White Mississippians Research Articles

Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts, 1890–1940The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After

Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts, 1890–1940The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After

Your Heritage Will Still Remain: Racial Identity and Mississippi's Lost Cause by Michael J. Goleman

Reviewed by: Your Heritage Will Still Remain: Racial Identity and Mississippi's Lost Cause by Michael J. Goleman Margaret M. Mulrooney Your Heritage Will Still Remain: Racial Identity and Mississippi's Lost Cause. By Michael J. Goleman. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 177. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1204-9.) On September 17, 2017, Alabama's Republican candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, a former judge, surprised many Americans by suggesting that our nation was better back in the days of slavery. "I think it [America] was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery—they cared for one another. … Our families were strong, our country had a direction" (Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/95396983-132.html). Historians of the South likely heard in this statement an echo of the Lost Cause narrative. As numerous scholars have amply demonstrated, this narrative had four main tenets: the South's cause, states' rights, was just; the Confederacy lost because it was overwhelmed by northern military might; black people were innately unsuited to freedom and had been better off in slavery, which was a benevolent institution; and Confederates were not traitors but the heroic defenders of American values and liberties. Former Confederates crafted this ideology in the 1860s to vindicate their beliefs and actions, but their descendants expanded its reach in the early twentieth century into all sectors of American society. How it emerged and why it continues to shape many contemporary white Americans' understandings of their own identity are the central concerns of Michael J. Goleman's brief yet insightful and accessible book. Goleman's work complements the extensive literature on the Lost Cause by focusing on its evolution in a single, very influential state: Mississippi. The book begins in the 1850s to establish the state and national context. The [End Page 767] remaining five chapters trace how white Mississippians constructed their version of events, adapted it during the years of Reconstruction, and maintained it into the Progressive era. He shows how the significance of prominent residents like Jefferson Davis blended with distinctive events like the siege of Vicksburg to shape the way a majority of white Mississippians viewed their relationship to the Confederacy and their particular place in the social and political landscape of the postbellum United States. He also reveals how these elements of Confederate heritage unique to Mississippi shaped white residents' "national social identity" (p. 134). Applying the methods of social theorists like Henri Tajfel and John Turner, who are interested in the creation of in-groups versus out-groups, Goleman examines how his subjects formed and reformed positive identities for themselves by constructing negative identities for others. For example, during the Civil War, white Confederates in Mississippi cast a wide range of out-groups, not just Union soldiers, into the role of enemy. But what matters most to Goleman is white Mississippians' use of the Lost Cause in the late nineteenth century to cast themselves as the nation's true patriots. Goleman is careful to acknowledge divisions among white Mississippians and between white and black constructions of the past. He draws chiefly on white-authored sources such as speeches, books, letters, and newspapers and incorporates black voices primarily in the final chapter, where he summarizes the development of a black counternarrative to the Lost Cause and the transformation of black culture in the emergence of the Delta blues. Although his analysis ends in the 1910s, Goleman argues in the conclusion that the Lost Cause shaped white Mississippians' response to the civil rights movement, especially the violence they directed at black activists like Medgar Evers and James Meredith. Finally, Goleman asserts that the Lost Cause continues to "define the state and some of its people" today (p. 131). Readers will easily recognize those elements of the Lost Cause in numerous other states. Margaret M. Mulrooney James Madison University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder

