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Unlock This CourseThe sit-ins and freedom rides had opened lunch counters and bus stations. They had not given black Southerners any power. Sheriffs, judges and governors were all elected, and in the Deep South almost all the voters were white. Remember, only about one black adult in twenty was registered to vote in Mississippi. Black voters could remove the officials who kept segregation going.
Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, liked this idea too. He thought voter registration would cause less violence, and less embarrassment for the President, than more freedom rides, so he encouraged the civil rights groups to take it up.
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The work began in Mississippi, the state where it was hardest. In the summer of 1961 Bob Moses, a young teacher from New York working for SNCC, started a voter registration project in the small town of McComb. SNCC workers ran classes on the registration form and walked with people to the courthouse.
In April 1962 the Voter Education Project began. It shared out money to SNCC, CORE, the NAACP and the SCLC. In Mississippi these groups worked together in the Delta, a cotton-growing area where most people were black and very poor. The town of Greenwood became the centre of the campaign.
The registrar's office was often closed, or open for only a few days each month. Black applicants had to pass a literacy test. In Mississippi the registrar could ask them to explain any part of the state constitution, and he alone decided whether the answer was good enough. The names of people who applied were printed in the local newspaper. Employers and landlords then knew who to punish, and many applicants lost their jobs or their homes.
Workers and local people were beaten, arrested and shot at. On 25 September 1961 Herbert Lee, a black farmer who had helped Bob Moses, was shot dead by a white member of the Mississippi state legislature, the body that makes the state's laws. The killer was never punished. In February 1963 the SNCC worker Jimmy Travis was shot and wounded in a car near Greenwood. On 12 June 1963 Medgar Evers, the NAACP's leader in Mississippi, was murdered outside his home in Jackson.
Fannie Lou Hamer shows what an ordinary person risked. She had worked on a cotton plantation for 18 years. On 31 August 1962 she travelled by bus with a group to the courthouse in Indianola to try to register. She failed the test, and that same day the plantation owner told her to leave her home. In June 1963 she was badly beaten in a police cell in Winona. She carried on and became a well-known voice of the movement.
Across the South as a whole the Voter Education Project helped hundreds of thousands of black people to register. In Mississippi it almost completely failed. So few people got onto the lists that at the end of 1963 the project stopped funding work there. In 1964 still fewer than 7 per cent of black adults in Mississippi were registered.
The federal government was a disappointment too. Its court cases against registrars were slow, and the FBI said it had no power to protect civil rights workers.
The drives still mattered. In November 1963 more than 80,000 black Mississippians took part in the Freedom Vote. It proved that black people did want to vote and were being kept out. The drives also produced new local leaders, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, and convinced campaigners that only a new federal law would open the voting lists.
James Meredith was a black Mississippian who had served for nine years in the US Air Force. In January 1961 he applied to the University of Mississippi, known as 'Ole Miss', which had never knowingly admitted a black student. He was turned down twice. With the help of Medgar Evers and NAACP lawyers, Meredith went to court. In June 1962 a federal court ruled that he had been rejected only because of his race, and in September the Supreme Court backed this and ordered the university to admit him.
The Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, refused to obey. He promised on television that no school in Mississippi would be integrated while he was governor, and he stood in a doorway in person to turn Meredith away. President Kennedy tried to settle the matter quietly by telephone with Barnett, and failed.
Meredith was guarded by marshals and soldiers for the whole of his time at the university. He graduated in August 1963.
Don't mix up Meredith and Little Rock. Little Rock (1957) was a high school in Arkansas under President Eisenhower. Meredith (1962) was a university in Mississippi under President Kennedy. Don't say the registration drives gave black Mississippians the vote, because very few got onto the lists. And don't confuse the Freedom Vote of 1963, an unofficial election, with the Freedom Summer of 1964.
Explain two effects of the Meredith Case (1962) on the USA. [8 marks]
One effect was that the federal government used force to make a Southern state obey the courts. Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi refused to let James Meredith enter the University of Mississippi, even after the Supreme Court ordered it. When a crowd of over 2,000 rioted on 30 September 1962, killing two people and injuring more than 160 marshals, President Kennedy sent in the National Guard and the US Army, more than 20,000 soldiers in all. This led to a clear message that state leaders could not block federal law, and it pushed Kennedy, who had hoped to avoid a clash with the South, into acting openly for civil rights.
A second effect was that segregation in Southern universities was broken in its strongest state. Because the troops ended the riot, Meredith was able to register on 1 October 1962, and he graduated in August 1963 under constant guard. This meant that the University of Mississippi was no longer all white, which encouraged other black students to apply to white universities. However, it also showed how fierce white resistance was, since it had taken an army to get a single student into his classes.
What lifts this to the top level: each paragraph names one effect, supports it with precise facts and then shows how the case led to that effect, using phrases such as 'this led to' and 'this meant that'.
This question wants two effects, and one effect alone cannot score more than half marks. Don't tell the story of the riot. Use each fact, such as the 20,000 soldiers or Meredith's graduation in August 1963, to show a result of the case.