The mirror of Mississippi: Authoritarian history illuminates current moment

“These leaders, when we say they’re descended from them, we’re not talking a thousand years ago. We’re talking in the immediate lifetimes of people who are here today.”

In the heart of Jackson, Mississippi, at the historic COFO Civil Rights Education Center, historian Robert Luckett speaks with the candor of someone unburdened by illusion.

As director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University and author of a major study of Mississippi’s former segregationist attorney general, Joe T. Patterson, Luckett situates the state not as an outlier but as a prism through which to view the nation’s broader historical trajectory.

Luckett describes the political order that took shape after the creation of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 as nothing less than a “totalitarian terrorist state,” a system designed to consolidate white supremacy through the seamless alignment of political, social and economic control.

“Total political control enables social control, enables economic control, enables control of all other aspects of life,” Luckett observes.

At a time when the nation is becoming increasingly authoritarian, Luckett’s argument reaches beyond the boundaries of Mississippi’s past. The machinery of domination forged during the Jim Crow era, he contends, did not vanish with the victories of the civil rights movement. It evolved—subtly and strategically—into new forms that now influence the broader architecture of American conservative politics. In this reading, Mississippi functions not merely as a site of historical study but as a template for understanding the persistence of racialized power in American life.

Terror and dignity

Luckett resists a narrative that portrays Black Mississippians solely as victims of oppression. Instead, he holds two historical truths in tension: the pervasive violence of white supremacy and the irrepressible vitality of Black life in its midst.

When asked if Black Mississippians lived in a totalitarian state, he pauses before answering: “To a certain extent they did, of course they did. And there was terror every day and they were afraid for their lives.” But he quickly adds a crucial qualifier: “Black Mississippians never lived their lives that way.”

It’s a delicate balance that he insists on maintaining. “Let’s be honest about the truth of the terror and the regime,” he says. “Let’s talk about lynching and this whole history of Jim Crow. But let’s also talk about the resistance to it. Let’s talk about the lives of great dignity that Black Mississippians lived.”

Luckett points to Jackson State University as supporting evidence. The institution moved to its current location in 1904, just 15 years after the creation of a state constitution that institutionalized Black disfranchisement and would be modeled throughout the South.

“What an inauspicious time to have a Black college opening a permanent campus here in Jackson, Mississippi,” Luckett says. “But they did it. And we’re still here. And we’re still one of the largest, most important HBCUs,” or historically Black colleges and universities.

This dual narrative—of systematic oppression and persistent resistance, of terror and dignity existing simultaneously—frames Luckett’s analysis of both the past and present.

There is also the fact that while civil rights sites were at the time frequently bombed by white supremacists, the headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations, or COFO—which was key to the resistance in Mississippi—still stands. The building is now a museum and educational space, with photos on the walls of activists including organizer Robert Moses in its meeting room.

Not just a Southern story

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Luckett’s argument is his rejection of the idea that authoritarianism represents a uniquely Southern, or even episodic, deviation within American democracy.

“I think authoritarianism undergirds world history,” he says. “There’s something in the human experience that is drawn to authoritarian regimes. Democracy is hard.” He gestures to our current political moment, when having agreeable conversations despite disagreement seems nearly impossible. “But that is what democracy is built on.”

The notion of Southern exceptionalism, Luckett argues, is a comforting fiction that allows the rest of America to avoid reckoning with its own history. “The South was always a function of this nation and reflected the worst impulses that have always been a part of America,” he says.

To illustrate the point, he moves easily from history to the present: George Floyd was murdered in Minnesota, not Mississippi; J.D. Vance, now vice president, emerged from Yale, not some provincial Southern institution; the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is largely Ivy League-trained. “Let’s start naming all the conservatives who are produced out of Ivy League schools,” he says. Invoking a colloquialism to underscore his point, he adds that even New Haven, Connecticut—home to Yale and emblem of Northern liberalism—“ain’t no racial Shangri-La. It is fraught with oppression.

“This notion in the American context of Southern exceptionalism—the rest of America likes to use that as an excuse to say the South was just a bad part of this country,” he says. “That is completely wrong. The South was always a function of this nation.”

Evolution of white resistance

Luckett’s book Joe T. Patterson and the White South’s Dilemma, about Mississippi’s attorney general from 1956 to 1969, offers a penetrating account of how white supremacy reinvented itself during and after the civil rights movement. Patterson, a staunch segregationist by both conviction and political onus, initially devoted his office to defending the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow. But after James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962, Patterson recognized that white supremacy would have to change tactics to survive.

