The 1968 United States presidential election in Mississippi was held on November 5, 1968. Mississippi voters chose seven electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President. Background During the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement dictated Mississippi's politics, with effectively the entire white population vehemently opposed to federal policies of racial desegregation and black voting rights. In 1960, the state had been narrowly captured by a slate of unpledged Democratic electors but in 1964 universal white opposition to the Civil Rights Act and "War on Poverty" and zero or negligible black voter registration meant that white Mississippians – apart from a small number in the northeastern red clay hills who feared loss of public works – turned almost unanimously to Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater's support for "constitutional government and local self-rule" meant that the absence from the ballot of "states' rights" parties was unimportant. The Arizona Senator was one of only six Republicans to vote against the Civil Rights Act, and Goldwater's staunchly conservative policies caused the small Mississippi electorate to almost unanimously support him over the "big government" Johnson. Following the Voting Rights Act, Federal examiners registered Mississippi blacks as voters in large numbers: African American registration rose from under seven percent to over fifty-nine percent between mid-1965 and 1968. Extreme anger ensued among white Mississippians, because black voting in significant numbers would threaten the entire social fabric of the Black Belt and was even feared by the few upcountry whites who had stayed loyal to Johnson as potentially causing social breakdown. The anger of Mississippi's whites was seen in the 1967 Democratic gubernatorial primary when both Black Belt whites and their traditional foes in the upcountry supported conservative John Bell Williams against William Winter whom it was believed was favored by the newly registered blacks – although it remained political suicide to openly court black support. In addition, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and resultant abolition of Mississippi's rigorous poll tax requirements for voting had allowed large increases in white, as well as black, voter registration, with some of these drives done by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, when segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace announced in early 1968 that he would mount a third-party candidacy for the Presidency, he had a powerful base in his native Deep South. Meanwhile, by the 1966 midterms, the Republican Party, under new RNC Chairman Ray C.