Reviewed by: Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder Gregory D. Smithers Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson. By Christina Snyder. ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 402. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-939906-2.) Some five hundred miles from the heart of the Choctaw Nation sat Great Crossings, in Scott County, Kentucky. This extraordinary antebellum experiment in indigenous education was the first national Indian boarding school operated by the United States government. When it opened in 1825, Richard Mentor Johnson, who eventually became vice president of the United States, oversaw this ambitious educational endeavor. When it closed in 1848, Johnson's political career lay in tatters, and his reputation among the Choctaws was severely tarnished. The story of Great Crossings is a tale of a small place in Kentucky with some profound historical implications. Historian Christina Snyder brings this story to life by using this federally funded educational institution to connect readers to fresh perspectives on Choctaw history and the histories of the Native South, slavery, and the social and political changes that altered life in antebellum America. Snyder's analysis is grounded in solid archival research. An insightful introduction and conclusion bookend twelve well-conceived chapters. In chapter 1 Snyder introduces readers to early-nineteenth-century Choctaws and the prominent Choctaw families who craved educational opportunities for their children. In the 1820s the Choctaws were already feeling the pressure of removal politics. The world that the previous generation of Choctaws defined as traditional was fading, and young men sought different paths to manhood and new skills to fight for their sovereignty. For the Pitchlynn family, that path involved a formal education. The most impressive and ultimately most famous member of the family was Peter Perkins Pitchlynn, or Hatchoctucknee. [End Page 443] For Peter Pitchlynn, Great Crossings proved to be an attractive alternative to the mission schools that dotted the Native South. As we learn in chapter 2, Pitchlynn met Richard Mentor Johnson at Great Crossings. Johnson and his mixed-race "'wife,'" Julia Chinn, oversaw the daily operations at Great Crossings (p. 3). Their work included navigating the racial tensions between Native Americans and African Americans at Great Crossings, which Chinn did with considerable skill. Great Crossings was indeed a diverse place. In chapter 3 Snyder provides insights into the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Potawatomi, Creek, and Cherokee students, as well as students from other Native communities, who attended the school. From this chapter readers get a sense of daily life among the students, the school's curriculum, and the pressures that were placed on the institution as the student population grew. Chapters 3 and 4 also provide glimpses of how students were taught to think about American history. As the school grew and students like Peter Pitchlynn excelled in their studies, racial tension persisted. In chapter 4 Snyder observes that disputes arose over issues as seemingly minor as the meals served at Great Crossings and the sense of social status that students projected on campus. Johnson, for example, felt that some Native students acted as if they were above their station. Chapter 5 provides a clear outline of how the racial science of phrenology emerged and helped sharpen discriminatory perceptions of indigenous people. The hardening of antebellum racial logic, Snyder explains, provided the intellectual foundation for removal and prompted an exasperated John Pitchlynn to refer to white Mississippians as "'the damnedest people in the world'" (p. 143). Chapters 6 and 7 address Choctaw removal in the early 1830s. In these chapters Snyder's analysis loses its focus on Great Crossings and reads like a fairly traditional narrative about Indian removal. Still, we continue to learn about the Choctaw students. As chapters 8 and 9 reveal, a number of these students, including Peter Pitchlynn and Adam Nail, became accomplished professionals, political leaders, and key figures in exposing the failings at Great Crossings during the late 1830s. While Johnson fought to maintain federal funding for Great Crossings, his support among both the Choctaws and the U.S. government dried up. As Snyder details in chapters 10–12, a new era in Choctaw education was about to open...

Life, liberty, and property in slaves: white Mississippians seek ‘just compensation’ for their freed slaves in 1865

ABSTRACTAfter the U.S. Civil War, a group of Mississippi politicians demanded that if their state abolished slavery and rejoined the Union the federal government must reimburse former slaveowners for the value of freed slaves. These politicians challenged the federal government’s authority to abolish slavery without ‘just compensation’ for their legally protected property. Though they failed, their allies and opponents alike believed Congress would compensate former slaveowners once Mississippi rejoined the United States. Their efforts are one chapter in a national story illustrating how white southerners attempted to defend their financial interests in slaves after wartime emancipation abolished slave labor.

Nation Within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government ed. by Glenn Feldman

Nation Within a Nation: The American South and Federal Government. Edited by Glenn Feldman. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. xii, 354. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-4987-8.) This collection begins with an essay by Thomas F. Schaller about that rebellious of states from nation's most rebellious region, South Carolina (p. 22). From Constitutional Convention to present, South Carolina's leaders have insisted on state sovereignty, and the state's belligerence, racism, misogyny, and violence have provided key signposts along route (p. 22). This strong language creates a framework for rest of essay, which exposes ways South Carolina's leaders continuously refused to uphold federal law. The only essay in Part 1, Schaller's chapter is a brisk but thorough overview of South Carolinians' anti-statist political predispositions since colonial times, supporting editor Glenn Feldman's thesis that South is distinctive, in sense most of us accepted before current spate of young historians' treatises to contrary. Schaller documents determined resistance to centric pull of national power and scorn for American democratic norms in South Carolina into twenty-first century. Part 2, Race, War, and Culture, includes four chapters: Zachary C. Smith's trailblazing essay about Georgia's Tom Watson during World War I, a time when racism and anti-Semitism often dominated his writings, and his populist, surprisingly egalitarian, and principled resistance to conscription and other federal war programs; Jason Morgan Ward's interesting essay about antistatist resistance to New Deal, a movement headed by southern industrialists and politicians that employed both racism and anticommunist smears in its drive against federal programs; Rebecca Miller Davis's entry about party realignments in Mississippi from 1930s to 1960s; and Chris Danielson's article about African American politics in Mississippi after passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965. The last two essays overlap chronologically, but while Davis sees race and states'-rights attitudes as primary causes of white Mississippians' turn away from Democratic Party, Danielson sees more nuance in this period of political transition and describes dilemmas within Republican Party after black voters began to register in 1965. Fred Arthur Bailey's essay about influential Dallas, Texas, English professor Melvin E. Bradford (1934-1993) is first chapter in Part 3. A Vanderbilt University graduate, admirer of Agrarians, and articulate conservative intellectual, Bradford contributed frequently to Southern Partisan and was credited by founders of neo-Confederate League of South as their prophet (p. 198). Many modern Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, celebrated Bradford's ideas, though Bradford often lost party stalwarts when he denigrated Abraham Lincoln. Swedish human geographer David R. Jansson's essay considers past events through lens of contemporary southern nationalism, using official e-mails and interviews with leaders of League of South (founded in 1994) and Southern National Congress (founded in 2008). …

