We have all seen the photograph. Three weary protesters, wearing milkshakes and mustard, sit stoically as dozens of young white men gleefully harass them at a Jackson, Mississippi, Woolworth’s lunch counter. The picture, taken by twenty-two-year-old Jackson Daily News photographer Fred Blackwell, captures the chaos of the May 1963 confrontation….

This extraordinary image inspired M. J. O’Brien’s meticulously researched exploration of the tumultuous period of protest that engulfed Jackson for several weeks. A corporate communications executive with a passion for research, O’Brien spent two decades tracking down and interviewing more than three dozen protesters and their antagonists, including the reclusive Anne Moody, the unrepentant segregationist D. C. Sullivan, and a transformed Fred Blackwell in one of his only interviews about the picture….

O’Brien’s interviews provide a richness of detail that will surprise and enlighten even those scholars intimately familiar with the Mississippi movement. We learn that (Medgar) Evers and (John) Salter “bonded” over a shared love of guns; we cringe when Bennie Oliver, a white roughneck pictured stomping on a protester, gets hired as a political aide to a candidate running for lieutenant governor; we laugh at Ed King’s mordant description of the “insane southern symphony” of sounds that accompanied the sit-in….

[S]cholars and lay readers alike will find much to learn and enjoy in this book. O’Brien’s labor of love has produced a fascinating account of this important civil rights story.

[We Shall Not Be Moved] easily draws the reader into the emotion, tragedy, and messiness of movement activity. O’Brien neatly dissects Blackwell’s image of the Jackson Woolworth sit-in on May 28, 1963, showing a mob of white youth pouring condiments and insults on the seated protesters. He then moves from the previous sit-in demonstrations in Jackson to the immediate and long-term reverberations of the three-hour ordeal the activists endured that day.

O’Brien rubs o_ some of the movement’s gilt by narrating intra-movement struggles that thwarted cohesiveness among activists when segregationists frustrated their attempts at every turn, then killed their most visible leader, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, two weeks after the sit-in. He does this by collating biographical narratives of the subjects of the photograph, both the abused and their abusers, as well as those—from Evers and the journalists and photographers to the police and politicians—not in the photograph but who helped to frame the scene.

O’Brien’s writing reflects his journalistic skills—he knows how to tell a story and how to analyze images, interview his subjects, and crat tight prose that engages readers and elicits empathy for those on both sides. By structuring the book through the dissection of an image, he provides a lesson in how to “read” photographs and weigh the cultural, historical, and political significance of an image by understanding the individuals pictured, those the photographer chose not to frame, and the photographer himself.

We Shall Not Be Moved contributes to the emerging historical literature on NAACP branches in black communities in the South. O’Brien centers his narrative on the story behind the photo, placing the local freedom movement within the larger civil rights context, and provides an intimate look at the various participants in this racial drama. In twelve chapters, a prologue, and epilogue, the lives of (Anne) Moody, (Joan) Trumpauer, (John) Salter, six fellow protestors, and others including reporters, police o_icers, ministers, college presidents, and segregationists, are included in a highly engaging narrative. We learn h ow they came to be involved on that fateful day, their actions in its immediate aftermath, and the course each took long after the campaigns ended.

What is most commendable is O’Brien’s decision to solicit diverse perspectives on what happened that day, including those of the opposition. The white opponents are represented by D. C Sullivan, a white bystander at the Woolworth’s protest who, as civil rights leader Julian bond writes in the Foreword, believed that “integration is wrong, then and now.” O’Brien includes the views of those opposing desegregation, as well as those determined to bring about change; and though O’Brien clearly opposes the actions of white racists, he refrains from portraying them as stereotypical southern characters….

O’Brien eschews the triumphalism of most early histories of the black freedom movement and reveals organizational rivalries, community apathy, personal conflicts, betrayal, and disagreements over tactics, strategy, and direction that could halt momentum and upset a promising and potentially important objective. In many ways, this is a tragic story, but one that demonstrates that even human failings could not halt significant racial change in Mississippi….

Part biography, part traditional history, We Shall Not Be Moved is a welcome addition to the expanding field of local movement studies.