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27 2 “I’m Here, Not Backing Up” Emergence of Grassroots Militancy and Armed Self-Defense in the 1950s “Bad Negroes” spoke loudly and defiantly in Mound Bayou at a massive camp meeting in April of 1955. The accommodationist Booker T. Washington had dedicated this town fifty years previously, but resistance, not accommodation, was preached at the gathering. Thirteen thousand Black people from the Delta assembled to participate in the mass rally. This massive camp meeting was organized by Dr. T. R. M. Howard and the Regional Council for Negro Leadership (RCNL). Advocating voting, civil, and other human rights, the rally also encouraged Blacks to persevere and overcome fear and intimidation. The spirit exhibited by the RCNL mass meeting was truly a break with the strategy of accommodation. The defiant tone of the rally represented what Ebony magazine described as “The New Fighting South”: “Today in Dixie there is emerging a new militant Negro. He is a fearless, fighting man who openly campaigns for his civil rights, who refuses to migrate to the North, in search of justice and dignity, and is determined to stay in his own backyard and fight.”1 Something new was happening in Mississippi. Although White terror was still formidable, Black people were willing to rally in the thousands for their freedom and human rights. Accommodationist Black leadership still had significant control over Black institutions, but they were being challenged by new, assertive activists who attracted and articulated the aspirations of a growing constituency. Black leaders emerged to demand the rights of citizenship and to express the grievances of the Black masses. What was occurring in Mississippi was connected to the struggles of people of color throughout the world. The decades following World War II represented a crisis for Western imperialism. Combined with the realignment of the international balance of power, new social forces among colonized and subject peoples asserted themselves. Internationally militant voices emerged from the intellectual and professional sectors of oppressed nations. The end of World War II ushered 28 “I’m Here, Not Backing Up” in an upsurge in nationalist movements among oppressed people across the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia. The Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi , and the rest of the South, was part of an international movement to dismantle racialism, colonial rule, and apartheid as well as to achieve democracy for oppressed people. Like anticolonial leaders in Africa and Asia, African descendants in the United States emerged and demanded human rights for their communities living under apartheid. The rise of the activist leadership from the Mississippi Black professional class is a consequence of the segregated economy. In the 1950s, Black professionals—including doctors, members of the clergy, and entrepreneurs—serving an almost exclusively Black clientele became Movement spokespersons and organizers. Like colonized troops returning to subject African and Asian nations following World War II, U.S. soldiers of color returned to U.S. apartheid from Europe and Asia. (Later they would return from the Korean conflict.) Mississippi activist Amzie Moore was a World War II army veteran when the U.S. armed forces were still segregated. Moore stated that Black U.S. soldiers involved in the conflict wondered “why are we fighting? Why were we there? If we were fighting four [sic] freedoms that Roosevelt and Churchill had talked about.”2 Moore returned to the Mississippi Delta, where some Whites had mobilized to protect their communities from Black G.I.s. Human rights activists in Mississippi did not miss the opportunity to point out the contradiction of U.S. troops of African descent fighting for “freedom” abroad while they and their communities remained oppressed in the southern apartheid states. Mississippi activist T. R. M. Howard asserted that “Black soldiers from Mississippi are fighting and dying for a democracy that they don’t know one single thing about back home on the plantations of the Mississippi Delta.”3 Another factor in global politics contributed to challenging the apartheid system in Mississippi and the South. The accelerating conflict and competition between the United States and other Western capitalist regimes , the Soviet Union, as well as other socialist countries affected U.S. domestic politics. Quick to expose the contradictions of its adversaries, the “Cold War” utilized propaganda to achieve an advantage in the global chess game between capitalism and communism. In this context, racial oppression was an obvious liability in the United States, gaining leverage in the propaganda war. Historian Mary Duriak argued, At a time when the United States hoped to reshape...

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