4 ideas
In 1933 Mississippi, a white mob comes to lynch T.J. Avery, a Black teenager framed for a white storekeeper's murder that the white Simms brothers actually committed. David Logan secretly sets fire to his own cotton field; the fire spreads toward Harlan Granger's land, and white and Black men alike stop to fight it, which breaks up the mob.
Owning land outright removes the main lever white power uses against Black families: sharecroppers can be evicted or cut off from credit for any defiance, but owners cannot. Because this independence is the family's capacity to resist, the powerful attack it through mortgages, debts that can be called in, and pressure on whoever holds the note, and the family treats keeping the land as worth nearly any sacrifice.
A boycott of an abusive white-owned store collapses because most participants are sharecroppers whose credit and tenancy are controlled by the plantation owner who backs the store. They can be punished one at a time, while the organizers are few enough to be targeted with violence and debt. Solidarity costs the least powerful the most, so the cost of defecting is asymmetric and the defection is predictable.
Resistance under domination is a series of priced decisions: each act of defiance has to be weighed against what it will cost the family, and the family then commits fully to the fights it chooses. Visible compliance can be tactical, as when Cassie feigns deference to Lillian Jean in order to take her revenge privately. Open fights are reserved for things that cannot be surrendered, such as the land, the family, and self-respect.