The impact of preventive screening resource distribution on geographic and population-based disparities in colorectal cancer in Mississippi.

BackgroundThe state of Mississippi has the highest colorectal cancer (CRC) mortality rate in the USA. The geographic distribution of CRC screening resources and geographic- and population-based CRC characteristics in Mississippi are investigated to reveal the geographic disparity in CRC screening.MethodsThe primary practice sites of licensed gastroenterologists and the addresses of licensed medical facilities offering on-site colonoscopies were verified via telephone surveys, then these CRC screening resource data were geocoded and analyzed using Geographic Information Systems. Correlation analyses were performed to detect the strength of associations between CRC screening resources, CRC screening behavior and CRC outcome data.ResultsAge-adjusted colorectal cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, mortality-to-incidence ratios, and self-reported endoscopic screening rates from the years 2006 through 2010 were significantly different for Black and White Mississippians; Blacks fared worse than Whites in all categories throughout all nine Public Health Districts. CRC screening rates were negatively correlated with CRC incidence rates and CRC mortality rates. The availability of gastroenterologists varied tremendously throughout the state; regions with the poorest CRC outcomes tended to be underserved by gastroenterologists.ConclusionsSignificant population-based and geographic disparities in CRC screening behaviors and CRC outcomes exist in Mississippi. The effects of CRC screening resources are related to CRC screening behaviors and outcomes at a regional level, whereas at the county level, socioeconomic factors are more strongly associated with CRC outcomes. Thus, effective control of CRC in rural states with high poverty levels requires both adequate preventive CRC screening capacity and a strategy to address fundamental causes of health care disparities.

“We Ain’t Doin’ Civil Rights”: The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Midway through 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into relaxing room of her plantation home and turns off television set her daughter Skeeter and two members of domestic staff have been watching. Don't them like that! she yells at her daughter, as the help rush from room. The futility of outburst is matched only by its historical improbability. By late spring or early summer of 1963 (when scene takes place), turning off a news clip of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers urging black residents in Jackson remain steadfast in their boycott of racist merchants would have done little, if anything, discourage most black viewers, whose support of protest had been operating below their employers' racial radar for months. Moreover, offending clip probably never aired in Jackson (at least while Evers was alive). Evers had not been invisible on local TV screens in spring of 1963, however. On May 20, he had delivered a 17-minute televised speech Jackson and much of Mississippi described indignities and injustices experienced every day by black Mississippians, and had assured his audience the years of change are upon us. Granting local airtime a black leader in Mississippi was unprecedented; time had been allocated by local NBC affiliate WLBT--a station since its first broadcast in 1953 had censored, selectively edited, and often simply refused broadcast programs it deemed integrationist--defied white and black belief. The station, however, had little choice in matter. For six years, Evers had petitioned FCC and WLBT provide airtime for opposing arguments segregationist programming and news coverage. Under investigation by FCC in 1963 for its role in instigating violence during James Meredith's desegregation of Ole Miss a year earlier, WLBT finally acceded local and federal pressure and allowed Evers respond on-camera Mayor Allen Thompson's previously televised defense of Jackson's race relations. seems probable, Adam Nossiter has written, that until his final month, Evers was an obscure figure a majority of white Mississippians. Nossiter, who covered retrial of Evers's killer for Atlanta Journal-Constitution during 1990s, believes at moment Evers stepped in front of WLBT camera on May 20, 1963, he entered a new, ultimately fatal zone of notoriety. Nine days later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home; less than two weeks after that, he was murdered in his carport, shot in back by Greenwood, Mississippi Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. The broadcast may or may not have prompted Beckwith track down and silence Evers, but in long-running debate about effects of speech one fact remains undisputed: for first time in Mississippi, a black man had formally and directly addressed a white audience on local television. Some members of intended audience--the silent, responsible citizens of white community, as Evers called them--no doubt found themselves compelled follow logic of speech and, possibly, question moral and legal premises of segregation; others found image of Evers standing behind a podium so provocative they demanded station stop broadcast as soon as it began and even threatened, as one viewer did, to come up there and take [Evers] off. Evers knew well a public appeal sympathy and reason of white Mississippians could inflame die-hard segregationists--that it could, in fact, encourage all manner of white action. It was this encouragement--of white, not black, listeners--that appeared on Jackson television screens in May 1963. (1) Recordings of Evers's historic address have not surfaced (as of this writing), which may explain a reliance by The Help's co-writer and director Tate Taylor on a widely used archival excerpt of a different event. …

