The Dixiecrat
Revolt
After WWII
• Black veterans came home
determined to end segregation
• White veterans came home with
doubts about continuing segregation
but most wanted to preserve it
• 1946: Bilbo ran for re-election to the
U.S. Senate, he told white
Mississippians to visit blacks the
night before the election to
“persuade” them not to vote
– He won the election but the Senate
denied him his seat for openly inciting
violence
• 1947: voters elected 78 new members to the
state house of representatives
– Many of the new members were veterans who
wanted to reorganize the government, improve
education, and help working people
– Passed worker’s compensation law
• 1946: Fielding Wright becomes governor, he
focused the legislature’s attention to
preserving segregation
Withdrawing from the National Party
• Wright vowed to attend the 1948 Democratic National
Convention
– Would withdraw from it if the party had a platform that
contained a civil rights article
• Civil Rights: basic rights of citizens, such as free speech,
the right to vote, privacy, and property ownership
• The convention ignored Mississippi’s request to
preserve segregation and adopted a civil rights article
• Southern Democrats left the party and created the
States’ Rights party, known as the Dixiecrats
• Wanted to preserve segregation
The Dixiecrats Walk out of the
Democratic National Nominating
Convention
Rebirth of the Republican Party
• Many people left the Democratic Party to support
the Republican party
– In the 1952 presidential election, the national Democratic Party was in favor of
integration.
– Integration was combining the separate facilities of the south.
– A group calling themselves Democrats for Eisenhower chose to support the
Republican Party in the election.
– This, along with the Dixiecrats, showed that the Solid South was breaking up.
• Whites started to take control of the Republican
Party because the Democratic party started to
supporting integration
Socially
• White Mississippians became the majority of
the population
• The split between the sharecropper and the
planter disappeared and the middle class grew
• Hugh White, in 1951, was elected governor
and his focus was school integration
• Integration: the process of bringing different
groups (races) into society as equals
Separate but Equal
• 1896- the US Supreme Court issued
a ruling in the Plessy vs. Ferguson
case that established separate but
equal
– Allowed states to pass laws to
segregate public facilities for blacks
and whites
Brown vs. Board of Education
• 1954-Supreme Court ruled in Brown
vs. Board Education that the
separate but equal was
unconstitutional
• The Supreme Court decided that
segregated facilities were
automatically unequal and therefore
unconstitutional.
• The Supreme Court ordered that all
segregated public schools be
integrated.
• 1955- Brown II: schools must be
integrated with “all deliberate
speed”
• 1954-Delta planter had founded the White
Citizen’s Council
– Distributed materials supporting segregation
– organized political pressure to support segregation
– made radio and television broadcasts in support
of segregation
• 1955- J.P. Coleman was governor of MS and
promised to keep schools segregated
The Death of Emmett Till
A. August 1955 – 14 year old Chicago boy
visited relatives near Money, MS
b. Supposedly whistled and called the wife of a
local (white) store owner “Baby.”
c. Till was taken a few nights later by the store
owner and his brother-in-law.
d. Body of Till was found three days later in the
Tallahatchie River –corpse unrecognizable
e. Mother of Till insisted on an open casket funeral
– so the entire world could see what happened
f. Trial failed to convict the men accused of the
crime – even with eye witnesses
g. Huge impact on ALL African-Americans –
North/South
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC)
a. Organized in 1957 by Martin
Luther King, Jr.
b. Churches were the largest and
best-organized black
institutions allowed to be
successful in the segregated
society.
c. This movement thus aimed to
mobilize the vast power of
the black churches on
behalf of civil rights.
Sovereignty Commission
• Governor Coleman did everything he
could to prevent integration… legally. He
didn’t believe he could ignore an order
of the U.S. Supreme Court
• He went along with the legislature and
established the Sovereignty Commission
– Designed to identify, watch, and defeat the
enemies of segregation
• 1959-Coleman loss to Ross Barnett who
was backed by the Citizen’s Council
– Barnett made the CC apart of the state
government
Crisis at Ole Miss
• Federal Court ordered integration
of Ole Miss by admitting James
Meredith in 1962.
• Gov. Ross Barnett blocked the
entrance of the school and
Kennedy sent Federal Marshals to
enforce the integration.
• Mob occurred and shot
out windows, streetlights
and car tires.
• 2 killed and 375 injured.
Ross Barnett
1. Ross Barnett was the governor of MS
at the time Meredith attempted to
enroll - he pledge not to allow
Meredith to enroll.
2. The weekend before Meredith was to
enroll, Barnett gave a speech at the
halftime of the Ole Miss football
game, telling the students to
“encourage” Meredith not to enroll.
3. His speech led to a riot on the
campus of Ole Miss.
4. JFK had to call in the U.S. Army to
stop the violence and insure that
Meredith was enrolled.
Medgar Evers
• Was the head of the Mississippi
NAACP (National Association of
the Advancement of Colored
People)
• June 1963- Byron de la Beckwith
murdered Evers on the carport
of his home
• Beckwith went to trial in 1964
– Twice the trial ended in a hung
jury (could not reach a verdict)
– In 1994, Beckwith was retried a
third time and convicted of
murder of Medgar Evers
Mississippi Freedom Summer
• Throughout the 1960s, individuals worked to
end segregation and to register black
Mississippians to vote
• The Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) concentrated on voter
registration- Traveled to the south to help
register black voters
• Organized Sit-ins that were used to
desegregate facilities
– Where people enter a segregated facility and
refuse to leave
The Freedom Riders
They will be met with violence:
many were arrested, the places
they stay will be fire-bombed
and some will be killed.
Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964
• Summer of 1964
• 800 College students from all
over the US met in Ohio to
be trained for voter
registration in the South by
SNCC.
• while working to register
African Americans to
vote, 3 Civil Rights
workers were murdered
in Neshoba County
Neshoba County
1. In Neshoba County, three civil rights workers will be kidnapped
and murdered - their bodies will eventually be discovered in a
pond dam by the FBI.
2. The FBI will arrest 19 men, which included several police officers,
but will not try them for murder in the state courts of MS.
3. Instead, they will try 18 of them in federal court for violating the
civil rights of the three men.
4. Seven of the men will be found guilty – the longest prison term
will be 10 years (none served more than six).
5. Edgar Ray Killen, considered the mastermind of the plan, would
be convicted of manslaughter in 2005.
The Site of the Bodies
*On June 21, 1964, three
young civil rights workers
— a 21-year-old black
Mississippian James
Chaney and two white New
Yorkers Andrew Goodman,
20, and Michael
Schwerner, 24 —were
murdered
*June 21, 2005: Edgar Ray
Killen, the supposed
mastermind of the crime,
was sentenced to 60 years
in jail for the crimes.
White Mississippians Opposed
to the Violence
• Most white Mississippians didn’t support the violence that
was occurring in MS during this time but anyone that spoke
out against segregation was in danger of being ostracized –
shut out of white society – or subjected to violence
themselves.
• Churches dismissed pastors who preached moderation.
• James Silver, a history professor at Ole Miss, was run out of
the state for publishing The Closed Society – a book about the
integration crisis at Ole Miss – and for eating lunch with
James Meredith in the university cafeteria.
Fannie Lou Hamer
• Fannie Lou Hamer was the 20th
child of a sharecropper who
grew up on a plantation in the
Delta.
• She became a civil rights
worker in MS and was arrested
and beaten in Winona, MS.
• She began traveling around the
country telling her story, which
had a big influence on public
opinion.
The Freedom
• In 1964, the Freedom Democratic
Democratic Party
Party, an integrated group of
Mississippians, challenged the regular
Democratic Party for their seats at the
Democratic national nominating
convention.
• Fannie Lou Hamer was allowed to
address the convention and she
claimed the FDR was the true
Democratic Party of MS because it
represented all Mississippians.
• The FDR didn’t get the seats at the
convention but Hamer’s speech (on
television) had a huge impact on public
opinion.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Made it unlawful for anyone to discriminate
on the basis of race if they served the public
– Forced MS businessmen to accept black
customers
• Mississippi business groups urged the public
to obey the law
• If they wanted to make money they could not
discriminate
Voting Rights Act
• 1965
• Sent federal registrars into Mississippi and
other states to register black voters
• Abolished the literacy tests!
School Integration
• Mississippi schools integrated peacefully in the 1970s
• Segregated private schools developed for those
whites unwilling to accept integration
• Most whites remained in public schools
Black Political Power
• Because of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, 21 black
men were elected to public office in 1964.
• Robert Clark, the grandson of a slave, became the
first black man elected to the state legislature since
Reconstruction.
• In 1971 Charles Evers, Medgar Evers brother, ran for
governor as an independent.
• In 1986, Mike Espy was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives, the first black man elected to the
federal government from MS since Reconstruction.
• Espy was eventually chosen by President Bill Clinton
to be the Secretary of Agriculture.