You happen to be completely right. I would just note that by 1950s, Mississippi had been stuck in that era for one and fifty years. The number of actual insurrections in Mississippi, where the supremacists killed their political opponents were numerous and the lynchings were about instilling a pervasive atmosphere of political fear to drive the Yankee Union soldiers out of the state and regain political control through repressing black Americans, especially black men because they posses a new power, that of voting and ruling over whites. Which did happen for a short time.
Sadly, the Supremacists won politically through violence, controlling the law and the ballot box by locking blacks from accessing it. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the state had one party controlling it for 80 years. Does one party control with no opposition sound like Democracy? It isn’t. Hence it can’t be considered even part of America if only one party votes and wins. Those decades only increased their sense of control, ownership, enhancing their supremacy by making them feel more, well, supreme. Oh, and their U.S. Senator, Bilbo, wrote a law to commit genocide against black Americans he submitted to Congress in April 1939 to Congress, which is still on the books and I read, because he also included it in his book advocating for black genocide, Take Your Choice, in 1947. The Choice he spoke of was to keep blacks segregated, including sending them to Liberia (under a white corporation to extract minerals of course) and if whites don’t take that choice then the white race will disappear by “miscegenation”, interracial breeding. Today they call this “The Great Replacement.” It is a dominant idea that never faded, it just just didn’t make it onto the news.
Lynchings continued in the 1960s in Mississippi, but never really stopped. Many recent cases reveal why. Police classify the murder of black Americans as “suicide”, as with a 2018 when a black man was found hanging by a noose from a tree (spoiler alert, the white guys did it), or the October 2022 case when the death of black man, who called his mother saying two white were chasing in a truck, was found in a wooded area with his head separated from his body by a good distance, and som either body parts near by. The sheriff rule it death by “natural causes.”
Genetics now reveal that sociopathy is a genetic trait that can be brought out in a violent and traumatic environment and manifest itself into a lack of empathy and violence. It can then be passed on and reinforced generation to generation through the same never ending pattern of constant normalized violence, racial slurs and other dehumanization tactics occurring daily, along with a right to rape black women which is constantly expressed (I won’t include details of this from a current report I read where, spoiler alert, the brutalized women were not believed in official report in Mississippi when they reported they were raped).
Psychopathy is not name calling, but a genetic predisposition passed along and reinforced through un-empathic actions, the worst actions being murder and rape, an almost constant in Mississippi history. After moving and living for a year of grad school in Mississippi in the mid 1990s, I can confirm that I was never more afraid of saying the wrong thing to a white or the threats I received from them in that time I lived (in contrast, not a single black American there treated me with anything other than kindness and respect). The white men in that state are thoroughly conditioned to violence, gun normalization, and an complete attitude of superiority that manifests itself constantly as anti-democracy. Trump may not have brought out the worst in many (but not all) white male residents of the state, especially those in power, but simply amplified and reflect their nature to the nation.
Thank you, and sorry I can only amplify your insights, but I did find something to disagree with about Mississippi: you can’t romanticize an era you’re still living in.