Mississippi praying: southern white evangelicals and the civil rights movement, 1945-1975

ContentsList of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: History, White Religion, and 1the Civil Rights Movement1 Segregation and the Religious Worlds of White Mississippians 152 Conversations about Race in the Post-War World 393 Responding to Brown: The Recalcitrant Parish 634 Strange and Serious Christian Heresy: Massive Resistance and the Religious Defense of Segregation 795 Ask for the Old Paths: Mississippi's Southern Baptists and Segregation 1056 Born of Conviction: The Travail of Mississippi Methodism 1277 The Jackson Church Visits: Good Quarter-Time Church with a Bird Dog and Shotgun 1558 Warped and Distorted Reflections: 181Mississippi and the North9 Race and the Restructuring of American Religion 199Conclusion: A Theology on the Wrong Side of History 231Notes 241Index 285About the Author 290

Prevalence and cardiometabolic associations of the glucocorticoid receptor gene polymorphisms N363S and BclI in obese and non-obese black and white Mississippians

Polymorphisms (SNP) in the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene can alter sensitivity to glucocorticoids. Previous studies of the N363S and BclI SNP in the GR gene have shown a metabolic syndrome phenotype in mostly non-African populations. The obesity phenotype of African Americans (AA) seems to be more severe than that of Caucasians. We aimed to assess the prevalence of N363S and BclI in obese and non-obese Caucasian (n=26) and African (n=23) Mississippians (age: 23-63 years) to investigate associations with body composition (body mass index/BMI, waist-to-hip ratio), metabolic parameters (salivary cortisol, fasting glucose and insulin, hemoglobin A1C, fructosamine, HOMA-IR index), and psychological stress perception (blood pressure/BP, perceived stress scale/PSS). All subjects were homozygous for wildtype N363N. BclI polymorphism genotype frequencies among the 23 AA were: homozygous CC (57%), GG (4%), and heterozygous CG (39%), and among the 26 white women: homozygous CC (35%), GG (19%), and heterozygous CG (46%). Linear and logistic regression analyses including a parsimonious model identified BMI as a statistically significant parameter between the two ethnic groups (BMI was 3.13 kg/m2 higher in AA). Within the AA group, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, log (HOMA-IR), PSS scores, BP, and hyperlipidemia showed no statistically significant relationships for the BclI polymorphism. PSS scores were 15.2 for AA vs. 14.7 for white women (normal mean: 14.7 vs. 12.8). Black Mississippians have a higher BMI than whites, which may be related to the presence of the BclI polymorphism and increased glucocorticoid sensitivity. Although more blacks (52%) than whites (38%) had elevated BP, PSS scores in both groups suggest that a high BMI is not regarded as abnormal or stressful. This might negatively impact behavior change regarding lifestyle modifications with increased physical activity and healthier food choices. Larger studies, particularly in African populations, are needed to better define metabolic and psychological characteristics in relation to the N363S and BclI GR gene polymorphisms.

Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi: Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ

I want to begin by noting how curious it is that I can find no novels by white southerners that engage the Civil Rights Movement directly--that is, which try to record the awfulness of the period, for example, by creating characters deep enough within the Klan to explore its inner mechanics and complexities or perhaps one associated with Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, somebody at least in a position to have been eyewitness to major events of Movement; John Grisham's Chamber (1994) comes closest to what I've been looking for and Minrose Gwin's Queen of Palmyra (2009) explores the complicated impact on a family of a father who does the Klan's work. To be sure, a lot depends on how you want to define The Movement. If you want to include novels with civil rights--i.e, racial--issues, dozens might qualify, e.g., Elliott Chaze's Tiger in the Honeysuckle (1965), Walker Percy's Last Gentleman (1966), Paige Mitchell's Covenant (1973), Barry Hannah's Geronimo Rex (1972), James Whitehead's Joiner (1972), Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle (1993), and, more recently, Kathryn Stockett's Help (2009). new stories in Barry Hannah's posthumous Long, Last, Happy (2010) feature as a central character the son of the French photographer who was killed during the Ole Miss riot on September 30, 1962, who has come to Oxford some decades later seeking revenge. These four quite wonderful stories promise a kind of exploration of the entire era that might have engaged Movement more directly had he lived to write them. Depending on how far you want to go back, a list might include some Faulkner and Hodding Carter's Winds of Fear (1944), but that's stretching it some. Elizabeth Spencer's Voice at the Back Door, a visionary novel of 1956 engages all of the issues of Movement without needing Movement itself. novel and its title have formed a sort of ground bass for my meditations on this topic for many years now: the voice that was always there if only white southerners had been listening. Perhaps such monumental history was, perhaps still is, too monumental; and since the issues are so clearly defined almost nobody will argue against the morality of Movement or the immorality of racism, it may have seemed difficult to find a theme besides outrage, which seems always a function of clarity rather than of complexity. And though Movement proper may rightly count voter registration and the desegregation of education and other public facilities among its grand achievements, the lingering effects of racism itself, still potent, renders Movement, finally, inconclusive, perhaps inconcludable. freedom riders brought into Mississippi not just their outside agitations but also a quality that white Mississippians of my generation often heard of and even discussed at length in church but which so many of us didn't really have: a conscience. They brought with them a history different from the one the ancien regime had given us, positing, as the narrator of Jack Butler's Jujitsu far Christ says, unknown territory, morally speaking. Defending the black--there were no precedents. No trails (90). A breakthrough moment occurs during one of the main character's arguments with his stepfather, which occurs after he has gotten to know well a black family and other black denizens of his laundromat studio and home: For the first time, when he heard nigger, jigaboo, junglebunny, he saw in his mind not some abstract menacing black man, but people he knew.... And he began to rehabilitate his soul (89). But rehabilitation for that generation was a long process of coming to terms with contradictory histories--moral hearts and heads said one thing, the right thing, while legal and over-trained defensive instincts said quite another--and with the whirlwind to follow. To a certain extent, then, perhaps it's their rehabilitation that's inconclusive and inconcludable. Rehabilitation is a very complex creature, and the ersatz hero of Jujitsu for Christ and representative of that generation of young people, alas, is not much of a model. …

