This roundtable explores five new histories of African American life and racial authoritarianism in the U.S. state of Mississippi. These emerging scholars demonstrate a range of Black activism too easily obscured by grand or national narratives. Personal histories, interpersonal relationships, and nationwide organizing efforts shaped the movements to end Jim Crow. They also shaped the order that followed. Topics include incarceration, education, policing, healthcare, and welfare.

Each scholar finds Black resistance to Jim Crow apartheid in the everyday lives of Mississippians, even as the social order transformed during key watersheds such as World War II and the civil rights movement. Dionne Bailey investigates incarcerated Black girls and women at Parchman Penitentiary. Bailey focuses on how they used their proximity to incarcerated Freedom Riders to resist racist and sexist forms of state-sanctioned violence. Jillian McClure examines how activists created campus organizations and studies programs—including Black Studies—to challenge the white, male-centered structure of universities. Activists achieved some success, she argues, and also provoked a conservative backlash that threatened higher education fundamentally. Justin Randolph explores how rural communities confronted the carceral state. He focuses on the ways policing functioned to dislocate Black Mississippians from the land and the ways people used national organizations, the law, and armed self-defense to resist. Katrina Sims centers the contributions of Black women fraternal leaders in the Mississippi Delta. She discusses their strategies to resist anti-Black politics and Black masculine ideas about leadership that threatened to jettison their uplift efforts. Pamela Walker discusses how Black women and mothers accessed food and survival goods through the little-known U.S. postal benevolence program, called The Box Project. Black women strategically utilized private benevolence and federal welfare to feed their families. Together, participants showcase new methodologies for U.S. historians as well as scholars of Black life, women, and gender. They show that Mississippi's famous local movements link particular histories to universal questions of the historical method and change over time.