ABSTRACT
Panola County is a minature society, with broad patterns of group life and interpersonal relations which have held through time. It is against this social order that national law was to proceed in the 1960's, so it is important that we first should understand it. As we shall see, civil rights law was not the only force of change working against this order. Parts of these established ways of life are economic, parts are political, and yet other parts involve social status. On matters of status I will have little to say, except to note that racial attitudes had created for Panola, as for much of the South, a status pattern that was more caste-like than not, and that within each race, status differentials existed along lines of occupation and lineage much like those found elsewhere in America. 1 It is to the economic and political structures and folkways I will pay most attention, to determine whether structural variations were associated with variations in compliance with the demands of the law.