Southern Patriarchy and the Figure of the White Woman in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers and public viewings of Till's mutilated body, stirred the American consciousness and provoked outrage across the country. In 1960, Gwendolyn Brooks published her own response in the form of A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon. Though the political nature of the poem is not unusual, considering Brooks's position as a poet writing during the 1950s and '60s, it is unusual for Brooks to use the perspective of a white American. She adopts this stance to examine Southern patriarchy and the myth of chivalry as they are implicated in Till's death, and ultimately, to condemn both the myth and the white woman's desire for its fulfillment. The irony of the romantic role of damsel being applied to a beleaguered housewife, that of hero to an insecure and immature man, and that of villain to a defenseless boy reveals not only the meaninglessness of using the myth as an excuse to commit violence, but also the absurdity of the myth as a fantasy in the first place. Brooks's apparent sympathy for the white woman as the pawn of domineering white men is subverted as she deconstructs the romance within the woman's mind and thereby holds the woman responsible for her complicity in the myth, and consequently, in the murder. This analysis of Brooks's poem demonstrates how Brooks uses the figure of the white woman both to criticize her and to denounce Southern ideology itself. In A Bronzeville Mother, Brooks is not merely condemning particular white men as murderers, or attacking Southern society in general for its practice of lynching; above all, Brooks is insisting that white women shoulder some responsibility for the violence carried out in their names. Any close reading of Brooks's poem must first consider the context of Till's murder and Brooks's subsequent composition of A Bronzeville Mother. At the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Brooks seeing the world in a new way, and was becoming absorbed into the national black consciousness of rising expectations (Kent 118). The time following Brown was also critical for African Americans in Mississippi, in part because the decision launched white Mississippians into a frenzied defense of the state's way of life. In the years between the decision and the publication of Brooks's A Bronzeville Mother, the state passed sweeping legislation that made it extremely difficult for blacks (and poor whites) to go to school, censored television broadcasts and other media, interfered with black voting rights, banned books and required white supremacist reading be provided to schools and libraries, enabled spying on critics and activist organizations, and then made it illegal to advocate, urge or encourage 'disobedience to any law of the State of Mississippi, and nonconformance with the established traditions, customs, and usages of the State of Mississippi' (Dittmer 59). Also, since white supremacists made the state's laws and established its customs, it is little wonder that Brown was declared invalid and unconstitutional (59), or that the following year, two men who murdered a fourteen-year-old African American boy were acquitted. Though Mississippi saw at least seven politically motivated murders in 1955 alone, it was the murder of Emmett Till that brought intense media attention to Mississippi and its lynching custom in the early years of the civil rights era. The court case in Mississippi, the public viewing of Till's body in Chicago, and the photographs of Till's mutilated face heightened Americans' awareness of the persistence of racial violence--especially in the Deep South, and particularly in Mississippi. (1) White supremacist violence against African Americans was so common that it was not particularly shocking when a black man was murdered in Mississippi; Till's age and, to a great degree, his mother's vocal outrage and public action made his death newsworthy. …

“I WANT TO BECOME A PART OF HISTORY”: FREEDOM SUMMER, FREEDOM SCHOOLS, AND THEFREEDOM NEWS

If we are concerned about breaking down power structure, then we have to be concerned about building our own institutions to replace old, unjust, decadent ones which make up existing power structure. --Charles Cobb, Schools Coordinator, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1964 (1) For many young African Americans in Mississippi, Civil Rights Movement did not enter their lives until famous Freedom campaign in 1964, a decade after U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. (2) The most publicized aspect of Summer was voter registration drives, and people throughout nation watched on television campaign's crescendo in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in late August during Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and black and white Mississippians testified before Democratic National Committee's credentials committee and protested seating of all-white delegation representing Mississippi's Democratic Party. (3) But Summer's ambitious campaign was not just about right to vote and political participation. Summer volunteers and local people sought in many ways, such as through opening of free and independent of state control. These autonomous institutions employed unique strategies and programs to educate young black Mississippians about their past and present to prepare them for a more promising future. school students took advantage of these radical sites of learning to conduct an intellectual coup against the state, which was depriving them of information and training for individual and collective liberation. (4) schools were designed not just to educate students, but to motivate and activate them. The schools provided unique opportunities for young Mississippians to participate in civil rights organizing activities. While some African American youths were involved in civil rights campaigns before Summer, they were often subject to direct reprisals for their actions in form of school suspensions and expulsions, as was case with school children participating in demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962 and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Youth activism was limited to local civil rights campaigns where students played supporting roles to adult leadership. But youths who attended freedom schools took lead in creation of school and participated in organizing activities led by civil rights workers in Mississippi. (5) school students were offered opportunity, many for first time, to enjoy literature and pursue intellectual freedom. They used newspapers to join in ongoing dialogue about meaning of freedom, full citizenship rights, and increased access to educational opportunities. Most black Mississippians were victimized by discriminatory and impoverished system of black public schooling that failed to provide sufficient resources for acquisition of basic literacy skills. Education was always important to black Mississippians, but it had been severely restricted and significantly underfunded following black political disenfranchisement in Mississippi beginning in 1875. Historian Christopher Span discussed schools opened by African Americans prior to emancipation. The freed-people in Mississippi created schools in church basements or abandoned buildings that provided important opportunities for literacy training for African American children and adults. These privately funded normally funded by church groups or philanthropic foundations, were prominent in Mississippi before end of Reconstruction, and offered employment opportunities for black teachers and a more religiously based curriculum. (6) Some schools, funded by industrial capitalists, placed restrictions on courses of study and programs offered, especially after expansion of Hampton-Tuskegee model of normal and industrial education in late 19th century. …

Organizing Resistance

The Citizens’ Council of Mississippi emerged from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to protest the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. More than half of white Mississippians were determined to protect the public schools’ segregated classrooms and supported the organized resistance movement with enthusiasm and determination. The Council relied heavily on a deliberate and strategic PR initiative to gain support for its ideals and initiatives with leaders polishing the use of traditional public relations tools and becoming savvy users of developing media technologies. This article explores how the organization's use of PR during the anti-civil rights movement relates to James E. Grunig's and Todd Hunt's widely accepted historical model that represents the development of the public relations profession.

