Justin Randolph, "Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026)

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Michael Stout
Guest: Justin Randolph (Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University)
Book Discussed: Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026)
Date: May 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Justin Randolph’s new book, Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside. The conversation delves into the history of policing in rural Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, exploring how law enforcement evolved, the tension between racial authoritarianism and liberal law and order, and the unique local and state dynamics that shaped policing away from urban centers. Notably, the discussion ties in Randolph’s fieldwork, local activism, and archival discoveries, offering both a scholarly and deeply personal take on the subject.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Scope of the Book

• A Focus Beyond Urban and Postwar Narratives: Unlike most recent histories that focus on cities or the post-WWII era, Randolph’s study examines the rural Jim Crow South and the state-level history of policing.
  • “First, by looking at police reform during Jim Crow, we have to grapple, I think seriously with notions of police change and so called improvement even during the period of notorious American racial authoritarianism... And second, yeah, the state is an entire level of jurisdiction that is frequently missing, I think from police histories.” (Randolph, 02:35)
• Project Origin: Inspired by an oral history interview with a Black farm family in Clay County, MS, Randolph uncovers an incident involving a drive-by shooting targeting civil rights activists and a mysterious Livestock Theft Bureau agent.
  • “...all the layers are there, right? You know, a black farm family in, in the movement, some weird state police stuff. It send me down all these questions like, you know, when did state policemen come to be? What role did they have in, in rural life?” (Randolph, 04:45)

2. Research Methods and Community Ties

• Building from Oral Histories to Archives: Each incident demands seeking out unique sources—family archives, organizational records, local newspapers—often stitched together by happenstance and the interconnectedness of families and activists in rural Mississippi.

  • “Each sort of incident has its own archive. And a certain way when you get this close to the ground, you know, no, these, this family in Mississippi had no sort of footprint, historiographic footprint...” (Randolph, 05:34)

• Local Knowledge from Community Historians: Elton Dean, Jr. played a pivotal role as a family historian, helping Randolph trace the history of Black landownership through oral interviews and family records.

  • “He gave hours of his time and copies of family records to which I could paint, you know, a really changing world of black farm owners in a period of unprecedented decline.” (Randolph, 10:23)

3. Activism and Contemporary Connections

• Mano Amiga and Bail Reform: While writing the book, Randolph was influenced by contemporary criminal justice activism in Central Texas and the power—and challenges—of local reform efforts.
  • “I lived a fuller life in many regards because I was so close to the activists working in these criminal justice nonprofits and change making spaces...” (Randolph, 12:33)
  • “They're winning all the time. I mean, you know... The revolution has not come...but it is the kind of thing that made me really appreciate both the failures too and what they tried to do, what we tried to do, and the victories when they happen.” (Randolph, 15:24)

4. Conceptual Innovations: ‘Policing’s Hinterland’ & Southern Exceptionalism

• Policing’s Hinterland: Randolph introduces the concept of the “hinterland”—the obscure, rural spaces where law enforcement operates outside public view, perpetuating abuse and lawlessness within the law.

  • “The hiding spaces which are constructed where these abuses and lawlessness of law enforcement occur. And policing's autocracy is the other, which is sort of the functional lawlessness that lived within the law and within the police in these sort of hinterland spaces.” (Randolph, 17:31)
  • Referencing Ida B. Wells’ “shine the light of truth” as a long-standing activist strategy.

• On Southern Exceptionalism's Limits: While Mississippi is uniquely shaped by its demographics and history, Randolph argues its policing practices are tied to national trends and cross-state flows, not merely Southern anomalies.

  • “Mississippi...is also a sort of a place where currents are flowing through back and forth through time and space from other portions of the nation.” (Randolph, 21:20)

5. Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol

• Institutional History: The book closely traces the creation and evolution of the Mississippi state police (Highway Safety Patrol), rooted in paramilitary traditions stretching back to militias, the National Guard, and early 20th-century riot squads. Initially unpopular, the Patrol’s legitimacy grew with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.
  • “It will be called the Highway Safety Patrol...it's part of a much deeper history that I try to get out of the book around paramilitary policing, which I think of as sort of like the militia form, if you want to do it that way.” (Randolph, 24:35)
  • Initially, local elites resisted centralized policing because it could disrupt local power structures.
  • “They don't want to be policed. So newspaper men in the, you know, the 1940s are calling them Nazis...But it all changes with the civil rights movement...” (Randolph, 28:40)

6. Tension Between Racial Authoritarianism and Liberal Law and Order

• Jim Crow as Laboratory: Randolph develops the idea that Jim Crow policing was not only repressive but also a laboratory for merging “racial authoritarianism and liberal law and order.”
  • “This is one of the book’s most important conclusions...the interconnectedness of liberals and conservatism on the question of policing and the carceral state buildup...” (Randolph, 31:57)
  • He draws on Naomi Murakawa’s idea that liberals aimed not to abolish racial violence but to channel it legally and bureaucratically.

7. Case Studies

• Leroy Miller: A 1947 incident involving a Black man falsely accused and “protected” by the state police flashes the tensions of “Mississippi law”—protection from lynching but victimization by state-sanctioned imprisonment.

  • “In one letter, hoping, begging for NAACP intervention in the case, someone who was too afraid to even sign their own name to the letter said, you know, you know, that Leroy Miller hasn't got a chance in Mississippi law.” (Randolph, 38:13)

• T.V. Birdsong—‘The J. Edgar Hoover of Mississippi’: Iconic founder and leader of the Highway Patrol, Birdsong embodied the deep lineage of paramilitary policing, with family roots in settler militias, and cross-state ties with Texas Rangers.

  • “He's such a piece of work is, man, I'm telling you...He is in the state police business for, like, 50 years.” (Randolph, 39:37)
  • “There's this like Texas Ranger, Mississippi State Trooper connection...” (Randolph, 42:23)

• Cows and the Livestock Theft Bureau: Unexpectedly, the story of rural policing is also the story of cattle—rising cattle farming, class change, and a “cow police” force which became a vector for expanding state police power and a conservative base of resistance to reform.

  • “It is the cow police. It is a group of people, it's usually a small group. They're plain clothes and they're about protecting the bovine capital which sort of increases into just all of the capital intensive pieces of farming.” (Randolph, 44:36)

• Cattlemen’s Massive Resistance: The White Citizens Council, a “country club Klan,” was founded by cattlemen and police, showing how modern reform efforts in policing were linked to white supremacist organizing.

