The state of Mississippi, regarded as the most recalcitrant of the southern states in the
civil rights era, might have been expected after the civil rights laws of the 1960s to have
immediately seen the surge of an all-white Republican Party that advocated federal restraint and
cared little for black voters. That may seem true now in the era of Haley Barbour, but this was
not necessarily the predestined path for the Mississippi GOP. While many scholars have
commented on the role that race has played in the shift of southern whites to the GOP, southern
party leaders did not always immediately embrace the creation of all-white parties. In the
Mississippi Republican Party, the party experienced a considerable internal schism over the
viability of the black vote in post-1965 Mississippi. Federal law also complicated the aims of
state GOP conservatives, and GOP presidential administrations pursued a more nuanced path
than simply embracing white segregationists. While Republican presidents favored weakening
or abolishing the Voting Rights Act when it came up for extension, GOP administrations,
especially that of Ronald Reagan, actually expanded the state’s black officeholding through their
enforcement of the Act.
For much of the pre-1965 era, the Republican Party commanded the allegiance of black
Mississippians, but this had changed by the middle of the century. The Mississippi Republican
Party, first under the leadership of the Black and Tans and then under the Lily White delegation
after 1960, did not provide any examples of leadership for civil rights activists during the 1950s.
With the state GOP and Democrats both appealing to white segregationists, black Mississippians
relied on their own political efforts during the 1950s and 1960s, through civil rights
organizations like the NAACP and the MFDP.1
When federal registrars arrived in Mississippi in 1965 to register black voters under the
provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the increase in black voters was not significant enough to
1
have an immediate impact on the state GOP. The party leadership under Wirt Yerger, a
Greenville insurance salesman, firmly opposed civil rights legislation. While the Republicans
did not indulge in the crude racial demagoguery of Democrats like Ross Barnett, they
represented a growing demographic of suburban, white, conservative professionals across the
South who had little interest in soliciting black votes. Like the rest of the emerging Sunbelt,
Mississippi’s suburban areas became the base of Magnolia State Republicanism. Yerger told the
national Republican chairman the oft-repeated statement that he did not favor “writing off
completely any vote [the black vote specifically], but I do think it is best to go hunting where the
ducks are.”2
The “ducks” were the rural whites who made up much of the state Democratic Party.
Prentiss Walker took that approach in 1966 when he challenged Sen. James Eastland’s reelection
bid. A chicken farmer who had won a congressional seat in the 1964 election, Walker joined his
Democratic colleagues in opposing the Voting Rights Act and solely focused on the white vote.
During the Senate campaign, Walker tried to “outsegregate,” in the words of state AFL-CIO
chief Claude Ramsey, Eastland, but most white voters stayed with Eastland.3
The failed GOP candidacies in the 1960s showed the difficulty the white conservatives of
the party had trying to convince white Democrats to leave the party of states’ rights and
segregation. A two-party system threatened to weaken white supremacy by dividing the white
electorate. While white Mississippians voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater in 1964, they did
not reciprocate with state Republicans since their Democratic opponents had even more fervent
commitments to Jim Crow. The “Great White Switch” had occurred, as Earl and Merle Black
labeled the shift of southern white voters to voting Republican in presidential elections, but party
2
identification with the Democrats continued on the state and local level due to the continuing
white dominance of the Mississippi Democratic Party.4
Black voting continued to grow as registration increased in the late 1960s, and the state
GOP could not ignore the numbers (find stats). The enfranchisement of black Mississippians
under the Voting Rights Act created a major ideological cleavage in the Republican Party that
would last for years even as they made another bid for the governor’s office in 1967. Since
1960, conservatives like Wirt Yerger had guided party philosophy. The ultraconservatives, or
conservative ideologues, favored economic philosophies that promoted an unregulated free
market. Many of these conservatives were businessmen who would benefit from such policies.
Much like the neobourbons, the rural conservatives who led resistance to school desegregation of
the 1950s, they regarded programs that helped the poor and African Americans as government
interference. 5 They favored soliciting white voters who had supported George Wallace, but with
coded racial appeals, not economic populism.
With the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, the ideologues found their influence in the
party contested by a progressive wing. The label “progressive” was relative to Mississippi, since
many of the more liberal Mississippi Republicans were still conservative by national standards.
The progressives differed from the ideologues with their significant efforts at black voter
outreach, which reflected a desire to build a biracial party based on economic development and
growth. Although some of their leaders came from the business sector like the conservative
ideologues, the progressives did not see government programs as being incompatible with
economic growth. The progressives generally supported social programs that favored low-
income, predominantly black Mississippians, as well as civil rights legislation.
3
In between these two factions were the less ideologically-committed members of the
party. Like the state GOP overall, they were reliably conservative, but shifted as the situation
demanded. These uncommitted members, or pragmatists, may have had sympathies with one
faction or the other (usually the conservative ideologues) but focused on gaining political power
and maintaining party unity, even if it meant at times compromising ideology. The pragmatists
would eventually become a significant force in the party, holding both party leadership positions
and the small number of elected offices Republicans won in the 1970s.
These divisions and philosophies did not mean that the ideologues were unaffected by or
ignorant of the changes wrought by black enfranchisement. As Joseph Crespino has shown,
conservative Mississippians accepted the reality of black suffrage and made a “subtle and
strategic accommodation” to the reality of federal civil rights enforcement. This accommodation
did not mean the ideologues gave up resistance, but it instead became part of the “conservative
counterrevolution” that enshrined states’ rights and white elite privilege in a nonracial discourse.6
The ideologues gave lip service to black outreach, but held it in far less esteem than their more
moderate Republicans. These developments were replicated in other areas of the South, and
became part of the “silent majority” that developed from the suburban conservatism of the 1960s
and 1970s.7 The counterrevolution was by no means uncontested within the party, however. As
Jason Sokol has demonstrated, the acceptance of the civil rights movement by whites was a
contested process with no single vision.8 In effect, the Voting Rights Act and the
enfranchisement of black Mississippians created in the state GOP the same conservative-
moderate split that divided the national Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s.
Rubel Phillips, who had previously ran as a Republican for governor in 1963, returned in
1967 to challenge John Bell Williams in 1967. Unlike his 1963 campaign, he ran as a
4
progressive and racial moderate, blaming Jim Crow for the state’s economic underdevelopment.
He became the first candidate in modern Mississippi to solicit black leaders through a mailing
campaign. Phillips realized that a simple racist appeal would not win him the election, but his
black outreach still had its limits. When the state MFDP endorsed Phillips as more palatable
than his segregationist opponent, Phillips, conscious of the need for white votes, distanced
himself from the mostly-black organization, but the damage was done. Phillips received less
than thirty percent of the statewide vote, although he did well in some of the black-majority
counties, and won majorities in some black precincts. However, his failure to take even MFDP
strongholds like Holmes County with an anti-segregation position foreshadowed the difficulty
the Republican Party would have wooing black voters with moderate positions.9
Clarke Reed, who became the chair of the state GOP in 1966, personified the pragmatist
wing of the state GOP and its ambivalent balancing act with black voters. The Greenville
businessman clashed with civil rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Charles Evers, but he
lacked a strong conservative identity. In 1968, he helped swing the presidential nomination to
Richard Nixon against the wishes of delegates like Prentiss Walker, who wanted to nominate
California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reed swayed the right wing of the Mississippi GOP by
assuring them that Nixon would move slowly on school desegregation.10
Reed’s position as the chair of the Southern Association of Republican State Chairmen
increased his political influence and thus his pragmatism. He had a warm relationship with
Harry Dent, President Nixon’s southern political strategist, and advised him on ways to increase
GOP gains in the South. Reed had to deal with conservatives angry over school desegregation as
well as attract black voters to craft a conservative, but not racist image of the party. He told
Reed to make sure that HEW’s civil rights division did not answer any queries from white
5
Mississippians “bitching” about school desegregation. “The letterhead alone makes the
recipients see red and starts them screaming,” he warned. Dent in turn advised Reed on black
outreach and set up meetings with Reed and black Republicans. Pragmatists like Reed and the
progressives hoped to benefit from a schism in the Democratic Party, where white state
Democrats held all the important political offices but were not recognized by the national
Democrats (the so-called Regulars) and the mostly-black Loyalist Democrats enjoyed national
recognition but held few political offices.11
If the pragmatic Reed valued victory over ideological purity, that sentiment was not
shared by William Mounger of Jackson, the party’s finance chairman. Mounger had amassed a
fortune as an oil and gas developer and represented the pro-business and antiregulatory outlook
of the conservative ideologues. An avid admirer of Barry Goldwater, Mounger opposed “New
Deal giveaways” and business regulation. He called himself a “small-government Republican,”
and had begun raising money for the state party in the early 1960s.12
On racial matters, Mounger cloaked his statements in the ostensibly nonracial rhetoric of
states’ rights. He was not a Ross Barnett demagogue or even a Wirt Yerger when it came to
statements on race, and accepted the need for some integration when he named three black
members to the Hinds County Republican Party Executive Committee. However, he defended
states’ rights despite the negative associations the phrase conjured, even to the point of insisting
that the word “sovereign” be kept in the 1968 state party platform. He declared that northern
pro-civil rights Democrats “lacked any real understanding of the social pressures weighing down
the southern states.” He opposed civil rights enforcement, especially what he called the
“Gestapo-like” ruling by the IRS denying tax-exempt status to racially exclusive private
schools.13
6
GOP leaders showed their skittishness about interracialism by refusing to participate in
the major state races in 1971. When Meridian businessman Gil Carmichael told GOP officials
that he planned to run for lieutenant governor, they talked him out of the race for fear that white
Mississippians would associate his candidacy and the Republican Party with Charles Evers’s
independent gubernatorial campaign. No GOP candidate for governor ran either, preventing a
split in the white vote that might have elected Evers.14
Gil Carmichael emerged as the Republican standard-bearer of the 1970s, and a leader of
the progressive wing of the party. A Volkswagen dealer from Meridian, he described himself as
a “progressive conservative” who championed economic development. In 1972, he challenged
Senator Jim Eastland, and like Rubel Phillips he blamed the state Democrats for the state’s
poverty. Carmichael, who also served on the advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights, worked to reach two very different groups of voters. His campaign staffers
contacted prominent black leaders and businessmen to try to garner black voters, while also
soliciting the aid of white supporters of segregationist politicians like George Wallace.
