Race relations in Mississippi were based on the many legacies of slavery and Jim Crow:  racism, intimidation, and fear. Whites and blacks did not sit on buses together, eat at the same restaurants, or send their children to the same schools.

Mississippi remained a “closed society” where a cotton curtain divided the races. The 1954 US Supreme Court decision Brown vs. the Board of Education altered the law of the land but had no effect on the rules in Mississippi. An era of massive resistance began in the white community against any form of integration, especially allowing black citizens to exercise their constitutional rights to vote. Blacks endured all the indignities of segregation and lived under the implicit and ever-present  threats of lynching, losing a job, and being denied housing.