In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. By Joseph Crespino. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xx, 360 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-12209-0.)

Joseph Crespino has written an engaging study of the politics of race in Mississippi and how white Mississippians attempted to join their backlash politics with the wider emergence of American conservatism. Crespino contends that white leaders in the state initiated a subtle and strategic accommodation to the demands of civil rights activists and the federal government, one that helped preserve the priorities of white elites and put white Mississippians in a position to contribute to a broad conservative countermovement against the liberal triumphs of the 1960s. (p. 4) Crespino is careful to point out that the extremist backlash carried out by groups such as the White Knights and the Ku Klux Klan—the type of violence that led to the murders of civil rights workers and the bombing of churches and other buildings—was unrelated to “mainstream conservatism.” Yet he sees “mainstream conservatives” intimately involved in the backlash itself; they were desirous of capturing the votes of white Mississippians who were attracted to conservative values on such issues as the Cold War, religious traditionalism, and free market economics.

‘Raw, Quivering Flesh’: John G. Cashman’s ‘Pornographic’ Constitutionalism Designed to Produce an ‘Aversion and Detestation’, 1883–1904

From 1883 until 1914 Vicksburg newspaper editor John G. Cashman campaigned against lynching. Later writers sometimes misrepresented Cashman, picturing him as a pro‐lynching pornographer, glorying in gory descriptions of black sufferings. But Cashman meant to shock the sensibilities of white readers by depicting the true barbarity of mob violence. Cashman opposed lynching not out of any empathy for Mississippi’s black population, but because mob violence offended his constitutional sensitivities. Cashman sometimes evinced faith in his fellow Mississippi whites, confident they could not truly favor anarchic violence over the rule of law. But whites’ continued and brutal savagery sometimes plunged Cashman into the depths of depression. His 30‐year antilynching crusade charts the fortunes of his faith in white Mississippians’ commitment to constitutional principles and the rule of law.

Mississippi's Giant House Party: Being White at the Neshoba County Fair

Neshoba County, Mississippi, the basement of the past is not very deep. --Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia For more than one hundred years, Mississippians have braved their long hot summer to head to the eastern part of the state for the Neshoba County Fair. For one week in late July, thousands of men and women from Philadelphia (the county seat), the rest of the state, and even farther afield descend upon the fairgrounds to create Mississippi town of respectable size. Joined by well over fifty thousand additional visitors, including the occasional reporter from Washington or Boston newspaper, they gather to enjoy food, drink, horse racing, gospel singing, and political oratory--in short, as National Geographic accurately characterized it, to join in tribal rites of fellowship a whole way of life finds affirmation. This annual ritual is an assertion that one can go home again. It's place, as one admirer explained, where there is comfort in knowing that tomorrow will be little changed from today. (1) The fair's most striking feature is the cabins that fan out from centrally located Founder's Square. Over six hundred in all, these magnificent specimens of vernacular architecture are decorated and named--The Fox Den, Green Acres, and Ye Old King's Kastle among them; purists argue whether such conveniences as screened windows and air conditioning compromise the cabins' aesthetic integrity. In contrast to the SUVS and minivans parked outside, these two- and three-story structures are self-consciously spartan, in keeping with the fair's early history as camp meeting: iron bedsteads and homemade wood bunks stand in rows dormitory-style, their covers wilting in 99-degree heat. Coveted, but in limited supply, the cabins are practically medium of exchange. As one owner noted, It's common thing in Neshoba County to have divorce they would decide the child custody, alimony, cash settlement and who gets the house, but the only thing they can't resolve is who is going to get the fair cabin. (2) Jealously passed on from generation to generation, the cabins and the relaxed living they encourage--strangers may find themselves invited inside for supper, or at least drink--are seen by long-time fairgoers as key to the fair's meaning. They are correct, for each summer the cabins, all owned by white families, become the heart of Disneyesque Southland, racially segregated imagining of Mississippi town. In county almost one-third black, the fair remains, in the eyes of many Neshoba County residents, largely for whites only. It's for them, not for us, black Philadelphian told me matter-of-factly. The fair exemplifies the most critical development in race and public culture in Mississippi over the last generation: move from explicit public commemoration of whiteness to an implicit rhetoric of racial definition signaled obliquely in cultural practices and artifacts. This rhetoric of white identity is now, in some ways, even more tenacious in the state's public culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s because it wields largely unspoken power. At the fair, whiteness and racially exclusive definitions of community are represented by the cabins themselves and encoded in the seemingly benign cultural practices of singing, visiting, and celebrating family life. In recent years, white Mississippians have been confronted with potent reminders of their state's defiant years: the release of the movie Mississippi Burning, the grudging opening of the State Sovereignty Commission's files, and the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers. But fairgoers, for all their obeisance to tradition and the past, display curious, even conscious, will to ignorance of the county's and the state's history of violent resistance to racial change. The fair represents paradox most white Mississippians have yet to grasp: their cherished celebrations of family and community cannot be separated from the state's racialist past. …

The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (review)

Reviews397 power, not idealism; that compromise was part and parcel of the political game that blacks were learning to play; and that change was more likely to come incrementally than in a giant leap to freedom. More generally, there might have been more emphasis on the consequences of the New Deal—which is barely mentioned—and of World War Two—which is discussed briefly. Not only did these twin phenomena set in motion the economic changes that provided the context for a successful assault on Jim Crow and disenfranchisement throughout the South, they also squeezed out a trickle of tentative white liberalism, even in Mississippi, which Dittmer rather underestimates. This is not to suggest that the relative and frequently ambiguous racial liberalism of Frank Smith, P. D. East, Hazel Brannon Smith, Florence Mars, Turner Catledge, or even Will Campbell in his sojourn at Ole Miss ever posed a serious challenge to white supremacy in Mississippi. Nor is it to deny that most racial liberals fell mute or ducked for cover the moment white racists rallied against an insurgent mass black movement. It is, however, to suggest that the very existence of these racial moderates and, in a world where such voices were once unheard, their public condemnations of racial brutality and support for black advancement within the boundaries of Jim Crow encouraged notions that change might just be possible in Mississippi. After more than a half-century of inertia and stasis, blacks drew strength for their coming struggle from any signs of a thaw in the middle of the racist iceberg that was Mississippi. Just as he fails to pay much attention to white liberalism, Dittmer fails to delineate white society more generally with quite the same subtlety he brings to his analysis of black Mississippi. We have the traditional cast of villains—from Theron Lynd through Ross Barnett to Byron De La Beckwith, the Klan, and the Citizens Councils and State Sovereignty Commission—but the mass of ordinary white Mississippians remains largely anonymous in an account that places so much emphasis on grass-roots affairs. In order to appreciate exactly what blacks and their allies were up against, we need to know even more about the various types of local white people; more about how their support, or at least acquiescence, in the resistance movement was secured; and more about if, when, and how fault lines in the solid rock of Mississippi's white resistance appeared. John Dittmer would, of course, be justified in claiming that this would require another book, and for now we should just be grateful to him for the masterly study that is Local People. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics. By George C. Rabie. University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 416 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Reviewed by Lacy K. Ford, Jr., associate professor ofhistory at the University ofSouth Carolina. He is the author ofOrigins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860, and is currently working on a history ofpolitical thought in the Old South. George Rabie has written a balanced, perceptive, and thoroughly researched history of high politics in the Confederacy. His compelling argument is succinctly summarized by the book's subtitle, "A Revolution Against Politics." Rabie maintains that the Confederacy is best understood not as an experiment in southern nationalism but as an attempt by white southerners to regenerate the republican purity of the Founding Fathers' generation with a revolution of their own: a revolution against politics. The Confederacy's revolution 398Southern Cultures against politics promised a rejection of the partisanship, patronage, and electioneering that southerners of virtually all ideological persuasions had practiced vigorously during the antebellum era, but which leading Confederates identified as an important if not decisive factor in the decline and fall of the old Union. To Rabie, the Confederacy was unquestionably a revolutionary experiment, but it was a conservative, restorationist revolution designed to create a republic safe for slavery and free of partisan politics. Ultimately, Rabie concludes, this revolution against politics failed only because the Confederacy itself failed. According to Rabie, both supporters of Jefferson Davis's troubled administration and its bitter opponents accepted the basic tenets of the revolution against politics: antipartyism and a belief...