Carmichael had little help from the GOP organization, demonstrated vividly when the Nixon
White House, publicly snubbed him by excluding him from a Jackson rally headlined by Vice
President Spiro Agnew.15
One of the chief Republican backers of the progressive Carmichael was, ironically, Billy
Mounger. The party finance chairman did not like Carmichael, and complained about his desire
for publicity and “ingratitude.” Unlike Wirt Yerger, who was suspicious of Carmichael’s
moderation, Mounger put more faith at this time in the Republican candidate and raised funds for
him. Mounger believed that Nixon had treated Carmichael poorly at the Agnew rally, and felt
bound by party loyalty to his fellow Mississippian.16
7
Carmichael’s campaign worried Eastland enough to force the aging Sunflower County
planter to actively campaign, even to the point of dispatching a representative to black college
campuses running ads in the state’s black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate. Eastland later
complained that “that son of a bitch cost my friends a half million dollars” in the last month of
the election, but Eastland won with a majority of 58.1 percent. Carmichael won eleven counties,
but only two were black-majority. Despite increased black voter registration since the 1960s and
the white supremacist history of James Eastland, Carmichael could not siphon significant
numbers of black Loyalist Democrats into the Republican camp.17
Other Republicans did have some success in winning black votes. Two Republicans,
Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, ran for congressional seats in 1972. Lott, a Pascagoula lawyer
who ran in the fifth district, did not make any significant bid for black votes since his district did
not have a single county with a black majority. Cochran, a Jackson attorney who ran in the
fourth district in southwestern Mississippi, actively campaigned for black votes, a strategy no
doubt influenced by the forty-three percent black population of the district. Mounger had no
quarrel with this strategy and raised the majority of Cochran’s campaign funds.18
Cochran’s strategy included hiring a black aide, but the independent candidacy of Eddie
L. McBride, a black minister, aided the Republican lawyer far more. McBride did not win a
single county but received over 11,000 votes, while Cochran defeated white Democrat Ellis
Bodron by a fewer-than 6,000 vote plurality. A black spoiler clearly had more of an effect on the
Republican victory than efforts to attract blacks to the GOP. Upper- and middle-class white
suburbanites in Jackson, not African Americans, formed the base of Cochran’s support in 1972
and in future elections. The “upwardly mobile new reactionaries,” as some observers called
them, gave Cochran Hinds County by a fifty-seven percent majority. Bodron was no moderate
8
and a product of the segregationist state Democrats, so Cochran did have some pull with a
minority of black voters, and in his successful 1974 reelection, he polled a near-majority in
Wilkinson County and forty-two percent of the vote in Claiborne and Jefferson counties, all
majority-black counties. Cochran’s willingness to speak before black audiences and his lack of a
segregationist past, since he was a political neophyte and tabula rasa, also aided him in a state
where Democrats had openly championed segregation in the recent past and voter discrimination
still plagued African Americans at the polls.19
The 1975 governor’s election led to the healing of the divided Democratic Party before
the GOP made significant gains in Mississippi, an action that would weaken the efforts of the
GOP progressives. Cliff Finch, a Batesville trial lawyer and former Ross Barnett supporter,
embraced a populist-style campaign for governor after winning the Democratic primary.
Observers commented that the campaigning of Finch resembled that of Alabama Governor
George Wallace, but unlike Wallace, Finch openly sought black votes. Finch hired black staffers
and won the endorsement of prominent black Democrats, but at the same time received behind-
the-scenes support from Klansmen and other segregationists.20
Finch likely campaigned for black support because his opponents did the same. Although
Henry Jay Kirksey, a sixty-year old black cartographer and former MFDP member, opposed
Finch with an independent campaign, his efforts drew little support. Finch’s more serious threat
in the campaign for black votes came from his Republican opponent, Gil Carmichael.
Carmichael, like he did against Eastland in 1972, ran as a progressive who championed
economic development and an end to the cheap export of the state’s natural resources. Harry
Dent, as part of his strategy for building a viable southern GOP, encouraged Carmichael to run
for governor. Carmichael also backed a number of progressive issues, including a new
9
constitution, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), compulsory school attendance,
reduced punishment for marijuana possession, and handgun licensing. The last issue, which he
proposed in the wake of the two attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford, cost him some
support with white voters and alienated more conservative Republicans like Clarke Reed. His
issues-oriented campaign, which he put forth in both personal campaigning and television ads
produced by campaign strategist Walter De Vries, contrasted with the vague economic proposals
and rhetoric of Finch.21
Race remained a significant issue in the election, but not in the same manner as past
gubernatorial races. With the absence of race-baiting or a major black gubernatorial candidate,
both men freely campaigned for the black vote and sought to create black-white coalitions to
help them into office. Carmichael countered Finch’s black endorsements by employing state
representative Robert Clark, the first black representative elected under the Voting Rights Act,
on his strategy committee. Carmichael had also cultivated goodwill with black residents in
Meridian when he hired black salesmen at his car dealership in 1968. He also became the first
gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi history to visit the all-black town of Mound Bayou.22
State Rep. Robert Clark became one of Carmichael’s most prominent supporters and the
front man for his outreach to black Mississippians. Clark saw himself not as joining the GOP,
but as trying to broaden political and economic opportunities for black people. He said that
Carmichael’s election would “force the [Democratic] party to . . . include all the people.” He
cited Carmichael’s record in Meridian and his pledge to hire blacks and the poor in state
agencies. Clark used strong racial imagery, telling black voters that they “can’t afford to be a
slave to a party.”23
10
Carmichael’s campaign, which marked the peak of the GOP progressives, exacerbated
the Republican intraparty schisms and eventually carried over into the national convention the
following year. The pragmatists reluctantly supported Carmichael or at least did not oppose him.
Thad Cochran stayed neutral, while Clarke Reed swallowed his disdain for Carmichael’s
positions and said that “for some reason I don’t understand, it [the campaign] seems to be
working.” Some conservative ideologues finally began to break with Carmichael, either publicly
or privately. Billy Mounger opposed the proposal for a new state constitution and pressed
Carmichael to hire Reagan associate Lyn Nofziger to run his campaign, but he resisted both
efforts. Although he raised money for the campaign, Mounger later recalled that he became
“progressively disillusioned” with Carmichael’s liberal platform, but he did not publicly voice
his concerns. When Carmichael, at DeVries’s urging, endorsed handgun registration, Mounger
quit the campaign. Still convinced that Carmichael was going to win, Mounger wrote a letter on
election night renouncing any links to the candidate. Specifically, he cited Carmichael’s support
of the ERA, handgun registration, and a new constitution as evidence of his “ineptitude” and
“Teddy Kennedy appeal to liberals.”24
Mounger did not voice an opinion on Carmichael’s black outreach, instead opting to
frame his critiques in ideological terms. Support of the old Constitution of 1890, which had been
created specifically to disfranchise black voters, had racial undertones, however. Voting
irregularities and intimidation continued to hamstring black voters in 1975, and the Justice
Department continued to deploy examiners to investigate reports of harassment and other
irregularities. For the November 1975 election, nineteen counties in the state received federal
observers.25
11
With the exception of Clark, Carmichael’s efforts did not sway most prominent black
political and civil rights figures in Mississippi. NAACP President Aaron Henry publicly
endorsed Finch in an open letter to the press but did not even mention Carmichael by name.
