* 1961 – American civil rights movement: Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for " disturbing the peace " after disembarking from their bus.

** Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist and Vice Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, addresses the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention, challenging the all-white Mississippi delegation.

* May 24 – American civil rights movement: Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for " disturbing the peace " after disembarking from their bus.

Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Political Transformation of the American South ( University Press of Mississippi ; 2010 ); 176 pages.

After the Freedom Rides, local black leaders in Mississippi such as Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and others asked SNCC to help register black voters and to build community organizations that could win a share of political power in the state.

White opposition to black voter registration was so intense in Mississippi that Freedom Movement activists concluded that all of the state's civil rights organizations had to unite in a coordinated effort to have any chance of success.

In mid-1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ( MFDP ) was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi's all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention of that year as not representative of all Mississippians.

* Cassy, an escaped slave who accompanied Flashman up the Mississippi ( Flash for Freedom!

* Mrs Mandeville, a Mississippi planter's wife ( Flash for Freedom!

* Victoria Gray Adams, the first black woman to run for U. S. Senate from Mississippi, as well as co-chair with Fannie Lou Hamer in founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, lived here near the end of her life.

J. Todd Moye, author of Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, said " Sunflower County has always been overwhelmingly rural " and that, at the end of the 20th century, the county had four " main towns of any size.

Andrew Goodman ( November 23, 1943, – June 21, 1964 ) was one of three American civil rights activists murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1964, Goodman volunteered along with fellow activist Mickey Schwerner to work on the " Freedom Summer " project of the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE ) to register blacks to vote in Mississippi.

Todd J. Moye, author of Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986, said that the white residents of Drew " traditionally been regarded as the most recalcitrant in the count on racial matters.

In conjunction with the 1963 elections, civil rights leaders organized a statewide " Freedom Ballot ," a mock election that demonstrated both the state-wide pattern of voting rights discrimination and the strong desire of Mississippi blacks for full citizenship.

Forrest County was also a center of activity for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ( MFDP ) which sent a slate of delegates to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white, pro-segregation delegates elected by the regular party in primaries in which African Americans could not participate.

The Freedom Summer relied heavily on college students ; hundreds of students engaged in registering African Americans to vote, teaching in “ Freedom Schools ”, and organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

In the fall of 1964, student activists, some of whom had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for civil rights causes.

SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years.

Split badly during the recent presidential election into almost equally divided camps of party loyalists and independents, the Democratic party in Mississippi is currently a wreck.

With a Democratic administration, party patronage would normally begin to flow to Mississippi if it had held its Democratic solidarity in the November election.

He was educated at Transylvania University in Lexington, where his classmates included five future Democratic senators ( Solomon Downs of Louisiana, Jesse Bright of Indiana, George W. Jones of Iowa, Edward Hannegan of Indiana, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi ).

Both before and after his time in the Pierce administration, he served as a Democratic U. S. Senator representing the State of Mississippi.

He was selected as one of six presidential electors for the 1844 presidential election and campaigned effectively throughout Mississippi for the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk

The national Party's liberal leaders supported a compromise in which the white delegation and the MFDP would have an even division of the seats ; Johnson was concerned that, while the regular Democrats of Mississippi would probably vote for Goldwater anyway, if the Democratic Party rejected the regular Democrats, he would lose the Democratic Party political structure that he needed to win in the South.

Eventually, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther and black civil rights leaders ( including Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, and Bayard Rustin ) worked out a compromise with MFDP leaders: the MFDP would receive two non-voting seats on the floor of the Convention ; the regular Mississippi delegation would be required to pledge to support the party ticket ; and no future Democratic convention would accept a delegation chosen by a discriminatory poll.

Despite the landslide victory, Johnson, who carried the South as a whole in the election, lost the Deep South states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, the first time a Democratic candidate had done so since Reconstruction.

After returning to Mississippi to live, in 1972 Meredith ran for the US Senate against the Democratic senator James Eastland, who had been the incumbent for 29 years.

In those days, winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election in Mississippi, and Eastland returned to the Senate on January 3, 1943.

In 1963, Eastland campaigned in Mississippi for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Paul B. Johnson, Jr., of Hattiesburg, the son of the governor who had first appointed Eastland to the Senate.

Eastland recognized that Nixon would handily carry Mississippi and did not endorse the national Democratic candidate, George McGovern of South Dakota.

The Red Shirts, a paramilitary organization that acted as an arm of the Democratic Party, was active in Vicksburg and other Mississippi areas.

A polarizing figure who dominated the Second Party System in the 1820s and 1830s, as president he dismantled the Second Bank of the United States and initiated ethnic cleansing and forced relocation of Native American tribes from the Southeast to west of the Mississippi River.

James Charles Evers ( born September 11, 1922 ), the older brother of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, is a leading civil rights spokesman within the Republican Party in his native Mississippi.

* Green Party of Mississippi ()

The Mississippi Natural Law Party nominated the Socialist Party presidential ticket of Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander, though they were ultimately barred from appearing on the Mississippi ballot due to a legal controversy surrounding the deadline hour for filing their presidential electors.

* Mississippi Libertarian Party

At the national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey the MFDP claimed the seats for delegates for Mississippi, not on the grounds of the Party rules, but because the official Mississippi delegation had been elected by a primary conducted under Jim Crow laws in which blacks were excluded because of poll taxes, literacy tests, and even violence against black voters.

McCarthy, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, philanthropist Stewart Mott, the Conservative Party of New York State, the Mississippi Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party, were the plaintiffs in Buckley, becoming key players in killing campaign spending limits and public financing of political campaigns.

* Farmers, the Populist Party, and Mississippi ( 1870-1900 ).

This involved the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ( MFDP ).

With participation in the regular Mississippi Democratic Party blocked by segregationists, COFO built on the success of the Freedom Ballot by formally establishing the MFDP in April 1964 as a non-discriminatory, non-exclusionary rival to the regular party organization.

The MFDP hoped to replace the regulars as the officially-recognized Democratic Party organization in Mississippi by winning the Mississippi seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention for a slate of delegates elected by disenfranchised black Mississippians and white sympathizers.

The Credentials Committee televised its proceedings, which allowed the nation to see and hear the testimony of the MFDP delegates, particularly the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, who gave a moving and evocative portrayal of her hard brutalized life as a sharecropper on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta and the retaliation inflicted on her for trying to register to vote.

MFDP leader and Mississippi NAACP President Aaron Henry stated:

When all but three of the " regular " Mississippi delegates left because they refused to support Johnson against Goldwater, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic northern delegates and took the seats vacated by the Mississippi delegates, only to be removed by the national Party.

Though the MFDP failed to unseat the regulars at the convention, they did succeed in dramatizing the violence and injustice by which the white power structure governed Mississippi and disenfranchised black citizens.

The MFDP continued as an alternate for several years, and many of the people associated with it continued to press for civil rights in Mississippi.

With participation in the regular Mississippi Democratic Party blocked by segregationists, COFO established the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ( MFDP ) as a non-exclusionary rival to the regular party organization with the intention of having the MFDP recognized by the national Democratic Party as the legitimate party organization in Mississippi.