Mississippi Studies Pre-Civil Rights Era from the Depression through the Mid 1950's

1. PRELUDE TO 1960’S CIVIL
RIGHTS IN MISSISSIPPI
Depression Era through the Mid 1950’s

2. 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.

3. • 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.

4. • 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

5. 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.

6. • 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

7. 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.

8. • 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.

9. • 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.

10. 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.

11. • 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.

12. • 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.

13. 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.

14. • 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.

15. 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.

16. • 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 not
equal.
White
school in
Pass
Christian,
1916.
Black
school in
the Delta,
1939.

17. 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.”

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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

21. LYNCHINGS
Lynchings, 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.

22. • 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.