Henry criticized the GOP as an institution that “has fostered programs that now has all America
teetering on the brink of economic, social, and moral decline.” He flatly stated that Finch was
not his first choice for governor, but that he needed black help “to withstand the forces that still
exist . . . that would advise him to return to a policy of racism.”26
GOP conservatives like Mounger avoided racial issues, and Clarke Reed said that race
was “not even a Mickey Mouse issue anymore” in Mississippi, but some ideological
conservatives linked their critiques of Carmichael’s liberalism to race. Prentiss Walker, the
former congressman, ran a column in the Clarion-Ledger blasting Carmichael as “a real discredit
to all the true Republican principles.” Walker referred to Carmichael’s call for handgun
registration, but he also attacked the Meridian businessman’s proposal for a new state
constitution. Walker said that Carmichael would rewrite the constitution “under the direction of
Senators [Edward] Brooke and [Jacob] Javits,” two liberal northern Republicans (Brooke was the
only black U.S. Senator).27
Walker made the racial nature of his attack more explicit when he invoked memories of
the Lost Cause, charging that Carmichael and his associates, Walker charged, have
“reestablished the old school of Radical Republicanism” in Mississippi. Mississippi Republicans
had routinely launched attacks on their liberal northern counterparts, such as when Clarke Reed
criticized Javits’s poverty tour in the Mississippi Delta with Robert Kennedy in 1967. Nor was
the bugbear of their Radical Reconstruction ancestors off-limits to Mississippi Republicans.
Rubel Phillips expropriated the rhetoric of Ross Barnett in 1963 when he accused the Democratic
12
Party of mimicking the Radical program of the 1870s.28 Yet the vitriol of Walker’s attack
harkened back to 1960s Mississippi political discourse, and was also unique in that it was a
public attack by one Mississippi Republican on another. Walker’s conjuring the ghost of Radical
Republicanism against a colleague openly appealing to black voters indicated that some of the
ideological conservatives did not want even the appearance of integration in 1975.
A few days after Walker’s advertisement, the Clarion-Ledger ran another anti-
Carmichael ad, this one paid for by a Finch supporter. The ad made no specific reference to
race, but had a very clear pro-segregationist slant in its attack on “Carmichael the cunning.” It
blasted the national Republican Party and said that Mississippi Democrats “have, since 1948,
been in the leadership of all the states in voting independently and for their own rights . . . we
voted Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright, for Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Nixon. We voted
unpledged and for George Wallace.” The ad painted Carmichael as the thrall of liberal New
York Republicans and said that “Republicanism, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, comes
to us in these latter days full of oily words and soothing assurances” and called on voters to
“crush the serpent!” Democrats as well as Republicans could invoke Republican racial
moderation in an effort to win segregationist votes.29
Carmichael ran a strong race, but Finch won 52.2 percent to Carmichael’s 45.1 percent.
Finch’s populist appeal, along with the traditional identification of black voters to the
Democratic Party, gave him eighty percent of the black vote. Finch won sixty-six of eighty-two
counties, including most of the predominately black counties, while Carmichael only won two
black-majority counties. Black voters were too firmly entrenched in the state Democratic Party
to go to the GOP in 1975. Carmichael made sincere appeals for the black vote, but since the
state Republicans had done little substantive groundwork before Carmichael, they could not
13
make many inroads. Leslie Burl McLemore, a former MFDP member and black political science
professor who supported Carmichael, said that the Republicans had needed to “work on people
over time” if they wanted a victory in 1975.30
Despite the disappointing showing that Carmichael had among black voters, the GOP still
made serious attempts to woo them after 1975. In 1977, with James Eastland’s Senate seat up
for election next year, Carmichael and state Republican chairman Charles Pickering both
entertained a run. Pickering, a rising star in the party, had first won election in 1971 as the first
Republican state senator from Jones County since the nineteenth century. Although more
conservative than Carmichael, Pickering showed his pragmatism when he solicited black leaders
and their votes, a tactic he would try in later elections. Both men courted black state leaders at
the NAACP’s annual state conference in 1977. The meeting occurred as black leaders in the
state began to publicly express their dissatisfaction with the Finch administration over poor
minority representation in state offices.31
Yet the Republicans, much like Finch in 1975, played both sides of the racial divide in
Mississippi. Sen. James Eastland’s Senate seat became an open race when the elderly planter
announced his retirement from politics. Thad Cochran and Pickering both announced their
candidacy for the GOP nomination. Charles Evers, the black mayor of Fayette, broke with the
state Democrats and ran as an independent for the open Senate seat. An Evers victory seemed
possible with a black plurality and a divided white electorate. With that in mind, Frank
Montague, a Hattiesburg attorney, urged Pickering and Cochran to campaign for black votes to
deny Evers a unified black vote. At the same time, he suggested they play to racial fears by
reminding white voters that their low turnout could mean a black senator.32
14
Cochran easily defeated Pickering in the Republican primary and moved to attract black
voters in the general election. Cochran’s conservative record in the House was not very different
from his fellow Republican Trent Lott, or his three Democratic colleagues. All five
representatives voted against busing, voted to restrict civil rights lawsuits filed by lawyers for the
Legal Services Corporation, and voted to import chrome from Ian Smith’s white-minority
government in Rhodesia, even though the country was under international sanctions. Yet
perhaps the most telling votes concerned suffrage. Despite the increase in black voter
registration since 1965, all five representatives opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in
1975. They also voted against the establishment of a nationwide voter registration system to
increase voter registration. Outreach to black voters, regardless of the party, had its limits.33
Cochran’s limited black support and outreach, built during his House campaigns, gave
him a veneer of moderation and pragmatism by 1978 that Lott, Mounger and other conservatives
did not possess. Cochran could also look to the recent GOP candidacy of Doug Shanks, who
won forty-six percent of black voters in Jackson during his failed bid to become mayor of the
city. The “Cochran Black Operation,” as the congressman’s campaign dubbed its outreach, was
a similarly structured campaign to get the black vote, funding advertising and fielding a network
of black county coordinators, canvassers, and speakers. The Cochran campaign believed that
well-educated blacks would be more likely to vote Republican, so it aimed in particular at blacks
with high school diplomas and college educations.34
Charles Evers’s campaign lagged in fundraising, trailing both Cochran and Maurice
Dantin, the Democratic nominee. But Evers helped by siphoning off critical black votes from
Dantin. Cochran himself acknowledged the help Evers was giving him by splitting the
Democratic vote and said that “if I had to write a script, I couldn’t have done a better job.”35 On
15
Election Day, Dantin received 31.8 percent of the vote while Evers took 22.9 percent, but
Cochran won with a forty-five percent plurality. The Fayette mayor drew over 133,000 votes,
more than enough to cost Dantin the election. Dantin clearly had a significant number of black
votes, since he ran competitively or led in the majority-black Delta counties, but the pull Evers
had with black voters proved too much for the Columbia attorney.36
With a Republican senator now representing Mississippi in Washington, the question that
loomed for the 1979 elections was whether the GOP would take the governor’s mansion as well.
Gil Carmichael prepared another run for the governor’s office, but he now faced opposition from
the ideological wing of his party over his moderate views. Conservatives in the Mississippi GOP
had opposed Carmichael in 1975, but kept quiet for the sake of party unity. After Carmichael’s
loss to Cliff Finch, all of that changed.37
The conservative and moderate factions in the state party erupted into a nasty public
squabble at the Republican national convention in Kansas City in 1976. Carmichael backed the
nomination of Gerald Ford while Billy Mounger became the state chairman for Ronald Reagan,
who challenged the incumbent president. Within the Mississippi GOP, the moderates backed
Ford while the conservative ideologues supported Reagan. The state delegation was officially
uncommitted, but the Ford campaign diverted its resources elsewhere after Reagan’s string of
victories in the southern primaries. Yet Harry Dent, the architect of Nixon’s Southern Strategy
and now a Ford advisor, saw a chance for Ford to win the state’s winner-take-all primary by
reaching out o the pragmatists, especially Clarke Reed.38
Reed had reason to be dissatisfied with Gerald Ford, in particular over civil rights issues.
