-
1. Race-Haunted Mississippi
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Z 6 Z chapter 1 raCe-haunTed MIssIssIPPI As I grew up in Boston, becoming more and more conscious of public afZ fairs, of the differences—and similarities—between North and South, one thing was clear to me: Mississippi was first in poverty and last in its treatZ ment of its black citizens. Lynchings there were covered in the Boston papers. Treatment of blacks in the country generally was far from perfect, as de facto housing segregation in my own city indicated. Yet, it was different in kind from the blanket denial of the right to vote to southern blacks, parZ ticularly in Mississippi. In fields unrelated to civil rights, southern states produced positive naZ tional leaders. Georgia, my father’s home state, had Senator Walter George, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Georgia also had as a senator venerable, respected Richard Russell, for whom one of today’s senZ ate office buildings is named. Alabama’s Lister Hill was a leader in health care legislation, and the state’s other longtime senator, John Sparkman, had been Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952. And Arkansas had the interZ nationalist Senator J. William Fulbright. These bright men did not rock the racial boat, but they did far more for their states and country than just cry race. Mississippi senator John Stennis was a leader of the Armed Services Committee, but in 1948 the state’s governor was Fielding L. Wright, the vice presidential candidate on Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat ticket, which ran nationally in opposition to the strong civil rights plank inspired by HuZ bert H. Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention. Segregation and violence toward blacks thought not to “know their place” continued unabated. Most of all, the state was personified by cigarZchomping James O. Eastland, chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee,1 appointed to succeed Senator Pat Harrison, who had died in 1941. By early 1962 when I made my first foray into Mississippi as one of RobZ ert Kennedy’s civil rights lawyers, the societal structure for which Eastland race-haunted Mississippi Z 7 Z was conducting a last holding action had become an anachronism in most of the country. In Chicago, Kansas City and Seattle blacks and whites sat side by side at lunch counters and next to each other in theaters. The quesZ tion was what, if anything, the rest of the country was prepared to do about Mississippi. The historian Neil McMillen has called the state in which he taught at the University of Southern Mississippi “this most raceZhaunted of all American states.”2 Before the Civil War, free blacks in the state were few in number and heavily restricted. The ballot had been limited to free white males. There had been 773 free blacks in Mississippi in 1860, and the state allowed no more to enter. Those already there were not permitted to travel within the state without a certificate authorizing such travel.3 But a revolution in racial mores was underway. In 1867, freedmen beZ came registered to vote under military authority, and the color bar was dropped from the Reconstruction Constitution of 1868. With black supZ port, a new legislature was elected that endorsed the Fourteenth and FifZ teenth Amendments and brought Mississippi back into the Union in 1870. In the early 1870s, its OhioZborn Republican governor, Ridgley C. Powers, in the flush of Reconstruction, declared it the first state to guarantee “full civil and political rights to all her citizens, without distinction.”4 Yet it was all illusory. While two blacks served in the United States SenZ ate for a time,5 and there were some other prominent black officeholders, whites continued to dominate the local power structures, and whites never accepted black suffrage. After the 1876 election returns for president were repeatedly challenged, a supposedly bipartisan commission awarded the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden in exchange for comZ mitments by Hayes that included his withdrawing federal troops from the South. Southern blacks were on their own, and intimidation and election fraud perpetuated white domination until Mississippi’s landmark ConstituZ tional Convention made it “legal” in 1890. The state’s votingZage population then was 271,080: 150,469 blacks and 120,611 whites.6 Convention president S. S. Calhoon led the way with his call “to exclude the negro.”7 Forthright approaches such as the exclusion from public ofZ fice of anyone with “as much as oneZeighth negro blood” did not carry...