In a Madhouse's Din

In a Madhouse's Din PDF Author: Susan M. Weill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313010625
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Mississippi is a unique case study as a result of its long-standing defiance of federal civil rights legislation and the fact that nearly half its population was black and relegated to second-class citizenship. According to the vast majority of Mississippi daily press editorials examined between 1948 and 1968, the notion that blacks and whites were equal as races of people was a concept that remained unacceptable and inconceivable. While the daily press certainly did not advocate desegregation, in contrast to what many media critics have reported about the Southern press promoting violence to suppress civil rights activity, Mississippi daily newspapers never encouraged or condoned violence during the time periods under evaluation. Weill places coverage of these important events within a historical context, shedding new light on media opinion in the state most resistant to the precepts of the civil rights movement. This is the first comprehensive examination of civil rights coverage and white supremacist rhetoric in the Mississippi daily press during five key events: the 1948 Dixiecrat protest of the national Democratic platform; the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools in 1954; the court-ordered desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962; Freedom Summer in 1964; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. From nearly 5,000 issues of Mississippi daily newspapers, more than 1,000 editorials and 7,000 news articles are documented in this volume.

In a Madhouse's Din

In a Madhouse's Din PDF Author: Susan M. Weill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313010625
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mississippi is a unique case study as a result of its long-standing defiance of federal civil rights legislation and the fact that nearly half its population was black and relegated to second-class citizenship. According to the vast majority of Mississippi daily press editorials examined between 1948 and 1968, the notion that blacks and whites were equal as races of people was a concept that remained unacceptable and inconceivable. While the daily press certainly did not advocate desegregation, in contrast to what many media critics have reported about the Southern press promoting violence to suppress civil rights activity, Mississippi daily newspapers never encouraged or condoned violence during the time periods under evaluation. Weill places coverage of these important events within a historical context, shedding new light on media opinion in the state most resistant to the precepts of the civil rights movement. This is the first comprehensive examination of civil rights coverage and white supremacist rhetoric in the Mississippi daily press during five key events: the 1948 Dixiecrat protest of the national Democratic platform; the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools in 1954; the court-ordered desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962; Freedom Summer in 1964; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. From nearly 5,000 issues of Mississippi daily newspapers, more than 1,000 editorials and 7,000 news articles are documented in this volume.

"In a Madhouse's Din"

Author: Susan M. Weill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civil rights
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Book Description


The Race Beat

The Race Beat PDF Author: Gene Roberts
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307455947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

The Fall of the House of Zeus

The Fall of the House of Zeus PDF Author: Curtis Wilkie
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307460711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
“Masterful . . . an epic tale of backbiting, shady deal-making, and greed [that] reads like a John Grisham novel.”—The Wall Street Journal A real-life legal thriller as timeless as a Greek tragedy, tracing the downfall of one of America’s most famous lawyers and exposing the dark side of Southern politics—from the author of When Evil Lived in Laurel Dickie Scruggs was arguably the most successful plaintiff’s lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against Big Tobacco and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin Hood and was portrayed in the movie The Insider as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs’s legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics—but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge. Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus uncovers the Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. Featuring Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe Biden, in supporting roles, with cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other Washington insiders, Curtis Wilkie’s account of this uniquely American tragedy reveals the seedy underbelly of institutional power.

The Smell of Burning Crosses

The Smell of Burning Crosses PDF Author: Ira Harkey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496824865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962. Preceded by a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and violent, deadly rioting, Meredith’s admission constituted a pivotal moment in civil rights history. At the time, Harkey was editor of the Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he published pieces in support of Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after firmly articulating his advocacy of change. Originally published in 1967, this book is Harkey’s memoir of the crisis and what it was like to be a white integrationist editor in fiercely segregationist Mississippi. He recounts conversations with University of Mississippi officials and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to intimidate him and muzzle his work. The memoir’s title refers to a burning cross set on the lawn of his home, which occurred in addition to the shot fired at his office. Reprinted for the fifth time, this book features a new introduction by historian William Hustwit.

Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race

Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race PDF Author: Harriet Pollack
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034432X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

Paths Out of Dixie

Paths Out of Dixie PDF Author: Robert Mickey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838789
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Full Court Press

Full Court Press PDF Author: Jason A. Peterson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496808215
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
During the civil rights era, Mississippi was caught in the hateful embrace of a white caste system that enforced segregation. Rather than troubling the Closed Society, state news media, on the whole, marched in lockstep or, worse, promoted the continued subservience of blacks. Surprisingly, challenges from Mississippi's college basketball courts questioned segregation's validity and its gentleman's agreement that prevented college teams in the Magnolia State from playing against integrated foes. Mississippi State University stood at the forefront of this battle for equality in the state with the school's successful college basketball program. From 1959 through 1963, the Maroons won four Southeastern Conference basketball championships and created a dynasty in the South's preeminent college athletic conference. However, in all four title-winning seasons, the press feverishly debated the merits of a National Collegiate Athletic Association appearance for the Maroons, culminating in Mississippi State University's participation in the integrated 1963 NCAA Championship. Full Court Press examines news articles, editorials, and columns published in Mississippi's newspapers during the eight-year existence of the gentleman's agreement that barred black participation, the challenges posed by Mississippi State University, and the subsequent integration of college basketball. While the majority of reporters opposed any effort to integrate, a segment of sports journalists, led by the charismatic Jimmie McDowell of the Jackson State Times, emerged as bold advocates for equality. Full Court Presshighlights an ideological metamorphosis within the press during the civil rights movement. The media, which had long minimized the struggle of blacks, slowly transformed into an industry that considered the plight of black Mississippians on equal footing with whites.

Birddogs and Tough Old Broads

Birddogs and Tough Old Broads PDF Author: Pete Smith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149858246X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by steady declines in both news revenue and circulation, and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett. Pete Smith argues that the experiences of the women journalists reflect broader social, political, legal, and cultural struggles and changes in both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women who aspired to such a position, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments.

The Blood of Emmett Till

The Blood of Emmett Till PDF Author: Timothy B. Tyson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476714851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The definitive account of the Emmett Till lynching, based on never-before-heard accounts by those involved, by an award-winning author.