“Sowing the Seeds of Discontent”

Abstract

Based on archival research and in-depth interviews conducted from 1999 through 2007, this article examines the role of Tougaloo College's Social Science Forums as a prefigurative collective free space in Mississippi's civil rights struggles. These Forums offered White and Black integrationists a unique opportunity to come together to hear lectures and discuss provocative ideas, some of which informed and inspired challenges to the state's system of White supremacy. By providing a location where integrationist networks and ideas were established and developed, the Forums helped to sow the seeds of discontent for challenges off campus and offered an interracial microcosm of the world that the Southern civil rights movement was trying to achieve. The article sheds light on specific ways an on-campus free space at a private Black Southern college fostered and mobilized oppositional ideas, interracial networks, and practices prior to and during the development of the Mississippi civil rights movement.