Civil Rights Strategies of the Mississippi Choctaw Tribal Council, 1951-1963

Introduction and Historical Background
 
At the time of the Civil Rights movement, there were nine federally recognized Indian tribes in the states of the former Confederacy as well as numerous other tribal communities recognized by their respective states. 
^{[ 1]}  These Indigenous peoples also challenged segregation during the 1950s and 1960s. Their story provides an interesting contrast to the mainstream Civil Rights Movement. While Southern Indians sought to desegregate schools, they also faced an additional layer of pressures because of the policies of termination and relocation that the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) pursued in the 1950s. Termination meant the transfer of all BIA services to the states so as to terminate tribes’ government-to-government relationship with the federal government. Relocation was a program to move Indians from isolated reservations to urban areas where economic opportunity was better. These pressures collided in Mississippi, where the Choctaws’ civil rights campaign provides a case study for Indigenous peoples’ responses to segregation. This campaign reveals several things that complicate our understanding of the Jim Crow South: the convoluted approach of the federal government to segregation; racial divisions among Mississippi’s minority communities; and the importance of understanding Indigenous activism for civil rights.
 
The Mississippi Band of Choctaws were those Indians who had remained in MS following removal under the auspices of Article 14 of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. This provision promised allotments of land to any MS Choctaws who wanted to remain in Mississippi. At the same time, the state legislature offered the remaining Choctaws: “all the rights, privileges, immunities, and franchises enjoyed by free white persons.” Implementation of Article 14 did not work out as promised. Roughly 4,000-7,000 Choctaws remained in Mississippi following removal and sought allotments. The government, however, failed to follow through on its’ treaty promises and the Mississippi Choctaws were dispossessed.[2]
 
The Choctaws who remained in Mississippi retreated into isolated closed communities on public lands in east-central Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast, and survived by sharecropping and low wage day jobs, which meant terrible poverty and deprivation. After years of lobbying, they finally convinced the BIA to open an agency for them in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1918 and to build schools in the seven Choctaw communities—these buildings functioned as community centers.  These institutions, separate from both black and white schools, reinforced Choctaw identity as a third racial group.^[3]  But they ended in the tenth grade, and the only high schools available were government boarding schools or African American schools.^[4] The Choctaws had distanced themselves from their African American neighbors since the late nineteenth century, both as a way of asserting their identity as Choctaws and as a means of protecting themselves from prejudice directed against African Americans.^[5]  
 
Racial discrimination against non-black minorities had generally been customary rather than statutory until 1927, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ruling of the Supreme Court of Mississippi in the case of Gong Lum v. Rice. Gong Lum, a Chinese merchant living in the Delta, had enrolled his daughter, Martha Lum, in Bolivar County’s white public high school, which promptly expelled her. Lum filed suit, arguing that his daughter was not “a member of the colored race, nor is she mixed-blood, but that she is pure Chinese,” and was therefore not subject to segregation laws. The Mississippi Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the term “colored races” embraced everyone who was not white.^[6] The Mississippi legislature then passed a law in 1930 authorizing “schools for Indians and other races,” and allowing for separate schools for each race in a given county, provided there were enough students to justify the expenditure.^[7] This was the legal context for the Choctaws’ push for integration of public schools, which developed gradually throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s.
 
II. Choctaw and African American Differences on Civil Rights
 
The Choctaws’ integration efforts developed gradually and contrasted with the mainstream civil rights movement in several important ways. While the goals of equal opportunity were the same, and the Choctaws’ tactic of invoking the federal government to protect constitutional rights was similar to the course taken by African American activists, the Choctaw campaign was distinctly Indian. Choctaw leaders did not view African Americans as partners in their struggle for integration; instead, they feared that association with them would hinder the Choctaw cause. They based this belief on the behavior of their neighbors and Choctaw Agency personnel, who were quick to conflate Indians and African Americans in order to discount both.^[8] Therefore, rather than finding common ground for social justice on the basis of race, race divided the Choctaws from their African American neighbors even as the two groups sought the same goals.
 
