“Negro leaders in the state point out that perhaps the most crucial factor in this remarkable increase was the stimulation and courage” provided by the Bilbo hearing. The surge in Black registration started immediately after the war and continued for several years. There were seventeen thousand on the rolls by 1952, of whom perhaps fifty-six hundred were voting. The number of registrants peaked around 1954 or 1955, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand, the highest figure in the twentieth century.
