About the Author

Dorothy Overstreet Pratt is retired from the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. She taught previously at the University of Notre Dame, where she also served as assistant dean in the College of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

Pratt is convincing when she traces many of the problems of twentieth century Mississippi to the 1890 Constitutional Convention. She notes that Mississippi and South Carolina were typically at the bottom of a host of economic and social measures, attributing the low rankings to tax policies and school funding issues that arose under the new Constitution. Further, it is hard to argue with her conclusion that because of that document, "the civil rights era was preordained."--Stephen Cresswell, West Virginia Wesleyan College "The Journal of Mississippi History"

A compelling portrait of an understudied episode in American constitutional and political history.--Cynthia Nicoletti, University of Virginia School of Law "Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXV, No. 2, May 2019"

For the first time, the full story of Mississippi's turn from the use of violence and terrorism toward legal constitutional means of enforcing white supremacy is told. Dorothy Overstreet Pratt takes us inside the lives of those men who crafted Mississippi's Constitution of 1890. The story she tells is complicated and troubling, and it is a story only a skilled historian and native Mississippian such as she could tell.--Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History, emeritus, University of South Carolina, and author of Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha