The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Master's Theses Fall 12-2011 Jackson, Mississippi, Contested: The Allied Struggle for Civil Rights and Human Dignity Matthew David Monroe University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.edu/masters_theses Part of the Cultural History Commons, Political History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Monroe, Matthew David, "Jackson, Mississippi, Contested: The Allied Struggle for Civil Rights and Human Dignity" (2011).edu/masters_theses/210 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact Joshua. The University of Southern Mississippi JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, CONTESTED: THE ALLIED STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND HUMAN DIGNITY By Matthew David Monroe A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Approved: __Curtis Austin______________________ Director __ Chester Morgan___________________ ___Susannah Ural____________________ __Susan A.
Siltanen__________________ Dean of the Graduate School December 2011 ABSTRACT JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, CONTESTED: THE ALLIED STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND HUMAN DIGNITY by Matthew David Monroe December 2011 Utilizing monthly reports and correspondence of civil rights organizations, in addition to newspaper coverage, oral histories, and memoirs, this study shows that a grassroots, community-driven movement mobilized in Mississippi’s capital to challenge institutionalized discrimination. Yet, racial identity did not dictate exclusively how White and Black Mississippians responded to the unfolding Civil Rights Movement. Conflicting and shifting motivations shaped the nature, extent, and pace by which Blacks and Whites challenged or protected status quo discrimination. The Jackson Movement began as early as 1955 and sustained protest activity into the 1960s.
By the summer of 1965, Jackson’s Black community secured most of its original demands for nondiscriminatory service and employment, but competing socioeconomic interests increasingly limited the pace of further social change in Jackson and in the broader Mississippi Movement. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, sincere gratitude goes to my thesis director Dr. Curtis Austin whose patience and skill strengthened my endurance for mature scholarship. Thanks also to Dr.
Chester “Bo” Morgan, who with Dr. Austin, remain fine scholars and gentlemen. I also appreciate the warm words of encouragement from committee member Dr. Susannah Ural throughout my time here.
I also thank the faculty of the history department who patiently dealt with my plethora of mistakes in attempting to strengthen myself into a better scholar. Thanks also to fellow comrade Shane Hand who fought with me in the trenches of graduate school. Finally, this project would never have come to fruition without the ardent emotional and logistical support from my parents Bill Monroe and Jean Higginbotham, as well as from my brothers Aaron, Adam, and Mark. Although only my name is listed, this project is unquestionably a product of the Monroe family and my thesis committee.
I owe a debt of appreciation to all who have helped shape my life that I fear can never be repaid. In the meantime, this is an attempt to get started. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………. COMMUNITY AND COMRADES: EVOLUTION OF THE JACKSON CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT………………………………….
RISING TIDE OF PROTEST: THE JACKSON MOVEMENT ESCALATES……………………………………………………………. MISSISSIPPI RECKONING: DIVERGENCE WITHIN THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE…………………………………………………………….88 BIBIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………98 iv 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart….and I would die, and die gladly, if that would make a better life for them. ---NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, June 7, 1963—assassinated five days later Historian Harvard Sitkoff suggests that, by the twentieth century, institutionalized discrimination in the United States “had undermined the nation’s democratic institutions for nearly two hundred years.” 1 Americans had failed to uphold the original republican ideal of unfettered liberty as consecrated within the Constitution and as a result, argues Historian Chana Kai Lee, the twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and its subsequent evolution into the Black Power Movement in the United States represented a “fight for political and economic freedom” or, put another way, an effort by black Americans to exercise meaningful control over their economic and political destinies without impediment.2 Since Africans had arrived in colonial America as indentured servants and slaves during the mid-sixteenth century, whites relegated them to substandard housing, few opportunities to earn more than a subsistence living, unequal social privileges, and second-class citizenship. With few exceptions, white Americans justified this discrimination through a common perception that blacks were biologically, socially, and culturally inferior.
By the mid-twentieth century, institutionalized discrimination continued unabated throughout the United States, but unlike the rest of the nation, the South maintained a 1 Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992, revised (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), viii. 2 Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), ix. 2 legal code known as segregation, which created and sustained separate and unequal public facilities and services for black Americans. White officials barely funded black schools and limited black access to largely dilapidated public facilities, while white community members and businesses regularly served black Americans in a discriminatory manner, designating certain areas for service and refusing to address them with courtesy titles.
Furthermore, Chana Kai Lee explains convincingly that institutionalized discrimination facilitated a disturbing, yet relatively common problem, of “sexualized racial violence” that helped to reinforce a culture of white privilege and black powerlessness. Because they were often believed to have transgressed social mores, black women faced an omnipresent threat of molestation and rape with little or no legal recourse against their attacker while segregationists often took particular interest in emasculating men by referring to them as “boy,” striking their genitals, or forcing them to shave and strip nude.3 Also unlike African Americans in other regions of the country, black southerners lacked voting rights which left them essentially powerless to elect leaders responsive to their needs. The Civil Rights Movement, in response, represented part of an extended historical process by which black Americans sought to challenge and ultimately dismantle institutionalized discrimination. Participants involved in the freedom struggle worked to secure social justice, or rather, equitable access to viable housing, employment, food, healthcare, education, and equal protection under the law for black communities and prompted black Americans to reject commonly-held assumptions of black inferiority in order to internalize a more positive image of their racial identity.
