Thank you, chris, and thank you all for being here today. Delighted you got off to such a good start for the mississippi book festival. To put our best foot forward, put on a court and tie, and governor barbour wore socks in the summer. Anyway, before i make the introductions of the panel, i see former governor william winner in the audience. Were so glad to have you. [applause] and i saw former governor ronny muss grove earlier but i dont know whether he is in here, but he is on the grounds, too. So were glad so many people have turned out. Let me just briefly introduce each member of the panel. The one thing that struck me ive read all of the books, and how its, again, reminder how small and swim hat and interconnected we are in this state because there are characters in these books that appear in more than one book. One member of the panel appears in more than one of the books and its a reminder again of how we really kind of all together in this state. But beginning on my far right, we have k. C. Morrison, professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Mississippi State university, and the author of aaron henry of mississippi, inside ang tater. Next to him we have Dennis Mitchell, who is head of the division of arts and science and a professor of history at Mississippi State university at meridian, and he is the author of a new history of mississippi. In the middle we have don thompson, who holds not only a bachelor bachelors degree but a masters degree and a ph. D in forestry from Mississippi State university. How did all these Mississippi State people get on our panel . Anyway, don lives on a farm, and he is author of a biography of the late senator john seven sinness, plowing a straight furrow, and Stuart Stevens, not sure how to describe stuart but political consultant nationally known, author of many books. Stuart was too cheap to provide me with a copy of his book but i have a readers copy. It is other lifetime of college football. On my right is my friend, former governor barbour, who is, as all of you know, firmer twoterm goveor of mississippi, who is returned sort of to the private sector in washington and governor barbour is the author of americas great storm, leading through hurricane which were coming up on the tenth anniversary of that. Gentlemen, i would start off by asking each of you, and i recall state with k. C. If i can. We all have day jobs but we have all written now books. What inspired you to tackle this subject and do this book, if you could start off for us. Thank you. Curtis. Well, as a high school and College Student doing a good deal of movement in mississippi, i had watched aaron henry and felt compelled to write about the Civil Rights Movement. Little did i know when i started this project, as a political scientist, id have to turn myself into an historian to try and tell this story, and so it took me a great deal of time to do that. 15 years, namely. The things that were particular interest to me that i think made henrys life of interest was i had an abiding interest in indigenous africanamerican leadership during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s in mississippi, and of course, henry was the quintessential example of this. He was the longest surviving, the longest serving of the early group of leaders who started the movement. Bringing the naacp, which had been largely underground until the arrival of met gaffers and aaron henry, and these two men essentially start a new naacp. So i was interested in indigenous leadership, the extent to which local mississippians took advantage of their own social change operations. As a political scientist, had studied social movements and was interested in that, how individuals and groups in community got hold of a contention and built a mean of bringing social change in a community. Aaron henry was a particularly interested in something he called the accomplishment of regularity for africanamericans, and built a comprehensive kind of vision that had politics in it, economics, social psychological dimensions, and he was an entrepreneur, he had grownup a family of entrepreneurs. He was a pharmacist. And in the life of this man, he embodied all of the things that struck me as important dimensions of an indigenous mississippi leader. Thank you. Dennis mitchell. Well, i wrote the new history briefly for two reasons. One, i wanted to set the record straight. Its called the new history because it is so different from the history that has been published about mississippi heretofore that the press insisted on that as the title. That wasnt my choice. But it is a new, very different interpretation of mississippi history, which tries to include a lot of people who were left out in the past, and the story of the environment and it is a very different account of mississippis past. The second reason that i wrote it is that ive always felt, as a historian, that we, mississippians would never make the progress we need make until we understand our history. Were so many myths and misunderstandings about our past, that they have to be cleared up, and we have to accept different vision of the past before we can move forward. Thank you. Don thompson. I was stationed in Mississippi Community college and took some education courses and took them for graduate credit, and i went to the dean and told him i wanted to get an otherwise indicatingal specialist. He said you cant do that you have to get a degree in Something Else, so i went to Mississippi State get a degree in Something Else. I went to the different professors in forestry and they wanted fulltime grad about student, and i found one that says the problem is the parttime students like you wont write the dessir addition. Youll take the coreses and that makes us look bad because we dont have completers. He said i would like you to