The Jim Crow Militia: Paramilitary Police Reform and Law-and-Order Liberalism in Mississippi

The Jim Crow Militia: Paramilitary Police Reform and Law-and-Order Liberalism in Mississippi Justin Randolph (bio) Writing in 1877, a former U.S. congressman and Confederate general named Winfield Scott Featherston grieved Mississippi's reputation in the world. "The impression prevailing abroad," he feared, was "that our people look with too much leniency upon those who violate the law their movement is disconnected from histories of modern policing. One thread of the literature on postwar paramilitarism emphasizes how the violence of irregular white supremacist militias delivered Democrats' overthrow of Reconstruction and the continued...