Civil rights time line

March 28, 1938 – In a speech in Georgia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had “always felt that he was unduly constrained by the restrictive nature of southern democracy and the conservative Congresses it produced,” equated the southern “feudal” system with the “Fascist system” in Nazi Germany. “If you believe in the one, you lean to the other,” he said.

February 1939 – FDR gave his new Civil Rights Section in The U.S. Department of Justice the job of investigating reported civil rights violations, and federal investigators fanned out across the South.


February 2, 1953: Setting the stage for implementing President Truman's executive order to desegregate the U.S. military, President Eisenhower declares: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Services.”

Summer 1961 – The first Freedom Riders roll across the South.

October 1, 1962 – James Meredith breaks the color barrier and becomes the first African American student to enroll at The University of Mississippi. Ensuing violence paralyzes the campus, and claims two lives. For weeks leading up to this event, the Jackson Daily News had defended Governor Ross Barnett and attacked anyone who seemed remotely moderate toward the cause of civil rights. In fact, over the previous three weeks since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black ordered that Meredith be admitted, the Jackson Daily News’s coverage had become increasingly confrontational, showing an unshaken belief in segregation and an absolute belief that Governor Barnett would resist federal mandates to allow Meredith’s enrollment.

June 11, 1963 – Deeply concerned that disturbing images of violence against blacks in the Deep South would adversely affect America's standing in the world at a time of delicate negotiations with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act of 1963. It would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed during the Johnson Administration the year after President Kennedy's death, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

June 15, 1964 – College students from around the country are trained in voter registration procedures, forming freedom schools, and Mississippi Democratic Party politics in preparation for Freedom Summer, 1964. The Jackson Daily News, under a two-column headline on a wire service story, reports: “D-Day Looms for Mississippi,” comparing the coming “invasion” by students with the wartime landing of U.S. and allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in the fight against Nazi Germany.

June 19, 1964 – The Freedom Summer story moved to page one of the Jackson Daily News, below the fold, as a three-column piece by Ed McCusker of the Associated Press served as an advance on the coming of the students. Headlined “First Rider Wave Due on Weekend,” the story led with how a reinforced Mississippi Highway Patrol and new state laws governing civil rights activities would greet the first wave of as many as 1,000 students who were coming to Mississippi “to work among Negroes.”

 

June 20, 1964 – Just as the students begin to arrive in Mississippi, three civil rights workers are reported missing in Neshoba County, where they had traveled from Meridian in order to investigate a reported church bombing.

June 21, 1964 –  The Jackson Daily News first report on the disappearance of the civil rights workers was headlined “Army Occupation of State Feared,” a four-column story with no byline that ran at the top of page A1. Various elements of the story would run on page one for the rest of the month, some un-bylined, some staff written and others carrying a “Special” tag. 

August 4, 1964 – The bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner are recovered from an earthen dam in rural Neshoba County, the victims of hate killings by members of the Ku Klux Klan.