As the world buries Nelson “Madiba” Mandela, one cannot help but think of the oppressive system of apartheid in South Africa and its American counterpart of segregation in the South . Segregation was American apartheid. Nowhere was it practiced so harshly as in Mississippi. After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, Mississippi and other Southern states were allowed to establish Black Codes that limited the freedoms and liberties of African Americans in the South. This group of laws included restrictions on such things as "curfews, vagrancy, labor contracts, women's rights, and land restrictions" (NLR -United States Part A, 7). Jim Crow laws followed where the black codes left off. Poll taxes and literacy tests prevented African Americans from voting. Violence was often used to enforce segregation and white rule in Mississippi, with hundreds of African Americans dying from lynching and other attacks. African Americans fought for many decades in Mississippi to end segregation and gain equal rights in the South with martyrs like Medgar Evers lea...