In the early 1960s, Pickering was active in the Democratic Party, but he switched affiliation in 1964 to the Mississippi Republican Party. At the time, Pickering said that "the people of his state were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention" in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At the convention, African Americans, who had been disenfranchised in the Deep South except during Reconstruction, formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the party regulars. A month before the convention, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.