Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas

Set in  1960's Missiissippi, this is a powerful historical fiction novel.  Celeste Tyree, an idealistic black college student from the University of Michigan volunteers to spend her summer helping the black Mississippi population register to vote.  She joins the One Man, One Vote movement and takes a train to Jackson, Mississippi, where she is trained and is then assigned to Pineyville, where she will run a half day school for the black childern and in the evenings she prepares the black adults to take the voter registration test.  All this sounds easy, but add into it that the white folks tried to make it impossible for the black folks to register.

Celeste endures searing heat and humidity, living in a house not more than a shack without indoor plumbing, using an outhouse for the 1st time. These things are nothing to the other challenges she faced:  the house being shot into after bedtime,sleeping on the floor for safety, a child drowning in the river, resistence from some of the black community to her programs, being arrested for taking a few folks to register to vote, having her church and classroom burned to the ground.  She even loses a tooth when she drinks out of a fountain and the sheriff takes offense. 

The writing is very descriptive.  You can almost taste the wonderul food of the south.  This is the author's 1st book, although she has written screenpalys and is an accomplished actress (Room 222; TV's version of In the Heat of the Night).  I hope she writes more.