The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980

Race has shaped public education in the Magnolia State from Reconstruction through the Carter Administration. Charles C. Bolton mines newspaper accounts, interviews, journals, archival records, legal and financial documents, and other sources to uncover the complex story of one of Mississippi’s most significant and vexing issues. He also uses the state’s desegregation history to illuminate similar struggles throughout the South.

This history closely examines specific events—the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the state, the 1966 protests and counter-demonstrations in Grenada, and the efforts of particular organizations—and carefully considers the broader picture. The state’s white and black public schools are given equal attention, as are the range of attitudes about integration amongst white and black Mississippians. The book also details the effects of desegregation on black communities and white private school attendance.

Despite a "separate but equal" doctrine established in the late nineteenth century, the state’s racially divided school systems quickly developed vast differences in terms of financing, academic resources, teacher salaries, and quality of education. As one of the nation’s poorest states, Mississippi could not afford to finance one school system adequately, much less two. For much of the twentieth century, whites fought hard to preserve the dual school system, in which the maintenance of one-race schools became the most important measure of educational quality. Blacks fought equally hard to end segregated schooling, realizing that their schools would remain underfunded and understaffed as long as they were not integrated.