The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

Civil Rights and States' Rights

Yasuhiro Katagiri

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781578063888
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496801258
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public schools, Mississippi created the State Sovereignty Commission. This was the executive agency established "to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi... from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government." The code word encroachment implied the state's strong resolve to preserve and protect the racial status quo. In the nomenclature the formality of the word sovereignty supposedly lent dignity to the actions of the Commission. For all practical purposes the Sovereignty Commission intended to wage this Deep South state's monolithic resistance to desegregation and to the ever-intensifying crusade for civil rights in Mississippi. In 1998 the papers of the Commission were made available for examination. No other state has such extensive and detailed documentary records from a similar agency. Exposed to public light, they unmasked the Commission as a counterrevolutionary department for political and social intrigue that infringed on individual constitutional rights and worked toward discrediting the civil rights movement by tarnishing the reputations of activists. As the eyes of the citizenry studied the records, the Commission slid from sovereign and segregated to unsavory and abominable. This book, the first to give a comprehensive history of this watchdog agency, shows how, to this day, the Sovereignty Commission remains obscure, debated, and for many citizens a star chamber of the most sinister sort. Why was the Commission created? What were some of the political and social climates that initiated its creation? What were its activities during its seventeen years? What was its impact on the course of Mississippi and southern history? Drawing on the newly opened materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, this examination gives answers to such questions and traces the vicissitudes that took the Commission from governmental limelight to public opprobrium. This book also looks at the attitudes of the state's white citizenry, who, upon realizing the Commission's failure, saw the importance of a nonviolent accommodation of civil rights.

Chapter 1
TO PROTECT THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI

The Origins of the State Sovereignty Commission

On January 17, 1956, James Coleman was sworn in as the fifty-second governor of Mississippi. After Chief Justice Harvey McGehee of the Mississippi State Supreme Court administered the oath of office to Coleman, the state’s new chief executive began to deliver his inaugural address in the presence of the joint legislative assembly. Referring to his resolve to maintain “the continued separation of the white and negro races” in Mississippi, the governor proclaimed: “I say to this audience … that I have not the slightest fear that four years hence when my successor stands on this same spot to assume his official oath, the separation of the races in Mississippi will be left intact and will still be in full force and effect in exactly the same manner and form as we know it today.”¹

Though Coleman made a solemn vow that he would stand fast to defend “Mississippi’s way of life,” the new governor hastened to add that “this is no task for the amateur or the hothead” and reminded Mississippians that they “must keep cool heads and calm judgement” in dealing with “all the provocation which is being hurled” upon them “from almost every direction.”² Notwithstanding the new governor’s plea for calmness, an overwhelming mood of defiance to the federal government dominated the state legislative session, which began on January 3, and the session would soon witness the introduction of a parade of bills and resolutions designed to protect Mississippi’s racial customs and its sovereignty. All of the seven segregationist proposals devised and recommended by the Legal Educational Advisory Committee (LEAC) the previous year were introduced in the session in the form of specific bills. By the end of February, four of these bills had been passed by both Houses and signed into law by Governor Coleman.³ One of the bills, which received the governor’s blessing on February 24, repealed the state’s compulsory education laws, whereby the state would be able to renounce its authority and responsibility to educate the Mississippi children if and when the state was forced to do so under the circumstances of racial integration.⁴ However, the legislature’s strongest determination to defend the state against the “illegal encroachment” of the federal government was expressed in its adoption of the interposition resolution.

The preparation for the interposition resolution began on January 26 when House Concurrent Resolution No. 12 was introduced, providing for the appointment of a thirteen-member joint legislative committee to draft the resolution. The House adopted the concurrent resolution that day, and four days later the Senate followed suit.⁵ Senator Earl Evans, the president pro tempore of the upper House, became chair of the joint committee, or the Committee on Interposition, and Senator Bland Hayden Campbell of Jackson headed a subcommittee to which the actual task of drafting the interposition resolution was conferred.⁶ On February 29, in submitting the committee’s preliminary report to the legislature, Evans, standing on the Senate floor, elaborated that the “only [legal] approach” that Mississippi would be able to depend upon in defense of its state sovereignty and racial integrity was found “in what Jefferson, Madison, and Calhoun and many others termed ‘the Right of Interposition,’ ” which “still remains [effective] though it has not been used in some eighty years.”⁷ Evans then asked the entire Senate to introduce and approve his committee’s draft of the interposition resolution in the form of a Senate concurrent resolution. Rising to the occasion, Lieutenant Governor Carroll Gartin, the presiding officer of the Senate, stepped from his platform to speak for the Senate’s adoption of Evans’s elevated proposal: “We are not willing to sit idly by and see rights reserved unto us trampled under foot and taken away by the Supreme Court. By all honorable and legal methods, we are going to wage a great fight to keep our traditions.”⁸

