Past executive directors have included Rickey Cole, Travis Brock, Sam R. Hall, Rosalind Rawls, Keelan Sanders, Amy Harris, Morgan Shands, and Alice Skelton.

Democrats overpowered the Republicans to combat these laws by means of force and violence in a method known as the Mississippi Plan, formulated in 1875 and implemented in the election of 1876.

"[2] On election day of 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama, all previously solid Democratic states.

[4] In the fall of 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi politicians in the state legislature reacted by approving and ratifying a constitutional amendment that would abolish the public school system.

[5][6] Soon, Mississippi became the focal point of national media when in August 1955, Emmett Till was lynched in Tallahatchie County.

Jackson's bus terminal was a stop for the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who in 1961 rode interstate buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans on routes through the segregated South to bring attention to the fact that localities in those states were ignoring federal desegregation law.

When the buses made it to the Mississippi state line, by an arrangement between Governor Barnett and the Kennedy administration, police and the National Guard escorted them into Jackson where they were arrested and jailed for trying to use the bus station's whites-only facilities.

[9] Established in April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) aimed to challenge discrimination based on race in the electoral process.

[10] The party was formed out of collaborative efforts from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

[11] In August 1964, a bus of MFDP delegates arrived at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the intention of asking to be seated as the Mississippi delegation[11] There they challenged the right of the Mississippi Democratic Party's delegation to participate in the convention, claiming that the regulars had been illegally elected in a completely segregated process that violated both party regulations and federal law, and that furthermore the regulars had no intention of supporting Lyndon B. Johnson, the party's incumbent president, in the November election.

[12][13] The Democratic Party referred the challenge to the Convention Credentials Committee, which televised its proceedings, which allowed the nation to see and hear the testimony of the MFDP delegates, particularly the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, whose evocative portrayal of her hard brutalized life as a sharecropper on the plantation owned by Jamie Whitten, a long time Mississippi congressman and chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, drew public attention.

With the help of Vice President Hubert Humphrey (chief sponsor of the 1948 civil rights resolution which sparked the 1948 Dixiecrat walk-out) and Party leader Walter Mondale, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the MFDP two at-large seats which allowed them to watch the floor proceedings but not take part.

Though the MFDP failed to unseat the regulars at the convention, and many activists felt betrayed by Johnson, Humphrey, and the liberal establishment, they did succeed in dramatizing the violence and injustice by which the white power structure governed Mississippi, maintained control of the Democratic Party of Mississippi, and disenfranchised black citizens.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not be running for a second full term, Mississippians took stock in the independent George Wallace.

It was also at this time that the Democratic Party went through drastic changes, when the national convention made the decision to award 1968 convention seats to the new "Loyalist" faction of the state Democratic Party, instead of the "regulars" (being "the old guard conservative delegation composed of the governor and others from Mississippi"[14])—the first time in history an entire delegation had been denied and replaced.

At the end of the 1996 general election, Republicans held three of the five congressional seats in addition to both U.S. senators, as well as a gain in the state legislature.

[21][22] However, according to John W. Winkle III, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Mississippi, "More than a century later, the 1890 Constitution, with its rather severe limitations on government and its antiquated organization and content, still shadows the state.

The term was coined by Senator J. Thomas Heflin, who said "I'd vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket!