Neil McMillen gives us a look at the real effects of Jim Crow in Dark Journey, the story of white supremacy in Mississippi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. McMillen explores this society of racial apartheid from the vantage point of the oppressor and the oppressed, for as he states in his preface, "until historians adequately explored the exterior forces that operated on the black community there could be no truly adequate histories of the interior life of the people within that community." He includes many descriptions of Mississippi during this "race-haunted" time from blacks themselves, which adds significantly to the texture of McMillen's "bottom up" depiction of how truly repressive the white regime was. What quickly emerges from this straightforward study is a society dominated without question by whites, one in which whites sought to re-establish race relations as they existed prior to the Civil War. They largely succeeded.
What strikes the reader forcefully from the beginning of McMillen's book is how insidiously prevalent the system known as Jim Crow was in Mississippi, and how it affected every aspect of black life. Jim Crow did not mean that blacks were simply in effect denied the right to vote and had limited economic opportunities, though to be sure both of these hurdles existed. White supremacy, as McMillen deftly points out, meant far more than denied voting rights and low-rung jobs. It meant (either de facto or de jury) poor or no high schools, lynchings, outrageous jury verdicts and trials, harassment for succeeding in traditionally white professions, no libraries, etc. The sheer scope and overriding predominance of white supremacy in Mississippi is shocking, especially since whites really did not seek to hide it from prying Northerners. White supremacy transcended class lines for the most part, McMillen show us, and even acted as a greater force upon whites than economic self-interest. For example, every white owner of a store, restaurant, garage, theatre, etc., who refused to serve blacks was also losing the money blacks would have paid them.
McMillen concludes that from the 1890s to the middle of the 20th century very few blacks overcame the high political and economic barriers placed in their way by a Mississippi society bent on oppressing them. Blacks in that state, however, managed to create and maintain their own separate political, religious, educational and social institutions despite the odds against them. Those who could, moved away from Mississippi, much like the oppressed and degraded Irish left their native island to escape the shackles of British economic and sectarian control. Truly, Mississippi's society was born of hatred of blacks by whites, a situation not totally eradicated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
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