Appalachian Figures
In the piney woods of Kemper County, the mill town of Electric Mills once advertised itself as the brightest town south of St. Louis. Built around a fully electric lumber mill, it had its own hospital, theater, and even company currency before the trees gave out and the town slowly emptied.
From that fading industrial outpost came a girl who would spend nearly three decades in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Betty Jane Long left Electric Mills as a child, but she carried the small town’s grit with her into Meridian courtrooms, Jackson committee rooms, and a little bakery that locals still remember for caramel cakes and egg custard pies.
Her legacy is complicated. She was a pathbreaking woman lawyer and legislator, a small business owner, a church teacher, and one of the most durable political figures in east Mississippi. She was also a loyal cog in Mississippi’s segregationist machinery, a defender of eugenic style criminal justice, and a leader in killing the Equal Rights Amendment. To understand her is to confront how gender, race, and power intertwined in the mid twentieth century South.
Electric Mills Childhood
Electric Mills began in 1913 when the Sumter Lumber Company relocated from Alabama and built what was advertised as the first fully functioning electric lumber mill east of the Mississippi River. The town grew to more than 2,500 people, with a teaching hospital, schools, churches, and rows of tidy mill houses along shaded streets.
Betty Jane Long was born there on May 8, 1928. Her obituary places her birth in Electric Mills and notes that she moved with her family to Meridian at age eight, after the mill town went into decline.
Electric Mills would become a ghost town within a generation, remembered today mostly through a historical marker on U.S. 45, a scattering of foundations and sidewalks, and family reminiscences recorded on the Electric Mills website. Long’s life went in the opposite direction. Where her birthplace dwindled, she moved into bigger and more visible arenas: Meridian’s legal community, the state party apparatus, and the Mississippi House chamber.
From Classroom To Courtroom
Long’s family settled in Meridian in the mid 1930s, at a time when the city was a regional rail and commercial hub for east Mississippi. Her obituary records that she earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Millsaps College, followed by a Master of Science from the University of Alabama, and then a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Mississippi School of Law.
She passed the bar in August 1953. Contemporary coverage in the Jackson Clarion Ledger listed sixteen new members of the Mississippi bar, with Long as the only woman in the cohort. The Mississippi Law Journal’s directory of state bar members soon after placed her office at 917 Greater Mississippi Life Building in Meridian, confirming her status as a practicing attorney in the city’s legal district.
Within a few years she was appearing in reported appellate cases. In a 1957 Mississippi Supreme Court opinion, Snowden v. Skipper, the court lists “Miss Betty J. Long, Meridian” as counsel for the appellee in a personal injury dispute involving a taxi crash in Lauderdale County. That brief notation is a reminder that by the mid 1950s she had already carved out a place in a courtroom culture that was overwhelmingly male and white.
Breaking Into The House
In August 1955, at just twenty seven years old, Betty Jane Long was elected to represent Lauderdale County in the Mississippi House of Representatives. A Clarion Ledger preview of the coming session remarked that the 1956 legislature would have more than one hundred new faces. Long was one of them, and one of only two women in the 122 member House.
Legislative handbooks compiled by the Mississippi Legislature for the late 1950s and early 1960s list “LAUDERDALE – Miss Betty J. Long, Meridian” among the House members, situating her firmly inside the state’s one party Democratic establishment. These handbooks, together with later volumes, confirm that she would ultimately serve seven consecutive terms from January 1956 through early 1984.
A slim booklet titled Women of the Mississippi Legislature, produced by the Mississippi Library Commission, profiled the small number of women serving in the House and Senate during the modern civil rights era. Long appears there alongside colleagues such as Helen Jacobs McDade and Mary Libby Payne, emphasizing how rare women legislators still were in mid century Mississippi politics.
From the beginning she was treated by the press as serious and ambitious. Political columnist Charles M. Hills periodically mentioned “Miss Long” in his Affairs of State column, sometimes speculating about her prospects for higher office. House journals and contemporaneous newspaper reports place her on key committees and show her sponsoring bills on topics ranging from local government reform to public health.
