Essay about The Battle of Ole Miss

The civil war was a major event in the history of Mississippi. The president during this time was Jefferson Davis during the years of 1861-1865. Mississippi was the second state to secede from the union. The view of the state was that it was necessity for the state to have slavery. So the white soldiers fought for the stand of keeping the slaves. Since they believed that the white citizens needed the slaves. Many of the battles were along the line of the Mississippi river. There were more than about 17,000 black men (Mississippi slaves) as well as freedmen that fought for the Union. There were 500 white men that fought for the Union as well. Many soldiers were upset when they realized that the war would be lost. In present time, it seemed that slavery was such a long time ago and long lost. What the people of Mississippi don’t realize the actual affect that it had. The men that were lost during the time period had wives and children that they left behind to start a new generation of what the fathers fought for.

Mississippi’s Civil War: A Narrative History begins by providing the account of the Nullification Crisis that took place in 1832. The crisis began as a dispute between the state of South Carolina and the federal government over a series of national tariffs that many of the southerners viewed as excessive. (6) The leader of the nullification movement in Mississippi was John Anthony Quitman. Quitman died in 1859 and the Mississippi finally left the Union in 1861. (8) As a result of the Nullification crisis, the Mexican War took place. Many Mississippians volunteered to fight with much enthusiasm. After nearly two years of war, America won. (11) From 1840-1860 Mississippi’s population doubled to almost 800,000 residents and by 1860 Mississippi’s institutions were hopelessly entangled in the web of slavery. The cotton based agriculture increased the need for slaves and by the eve of the Civil War slaves represented 55 percent of the state’s total population. (12) Mississippi’s ordinance of secession officially took them out of the union in 1861 leading up to the Civil War. (32)

Throughout this essay, I will be examining the effects of one of the most controversial university enrollments. James Meredith paved the way for African American acceptance into a historically all White University. No matter how much adversity Meredith would encounter, he would not give up or give in to institutional racism. The want to keep Ole Miss segregated by those there did not hinder his success. In an attempt to end racial segregation, the Supreme Court ordered the admittance of James Meredith to the campus. This action was a clear defiance of racial segregation. This resulted in an abundant amount of not only riots but also casualties. Meredith paved the way for other African-Americans

The following day after the case was presented to the Supreme Justices, the Dallas Morning News paper gave a few remarks about how “the federal government stood alongside the state of Mississippi in the Supreme Court and pleaded for delay in further desegregation…”1 The use of the federal government in this situation is to have the reader sympathize with Mississippi and is even followed by “pleaded” to further the sympathy. “The government shared the frustrations of black school children…”1 is written to try to balance out the biased opinion but when ‘children’ is used instead of students, it creates a belittling picture of their opposition. The administration’s chief civil rights lawyer, Jerris Leonard, was quoted saying that both the North and South had made “’substantial breakthroughs’ in desegregation of schools… but that

Beginning in 1861, the civil war was fought over many political questions regarding slavery, yet was barely focused on the actual freedom of the slaves themselves. It is often taught that the Union fought for the freedom of slaves at the beginning of the war. However, it is more accurate to say that Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal at the beginning of the war was to reunite the Union after the majority of the slave-owning states seceded to protect their way of life: slavery. Yet, by the end of the war, the Union’s goal was to free the slaves. Though the laws securing slaves freedom and suffrage were contributed to by many, the primary driving forces behind them was the African Americans. Through their willingness to fight and support the Union cause, African Americans made the United States acknowledge their struggles and transformed the war into a fight for reconnection and freedom. Though hindered by racist people and policies, the African Americans’ participation during the war and Reconstruction greatly contributed to tremendous cultural change as well as the securing of legal rights to blacks.

