PRELUDE TO 1960’S CIVIL RIGHTS IN MISSISSIPPIDepression Era through the Mid 1950’s

GREAT DEPRESSION• Stock market crashed in 1929.

• Banks failed, and accounts were not insured.• Fear over stock market crash and bank

failures caused people not to buy things.• Fewer items were produced.

• Fewer people needed to work to produce items.• People lost jobs and could not

pay bills. Items bought on credit were repossessed.• High unemployment left few

people spending even less to stimulate the economy.

• Already low crop prices went even lower. Production reduced because of boll weevils and the Great Flood of 1927.• Some had to sell their own farms and work on others’

farms as tenant farmers and sharecroppers.• Some got out of farming altogether and looked for

other jobs that normally went to African Americans.• This left African Americans out of work even more.

• Many African Americans still continued to move northward looking for opportunities. Since WWI they had started moving in large numbers to urban centers like Chicago and Detroit in the Great Migration, but this slacked some during the Depression.

Click the picture for more about the Great Migration

HELP FROM BAWI AND WWII

• Governor Hugh White got the MS Legislature to pass Balance Agriculture with Industry Act, which pursued getting industries to locate in the state. Special tax breaks and construction grants made MS more attractive to companies like Ingalls Shipyard.

• WWII required manufacturing of ammunition, machinery, vehicles, and anything the army needed. It caused a boom to the economy.

• In Prairie, MS, near Aberdeen, the Gulf Ordnance Plant built by Proctor and Gamble manufactured about 25% of the nation’s munitions used in the war.

• Most of the workers were women.

Check out this blog by Jim Woodrick, a great MS historian! http://andspeakingofwhich.blogspot.com/2012/06/gulf-ordnance-plant.html

NEW POLITICS• President Franklin Roosevelt’s

wife, Eleanor, became concerned over the plight of African Americans in the South.

• Partly because of her urging, and because of the need to relieve economic suffering of the Depression, Roosevelt proposed programs known as the New Deal.

• Roosevelt’s policies to provide economic assistance and jobs won over many African American voters to the Democratic Party.

• This was the first time since Reconstruction that the Federal Government focused on the needs of African Americans and poor whites.

• African Americans were fighting just like whites did in WWII.

• The Tuskegee Airmen were just a few of the African Americans who served with distinction. Among them were Robin Roberts father, Lawrence Roberts, and Alva Temple, from Columbus.

Top right: Felicia Bowen, granddaughter of Alva Temple of Columbus, MS. (Photo by Kelly Tippett of the Commercial Dispatch)Bottom left: ABC TV Good Morning America Host Robin Roberts with her father, Lawrence Roberts of Bay Saint Louis, MS.

INOUYE RECEIVED THE MEDAL OF HONOR FOR HIS HEROICS IN WWII.

CLICK THE PICTURE BELOW TO LEARN MORE.

• Mississippi’s climate was ideal for bases, such as Camp Shelby, which trained the Nisei troops, and Keesler, which was an army air field on the coast.

• Senator Inouye of Hawaii, who was of Japanese descent, spoke well of his treatment in Hattiesburg at a time when Japanese Americans were mistrusted in the U.S.

• There were also WWIII Prisoner of War camps around Mississippi.

• Bases in Columbus, Keesler, Camp Shelby, and Meridian are still active today.

Left : CAFB trained WWII pilots in single engine airplanes like this one . Right: High ranking captured German WWII officers were held at Clinton, MS.

• Harry Truman became President when FDR died in 1945. FDR was in his 4th

term when he passed away from a stroke. After that, the U.S. added the 22nd

Amendment to the Constitution that allows running for only two four-year terms.

URBANIZATION• With the war over since 1945, returning servicemen and women were drawn to the urban areas (cities) that were developing because of new industries. African Americans returning from service were expecting to be treated equally after the war.

• Truman was the first U.S. President to address the NAACP, and he supported civil rights laws that would give equality in hiring practices and in the military.

Truman made a speech about civil rights at the Lincoln Memorial. Click the picture for the text of his speech.

THE DIXIECRATS

• Many Southern Democrats began leaving the National Democratic Party because of Truman’s racial policies. They formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly called the Dixiecrats.

• They nominated Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright (MS) to be President and VP in 1948, but were unsuccessful.

• They were successful, however, in keeping up opposition to race relations change in MS.

• As the MS economy grew, they still had not kept up with the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that said schools could be separate as long as they were equal. They were separate, but notequal.

White school in Pass Christian, 1916.Black school in the Delta, 1939.

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS , 1954

• The Supreme Court overturned the separate but equal idea in Plessy v. Ferguson. They said it was unconstitutional. In fact, they wanted schools to be desegregated with “all deliberate haste.”

FIGHTING THE BROWN DECISION

• Whites who fought the decision called it “Black Monday.” They even called for a state amendment to the Constitution that would dissolve public schools, if necessary, to stop integration.

• Citizens’ Councils set out to stop implementation of Brown, but by 1970 they began building private, non -government funded, all white schools.

EMMITT TILL- SUMMER 1955

Emmitt Till

A 14 year-old from Chicago, visiting his MS relatives, whistled at a white woman. Days later, his beaten and mangled body was found in the Tallahatchie River.

His mother insisted on an open casket, and news of the brutal murder focused national attention on racial aggression in the South, particularly in Mississippi .

J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were found not guilty of the murder, but later confessed to it in a magazine interview. They could not be tried for the same crime twice because of the Double Jeopardy Clause of the 5th Amendment.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LEADERS IN THE EARLY 50’S

Howardhttp://reason.com/archives/2009/03/20/a-forgotten-civil-rights-hero

Dr. T.R. M. Howard was a wealthy entrepreneur and surgeon in Mound Bayou who tried to bring the Emmitt Till murderers to justice, and he helped bring the attention of the country to the case.

Aaron Henry was the President of the NAACP in MS, and he was influential in all work toward Civil Rights in MS, including the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Henry

LYNCHINGSLynchings, mob violence activities that were carried out in the guise of justice were more common in Mississippi than other states. From the 1880’s to the 1960’s there were 42 cases of white victims and 539 of African American victims reported.

Click the picture for a link to an interactive map about each state’s lynching statistics and Jim Crow Laws.

• Our next segment will examine the organizations and leaders within Mississippi. We will also explore Freedom Schools and the killing of three Civil Rights workers near Philadelphia, MS.