A Jury Box For Women
One of Long’s earliest and most striking initiatives centered on women’s civic participation. In January 1958 she helped introduce a bill that would qualify women for jury duty in Mississippi and require women’s restrooms in courthouses. Press coverage in the Delta Democrat Times described her alliance with state senator Lovie Gore on the proposal and chronicled the bill’s eventual defeat.
At the time, Mississippi still restricted women’s service on juries, and many courthouses had no facilities for women at all. The jury duty bill did not immediately change that, but it marks Long as part of a small cohort of white women who pushed for incremental changes within a deeply conservative and segregated system.
Her public comments often framed such issues in economic and social terms rather than as a feminist rights campaign. In a 1960 interview with the Clarke County Tribune, she was quoted as saying that payrolls were the state’s greatest need, tying questions of infrastructure and public services to the promise of jobs. That pragmatic tone would remain a hallmark of her legislative career.
Conservative Feminism At The Capitol
Through the 1960s and 1970s Long steadily accumulated influence. She chaired several committees, served as secretary of the Mississippi Democratic Party in 1956, and by the mid 1970s she headed a subcommittee of the powerful House Rules Committee that controlled the fate of the federal Equal Rights Amendment in Mississippi.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s article on the Equal Rights Amendment notes that Rep. Betty Jane Long of Meridian chaired the House subcommittee that handled ERA resolutions. The piece quotes her public statements voicing skepticism that the amendment could pass in Mississippi and warning that it might subject women to the military draft and combat duty.
In newspaper interviews from 1974 and 1975 she predicted that the ERA had little chance in her committee and raised fears about unintended consequences for families and traditional gender roles. Under her leadership, the ERA died in committee multiple years in a row.
Long’s stance combined boundary pushing and boundary keeping. She had personally broken barriers in education, law, and legislative leadership. Yet she resisted a national feminist amendment that many women’s groups championed, preferring a vision of women’s advancement that stayed within established gender expectations and state level control. Historians of southern politics often describe this blend as conservative feminism, and Long fits comfortably inside that tradition.
Segregation, Sovereignty, And Reproductive Control
Any honest account of Long’s career has to reckon with the racial politics of mid century Mississippi. She rose inside a white Democratic establishment that built elaborate defenses against desegregation and federal intervention.
Recent scholarship on the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the state’s segregationist intelligence agency, places Long close to that machinery. A thesis on Commission informants identifies her as a former board member, alongside other legislators and local elites who oversaw or cooperated with the agency’s investigative work. Another study of post war eugenic ideology notes that a Commission investigator recalled looking into civil rights worker Michael Schwerner after a request from Long, evidence that she was willing to use state surveillance tools against civil rights activists.
Her legislative record on reproduction also reflected the era’s obsession with racial control. A 2019 article on reproductive rights in the modern South notes that a notorious Mississippi bill targeting out of wedlock births and authorizing sterilization as an alternative to prison had backing from three female representatives, including Betty Long of Meridian. The article quotes Black activists who labeled such measures “genocide in Mississippi.”
These examples do not make Long uniquely extreme; they place her squarely within the mainstream of white Mississippi politics in the 1950s and 1960s. They also highlight the limits of her advocacy. She championed jury service and restroom access for women, but not racial equality, and she helped maintain a system that policed Black bodies and civil rights workers in the name of law and order.
Speaker For A Day
Long reached the symbolic peak of her legislative career in November 1966. When long serving House Speaker Walter Sillers Jr. died, the House needed a temporary presiding officer to oversee the election of his successor. News reports from the Hattiesburg American and the Clarion Ledger note that the House chose Betty Jane Long as temporary speaker, making her the first woman to preside over the Mississippi House, if only for a brief and carefully defined moment.
Biographical reference works and later accounts emphasize her committee leadership through the 1970s, particularly on Rules and public health related legislation. She also served as a delegate for Alabama governor George Wallace at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, underscoring her alignment with the party’s segregationist and states rights faction during that period.
Despite this conservative profile, she developed a reputation as a savvy, personable legislator. In a 2022 essay for Memphis Magazine, journalist John Branston recalls covering the Mississippi legislature for UPI in the early 1980s and being taken under the wing of “The Lady from Lauderdale County.” He describes Long as a trailblazing legislator and lawyer who opposed the ERA yet owned and worked in her own bakery, a mix of contradiction and charm that impressed the young reporter.
By the end of the 1970s her staying power set her apart. The obituary and contemporary press note that after the 1979 elections she was the only woman left in the Mississippi Legislature.
Baker, Boss, And Back Home In Meridian
Long’s public life in Jackson was mirrored by her business and community life in Meridian. In 1960 the Clarion Ledger’s Magnolia Mirror column mentioned the opening of the Acme Cafe in Meridian, a venture she co founded with her mother that would be the forerunner of Long’s Bake Shop.
Her obituary and local reminiscences describe Long’s Bake Shop as a downtown cornerstone, famous for apple pie, caramel cake, and egg custard pies. Facebook threads in Meridian history groups still spark nostalgia for the bakery’s desserts and for Long’s habit of talking politics with anyone who came through the door.
Church and civic work rounded out her local presence. She was a long time member and elder at Jones Memorial Presbyterian Church in Meridian, where she taught Sunday school and contributed legendary desserts to the church’s fall festival. She served on several local boards and consulted for AARP, and the Mississippi Bar later highlighted her pro bono work on behalf of battered women in a memorial note.
Retirement And Constitutional Repair
In May 1983, after nearly three decades in the House, Long announced that she would not seek another term. Newspaper coverage and her obituary attribute the decision to her father’s illness and the financial strain of running the bake shop along with political life. Commentators in the Clarion Ledger lamented that her retirement would weaken east Mississippi’s clout in Jackson.
Her public service did not end there. Governor William Allain appointed her in 1985 to a committee charged with reviewing the legislative sections of the Mississippi Constitution, and later to a sixteen member panel tasked with drafting a proposed new constitution. Those efforts ultimately stalled, but Long’s presence on the committees shows that even after leaving elective office she remained part of the state’s governing class.
Remembering A Complicated Life
Betty Jane Long died on June 29, 2023, at the age of ninety five. Obituaries from Webb and Stephens Funeral Home and Legacy.com emphasized her long legislative career, her pioneering legal status, her service to Jones Memorial Presbyterian Church, and the sweet comfort of her cakes and pies. WTOK TV called her a trailblazer who helped operate Long’s Bake Shop for decades.
The Mississippi bar memorialized her in its magazine and in a joint Mississippi Supreme Court and Mississippi Bar memorial service, noting both her professional accomplishments and her pro bono work. A year end Clarion Ledger feature on notable Mississippi deaths of 2023 placed her alongside other political and civic figures who shaped the state.
From the vantage point of Electric Mills, her story reads like a parable of twentieth century Mississippi. She grew up in a company town built on industrial optimism, watched it vanish, and made a life in the larger regional center down the road. She opened doors that had been closed to women, yet helped preserve a racial and gender order that harmed many of her fellow Mississippians. She poured energy into both courthouse and bake shop, Sunday school classroom and committee room.
For Appalachian and upland communities throughout the South, Long’s life is a reminder that local power can rest in hands that are at once nurturing and deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. The Lady from Lauderdale County was a loyal daughter of Electric Mills and Meridian, a product of her time, and a figure whose complicated legacy still has much to teach us about the intertwined histories of gender, race, and rural politics.
