1945-2000
Mississippi was a center of the American Civil Rights Movement and especially captured the national stage in 1963 and 1964. Few white leaders in the state supported the effort to secure voting and exercise of other civil rights for African Americans.
According to the 1960 census, the state had a population of 2,178,141, of which 915,743, or 42% of the residents, were black. Their long disfranchisement meant that white state legislators had consistently underfunded segregated schools and services for African Americans, and passed laws that worked against their interests. African Americans had no representation in local governments, juries or law enforcement.
The Ole Miss riot of 1962 erupted as a white mob attacked 500 United States marshals deployed by President John F. Kennedy to ensure the safety of James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Segregationist rioters assaulted the marshals with bricks, bottles, and gunfire before the marshals responded with tear gas. The fighting which ensued claimed the lives of two men and seriously injured dozens more, and polarized race relations and politics, as whites assumed they were under attack from the federal government.
In September 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a secretive and extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This covert action program sought to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize Ku Klux Klan groups in Mississippi whose violent vigilante activities alarmed the national government. The program succeeded in creating an atmosphere of paranoia that turned many Klan members against each other. The effect on Klan groups between 1964 and 1971 helped destroy many of them. Some members of the Klan groups subsequently joined other white supremacist organizations, including Christian Identity.
Read more about this topic: History Of Mississippi