As chairman of the Southern Association of Republican State Chairmen, Reed continued to try to
exert influence on Ford, just as he had done with Nixon on school desegregation. However, Ford
16
waffled over extending the Voting Rights Act extension in 1975 to all fifty states, a position
Reed supported and also sponsored by Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss). Ford’s clumsy endorsement
of Reed’s position and his subsequent retraction in the wake of liberal Republican concerns
angered Reed and led some observers to brand Ford incompetent.39
Ford backer Gil Carmichael was a state delegate at the convention, and provided
intelligence to Dent, giving him information on the delegates so that he could contact and
pressure them. Dent said that Reed, despite his conservatism, understood the importance of
winning, while one conservative less kindly described Reed as weak “because he wanted to
please everybody.”40
The Dent strategy of working on the pragmatists showed how fluid and circumstantial
some of these ideological categories were in the Mississippi Republican Party. Reed wanted to
maintain influence by supporting the winner, even if it meant a less conservative nominee, and
Dent played to Reed’s ambition. Yet Dent also worked on state senator and party chairman
Charles Pickering, even arranging a personal audience with Ford. Pickering, a conservative
whom Mounger liked and supported, eventually backed Reagan even though he did consider
switching his support to Ford.41
Billy Mounger used his clout as the party’s chief fundraiser to keep the delegates aligned
with Reagan. Mounger had already broken privately with Carmichael, but Reed’s vacillation
particularly infuriated Mounger, who put a high value on loyalty. In 1975, Reed had encouraged
Reagan to run for president, so Mounger interpreted Reed’s wavering as a personal betrayal of
both Reagan and conservative principles. Reed finally abandoned Reagan when he picked
liberal Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.) to be his running mate, declaring Schweiker
unpalatable, but in reality Reed was looking for an excuse to back Ford. Yet Mounger, despite
17
his distaste for Schweiker, stayed loyal to Reagan, reasoning that a liberal vice-president was
tolerable as long as the conservative Reagan headed the ticket. The ideological splits carried
over to other prominent state GOP figures as well. Ideologues like Wirt Yerger and Trent Lott
backed Reagan, while the pragmatist Cochran favored Ford. While Pickering worked to keep
the peace at the convention, fallout from the Ford-Reagan feud would also have implications for
the state GOP and the direction it would take with black voters.42
With the party divisions now publicly laid open after Kansas City, the GOP struggle over
black voters became more visible as a key component of the ideological clashes. Carmichael
said that his goal was to make sure the Republican Party did not become “lily white and hard
right.” The conservative faction in the party, by implication, wanted to do the opposite of
Carmichael. The Mounger faction of conservative ideologues did not make open appeals to
segregationists or use other forms of overt race-baiting like Prentiss Walker and Rubel Phillips
did in the first half of the 1960s. Sensitive to charges of racism, they had adopted the nonracist
discourse of the New Right discussed by scholars like Joseph Crespino, Matthew Lassiter, and
Kevin Kruse. While more astute than Walker had been in his 1975 attack on Carmichael, the
ideologues’ actions betrayed little interest in party integration. Mounger generally did not
support other Republicans who made interracial appeals, and in some cases actively opposed
them, as in the case of Doug Shanks’s 1977 bid for mayor of Jackson.43
Mounger defended conservative doctrine against another campaign by Gil Carmichael.
Carmichael prepared another run for the governor’s office in 1979, but Mounger and Wirt
Yerger rallied Leon Bramlett, a wealthy Clarksdale cotton planter, to oppose him. Bramlett, a
former chairman of the Regular Democrats, had opposed fusion with the mostly-black Loyalists
18
and switched to the GOP shortly after Cliff Finch’s election in 1975, citing “quotas and
preferential treatment” as a source of his discontent.44
Carmichael won in a close primary victory, and faced Lieutenant Governor William
Winter, who won the Democratic nomination. Carmichael repeated his earlier theme of
economic development, declaring that he would attract high-paying industrial jobs to the state.
In speeches before black audiences, he echoed Evers’s theme of replacing social programs with
jobs. He played to anti-welfare sentiment, but at the same time, declared that he would not cut
spending and took pains to deflect the charge that he was an enemy of entitlement programs.45
Although the campaign pitted two racial moderates against each other, some lingering
racial issues created tensions. Carmichael irritated some black voters by waffling over the issue
of busing, and avoided a firm stand when he predicted that the energy crisis would curtail it. He
continued to emphasize his own record on economic issues, namely his employment of African
Americans at his Volkswagen dealership, and the called attention to the lack of black employees
at Winter’s law firm. Yet Carmichael admitted his own shortcomings when he apologized
before an NAACP meeting for his membership in an all-white country club. Carmichael
continued his black outreach, especially to ministers, businessmen, and black elected officials to
run operations in black precincts. Winter in turn reminded black voters that his moderation
likely cost him the governor’s race in 1967, when he lost to John Bell Williams.46
Carmichael’s biggest handicap, like in 1975, remained his Republican Party label. As
one black voter put it, the Republicans “don’t really want blacks and poor people to join their
club, just vote for them.” Carmichael solicited help from national conservatives like Ronald
Reagan, who did not enjoy wide popularity among black people. Mississippi Republican Jon
19
Hinson, who had won election to Cochran’s House seat in 1978, also stirred anger from black
voters when he opposed a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.47
Racial matters also surfaced late in the campaign in another statewide race. In the
attorney general’s race, political observers favored Republican nominee Charles Pickering over
assistant attorney general and Democratic nominee Bill Allain. Pickering ran commercials on
several black radio stations the weekend before Election Day that accused Allain of previous
membership in the White Citizens’ Councils. The ads made a direct reference to Allain’s tenure
as assistant attorney general from 1962 to 1975, when he represented the state in the Conner
cases. One of the radio spots said that “in the reapportionment cases, Bill Allain fought equal
representation for blacks.” The ads misfired, especially when the Citizens’ Council allegation
proved to be untrue. Pickering backed off from the ads, but the fallout over them created a last-
minute backlash giving Allain a narrow victory.48
Billy Mounger, who was unaware of the development of the ad campaign, called it
“disastrous” and said he would have opposed it. To Mounger, ever-attuned to the racial feelings
of conservative whites, the ads had the opposite effect and made Allain more palatable to them
by linking him to the Councils. He made clear the importance of white racial conservatism to the
expanding state GOP when he said after the election that “the greatest errors Mississippi
Republican candidates commit are those concerning appeals for liberal or black votes.”
Mounger recognized, as Dan Carter has pointed out about the GOP generally, that the George
Wallace Democrats were the GOP’s “natural constituency” and in order to win, “never alienate
these groups.”49
Although avoiding racist commentary, Mounger laid out his party’s direction regarding
which voters to pursue in clear racial terms. Black voters were welcome, but only if they shared
20
the totality of Mounger’s conservatism. Compromise, so abhorrent to him, would not be
tolerated for the sake of party biracialism. Regarding the memory of the civil rights movement,
Mounger saw even a rhetorical condemnation of the state’s past as undesirable. The wooing of
Wallace voters rested squarely on race, as Mounger and other ideologues were opposed to the
populist economic agenda of Wallace and instead backed the pro-corporate orientation of the
national New Right.
Mounger no doubt felt his views vindicated when Carmichael lost again, with dire
consequences for the GOP moderates. On Election Day, William Winter easily won with
413,000 votes to Carmichael’s 263,000. Carmichael failed to carry a single majority-black
county, and did not even get the support of some Bramlett Republicans, who voted for Winter or
not at all out of their dislike for the Republican nominee.50 The defeat of Carmichael marked the
permanent decline of the moderate wing of the state Republican Party. With the exception of
Cochran, GOP pragmatists largely drifted away from interracial outreach.51
The Democrats’ own problems with race still encouraged some Republicans to make
overtures to black voters. In 1980, Gov. Winter created a major rift in the state party when he
sought to end the biracial chairmanship of the party and appoint a white party head, ostensibly to
stymie the movement of white voters to the Republicans. Black Republicans used the
Democrats’ woes to successfully push for the election of three black alternate delegates to the
Republican national convention by warning of a similar schism erupting in their own party.
Mike Retzer, the GOP party chairman and a pragmatist, tried to reap political gain from the
Democratic problems by calling for black Mississippians to join the party, but Clarion-Ledger
reporter Jo Ann Klein dubbed this the GOP’s “annual request for blacks.” The state GOP sent an
all-white delegation to the national convention in 1980, and only three of the twenty-two
21
alternates were black, while the Democratic delegation that year was thirty-four percent black.