Sources And Further Reading
Mississippi Legislature, Hand book: Biographical Data of Members of Senate and House of Representatives, Personnel of Standing Committees (1960, 1964 and later sessions). Entries for “LAUDERDALE – Miss Betty J. Long, Meridian” confirm her House service, party affiliation, and committee roles. eGrove+1
Mississippi Law Journal, vol. 35 and 37 (1964 and 1966), directories of Mississippi State Bar members listing “Betty Jane Long, 917 Greater Miss. Life Bldg., Meridian,” documenting her status and address as a practicing attorney. Internet Archive+1
Snowden v. Skipper, 230 Miss. 684 (1957). Mississippi Supreme Court opinion listing “Miss Betty J. Long, Meridian” as counsel for the appellee in a personal injury case. Justia+1
“Women of the Mississippi Legislature,” Mississippi Library Commission, Mississippi Digital Library. Brief biographical sketches and photographs of women legislators, including Long, situating her within the small female cohort at the Capitol. MSDigiLib Collections
“The Equal Rights Amendment and Mississippi,” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Discusses the ERA fight in the state and identifies Rep. Betty Jane Long of Meridian as chair of the House subcommittee that blocked the amendment, quoting her concerns about drafting women.
Webb and Stephens Funeral Home, “Betty Jane Long Obituary” (July 29, 2023), and Legacy.com reprint. Provides detailed biographical timeline, educational background, bar admission, legislative career, retirement reasons, and community involvement. Webb & Stephens Funeral Homes+1
WTOK TV, “Retired legislator Betty Jane Long dies at 95” (Aug. 2, 2023). Obituary style news item highlighting her bar admission in 1953, first election in 1955, seven legislative terms, and decades of operating Long’s Bake Shop. https://www.wtok.com
Mississippi Lawyer (Mississippi Bar magazine), Summer 2023, memorial note on Betty Jane Long, referenced in the bar’s remembrance materials and noting her pro bono work for battered women. Mississippi Bar
“Notable Mississippi deaths of 2023,” Clarion Ledger (Dec. 28, 2023). Short notice summarizing her age, date of death, and political significance. Clarion Ledger
Mississippi State Department of Archives and History, Electric Mills historical marker text and related coverage, including WTOK’s 2019 story on the marker unveiling and HMdb.org’s marker transcription, documenting Electric Mills as a Sumter Lumber Company town known as the brightest town south of St. Louis. HMDB+1
Electric Mills, Mississippi website and blog, particularly the “Electric Mills Historical Marker” and “About” pages, which outline the town’s origins, peak population, and decline after the mill closed. Electric Mills
“Betty Jane Long,” Wikipedia entry. Synthesizes contemporary news reports, legislative handbooks, and other sources on her life, including term dates, committee roles, the jury duty bill, ERA subcommittee leadership, Wallace delegation, and post legislative constitutional work. Wikipedia
John Branston, “The Best ‘Worst State’ Ever Part Three,” Memphis Magazine, July 7, 2022. Includes an anecdotal portrait of Long as “The Lady from Lauderdale County,” describing her as a trailblazing legislator, lawyer, ERA opponent, and working owner of Long’s Bake Shop. Memphis magazine
Nursing Clio, “The Politics of Reproductive Rights Legislation in the Modern South” (2019). Analyzes Mississippi’s mid century reproductive legislation and notes that a punitive bill tying illegitimacy and sterilization had support from three female state representatives, including Betty Long of Meridian, drawing on SNCC’s pamphlet Genocide in Mississippi. Nursing Clio
CJ Sadler, “African American Informants and Allies of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission” (University of Memphis thesis, 2011). Discusses the Sovereignty Commission’s structure and notes figures such as legislator Betty Long as part of its board level leadership, placing her within the apparatus of segregationist surveillance. University of Memphis Digital Commons
AK Fair, The Faces of Eugenic Ideology in the Post WWII American South (Miami University thesis, 2019). Uses Mississippi Sovereignty Commission records to explore intersections of eugenics, race, and state power, and includes discussion of Long’s interactions with Commission investigators. epdf.pub
JK Hawkins, “A Case Study of the Educational Reform Efforts of Former Governor William Winter” (Mississippi State University, 2007). Mentions Representative Betty Long as an opponent of parts of Winter’s education reform program, illustrating her conservative stance on some school changes. Scholars Junction
Kiddle Encyclopedia, “Electric Mills, Mississippi: Facts for Kids,” and Electric Mills entry on Kemper County. Child friendly syntheses derived from Wikipedia that highlight Electric Mills’ history, malaria control experiments, and list Betty Jane Long among famous people from the community. Kiddle+1