America. "Historians have longed for...local studies of the...Movement. Now with ["Greater Freedom"], their prayers have been answered resoundingly." --Gerald Horne, author, "Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s." "Greater Freedom...is a masterful work of local history and an equally marvelous work of movement history." --Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of "Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt." Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is an assistant professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.