The decades-long failure to prosecute Killen and other arch-criminals of segregationist terrorism was bound up with political decisions made at the highest levels of the American ruling elite, and above all, the incorporation into the Republican Party of the Southern racists and Christian fundamentalists who now comprise the bulk of its popular base. The author of this policy was Richard Nixon, whose infamous “Southern strategy” called for displacing the Democratic Party, dominant in the South for a century, by making coded appeals to the white majority, using “law-and-order” demagogy as a surrogate for overt racism. Over the next three decades, the Republican Party came to dominate the politics of the South, first at the federal level, then increasingly at the state level. In Mississippi, the state’s two longtime senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, are both Democrats-turned-Republicans. Three of the state’s four congressmen are Republicans, including Charles Pickering Jr., who represents the district that includes Neshoba County and Philadelphia.

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