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Amite County is a county located in the state of Mississippi on its southern border with Louisiana. As of the 2010 census, the population was 13,131.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28/28005.html )〕 Its county seat is Liberty.〔(【引用サイトリンク】accessdate=2011-06-07 )〕 The county is named after the Amite River which runs through the county. The name is derived from the French ''amitié'', meaning "friendship." Amite County is part of the McComb, MS Micropolitan Statistical Area. ==History== After Indian Removal in the 1830s, white European-American migrants developed the county for cotton plantations, worked by African-American slaves. As a result, the county population was majority black before the American Civil War. White planters did well during the cotton boom, and cotton was the basis of the economy until the 1930s. Amite County was not in a theater of war of the American Civil War. A raiding party of Union cavalry under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson is known to have camped in the county nine miles east of Liberty on the evening of 28 April 1863 while conducting a deep penetration raid as part of the Vicksburg Campaign. At the end of the Civil War, Amite County's population was 60% African American. During Reconstruction, freedmen elected several African Americans to local office as county sheriff.〔 After Reconstruction, white Democrats regained power in the state legislature through a combination of violent voter repression and fraud. They disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites in the state by the new 1890 state constitution, which imposed a poll tax, literacy tests, and other requirements as barriers to voter registration. These were administered by whites in a discriminatory way. Most black voters and many poor whites were dropped from the voter rolls. Racial violence, including lynchings, escalated during the Jim Crow years.〔("Amite County" ), Mississippi Civil Rights Project, accessed 16 March 2014〕 Discriminatory practices, such as the white primary and economic boycotts, kept blacks excluded from the political process in the county and state until the late 1960s. African Americans were a majority in the state until the 1930s. Excluded from voting, they were also excluded from juries and the entire political system. The county continued to be based on agriculture, shifting to logging and dairy farming in the 1930s. As agriculture was mechanized, reducing the need for farm labor, many blacks left Amite County during the early 20th century in two waves of the Great Migration. In the first wave many moved north to Chicago and other industrial cities of the Midwest. In the second wave, they moved to the West Coast, where the burgeoning defense industry in California particularly created jobs. From 1940 to 1960, the county population declined by 29%, as can be seen on the census tables below. Some rural whites also left the county. In the 1950s, local farmer E.W. Steptoe founded a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the county, and Herbert Lee, a married farmer with nine children, was among its charter members. They were working to regain civil rights, including the ability to vote. In the summer of 1961, Robert Parris Moses from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked in the county to organize African Americans for voter registration. He was beaten by Bill Caston, a cousin to the sheriff, near the courthouse, and arrested. He was told to leave the county for his own safety.〔("Murder of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen" ), Amite County, Mississippi Civil Rights Project, accessed 16 March 2014〕 In the 1960s, only one African American of the total of 5,500 in Amite County was a registered voter. Even after the Voting Rights Law was passed in 1965, grassroots efforts were required to register eligible voters.〔 (詳細はCivil Rights Movement. On September 25, 1961, at the Westbrook Cotton Gin, about a dozen witnesses, both white and black, saw E.H. Hurst, a white state legislator, murder Herbert Lee, a married African American with nine children. At the inquest that day, Hurst claimed self-defense and witnesses, intimidated by armed white men in the courtroom, supported him. Learning that the federal government might hold a grand jury in the case, Louis Allen, an African-American veteran of World War II and witness to Lee's murder, talked to the FBI to try to gain protection if he were to testify truthfully to what he saw. They said they could not help him. Whites suspected he had talked with the FBI and began to harass him.〔 His business was boycotted, and Allen was beaten and arrested more than once by the county sheriff. He stayed in the area to help his parents, but planned to leave; on January 31, 1964, he was shot and killed on his land. No one was prosecuted for Allen's death. Investigations since 1994 suggest that Allen was killed by Daniel (Danny) Jones, the county sheriff and son of the Ku Klux Klan's leader in the county.〔(Cold case: "The murder of Louis Allen" ), ''60 Minutes'' (CBS), 10 April 2011〕 Danny Jones was featured in a 2011 episode of ''60 Minutes'' focusing on civil rights cold cases, but he denied an interview. He died in 2012 or 2013. Following the repression of the civil rights era and a continuing poor economy, younger African Americans continued to leave the county, seeking jobs in bigger cities. The population declined more than 11 percent from 1960 to 1970, and further declines occurred to 1980 (see census tables below.) Because of the murders of Lee and Allen, voter registration efforts had stopped in the early 1960s. African Americans did not register until after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal protection and oversight. Today the county is majority white in population. Noted historic sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places include the Amite County Courthouse and the Westbrook Cotton Gin, the only one surviving of seven in the county. In addition 19th-century plantation houses and the Liberty and Bethany Presbyterian churches are included on the Register. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Amite County, Mississippi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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