Racial Terror and the Press: The Collusion of White News and Political Leaders in Building and Protecting White Supremacy in Mississippi, 1875–1975

In 1875, Ethelbert Barksdale, the white editor of the Jackson Clarion, used his position and newspaper to help plan, organize, execute, and defend the Democratic Party’s anti-Black Mississippi Plan to “redeem” the state from Republican rule and bring an end to Reconstruction. The plan involved organizing white paramilitaries to intimidate Black men attempting to participate in politics, and to murder them if necessary. It resulted in anti-Black riots, massacres, and murders across the state and the Democratic Party’s gaining control of state government.

From 1875 onward, leading white newspaper editors and publishers collaborated with political leaders, often using racial terror, to maintain white supremacy in Mississippi. The Jackson Clarion, which became the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1888, was at the center of these efforts. The Hederman family used the newspaper as a key political weapon in its collaboration with state leaders to maintain white supremacy and create family wealth and power. In the wake of Brown v. Board, the Hedermans secretly joined forces with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a new state agency created to spy on and quash Black civil rights efforts and to spread propaganda to the Northern press meant to justify segregation.

White supremacist news leaders sometimes did their political work out in the open, sometimes secretly, but they always used the professional standards of their news operations—like neutrality, facticity, independence, and, from the 1920s on, objectivity, to white-wash their anti-democratic, anti-Black efforts. Along the way, they demonized the Black press and attempted to control its circulation and content. While white supremacist news leaders in Mississippi used professional journalistic standards like neutrality and objectivity to coat their racist coverage with the veneer of professional respectability, Black news leaders challenged this cynical deployment of news standards and embraced advocacy as an antidote.