Winner, Mississippi Historical Society 2026 Book of the Year Award
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (2025)
In March 1961, a group of nine Tougaloo College students walked into a “Whites-only” library in Jackson, Mississippi, sat down, and started to read. This simple, quiet, non-violent act began a “change of tide” in the Magnolia state, highlighting Black discontent with the Jim Crow segregationist system of exclusion and disenfranchisement. The sit-in was strategically planned to disrupt and provide a counter-narrative to the concurrent all-White Civil War Centennial celebration planned for the following day.
This juxtaposition of powerful currents—the Heritage groups honoring their lost dead and harking back to a mythic, monochromatic past vs. the Multicultural crowd trying to pull Mississippi forward into a new day of diversity and opportunity—clashed violently on the day of the trial of the Tougaloo Nine. Police dogs and billy clubs assaulted anyone outside the courthouse who dared to express support for the students’ right to enter White spaces. O’Brien artfully explores the lives of the nine students and the closed-minded Southern culture they confronted during this first wave of the Jackson Movement and makes the point that some of those same currents are evident in our politics today.
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Winner, 2014 Lillian Smith Book Award
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (2013)
We Shall Not Be Moved explores the explosive tension and dramatic outcomes of one of the most violent sit-ins during the heyday of the civil rights era. Using primary sources from those who lived through the event and its aftermath, as well as deep archival research, O’Brien treats the reader to a front-row seat to history.
“It’s all here: solid research, relevant history, honed prose. Masterpiece is not too grand a word to describe the excellence of M. J. O’Brien’s enduring work.“
— COLEMAN McCARTHY, former columnist for The Washington Post and Director, Center for Teaching Peace, Washington, DC
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