Richard Wright

Richard Wright

Richard Wright spent a lifetime writing against racism. The son of a Natchez sharecropper and a high school teacher, Wright grew up in Adams County and Jackson, before moving to Chicago in the 1920s. In Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940), he gave voice to the experience of American racism. In Black Boy (1945), he wrote about his personal encounters with racism. Wright joined the Communist Party in Chicago, but, finding no answers, discontinued his associated after 10 years.

Julius Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald

When the state refused to adequately fund Black education, the Julius Rosenwald Fund stepped in to offer grants for community-built schools for Black children. The fund stemmed from a collaboration between Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald. The fund provided a third of the cost to be matched by state and local sources. Parents donated labor and materials to build schools and helped with maintenance. After 1890, nearly all public funds spent on Black education in Mississippi were spent to match Rosenwald grants.

Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce

Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce

Blanche Kelso Bruce rose from slavery to the US Senate. Born a Virginia slave, Bruce was taught by his young master’s tutor. He left his master at the beginning of the Civil War and moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he taught school briefly before continuing his education at Oberlin College in Ohio. After the war, Bruce worked on a Mississippi steamer for a year before settling in Bolivar County, where he became a successful planter.

Senator Hiram Revels

Senator Hiram Revels

Born free in North Carolina, Hiram Revels committed his life to education, church, and community. During the Civil War, Revels organized two Black regiments in Maryland, and founded a freedmen's school in St. Louis. An ordained minister, Revels followed the Union Army to Jackson, where he lectured and organized Black churches and schools. Moving to Vicksburg in 1864, he served as chaplain of a Black regiment and minister of the Bethel A.M.E. Church. He also assisted the provost marshal of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1866, Revels became pastor at Zion A.M.E.

Representative John Roy Lynch

Representative John Roy Lynch

The child of a slave mother and Irish plantation manager father in Vidalia, Louisiana, John R. Lynch and his mother were sold to a Natchez planter after his father’s death. A self-educated man, Lynch operated a photography studio and became active in the Republican Party after the Civil War. Governor Adelbert Ames appointed him justice of the peace in 1869. The same year, he won election to the state legislature, later serving as Speaker of the House. In 1873, he won election to the US House of Representatives.

Reverend James D. Lynch

Reverend James D. Lynch

A native of Baltimore, Rev. James D. Lynch served as a missionary for the A.M.E. Church in South Carolina and Georgia during the war, helping to establish Black schools and churches. In 1868, he brought his missionary work to Mississippi, but soon realized that political rights were also critical to Black freedmen. Lynch became one of the founders of Mississippi’s Republican Party and served as its first vice president. In 1869, he won election as Mississippi Secretary of State, the first African American to hold that office.

Black Elected Officials

From 1867 to 1869, Mississippians elected 13 Black state senators and 102 representatives. In the 1870s, Alexander K. Davis served as lieutenant governor, Rev. James D. Lynch and James Hill each as secretary of state, and John R. Lynch and Isaac D. Shadd as Speakers of the House. At a time when US senators were elected by state legislators, Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels (1870-1871) and Blanche Kelso Bruce (1875-1880) to Washington. 

Black Middle Class

A small Black professional class—doctors, dentists, lawyers, photographers, and pharmacists—usually in larger cities, served Black customers. Preachers and teachers commanded respect in Black communities, but their employment was often subject to the good will of Whites. Jim Crow laws and segregation forced many out of spaces that White professionals were welcome, but their independence allowed them to be more politically outspoken.

At the End of the Civil War…

Black Mississippians emerged from slavery with their first hopeful glimpses of freedom. Most White Mississippians had grown up treating Black people as property. They did not relish sharing the state’s wealth and political power with people they viewed as "inferior." When Union Army occupation ended, so too did enforcement of civil rights for Black people.

Abandoned By the Law: No Protection, No Place to Turn

After 1890, Black Mississippians were at the mercy of their White neighbors. Lynchings were committed openly. Civil disagreements offered Black people no legal recourse. They were sometimes arrested under false pretenses and then conscripted to forced labor. Lynchings rose and fell in frequency with hard times. Two peak periods of lynchings—1889 to 1908 and 1918 to 1922—were caused by economic hardship, World War I, and new waves of immigration.

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