  • “The White Citizens Council was founded by a cattleman and police officer in Mississippi, which was something I didn't know before I did this research.” (Randolph, 50:19)

8. Resistance and Abolitionist Reform

• COFO v. Rainey Case: Civil rights groups sued every law enforcement officer in Mississippi, demanding that federal courts appoint special functionaries to replace local sheriffs. This movement-wide lawsuit exemplified an early abolitionist vision that went beyond reform.
  • “...the case is of course, struck down very quickly...but it becomes much more than a court case. It becomes sort of a movement opportunity where all the people who have, you know, been impacted by law enforcement in Mississippi during Freedom Summer...have an opportunity to write affidavits and send them to the court...” (Randolph, 55:21)

9. Elijah Pierce and the Power of Art

• Book’s Epilogue & Visual Representation: Randolph centers the end of the book on Elijah Pierce’s woodcut, “Elijah Escapes the Mob,” artfully rendering how policing sometimes “protects” Black Mississippians from lynch mobs—only to then victimize them through the legal system.
  • “For me, it just hit me on such a. A rabbit hole to discover the life of Elijah Pierce...He's clearly thinking, it seemed to me...about some of the same themes, intentions that I saw recurring in the work as I wrote it.” (Randolph, 62:35)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Tension in Reform:

  • “The revolution has not come. I'm sorry to tell you, Michael, but you know, but it is, it is the kind of thing that made me really appreciate both the failures too and what they tried to do, what we tried to do, and the victories when they happen.” (Randolph, 15:24)

• On Southern Exceptionalism:

  • “Mississippi...belong[s] to a whole nation full of lies. Right. And I really want to, I Want to emphasize how Mississippi is also a sort of a place where currents are flowing through back and forth through time and space from other portions of, of of the nation.” (Randolph, 21:20)

• On Policing’s Hinterland as a Heuristic:

  • “It's a rural history of places, events, and people that were and will remain outside public perception. Mostly it's. It's a history of how law enforcement constantly remade frontiers in a certain way, especially around, like, land theft.” (Randolph, 18:27)

• On Law, Order, and Violence:

  • “They wanted to stop lynching...and they wanted the courts to do all the dirty work. They wanted something that's far more familiar in our notion of law and order.” (Randolph, 35:29)

• On the Livestock Theft Bureau:

  • “What on earth is a Livestock Theft Bureau agent? And it is the cow police. It is a group of people...about protecting...the bovine capital which sort of increases into just all of the capital intensive pieces of farming.” (Randolph, 44:36)

• On Elijah Pierce and Visual Testimony:

  • “For me, it just hit me on such a. A rabbit hole to discover the life of Elijah Pierce, who in the art world is rather well known and appreciated...He seemed to capture in his art and the story of his life as well. So much of what...had transpired in the book that I really wanted to show more people the work of Elijah [Pierce].” (Randolph, 62:35)

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Key Timestamps

• Project Genesis & Scope: 02:01–05:03
• Research, The Deans, and Family History: 08:05–12:18
• Texas Activism & Mano Amiga: 12:33–16:59
• Policing’s Hinterland & Theoretical Approaches: 17:31–21:00
• Southern Exceptionalism: 21:00–24:35
• Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol History: 24:35–31:31
• Jim Crow Policing’s Two Faces: 31:57–36:06
• Leroy Miller’s Case: 36:21–39:20
• T.V. Birdsong’s Legacy: 39:37–44:02
• The Cows & Livestock Theft Bureau: 44:21–49:59
• Cattleman’s Massive Resistance: 50:19–54:15
• COFO v. Rainey, Black Resistance, Abolitionist Reform: 54:15–60:31
• Elijah Pierce’s Art & Book’s Conclusion: 61:02–65:05

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Closing Sentiment

Justin Randolph’s Mississippi Law provides a dynamic synthesis of grassroots oral history, scholarly research, and theoretical innovation, reshaping our understanding of Jim Crow, policing, and reform—both in the rural South and the nation as a whole. The episode offers a thoughtful reflection on the persistence of racial authoritarianism intertwined with legal reform, the challenges of grassroots activism, and the enduring impact of history on present struggles for justice.

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For further exploration:

• Mississippi Law is now available from University of North Carolina Press.
• Recommended reading: the work of Naomi Murakawa, Amna Akbar, Ida B. Wells, and Howard Zinn’s New Abolitionists.
• Look into Elijah Pierce’s powerful visual art for further historical context.

Transcript

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[Justin Randolph]

Network

[Michael Stout]

hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stout, and today I'm here with Justin Randolph to talk about his new book, Mississippi Law, Policing, and Reform in America's Jim Crow Countryside, which is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Justin Randolph is an assistant professor of history at Texas A and M University, and his other research projects include histories of police desegregation, rural debt peonage, the Taser, and911. His writing has appeared in scholarly outlets like the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures. He has also written for popular outlets such as the Washington Post, the Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Mississippi center for Investigative Reporting. He has has received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and prizes from both the Southern Historical association and Agricultural History Society. Justin welcome to the show.

[Justin Randolph]

Michael thanks for having me.

[Michael Stout]

Of course, of course. Let's start with the title Mississippi Law, Policing, and Reform in America's Jim Crow Countryside. To me, this title makes at least two big conceptual claims right at the start that I really appreciate. One, this book covers an earlier period, the Jim Crow era, than a lot of recent histories of policing, including my own, and so many of these seem clustered in the post World War II era. And second, it focuses on a state rather than a city or a federal government. So can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at this project and that focus?

[Justin Randolph]

Sure. Well, absolutely. Let me say up front that two of the signals you're picking up on are intended. There are two big interventions I hope to make in the book. First, by looking at police reform during Jim Crow, we have to grapple, I think seriously with notions of police change and so called improvement even during the period of notorious American racial authoritarianism that runs somewhere between 1890 and 1970. And second, yeah, the state is an entire level of jurisdiction that is frequently missing, I think from police histories. And the state police is a major focus of this book, from the image of the COVID on the COVID to the many histories from the bottom up that occur inside. But you know, to get to how I got to the project and its focus, you know, one of those stories that I tell in the book, it appears really in chapter seven, so it's sort of buried in the middle is the origin story of the entire project. In 2012, I was conducting oral history interviews for NEH funded project named Breaking New Ground. It's for, it's to collect interviews with black landowning farmers in the American South. And one day I found myself in Clay County, Mississippi, sitting on the front porch talking to a farm family who told me about a drive by shooting that targeted them in August 1965. They'd been too young at the time to sort of understand everything that was going on, but they understood it to be retaliation for the family's role in the civil rights movement, sort of long term engagement through various outlets and organizations. And when I accessed the larger archive of this event, this moment in time, I found that it hadn't been like a random act of white violence. And in fact the people tried to kill, you know, generations of a black farm family because a state policeman had died during a civil rights protest the day before. And this was not any, just any state policeman. This was actually a lot. Something weird called the Livestock Theft Bureau agent, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but. Yeah, so, but all the layers are there, right? You know, a black farm family in, in the movement, some weird state police stuff. It send me down all these questions like, you know, when did state policemen come to be? What role did they have in, in rural life?

