NONFICTION - Jan. 21, 1996

SILVER RIGHTS by Constance Curry (Algonquin Books: $21.95; 258 pp.). It’s 1965 in Sunflower County, Miss., only miles from the 5,800-acre cotton plantation of segregationist Sen. James Eastland. Mae Bertha Carter, mother of 13, has had enough; she wants her children to get a decent education and never have to pick another boll of cotton on the 25 acres the family sharecrops. A new federal law has made that dream possible. Mae Bertha has filed papers enrolling seven of her children in the county’s previously all-white public schools--and now, hours later, the plantation overseer is on the Carter doorstep explaining that the family should maybe keep their kids in the all-black school. What does Mae Bertha do? Brings a record player onto the porch and puts on John Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act speech, the president saying racism is “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution,” that “American students of any color should be able to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.”

This wonderful scene appears early in “Silver Rights,” and it captures the tenor of the 30-year battle fought by the Carter family to obtain a reasonable education, if not justice, for the next generation. Constance Curry, who first met the Carters in 1966 while helping to desegregate the South as a field representative of the American Friends Service Committee, has done an exceptional job of telling the Carters’ story; it is alternately inspiring and mortifying, frightening and enraging, with Sunflower County whites using every sort of pressure--threats and gun shots, taunts and money--to try to keep their white schools white. Three cheers for the Carters--especially Mae Bertha--for continuing to fight for equality despite believing about the majority of white Mississippians, “If they don’t get you in the wash, they’ll get you in the rinse.” And three cheers for Curry, too, for “Silver Rights” is a sure-to-be-classic account of 1960s desegregation.