History of Mississippi

The sharecropping system, as Cresswell (2006) shows, functioned as a compromise between white landowners' desire for a reliable supply of labor and black workers' refusal to work in gangs.
In 1890 the state adopted a new constitution with stiff restrictions on voting, and especially a poll tax of $2 a year that the great majority of blacks did not pay, and thus could not vote. These requirements, with additions in legislation of 1892, resulted in a 90% reduction in numbers of blacks who voted. In every county a handful of prominent black ministers and local leaders were allowed to vote.[41]
As only voters could serve on juries, the disfranchisement meant that blacks did not get to serve on juries, and lost all chance at local and state offices, as well as representation in Congress. When these provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1898 in Williams v. Mississippi, other southern state legislatures rapidly incorporated them into new constitutions or amendments, effectively extending disfranchisement to every southern state. In 1900 the population of Mississippi was nearly 59% African American, but they were virtually excluded from public life.

The Jim Crow system became total after 1900, with disfranchisement, coupled with increasingly restrictive racial segregation laws, and increased lynchings. Economic disasters always lurked, such as failure of the cotton crop due to boll weevil infestation, and successive severe flooding in 1912 and 1913. By 1920, the third generation after freedom, most African Americans in the Delta were landless sharecroppers or laborers facing inescapable poverty. As a result tens of thousands of African Americans left Mississippi by train to migrate north starting during World War I. In the Great Migration, they went north to leave a society that had been steadily closing off opportunity.

Another wave of migration came in the 1940s and 1950s. Almost half a million people, three-quarters of them black, left Mississippi in the second migration. Many sought jobs in the burgeoning wartime defense industry.

Schools

Public school funding was poor for whites and very poor for blacks. However, northern philanthropy helped a great deal. The Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, begun in 1907 and also known as the Negro Rural School Fund, aimed to provide rudimentary education for rural Southern blacks. Jeanes supervisors, all experienced teachers personally implemented physical and academic improvements in rural schools. Early Jeanes supervisors brought vocational education into their classrooms, based on the Hampton and Tuskegee Institute models promoted by Booker T. Washington. By the 1940s, the Jeanes program changed its emphasis from industrial education to academic subjects. Other major northern foundations also helped, especially the General Education Board (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rosenwald Fund, while northern churches supported denominational colleges.

Jazz

Mississippi became a center of rich, quintessentially American music traditions: gospel music, jazz music, blues, and rock and roll, all were invented, promulgated, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians.

John Lomax recorded some of the Delta's rich musical tradition for the Library of Congress. He recorded a very young Muddy Waters, and also convict blues songs and field chants at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Progressive Era

By 1900 the state had no paved highways, a one-party government, regular epidemics of contagious diseases, endemic hookworm, routine lynchings, local affairs controlled by courthouse rings, widespread illiteracy, and few assets besides prime cotton land, Mississippi failed to attract much outside investment or European immigration.

The Progressive Era reached Mississippi. Governor Theodore Bilbo (1916–20) had the most successful administration of all the governors who served between 1877 and 1917, putting state finances in order and supporting such Progressive measures as passing a compulsory school attendance law, founding a new charity hospital, and establishing a board of bank examiners. But Bilbo became intensely racist after moving on to the Senate in 1934.

A renewed surge of patriotism during World War I swept away most of the remaining bitterness from the Civil War and helped end Mississippi's physical and psychological isolation.

1920s and 1930s

Mississippians saw more prosperity in the 1920s than they had known for two generations, although the state was still poor and rural by national standards. The people nevertheless had a slice of the American Dream. Ownby (1999) in his in-depth study of the state identifies four American dreams that the new consumer culture addressed. The first was the "Dream of Abundance," offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth. The second was the "Dream of a Democracy of Goods," whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world whereby only the rich or well-connected are granted access to luxury. The "Dream of Freedom of Choice," with its ever expanding variety of good allowed people to fashion their own particular life style. Finally, the "Dream of Novelty," in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience in terms of purchasing skills and awareness of the market, and challenged the conservatism of traditional society and culture, and even politics. Ownby acknowledges that the dreams of the new consumer culture radiated out from the major cities, but notes that they quickly penetrated the most rural and most isolated areas, such as rural Mississippi. With the arrival of the model T after 1910, consumers in rural America were no longer locked into local general stores with their limited merchandise and high prices, and to comparison shop and in towns and cities. Ownby demonstrates that poor black Mississippians shared in the new consumer culture, both inside Mississippi, and it motivated the more ambitious to move to Memphis or Chicago.

