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7 Race and Mississippi Politics Changes and Continuities Historically, race has been the central theme of Mississippi politics. Writing in 1949, political scientist V. O. Key, Jr., concluded that "the beginning and the end of Mississippi politics is the Negro."l This author has surveyed elements of the racial politics of Mississippi for the past thirty years, beginning with the suppression of the black vote in the early 1960s and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that liberated black citizens from their bondage of disfranchisement. The author has demonstrated that despite the fact that large numbers of black citizens soon became registered to vote they found that they were unable to elect more than a handful of black candidates to office. The political massive resistance statutes of the 1966 session of the Mississippi Legislature, together with existing discriminatory election structures such as at-large municipal elections , erected strong barriers to the effectiveness of the new black vote. Black citizens were able to register and vote, but in many parts of the state they were unable to elect candidates of their choice to office. Overcoming these barriers took years of litigation, and despite the hostility of some Mississippi federal judges this litigation ultimately was largely successful. Among other successes, the large multimember state legislative districts were broken up into smaller single-member districts statewide, at-large election of county supervisors and school board members was struck down, extensive racial gerrymandering of county supervisors' district lines was successfully challenged , and at-large elections for city council members were widely eliminated. Once these barriers were struck down, large numbers of black candidates were able to win election to legislative, county, and city offices. Mississippi, which previously had the lowest number of black elected officials of any state in the nation, became the state with the highest number. Beyond its impact in increasing the number of black officials in the state, this litigation also had an enormous impact on national voting rights policy and advanced the expansion of the legal protections for minority voting rights nationwide. This concluding chapter looks at several questions raised by the Race and Mississippi Politics 199 changes which have occurred: What overall impact has this dramatic emergence of black political participation had on the politics of Mississippi ? Has it diminished racism as a factor in state politics in any significant way? Has the legal struggle for minority voting rights run its course, or are there barriers that remain? And finally, what do the events described indicate regarding the existence of a national consensus that minority votes should not be diluted? At this point in time, it may be too early to give definitive answers to such complex, ultimate questions, but some tentative responses may be suggested. The Impact of Black Political Emergence First, the most immediate impact of the increase in black voter registration after 1965 and the increase in black elected officials was a decline in the systematic use of terrorism by whites as a method of political and social control of black Mississippians noted in chapter 1. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward point out in their book Poor Peoples' Movements, violence and intimidation-whether in the form of police violence, lynch mobs, individual attacks on blacks, arbitrary imprisonment, or economic intimidation-historically have been the primary methods by which whites have enforced the political and social caste system in the South to keep blacks in their place. "In the South," the authors note, "the deepest meaning of the winning of democratic political rights is that the historical primacy of terror as a means of social control has been substantially diminished.,,2 Using a wide variety of sources, political scientist David C. Colby has documented that white violence in Mississippi reached its peak during 1964 and 1965 in reaction to the high level of civil rights activity in the state and dropped dramatically after 1965. Colby notes that much of the economic intimidation and attacks against blacks during this period was specifically aimed at preventing blacks from registering and voting. But once Mississippi's black people gained the vote and began to elect public officials, the violence subsided because further use of violent methods was futile, and black people now had the political and legal means to counter it.3 This is not to say that racial violence against blacks in Mississippi has been eliminated. Historically, Mississippi has had a violent society , and individual and group acts of racial violence continue to...

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