The Dixiecrat Revolt

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The Dixiecrat Revolt
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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

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• 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 workers compensation law
• 1946 Fielding Wright becomes governor, he
  focused the legislatures attention to preserving
  segregation

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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 Mississippis 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

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The Dixiecrats Walk out of the Democratic
National Nominating Convention
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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

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Social Change and The Civil Rights Movement
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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

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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

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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

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• 1954-Delta planter had founded the White
  Citizens 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

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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.

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• 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

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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.

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Sovereignty Commission

• Governor Coleman did everything he could to
  prevent integration legally. He didnt 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 Citizens Council
• Barnett made the CC apart of the state government

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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.

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Ross Barnett

• Ross Barnett was the governor of MS at the time
  Meredith attempted to enroll - he pledge not to
  allow Meredith to enroll.
• 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.
• His speech led to a riot on the campus of Ole
  Miss.
• JFK had to call in the U.S. Army to stop the
  violence and insure that Meredith was enrolled.

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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

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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

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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.
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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

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Neshoba County

• 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.
• The FBI will arrest 19 men, which included
  several police officers, but will not try them
  for murder in the state courts of MS.
• Instead, they will try 18 of them in federal
  court for violating the civil rights of the three
  men.
• Seven of the men will be found guilty the
  longest prison term will be 10 years (none served
  more than six).
• Edgar Ray Killen, considered the mastermind of
  the plan, would be convicted of manslaughter in
  2005.

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The Site of the Bodies
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• 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.

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White Mississippians Opposed to the Violence

• Most white Mississippians didnt 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.

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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.

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The Freedom Democratic Party

• In 1964, the Freedom Democratic 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 didnt get the seats at the convention
  but Hamers speech (on television) had a huge
  impact on public opinion.

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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

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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

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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.