(Note: these learning modules encompass the
actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss
class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students.
Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)
The Old South historically was characterized by
white supremacy and racial segregation. It is important for everyone to
understand our region’s history, if you wish to be able to function in our
nation’s modern economy. Some Ole Miss graduates have not fully understood
Mississippi’s troubled racial history, and they paid for it in terms of their
careers. Trent Lott was one example, but another was Haley Barbour, who when
testing the waters for a possible presidential bid kind of made light of the
white Citizens’ Councils, calling them community leaders who kept the Klan out
of his hometown of Yazoo City. After some national criticism of his
“insensitivity,” he decided not to run for President. (Honestly, I think he
could have made an excellent President, as shown by his outstanding leadership
in dealing with Hurricane Katrina.) Some of you may get depressed over the
following topic, but we have to understand our history, so that we do not
repeat our mistakes. Mississippi historically has had a terrible image
nationally, as people think of movies such as In the Heat of the Night, or
Mississippi Burning. But my students who have survived learning about our
region’s history do quite well in national competition. We have a number of
political science alumni at top 10 law schools, and are very diverse
demographically and ideologically. Our state today even receives praise at the
national level, such as for the Mississippi Miracle, which is its dramatic
improvement in K-12 education test scores in reading and mathematics. The kind
of discrimination that I am discussing this week existed in all 11 of the
southern states, but I am going to focus on Mississippi since I have done
research on that state, plus it along with Alabama are viewed as the “deepest”
of the Deep South states with the most repressive methods used to maintain
white control of politics and society. A final note is that this kind of
"tribal" discrimination is not unique to the American South but can
be found in nations around the world and throughout human history.
There
are about 12 different ways that white Mississippians maintained their
white-ruled segregationist system. Remember what they were, remember the time
frames, and remember specific details about how these devices and practices
were used.
1) After the South lost the
Civil War, most states were militarily occupied by the North under Radical
Reconstruction. African Americans were not only freed, but also provided the
same political rights as whites. Mississippi had had so many slaves that a majority
of voters were now African American. In 1870, for example, a biracial coalition
of Republicans controlled the state legislature. Both of the state’s U.S.
Senators were African Americans (and Republicans)- Blanche Bruce and Hiram
Revels. Go on-line and learn the bios of these Senators. In the 1875
election whites revolted and instituted what became known across the region
as the Mississippi Plan. It consisted of whites destroying
Republican ballots, substituting Democratic ballots for Republican ballots for
illiterate African Americans, and intimidating some blacks from voting.
Indeed, one white political leader in 1890 publicly admitted that whites had
been “stuffing ballot boxes, committing perjury” and engaging in “fraud
and violence” for fifteen years to maintain white control of the political
system (Shaffer and Krane, 1992 book, Mississippi Government and Politics,
pages 30-31). White Democrats regained control of Mississippi state
government in the 1875 election. (Note: a similar situation existed in other
southern states, including allegations that Republicans had also resorted to
fraud; indeed, such fraud charges led to South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana
sending competing slates of presidential electors to Congress, and Congress
setting up an Electoral Commission to resolve the issue; by a one vote
party-line margin they favored Republican Hayes as President, prompting the
Democratic-controlled House to threaten a filibuster, and Hayes promising to
withdraw federal troops from the South.)
2) The 1890 state
convention therefore wrote up a new state constitution to “legally”
disenfranchise (deprive of the vote) African Americans. The poll tax of $2
was expensive enough for lower income people, but Mississippi also made it cumulative
(you had to pay for 2 previous years that you had not voted in), and you had to
pay it over 9 months before the election (when many people weren’t even
thinking about the election, so they didn’t pay it, and therefore couldn’t
vote). Mississippi also started a literacy test, which required that you
either had to read any section of the state constitution, or be able to understand
it and give a reasonable interpretation of it; many residents of both races
were illiterate at that time, so white polling attendants would ask African
Americans harder questions than whites about obscure sections of the state
constitution (this constituted a discriminatory application of the literacy
test). This new constitution also included a long 2-year state residency
requirement and a 1-year electoral district residency requirement; the
thought was that African Americans were more likely to move around seeking
agricultural work, so they would be more likely than whites to be
disenfranchised. The 1890 state constitution ended up preventing 90% of
eligible African Americans from voting, and even about half of whites lost the
vote.
3) Violence and
intimidation by whites was a major way of maintaining white supremacy, and lynching
(murder) was the ultimate tool. From 1882 through 1952, 534 African
Americans were lynched in Mississippi. A black man could even be murdered for
“leering” (looking) at a white woman (Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from
Chicago). Northern Democrats attempted to make lynching a federal crime in
1922, but southern Democrats filibustered the bill. (Lynching was finally
officially outlawed by the federal government as a hate crime in 2022, and the
law was named after Emmett Till.) The threat of violence was illustrated by
civil rights leader Medgar Evers' unsuccessful effort to vote when he returned
home from military service during World War 2, as "fifteen or twenty armed
white men" confronted him in the circuit clerk's office forcing him to
return home without voting (For Us the Living book, p. 27). African Americans
who signed petitions calling for school desegregation would often lose their
jobs, such as 50 of the 52 petition signers in Yazoo City (the other 2 left the
state)(Katagiri, 2001, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, p. xxxiv).