[Michael Stout]

Right, right. Well, let's, let's stay on that a little bit. Now. I really like the idea that like you start with an oral history and that sends you down a path that is kind of toward new scholarly terrain. The state itself as like A conceptual. As a jurisdiction, I guess, among other things. So could you talk a little bit more about how, how the book came together as a series of archives, you know, like, ranging from oral histories to other stuff. Was there just, Just tell me a little bit more about that.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, I mean, great question. Gonna be really difficult to answer with any sort of justice, but, you know, it really. Each sort of incident has its own archive. And a certain way when you get this close to the ground, you know, no, these, this family in Mississippi had no sort of footprint, historiographic footprint, you know, I, I wouldn't find them in any published work. And so, you know, it started from sort of temporal in this sense and then like expanding to, okay, so the activist organizations working in the, in the moment under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations, including the most popular, well known SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Core Congress of Racial Equality, you know, stuff like that. So you search out the archives, there's supplemented by newspapers sort of stitching together because this event actually does make national news. It's somewhere in the Washington Post, I think, the next day. And it's a weird, it's a really weird, like, instance of how the archive gets made because in part, this archive only exists. And I'm able to learn so much more about this instance of the state trooper almost being killed and stuff like that, because, you know, and I even slipped and said he was killed. He died. He died of, of congestive heart failure, actually a long term thing. And he died because, I guess you could say, or at least the state claimed one of the activists when the cop yanked the snick button off of him. You know, he sort of like twisted to resist him and that just facilitated the guy's death. But the, the activist was the son of a United States congressman from Wisconsin. And so that's the kind of like happenstance in this particular case that like really built out a much bigger case that ended up creating an archive. And I was able to interview the, the activist at the time, you know, just a few years ago, Michael Royce, who has a, a really interesting career and was, you know, caught up in, in the movement, like many folks were to come down to a part of Mississippi he had never been to or heard from before.

[Michael Stout]

Okay. Okay, great. Now, am I mistaken? This incident involves the deans, Elton Dean Jr. And senior. Is that right?

[Justin Randolph]

Well, they live nearby, as a matter of fact, and the deans actually put me in touch with the Farm family who led me to the story in the first place. But I'm happy to talk about the deans.

[Michael Stout]

Well, that was my next question. Yeah, I wanted to be clear about where we. Where we were at in this thing, because one of the first things I always read when I read a book is the acknowledgments. And in your acknowledgements, you mentioned two things that I thought were really interesting. One is the story about the deans and how they had done a certain kind of research that you were building on, which I thought was really evocative. And I wanted to know more. And also you, you, you know, you mentioned this thing. You were like, Google Mono, Amiga, and Nicole Hayes, Examiner. And so I did, and I wanted to know, what is the story about successfully challenging a ban on public bail hearings in Caldwell County, Texas? Why does that belong among a list of your neighbors in Central Texas? There's so much of the buried in the acknowledgments. Tell me more.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, thanks for reading them. It means the world to know that the folks who made this possible, like, have had eyes on them, frankly. Yeah. So the deans. And it's funnier even for speaking verbally versus reading the book, because the Elton Deans readers would appreciate better because though their father and son, junior and Senior, they actually spelled their last name differently, but pronounce it the same way. And this is like, I've always thought of as a beautiful artifact of the family's interaction with. With the state and a certain type of modernity. Right. That doesn't sort of. You can't get away with that in the city the way that you can on the farm, that kind of thing. But, yeah, so truly, some of the kindest, most welcoming people I encountered during this research, also interviewed them during Breaking New Ground. They're also, I'm sorry to say, they were some of the hardest to keep up with. They're no longer farming. Elton Senior died, you know, shortly after we interviewed, and Elton Jr. Moved off the farm. So, Elton, if you're listening to this or if anyone who knows Elton ever hears this, I hope you'll put me back in touch with him. But now, you know, the Dean's own land as black landowning farmers in Clay county for generations back to the 1870s. And Elton Jr. Had come back to his home community after living the corporate life. He had gone to college and worked at Monsanto, actually the corporate sort of farming giant that many of us know. You know, he had modernized the farm. He'd gotten involved with cattle farming in a way that he, his family hadn't before. He worked for the usda, despite that organization's history of hostility to black farm participation. And he had also become the family historian, to your point. Right. About how I come to build on his work. I mean, he was my first oral history interview, if you imagine. But. And he was an. An immensely patient teacher. He gave hours of his time and copies of family records to which I could paint, you know, a really changing world of black farm owners in a period of unprecedented decline. I mean, you know, because as my book shows, in the, in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s, there's just a truly unprecedented cliff that black property ownership falls off of. And really, I mean, it's remarkable that really the cliff is really like 1954. Right. So if you think of a year marked by Brown v. Board of Education and such as that, like the really turning point in the racial politics of the nation, but it's really like you just see a cliff. So to learn about their generational life on the land and, you know, get the, the land patents from Elton's, you know, Peyton Dean in the 1870s, like, that was just really a special opportunity.

[Michael Stout]

Well, yeah, okay, so that's helpful about the deans and the way that their, their prior research helped you along the way with your own. But tell me a little bit more about this Monoamiga thing that I googled.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, well, thanks again for googling. And yeah, I mean, there's such a great group of organizations to be working alongside. So I wrote most of this book while I was teaching at Texas State University and in San Marcos, and I lived a fuller life in many regards because I was so close to the activists working in these criminal justice nonprofits and change making spaces, you know, in and around San Marcos and the rural sort of what we thought of as the i35 corridors. So between sort of Austin and San Antonio, there's a massive population boom there and a lot of generational folks living there as well. So just a ton of history in the making with a legacy of, you know, anti Mexican and anti black violence sort of stacked on top of it as history as well. But yeah, Manuamiga is, you know, criminal justice nonprofit, focus on political education, legal advocacy, policy change, policing, incarceration, immigration enforcement, mental health, criminalization. I mean, I saw them, I witnessed and work on all of these kinds of campaigns when I was there. The examiner is sort of a spin off watchdog journalism group. And both of them are just working so fundamentally to, you know, to fight the kind of workaday authoritarianism that can come about through the natural state in the criminal legal system as it goes about just its daily work. So that really led me to appreciate better how difficult it can be to bring cases that are completely forgotten and not legible at all to wider audiences, to levels of observation that are abstracted from being there. So local on the ground. But if you all want to look up the cases of Cyrus Gray and devonte Emerson, like folks who were, you know, without a doubt confined, you know, without reason for years, just basically because they couldn't pay bail, someone like Gerardo Reyes, a much more recent immigration enforcement case, Jennifer Miller, a woman who was killed by an off duty cop who was drinking like in the car, like when he hit the woman with his car. Like, you know, just all these cases of like that were hidden to the wider world but really show the impunity with which law enforcement could operate. Right. That's the kind of thing that I was witnessing while I was writing the book.

