The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and State' Rights

Abstract

A professor of American history at Tokai University in Japan, Yasuhiro Katagiri has written the first scholarly history of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Charged officially with protecting state sovereignty, the commission also had a clear, if unstated, objective of defending racial segregation and opposing the civil rights movement. In the 1950s, the Sovereignty Commission soon became known as the state's segregation watchdog agency. Katagiri follows it from its creation by the legislature in March 1956 until its abolition by statute in 1977. Katagiri joins his valuable outsider's perspective with a close examination of 132,000 pages of the secretive commission's records, which became available in March 1998, and he supplements the files with other archival materials, thirty oral histories (mostly by others), and secondary sources. Katagiri clarifies many aspects of the commission's history. He explains, for example, that for its first two years under Gov. J. P. Coleman the commission concentrated on public relations. In the later 1950s, however, it recruited black informants and provided funding for the Citizen' Councils. A “police-state mentality” (p. 45) developed in 1958, but Katagiri argues that any idea that the commission was a high-powered detective organization in 1958 is “sheer fantasy” (p. 53). Under Gov. Ross Barnett (1960–1964), the Sovereignty Commission increased its investigative role and tried desperately to link the civil rights movement to Communism; the agency's “heyday” came in the last two years under Barnett. In the spring of 1963, however, Erle Johnston, a self-described “practical segregationist” (p. 98), became the commission's director, and in 1964 a more conciliatory governor, Paul B. Johnson, downplayed the commission. Katagiri observes that by the mid-1960s the Sovereignty Commission had recognized the need for “nonviolent accommodation” and “struggled to promote moderation and positive acceptance of change” (p. 175). The Citizen' Councils, therefore, criticized Johnston and Johnson. By the end of 1964, Johnston publicly recognized that the state was in a “period of transition” (p. 184) and that the commission's role had changed to racial reconciliation. Under Gov. John Bell Williams (1968–1972), the commission reduced its public relations efforts and concentrated on investigating subversives, drug dealers, antiwar protesters, and black separatists. In 1973 Gov. William Waller vetoed appropriations for the Sovereignty Commission, and it closed its operations. In a very useful concluding chapter, Katagiri surveys the struggle to save and eventually open the papers of the commission.