Following the lieutenant governor’s plea, as if to show its strong determination, the entire forty-nine-member Senate introduced and approved the state’s interposition resolution, which provided: “That the State of Mississippi has at no time, through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, or in any manner whatsoever, delegated to the Federal Government its right to educate and nurture its youth and its power and right of control over its schools, colleges, educational and other public institutions and facilities, and to prescribe the rules, regulations and conditions under which they shall be conducted.”⁹ Noting further that “a question of contested power has arisen” between the state government of Mississippi and the federal government, it declared that Mississippi had the right “to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” Finally, the resolution asserted the state’s “firm intention to take all appropriate measures honorably and constitutionally available” to “void this illegal encroachment” upon the rights reserved to Mississippi and invited all states “to join in taking such steps as are necessary to settle the grave question of contested sovereignty.”¹⁰

The interposition resolution was immediately sent to the House for its consideration, and the lower House also concurred by a vote of 137 to o.¹¹ When the bill passed, five House members stood up and broke into a chorus of “Dixie.”¹² Thus, the interposition resolution—the state’s virtual official declaration to refuse to recognize the Supreme Court’s anti-segregation decisions—easily passed both Houses, and copies of the resolution were transmitted, through the governor’s office, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the governors of the other forty-seven states, all members of Congress, and all nine justices of the Supreme Court.¹³

With the defiance of the federal government at its height, Mississippi lawmakers turned to creating a tax-supported implementation agency of the resolves expressed in the interposition resolution, seeking to materialize the initiation of “a permanent authority for maintenance of racial segregation” advocated by LEAC in September 1955. On March 20, led by House Speaker Walter Sillers, fifty-eight state representatives introduced House Bill No. 880 providing for the creation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as part of the executive branch of the state government.¹⁴ Defining the purpose of the Sovereignty Commission, Section 5 of the bill read:

It shall be the duty of the commission to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government… and to resist the usurpation of the rights and powers reserved to this state and our sister states by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof.¹⁵

Despite the fact that the Sovereignty Commission was soon to be identified as Mississippi’s “segregation watchdog agency,” neither the word “segregation” nor the word “integration” appeared in the carefully crafted bill. But to be sure, federal “encroachment” was a periphrasis implying “forced racial integration,” and “to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi” from that “encroachment” was a sophisticated roundabout expression of the state’s resolve “to preserve and protect the racial segregation in the state.” With the aura of sophistication and respectability emanating from the word “sovereignty,” the Commission, for all practical purposes, was expected “to maintain segregation in the State of Mississippi” and to wreck “the NAACP and any other organization which is attempting to advocate integration and trampling” the rights reserved to the state.¹⁶

While the bill further provided in Section 6 that “the commission may co-operate with one or more of the states of the Union, or any agency or agencies, commission or commissions thereof, or with any person or persons, corporation or corporations, [and] organization or organizations” in achieving its objectives, it also empowered the state agency to carry out public relations activities on behalf of the state. Section 13 read that the agency “may expend … its funds deemed necessary for advertisement” and for employment of “speakers and other persons and agencies” to spread the virtue of Mississippi’s “segregated way of life.” The next to last section of the bill dealt with the protective measures for the bill itself. “If any section, paragraph, sentence, or clause of this act shall be held to be unconstitutional or invalid,” it provided, “the same shall not effect [sic] any other part, portion or provision of this act, but such other part shall remain in full force and effect.” Finally, the bill spelled out that the Commission would be composed of twelve members, including four ex officio members: the governor, the lieutenant governor, the House Speaker, and the attorney general. In addition, there would be two members of the Senate appointed by the lieutenant governor, three members of the House appointed by the Speaker, and three citizen members appointed by the governor. The governor and the lieutenant governor would serve as chair and vice chair of the state agency, respectively.¹⁷ The segregationist Jackson Daily News and the liberal Greenville Delta Democrat-Times both agreed that the powers to be vested in the Sovereignty Commission “virtually amount to a blank check.”¹⁸