Although Retzer accused the Democrats of taking black voters for granted, he refused to endorse
a biracial chairmanship for his party, which had no black members on its executive committee.52
Party ideologues would likely interpret such an approach as racial quotas, which had prompted
whites like Leon Bramlett to leave the Democratic Party.
The nomination of Ronald Reagan for president in 1980 satisfied Republican
conservatives in Mississippi, who knew the former California governor could attract white
southern support. Although black voters were not completely written off in heavily-black
districts, the Mississippi GOP’s limitations on race did not make the party attractive enough for
black voters to bolt the Democratic Party, and most stayed with Jimmy Carter. Reagan did not
help his standing with black Mississippians when in August 1980 he campaigned at the Neshoba
County Fair in Philadelphia, site of the Freedom Summer murders in 1964. Reagan had come at
the urging of Rep. Trent Lott and other Republicans, who felt an appearance could carry the state
for Reagan. Carter lost the state by a narrow margin that fall, and lost the election nationally.53
A few black Mississippians did make a home in the Republican Party by 1980. The
state’s Black Republican Council had twelve county chapters by 1980 but only a few hundred
members. Like some of the black candidates in the 1960s and 1970s, its members saw
themselves less as ideological party loyalists than as activists for their race who believed that an
overwhelming black vote for the Democratic Party would lead white politicians to take them for
granted. Wilbur Colom, a Columbus attorney and spokesman for the Council, criticized “blind
loyalty” to the Democratic Party but refrained from attacking black Democrats and called for
“structured participation by blacks in both parties.” While Colom embraced the economic
conservatism of the Republicans, he saw a viable effort by the GOP to win black votes as a way
22
to create meaningful competition for the black vote and thus improve the political status of the
African-American community. He and other black Republicans reasoned that an independent
black vote would only benefit the black community and increase its political influence.54
Later attempts at party integration still met the fierce resistance of Mounger. He opposed
the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, telling Reagan it was an “inequitable, invidious,
and iniquitous” law. He again dismissed black votes for Republicans, insisting that “they are
only for sale through government handouts.” In another sign of the rift between him and Thad
Cochran over ideology and black outreach, Mounger blasted a proposal from Cochran to add five
black Republican delegates to the state party’s Executive Committee, calling it “incestuous
proliferation” and “worse than any quota.” He admitted the party needed to attract black voters,
but he felt the integration of the Executive Committee violated conservative principles.
Mounger’s rhetoric, while ostensibly nonracist, was laden with the racial anxieties of white
segregationists and certainly not a colorblind discourse or ideology. The overt hostility of
conservatives like Mounger to the institutionalization of racial progress cannot be deemed
nonracial in tone or rhetoric, despite what some scholars have argued.55
The failure of the moderates in 1979 and the victory of Reagan in 1980 was the death
knell of major black outreach by the Mississippi GOP. Although individual candidates
continued the efforts, the party preferred the ever-increasing numbers of defecting white
Democrats. The second “Great White Switch” of white southern Democrats by the 1980s to a
partisan identification with the Republican Party, combined with a comparable black
identification with the Democratic Party, ended the efforts of the moderates.56
Although the Mississippi GOP had decisively moved towards appealing to the old
Wallace Democrats by the 1980s, the federal government under Ronald Reagan did not always
23
take the same path, to the annoyance of the state party’s conservative ideologues. In
reapportionment cases during the 1970s and 1980s, civil rights lawyers and black plaintiffs
fought against discriminatory gerrymandering, but they experienced limited success until the
passage of the strengthened Voting Rights Act in 1982 changed. Mississippi’s black voters then
found an unlikely ally in the Reagan administration. The federal government’s intervention in
1983 greatly increased black representation on the county boards of supervisors and removed yet
another mechanism of vote dilution in Mississippi.
The 410 elected county supervisors were among the most powerful local offices in the
state’s eighty-two counties, controlling road and bridge construction and other public works, but
severe malapportionment from demographic changes affected many supervisors’ districts. After
the Supreme Court ruled in 1969 in Allen v. State Board of Elections, that the Voting Rights Act
covered not just obstacles to voting but also schemes like at-large elections, many Mississippi
counties shifted to gerrymandering their single-member districts to prevent or limit the election
of black supervisors. Boards of supervisors devised plans that “cracked” black voting strength
among several districts to prevent a black majority, or “stacked” white population areas onto
black-majority districts to dilute black votes.57
Black county residents, with the aid of civil rights attorneys, challenged the new
gerrymandering in the courts. Although they filed a series of lawsuits, most notably in Hinds
County, they had mixed success since they often could not prove discriminatory intent in the
crafting of the gerrymandering plans. They received a major boost in 1982 when Congress
debated strengthened vote dilution standards in the extension of the Voting Rights Act. A
bipartisan group of voting supporters introduced an amendment to section two of the act to
prohibit any practice “which results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote. The change,
24
known as the results test, meant that future suits would be able to focus less on proving racist
intent in local governments and election systems and more on effect, regardless of the original
circumstances of the examined law or system. Although the proposed change clearly rejected
proportional representation, it did utilize the “totality of circumstances” that the courts had
established in voting bias cases instead of focusing on narrow remedies.58
Prominent conservatives opposed the strengthened section two. William Bradford
Reynolds, the head of Reagan’s Civil Rights Division, called the revised section “a proportional
representations scheme . . . inconsistent with the democratic traditions of our pluralist society.”
The results test stayed intact, however, and on June 29, 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed
the renewal into law, extending the Voting Rights Act by twenty-five years and with provisions
even stronger than the original 1965 act.59
In the spring of 1983, black residents in Bolivar County lobbied the Justice Department
to reject the county’s redistricting plan, charging that it fragmented black voting power. Local
activists received a boost when the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in the Mississippi Delta in early
June 1983 as part of a voter registration campaign targeting seven southern states. Jackson
coordinated the campaign as a precursor to his formal announcement of candidacy for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. He criticized lingering barriers in Mississippi such
as dual registration, where a voter had to register separately for municipal and county elections.
