(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.)

LEARNING MODULE: WEEK 3, The Old South

Well, we’re already behind. I sure do talk a lot, but what do you expect. I’m a professor! It doesn’t matter, I’ll just hit the high points. The next topic would make another good midterm exam essay question, so I’m going back to double spacing the important points.

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. A few years ago, we had at least 7 political science alumni at top 10 law schools, and they were very diverse demographically (3 white females, 1 black male, 1 black female, 2 white males). The kind of discrimination that I am discussing existed in all 11 of the southern states as my full notes document, 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. Indeed, since 1980 MSU has had African American professors from northern states interviewing for high-level positions who spoke very favorably of the racial situation at our own university compared to their own university or local community.

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- 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 they favored Republican Hayes, prompting the Democratic controlled House to threaten a filibuster, and Hayes promising to withdraw federal troops from the South. The U.S. may have narrowly averted a similar mess in 2020!)

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 bad 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 (discriminatory application of 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, but only 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 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 20^th 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) Well, 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, 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 (loss of jobs, bank credit).

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, and seated the loyalist Democrats instead. Finally, the national Democratic Party was refusing to recognize Mississippi’s historically all-white regulars.

9) Well, the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act finally outlawed the 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 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. I know, 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. Golly, each district now has a white population majority. Guess what, each district ends up electing a white Democrat.” (Obviously, I’m just making up what I believe they were thinking. Documentation is provided in 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 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 of course occupies that seat. 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.

10) Ah, but how can the all-white state legislature remain all-white after the 1965 Voting Rights Act? Well, let’s see. Ah, yes, time for multi-member districts. We’ll just make sure that every district is majority white, but districts will be of different sizes and have a different number of legislators; each voter will vote multiple times, 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 (of course, that is an improvement over 0 from the previous year). 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; they 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 are from Parker's Black Votes Count, 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 up into 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.

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 of course 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 (though there is current concern over declining enrollments at the historically black schools and their limited endowments).