mississippi: is this america?

“This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg.

This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected.”

-- Bob Moses, 1961

Mississippi: Is This America?

2

1720-1835

1835-1865

1865-1876

Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, U.S. Senators from Mississippi, both African American

Two Members of the Ku Klux Klan in Disguise, 1868

Thomas Nast’s 1874

cartoon entitled “Worse Than

Slavery”

The “patchwork quilt” of Reconstruction and Redemption

1890 Mississippi

1895 South Carolina

1901 Alabama

12

The Rise of Segregation: The Strange Career of “Jim Crow”

Three Pillars of White Supremacy

• Segregation• Voter disfranchisement• Extralegal violence and use of criminal justice

system [concept of “legal lynching”]

14

Voter Disfranchisement

15

The Scourge of Lynching

16

. . . and “Race Riots”

1940-1954

Charles White.The Return of the Soldier, 1946.Pen and ink on illustration board.Prints and Photographs Division.Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-4886 (8-19)

1954

1955

“I want the whole world to see what they did to my baby. . . .”

MediaWhat role do the media play

in shaping perceptions of a social movement and its antagonists?

1960

Julian Bond and SNCC activists

1961

CORE Freedom Riders after attacks on their Greyhound bus outside of Anniston, Alabama

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy

Alabama Governor John Patterson

Freedom Riders arriving in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were promptly arrested

“And people ask why we are down here. . . .”

Fundraising advertisement published by SNCC

in its newsletter, The Student Voice, in 1964

1962

October 1, 1962: James Meredith (center) is escorted by Federal officials including U.S. Department of Justice

Attorney John Doar (pictured on right) at the University of Mississippi.

Defenders of segregation at Ole Miss

U.S. Marshals arrive in Oxford in Army trucks

September 30, 1962: Students riot in response to James Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss.

October 1, 1962: Soldiers remove arrested rioters from the Ole Miss campus

August 18, 1963 - Meredith graduates from the University of Mississippi

1963

Medgar Evers, assassinated on June 11, 1963

Martha Prescod, Mike Miller, and Bob Moses register voters in the Mississippi countryside, Fall 1963

1964

Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr.

See notes

COFO Freedom School in the Mississippi Delta, Freedom Summer, 1964

Edie Black teaches a freedom school class in Mileston, Mississippi, Freedom Summer, 1964.

Fannie Lou Hamer campaigning for the MFDP

James Forman of SNCC

Roy Wilkins of the NAACP