After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 mandated the desegregation of schools nationwide, the legislature in the state of Mississippi created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the basic mission of which was to prevent integration in that state. This book is an investigative history of the Commission, other government agencies (including the FBI), and organized crime, all of which conspired to break the law in dealing with civil-rights and antiwar activists during the 1950s and 1960s. The author uncovers new information about the efforts of FBI agents to combat integration and exposes the longest-running conspiracy in American history.

HOW DID THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, THE PARTY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, MUTATE INTO A WHITE IDENTITY POLITICAL ENTITY THAT TODAY PROMOTES THE RACIST VIEWPOINTS OF THE OLD CONFEDERACY?

Media & Minorities looks at the media's racial tendencies with an eye to identifying the "system supportive" messages conveyed and offering challenges to them. The book covers all major media--including television, film, newspapers, radio, magazines, and the Internet--and systematically analyzes their representation of the four largest minority groups in the U.S.: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Entertainment media are compared and contrasted with news media, and special attention is devoted to coverage of social movements for racial justice and politicians of color.

Documents governmental and political corruption in the Deep South through the story of a daughter who seeks justice when her parents are slain in Mississippi.

Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. In Designing Dixie, Reiko Hillyer shows how these boosters crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract northern tourists and investors. Neither romanticizing the Old South nor appealing to Lost Cause ideology, promoters of New South industrialization used urban design to construct particular relationships to each city’s southern, slaveholding, and Confederate pasts. Drawing on the approaches of cultural history, landscape studies, and the history of memory, Hillyer shows how the southern tourist destinations of St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta deployed historical imagery to attract northern investment. St. Augustine’s Spanish Renaissance Revival resorts muted the town’s Confederate past and linked northern investment in the city to the tradition of imperial expansion. Richmond boasted its colonial and Revolutionary heritage, depicting its industrial development as an outgrowth of national destiny. Atlanta’s use of northern architectural language displaced the southern identity of the city and substituted a narrative of long-standing allegiance to a modern industrial order. With its emphases on alternative southern pasts, architectural design, tourism, and political economy, Designing Dixie significantly revises our understandings of both southern historical memory and post–Civil War sectional reconciliation.

In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history -- the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after -- while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded -- northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the "northern messiahs" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, "race-mixers," and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists. Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement -- and those who struggled for equality -- fought to overcome.