as a third party.) Efforts by the Dixiecrats to paint Southern Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the 1948 Mississippi state Democratic sample ballot warned that a vote for Truman electors was "a vote for Truman and his vicious anti-Southern program" and that a Truman victory would mean "our way of life in the South will be gone forever." On election day of 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama, all previously solid Democratic states. Truman won the national election anyway, without their electoral votes. The States' Rights Party movement faded from the landscape, and its Mississippi leaders resumed their place in the ranks of the national Democratic Party with no repercussions, even though all seven incumbent Congressmen and Senator James O. Eastland had run on the Dixiecrat ballot with Thurmond and Governor Wright. Civil Rights Movement and 1960–1963 In the fall of 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi politicians in the state legislature reacted by approving and ratifying a constitutional amendment that would abolish the public school system. This provision, on the other hand, was never used. Soon, Mississippi became the focal point of national media when in August 1955, Emmett Till was lynched in Tallahatchie County. In 1957, Congress began to enact the first civil rights laws since the Reconstruction Era. By the time of the 1959 state elections, white Democrats acted to put a stop to this and elected Ross Barnett as governor. Democrats in Mississippi were not challenged in general elections and Barnett too ran unopposed. As a Dixiecrat, or States Rights Democrat, a member of the White Citizens' Council and by law on the board of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Barnett was a staunch supporter of segregation laws, as had been his two challengers in the primary. By the time of the 1960 presidential elections, he refused to support John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon. Barnett opted for the traditional route, while many other Mississippi Democratic officials supported Kennedy's campaign. The state party itself had declared, in its platform, to "reject and oppose the platforms of both national parties and their candidates" after the 1960 Democratic National Convention and its adoption of a civil rights platform. As a result of its insistence on maintaining segregation, Mississippi became a focal point for other major civil rights activity. Jackson's bus terminal was a stop for the Freedom