University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2015 Sisters of the Mississippi struggle : examining the contributions by women to the fight for voting equality in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Morgan Ackerman, 1980- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ackerman,, Morgan 1980-, "Sisters of the Mississippi struggle : examining the contributions by women to the fight for voting equality in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Electronic Theses and Dissertations.18297/etd/2145 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository.
This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville. SISTERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI STRUGGLE: EXAMING THE CONTRIBUTIONS BY WOMEN TO THE FIGHT FOR VOTING EQUALITY IN MISSISSIPPI IN THE EARLY 1960s By: Morgan Ackerman M. University of Louisville, 2015 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History Department of History University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2015 Copyright 2015 by Morgan Ackerman All Rights Reserved SISTERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI STRUGGLE: Examining the Contributions of Women to the Fight for Voting Equality in Mississippi in the Early 1960s By: Morgan Ackerman M., University of Louisville, 2015 A ThesisApproved on 14 April 2015 By the Following Thesis Committee: ----------------------------------- Dr.
Harrison, Thesis Director ----------------------------------------- Dr. Tyler, Second Reader ------------------------------------------ Dr. Theriot, Outside Reader ii ABSTRACT SISTERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI STRUGGLE: EXAMING THE CONTRIBUTIONS BY WOMEN TO THE FIGHT FOR VOTING EQUALITY IN MISSISSIPPLI IN THE EARLY 1960s Morgan Ackerman 14 April 2015 This thesis examines the contributions made by women in the fight for voting equality in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The covered period began with the immediate reaction to the Brown Vs Board of Education decision and culminates with the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party’s challenge to be seated in place of the regular (and proactively segregated) Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
The focus of primary concern of this thesis is the grassroots tactics utilized primarily by women, in contrast to the more visceral marches and civil disobedience espoused by male leaders, and how these differing tactics affected media coverage of the Civil Rights movement as a whole. Conclusions are made based upon personal interviews, letters, and especially newspaper articles and print media coverage of relevant events. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS: I. Introduction:……………………………………………………………………………8 Exposition of topic and thesis; purpose and methods; opening statements.
“Land of the Tree and Home of the Grave”:1……….………………………………17 Brief biographical sketches the life experiences of the women whom feature prominently in this research. Special attention is given to the aspects of the women’s experiences which propelled them into Civil Rights advocacy. “Hard Time, Mississippi” 2:…………………….………………………………36 An outline of the cultural and legal situations in Mississippi from the immediate reaction to Brown V Board of Education through roughly the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Women Challenge the “Mississippi Monolith”3.……………………………………65 Discussion of the Civil Rights activism of the women who are the primary focus of this project: Clarie Collins Harvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Jackson Gray Adams, Unita 1 Quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, who used the phrase on multiple occasions to describe her home state.
2 Quote from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 song “Living for the City”. 3 Quote taken from a 1962 internal SNCC memo, in which Bob Moses used the term ‘Mississippi monolith’ to describe the entrenched white resistance faced by the organization. iv Blackwell, and Casey Hayden. Special attention is devoted to the actions of these women through the summer of 1964.
“Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired”……………………………………………98 The Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party’s Challenge to be seated in place of the all- white state delegation at the 1964 Democratic Nation Convention.114 Closing statements on newspaper coverage of the fight for voting equality in Mississippi, headlined by the MFDP challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. INTRODUCTION: Exposition of topic and thesis; purpose and methods; opening statements. Exposition of Topic and Thesis The study of African-American history has changed greatly over the last half century. Before approximately the 1960s, the historical representation of African Americans had been that of a large but only marginally important group of virtually all slaves who toiled on Southern plantations but made no other real impact upon America.
Popular history of the time seemed to have believed that Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, W. Dubois, and George Washington Carver were the only notable African Americans up to that point. During the height of the Civil Rights movement however, revisions of African- American history began to be made. Only then the centrality of African Americans in American history begin to slowly come to light.
Although great African American scholars, such as Charles H. Wesley, Dorothy Parker Wesley, and Rayford W. Logan, among others, had been chronicling the many contributions to Americ 1 an society and history of African Americans for decades, only in the second half of the twentieth century did the African-American history begin to receive its due. In many ways, Civil Rights history parallels African-American history as a whole.
Until notable scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. corrected the record, the narrative of Civil Rights history strongly insinuated that African-American activism began only in the 1950s; that the entire Civil Rights movement essentially laid dormant between Reconstruction and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many scholars have now thoroughly eviscerated that misconception and it is now accepted fact that the 1950s marks only the time when the Civil Rights began to win nationally relevant victories and not the beginning of the agitation. Gone forever is the painting of Rosa Parks as simply a woman too tired to walk to the back of the bus; she is now known as a dedicated activist with a decades-long career.
