Mississippi is a central setting in the book’s account of how federal intervention and Black mobilization challenged the South’s extractive institutions. The effort to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in Oxford exposed the gap between a court ruling and its implementation: state resistance gave way only after federal marshals and troops intervened. The later expansion of Black voting and access to textile employment shows how enforcement could alter both political participation and economic life.

Oxford and the Meredith Crisis

After federal courts ruled that James Meredith, a young Black Air Force veteran, had to be admitted to the University of Mississippi, opposition to implementing the decision gathered around the state government and white supremacist resistance. The Citizens’ Councils, formed to fight desegregation, helped organize that opposition. On television on September 13, Governor Ross Barnett rejected court-ordered desegregation, declaring that state universities would close rather than integrate.

The confrontation then moved from public defiance to federal enforcement. Following negotiations between Barnett, President John F. Kennedy, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a date was set for U.S. marshals to bring Meredith to Oxford. White supremacists organized in anticipation. On September 30, the day before Meredith was due to appear, marshals entered the campus and surrounded the main administration building. A crowd of about 2,500 gathered; a riot broke out, and marshals used tear gas before coming under fire.

Federal Enforcement and Its Cost

Federal authorities escalated their response as violence spread. By 10 p.m., federal troops had been moved into Oxford to restore order; the eventual deployment reached 20,000 troops and 11,000 National Guardsmen. Three hundred people were arrested. Meredith remained on campus under the protection of U.S. marshals and 300 soldiers, and eventually graduated. The episode showed that a judicial decision alone could not desegregate a university when state officials and local resistance obstructed its execution.

The confrontation also formed part of a wider contest over federal authority. In 1948, segregationist Democrats had regrouped under the States’ Rights Democratic Party, whose presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried four states and won thirty-nine electoral votes. Barnett’s resistance in Mississippi likewise asserted the state’s power against federal intervention. In the book’s account, however, such opposition did not prevent federal institutions from enforcing the desegregation ruling.

Voting Rights and Institutional Change

The Meredith crisis belonged to a broader sequence of federal action. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed a wide range of segregationist state laws and practices. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made literacy tests, poll taxes, and other methods used to disenfranchise Black southerners illegal, while extending federal oversight of state elections. These measures mattered not merely as declarations of rights but because they changed who could participate in political life.

In Mississippi, the change in voting was stark: about 5 percent of eligible Black residents voted in 1960, compared with 50 percent in 1970. Across the South, the weakening of the Democratic Party’s support for institutions that discriminated against Black people opened space for wider economic changes as well. Black employment in southern textile mills rose from about 5 percent in 1960 to 15 percent in 1970 and 25 percent by 1990, as civil-rights legislation curtailed discrimination in hiring.

Mississippi in the National Argument

The state’s experience supports the book’s broader explanation of institutional change: the interaction between local resistance and national institutions could alter the balance of power. Mississippi’s segregated system had been sustained not only by state and local control, but also by the failure of federal protections to be implemented. In the 1890s, federal legislation enfranchising southern Black people went unenforced because local law enforcement remained under the control of the southern elite and the Democratic Party, while the federal government acquiesced.

By the 1960s, the conditions had shifted. Black resistance and the erosion of the southern elite’s political hold helped make federal intervention possible. The author also points to the wider context of Black outmigration and the mechanization of cotton production, which made southern elites less willing to continue resisting change. Mississippi thus appears both as a site of violent confrontation and as evidence of how enforcement, political mobilization, and changing economic conditions could transform institutions. Across the South, these changes accompanied narrowing income disparities: southern states, which in 1940 had about half the national per-capita income, had largely closed the gap by 1990.