4) White public
officials used racist rhetoric to support the white-ruled
segregationist system. Two such governors of the first half of the 20th
century were James Vardaman, known as the Great White Chief, and Theodore
(The Man) Bilbo. Both used the N word. Oddly enough, though, some of these
white racist governors pursued economically progressive programs in office,
because there were so many poor people in Mississippi. Another public official
who used racist rhetoric was Senator James Eastland, who as Chair of the
Senate Judiciary Committee killed civil rights legislation in the 1950s. (An
interesting side note about how Mississippi has changed, though, is that when
the state’s first African American Congressman since Reconstruction, Mike Espy,
ran for re-election in 1988, Eastland’s second cousin hosted a fundraiser for
him at the Eastland plantation.)
5) After the U.S. Supreme
Court struck down the white primary (state laws prohibiting blacks from
voting in the Democratic Party primary), and as national Democrats started
talking about getting the federal government to protect civil rights,
Mississippi state legislators in 1947 decided to pass a law that required that
anyone voting in a party’s primary be in accord with the principles of that
party. The Mississippi Democratic State Executive Committee proceeded to
announce that its “principles” were a belief in states’ rights, support for the
poll tax, opposition to any federal anti-lynching law, and opposition to any
federal anti-discrimination in employment committee. In other words, to vote in
the Democratic Party’s primaries, you had to believe in segregation!
This new Democratic Party rule was seldom enforced, though, because all
of the other voting devices had been so effective in disenfranchising African
Americans.
6) The segregationist
third-party of 1948, the Dixiecrats or States’ Rights Party had
Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as its Vice-Presidential candidate
(Strom Thurmond was the presidential candidate). The Democratic State Executive
Committee in Mississippi listed the Dixiecrats as the “official” Democratic
party nominees on the general election ballot, so the Dixiecrats won
Mississippi’s electoral votes. The same thing happened in the other Deep South
states that the Dixiecrats won. President Truman had to file an independent
slate of electors to get on the ballots in those states. This showed how the
state Democratic Party organization was an all-white institution dedicated to
upholding segregation.
7) The state legislature
in the early 1960s (during President Kennedy’s pro-civil rights
administration) passed legislation designed to prevent African Americans from
voting. A 1960 amendment to the state constitution required that voters be of a
“good moral character” with local white registrars empowered to make
that determination. A 1962 state law required that local newspapers publish
for two weeks the names of anyone who applied to register to vote, thus
subjecting blacks to economic intimidation (such as loss of jobs and of credit
from banks).
8) The state Democratic
Party persisted in sending all-white delegations to the national
Democratic convention. African Americans in 1964 created the Freedom
Democratic Party, and sent 62 blacks and 4 whites to challenge the seating
of the “regular” Democratic delegation. Civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer
testified how she had repeatedly been denied the right to vote, and had even
been beaten at the instruction of police. The national Democratic Party
promptly changed its national party rules to bar in the future any state party
delegation that engaged in racial discrimination. In 1968 the Freedom Democrats
joined with white labor union leaders and with College Democratic chapters to
create a more biracial “loyalist” Democratic group, loyal to the
national Democratic Party. In both 1968 and 1972, the national
Democratic Party unseated the regular Democrats (though the regulars by 1972
were racially integrated), and seated the loyalist Democrats instead. Finally,
the national Democratic Party was refusing to recognize Mississippi’s
historically all-white regulars.
9) The federal 1965 Voting
Rights Act finally effectively outlawed racially discriminatory voting devices
such as the literacy test and poll tax, so now African American voter
registration came to equal that of whites. Though African Americans due to
migration to other states no longer made up a majority of the state,
Mississippi nevertheless did have the highest percentage of blacks in the
nation. The all-white state legislature in 1966 looked at the map
of the state’s U.S. House districts and probably thought, “Woops, the
old Mississippi Delta district has a black population majority, blacks can vote
now, they can elect an African American congressman. Guess it’s time to redraw
our House districts. Instead of having geographically compact and culturally
meaningful districts, why don’t we just split the majority black Delta area
up into three House districts. We’ll just draw those three House districts
so that they go across the state, all the way from the Louisiana to the Alabama
state lines. Therefore, each district now has a white population majority. And each
district ends up electing a white Democrat.” (Obviously, I’m just making up
what I believe they were thinking. The redrawn district lines are shown Frank
Parker’s 1990 book, Black Votes Count, page 50.) African American plaintiffs
filed a federal court challenge to this practice, and finally the state agreed
to recreate the Mississippi Delta Congressional district. The first
election under this new plan was in 1982, and a conservative white Republican
Webb Franklin narrowly beat African American state legislator Robert Clark (the
district was more racially split than it is today). Four years later, a young,
professional, African American, Democrat Mike Espy, unseated Franklin.