3 Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, x; see also Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street and Katherine Charron’s Septima Claark: Freedom’s Teacher. 3 Until the late 1990s, scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement largely credited well-known social and political leaders, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr., for sparking a nation-wide challenge to institutionalized discrimination during the mid-twentieth century. Yet, a growing collection of scholarship illuminates the importance of community-driven activism rather than centrally organized leadership for driving civil rights protest activity. John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi and Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle collectively shifted the focus away from well-recognized historical actors, who nonetheless were vital to the movement, and instead examined the contributions of “everyday people,” or the multitude of largely unknown men, women, and children who mobilized and sustained a grassroots struggle for civil rights in Mississippi.
Dittmer and Payne utilize the experiences of grassroots organizing in impoverished Delta communities as a lens to understand how activism unfolded throughout the state. They explain how civil rights activists from outside Mississippi traveled to the state to help local black communities organize themselves for social, political, and economic uplift. Payne furthermore argues convincingly that the success of Mississippi’s civil rights movement relied upon the close-knit interpersonal relationships between activists and the black communities in which they lived and worked.4 Like Dittmer’s and Payne’s, this study focuses largely on events in Mississippi, but more specifically the struggle within the capital city of Jackson. As an urban center 4 John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 19; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2-5.
4 and seat of power for the state’s white power structure, Jackson differed from most communities in the Delta where wealthy planters and industrialists exercised incredible control over the social and economic lives of black Mississippians. This control was often enforced by the threat of vigilante violence. Uncomfortable with a perceived image of “lawlessness,” white officials in Jackson including Mayor Allen Thompson preferred instead that police and white businessmen handle individuals who violated social mores by arresting them or by employing economic reprisals. This project attempts to provide a narrative of twentieth century civil rights protests that occurred in Jackson, but set within the broader context of the Mississippi and much broader black struggle for freedom.
Well publicized events such as the 1961 Freedom Rides and the Freedom Summer of 1964, of course, continue to garner widespread attention from the public, but analysis of the extended chain of events associated with the Jackson Movement illuminates a more complicated understanding of how the community mobilized and sustained a grassroots movement for social justice. Dittmer too narrowly defines the Jackson Movement as a brief, but highly publicized period of protest activity that occurred between December 1962 and June 1963. Yet, by examining activity that preceded and followed the protests of December 1962 to June 1963, this study broadens the definition of what constituted the freedom struggle in Mississippi’s capital. Furthermore, in the Jackson Movement, as in the broader Civil Rights Movement, some black and white Americans openly supported challenges to discrimination, while others staunchly resisted changes to the status quo.
Other blacks and whites exhibited a conflicted attitude towards segregation that, for many of them, fluctuated over time in response to shifting socio-political events of the 1950s and 1960s. White and black 5 Americans, influenced partly by their socioeconomic standing, race, gender, age, political leanings, and religious views, struggled either to dismantle institutionalized discrimination in Mississippi, to protect it, or were reluctant to act either way. This helps to explain why neither Jackson’s white or black community presented a monolithic response to the civil rights struggle in their midst. Disagreements existed within and between civil rights organizations over protest strategy preferences, leadership roles, publicity, and funding, while members of Jackson’s black community similarly argued over the nature and extent to which they worked with activists, if even at all.
Individuals in Jackson’s white community, on the other hand, debated over what tactics they believed were most effective for undermining civil rights activity or the extent to which they were willing either to enforce or to help to dismantle segregation. This study attempts to illuminate the shifting nature of how complicated motivations drove individuals to help uphold or to help undermine institutionalized discrimination. Chapter I introduces the four major civil rights organizations that coalesced during the twentieth century and traces their movement into Mississippi. It also explains how Medgar Evers of the NAACP mobilized a grassroots civil rights movement in Jackson, and when joined by more activists in 1961, presented a powerful threat to city officials by December 1962.
Chapter II examines the way in which community youths prompted even black conservatives to join a major wave of demonstrations throughout 1963 until a compromise with city officials offered token concessions. Although black conservatives briefly stopped protest activity, young people nonetheless continued direct- action protests and soon rekindled movement activity with wide support within Jackson’s black community. Meanwhile, members of the four major civil rights organizations 6 reorganized an alliance called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to mobilize politically black communities to challenge segregation. Chapter III charts the growing progress by Jackson Movement personnel in forcing concessions from the power structure while members also worked within the COFO-led project to challenge Mississippi officials politically.