[Michael Stout]

And then these guys, they, they end up being kind of making some victories. Is that right? There's, there's, there's some, a certain number of wins. Is that, is that what.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, I mean they're, when they're winning all the time. I mean, you know, they're not overturning, you know, we're not. When the revolution has not come. I'm sorry to tell you, Michael, but you know, but it is, it is the kind of thing that made me really appreciate both the failures too and what they tried to do, what we tried to do, and the victories when they happen. You know, one of the biggest things I can remember is just like they, they found a way to call a question on the contract. There's not truly a contract because they're not really like a police union in Texas, but they have these things as stand info contracts that have to be approved every so often. And so they sort of found a way, a legal mechanism to throw that into question and find a way like a lever point to say, well, like, you know, if enough of the city council doesn't approve of this, we're not going to approve this contract again until like we see some of the changes that we want to see. Some like tangible things that you, you prove to do any of. Like Cyrus Graham, devonte Emerson got out, right? They got out because of the legal representation that were offered. And the other thing I'd say, Michael, that I learned is like the importance of recording and reporting. Right. These things in real time and, and the opportunities for people in university settings to like bring students into those spaces and to see and to witness and to. Yeah. Have a whole another set of learning opportunities, which I think of as a true fuller understanding of public history.

[Michael Stout]

Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And I think it's also for those of us that study policing, it can be a little bit dark. But to know that there's some reform, that it's possible to achieve some reforms on a local level, I'm sure is very heartening. Well, so let's talk a little bit about policing's hinterland. This is a concept that comes up in the book, and I think that I just wanted to know more about what that means and also how it contributes to our sort of growing historical understanding of policing and the state and white supremacy, among other things.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, well, I mean, you don't really get policings in drill. And I'll be honest, without my experience with like, Manu amiga and the examiner, in some ways. Right. I mean, it's me witnessing, like, how hard people have to work to escalate, to elevate, like, everyday abuses, to just like a basic consciousness of a group of people. But, yeah, in the book, I land on two sort of. I don't know if you want to call them heuristics or sort of theoretical layers that help me think about the particular history of policing during Jim Crow in Mississippi. That's what the book is. But it's also like that particular history's connection to more general histories of policing, race making black freedom struggles. Right. Trying to move us past narratives of Southern exceptionalism especially. And the two heuristics are policing center, land. Right. The hiding spaces which are constructed where these abuses and lawlessness of law enforcement occur. And policing's autocracy is the other, which is sort of the functional lawlessness that lived within the law and within the police in these sort of hinterland spaces. Like the hinterland, you know, it's a rural history of places, events, and people that were and will remain outside public perception. Mostly it's. It's a history of how law enforcement constantly remade frontiers in a certain way, especially around, like, land theft. You know, I've got so many cases of cops or cop affiliated folks stealing land or just surveilling and displacing people in other contexts. You know, in the hinterland, I think in. This builds on notions from Michel Trouilllot, Leila Khalili, Ruthie Gilmore, other folks, but to the book's history of reform policing. Hinterland also names in some ways the analysis and approach that some black observers adopted when they looked at the problem of Jim Crow policing. Ida B. Wells classic administration to shine the light of truth upon what is going on. The hope that a revolution of public sentiment would do away with lynch law. Martin Luther King's got a famous line about police officers being cloaked in night that he delivers in 1964. I think this approach I found in activists across the ages just trying to lift these everyday abuses during Jim Crow to a level of scrutiny that could, you know, find some sort of relief. I also want to say too that, you know, it's an interesting sort of two faced concept in my mind because I, you know, I, I think there's an extension of like the hinterland idea, right. That there's these hiding spaces and all we have to do is just find these things and it will. And bring attention to it and it will fix it. That is just not borne out by, you know, where we're at now. And I think of this with like approaches to police abuses today with police wearing body cameras, for instance. Right. I mean, how you can't get more sort of observational and recording and sort of shining light upon it maybe then, then that, so there, there's got to be a more fundamental sort of truth telling and finding, I guess, but that the seed is definitely there.

[Michael Stout]

Right, right, right, right. Well, you mentioned a little bit Southern exceptionalism. I wanted to ask a little bit more because this is a, it feels like it's deeply engaged with Southern historiography and stuff. So. Yeah, tell me more about what, what this book contributes to our understanding of Southern exceptionalism and its limits.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, I mean, it's a story about the South. You know, people who are living there understand themselves to be in the South. You know, something like Mississippi is a very, you know, it's a singular case in many ways, if only because of the sort of, if you're going to have a democracy or pretend to have or say you have a democracy in Mississippi, right? Well, you've got the highest black portion of state population right at, in the nation at various points in this history. So that's going to, that's going to sort of amp up the stakes of, you know, political institutions and patronage systems and law enforcement generally. So, you know, it is true that Mississippi is, you know, its own case, but at the same time, and you know, I think even of like Nina Simone's famous song Mississippi Goddamn, you know, everybody knows about Mississippi, you know, but if you listen to the whole song, you know, Mississippi listen belongs to a whole nation full of lies. Right. And I really want to, I Want to emphasize how Mississippi is also a sort of a place where currents are flowing through back and forth through time and space from other portions of, of of the nation. You know, and I look at the military in a particular way. I look at the FBI in another particular way.

[Michael Stout]

Right.

[Justin Randolph]

To see like how other states like Texas. We'll talk about maybe the Texas connection later. But you know, you don't get them state police in Mississippi without the state police in Texas. So you know, it, it's, it's this way that they're, they're, you know, currents that are flowing through the entire country in law enforcement notions of reform. You know, when they create the, the National Guard in Mississippi in the 1880s, they're, they're talking about how the National Guard is. This like, is at the forefront of, of police reform in the nation. And we, we should adopt that. We should join on in this. Right. There's not some like backward looking reactionary to that. Like that's, that's sort of a futurity and a demand to sort of join on what they see as a class of peers that I think we can, we can lose track of when we're, we're focused on the south being some sort of belly of, of the worst possible thing. Yeah.

