those racist systems include, but cannot be reduced to, racial bigotry.
13
And we know better at glance that slavery as the rooted of racism existed in the United States.
B. Racism in Mississippi 1. Historical Racism of Mississippi
There is plus minus between north State and South state in America. For the northern states, economically grow up by establishment of center of American
industry. And socially they are more open and more liberal in daily life. The north’s also become the center of American political activity. The most of the north states
such as New York and Washington D.C. In contrary, the South State most well known as the center of American
agricultural economy. The south’s also export big commodity for US consumption in agriculture. But socially, almost the south states fulfilled hatred and racial
discrimination by white people to the colored people. The sentiment of race also happened in political activity which supported by government powered by the white.
In this region white supremacist is the rule. Mississippi is one of the South States that have bad reputation on racism. This
problem has rooted when the white people lose their benefit from the new system on cotton sharing benefit. As we know that Mississippis major crop, became highly
13
Noel A. Cazenave and Darlene Alvarez Maddern, “Defending the White Race: White Male Faculty Opposition to a White Racism Course,” in Race and Society 2, 1999, pp. 25-50.
profitable in the 19th century, with steamboats as the principal means of shipping. The bank of the Mississippi filled rapidly with river towns and luxurious plantation
homes. The cotton economy was based on the use of slave labor. When the conflict over slavery came to a crisis, Mississippi was the second state to secede from the
Union January, 1861. Jefferson Davis, Mississippi soldier-statesman became President of the Confederate States.
14
But this situation comes to change in the twentieth century when the sharecropping system applied and practiced to all white landlords. Since that time
cotton no longer made Mississippi prosperous. In the hill country the white farmers, derisively called “rednecks or “peckerwoods, became as impoverished as the black
sharecroppers. In addition, in the early 1900s more than half of Mississippis population was black, but blacks were denied the vote by rigid application of a
literacy-test requirement in the 1890 constitution. By mid twentieth, exactly in the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state
in the nation. 86 of all non-white families lived below the national poverty line.
15
In addition, the state had a terrible record of black voting rights violations. In the 1950s,
Mississippi was 45 black, but only 5 of voting age blacks were registered to vote.
16
Some counties did not have a single registered black voter. Whites insisted
14
http:history.howstuffworks.comamerican-historyhistory-of-mississippi.htm accessed on December 25, 2008.
15
Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 New York: Abbeville Press, 1996, pp. 132-135.
16
Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: Americas Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987, p. 208.
that blacks did not want to vote, but this was not true. Many blacks wanted to vote, but they worried, and rightfully so, that they might lose their job.
In 1962, over 260 blacks in Madison County overcame this fear and waited in line to register. 50 more came the next day. Only seven got in to take the test over the
two days, walking past a sticker on the registrars office door that bore a Confederate battle flag next to the message Support Your Citizens Council.
17
Once they got in, they had to take a test designed to prevent them from becoming registered. In 1954, in
response to increasing literacy among blacks, the test, which originally asked applicants to read or interpret a section of the state constitution, was changed to ask
applicants to read and interpret that document.
18
This allowed white registrars to decide whether or not a person passed the test. Most blacks, even those with doctoral
degrees, failed. In contrast, most whites passed, no matter what their education level.
By 1960 blacks no longer made up the majority of adults of voting age, but a movement to register blacks for voting met with uniform resistance. In 1962 a federal
court ordered the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith as its first black student. Defiance of the order was led by Governor Ross Barnett, and serious rioting
broke out at the university. Federal troops were needed to help Meredith enter the
17
Anthony Lewis, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution New York: Random House, 1964, p. 135.
18
Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 225.
university. Other racial violence included the murder in 1963 of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and in 1964 of three civil rights workers.
19
In the mid-1960s, the participation of blacks in politics increased. In 1969 Charles Evers, Medgars brother, was elected mayor of Fayette - the first black mayor
of a biracial Mississippi town since Reconstruction. Also in the late 1960s, white opposition to public school integration led to racial disturbances. By the early 1970s,
court-ordered desegregation of public schools at all levels was under way. During sixties the black people faced some serious difficulty to determine
their life for social economy domain as well as in political participation. It is not surprisingly if black people make a mob to demand their civil right as well as the
whites. Approximately, there are 5.000 of black people of Mississippi out of the list of register to vote. The white people, who joined in some community based color like
Ku Klux Klan, fraternal organization, make intimidation, kidnapping, and lynching the black who try to register.
