Mississippi Law

“This powerful history of policing in the rural South reveals the origins of law enforcement as white control of Black mobility and freedom. Amid today’s calls for police reform and abolition, this book reminds us why history matters.”—Françoise N. Hamlin, author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II

“A deeply researched and precisely observed history of police power that merits serious engagement. Connections between America’s plantation past and mass incarceration are often asserted but rarely demonstrated. Here, they receive the attention they deserve.”—Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

“Randolph has written a landmark history of Jim Crow policing and the Black freedom struggle in Mississippi. In the process, he has contributed an invaluable study of race and rural law enforcement to the field of carceral studies.”—Jason Morgan Ward, author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century

“Randolph convincingly charts how local rivalries for power among white sheriffs, private citizens, police and patrolmen in Mississippi gave way to alliances against Black political, social, and economic power during the high civil rights era. Mississippi Law is an impressive work of scholarship.”—Jane Dailey, author of White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History.