When the Sovereignty Commission bill was introduced into the lower chamber by all-powerful House Speaker Sillers and a host of his like-minded colleagues, its passage in the legislature seemed an easy task. Though that turned out to be the case in the Senate, the bill had a rather uneasy beginning in the House. In the first vote taken there on March 21, only two representatives—George W. Rogers Jr. of Vicksburg, Warren County, and Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Hewitt of Meadville, Franklin County—opposed the bill. Neither of them took the floor to debate the bill’s substance. However, during the afternoon session on the same day, Rogers and three other lawmakers, including Joseph E. Wroten of Greenville, Washington County, entered “a motion to reconsider” the first vote.¹⁹ Wroten, who was destined to become an almost lone dissenter in the state’s “massive resistance” policies, recollected later: “When the bill was first presented, it was presented as if it were just a group which would advocate constitutional government, orderly disposition of concerns about race relationships and the like.” “And indeed,” he added, “there was even an illustration of it as being the counterpart of a group … called the Virginia Commission [on] Constitutional Government.” But the Greenville representative and some of his colleagues soon learned that the bill “was something that was being sponsored” by the Citizens’ Council. On the following day, having realized the probability that, if the Sovereignty Commission was created, “it would be misused … [and] would serve as a handmaiden” for the Council, Representatives Wroten, Karl Wiesenburg of Pascagoula, Jackson County, and William F. Winter of Grenada, Grenada County, a future governor of the state, joined twenty other lawmakers in voting against the bill. In the end, ninety-one representatives favored the bill, and twenty-three House members were against it, with twenty-six others being recorded as either “absent” or simply “not voting.”²⁰ The next day, Wroten, Winter, and seven other representatives entered the following explanation concerning their votes on the Sovereignty Commission bill in the Journal of the House of Representatives: “The language of Section 6 may be susceptible of the construction that expenditures of state tax funds could be made in support of and under the partial control of private persons, corporations or organizations. Desiring to offer an amendment for the purpose of removing this possibility, we therefore voted to reconsider the bill for that purpose.”²¹

Notwithstanding their expressed concern, Section 6 remained intact in the Senate, and the Sovereignty Commission bill was unanimously adopted in the upper House by a vote of forty-eight to zero.²² The fears entertained by Representatives Wroten, Winter, and others would become a reality within four years under the administration of Coleman’s successor. On March 29, 1956, with the blessing of Governor Coleman, Mississippi created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.²³ The grand task conferred upon the new state agency was “to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi.” While the words “encroachment” and “usurpation” embodied the state’s watchwords of the day, white Mississippians, in the eyes of the nation, became an embattled minority. A week later, the fledgling Sovereignty Commission was given a two-year appropriation of $250,000 by the state legislature, and with that the Commission officially replaced the two-year-old LEAC.²⁴ In the middle of April, fulfilling his duty, Governor Coleman announced the appointment of “three of the state’s outstanding lawyers” to the newly organized state agency: Will S. Henley of Hazlehurst, Copiah County, a former member of the now defunct LEAC and a past president of the Mississippi State Bar Association; Hugh N. Clayton of New Albany, Union County, the newly elected president of the state’s bar association; and George J. Thornton of Kosciusko, Attala County, a member of the state Democratic Party’s executive committee.²⁵ Later, in February 1959, Thornton resigned from the Commission to take a post as a member of the State Oil and Gas Board. Governor Coleman eventually filled Thornton’s place with “one of the outstanding school superintendents in the State of Mississippi”—H. V. Cooper of Vicksburg, Warren County—“to give the school people representation on the Sovereignty Commission.”²⁶ Following a conference with Coleman, Lieutenant Governor Gratin and House Speaker Sillers appointed two senators and three representatives, respectively, to the Sovereignty Commission on April 28. Gartin’s choices were Senators Evans and William G. Burgin Jr. of Columbus, Lowndes County. Senator Evans, who was a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before he began his political career as a state lawmaker, had been a member of LEAC and served as chair of the joint legislative Committee on Interposition. Meanwhile, Sillers’s appointees were Representatives George Payne Cossar of Charleston, Tallahatchie County; William H. Johnson Jr. of Decatur, Newton County; and Joseph W. Hopkins of Clarksdale, Coahoma County, who also had been a member of LEAC. The four ex officio members of the Commission included Coleman, Gartin, Sillers, and Attorney General Joe T. Patterson.²⁷

After an organizational meeting held in Governor Coleman’s office on May 2, the Sovereignty Commission announced its plan to set up a publicity office within the agency. At the same meeting, the Commission members also contemplated the employment of “a special attorney” with “wide federal court experience” who would “co-operate with the attorney gener...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction For the Purity of White Blood
• Chapter 1 To Protect the Sovereignty of the State of Mississippi
• Chapter 2 Fear of the Unknown
• Chapter 3 To Maintain Segregation in Mississippi at All Costs
• Chapter 4 The Greatest States’ Rights State
• Chapter 5 Feelings Run Deep and Blood Runs Hot
• Chapter 6 Officially but Discreetly
• Chapter 7 The Last Hurrah
• Conclusion To Grapple with the Past
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index