Take Your Choice: Separation Or Mongrelization

The author was America's most controversial politician ever elected to high office, including the governorship and senate of the state of Mississippi. This book, written while Bilbo was awaiting a ruling by the US Senate designed to strip him of his senate seat, summed up his core beliefs about race, civilization and what he called the only solution to racial conflict: separate geographical states. It is a valuable historical document which accurately reflects racial thinking in the Deep South prior to the Civil Rights Era. An avowed Southern nationalist, Bilbo was even a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth, although he left that organization before he was elected to office. A firm defender of Southern segregation, Bilbo was unusual in that he realized that segregation was no answer and invoked considerable opposition from his fellow Southerners because of his demand that physical geographical separation was the only way to preserve Western Civilization. "If we choose any plan short of the physical separation of the races, we are in effect adopting the scheme of amalgamation of the races. Any student of racial history knows that if the Negroes remain in the United States, the last American will be an octoroon or a mongrel . . . If the Negroes are not removed, this condition may come about in three to five hundred years: The fact that it will come sooner or later is a certainty."