Mar 25, 2026
Mississippi government once embraced the Klan for its help in weakening the Black vote. Today, it uses legislation.
The KKK didn't beat the system in Mississippi. They were the system. And that's why what we're fighting today still matters.
This week, workers at the Mississippi Department of Public Safety found a suitcase in a closet while packing up to move. Inside were materials tied to the Ku Klux Klan: a robe, a White Knights handbook, charters, recruitment documents, and what appears to be a membership ledger. We don't yet know how it got there. But we're not exactly shocked that it did.
At its peak in the 1920s, the Klan claimed influence over governors, U.S. senators, and dozens of members of Congress. In Mississippi, that influence wasn't abstract. Mississippi elected Theodore Bilbo — a man who openly acknowledged his Klan membership — as both governor and U.S. senator. His statue still stands in the Mississippi Capitol, in the same building where the Legislative Black Caucus meets.
It wasn't just politicians. When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in 1964, it was Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price (a Klansman) who arrested them and held them in custody while others prepared to kill them. Across the South, sheriffs, police chiefs, mayors, and judges either looked the other way or participated directly.
They didn't need to overthrow the government. They were the government.
And this isn't ancient history. Mississippi Klansman James Ford Seale wasn't convicted for the 1964 kidnapping and murder of teenagers Henry Dee and Charles Moore until 2007. Local authorities had dropped the original charges in 1964 because some of them were complicit. Someone born the year that verdict came down is just now in college.
The reason Mississippi's government became so entangled with the Klan was simple: control of the vote. Keeping political power in the hands of one group, and one group only. That effort didn't disappear. It adapted.
Because violence can only suppress people for so long. But when disenfranchisement is written into law, it can last for generations.
That's the effort we're seeing today. The parallels are hard to ignore.
When Mississippi Republican lawmakers block efforts to expand ballot access, or insist that laws like the SHIELD Act "aren't meant to disenfranchise anyone," we've seen this story before — and we know exactly how it ends.
Mississippi has a long history of laws justified in the name of "election integrity" that ultimately made it harder for certain people to vote. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Administrative hurdles designed to look neutral but applied in ways that weren't.
The SHIELD Act raises those same concerns — adding new requirements in response to a problem with little documented evidence of occurring at scale, and creating additional barriers more likely to burden some voters than others.
The Klan's violence was brutal and undeniable. But it was also purposeful. It wasn't just about hatred — it was about control. About making sure Black Mississippians stayed "in their place," and that place was as far from the ballot box as possible.
Intentional or not, some lawmakers are continuing that mission today: the idea that government power can and should be used to decide who belongs in the electorate and who doesn't. That sacred rights can be infringed if it protects their power, influence, and "way of life".
That blueprint didn't just leave a suitcase of Klan materials in a government building. It put people in those robes into government itself.
The Klan monitored and suppressed Black voting. The Citizens' Council used economic pressure to keep Black Mississippians off the rolls. The Sovereignty Commission used taxpayer dollars to surveil civil rights workers.
They didn't call it disenfranchisement either.
You don't have to wear a robe to follow that blueprint. You just have to be willing to use the machinery of government against the people it's supposed to serve... and not care too much about who gets caught in it.
Mississippi Democrats care.
That's why we fight.