Joseph Crespino, Mississippi as Metaphor

Mississippi as Metaphor
State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination

Joseph Crespino, Emory University

Overview:

Mississippi emerged as an iconic space for the struggle over the meaning of democracy and equality in the South and in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Examining three metaphors widely used in those years, Professor Joseph Crespino argues that, as “the South on steroids,” Mississippi became as much a contentious, imagined space as a real location for addressing national problems of white racism. The Mississippi of metaphor continues to affect, and to limit, how the South and the nation pursue social reform and equality.

Presentation Sections:

Mississippi as Metaphor | Recommended Resources

Video:

Part 1 (3:57 min.) RealMedia \| Windows Media \| QuickTime	Introducing the metaphors: “Mississippi as closed society,” “Mississippi as America writ large,” and “Mississippi as scapegoat.”
Part 2 (4:52 min.) RealMedia \| Windows Media \| QuickTime	Introduced in 1964, James Silver's image of Mississippi as "the closed society" framed the state’s crisis of white racism in terms of a "reign of intimidation" allowing an engrossed American public to draw parallels with another closed society, the Soviet Union. Crespino notes the reactions of folk revivalist Phil Ochs and novelist Walker Percy, and suggests the limits of the closed society metaphor.
Part 3 (6:47 min.) RealMedia \| Windows Media \| QuickTime	Many civil rights activists felt that America was Mississippi writ large. Crespino follows the idea of Mississippi as synecdoche into the 1964 Democratic National Convention and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, while considering the political analyses of John Egerton, Merle Black, C. Vann Woodward, Bruce Schulman, and Barbara Fields. Did the “Mississippi Plan,” re-packaged as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” become the American way?
Part 4 (5:26 min.) RealMedia \| Windows Media \| QuickTime	The scapegoat metaphor of Mississippi as “innocent victim,” raised by segregationists, complicated the national race debate and remains influential in North-South, urban-suburban controversies over desegregation policies and practices.
Part 5 (2:20 min.) RealMedia \| Windows Media \| QuickTime	Metaphors become instruments for social and political reform. The idea of southern exceptionalism, however, while valuable in facilitating civil rights achievements in the 1960s, is a limiting conception for political strategies and moral critiques that seek to achieve a more substantive and meaningful equality today.

About Joseph Crespino:

Professor Crespino received his Ph.D. in American History from Stanford University in 2002. His research interests focus on the political culture of twentieth-century America, in particular, the U.S. South. Crespino's first book, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines segregationist politics in the state generally considered to be the most recalcitrant. He proposes that white Mississippians were key actors in a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that reshaped American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Video of Professor Crespino was taken at "The End of Southern Exceptionalism" conference held at Emory University in March 2006, an event organized by Prof. Crespino of the Emory University History Department and Professor Matt Lassiter of the Department of History at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Presentation Sections:

Mississippi as Metaphor | Recommended Resources