On April 6, 2022, Alicia K. Jackson presented “The Land of Promise: North Mississippi and the Hope of Refuge" as part of the History Is Lunch series.
By the early 1870s life for rural Black Georgians was marred by restrictive laws that unduly regulated Black farmers, separated Black families, and incarcerated Black men in high numbers. Many formerly enslaved people found refuge in Black communities in the north Mississippi counties of Panola, Tate, and Marshall, where they experienced a fleeting period of economic opportunity, access to political office, and freedom to establish their own churches and educational institutions.
Isaac Anderson, a minister and politician, was forced to flee from his home in Georgia despite being elected to the state’s Senate in 1870. “Like hundreds of other formerly enslaved people, he found refuge in northern Mississippi—although that sanctuary would ultimately be short-lived,” said Jackson, author of the new University Press of Mississippi book The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson. That biography traces strategies used by Black southerners to challenge growing restrictions of their rights during Reconstruction and through the early twentieth century. “That period was the nadir of race relations, and Anderson’s story and those of the countless other Black leaders ‘lost’ to history represent Black resistance as Jim Crow legislation was becoming synonymous with the region,” said Jackson.
Alicia Jackson is associate professor of history at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. She earned her BA from Centenary College, her MA from Louisiana Tech University, and her PhD from the University of Mississippi. At Covenant College, Jackson leads a student-based District Hill Cemetery Project, which focuses on recovering the lost history and stories of a vibrant Black Chickamauga, Georgia community. She is the author of “Having Our Own: The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Struggle for Black Autonomy in Education,” which was published in Southern Religions, Southern Cultures: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson by University Press of Mississippi.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson. Signed copies of the book will be available.
