Moving Past the Crossroads: Law and Mississippi’s Modern Age

Mississippi’s post-World War II legal history consists of two major struggles. The first was the long legal battle between Mississippi lawmakers and federal appellate courts that accompanied the political battle to end segregation (1950-70). The end of legal segregation and voting restrictions empowered black Mississippians and created a new, three-cornered political balance between blacks, white moderates and conservatives. The rise after 1960 of “expressive individualism,” a philosophy that valued individual autonomy over shared public values, triggered the second struggle. The battle between individualists and traditionalists has been fought on many fronts in Mississippi including rights of female and gay Mississippians, abortion rights and debates over the extent to which government may support private schools. Mississippi has mostly sided with traditionalists but has not been a leader on either side.

Thresholds of Change: Mississippi Law in the Progressive and New Deal Eras

During the Progressive (1890-1915) and New Deal eras (1929-41), Mississippi’s economic liberalism stood in sharp contrast to its reactionary racial policies. The state was an early supporter of Progressive measures such as open primaries, lawmaking by initiative and referendum and child labor laws. During the Depression, Mississippi created the Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) program of municipal subsidies to business. BAWI was upheld by Mississippi’s supreme court against constitutional challenge and became a national model. But the early twentieth century also marked the height of Mississippi’s Jim Crow era. Judges such as William Anderson and Virgil Griffith and black lawyers such as Sidney Redmond tried to preserve a measure of due process for black criminal defendants but too often, whites viewed those efforts as a threat to the racial order and responded with lynchings. After 1930, an aroused U.S. Supreme Court forced a stricter observance of due process in Mississippi.

Flush Times, Hard Times: Law, Jacksonism, and a Cotton Economy

American states implemented many important legal reforms during the age of Andrew Jackson. Mississippi, always enthusiastic for Jackson, pioneered several of those reforms but was slow to adopt others. Mississippi was the first state to provide for popular election of all its judges (1832) and at the urging of Piety Smith Hadley, an underappreciated figure in women’s history, it was the first to give women the right to control their own property (1839). Mississippi judges strongly resisted federal judges’ efforts to limit the extent to which legislatures could regulate corporations. Mississippi legislators actively regulated banks and other fledgling corporations but also guaranteed many banks’ obligations in order to sustain the credit system on which the state’s cotton economy relied. When early banks failed and their obligations fell due, Mississippi, unlike most Jacksonian states, repudiated its guarantees and rejected legal challenges to repudiation.