Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On March 28, 1961 a six-mile, two-hour parade wended its way through Jackson, Miss. — the largest public event in state history — to mark the centennial of Mississippi’s secession and the beginning of the Civil War. Tens of thousands of white Mississippians lined the route, greeting the festooned marchers with rebel yells of “Yiiiii Hoooaaah!” Women from the Mississippi Delta region, dressed in their Old South finery, rode on a float and sipped mint juleps as they toasted sending their men “off to war.” The South that day, noted the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, “rose again, in all its Confederate splendor.”

State officials proudly pointed out that, while Mississippi had been second to South Carolina in seceding a century earlier, it was the first state to conduct an official celebration of the centennial of secession and the war, and that no other state planned a celebration of those events on as large a scale as Mississippi’s. “Stirring strands of Dixie resounded throughout downtown Jackson,” the Clarion-Ledger said in a front-page story the next morning. “Confederate flags, peanuts and candied apples added to the carnival-like atmosphere.”

Courtesy of Bill Minor

Among the marching and mounted gray-clad troops were most of the state’s officials and members of the legislature. Gov. Ross Barnett, renamed Confederate General Barnett for the day, led the parade dressed in a Confederate uniform and riding in a horse-drawn carriage. He then reviewed some 6,000 “rebel” cavalry and infantry troops as they passed the Governor’s Mansion. He was reported to have been “satisfied [that] his boys could battle the Yankees on even terms if they had to.” (Mr. Barnett’s “boys” would be put to the test 18 months later in a battle with federal forces on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where state officials sought to block James Meredith, an African-American student, from enrolling.)

Some of the honorary Confederates were driven in National Guard jeeps, said to have been “captured from the Yankees.” “Ever [sic.]so often,” the city’s afternoon paper, the Jackson Daily News, reported, “to the delight of the crowd, a mounted cavalryman would stop his horse, point to a member of the crowd and shout, ‘There’s a Yankee; shoot him!’”

Following the parade, a 50-minute play, specially written for the occasion and depicting the activities of the Mississippi secession convention of 1861, was performed in front of the Old Capitol, where state delegates had voted to leave the Union a century before. The play closed with a stirring reenactment of the farewell address that Jefferson Davis had given before the state legislature 23 years after secession.

Surely the highlight of the day, though, had come during the parade with the passing of the world’s largest Confederate battle flag, owned by the University of Mississippi. It stretched from one side of Capitol Street to the other as it followed the Ole Miss marching band and was accompanied by more than 3,000 Mississippi Grays.

Somehow gray seems an odd color to be worn by people intent on keeping black and white from mixing. As most of Mississippi’s whites were looking backward and celebrating their Lost Cause 50 years ago this spring, some of the state’s young blacks were casting their eyes forward on a cause yet to be won.

Only the day before, Jackson had been the site of Mississippi’s first sit-in when nine Tougaloo College students took seats in the whites-only Jackson Public Library. Police arrested the quiet readers for disrupting the peace. That night hundreds of students from Jackson State College gathered in front of the college’s library to protest the arrests. They sang hymns and chanted, ‘We want freedom.’”

The Jackson Daily News characterized the protesters as “a singing, chanting, praying mob.” City police dispersed the crowd as one student remarked, “They haven’t seen anything yet. This will go on until we have freedom.” A march the next day was broken up by police using tear gas and dogs (two years before the infamous use of dogs and fire hoses against demonstrators by Eugene “Bull” Connor in Birmingham).

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The nine “read-in” students appeared in court the day after the massive secession celebration. They were fined $100 each and given 30-day jail sentences, which were suspended. When several hundred peaceful African-American protesters stationed themselves across the street from the courthouse, club-wielding policemen with dogs waded into the crowd and chased the demonstrators away. The police even had the assistance of concerned citizens. “One noted Rankin county bootlegger was seen beating a Negro over the head with a .45 caliber pistol,” the Clarion-Ledger’s front-page story informed readers.

Nor were the newspapers particularly sensitive to the state’s racial tensions. On the day of the parade, along with the report of the arrests, there appeared this bit of what passed for humor in white Mississippi, ca. A.D. 1961, on the front page of the Clarion-Ledger: “One Tougaloo College coed to another: ‘Is you did ya’ Greek yit?” The front page of the Jackson Daily News that same day featured a large cartoon of a smiling white man with a moustache, cigar and Confederate cap, over a backdrop of a rebel battle flag. The character was labeled “All of Us.”

For all the vast crowds and hoopla surrounding the celebration of the past, the more important events in Jackson on those couple of days in March 1961 were those undertaken by the much quieter and far smaller number of young African-Americans, who were working toward a future Mississippi with a much more accurate definition of “All of us.”

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Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College. He is the author of 10 books, including “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941” and “Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History.” He is completing a book on America in the early 1960s.