This system, he charged, handicapped poor, black and rural voters by requiring them to travel to
separate locations to register.60
When Jackson returned to Mississippi in mid-June, he had a powerful and unlikely
companion. William Bradford Reynolds, whom President Ronald Reagan had appointed to head
the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, seemed to be the last person that would appear
25
publicly with the liberal black preacher. Reynolds, dubbed by one critic “the iceman,” was a
former corporate lawyer who had alienated the nation’s civil rights lobby through his
enforcement of Reagan’s conservative civil rights policies. Probably his most controversial
stance was his fervent opposition to affirmative action programs, which he said “bestowed
benefits on people who are not victims of discrimination at the expense of those who have done
no wrong at all.” He also lacked strong voting rights credentials. In 1982, he urged the Reagan
administration to side with an all-white county government in Georgia in a voting discrimination
suit. Many Carter-era Justice Department attorneys, including many of the black lawyers in civil
rights enforcement, left the administration rather than continue working under Reynolds.61
Reynolds’s visit may have been motivated by political factors. While he came at the
invitation of Jackson, Reynolds also came the week before a scheduled visit by President
Reagan. The timing of the visit drew criticism from state Democratic Party chairman Danny
Cupit, who called the trip an attempt to interfere in the August Democratic primary. Jackson
accompanied Reynolds on a two-day trip across the Delta. At each stop, Reynolds heard local
African Americans give testimony of the problems they encountered trying to register and vote,
including stories of economic intimidation of black workers by plantation owners and factory
managers. White employers used methods such as required overtime and no lunch breaks on
Election Day to prevent voting, and one woman reported an eviction of a black family from a
plantation for voting.62
Throughout the two days Reynolds remained noncommittal on what course he would
take. Still, Reynolds commented that “the ability to register is not as open and accessible as it
might be.” He recalled numerous and blatant voting irregularities in the Delta, and said that
some of the “subtle gerrymandering [was] not so subtle.” After his return to Washington,
26
Reynolds ordered federal voting registrars into five majority-black counties. He also declared
that the Voting Rights Act “is the most precious civil rights legislation ever passed,” a marked
change from his criticism of portions of the Act during the previous year.63
Reynolds’s actions drew quick condemnation from Rep. Webb Franklin of the second
congressional district, which encompassed the majority-black Delta. Franklin, a white
Republican who had won his seat in a racially charged election against black state representative
Robert Clark the previous year, had little sympathy for any effort to increase black voter
registration in his majority-black district.64 Reynolds took criticism from the national civil rights
establishment as well. Lani Guinier, a former Justice Department lawyer now with the NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that the trip was not “an indication that [Reynolds]
has seen the light.” With the exception of a brief story in Newsweek and some coverage in major
newspapers like the Washington Post, the trip garnered relatively little national attention. When
President Reagan came to Jackson the Monday following Reynolds’s trip, he made no public
mention of the Reynolds’s visit.65
Reynolds objected to thirty-six Mississippi redistricting plans in all, most of them after
his June trip. Much of the push for Reynolds to act came from the twenty-eight county
redistricting lawsuits that black voters and civil rights lawyers filed. Lawsuits delayed many of
the elections and led to federal court orders that halted the August supervisors’ elections in
fourteen counties on the grounds of unconstitutional district lines, an action that Webb Franklin
sharply criticized. After the counties held the delayed elections in 1984, the number of black
supervisors in the state almost doubled from twenty-seven to forty-seven. Most of the growth
came in counties without black majorities, which marked the first black representation that many
African Americans enjoyed in their home counties. Black-majority Madison County and white-
27
majority Pike County made the most dramatic gains, going from zero black supervisors to two
apiece. Humphreys County also increased its black supervisors from one to three to give them
control of the board, and Holmes County added a black supervisor to gain a majority.66
Despite the obvious and tangible gains in black representation from Justice Department
and court intervention, a survey of all eighty-two counties showed the limits of legal reform in
advancing black electoral power. Many counties that gained black supervisors still had low
levels of black representation, and many of the Delta counties with black majorities did not
increase their black supervisors over their numbers before the lawsuits. Even though twenty
years had passed since the Voting Rights Act became law, seven counties with black populations
of forty-five percent or higher still had no black representation at all on their boards of
supervisors. Not surprisingly, the most heavily black-counties usually had the highest numbers
of black supervisors, with Holmes, Humphreys, Claiborne, and Jefferson having the heaviest
black representation, much of this resulting from earlier civil rights organizing and not the
actions of Reynolds. Poverty, much like it had in the 1960s, also contributed to the lagging black
representation and limited electoral and legal reform in the era of civil rights enforcement, seen
vividly in the defeat of black candidates in Quitman County in 1983.67
Despite the limited outcomes, the redrawing of the county supervisors’ districts in the
early 1980s and William Bradford Reynolds’s 1983 trip raise some curious if unanswered
questions. Reynolds’s actual motives for the trip and his swift action to redistrict the counties
remain unclear. One theory is that he wanted to exacerbate the racial split in the fragile biracial
state Democratic Party. The redistricting affected a statewide Democratic primary and pitted
white incumbent Democrats against black Democrats, so any fissure could only help the
Republicans who would profit from further white defections from the Democratic Party, a charge
28
made by political scientist Abigail Thernstrom. She charged that Republicans favored
redistricting that drew up majority-black districts since such plans also created heavily-white
districts that favored white conservative candidates.68
Reynolds could also have been trying to boost Jesse Jackson’s candidacy by building a
stronger black base and viable candidacy for him so that the national Democratic Party would
face a racially divisive presidential nomination process in 1984 and help President Reagan’s
reelection. That is exactly what Jackson’s candidacy did to former Vice President Walter
Mondale in 1984. Many southern whites, inflamed or frightened by Jackson’s campaign and his
eventual support for Mondale, turned out in large numbers to defeat the Democratic ticket. The
three million new southern white voters that voted in 1984 overwhelmed the 1.3 million new
southern black voters that Jackson’s campaign had helped to register.69
Reynolds’s actions may also have been what Frank Parker called “the national consensus
on voting rights.” Parker argued that in the years after the enactment of Voting Rights Act, a
broad-based consensus that crossed partisan lines developed to protect minority voting rights.
The act won extensions from bipartisan coalitions in Congress despite the attempts of
Republican presidents to weaken it. In the case of all four extensions, a Republican president
signed them into law, and their Justice Departments enforced the Act. The Supreme Court
contributed to the consensus by expanding interpretations of what constituted vote dilution and
discrimination. Voting rights protections, Parker argued, do not raise the same emotional white
opposition as affirmative action and busing. While white officials on the state and local level
continued to obstruct political access in various ways, national pressure from Congress and the
Justice Department remedied the situation. Reynolds, as a national figure in the Reagan
administration, had come to share the same views of the voting rights consensus. His job as an
29
enforcer of the law and legal precedent likely pushed him in this direction despite his earlier
objections to the 1982 amendments.70
Reynolds denied any ulterior motives, and pointed out that conservatives criticized him
for his appearances with Jesse Jackson. He said that the trip had been an “eye opener” that
revealed the continuing problems of racial voting discrimination.71 According to him, local
officials’ actions proved their intent to discriminate on race, a clear violation of the original
intent of the Voting Rights Act. Reynolds could then enforce the law but still legitimately
criticize the broadened provisions of the 1982 extension as an overreaching of the Act’s 1965
boundaries.
Whatever the reason for his actions, Reynolds profited little from his redistricting orders.
His nomination by Reagan to be Associate Attorney General in the summer of 1985 failed to
make out of committee. The national press made almost no mention of his actions in Mississippi
two years earlier, and even his defenders in conservative publications like National Review did
not point to the change he wrought in numerous Mississippi counties, instead praising his
opposition to racial quotas. Reynolds stayed on as head of the Civil Rights Division for the rest
of the Reagan administration and continued to serve as a lightning rod for criticism from the civil
rights lobby. Despite his positions on other civil rights measures, his intervention on behalf of
black voters greatly increased black representation in the county governments of Mississippi.72
While the state GOP had by the Reagan administration firmly shifted towards the “lily
white and hard right” position that Gil Carmichael feared, the Reagan administration’s own
enforcement of federal civil rights law displeased many of those same state conservatives. The
struggle within the state party over black voting as well as the dichotomy between state
Republicans and Republican presidential administrations indicate not only the central part race
30
played in the “Great White Shifts,” but also the complex and contested processes in the creation
of the Republican South.
31
1
McMillen, Dark Journey, 60-64, 69; Dittmer, Local People, 200-207; Bass and DeVries, The Transformation of Southern
Politics, 204; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 45-46.
2
Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 84-85, 87; Shulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 215; Resume of Wirt A.
Yerger, Jr., Mississippi Republican Party Papers, Biographies Folder, Box H-1, Special Collections, Mississippi State
University. Hathorn, “Challenging the Status Quo” Journal of Mississippi History; Robert Webb, “Kennedy ‘Absolved’ of
Link to Riders,” unknown newspaper clipping from State Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR ID# 2-140-1-49-1-1-1.
For a detailed narrative of the transition from the Black and Tans to the Lily Whites in Mississippi, see Crespino, “Strategic
Accommodation,” 121-129. Crespino’s dissertation has been revised into his book In Search of Another Country, but the
quotes are only in the dissertation and the account of the Black and Tan overthrow is longer. In Mississippi, urban areas are
defined as municipalities 10,000 or more in population. Parker, Black Votes Count, 143.
3
Sistrom, “Authors of the Liberation,” 364; “Negroes Eye State Republican Party,” Jackson Advocate, 14 May 1966;
Lamis, The Two-Party South, 45-46; Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1968-1972, 442.
4
Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 89; Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, 4.
5
Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance.
6
Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 4.
7
Lassiter, The Silent Majority.
8
Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 17.
9
Hinds County FDP News, 3 November 1967; Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 217-18; Hathorn, “Challenging the
Status Quo,” Journal of Mississippi History, 244; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 47; Crespino, In Search of Another
Country, 217-18; “General Election Vote Equals Primary Tally,” Lexington Advertiser, 9 November 1967.
10
Biography of Clark Thomas Reed, Mississippi Republican Party Papers, Biographies Folder, Box H-1, Special
Collections, Mississippi State University; Paul Squires to W.T. Wilkins, 13 May 1970, Mississippi Republican Party
Papers, Box G-1, Census Civil Rights Folder; Bruce Galphin, “Miss. GOP Chief Blocked Evers Aid Bill,” Washington
Post, 20 March 1970; Don Oberdorfer, “HEW Approves Grant Requested by Evers,” Washington Post, 4 May 1970;
Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 226; Paul Pittman, “Reed is facing trouble on school desegregation,” Delta
Democrat-Times, 20 February 1969; W.T. Wilkins to Harry Dent, 6 January 1968, Mississippi Republican Party Papers,
Box G-3, HEW Coahoma County Schools Folder; Wilson F. Minor, “Reed: Chicken-fried Machiavellian or conservative
True Believer?” Eyes on Mississippi column, newspaper unknown, 11 July 1976, Minor Papers, Box 10, Eyes on
Mississippi Folder.
