With an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman. This is a true story from the front lines of the civil rights struggle--the story of the Carter family of Sunflower County, Mississippi. African-American sharecroppers and the parents of thirteen children, Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter accepted their school district's 1965 "Freedom of Choice" offer at its face value and enrolled their seven school-age children in the formerly all-white schools of tiny Drew, Mississippi. SILVER RIGHTS tells what happened to them next. As noted civil rights activist and Children's Defense Fund president, Marian Wright Edelman says in her introduction, "This deeply moving book chronicles the pain and poverty in the lives of sharecroppers, their extraordinary grit, courage, and endurance." "We should be grateful to and inspired by the lives of the Carter family."--Booklist; "A book teeming with loud voices and heat and faith, and backbreaking work and timeless courage and honor."--Melissa Fay Greene, author of PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK. A LITERARY GUILD SELECTION. Alice Walker has observed that the expression civil rights when pronounced by older black country people becomes silver rights and that she always felt that those older blacks imparted "music" to the term. This idea is the backdrop Curry uses in this study about the Carters, a Mississippi family of sharecroppers. Matthew and Mae Bertha demonstrated great courage in their involvement in the civil rights movement, most importantly by defying the odds for survival when they enrolled 7 of their 13 children in the Drew, Mississippi, school system. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated that states integrate their schools. Mississippi's interpretation of that law was "freedom of choice" papers, which allowed parents to designate the schools they wanted their children to attend. The Carters' determination to ensure that their children would receive a top-notch education was the beginning of their long, hard, and initially lonely road to integrating the schools and playing an important role in the Mississippi civil rights movement. We should be grateful to and inspired by the lives of the Carter family, particularly since the civil rights agenda is increasingly under attack. Lillian Lewis Constance Curry is a writer, activist, film producer, and a fellow at the Institute for Women's Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She has a law degree from Woodrow Wilson College. Curry did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bordeaux in France. She earned her B.A. degree in History, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She was a Fellow at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute, Center for Civil Rights, Charlottesville, 1990-91. Curry is the author of several works, including her first book, "Silver Rights" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995; Paper--Harcourt Brace, 1996), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction in 1996 and was a finalist for the 1996 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The book was named the Outstanding Book on the subject of Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. With an introduction by Marian Wright Edelman, "Silver Rights" tells the true story of Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter and her family's struggle for education in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The Carters were Mississippi Delta sharecroppers living on a cotton plantation in the 1960's and dared to send seven of their thirteen children to desegregate an all-white school system in 1965. Curry wrote "Mississippi Harmony" with Ms. Winson Hudson, published fall 2002 by Palgrave/St. Martin's press, which tells the life story of Mrs. Hudson, a civil rights leader from Leake County, Mississippi, who also challenged segregation in the 1960s. Curry collaborated in and edited "Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement" (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and the book "Aaron Henry: the Fire Ever Burning" (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). "The Wrong side of Murder Creek," released Nov. 1, 2008, is the memoir of Bob Zellner, the first male white field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961-67, and is co-written by Curry. They received the Lillian Smith book award for Non-fiction in September 2009. From 1957 to 1959, she was Field Representative, Collegiate Council for United Nations. From 1960 to 1964, she was the Director of the Southern Student Human Relations Project of U. S. N. S. A., Atlanta, developing programs for black and white college students to organize. During that period, she was the first white woman on the executive committee of SNCC and was often their "designated observer" for sit-ins and other demonstrations. From 1964 to 1975, Curry was Southern Field Representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). From 1975 to 1990,