Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965

Afterword

209 Afterword T he years after 1965 were truly years of change for Mississippi’s African Americans. Change came slowly, but it came through ongoing legal battles throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It came on the backs of local movement people who fought the white power structure’s constant efforts in rewriting state laws through redistricting, gerrymandering, pairing white majorities with African American counties, changing positions from elective to appointive, and generally instituting legal mechanisms that inhibited the empowerment of African American public officials. In the end the white power structure’s efforts failed as they were overturned in the state and federal courts. However, this process took many years, and only in 1986 did Mississippians finally elect an African American to the reconstituted Second Congressional District in the Delta. This continuing fight has led to the election and appointment of more African American officials than in any other state. The local movement has remained active, and such people as Hollis Watkins, Lawrence Guyot, Leslie McLemore, Charles McLauren, Dorie and Joyce Ladner, Owen Brooks, Brenda Travis, Reverend Willie Blue, Ben Chaney, L. C. Dorsey, Euvester Simpson, Jesse Harris, George Greene, Bobby Talbert and Lafayette Surney, along with many others, are still working for change. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer stayed active until her death in 1977, and other activists have also worked toward economic progress for many years. Even outside SNCC and CORE, activists such as Bob Moses and Dave Dennis, who were the project director and assistant project director for COFO, returned to the state to create projects to improve the condition of African Americans. The substantive change brought about by the civil rights movement did not happen during the years of my study, 1960–65, but that change happened in the years afterward and continues today. Civil rights history is taught in Mis- 210 student activism and civil rights in mississippi sissippi schools as of 2009. A law was passed in 2006 mandating its inclusion in schools throughout the state. The pilot programs have begun in McComb, the home of an extreme amount of violence against local people, and in Neshoba County, where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were lynched in 1964. Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 for his assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963 while other cases of lynching have been reopened where whites had never been convicted for the murder of African Americans. Yearly conferences are held to memorialize former civil rights activists, and school children have written about their parents and their efforts to bring about change in the closed society. There is a Fannie Lou Hamer Institute at Jackson State University and a memorial park for her in Ruleville in the Delta. The efforts to bring about positive change and economic improvement are as important as ever, and the struggle to attain a better quality of life for African Americans continues. ...