Special Collections

Ed King, a native Mississippian, was a major figure in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. In the 1960s, King and his wife, Jeanette, returned to Mississippi from the North, and King began working as chaplain at Tougaloo College, a predominantly black school in Jackson. A Methodist clergyman, King was denied membership to the white Mississippi Methodist Conference due to his liberal racial views. The black Mississippi Methodist Conference, however, accepted King as their only white member. King was a key leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In the 1963 Freedom Vote mock campaign and election, King ran for Lieutenant Governor and Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi NAACP, ran for Governor. In 1966, King unsuccessfully challenged John Bell Williams in the Mississippi Democratic primary for the position of Third District Congressman. King also served as one of the MFDP’s delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. King also helped found the Mississippi Civil Liberties Union.

The material in the Ed King Collection is divided as follows:

The Ed King Collection: Box 1 contains copies of newspapers and newsletters, along with newspaper clippings on various prominent figures and organizations in the Mississippi movement. Box 2 contains newspaper clippings detailing the progress of the Mississippi movement, pamphlets and campaign material for the MFDP, among other things, and is organized chronologically, from the initial challenge to school segregation in the 1950s to the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 1982. Box 3 is organized topically and contains a miscellany of newspaper clippings, pamphlets, copies of Opera News, and programs from entertainment events. Box 4 contains copies of periodicals with extensive coverage of the civil rights movement in the South, and Box 5 contains newspapers, phonograph records, posters of civil rights figures, and campaign stickers for black candidates for various Mississippi offices.

The Ed King Collection – Accretion 1: An accrual to the Ed King Collection (Accession 00-620), consisting of two boxes of printed material and oversize items pertaining to the civil rights movement.

This finding aid describes two units: The Ed King Collection, consisting of King’s original donation of materials to the University; and Accretion 1, consisting of additional material received at a later date. These two units were processed at different times and are described separately in the Container List below.

This collection is protected from unauthorized copying by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code).

The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use”, that user may be liable for copyright infringement.

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