Not all Mississippi was doing well. In the Pearl River country in the south central region, the 1920s was a decade of persistent poverty and new interest in antimodernist politics and culture. The timber companies that had employed up to half of all workers were running short of timber so payrolls dwindled. Farming was hard-scrabble. Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, a native of the region, won widespread support among the poor white farmers and loggers with his attacks on the elites, the big cities, and the blacks. Dry laws were but one aspect of a pervasive prohibitionism that included laws against business or recreation on Sunday as well as attacks on Catholics and immigrants. Baptist and some other denominations embraced fundamentalism and rejected newfangled liberal ideas such as evolution along with the Social Gospel.

Transportation
When the automobile arrived about 1910, the state had poorly constructed dirt roads used for wagon traffic, and an outdated system of taxation. Road improvement continued to be a local affair controlled by county supervisors and achieved few positive results. The Lindsey Wagon Company of Laurel built the famous Lindsey wagon after 1899. It was a heavy-duty eight-wheel wagon used to haul logs, timber, and other bulky and heavy material. Wagon production reached a peak in the 1920s, then fell off as better roads made it possible to use trucks built in Detroit, and the Great Depression after 1929 slowed reduced the need for new wagons.

After 1928, the pressure to build roads motivated politicians to talk up the cause. They enacted massive bond issues, create excise taxes, and centralize control to create a genuine state highway system, with a system of main highways designed by engineers, using a common system of signage and nomenclature.

World War II

The war years brought prosperity as cotton prices soared and new war installations paid high wages. Many blacks headed to northern cities, and white farmers often headed to southern factory towns. Young men, white and black, were equally subject to the draft, but farmers were often exempt on occupational grounds. The World War II era marked a transition from labor-intensive agriculture to mechanized farming in the Delta region of Mississippi. Federal farm payments and improvements in mechanical cotton pickers made modernization economically possible by 1940, but most planters feared loss of racial and social control and simply shifted from sharecropping to wage labor. As workers left the farm for military service or defense jobs, farm wages rose. By 1944, wages had tripled. In 1945 the newly established Delta War Wage Board provided planters temporary relief by setting a maximum wage for farm workers, but President Harry S. Truman lifted wartime economic controls in 1946.

Beginning in the 1930s, the ravages of the boll weevil and federal crop restrictions and conservation programs encouraged many farmers to turn from cotton farming to growing other crops, such as soybeans; to sowing grasses for livestock; and to planting trees for timber. Agricultural productivity increased, and as an added bonus the soils were improved by crop rotation, strip planting, terracing, contour plowing, and the use of improved fertilizers, insecticides, and seeds. After 1945 , farm mechanization advanced rapidly, especially in the cotton belt, and small farms were consolidated, as small farmers who could not afford the new machinery and sharecroppers left the land. Planters rapidly mechanized. It now took only a few operators of cotton picking machines to do the work of hundreds. There was no other farm work for the sharecroppers, so the entire sharecropping system collapsed as the croppers moved to the cities, often in the North. By 1950 whites were a majority of the population, statewide and in every region outside the Delta.

945-2000

Mississippi was a center of the American Civil Rights Movement and especially captured the national stage in 1963 and 1964. Few white leaders in the state supported the effort to secure voting and exercise of other civil rights for African Americans.

According to the 1960 census, the state had a population of 2,178,141, of which 915,743, or 42% of the residents, were black.

Their long disfranchisement meant that white state legislators had consistently underfunded segregated schools and services for African Americans, and passed laws that worked against their interests. African Americans had no representation in local governments, juries or law enforcement.

The Ole Miss riot of 1962 erupted as a white mob attacked 500 United States marshals deployed by President John F. Kennedy to ensure the safety of James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Segregationist rioters assaulted the marshals with bricks, bottles, and gunfire before the marshals responded with tear gas. The fighting which ensued claimed the lives of two men and seriously injured dozens more, and polarized race relations and politics, as whites assumed they were under attack from the federal government.

