“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?
Feb 23, 2016
“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