The most forceful voices for integration belonged to Emmett York and Phillip Martin, who alternated the Chairmanship of the Tribal Council from 1957 to 1965. York and Martin asserted Choctaw tribalism in response to segregation, which differentiated Choctaw agitation for civil rights from African American activism.
Choctaws did not believe that Jim Crow laws applied to them. York expressed their position most succinctly:
 

When will the people living around here and the government ever find out that we are not negroes [sic]? We know that this segregation is for negroes. Are we taken as [the] negro race of people by the United States?” After noting the common brotherhood of all humans “in the eyes of God”, York asserted that “We are an Indian and we are always going to be Indians” and Congress had granted American citizenship, hence equality, to all Indians in 1924.^[9] 

 
Thus, York proclaimed an American political identity linked to the Choctaws’ unique relationship to the federal government, which he contrasted with African Americans, whom he regarded as subjects of the state of Mississippi.
 
Choctaws further rejected segregation because of their status as the first Mississippians, thus grounding their tribalism in their relationship to their homelands. Chairman Phillip Martin made exactly this case in another Council meeting:
 

 The Choctaw Indians were here in Mississippi before anybody. When the white people came they brought with them the negroes [sic] as their slaves. So, in a nutshell, the white and negro problem is one of their own making. In my opinion, the basis of the Indian problem is entirely different.

 
Martin also explained that the Choctaws’ dilemma was not so much segregation as dispossession and loss of political autonomy. He argued that the solution to the Choctaws’ problems was an assertion of tribal sovereignty that guaranteed them equality.
 
Moreover, Martin believed that the Choctaws suffered from discrimination less because of race, than because of class, for dispossession following Removal had impoverished them.^[10] He argued that Choctaws needed only to “bring themselves up educationally and economically” to gain acceptance in the white community.^[11]
Thus, Martin’s primary focus was material rather than ideological. He believed that developing a reservation economy capable of providing regional economic development was central to overcoming prejudice. As he later told interviewers in 2001, “given the choice between hating and eating, most will choose the latter.”^[12]  
                        
The BIA urged relocation as a solution to segregation, but the Tribal Council rejected that idea. Chairman Martin complained that Vance wanted the Choctaws to “run away” from their problems in Mississippi, while the “Choctaw goal is to change the situation.”  And they unveiled a plan to do exactly that.
 
III. The Tribal Council’s Strategy
 
The Choctaws’ based their civil rights activism on a gradualist approach to race relations. Rather than demanding integration through court challenges and civil disobedience, Choctaws focused on convincing white Mississippians that Indians were acceptable neighbors.  They did this by laying out a vision for their own Choctaw high school. Although this approach appears to favor segregation, examination of the push for a Choctaw high school reveals a complex approach to civil rights grounded in Choctaw assertions of tribal sovereignty.
 
Beginning in 1959, the Choctaw launched a major political campaign for a high school by using pan-Indian networks to lobby Congress. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the Mississippi Federation of Women’s Clubs (MFWC), and the Association on American Indians Affairs (AAIA) activated their networks and Oklahoma Choctaw Chief Harry Belvin also joined the crusade.^[13] These organizations flooded the Mississippi Congressional Delegation with pleas for a Choctaw high school. By 1962, the BIA finally gave in and requested the appropriation. ^[14]
 
