Hattiesburg: The Hub City and the Freedom Vote

Hattiesburg calls itself the Hub City because of the railroads. In the eighteen eighties, the timber industry was harvesting the longleaf pine forests of south Mississippi at industrial scale, and Hattiesburg grew up as the rail junction where the logs came together. Captain William Hardy of the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad founded the settlement in eighteen eighty-two and named it for his wife Hattie. Within two decades it was the largest city in south Mississippi.

The longleaf pines are mostly gone now. What replaced the timber economy was Camp Shelby, the military training base established in nineteen seventeen that has operated continuously since then. During World War Two, Camp Shelby was one of the largest training installations in the country. The Japanese American Forty-Second Regimental Combat Team trained here before deploying to Europe, where it became the most decorated unit in American military history. The African American units that trained here returned home to a Mississippi that had not changed.

In the autumn of nineteen sixty-three, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ran a Freedom Vote in Hattiesburg as a parallel election. The official Democratic Party refused to register Black voters, so SNCC organized its own mock gubernatorial election open to all Mississippi residents. Nearly eighty thousand Black Mississippians voted in a process that had no legal force but proved that African Americans would participate in democratic life if given the chance. Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been evicted from her plantation for attempting to register, campaigned for the Freedom Vote across the state.

The following summer, Freedom Summer brought hundreds of student volunteers to Mississippi, many of them through Hattiesburg. Vernon Dahmer, a local NAACP leader who offered to pay poll taxes for voters who could not afford them, was killed when his home was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan in January of nineteen sixty-six.