In his powerful memoir, Mississippi, Anthony Walton explores race relations in Mississippi in a historical context in an attempt to teach readers about Mississippi’s dark and muddled past. In the third section of the memoir, entitled “Rebels”, Walton focuses on the history of Mississippi through the lens of famous and not so famous changemakers who shaped Mississippi as it is today. Walton purposefully tells this story in chronological order, so that the reader can see the evolution of the Mississippi rebel; beginning with union and confederate troops, and ending with civil rights leaders and white supremacy groups. Walton’s purpose of creating such structure becomes abundantly clear at the end of the section, where he juxtaposes the success of the civil rights movement with that of the white supremacy movement in Mississippi. Walton argues that the ability of a cause to inspire fear ensures its continued survival.

A similar incident happened when a young man tried to enrol for the University of Mississippi, an all white university. An angry mob and the governor of Mississippi tried to stop him. The case was brought to court by the NAACP and won the right for him to enrol. President Kennedy also sent troops in to protect the young man when he was enrolling but riots broke out ending in 375 people injured and two dead. The rest of the state universities in the south were slowly desegregated.

Since the publication of Charles Payne’s book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Mississippi Freedom Struggle other scholars have joined him to counter an influential scholarship that has treated the movement largely from a political history perspective, often one that failed to transcend national boundaries to investigate its transnational dimensions, both in terms of its interconnectedness with other anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, but also with regard to how the civil rights movement resonated with people in other Western

C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of

Constance Motley contributed in almost every significant civil rights case brought to trial between 1945 and 1965. She was the first African American woman to represent the NAACP in court. Motley’s career with the NAACP would bring her many high profile cases but involved in cases with school unification. She played a main role in the legal research for the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case (Carson 1991, p.246). She was the first black woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. She was fighting for the blacks’ rights and she was being pacified aggressive to get them into segregated schools. She was also the lead council in the case. She was part of the case to allow James Meredith to be admitted to the University of

Although I wasn’t in Mississippi during the ‘Freedom Summer’, I had a solid understanding of how life was during the ‘Freedom Summer’. This was years of racism and segregation towards the blacks in the US during the Civil Rights Movement. My aspect type was racism, and I learned of its impact on life through our analysis in the class of The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, an epistolary novel about the lives of black people in rural dominated white racist Georgia during the 1920’s-50’s. Furthermore, we discussed Nelson Mandela’s Inaugural Speech in class, and how Mandela fought for Independence from the white racist government. With extra research of the Freedom Summer project launched by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

People are becoming vocal about the hypocrisy in our government and with our laws. There is a quote that Williams includes early in the book which says: “The lawful authorities of Monroe and North Carolina acted to enforce order only after, and as a direct result of our being armed. Previously they had connived with the defense prevented bloodshed and forced the law to establish order” (5). The fact that the NAACP would collaborate and support with the intervention of the government and the opposition of Williams being the leader of the Monroe NAACP chapter demonstrates the oppression African Americans have always faced when trying to defend and exercise their second

The twentieth state of the United States had quite some history to go through, starting with what is its name, the natives that started and the slave trade that led to the unwanted war of America. Mississippi brought a lot nationalism which brought a lot of social inequality. This essay will lightly cover the background and history that Mississippi holds.

     The Civil War, often called the War for Southern Independence began on April 12, 1861. The main cause of the war was slavery. The southern states depended on slaves to help grow crops which were the main source of income for the south. Slavery was illegal in all of the northern states but most people actually were neutral about it. The main conflict was if slavery should be permitted in the newly developing western territories.

The Columbian University journalism professor Nicholas Lemann’s aim of writing this book is to look at the brutal campaign of fraud and violence during the mid-1870s that ultimately led to the restoration of conservative, white governments in some southern states. The author focuses on the reconstruction of Mississippi. He stirs memories of the murderous Southern resistance and to civil rights movements 90 years later. Lemann writes at an era when neo-Confederate sympathies have cropped up again in southern politics, and amid several reports of the suppression of the minority voting throughout the country. Mr. Lemann presents the last battle of the Civil War.