[Michael Stout]

When. And Nina Simone was there first, of course. So. Well, underneath your claims, maybe this is the time to talk about this. This the state police, underneath your, underneath your claims about Mississippi law during the Jim Crow south, your interrogation of Southern exceptionalism, its conceptual limits, or even your observations about policing's hinterland and policing's autocracy. The book is in large part a history of the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol. So can you give us an overview of some of that history? Where does that come from historically?

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, it is truly in some ways a biography of the state police force and incidentally its founder. I'm sure William have occasion to talk about. But Thomas Butler Birdsong is the guy who. Yeah, but you know, they're county sheriffs, there's local cops in the book, but it's really a state police that from these sort of interesting for a historian because it's the largest rupture or at least redeployment in police power and reform in the story in the time period like, you know, it doesn't exist formally until 1938. And it will be called the Highway Safety Patrol. It will be tied to sort of automobility and the, in the need for, for a new sort of landscape. You know, we're moving away from wagon and, and horse and mule and buggy and. And we're like, you know, everybody's got a car now. We're moving away from the age of rail into the age of cars and trucks. And, you know, that will be the. The trapping, the trappings in which this state police force comes robed. But it's a. It's part of a much deeper history that I try to get out of the book around paramilitary policing, which I think of as sort of like the militia form, if you want to do it that way. Much deeper roots and routes, right. Than 1938 that, you know, all the way back to the state militia and the state troops that, you know, existed from the time it was, you know, the Mississippi territory into the National Guard phase of the 1880s and institutionalized with the Jim Crow constitution in 1890 and sort of cemented in the years after that, you know, so the founders of the new white supremacist social order based on segregation, black voter disfranchisement, you know, the hallmarks of the Jim Crow order will also be saying, we need a police force of last resort, right? And we're going to need that for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, we don't expect black Mississippians to take this sort of sitting down. And also the violence with which we have recently overthrown multiracial democracy in the state is threatening to us as well. So, you know, there will be a real desire to sort of rein in some forms of racial violence, unauthorized racial violence. What you could shorthand is lynching, and that you would use the state troops and the state, eventually police to do that. So, you know, from that. From that period of founding, you move into, you know, the biggest transition point, the next one is in the 20s and 30s, and thinking of the Depression, massive social dislocation and upheaval and crisis there, the National Guard's riot squad becomes very important and, you know, going to prison protest or prison strikes at Parchment Penitentiary, the prison farm, Right. And so in that moment, the. The state National Guard will be finally formalized into a state police, which we. We still have today. The state troopers, the highway patrol, who also have, like, various functions of investigative capacity that's really destroyed. But the thing is, Michael, this was incredibly unpopular, right? Until it wasn't, right? The notion in white Mississippi that you would have the centralized state police force was unpopular for anyone who had local power and patronage connections. So if you think of the sheriff, right, These guys, these state police officers could theoretically or hypothetically go over the head of a sheriff, right? Their jurisdiction does not bounded by a county line. And you know, so these folks don't want to be policed. Right. They're friends with the sheriff. They don't think that they're going to get in trouble. They don't want to be policed. So newspaper men in the, you know, the 1940s are calling them Nazis, you know, calling state police, storm troopers, troopers and saying that you should let, you know, you should leave that to the Nazis. But by 1946, lawmakers are literally reducing the state police budget because they're so anti state police. But it all changes with the civil rights movement and it really starts to build in the 1950s to where it's acceptable to have a centralized state police that is necessary. And then by 1964, with Freedom Summer and sort of the peak of the movement in Mississippi on the ground, with outsiders coming in, for instance, you'll actually have a tripling of the state police and with massive new powers that puts them in a more legitimate position in the state that they've never been at before.

[Michael Stout]

Great. Yeah. Well that's amazing because it's both a modern story. I think that's important that, that people are innovating and they're not simply calling on the past, but it's, it's rooted in particular forms of policing that were much older. Is that right?

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, rooted in the past. And you know, I think of it as sort of state troops to state troopers and slave patrols, the highway patrol. Right. I mean, it's not a straight linear story by any means. It's a crooked jagged line. But the institutional vessels, you know, that sort of move through those times and space, you know, down to the words that we use to call on these things are, you know, the same. In the original mandate for state troops was two things. It acted as sort of a police force for native people.

[Michael Stout]

Right.

[Justin Randolph]

So aided in native dispossession and removal. And it functioned as a slave patrol when chattel slavery was, was legal. So you know, those kinds of remits, those kinds of duties that they had became, you know, in different contexts, you know, still part of the vision. But like to your point, like the, the forward looking, like the futurity, like these guys have a future in mind. It might not be a, you know, a very humane one or humanitarian one by our estimation, but like they, they see a path towards like progress and prosperity in their words that is not like tied to the lynch mob and sort of lawlessness, mass lawlessness, mob violence.

[Michael Stout]

All right, now that, that actually leads right into another question. That I had, which was you, you know, at some point you suggest that what you call Jim Crow policing is actually, and I'm quoting you here, a laboratory for the coexistence of racial authoritarianism and liberal law and order. So both of these things are kind of taking place at the same, at the same time, and Jim Crow policing is kind of unifying these two things. So how does that work?

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the book's most important conclusions that I increasingly just couldn't look away from, you know, as I was doing and I was reading, you know, really important books that, you know, didn't discount sort of the history of conservatism when it came to policing, but certainly like pushed us to understand the interconnectedness of liberals and conservatism on the question of policing and the carceral state buildup that will lead to something like mass incarceration. But this is, you know, I set it up in the introduction using Naomi Murakawa's important work, the First Civil Right, where she says something like, you know, the liberal law and order confronted racial violence in policing as an administrative deficiency. You know, she goes on to say that like, you know, lynching is lawless, but like an execution is like orderly. Right, that, and that's the kind of the, the, the definition of liberal law and order that she has. And by that definition, like, there are a bunch of liberals running around Mississippi right. In this, in. Right. Because you know, they're really, you know, the state police build up and for instance, the decrease in illegal executions and increase in legal executions in the state capital punishment. Well, you know, th. Those graphs really correspond well, and part of the state police's job will be to police capital punishments. Right. The literal acts of state killing people like the state police will be there to ensure that it goes the way that the state wants it to and that it's not co opted by the mob. So yeah, on the one hand, that coexistence is about collaboration, the coexistence between racial authoritarianism and liberal law and order. I mean, the U.S. supreme Court will not interfere in Mississippi's regime of racial order and terror. And it will have many opportunities to do so. It's collaboration in the form of federal dollars that come pouring into the state militia and state police and state penitentiary at various points in time, like in the early 20th century, but also with the sort of liberal war on crime as sort of initiated by Lyndon Johnson, but of course co opted and taken over by the new conservatives to come after, you know, and Even thinking of Johnson himself. Right. I mean, who is Johnson in this story? You know, if you just set aside his party allegiance for a second, he was. He was the Jim Crow elected official. You know, he may have absorbed immorality and inhumanity of the system, but he was a product of it. Right. Wouldn't have been in government without it. So that's like, you know, I think of, like, the certain collaborations between the two. But on the other hand, it's also like that coexistence. A coexistence is about sort of a nonpartisan quality around police reform during Jim Crow. You know, I. If you look there, I think it gets us closer to understanding the fundamental ideas, you know, that are beyond parties and labels like conservatives and liberals. Many of the people who wanted to reform the police in Mississippi through expanding it and making it more like the military and more. Every cop more like a scientist, theoretically, than, you know, a bruiser. You know, they considered themselves moderates. They were not seeing themselves as, like, racial authoritarians. They saw themselves as the opposite of that and the path to progress. They wanted to stop lynching, as I said, and they wanted the courts to do all the dirty work. They wanted something that's far more familiar in our. In our notion of. Of law and order.

[Michael Stout]

Right, right, right. Well, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about this person named Leroy Miller that comes up in the story as a way of kind of demonstrating how this. How these two. This bipartisan policing worked one alongside the other.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, I mean, I start the book with the story of Leroy Miller and the amory, Mississippi in 1947. It's also the story from which the title comes Mississippi Law. You know, Leroy Miller is in his 20s. He's out of work. He's the son of sharecroppers who have moved to town, which is a very common story in the period. He asked a former employer for a car so that he could go out and find for work. You know, again, this is an automobile sort of society, but you've moved out of the country. You're in town now. You need a car to get around and find work. The former employer declines and calls the cops. And by the end of the day, Leroy Miller has confessed to a string of burglaries, falsely confessed to a string of burglaries in the town. And also, you know, in one case, with the intention of raping a white woman. So, you know, here's a classic case. If you know anything about the Southern past in this period, you know, the mention, the notion that A black man sought sex with a white woman instantly raises the threat of lynching. So the town leaders call in the state police and they put Miller into protective custody. There isn't a lynching. His life is spared from a mob. I don't even have any evidence that a mob bothered to form in the case, but they drove him 300 or some miles, you know, away to protect him nonetheless, and kept him in the Hinds County Jail in Jackson, the state capitol. But for me, that's the story, right? They. They sort of spare his life in that moment from some sort of mob. But then leroy Miller does 12 years on, or maybe 14 years at Parchment, you know, unremunerated labor, hard labor, cotton fields. Right. Because of this. Right. And it's. There's a massive NAACP investigation that exposes it for the fraud that it is, goes all the way to the Supreme Court under Thurgood Marshall. They choose not to make a ruling on it, but it's just one of those most blatant examples of how lawless the system was. And in one letter, hoping, begging for NAACP intervention in the case, someone who was too afraid to even sign their own name to the letter said, you know, you know, that Leroy Miller hasn't got a chance in Mississippi law. Right. And so that is sort of, I take as the. As the title and the. The way of exploring, like, you know, what does that mean? What did it mean in the moment? In what ways are Mississippi law, America law, you know, and vice versa.

[Michael Stout]

Right, right. Well, that's. That's kind of a great segue, because one of the people who embodies Mississippi law and the. And the concept of this, like, State Highway Patrol is TV birdsong so tell us about him and why his story is so important to the. To the history of Mississippi law that you tell.

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah, he's such a, you know, such a piece of work is, man, I'm telling you. Yeah, he's a really interesting vehicle to show, again, the roots and the routes of this story. You know, he's such a fixture in paramilitary police reform under Jim Crow in some way, in some reason, simply just because he's there so long. He is in the state police business for, like, 50 years. So he has an incredibly long career. He's really attached to a lot of things. He's called the J. Edgar Hoover of Mississippi. Right. So it's really right there in his. In the way that people think about him as having these ties to national. But he's also military. But before I get into that, let me just Give you a little snippet of his like, multi generational legacy because this is like. To talk about the roots like this is incredible. Like his, his great grandfather was, you know, a militiaman in the border regions of Alabama and Georgia in the 18 teens and 20s when settlers are, you know, instigating wars with native people like the Creek to force their removal west of the Mississippi and create plantation country, you know, in, in Alabama and slowly into Mississippi. You know, Claudio Sant's work is really good on this, but, you know, to think that like, there's so many types. There's another guy in the book, Winfield Scott Featherston, who also sort of dates to this, to this moment, right, this deep distant past where in some ways this, the, the colonization of the old Southwest by Anglo settlers has really opened up. And the militia is sort of at the core for that. Right? Skip a generation to his. His grandfather, he was an enslaver and a militiaman who fought in the Confederate army during the Civil War. His dad was a militiaman who led the preparation for state troops for the war in 1898. So, you know, multi generations of like the, the militia form in this guy's family. And he joins as a teenager, got pretty good evidence. He lied about his age to join early, which was of course much easier in, in the period when this would have been. But in 1917, he goes to the Texas Mexico border after Woodrow Wilson nationalizes the National Guard in response to the mass Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa in their exploits in. In the Borderlands. So, you know, he goes to the border, stays there for two, two, three years. Something like that. Certainly learns from Texas Rangers in the period, you know, known to Texas and Mexican historians as La Matanza. Right. The massacre is because there's just so much Ranger violence against Mexican people in the period. And you know, then just skip ahead to when Birdsong creates the state police. Who does he bring with him? He brings, he brings Texas State policemen to help train Mississippi State troopers, the first class Mississippi State Troopers in 1938. And I have got evidence that he goes back and forth with them, you know, into the 1950s. So there's this, there's this like Texas Ranger, Mississippi State Trooper connection that I actually explore in a chapter that's coming out on an attitude volume soon. But yeah, I mean, this is a guy who works, you know, tirelessly in his mind to enforce law and order strictly. He police has lots of lynchings to make sure, or, excuse me, police has lots of capital punishment incidences to make sure that they don't become lynchings. He is head of the State Police until 1968 with very few sort of interruptions. So, yeah, he's there with it all. Good friends with J. Edgar Hoover. Nice photos of them taken together. Always gets high praise from. From. From Uber. Yeah.

[Michael Stout]

Okay. Well, there you go. TV bird song. Now to just another thing that was very unexpected about this book for me was there are a lot more cows than I thought there would be. So can you tell us about the cattleman's massive resistance and this thing called the Livestock Theft Bureau?

[Justin Randolph]

You ruined it, Michael. I want it to be like, you know, I want it to be this thing that people like also accidentally happen upon and they're like, wow, I learned a lot about rural life.

[Michael Stout]

You know, sorry, you can't keep good material like that buried, though. It's.

[Justin Randolph]

No, it really is. I. For the record, I didn't think I was going to be writing so much about cows, but this in some ways goes back to that story that I told you about from. From Clay county with the drive by shooting in 1965. So I learned that this trooper dies. He's a Livestock Theft Bureau agent. I'm like, what on earth is a Livestock Theft Bureau agent? And it is the cow police. It is a group of people, it's usually a small group. They're plain clothes and they're about protecting sort of the bovine capital which sort of increases into just all of the capital intensive pieces of farming. Right. If you think about it, there's a major shift from labor intensive agriculture to capital intensive agriculture in this period. Right. It used to be an incredibly heavy emphasis put on obtaining labor, usually black labor, to cultivate cotton and to some extent other crops. But that changes beginning really in the Great Depression. And as again, through federal subsidy, white landowners and property class occupants begin to transition to, you know, capital intensive forms of agriculture stuff that you need combines and tractors for things that you need a lot more land to grow than you did a patch of cotton. Cows especially. Right. You're going to need or want a police force to secure that in a particular way. And especially in a space that is so unequal. Right. Unequitable. Right. Where this. Distinctions in social class are so steep in a place like Mississippi. So, yeah, that led me into having to wonder, how did these Cal Policemen come to be. And, you know, why is it that this, you know, could be in 1965? Why was this guy policing a civil rights protest if he's, you know, supposed to be watching and making sure that people don't steal cows? Or chasing down the people who do. And just to be, you know, clear on that, like, these cows were incredibly valuable, which is something I also had very little appreciation for. You know, these are pedigreed beef cows. Yeah, there's. There's some real sort of Darwinism going on there. Like, you know. Yeah. I mean, it's really, really intense. But, you know, like the beef cattle revolution in the state, like Mississippi, that is still, I'm sure by most people thought of as having like cotton around every corner. Right. If you drive through large sections of the state, it's just rolling cow pastures. Right. Which is actually like, statistically speaking, how most of the North American continent is occupied is. This is sort of an incredible thing to piece together. But yeah, they. They summon their own sort of police presence. And it's really important to the story in a sense that I spoke of earlier, where like a certain class of white Mississippian did not want a state police, had no interest in a centralized state police power. But they start to change their minds during sort of the first onsets of the formal civil rights movement in the 1950s, when there is actually a great deal of underground or no, I should say above ground activism, largely through the naacp, other historians have shown to other organizations. But, you know, this is a moment when like the economic shifts and the political shifts, who are calm together in a way that puts these weird cow policemen as this like, hinge point

[Michael Stout]

place

[Justin Randolph]

where diverging opinions can focus in a line. And it's. It's really interesting how they end up sanitizing state police power for a lot of people who had been resistant. So the, the livestock theft Bureau in my story is, you know, it's an experiment with expanding police jurisdict because those guys can go anywhere and they're playing clothes with arrest powers. The general state trooper has to stay on the road and should be writing traffic tickets. Right. So when the movement that we know of, with massive protests and organizing and board to door voter campaigns, voter registration campaigns come, right. These are the guys. And that's the model that's going to be on offer for changing police in the moment, in the period.

[Michael Stout]

Right, right, right. So. But there's massive resistance. So tell us a little bit. What's massive resistance and what are the. How are the cattlemen resist? I have a second question about what they're resisting, but let's just kind of like it's such a great term, cattleman's massive resistance. So just, just situate us in that. In that space.

[Justin Randolph]

Sure, sure. I give you way more about the livestock Death Bureau than you probably care to know.

[Michael Stout]

No, I loved it. Sell yourself short.

[Justin Randolph]

You know, the guys who were into state levels who are summoning the livestock Theft Bureau are also doing a lot of other things around, you know, emphasizing law and order, policing, incarceration. And so that's the, the cattleman's mass massive resistance. Of course, massive resistance is the, is a term coined by Mississippi senator James Eastland to say that like, just like the NAACP has a grassroots sort of campaign for segregation, we need a grassroots campaign against segregation. Right. And there are various forms that this will take. Of course the Ku Klux Klan will be resurgent in these years and other right wing, far right sort of armed vigilante groups will take off. The white Citizens Councils, the so called country club clan will sprout across the state, across the nation and eventually across the decolonizing world. The White Citizens Council was founded by a cattleman and police officer in Mississippi, which was something I didn't know before I did this research. So there is very much a way that the sort of again, the economic development that is moving away from cotton and the labor system of Jim Crow will become sort of on the upswing and ascendant in this moment. And they will in fact take over the state police momentarily. The, the head of the state police when Birdsong is away will be a cattleman from a rural part of the state. He'll sort of really beef up, pardon the pun, he'll strengthen the cattleman or the livestock theft bureau. And you know, the governor at the time most associated, this is James Plemon Coleman, who Lyndon Johnson again talk about our collaborators, will actually appoint to the fifth circuit court of App. Heels someone who was a famed segregationist. But his smart segregation, the sort of notion that these moderate guys will, some, you know, the liberals can do business with them, will put them in very powerful positions, but you know, cattleman becomes the head of the Mississippi State Penitentiary in this. It's just like it seems for a moment that like, you know, these guys who are making the money off of beef and other sorts of non cottony things, or at least are diversifying their agricultural interests are the ones who are sort of steering in a particular way the, the okay forms of massive resistance. Right. And who will be in a position to sort of quash or say that they are not aligned with the far right radical forms of, of resistance from something like the Kuwait.

[Michael Stout]

Right, right, right. So that, that's, that gets us to my second question, which is about what they're resisting. And this is not only a story about, you know, how efforts to reform the police ended up expanding their power and embedding a longstanding racial authoritarianism alongside liberal law and order. It's also a story about efforts to fight back and propose alternatives. And one of those efforts comes through the Council of Federated Organizations. Can you talk a little bit about this case that you write about, the COFO v. Rainey case?

[Justin Randolph]

Yeah. Well, I mean, to your point, I'm in pains to stress the diversity of black responses to Mississippi law. You know, there's armed self defense from Ida B. Wells Winchester on the mantle to, you know, armed self. Like actual armed self defense. You know, one case from this, the cattle period. Right. I've got a sharecropper named Toby Fau Faulkner, who gets it, just gets in a shootout with the state police after he shoots a cow that it seems is eating his flowers. And, you know, the farm owner confronts him and calls the police and, you know. Yeah. And so there, there are many different forms of resistance to this. And, you know, the. The case that shows me sort of the full breadth of what reform movements can look like in the state. It comes in chapter eight that I call the New Abolition, which is really about Kofo v. Reynie. So, you know, the New Abolition, I take from the title of a book, why am I blaming on the name of Howard Zinn, you know, or the much forgotten Howard Zinn? Just kidding. Yeah. You know, it seems that in this moment, the notion of abolition is being applied to Jim Crow in a. In a real way again, you know, in this old. Ida B. Wells called for, like the abolition of lynch law in 1895. But thinking about, you know, the way that the police form of Jim Crow could also be thought about in sort of an abolitionist scheme is sort of the work of the chapter and a place. I find people thinking, I think much more fundamentally about reform for the police and not thinking about the old sort of paramilitary style of police reform defined by expanding and militarizing with more people, more resources. Right. Is this court case in 1964, 1965, around the Mississippi burning case in Neshoba county where James Cheney and two other men are murdered, activists are murdered. So the CofO in the case is the Council of Federated Organizations, the umbrella group of civil rights organizations. The Rainey is the sheriff of Neshoba county, and it's actually a class action case. So there's a. Et Al. After both of those. And the et al after Rainey in this case is every single law enforcement officer in the state of Mississippi, as well as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils and others, right? So there's this moment where the movement literally sues every law enforcement officer in the state. Not carving out anybody, not saying that the state police is somehow immune or better. And in this, you know, I find that they're really demanding two things through a massive class action court case. One is they want a temporary restraining order against all police officers in the state who are policing civil rights protests or organizations or anything like that. Right. So they literally want to sort of take away the duties, the responsibilities from the domestic law enforcement. And then they want to use a law from the first reconstruction that empowers the federal courts to appoint special judicial functionaries to enforce the law law in places where a law and order has completely broken down. So this would be like putting a court functionary in the place of the sheriff, but, you know, specifically. So in all 82 counties, right, there would be some sort of functionary put in to replace the sheriff or in the law enforcement entities that, that are, that are in the kid. The case is of course, struck down very quickly, like it doesn't get a hearing, but there is, there's an appeal. And the appeal court says, yeah, we'll listen to this. And so it becomes much more than a court case. It becomes sort of a movement opportunity where all the people who have, you know, been impacted by law enforcement in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, which are a ton of, have an opportunity to write affidavits and send them to the court describing what happened. So it becomes this massive organizing effort that brings in people like James Earl Cheney's mom, Fanny Lee Cheney, who, you know, becomes a bit of an activist in the period, does some speaking and gives like, is the lead plaintiff on the case and, you know, really gives a notion that links like generations of black life in Mississippi to what the world has just witnessed in, in the Mississippi burning case. But it's an opportunity for me to think about like different kinds of reform. And I, you know, I lean on the work of Amna Akbar to, you know, to see some hallmarks of what we can call abolitionist reform around policing there, you know, or non reformist reform notions that, you know, where we're not trying to like build or expand, but instead we're sort of taking a radical pause to see, you know, what needs to change and then what the horizon for possibility moving forward out of something like, you know, Neshoba County, 1964 could be. And it was an international spectacle. The world's Eyes from this is at the end of the book.

[Michael Stout]

Yeah. Well, it's a great story, and I'm really glad that you've done the work to include it and make it part of this thing. I'm also glad that you bringing back Zinn's new abolitionist. He's talking about sncc. I'll never forgive myself for lending out an original copy of that book that I never got back. So that's one of the personal traumas that I have to deal with. So you end your book with the woodcut artwork of Elijah Pierce. What about his artwork and his story did you find so compelling in relation to this project?

[Justin Randolph]

You know, some of this. You know, I hate to get too mystical here, but I was living for no real reason connected to the book or anything else in Columbus, Ohio, for a year in grad school, and I happened to go to the fantastic Columbus Museum of Art, and staring back at me on the wall is a wood cut. And for those of you who can't maybe imagine, it's like, you know, a sheet of wood into which someone has carved by hand, art and then painted various portions of it is a woodcut of a man, a black man wearing a baseball cap, standing between, on the one hand, what is clearly a mob, right? Armed mob. Nobody's bothered to put on masks. Right? This isn't like the pointy added clan, right? This is just men with guns. And on the other side is the sh. You know, a cop, a law enforcement officer with his gun out, taking this character into custody. So I'm looking at that, and I'm like, oh, my goodness. Like, what. What is this? Who made this? It was Elijah Pierce. And the woodcut is named Elijah Escapes the Mob. How did he escape the mob? He escaped the mob because he was taken into protective police custody and then released. He was, you know, he was arrested because someone was being chased by a white mob, and the police thought that he fit the description of the person who was being pursued by the mob. Turns out he had nothing to do with this. He was playing a baseball game, I think, in Tupelo, Mississippi, when it happened. But, you know, for me, it just hit me on such a. A rabbit hole to discover the life of Elijah Pierce, who in the art world is rather well known and appreciated both for the uniqueness of his. Of his sort of form and then function of his art. He was a whittler originally, so, like, carving wood in his spare time into ornate shapes, you know, had a massive sense of humor. Right. He carved some really incredibly funny things he, you know, he was devout Christian and did other, you know, Christian related art as well. But then he has a whole sort of segment of political art as well. And so Elijah Escapes the mob. Is art autobiographical. Right. He's telling the story of his life and he'll leave Mississippi in the years very soon after this and will live in Columbus, Ohio, for most of his life as part of the great migration. But, you know, we'll not stop thinking about politics. Like, you know, one of his great pieces is, like, presidents and chain gangs or something like that. So again, there's sort of the collaboration. So he'll have a painting of like a prisoner attached to a ball and chain while, like, Abe Lincoln and George Washington or, you know, Uncle Sam stand nearby. And so he's clearly thinking, it seemed to me that, right, he was thinking about some of the same themes, intentions that I saw recurring in the work as I wrote it. And, you know, the. Yeah, he's just. He seemed to capture in his art and the story of his life as well. So much of what, you know, had transpired in the book that I really wanted to show more people the work of Elijah Fear. So I hope you all have a chance to look into more. Yeah.

[Michael Stout]

Well, that's great. And that's a great. Maybe that's a great note to end on. Justin, this is a great book. It's been such a pleasure doing history with you. Thank you for your time.

[Justin Randolph]

Thanks, Michael.

[Michael Stout]

For our listeners, Mississippi Law, Policing and Reform in America's Jim Crow Countryside is available now from the University of North Carolina Press, and you can find it wherever the finest books are sold. Justin, I thank you again for being on the show. Congratulations on the book.

[Justin Randolph]

Thank you.

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