11
Memorandum from Clarke Reed to Harry Dent, 9 February 1970, Harry Dent Papers, Box 5, folder 159, Special
Collections, Robert Muldrow Cooper Library, Clemson University; Memorandum from Harry Dent to Clarke Reed, 12
November 1969, Harry Dent Papers, Box 18, folder 456; Harry Dent to Clarke Reed, 11 July 1969, Harry Dent Papers, Box
18, folder 456; Harry Dent to Clarke Reed, 16 December 1971, Harry Dent Papers, Box 22, Folder 506. For an example of
Mississippi Republican complaints about school desegregation under Nixon, see James M. Moye to Harry Dent, 13 August
1970, Harry Dent Papers, Box 5, folder 159.
12
Mounger and Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 58, 69-71, 75.
13
Ibid, 64-65, 88, 125, 145, 350, 371. For coverage of the IRS private school decision, which culminated in the Bob Jones
v. U.S. case, see Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 237-66.
14
Gil Carmichael, interview by author, tape recording, Meridian, Miss., 13 October 2004.
15
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1972-1976, 475, 480; Biography of Gilbert Ellzey Carmichael, Mississippi
Republican Party Papers, Biographies Folder, Box H-1, Special Collections, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State
University; J.F. Barbour III to Tommy Giordano, Gilbert E. Carmichael Papers (hereafter referred to as GEC Papers), 1972
Campaign Correspondence, folder 150, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University; Membership card of
Gilbert E. Carmichael for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, GEC Papers, Organizations, folder 16; Bass and De Vries,
The Transformation of Southern Politics, 214.
16
Mounger and Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 136-39, 141-42, 155.
17
Carmichael interview, 13 October 2004; Advertisement for Sen. Jim Eastland, Jackson Advocate, 27 May 1972; Nash and
Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 51; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 49-50; Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1972-
1976, 480. Bass and De Vries describe Carmichael’s black support in 1972 as “substantial,” and while he did run strong in
some black-majority counties, in others he trailed badly, including most of the black Delta counties. Bass and De Vries,
The Transformation of Southern Politics, 215; Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1972-1976, 480. As an example
of Meredith’s ever-changing political nature, he ran as a Democrat in 1974 in the fifth congressional district, but then
withdrew after leading in the first primary and ran as independent in the general election. “Meredith After Winning
Withdraws; Dean, Sturgeon In Runoff,” Fayette Chronicle, 6 June 1974.
18
Hinds had a 39.3 percent black population in 1970, but was the most populous county in the state. Amite and Copiah
actually had slight black majorities in 1970 (50.5 and 50.3 percent, respectively), but they had declined to 47.6 and 48.4
percent by 1980. 1970 and 1980 Census of the Population, Vol. 1, General Characteristics of the Population; Mounger and
Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 139, 143.
19
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1972-1976, 149-50; Bass and De Vries, The Transformation of Southern
Politics, 215; Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1976-80, 432; Barone, Ujifusa, and Matthews, The Almanac of
American Politics 1978, 466; Leslie Burl McLemore, interview by author, tape recording, 19 November 2004, Oxford,
Mississippi. Bass and De Vries completely omit mention of Eddie McBride’s independent candidacy and lead the reader to
believe that Cochran won his election solely by siphoning black votes away from his Democratic opponent. Lamis gives
attention to McBride and credits his 8.2 percent showing with throwing the race to Cochran. Bass and De Vries, The
Transformation of Southern Politics, 215; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 57. For continued reports of voting discrimination
in Mississippi in the early 1970s, see Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 231-33.
20
“The Common Touch,” Newsweek, 8 September 1975; Bass and De Vries, The Transformation of Southern Politics, 216.
Winter had also black staffers in his 1975 campaign. R.W. Apple, Jr., “Republican Courts Mississippi Blacks,” New York
Times, 18 August 1975; Fred Banks, interview by author, tape recording, Jackson, Miss., 28 June 2005.
21
Sewell and Dwight, Mississippi Black History Makers, 79; Jack Elliot, “Kirksey Charges State, Opponents Trying To
Keep Him Off Ballot,” Clarion-Ledger, 2 August 1975; Linda Buford, “Kirksey Vote: No Counties Won, No Black
Support,” Clarion-Ledger, 6 November 1975; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 50-51; Harry Dent to Gil Carmichael, 13
November 1974, Harry Dent Papers, Box 25, Folder 554; Apple, New York Times, 18 August 1975; “New Breezes
Blowing On the Old Magnolia,” Time, 3 November 1975; Roland Evans and Robert Novak, “Carmichael’s Mississippi Is
Viewed,” Clarion-Ledger, 18 October 2005; Jack Elliot, “Batesville’s Backing Its Man, Finch,” Clarion-Ledger, 1
November 1975; Telephone interview with Gil Carmichael, 31 August 2006.
22
Bass and De Vries, The Transformation of Southern Politics, 210; Carmichael interview, 13 October 2004; Walter C.
Gough to Gil Carmichael, GEC Papers, 1975 Campaign Correspondence, folder 328.
23
Robert Clark press conference, GEC Papers, 1975 Campaign, folder 454.
24
Lamis, The Two-Party South, 51; “Cochran Not Endorsing His Fellow Republican,” Clarion-Ledger, 16 October 1975.
Mounger and Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 153-55, 157-58, 160-61.
25
Exhibits to the Testimony of J. Stanley Pottinger before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Committee
on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, March 5, 1975, J. Stanley Pottinger Papers, box 94, folder 270, Gerald R.
Ford Presidential Library; J. Stanley Pottinger to Gerry Jones, 30 October 1975, J. Stanley Pottinger Papers, box 64, folder
133, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. For an example of harassment of black voters in 1975, see Memorandum for the
Attorney General from J. Stanley Pottinger, 30 October 1975, J. Stanley Pottinger Papers, box 64, folder 133, Gerald R.
Ford Presidential Library.
26
“Finch ‘Recommended’ For Governor; ‘Our Only Viable Choice’; Total GOP Posture ‘Unredeemable’ For Poor,”
Lexington Advertiser, 23 October 1973.
27
Advertisement by Prentiss Walker, Clarion-Ledger, 18 October 1975.
28
Ibid; Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 217; Hathorn, “Challenging the Status Quo,” 240.
29
Advertisement by Elmore Douglass Greaves, Clarion-Ledger, 3 November 1975.
30
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 497, 500; Gil Carmichael to President Gerald Ford, GEC Papers, General
Political, folder 167; Bass and De Vries, The Transformation of Southern Politics, 216; Lamis, The Two-Party South, 51;
Buford, Clarion-Ledger, 6 November 1975; Jack Elliot, “Finch Shows Rural, Black Strength,” Clarion-Ledger, 6 November
1975; McLemore interview, 19 November 2004.
31
“NAACP Object of GOP Wooing,” Clarksdale Press Register, 4 November 1977; “Finch displeasing black leaders,”
Clarksdale Press Register, 30 May 1977; Ken Faulkner, “State black officials form organization,” Clarksdale Press Register,
8 November 1977; Biographical Sketch of Charles Pickering, Mississippi Republican Party Papers, Box H-1, Biographies,
Special Collections Department, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University.
32
Frank Montague, Jr. to Charles W. Pickering and Thad Cochran, GEC Papers, General Political, folder 213.
33
Barone, Ujifsa and Matthews, The Almanac of American Politics 1976, xiv-xv, 458-65; The Almanac of American
Politics 1978, xix, 462-67; Bill Pardue, “Senate Approves Delegate Election,” Clarion-Ledger, 22 January 1975; Calvin
Edward Durden, “All five opposed Voting Rights Act,” Mississippi Press (Pascagoula), 19 August 1975. For the Citizens’
Councils and their support for Rhodesia and South Africa, see McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, xiii.
34
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register 1980-1984, 454-55; “The District, County, and Precinct Coordinated
Approach to the Recruitment of Black Voters for Thad Cochran in the U.S. Senate Race,” GEC Papers, General Political,
folder 215; Jo Ann Klein, “The GOP Sale,” Clarion-Ledger, 28 August 1978.
35
Vern E. Smith, “A Different Campaign,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine, 5 November 1978.
36
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1980-1984, 458-59. Jasper was the one county Evers won that was not
majority-black.
37
Lamis, The Two-Party South.
38
Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, 31-32; Witcover, Marathon, 446.
39
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “The Incompetency Factor,” Washington Post, 31 July 1975, clipping in the John
Stanley Pottinger Papers, box 95, folder 270, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, University of Michigan.
