The Ku Klux Klan and the War on Poverty

Chapter three traces the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi from Reconstruction to the 1960s, before exploring the wave of white supremacist violence that exploded across the state of Mississippi in 1967. This renewed wave of Ku Klux Klan attacks was directed at the state’s antipoverty programs, and in particular at white men and women involved in those programs. The chapter traces the rhetoric used in Klan literature in opposing the war on poverty, which claimed the programs were part of a move toward federal dictatorship. The language fused the core myths and fears on which white segregationists drew—miscegenation, the spread of venereal disease, interracial sex, the threat of black power, and liberal welfare policies that benefitted African Americans. It also illustrates how gender shaped both the Klan violence and its ideology, as attacks on white women teaching in Head Start classes intensified.

Mississippi Republicans and the Politics of Poverty

Chapter six explores the impact of the election of Richard Nixon on the war on poverty. It uncovers the conversations in the new Republican administration regarding the fate of the war on poverty, from questions over whether to rename the Office of Economic Opportunity to the appointment of Don Rumsfeld as OEO director. The chapter then moves on to discuss the way in which the evolution of massive resistance after 1965 and white opposition to the war on poverty shaped and contributed to emerging strands of conservative Republicanism in Mississippi. It places Mississippi’s “conservative color-blindness” in the broader context of the rise of the sunbelt South. Finally, the chapter illustrates the ways in which grassroots conservative groups—particularly women—were central to forging an ostensibly race neutral war against the war on poverty that was vital to the growing Mississippi Republican Party.