In September 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a secretive and extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This covert action program sought to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize Ku Klux Klan groups in Mississippi whose violent vigilante activities alarmed the national government. The program succeeded in creating an atmosphere of paranoia that turned many Klan members against each other. The effect on Klan groups between 1964 and 1971 helped destroy many of them. Some members of the Klan groups subsequently joined other white supremacist organizations, including Christian Identity.

Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964


Meanwhile black activists had been increasing their local work throughout the South. In Mississippi in 1962, several activists formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), to coordinate activities in voter registration and education of civil rights groups in Mississippi: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In 1963 COFO organized a Freedom Vote in Mississippi to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. They had been disfranchised since statutory and constitutional changes in 1890 and 1892. More than 80,000 people quickly registered and voted in mock elections which pitted candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic Party candidates.

In the summer of 1964, the COFO brought more than one hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Many white residents deeply resented the outsiders and attempts to change their society. The work was dangerous. Activists were threatened.

On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two Jewish volunteers from New York, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department. With the national uproar caused by their disappearance, President Johnson forced J. Edgar Hoover to have the FBI to investigate.

The FBI found the bodies of the civil rights workers on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. During its investigation, the FBI also discovered the bodies of several other Mississippi blacks whose murders and disappearances over the past several years had not gained attention outside their local communities.

The case of the young murdered activists captured national attention. President Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2. It banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting protection was addressed more substantially by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964


In 1964, civil rights organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white slate from the state party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their own primary. They selected Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress, and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient. Democratic Party organizers had planned a triumphant celebration of the Johnson Administration’s achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the party. Johnson was also worried about inroads that Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was making in what had been the Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South", as well as support which Independent candidate George Wallace had received in the North during the Democratic primaries. All-white delegations from other Southern states threatened to walk out if the official slate from Mississippi was not seated.

Johnson could not prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee. There Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings which she and others endured, and the threats they faced for trying to register to vote. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"

Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the compromise. The MFDP kept up its agitation within the convention, even after it was denied official recognition. The 1964 convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the Civil Rights Movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP. The new party invited Malcolm X, head of the Black Muslims, to speak at its founding convention and opposed the war in Vietnam.

Armed self-defense became an integral part of the Southern planning strategy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after 1964. The ideological shift on the question of nonviolence within CORE and SNCC occurred primarily because of the impact of events in Mississippi such as the murder of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Neshoba County. The shift marked the beginning of the end of nonviolence as the philosophy and method of the Southern freedom movement. Southern blacks had a tradition of armed resistance that became more organized and intense as the struggle accelerated and federal protection failed to appear. Moreover, it was the armed protection by local blacks and the haven provided by Mississippi's black farming communities that allowed SNCC and CORE to operate effectively in the state.

After 1966 the blacks moved into the Democratic party, where the fought for control of local government, especially in the Delta

National image

During the 1960s, the vocal opposition of many politicians and officials and the violent tactics of a few Ku Klux Klan members and sympathizers gave Mississippi a reputation as a reactionary state.The state was the last to repeal prohibition and to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, in 1966 and 1995 respectively.

Since 2000

Mississippi in recent years has been noted for its political conservatism, improved civil rights record, and increasing industrialization. In addition, a decision in the 1990s to permit riverboat gambling has led to economic gains for the state. However, an estimated $500,000 per day in tax revenue was lost following Hurricane Katrina's severe damage to several riverboat casinos in August 2005. Gambling towns in Mississippi include the Gulf coast towns of Gulfport and Biloxi and the river towns of Vicksburg and Tunica. Prior to Katrina, Mississippi was the second largest gambling state in the Union, after Nevada and ahead of New Jersey.

Hurricanes
August 17, 1969 - Category 5 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage.
September 12, 1979 - Hurricane Frederic
September 2, 1985 - Hurricane Elena
September 28, 1998 - Hurricane Georges
August 29, 2005 - Hurricane Katrina caused even greater destruction across the entire 90 miles (140 km) of Mississippi Gulf coast from Louisiana to Alabama.

Literature

Mississippi has been noted for its authors, including Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner, as well as William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Stark Young, Eudora Welty and Anne Moody.