40
Witcover, Marathon, 446; Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, 32; “Mississippi Republican Party 1976 Delegates
and Alternate Delegates to the Republican National Convention Elected April 10, 1976,” Harry Dent Papers, Box 26, Folder
560.
41
Witcover, Marathon, 449-50; Dent, The Prodigal South Returns to Power, 47, 53; James Young, “GOP Looks To
Blacks,” Undated newspaper clipping, Mississippi Republican Party Papers, Box J-18, Charles Pickering Folder.
42
Mounger and Maxwell, Admidst the Fray, 170-71, 197, 199-200; Lott, Herding Cats, 68-70; Bill Minor, “GOP Factional
Quarrel Deepens,” Times-Picayune, 18 April 1976; GEC to Richard Cheney, 26 June 1976, GEC Papers, General Political,
folder 201; Charles Pickering to GEC, GEC Papers, General Political, folder 194; Cannon, Governor Reagan, 395, 429;
Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 236.
43
Telephone interview with Gil Carmichael, 31 August 2006; James Young, “GOP Looks To Blacks,” Undated newspaper
clipping, Mississippi Republican Party Papers, Box J-18, Charles Pickering Folder; Mounger and Maxwell, 223-25;
Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Kruse, White Flight.
44
GEC to Leon Bramlett, 24 March 1976, GEC Papers, 1975 Campaign Correspondence, folder 412.
45
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1980-1984, 505; GEC Papers, 1979 Campaign, folder 261; “Carmichael Asks
Black Support in Miss. Election,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 15 October 1979.
46
Dunbar Prewitt, Jr. in the Reporter, 20 September 1979; “Carmichael Says Fuel Crisis May End Busing,” Northeast
Mississippi Daily Journal, 20 July 1979; GEB Papers, 1979 Campaign, folder 261; “Winter, Carmichael Outline Civil
Rights Records To NAACP,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 29 October 1979; “Blacks Back Carmichael,” McComb
Enterprise Journal, 3 October 1979; GEC Papers, 1979 campaign, folder 8; “Winter, Carmichael Outline Civil Rights
Records To NAACP,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 29 October 1979.
47
Dunbar Prewitt, Jr. The Reporter, 20 September 1979; Deborah Lesure, “In Commemoration of a King,” Jackson
Advocate, 10-16 January 1980; Howard, Men Like That, 270.
48
David Bates, “Pickering ads claim Allain against blacks,” Clarion-Ledger, 5 November 1979; David Bates, “Allain clings
to 2 percent lead in attorney general election,” Clarion-Ledger, 7 November 1979; Mississippi Official and Statistical
Register, 1980-1984, 519.
49
Mounger and Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 285-89; Carter, From George Wallace to New Gingrich and The Politics of
Rage.
50
Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, 1980-1984, 47, 51, 517, 534
51
Wayne Weidie, “GOP Loses Ground in Municipal Elections,” The Carthaginian (Carthage, Miss.) 7 July 1977; Winter
interview, 28 September 2004; Telephone interview with Gil Carmichael, 31 August 2006; Wayne Wiede, “Don’t Pack
Your Bags Yet,” Copiah County Courier, 15 August 1979.
52
Jo Ann Klein, “GOP: Winter building patronage machine,” Clarion-Ledger, 21 May 1980; Gene Monteith, “Blacks hope
to build GOP state strength,” Clarion-Ledger, 27 September 1980.
53
Cannon, Governor Reagan, 477-78; Lott, Herding Cats, 253; Bates, “The Reagan Rhetoric,” 23-25, 28-30; Marable, Race,
Reform, and Rebellion, 167-70. Cochran later called his opposition to the Neshoba speech “wrong,” given the “great
success” of the visit. Bates, 37.
54
David Mould, “Black Group Urges More GOP Support,” Commercial Appeal, 27 September 1980; Gene Monteith,
Clarion-Ledger, 27 September 1980; Tom Bailey, Jr., “Black Students Get Double Pitch For Reagan,” Commercial Appeal,
19 February 1981; “Blacks Back Carmichael,” McComb Enterprise Journal, 3 October 1979; Jo Ann Klein, “GOP Sale,”
Clarion-Ledger, 28 August 1978.
55
Mounger and Maxwell, Amidst the Fray, 262-63, 375; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 14; Crespino, In Search of Another
Country, 8.
56
Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 198; Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, 4.
57
Parker, “County Studies In Mississippi,” 393-94, 399-400, 402-405; Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 133, 160-61.
58
Wolters, Right Turn, 46-48.
59
Ibid, 63-64.
60
Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 290-91; Bob Kyer, “Bolivar Remap Rejected,” Delta Democrat-Times, 15 June 1983; Jane
Egger, “Jackson pushes in Delta,” Delta Democrat-Times, 5 June 1983; “Dual Registration Should Go,” Delta Democrat-
Times, 7 June 1983; Rachel Brown, “Jackson visits Cleveland, urges blacks to vote,” Bolivar Commercial, 1 August 1983.
61
“Civil-Rights “Iceman” or Idealist?” U.S. News & World Report, 17 June 1985; “Reynolds’s Inquisition,” National
Review, 12 July 1985; Michael S. Serrill, “Uncivil Times at “Justless”,” Time, 13 May 1985; “A Public Disagreement
About The Pursuit Of Equality,” Black Enterprise, January 1982; David M. Alpern, Ann McDaniel and Margaret Garrard
Warner, “A Roadblock for Reynolds,” Newsweek, 8 July 1985.
62
“Civil rights lawyer investigates voting charges,” Delta Democrat-Times, 14 June 1983; “Registrars coming to Delta to
sign voters,” Delta Democrat-Times, 16 June 1983; “Reynolds Takes a Ride In the ‘Justice Buggy’” Newsweek, 27 June
1983; Sandra Camphor, “Blacks’ voting rights complaints heard,” Delta Democrat-Times, 15 June 1983; Sandra Camphor,
“Blacks tell justice official of problems,” Delta Democrat-Times, 15 June 1983.
63
Camphor, “Blacks’ voting rights complaints heard,” 15 June 1983; Newsweek, 27 June 1983; “Registrars coming to Delta
to sign voters,” Delta Democrat-Times, 16 June 1983; Lawson, In Pursuit of Power, 288-89; Phone conversation with
William Bradford Reynolds, 14 August 2006. The counties were Humphreys, Leflore, Madison, Quitman, and Sunflower.
“Franklin says Justice visit unfairly convicts state,” Delta Democrat-Times, 17 June 1983.
64
“Franklin says Justice visit unfairly convicts state,” Delta Democrat-Times, 17 June 1983; “Blacks hope registrars will
help voter turnout,” Delta Democrat-Times, 19 June 1983; Phone conversation with William Bradford Reynolds, 14 August
2006.
65
Newsweek, 27 June 1983; Wolters, Right Turn, 70, 90-91; “Remarks at a Mississippi Republican Party Fundraiser Dinner
in Jackson, June 20, 1983,” Public Papers of the President: Ronald Reagan, 1981-1988, The Ronald Reagan Library,
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1983/62083b.htm.
66
Parker, Black Votes Count, 157-58; “No serious problems seen by poll watchers,” Delta Democrat-Times, 4 August 1983;
“Franklin blasts federal agency over confusion,” Delta Democrat-Times, 2 August 1983; National Roster of Black Elected
Officials, Vol. 12, 153-54; National Roster of Black Elected Officials, 15th ed., 229-31.
67
National Roster of Black Elected Officials, 15th ed., 229-31; Art Harris, “In Mississippi County, Blacks Dissect the
Failure of a ‘Revolution,’” Washington Post, 18 August 1983. The seven heavily-black counties with no black supervisors
were Sunflower, Washington, Carroll, Tallahatchie, Panola, Kemper and Sharkey.
68
Mayer, Running on Race, 194; Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count?, 234.
69
Mayer, Running on Race, 194.
70
Parker, Black Votes Count, 207-209.
71
Phone conversation with William Bradford Reynolds, 14 August 2006.
72
David M. Alpern, Ann McDaniel and Margaret Garrard Warner, “A Roadblock for Reynolds,” Newsweek, 8 July 1985;
“Reynolds Wrap,” National Review, 26 July 1985; George F. Will, “Battling the Racial Spoils System,” Newsweek, 10
June 1985; Colleen O’Conner and Ann McDaniel, “The President’s Angry Apostle,” Newsweek, 6 October 1986. Much of
the historical omission of Reynolds’s Mississippi visit has carried over to historiography on Reagan’s civil rights policies.
One exception and defense of Reynolds is by the legal historian Raymond Wolters in his book Right Turn.
