Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

     On Monday, May 17, 1954--the day which many white Southerners would soon remember as “Black Monday”--the United States Supreme Court unanimously outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Resenting this voice of American conscience raised by the nation’s highest tribunal, some white Southerners advocated that segregation, crucial to their cherished “southern way of life” was God-ordained and some, even though they were small in number, resorted to violence to defend the region’s racial status quo. Still, others resurrected a more sophisticated theory of states’ rights constitutionalism to defy the Supreme Court decree and to combat the ever-intensifying civil rights movement in the South.

     While Mississippi had already become the birthplace of the Citizens’ Council in private spheres, with the swearing in of James P. Coleman as the fifty-second governor of the state, an overwhelming mood of defiance to the federal government dominated the 1956 state legislative session, which witnessed the introduction of a parade of bills and resolutions designed to protect Mississippi’s racial customs and its sovereignty. Among them, the legislature expressed its determination to defend Mississippi against the “illegal encroachment” of the federal government by adopting the so-called “interposition resolution.”

     With the defiance of the federal government at its height and inspired by the issuance of the interposition resolution, Mississippi lawmakers then turned to creating a tax-supported implementation agency of the resolves expressed in the resolution. Thus, on March 29, 1956, with the blessing of Governor Coleman, the state created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as part of the executive branch of its government “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi.” With the governor as its chair, the Sovereignty Commission was composed of twelve members: the governor, the lieutenant governor, the House Speaker, the attorney general, two state senators, three state representatives, and three citizens.

     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 creating the new state agency. 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 determination to preserve and protect the racial segregation in Mississippi. With the aura of sophistication and respectability emanating from the word “sovereignty,” the state agency, for all practical purposes, was expected to maintain segregation and to wreck the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations in Mississippi.

     Since its inception in 1956 until its practical demise in the late 1960s, the Sovereignty Commission had consisted of two main departments, one concerned with public relations and the other with investigation. Under the Coleman administration, by the fall of 1957, more than 200,000 pamphlets and other forms of direct mail had been sent to newspaper editors, television stations, and state lawmakers above the Mason-Dixon Line by the state agency to “educate” the nation on Mississippi’s race relations. Meanwhile, the Sovereignty Commission deployed its paid and unpaid black informants throughout the state to keep the NAACP and the Mississippi Progressive Voters’ League under surveillance. Thanks to the eyes and ears of these informants and its own investigators, by the summer of 1959, the Sovereignty Commission had accumulated over 4,000 index cards and several hundred investigative files containing a hodgepodge of allegations, rumors, and bizarre details, many of them baseless, revealing the hysterical state of Mississippi’s white leaders.

     The Sovereignty Commission experienced its heyday during the administration of Ross R. Barnett, who took office as governor of Mississippi in 1960. The new governor supported rigid racial segregation in the state and set out to reorganize and revitalize the state agency in the early summer of 1960. Under the initiative of the Sovereignty Commission’s public relations director, Erle E. Johnston, who would later become director of the whole agency, the Commission organized its speaker’s bureau program.  This program, composed of Sovereignty Commission members, state officials, legislators, judges, attorneys, newspaper editors, and business people, sent some 100 volunteer speakers to approximately 120 speaking engagements held in northern and western states. Carrying “the message from Mississippi,” their mission was to paint a rosy face on the state’s race relations and to alert the rest of the nation of the gradual encroachment on states’ rights by their centralized government.

     Shortly after Barnett became governor, along with administering its speaker’s bureau project, the Sovereignty Commission began to take up the broadly defined “subversive hunt” as one of its most important investigative functions. By definition, civil rights leaders, activists, and sympathizers in Mississippi could all be categorized as “subversives” in the sense that they willfully defied the state’s white establishment and its long-cherished “way of life.” Under these circumstances, to call them Communist-influenced “subversives” was one of the most effective means for the Sovereignty Commission to undermine the credibility of those who were involved in civil rights struggles in Mississippi.

     In the aftermath of the wretched consequences of the 1962 University of Mississippi desegregation crisis, the Sovereignty Commission was involved in a number of bizarre incidents during the final two years of Governor Barnett’s administration, manifesting both the state agency’s heyday and its hypersensitivity to the Barnett-prescribed rigid racial conformity. Those episodes ranged from the Commission’s inspections of allegedly “integrated” outdoor toilets on construction sites to its investigations on suspected racial miscegenation cases.

     While the Sovereignty Commission kept its watchful eyes on Mississippi’s civil rights activities, the state agency’s functions, however, underwent some unmarked shifts in the middle of the 1960s with the advent of Barnett’s successor, Governor Paul B. Johnson. After Mississippi experienced a series of traumatic and rapid-fire incidents on the state’s civil rights front in 1964, the Sovereignty Commission--the state’s keeper of its “closed society”--grudgingly and painfully began to transform itself to a pragmatic accommodator to the state’s “open”--or more accurately, “opened”--society. While this development did not indicate that the Sovereignty Commission was converted to an advocate of the advancement of civil rights causes in any way, by taming the activities of such unreconstructed white supremacist groups as the Citizens’ Council, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, the state agency tried to make Mississippi’s white citizenry realize the importance of a nonviolent accommodation to the reality of the 1960s.

     Though the Sovereignty Commission, as Mississippi’s “segregation watchdog agency,” had virtually outlived its usefulness by 1968, it was nevertheless inherited by Governor John Bell Williams. Under the Williams administration, the state agency’s public relations functions were practically dismantled, and it concentrated its resources on the agency’s investigative work to identify anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, black nationalists, and campus radicals in Mississippi, reflecting the transformation of the nation’s political and social trends in the late 1960s.

     On April 17, 1973, true to a vow made during his gubernatorial campaign, Governor William L. Waller vetoed the Sovereignty Commission’s annual appropriation bill, thereby terminating the seventeen-year-old state agency. But the 1956 act that had created the Sovereignty Commission remained on the state’s law books until 1977, when the state legislature voted to seal the official records of the agency for fifty years until 2027. Spearheaded by the Mississippi branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, a group of civil rights activists filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Jackson to make the records open to the public. After a tortuous process of legal maneuvering for over two decades, the official records of the Sovereignty Commission were finally opened at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on March 17, 1998..

Yasuhiro Katagiri

Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (2001); Erle Johnston, Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1953-1973: An Interpretive Documentary with Personal Experiences (1990); Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’  Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-64 (1971; reprint, 1994); Katagiri, “‘But the People Aren’t Going to Know It, Are They?’: The Clyde Kennard Incident in Mississippi and the Redemption of a Southern University,” Humanities in the South: Journal of the Southern Humanities Council (2002); Sarah Rowe-Sims, “The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: An Agency History,” Journal of Mississippi History (Spring 1999).