analyze the research program. I had about so it i went to the library, pulled down the code and read and it it was just two pages. I thought, how hard can this be . But it took about five years and about a 260something page dissertation to expand, but stanis files were open to the public at Mississippi State, and i start reading in there, looking for the forestry research. I got off track and got in the prestennis boxes, not vary men but a few and i kept seeing letters where people were begging him to run for higher office. Thought it ought to be the other way around. He ought to be asking for support. Instead people are wanting him to run. So i got to reading more and thought this guy is unique. I had a stereo type of a senator, and he really didnt fit that. He was has had high integrity, really respected well by all. I kind of wanted to write the book with the premise that some young person who might be interested in studying Public Service might use him as an example. Thank you. Stuart. Thanks. Well, in 2012, i worked on the romney campaign. We lost. And that kind of freed up some time. But i really found myself after that Campaign Thinking a lot about sort of what was important and the concept of loss, and my dad was 95 then, and a lot of the ways when i grew up, my dad and i sort of connected and bonded, was through college football, particularly ole miss football. So, he and i went to the all of the and my mom to 2013 ole miss games together. And that became really a framework of writing a book that was sort of a reflection on growing up in jackson, i grew up not far from here. And the south, and sort of a meditation on loss. That was really the motivation for it. Thank you. Governor . Curtis, after katrina, as things were written both in realtime by the press and in books about katrina, they tended to be about louisiana, and i always used to explain to people, that doesnt like to cover airplanes that land safely. And that made me have the idea that somebody ought to write a book about this, and after i was no longer governor, i tried to do that. And i did it for pretty obvious reasons. There were so many people who were heroes. There were so many people we owe enormous gratitude toward. 954,000 volunteers came to mississippi over the first five years and registered with a church or charity. These are not guessing. These are names of people who registered and worked in cleanup or in Disaster Assistance. 44 states. 44 of our sister states sent resources to mississippi. And 26,000 state employees or contractors from the other states came to mississippi. More than 10,000 national guard. I think about the volunteers, i think about our sister states. I think about the local First Responders, who were magnificent. I had no idea when i became governor but i learned, we prepare for major disasters yearround, and almost any state agency or department has got a disaster preparation. The problem is we prepared for camille. We thought that was the Gold Standard for a hurricane. 200milesanhour winds. But we got katrina. Despite those 5milesanhour winds it was so much worse, yet these First Responders adapted. They were flexible. They changed. As the first day after the storm when i flew over the coast in a helicopter, you would have told me only 238 people in mississippi would die . I would have thought that was the most optimistic polly anish, 1800 people died in louisiana. Our people were just magnificent, and our local officials, governor wenner endured this as i have. Mississippi is a constitutionally weak governor. But i always say doesnt mean the governor has to have a weak constitution, but the local officials decided, somebody had to be in charge, and the only logical person was the governor. And so they did one of the most unnatural acts in politics. They gave away their power. They said, were going to follow you. Were going to follow the state. Our congressional delegation, the federal government. Look, the fema takes a terrible rap, deservedly for some things, like their logistical system collapsed. Just never worked. But i tell you at the end of the day, the federal government did a whole lot more right than wrong. Some days i could have choked them, but they did more right than wrong. They were good partners, and that story never got told. And i would just say to you, curtis, if this book is half as good as the story, if half as good as the strong resilient people of mississippi and what they did for themselves, and for others, then i will be very proud i wrote the book. Thank you. Theyre all good books. [applause] let me look back down to k. C. Morrison to talk about aaron henry, who incidentally was a friend of mine and in fact a mentor to me as a young reporter in clarksdale during the Movement Days in the 60s. This is a guy who was basically the founder of the mississippi freedom democratic party. He was largely responsible for organizing freedom summer, so many things that he was involved in. How would you rate him on a scale of the National Civil rights leaders . Because sometimes i think he doesnt get as much recognition as he deserves. I think he is as important as the most important of our National Civil rights leaders, and one of the things that is lost in our discussions and thinking about henry is that he was deeply engaged in the National Democratic party, a major player in the party. He was an adviser to every president from the time of kennedy, until his death, and end n in describing the characteristic about him to be everywhere and get on with everybody and to make everybody who was around him better, john didmer called him the ecumenical leader in the movement, which is to say he had he found a way to work successfully with all of the civil rights organizations involved in mississippi, and there were many organizations, and there were competing interests about turf and all that. And when i was doing the research for this and interviewing scores of people, a singular response that i got from people who talked to me about henry was this sense they had that he was a man of integrity, he could be depend on to allow you space to do your own thing and making a contribution to the movement. So, he is large in that sense. He was man who knew everybody because of his tremendous networking capability. He was a gregarious, backslapping kind of mississippian who had a way of getting on with people so he was engaged at the National Level as much as the local, and in mississippi, because he goes on longer than anybody else, who begins in the Civil Rights Movement, that just more time for him to make accomplishment, and the steadiness with which he moved from day one to day last was a part of that accomplishment. During the 60s, of course, he was allied at first with medgar efforts and then following his murder here in 1963, medgar evers brother charles came to mississippi and become almost coequals within the naacp. You suggest in your book that later on in the 60s, aaron felt betrayed by charles evers. Could you elaborate . There were always tensions, of course. Aaron henry and medgar evers had been true partners. They came to know each other in the delta, henry, of course, was a man of the delta. Medgar evers first thought when he comes back, one of the world war ii veterans, a lot of them concentrated in the delta but he wasnt from the delta, but he moves there. And needs aaron henry, and they really do transform the naacp as an organization. It will be recalled that the organization had been underground and to the extent that it was public, in order to have any success at all, it soft pedaled a number of the issues. These two men, medgar and aaron henry, bring the naacp aboveboard and begin to make strong statements about what the challenge was. Medgar do is. This is a tremendous blow. Medgar dies. This is a tremendous blow for aaron henry. The man who almost rebuilt the organization is 0 no longer there. They depended on each other and so on, and his brother arrives, who had not been in the state, there were tensions in the beginning. Charlie evers was a man of strong opinion, and there were many differences in the beginning, but he became the field secretary for the naacp, and so they worked together until the movement moves from the social Movement Part to the political mobilization, and Charlie Evers had political ambitions of his own, and so they began to diverge, and it was for henry a bitter disappointment that the further they moved away. Thank you. Dennis mitchell, i mentioned i just heard you talk about how you felt certain commitment to kind of write a different version of mississippi history from that we have been exposed to, and i told you earlier, if you would indulge me, ill read a couple of lines from the Mississippi State history that i was taught when i was a young boy here in school in summit, mississippi. This was direct quotes from our history the life the negro lived as a slave was much bert than in africa. It was said his conditions would continue to improve more rapidly in slavery than as a free man. Be also learned in that old state history book that the klu klux Klu Klux Klans terrorism during reconstruction, quote, helped the south at a difficult time. Period. Close quote. So, glad to get a new history. But how much of a commitment did you feel to kind of its not revisionist history. Its real history this time youre dealing with. Well, it wasnt that i was doing this all on my own. You understand. I had the last single volume history of mississippi was written in 1979 this bicentennial history, and since 1975 historians have been very busy, and so i had a tremendous gold mine of research and scholarship to draw on. One of the hardest things to do as the historian from mississippi is to cover adequately the lives of the black population, who, i stress, in my book, were the majority of the population for 100 years. Most White Mississippians dont realize that at all. In fact, one of the people who read my manuscript for me had taught mississippi history at Belhaven College for many years before he moved to virginia, and i remember him coming in. He said, really . For 100 years . Black people were the majority . And that was the man who taught mississippi history for a long time. So, the i mean, what i did was to take the modern scholarship and try to turn it into a story that hopefully is readable. I really wanted a pageturner, not a dry history. So, that was difficult but i really feel like that i got it right. The reviewers have said i did. And it is a much richer history than the one mclemore and others have told. And its the history that people have struggled to give birth to, you know. The first School History to try to change things, those historians had to go to federal court and get the existing history declared a racist history. It didnt have a single picture of a black person in the history. But of course, they won the case, and the federal courts made the Government Agency add conflict and change was the title of it to the approved list, but then the only schools who used it were a few Catholic Schools back in the 60s because the local School Boards could still buy the history, so even though it existed, it wasnt used for very long time. So, the new history of mississippi, i hope, will make an impact on our state. I understand it has been adopted as the textbook for most of the College Level courses in the state. So, hopefully that will train the teachers who will go into the schools and teach a different version of the history. In your book, you write at one point, after the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, quote White Mississippians rejected modernism and t