“If white supremacy is going to maintain any power at all, we’ve got to change the way we do things,” Luckett says in explaining Patterson’s thinking. “We’ve got to bend but not break.” He summons a football metaphor to describe that thinking: Give up a field goal, but not a touchdown.

This wasn’t moderation in any meaningful sense. “These were not moderates,” Luckett emphasizes. Patterson and his ilk “knew that what they were doing was explicitly racist. They knew that what they were doing was meant to maintain as much white power as possible and to keep Black Mississippians in a second class.”

The shift to race-neutral language and sophisticated legal and economic mechanisms proved devastatingly effective, he argues. What emerged was what historian Joe Crespino called “practical segregationism”—a system cloaked in neutral rhetoric but designed to maintain racial hierarchy through bureaucratic means rather than overt violence.

The consequences of this transformation were profound and paradoxical. “We now have a generation of political leaders who don’t think they’re being racist,” Luckett argues. He points to current Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves as an example. “I don’t think Tate Reeves believes he’s racist. As governor of the state, he doesn’t think that his policies have disproportionately racist impacts. But that is the success of Joe Patterson.”

The architects of this system in the 1960s knew they were being intentionally racist. But their colorblind language was so successful that it now operates almost on autopilot, with leaders who can deny any racist intent while perpetuating racist outcomes.

Direct lineage

Luckett doesn’t just see these patterns as abstract historical parallels. He traces direct lines of descent. In 1970, when Mississippi public schools finally desegregated under court order, an estimated 10,000 students fled Jackson Public Schools overnight—40 percent of the student body. Sixty percent ended up at segregationist academies like Jackson Preparatory School and others operated by the white supremacist Citizens Council.

Luckett notes of some of those students, “Their parents are political leaders and economic leaders and religious leaders.” Among the ninth graders who left in 1970 was Phil Bryant, who would become Mississippi’s governor from 2012 to 2020.

“Phil Bryant and his politics are a function of what he was taught,” Luckett says. “For his most formative high school years, he was immersed in an explicitly racist segregationist school and graduated from there. Do we not think that his modern conservative politics are a function of how he was raised and how he was educated?

“We’re not that far removed from this history. We’re really not. These leaders, when we say they’re descended from them, we’re not talking a thousand years ago. We’re talking in the immediate lifetimes of people who are here today.”

The strategies that conservatives deploy today around voting rights, education policy and diversity initiatives, Luckett argues, were “crafted very recently, historically speaking, that they’ve learned from.”

Reversals and persistence

Are we now seeing a reversal, where the coded language and dog whistles of the post-civil rights era are giving way to explicit racism and open authoritarianism? Luckett’s answer is nuanced.

“Those impulses to be explicitly racist have always been there,” he says. “They didn’t disappear with this evolution.” He points to recent examples like the Goon Squad case in Rankin County, where rogue police officers terrorized and murdered members of the Black community. “We always have had those stories. They’ve never stopped.”

But he also notes important changes: “One great change is all those assholes in Rankin County are now in prison. That never would have happened,” he says, in earlier eras. Judge Carlton Reeves, a Black federal judge, presided over the case of James Craig Anderson, murdered on Ellis Avenue in Jackson in 2011.

“We are in a moment of time where historically we’re in the ebb and flow of progress,” Luckett says. “It feels like, man, we’re really ebbing. It feels like we’re ebbing big time. And we got some big problems.” He pauses. “But I don’t know that that’s any different than any other time in our history.”

This historical perspective doesn’t minimize the challenges of the current moment, when the federal government, which was often a check on white supremacist activities before, is now more often a willing participant. But it does place those challenges in a longer context—one that includes both regression and progress, often simultaneously.

The blueprint for resistance

If Mississippi offers a warning, it also offers inspiration. Luckett reserves his greatest enthusiasm for discussing the organizing tradition embodied by COFO, in whose former headquarters this interview was conducted. He traces the philosophy back to Ella Baker at the founding of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in 1960. Baker told the young organizers to focus on “group-centered leadership rather than a leader-centered group.”

“It was a radically ‘small-d’ democratic vision for organizing,” Luckett explains. “Grassroots uplift, empowering people in community, and listening to everybody.” COFO meetings were famously long—five, six, seven hours—”because everybody was going to be heard.”

Bob Moses, the architect of COFO’s organization, embodied that ethos, and Luckett clearly admires him. “This was a quiet dude. Intellectual, brilliant dude, but kind of nerdy.” Moses’s method was patient, participatory and profoundly subversive. Entering local communities, he told residents not that he would lead them, but that they already possessed the capacity to lead themselves. “You guys have the power to change this thing,” Luckett says, channeling what Moses would say. “Let us help you develop your own leadership tools so that you can change this thing.”

