Tag: Statewide

Chloe Edwards, of the Government Records Section, brings us this post in an ongoing series about Mississippi Advertising Commission posters. Many thanks to Ms. Edwards for sharing these fun artifacts.

The unspoken assumption of the program was that white Mississippians would get new industrial jobs, while the African-American population remained the backbone of the state’s agricultural system. Mississippi’s new industrial workers were not offered legal protection in the form of minimum wages, unions, or worker’s compensation laws. In fact, the cheapness and compliance of the Mississippi workforce was touted as an advantage for companies seeking to escape heavily unionized Northern states. Some companies abused the training programs. Most notably was the Vertex Hosiery Company in Ellisville, where groups of students were rotated through unpaid “training programs” at the plant and then told they could not be hired, while the items they manufactured were sold.

Chloe Edwards, of the Government Records Section, brings us this post in an ongoing series about Mississippi Advertising Commission posters. Many thanks to Ms. Edwards for sharing these fun artifacts.

A Mississippi version of the New Deal, the BAWI program sponsored local industrial initiatives that would be mostly financed and wholly administered by the local authorities. Before it could be passed, BAWI had to overcome a hurdle. The 1890 Constitution forbade state investment in private companies. The authors of the BAWI bill appealed to the constitution’s general welfare clause on the recommendation of Jackson lawyers. They argued that the bill was a “necessity to protect [the] people” in the midst of the Great Depression. The bill passed in a special session in late 1936.

Source:

Connie L. Lester, “Balancing Agriculture with Industry: Capital, Labor and the Public Good in Mississippi’s Homegrown New Deal,” Journal of Mississippi History 70, no. 3 (2008).