What strikes the reader forcefully from the beginning of McMillen's book is how insidiously prevalent the system known as Jim Crow was in Mississippi, and how it affected every aspect of black life. Jim Crow did not mean that blacks were simply in effect denied the right to vote and had limited economic opportunities, though to be sure both of these hurdles existed. White supremacy, as McMillen deftly points out, meant far more than denied voting rights and low-rung jobs. It meant (either de facto or de jury) poor or no high schools, lynchings, outrageous jury verdicts and trials, harassment for succeeding in traditionally white professions, no libraries, etc. The sheer scope and overriding predominance of white supremacy in Mississippi is shocking, especially since whites really did not seek to hide it from prying Northerners. White supremacy transcended class lines for the most part, McMillen show us, and even acted as a greater force upon whites than economic self-interest. For example, every white owner of a store, restaurant, garage, theatre, etc., who refused to serve blacks was also losing the money blacks would have paid them.
McMillen concludes that from the 1890s to the middle of the 20th century very few blacks overcame the high political and economic barriers placed in their way by a Mississippi society bent on oppressing them. Blacks in that state, however, managed to create and maintain their own separate political, religious, educational and social institutions despite the odds against them. Those who could, moved away from Mississippi, much like the oppressed and degraded Irish left their native island to escape the shackles of British economic and sectarian control. Truly, Mississippi's society was born of hatred of blacks by whites, a situation not totally eradicated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.