The Tribal Council resolution for a Choctaw high school highlighted their use of Choctaw tribalism to combat racial prejudice.  The resolution proclaimed the Band’s sovereign right to take responsibility for projects designed to benefit them. It listed Choctaw goals for education, beginning with “eventual assimilation into the public school system under honorable conditions.” Martin and York noted that because this objective was far in the future, the Choctaws should use their Indian high school as a vehicle for integration, locating it not in the Pearl River community, as the BIA had decided, but in the town of Philadelphia, on land near either the Choctaw Agency or the Indian Service hospital.  “We emphatically state,” said the resolution, “that the eventual assimilation [into the public school system] of these facilities and their students come about through the re-education of the thinking and the joint cooperation of both the non-Indian and Indian people.” Martin explained that a state-of-the-art high school in the middle of town would improve public relations, proving that the Band was progressive enough to build the best schools and that Choctaw students were equal to whites.^[15] The Council, however, was divided on the issue, with opponents of the plan stressing that whites’ attitudes must be changed before progress could be made, and the vote was close.^[16]
 
BIA officials were also skeptical of this plan. Eight years after the Brown decision, Neshoba County was still building new segregated schools, indicating their continued resistance to integration. Officials warned that inserting an Indian school in the middle of town at this time would alienate white citizens.  In the end, the BIA built Choctaw Central High School in the Choctaw Community of Pearl River. It opened late in 1963, and integration of white schools near Choctaw communities occurred very slowly over the next decade. ^[17]  The Choctaws’ plan to use a segregated school to promote integration failed b/c their decisions were subject to the BIA, but the campaign suggests some interesting things about civil rights in Mississippi.
 
 IV. CONCLUSIONS 
 
The actions of Martin and York suggest that the Choctaws did not just sit out the civil rights movement as some researchers have claimed.^[18] While they eschewed extra-legal means of protest and did not join with African Americans in the 1964 Freedom Summer action, Choctaw leaders nonetheless acted systematically to address discrimination.
 
Choctaw political identity in the context of civil rights focused on their status as Indians with a unique connection to the federal government. York and Martin argued that this relationship gave legal sanction to their racial identity—Indian—which in turn exempted them from Jim Crow laws. The Council therefore rejected the insistence of BIA officials that segregation posed a severe threat to their ability to remain in Mississippi.  Instead, they believed that measured pressures for integration, supported by the federal government, would eventually change their milieu.
 
As part of those efforts, some Choctaw leaders stepped back from the Choctaws’ long-standing strategy of racial separatism and advocated integration of white schools.  York and Martin pushed this agenda even further, proposing integrating the town of Philadelphia by building a Choctaw high school there.
 
The campaign for civil rights, grounded in tribal sovereignty, ultimately strengthened the Choctaws’ political autonomy. The drive for racial equality in education had produced national campaigns that brought the Choctaws into contact with such organizations as the AAIA and the NCAI—which they joined in 1963.^[19] Working with both Indian and non-Indian activists from across the nation provided a broader perspective on Choctaw problems.
 
In their crusade against Termination, both the AAIA and the NCAI framed Indian sovereignty in the language of international politics. Likening conditions on Indian reservations to those in nations emerging from colonialism and calling for the equivalent of the Marshall Plan—a proposal called Point IV—to rebuild reservation economies. These activists suggested that the treatment of Native peoples in America provided propaganda for the communists, and advised that America’s struggle to hold the moral high ground in this ideological contest was contingent on justice for Indians.^[20] It is likely that working with AAIA and the NCAI activists had encouraged Martin and York’s use of Cold War analogies in Council meetings and had shaped their views of Choctaws’ American identity. Choctaw leaders such as Martin and York now deployed the rhetoric of the Cold War and declared an American identity—one based on their Indian citizenship.
 
Thus, while the Choctaw’s civil rights struggle did not result in integration of Mississippi’s public schools, it nonetheless served as the catalyst for a powerful tribalism that ultimately transformed both the Choctaws and rural Mississippi. Over the next decade, Phillip Martin began the process of economic revitalization of the reservation that came to be known as “the Choctaw Miracle.”  True to Martin’s predictions of the power of eating over hating, race relations between Indians, African Americans, and whites improved significantly as the reservation economy began to employ workers of all races. It is evident, therefore, that Choctaw tribalism played a starring role in the drama of civil rights in Mississippi.