For this reason NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People went to Mississippi in an effort to register more blacks in the late
1950s. Amzie Moore, a local NAACP leader in Mississippi, met with SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worker Robert Parris Moses when Moses
19
http:history.howstuffworks.comamerican-historyhistory-of-mississippi.htm accessed on December 25, 2008.
traveled through the state in July 1960, recruiting people for a SNCC conference. Moore encouraged Moses to bring more SNCC workers to the state, and the
following summer he did, beginning a month-long voter registration campaign in the town of McComb, in conjunction with C.C. Bryant of the NAACP. SNCC organized
a voter registration education program, teaching a weekly class that showed people how to register.
20
SNCC worker Marion Barry arrived on August 18 and started workshops to teach young blacks nonviolent protest methods. Many of the blacks, too young to
vote, jumped at the opportunity to join the movement. They began holding sit-ins. Some were arrested and expelled from school. More were expelled when they held a
protest march after the murder of Herbert Lee, who had helped SNCC workers, on September 25. In response to these expulsions, Moses and Chuck McDew started
Nonviolent High School to teach the expelled students. They were arrested and sentenced to four months in jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors.
21
Other protests by blacks were met with violence. At sit-ins which began on May 28, 1963, participants were sprayed with paint and had peppered thrown in their
eyes. Students who sang movement songs during lunch after the bombing of NAACP field director Medgar Evers home were beaten. Evers himself was the most visible
target for violence. He was a native of Mississippi and World War II veteran who was
20
http:www.watson.org~lisablackhistorycivilrights-55-65missippi.html accessed on December, 25, 2008.
21
Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 213.
greeted by a mob of gun-wielding whites when he attempted to register after the war in his hometown of Decatur. He later said, We fought during the war for America,
Mississippi included. Now, after the Germans and Japanese hadnt killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would. After he was denied admission to the
University of Mississippi law school, he went to work for the NAACP. By 1963, Evers was aware that, in the words of his wife Myrlie Evers,
. . . Medgar was a target because he was the leader. The whole mood of white Mississippi was that if Medgar Evers were eliminated, the problem would be
solved. . . . And we came to realize, in those last few days, last few months that our time was short; it was simply in the air. You knew that something was
going to happen, and the logical person for it to happen to was Medgar.
22
In next program, after succeed for Freedom Vote, SNCC also decided to send volunteers into Mississippi during the summer of 1964, a presidential election year,
for a voter registration drive. It became known as Freedom Summer. Bob Moses outlined the goals of Freedom Summer to prospective volunteers at Stanford
University: 1. to expand black voter registration in the state; 2. to organize a legally constituted Freedom Democratic Party that would challenge the whites-only
Mississippi Democratic party; 3. to establish freedom schools to teach reading and math to black children; 4. to open community centers where indigent blacks
could obtain legal and medical assistance.
23
800 students gathered for a week-long orientation session at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, that June. They were mostly white and young, with an
22
The murder of Medgar Ever was filmed by some American director. The Ghost of Mississippi by Rob Reiner is one of the film describe a courtroom drama.
23
Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 229.
average age of 21. They were also from well-to-do families, as the volunteers had to bring 500 for bail as well as money for living expenses, medical bills, and
transportation home. SNCCs James Forman told them to be prepared for death. I may be killed. You may be killed. The whole staff may go. He also told them to go
quietly to jail if arrested, because Mississippi is not the place to start conducting constitutional law classes for the policemen, many of whom dont have a fifth-grade
education.
24
On June 21, the day after the first 200 recruits left for Mississippi from Ohio, three workers, including one volunteer, disappeared. Michael Schwerner, Andrew
Goodman, and James Chaney had been taken to jail for speeding charges but were later released. What happened next is not known. Local police were called when the
men failed to perform a required check-in with Freedom Summer headquarters, but Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was convinced the men were hiding to gain publicity. The
FBI did not get involved for a full day. During the search for the missing workers, the FBI uncovered the bodies of three lynched blacks who had been missing for some
time. The black community noted wryly that these murders received nowhere near the same nationwide media attention as the murders of the three workers, two of whom
were white. The murder case of three workers above for more detail wills discuses in the
following chapter.
24
Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 230.
C. Reflection Theory of Cultural Racism