As the narrative of Civil Rights history continues to evolve, the role of women therein continues to evolve as well. Recent scholarship has illuminated the contributions of women to Civil Rights from many perspectives. Taylor Branch chronicled Martin Luther King’s aversion to women in positions of power4; Lynne Olson demonstrated women’s persistence in all areas of the Civil Rights struggle, despite chauvinism both within the movement and from society at large, and Sara Evans argued that women’s experiences in the Civil Rights movement directly inspired the subsequent women’s 4 Branch chronicled Dr. King’s reluctance to allow Ella Baker even temporary control of the otherwise moribund SCLC program Crusade for Citizenship, despite, in Branch’s telling, Baker being more experienced than any other candidate.
King did eventually allow Baker the position, though only as “acting director”. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years: 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.5 On the subject of grassroots-level Civil Rights activism, John Dittmer wrote the seminal work, Local People. Though these works are all of great importance to the body of knowledge, this project is fundamentally different in focus from each.
This research concerns itself strictly with the voting equality struggle, as opposed to the broader spectrum of Olson’s and Evans’s work. And, whereas Dittmer discusses both genders and deals strictly with the accomplishments of grassroots-level activism and its ramifications within the state of Mississippi, this project deals specifically with the unheralded heroines of the Mississippi movement. Furthermore, this project coming after such historians as these have already long proved the essential contributions of women, the major argument herein lies not in reproving that women made vital contributions to the Mississippi movement, but rather how those contributions affected national and local media perception and coverage of the Civil Rights movement as a whole. Though many historians have studied the role of women in the Civil Rights Movement from many angles, there remains areas to be illuminated.
Rather than the contributions of women to the Civil Rights struggle as a whole, either thematically or chronologically, this research focuses strictly on women in the fight for voting equality in Mississippi. This project makes no claim to chronicle the entirety of the struggle for African-American voting rights in Mississippi, as that could fill a volume, and the point could be argued that that struggle continues to this day. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left. New York: Vintage Publishing, 1980. 3 To break such a large topic down to a thesis length argument, this project focuses on five women who particularly affected the Mississippi agitation for voting equality: Clarie Collins Harvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Jackson Gray Adams, Unita Blackwell, and Casey Hayden. Featuring these particular women is not intended to insinuate in any way that they are more important than women not featured; far too many women played significant and heroic roles in the Mississippi struggle to feature all of them.
Rather, the hope of this research is to illuminate five particular heroines. Clarie Collins Harvey founded Womanpower Unlimited to assist jailed Freedom Riders and quickly built a full-fledged Civil Rights organization from it. Fannie Lou Hamer grew up on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta; a viciously cruel environment which sculpted her into a brazen and forceful campaigner against the atrocities of Jim Crow economics. Victoria Jackson Gray Adams organized many meetings and rallies in the extremely dangerous Hattiesburg area and taught African Americans the essential reading and citizenship knowledge needed to pass registration tests.
Unita Blackwell rose from political novice to helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party. Casey Hayden was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who brought her fierce anti-segregation beliefs and organizational talents to the Mississippi movement from east Texas via Atlanta. Though these women may have engaged in different activities, the common thread throughout all of their activism was concentration on grassroots-level organization of their loved ones, acquaintances, and communities into cohesive units which could then 4 attain through force of numbers voting rights. Suffrage6 equality was far from the only goal, but in many ways, was the essential victory which could make most other goals possible.
As Mississippi freedom activists knew, many of their ultimate goals (integration, equal protection of law enforcement, equality in schools, etc.) would remain moot until African Americans in the state could vote in numbers commensurate with their population. Furthermore, African Americans knew they could not expect anything approaching integration or equality while segregated from participating in elections in a state that repeatedly elected politicians such as Theodore Bilbo, Ross Barnett, James O. Eastland, and Paul B.7 For that reason, the women featured in this research focused their attention upon equal access to voting as a primary raison d’etre within the Civil Rights movement. The precise focus of this project is the tactics utilized by women in the Mississippi movement agitating for African-American voting rights and how the differing tactics affected media coverage of the Civil Rights movement as a whole.
Unlike their much more studied male counterparts in the struggle, who could organize bus boycotts, marches on Washington, and visceral acts of large-scale civil disobedience and direct action, women tended to concentrate on the equally important grassroots-level organizing. These women, and many others, utilized the strong community networks 6 Though African Americans had officially had the right to vote, for men, since 1870 and women since 1920, the fact remains that African-American voting in Mississippi remained essentially non- existent until the 1960s. As African Americans were not allowed the right to vote by resistance at the local level, the term suffrage appears in this text as synonymous with voting equality in practice. 7 Before Johnson Jr.