Today, civil rights pioneer Bennie Thompson has occupied that seat since
1993. Thompson was first elected alderman in 1969 and four years later mayor of
Bolton, and was able to take office in both cases only after a federal court
rejected whites' election challenges. In 2022 Congressman Thompson chaired the
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States
Capitol, a Committee that operated in my opinion more effectively than either
of the Trump impeachment processes and that lit a fire under the federal
Justice Department so that they did indeed get former President Trump indicted
for alleged federal crimes (those indictments were dismissed after Trump won
the 2024 election).
10)
So, how could the all-white state legislature remain
all-white after the 1965 Voting Rights Act? Well, partly by the increased use
of multi-member districts. To ensure that nearly all districts would
remain majority white, majority black areas would be combined with larger white
areas so that the enlarged district would remain majority white in population.
Each voter would vote multiple times, casting one vote for each of the
legislative seats in that district. Hinds county, for example, had a 40% black
population at the time, so a single-member district plan could have resulted in
4 majority black state house districts. Instead, the legislature created a
10-member Hinds district, and everyone in that district voted 10 times, for 10
representatives who would all represent that county; now, all 10 members would
be elected from a district that was 60% white. Needless to say, only one
African American, Robert Clark, ended up being elected to the state
legislature in 1967; one African American out of a House of 122 members and a
Senate of 52 members. The numbers of African American legislators increased to
4 after the 1975 election. African American plaintiffs filed 14 years of
lawsuits, and it took 9 trips to the U.S. Supreme Court before the state
legislature in 1979 finally enacted a single-member district plan (that
produced 17 black lawmakers). Why the lengthy litigation? Well,
Mississippi’s federal district judges at the time were unsympathetic to such
civil rights cases; their nominations had needed the approval of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, chaired by James Eastland. Today, the legislative Black
Caucus is a very substantial group that almost reflects the black population
numbers. (Specifics cited are from Parker's Black Votes Count book, pp. 65,
104).
11)
Some people blame the state legislature for this state of affairs,
but polls suggest that the average white voter was supportive of segregation
throughout the 1960s. One poll in 1969 showed that a majority of white
Mississippians believed that “many federal laws were unconstitutional,” that
“most Supreme Court decisions were not in the best interests of the country,”
and that “the federal government is so powerful that it is like living in a
dictatorship.” Of course, these conservative views may also reflect reaction
against non-racial issues, such as the Supreme Court’s decisions protecting the
rights of those accused of crimes or striking down religious practices in the
public schools. But all three Mississippi governors of the 1960s were
segregationists. Ross Barnett’s campaign theme was: “Roll with Ross.
He’s for segregation one hundred percent. He’s not a mod-rate like some other
gent.” Paul Johnson’s slogan was Stand Tall with Paul, reflecting his
role as lieutenant governor during the Ole Miss integration when he tried to
block James Meredith’s entry. John Bell Williams in the late 1960s was most known
for being stripped of his congressional seniority by House Democrats after he
backed Goldwater for President. Needless to say, white attitudes changed
greatly by 1980, and our statewide Mississippi Polls found that white
Mississippians were as supportive of school and housing integration as were whites
in the rest of the region and even nation; indeed, a racial liberal, William
Winter, was elected governor in 1979, and he pioneered the landmark 1982
Education Reform Act.
12)
Mississippi’s segregated society was preserved by having all-white
state boards and commissions. One of them was the state College Board,
whose members were appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state senate.
Mississippi’s segregated university system had 8 public universities. Ole
Miss, MSU, Southern, and Delta State were all white; MUW
(Mississippi University for Women) was all white women; Jackson State,
Alcorn, and Valley State were all African American. Naturally, the white
schools received more funding and more desirable academic programs. The first
African Americans enrolled at the two largest white schools were James Meredith
at Ole Miss (in 1962), and Richard Holmes at MSU (in 1965); USM is most
known for Clyde Kennard, a Korean War veteran, who in the 1950s attempted to enroll
there and was framed for a crime and jailed. Democratic governors of the 1970s
and 1980s integrated the College Board and other state boards and commissions
by making some African American appointments. The first Republican governor
since Reconstruction, conservative Kirk Fordice, after his 1995 re-election
nominated 4 College Board members, all of whom were white, male, businessmen,
and from the three largest historically white universities. A now biracial
state legislative senate committee chaired by an African American ended up
voting down all 4 nominees, as African American lawmakers expressed concern
over a possible return to all-white state boards. Fordice’s new nominees
included an African American male and a white female. All succeeding governors
have maintained the diversity of the modern College Board with their
appointments of African Americans and women as well as white males. The Ayers
higher education lawsuit by African American plaintiffs (including Bennie
Thompson) was finally settled in 2002 with the settlement including $503
million provided to the historically black public universities by the year 2022.