Southern Cultures and the Journal of Southern History; he has received prizes such as the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. His current research includes an oral history project with the first Black police officers after Jim Crow segregation as well as a cultural history of the Taser.
Randolph applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Mississippi Law drops readers into a local fight against America's regime of Jim Crow apartheid during the 1950s. In some ways I think it provides a fairly accurate snapshot of the book. The ingenuity of everyday people. A scope of violence too easily described as "segregation." Activist recognition of the police as part of a system of inequality. These are all historic truths I emphasize on page 99 and throughout the book. Yet this page should also leave readers wanting more.Learn more about Mississippi Law at The University of North Carolina Press website.
Page 99 falls in Chapter 5, “The Cattleman’s Massive Resistance.” This chapter establishes the connections between new forms of rural economic power and so-called massive white resistance, the racist fight against a new phase of Black freedom struggles. Page 99 begins in Columbus, Mississippi, a small city by rural Southern standards. And there we meet two important activists, Emmett Stringer and Flora Ghist Stringer. The page covers the years in their lives between World War II and ends in 1954, the year the US Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Black Mississippians like the Stringers drove civil rights movements in a time before civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. took center stage. The page shows us a world of possible futures. Will white elites simply implement Brown and desegregate the schools? Will Black Mississippians be allowed to continue to register to vote in larger numbers? Will segregationists find enough pro-segregation Black leaders to attack civil rights activists on the government’s behalf? The page ends in a moment when the future was far from certain.
None of these imaginable outcomes came to pass, and so page 99 should leave folks wanting more. Readers who continue in Chapter 5 and the rest of the book will find how the everyday campaigns against Black human rights came from all directions. Bankers canceled activist lines of credit. Insurance brokers refused to renew activist policies. Civil rights activists turned on each other. Police and courts amplified their criminalization of Black life in historic proportions. And yes, as the chapter title implies, Mississippi’s beef cattlemen frequently led the effort. One created the global white Citizens’ Council movement. Another expanded the state police force, a central topic of the rest of the book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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