The work COFO accomplished in its most intensive three years (1962-1965) was, Luckett argues, “the most important organizing work in the modern civil rights movement in this state.”

Luckett is clear-eyed about what that required: courage. “The distinction between allyship versus activism is the courage to do something,” he says. “In the face of totalitarianism, a dangerous place, willing to risk your lives and knowing that risking your life meant you are also risking the lives of the people you love.”

He returns often to the example of Fannie Lou Hamer—the sharecropper who rose to national prominence as a moral force of the movement and died nearly destitute. “She couldn’t keep a job because of her activism,” Luckett notes. “She was largely forgotten by the national movement after 1965. At a Fannie Lou Hamer Day in 1975, as she was dying, almost no one showed up. But at her funeral in 1977, everyone was there for the photo ops.”

The lesson extends beyond Hamer herself. The work of transformation, Luckett insists, is sustained not by spectacle but by persistence. “The local activists never left,” he says. “They were still there doing this work. And so that’s the type of work we need. We don’t need everybody. We just need enough.”

Reasons for hope

Despite the ebb in progress Luckett describes, he maintains a stubborn optimism. He invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line: “The arc of history bends towards justice,” adding, “It doesn’t always—sometimes it feels like it bends up and down. But world history has told us that that is essentially true. We are freer today than we were 50 or 60 years ago.”

Sixty years ago, walking through the front doors of the COFO building “would have meant you were an activist, and you were risking your life,” Luckett notes. “Something has changed.”

He also finds seeds of change in demographics. “As the demographics of this nation change, as the state of Mississippi becomes blacker and browner, there will be change. The question is, are we going to be prepared? Are young people going to be ready to step up and make that change?”

Yet Luckett is under no illusions about the stakes, or the difficulty. “What is our moral imperative?” he asks. “It’s to stand up to that power and to speak truth to that power as best we can in the ways that we can. And I don’t think that any of us can do this all by ourselves. We’re not going to. But all of us can do something and all of us can probably do something a little bit more than what we’re doing.”

He adds a sobering caveat about the current moment: “Do we have the courage? It is scary. Do I say the same things on Twitter that I would have said 10 years ago? Absolutely not. You are losing your job today.”

It’s a reminder that moral courage has costs—and that those costs shape what resistance looks like in practice.

The mirror and the lesson

Near the end of our conversation, Luckett returns to the metaphor of Mississippi as a mirror. He mentions historian James Cobb’s book The Most Southern Place on Earth about the Mississippi Delta and its famous line: “The Mississippi Delta is as much a part of the world as it is a world apart.”

“The argument he’s making,” Luckett says, “is that everything you see in the history of the Mississippi Delta is a product of America. It’s built by America. It’s built by this nation with intentionality.” Federal investment after the Civil War, the rebuilding of railroad lines, the draining of swamps, the building of levees—all of it required massive American effort and resources. “What he’s saying is Mississippi ain’t any different than any other part of this country,” Luckett says. “Mississippi is a mirror, is a lens, you know, to look at ourselves, to examine American history.”

He acknowledges that it can be uncomfortable to look into that mirror. It shows us that authoritarianism isn’t an aberration but a persistent temptation. It reveals that racist systems don’t disappear—they adapt and evolve, becoming more sophisticated and harder to identify. It demonstrates that progress is never linear or permanent.

But that mirror also reflects something else: the persistent courage of people who resisted, who built institutions under seemingly impossible circumstances, who organized communities from the ground up, who kept fighting even when others looked away.

COFO was a collaboration of otherwise competing activist organizations: the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other local groups, representatives of which began meeting in this building on Jackson’s J.R. Lynch Street in 1963.

“The blueprint is there,” Luckett says simply. “We’ve got to have people who are committed to it. And it’s hard. It’s a lot of work.”

As we wrap up our conversation, students begin filtering into the COFO center. Luckett greets them warmly, introducing himself and explaining the center’s work. It’s a small moment, but it feels significant—another generation learning about the history of this place, about what was accomplished here, about what might be possible again.

Jackson State opened its campus in 1904, in the midst of pervasive oppression. It’s still here. COFO organized the most important civil rights work in Mississippi from 1962 to 1965. Its building still stands, as both a testament and a teaching facility. The work continues.

In Luckett’s view, all that is required is enough activists to foster change. Not everyone--just enough people with enough courage. In 1904, in 1962, in 2025, that equation remains the same, he says, and the mirror of Mississippi continues to reflect how state activists responded to authoritarianism, the last time around.

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Image: Civil rights activist mural on wall of former COFO headquarters (via COFO Civil Rights Education Center)