Vera Pigee (1924-2007) managed Pigee's Beauty Salon in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and worked as a civil rights activist, serving as branch secretary to the Coahoma County chapter of the NAACP, a chapter she helped organize with Aaron Henry. She was an advisor to the Mississippi state NAACP Youth Council, taught citizenship classes, trained activists, and ran voter registration drives. She later became an ordained Baptist minister. Francoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies and History at Brown University. She is author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II and coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship.
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Vera Pigee's books were (until now) self-published, out-of-print, and not readily available. She had sold them at NAACP conferences and when she traveled to speak, but they were never uniformly distributed. . . . Republishing these books creates a more permanent space for her as one of the first in the slew of civil rights autobiographies that have emerged since.--Francoise N. Hamlin To get a sense for how the civil rights movement's energy flowed from charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. to organizers such as Ella Baker and on to the members of the community who shed their fears to march, protest, and vote, there's no better book than The Struggle of Struggles. . . . Pigee's book bristles with raw emotion and includes the kind of intimate detail seldom seen in popular accounts of the struggle.--Jonathan Eig "The Wall Street Journal" The Struggle of Struggles is a must-read for anyone interested in civil rights, Mississippi, and women's history.--Tiyi M. Morris, associate professor of African American and African studies, The Ohio State University at Newark In this labor of love, Francoise N. Hamlin excavates Vera Pigee's memoirs self-published in the 1970s. The Struggle of Struggles combines this brief biography with reflections on how easy it is to lose grassroots sources, the kind that give us glimpses of women like Mrs. Pigee, women who were at the heart of the civil rights movement.--Emilye Crosby, editor of Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement