John Dittmer (1) (1939–)

In Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, John Dittmer traces the history of Civil Rights in Mississippi from late World War II through the late 1960s. He writes, “The World War II veterans and traditional black leaders were facing a seemingly impossible task in Mississippi, for despite the wartime upheavals, whites were determined to maintain their supremacy by denying blacks political, educational, and economic opportunity and by maintaining racial segregation in all walks of life” (pg. 19). Discussing class, he writes, “Using the race issue to keep the white lower classes in their place, the men who ran Mississippi unabashedly proclaimed an economic conservatism that would preserve and widen the gap between rich and poor” (pg. 22-23).
Dittmer writes, “In the wake of Brown white Mississippians had developed a siege mentality so pervasive it encompassed virtually every citizen and institution…As the Red Scare of the fifties was abating in the rest of the country, a homegrown McCarthyism took hold in the Magnolia State. Books were banned, speakers censored, and network television programs cut off in midsentence. To be certain that subversives did not operate underground, the legislature created the State Sovereignty Commission, a secret police force that owed its primary allegiance to the Citizens’ Council” (pg. 58). He continues, “What it all comes down to is that in the mid-1950s white supremacists in Mississippi had a specific program: to maintain the status quo in race relations, whatever the cost. Moderates, on the other hand, could offer only cautionary admonitions – to blacks, to go slow, and to northern whites, to stop meddling. The result was a bankruptcy of both moral and political leadership at the most critical point in Mississippi’s history since Reconstruction” (pg. 69).
Dittmer writes, “Much of the middle class was under severe economic constraints and could not be counted on to support the assault against segregated institutions. SNCC workers learned that although officials of the Justice Department listened to their grievances, the activists could not rely on the Kennedy administration to enforce the First and Fifteenth amendments in Mississippi” (pg. 115). He continues, “Until his death John Kennedy tried to maintain good relations with Mississippi’s segregationist congressional delegation. The president went out of his way to avoid conflict, observing the amenities of senatorial courtesy in federal appointments even though it meant undercutting the handful of loyal white Democrats in the state” (pg. 197). On the other hand, “In its final days the Kennedy administration did more visibly identify with the black struggle in the South. After initially opposing the March on Washington, fearing it would alienate support for the administration’s civil rights bill, John Kennedy eventually embraced it, enhancing the movement’s status in the eyes of many skeptical northern whites” (pg. 198).
Dittmer continues, “In Jackson, the unbending resistance of local whites had for a time united blacks across lines of class and age, but as the level of violence intensified, the more conservative black ministers and businessmen became willing to settle on terms that stopped far short of the movement’s original goals” (pg. 168). He writes, “The year 1963 witnessed an explosion of civil rights activity and brutal white repression across the South. Direct action protests rocked Birmingham, Greensboro, Atlanta, Danville, and more than 100 other cities in eleven southern states, with over 200,000 people arrested. In Mississippi the Winona beatings, followed by Evers’s murder, were the opening salvos in a summer campaign of white lawlessness unmatched since 1955” (pg. 173).
Dittmer concludes, “The ambiguity of the phrase ‘black power’ and the subsequent lack of a clearly defined program enabled Mississippi activists to interpret the slogan broadly, enlisting it in behalf of boycotts, voter registration drives, and economic self-help endeavors such as the cooperatives. As far back as the fall of 1964 FDP leaders had been open to the ideas of Malcolm X, who had addressed an FDP rally in Harlem and introduced Fannie Lou Hamer at his Harlem mosque…The strident black nationalism of Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, however, with its underlying theme that whites had no role to play in a black movement, did not attract a large following among local people” (pg. 411). Further, “By the end of 1968 it was clear that the movement had won significant victories in Mississippi. More than 250,000 blacks were now registered to vote, 60 percent of those eligible. Although such numbers did not immediately transfer into political power, the level of political discourse was now changing, and over race-baiting was strikingly absent in campaign oratory. The War on Poverty was by then falling apart, but Head Start, reforms in food stamp allocation, and Medicare and Medicaid brought some improvement in the lives of the black poor” (pg. 425).… (mer)

Dittmer chronicles the grass roots politics of the Magnolia State, the home of the South's most virulent form of White Supremacy. Focusing on both the local Blacks of Mississippi and the activists from outside the state in SNCC and CORE, he adds complexity to the picture of the Civil Rights Movement in documenting the interplay between "outside agitators" and native protest. Outsiders from SNCC and CORE could never have survived without the support of local people. He also helps us understand the class undercurrents of a movement that often pitted the black middle class against the rural poor. The trajectory he maps is one that follows native protest from the cauldron of WWII and its aftermath through the 50s and into the 60s. Men who returned from the war and were denied the vote became activists in the 40s and 50s within the NAACP. The 60s are really the focal point of his story and here his focus begins with SNCC and ends with the demise of the MFDP. To move beyond this demise in local activism after 1968 is not the project of this book. Dittmer's conclusion is that the radical demands of the MFDP, like the radical demands of other movements in American history (the Populists?) were not met. Though much of their reform program was indeed enacted. We inhabit an America shaped by the egalitarian strivings of local people from Mississippi as much as we do one shaped by the National Government's halting progress toward equal rights.

Mississippi in the age of "Grand Expectations" was a very violent place, and most of that violence was exercised by white supremacists against blacks. Dittmer catalogs this violence in near numbing detail. As Kim Lacey Rodgers points out in her review, he also " shows the craven role played by the federal government, as the administrations of both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson ignored the segregationist violence in the state in hopes of placating men such as Senators John Stennis and James O. Eastland." As Alan Draper points out in his review for the Journal of Negro History, Dittmer's archetype for local people is Fannie Lou Hamer. But she is an archetype, indeed, and in giving credit to the local people in Mississippi he chronicles the lives of people who braved the terror of the South's worst state. In Draper's apt summary, credit here goes

to the people in Ruleville who braved economic reprisals and police violence to register to vote; to the people in Jackson who desegregated public facilities; to the people in McComb who withstood Klan terror to build a community center; to the people in Cleveland who distributed food when the county withdrew from federal support programs; to the people in Clarksdale who boycotted white merchants; and tot the people of Hattiesburg who waited in line for hours to take the voter registration tests. (p. 203)

Granting this, however, Draper takes issue with the way Dittmer uses class. Trying to demonstrate the class politics of the movement, Draper believes Dittmer misrepresents the struggle. Teachers and preachers certainly belonged to the middle class, but so too did business people and independent farmers. And more generally, one is left arguing if the radical democracy represented the larger Mississippi Black population better than the more "moderate" program of the NAACP. Against the class politics of the MFDP, Draper urges a consideration of the mass mobilization around voter registration. I would submit, however, that Dittmer's consideration of Great Society Politics in Mississippi is a lasting contribution to the historiography.… (mer)

The Good Doctors is an interesting and well-researched account of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals that played a large yet often ignored role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Dittmer does an excellent job portraying the people who played major roles in the organization and the sacrifices they made in order to provide medical services to other activists and bring to light the injustice of segregated health care. For their belief that every human being deserves quality health care regardless of the color of their skin, many left lucrative private practices, were ostracized by many in their professional community, and even faced violence and arrest.

This account of the unsung heroes behind the scenes of the civil rights movement is worth reading for anyone who is interested in the movement or health care.… (mer)

The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) was created in 1964 to provide medical care to civil rights workers during Freedom Summer, the grass roots program that sought to register thousands of black Mississippians to vote. The Magnolia State in the mid-1960s was the poorest and most repressive state in the Union, as many of its black citizens were starving, dying from preventable illness, and in great fear of seeking their civil rights due to hostile whites, state and local police that brutally preserved the status quo, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South.

The MCHR expanded its operations throughout the South, after some initial missteps, and played a major role in desegregating hospitals that were in violation of federal law, providing health care and education for blacks who had never been seen by a physician, and treating activists and local residents felled by police and angry mobs during civil rights marches and demonstrations. The MCHR also took an active role in opposing the Vietnam War, encouraging medical schools to enroll more minority physicians, opening community health centers, and lobbying for universal health care.

In later years the effectiveness of the MCHR was diminished by internecine feuds and external opposition, and it withered and collapsed during the early 1980s due to financial difficulty and a lack of purpose. Despite its short existence and limited successes, its efforts continue to bear fruit: many more minority physicians and nurses are in practice in the Deep South and throughout the United States; community health centers continue to operate in underserved areas; and medical organizations such as Doctors for America and Physicians for a National Health Program continue to lobby for universal health care.

John Dittmer, a professor of history at DePauw University, does a great service by chronicling the efforts of the MCHR in "The Good Doctors". However, the book is marred by an overemphasis on detail, as the author includes too many people and facts, which made this a difficult book to enjoy. I doubt that I would read it to the end if I wasn't highly interested in the topic. The story of the MCHR is a compelling one, but it deserves a better narrative, and I would only recommend "The Good Doctors" for the reader with a strong desire to learn about this Committee.… (mer)