A Different Picture of the Civil Rights Movement: Rural Activism in Clay County, Mississippi (2013)
Undergraduate: Justin M. Randolph
Faculty Advisor: W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Department: History
My senior research project explores the rural civil rights movement in northeast Mississippi's Clay County. Seventy air-line miles east of the infamous community Money, where Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, and on the same fertile Black Belt land of Selma, Alabama, black farmers joined northern activists of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) from 1964-65 to seek social justice unique to a rural time and place. From desegregating a local livestock sale barn to running black farmers in community USDA elections, Clay County's movement challenges the overwhelming undergraduate perception of civil rights as merely school desegregation and voting rights. It likewise shows that not all conservative white Mississippians resorted to murder in attempts to save Jim Crow. Instead, their economic methods of intimidation could be almost equally punitive. Clay County's story is here captured in one activist farm family's dramatic (and violent) oral history: The Day family lost employment, property, and peace of mind in their struggle for equal rights in rural Mississippi. I also utilize manuscripts from the MFDP and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission's spy files.