by Jon Meacham
For me, practically any document in the secret files of the State Sovereignty Commission has a certain resonance: at the beginning of the sixties, I was in and out of Mississippi, originally as a reporter for the Southern bureau of Time. I can now place the source, say, of a front-page Jackson Daily News item that I’ve kept all these years—an item that begins, under a four-column headline, “Mississippi authorities have learned that the apparently endless ‘freedom’ rides into Mississippi and the south were planned in Havana, Cuba, last winter by officials of the Soviet Union.” Reading about Tom Scarbrough’s fingernail inspection brings back into focus what I came to think of during my time in the South as a regional obsession with yard-sale anthropology. Any number of white people explained to me, for instance, that the brains of black people were capable of processing specific statements but not general or abstract statements. (My response was always “Give me an example.”)
But, as I go through the State Sovereignty Commission material now available, what I still find most interesting is how small a deviation from the Mississippi way of life was required to attract the attention of Scarbrough or one of his colleagues—a pastor’s attendance at an interracial meeting or a professor’s choice of a suspect textbook or a student’s attendance at the wrong concert. That was the aspect of the Commission that had most fascinated me from the start—from the time, in 1961, when I spent a few days in the state to look into revelations that the Sovereignty Commission had tried to smear a senior at the University of Mississippi named Billy Barton, who was running for the editorship of the Ole Miss newspaper. The rumors that had been spread about Billy Barton accused him of, among other things, being a protégé of Ralph McGill—an accusation that Barton, of course, vehemently denied. He said he had never met Ralph McGill, the Atlanta newspaperman who was then widely considered by people outside the South to be the region’s most distinguished journalist; and he voluntarily took a lie-detector test to confirm that statement.
Because Barton’s file became public and could easily be shown to be nonsense, the case provoked some weekly newspaper editors in Mississippi into criticizing the Commission as a sort of cornpone Gestapo that had got out of hand. But in 1961 the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission had no reason to fear grumbling from a few county weeklies. It acknowledged, in a speech given around the state, that it kept a file on “persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes.” It openly contributed five thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money every month to the Citizens Council—sometimes referred to as the uptown Klan—which claimed a membership of ninety thousand and was considered the most influential political force in the state. Several members of the Citizens Council’s executive committee also sat on the Sovereignty Commission, and some observers considered the Commission to be basically a device for providing the Citizens Council with the resources and legitimacy of the state. Except for the smattering of editorials provoked by the Billy Barton case, there was little significant opposition to any of this. Partly through the economic intimidation that was the specialty of the Citizens Council, most of Mississippi’s small store of moderate and liberal whites had been silenced or driven from the state.
One of those who remained, an Ole Miss history professor named James W. Silver, wrote in the early sixties that “Mississippi is the way it is not because of its views on the Negro—here it is simply ‘the South exaggerated’—but because of its closed society, its refusal to allow freedom of inquiry or to tolerate ‘error of opinion.’ ” (Even before those words were printed in an influential book by Silver called Mississippi: The Closed Society, the director of the State Sovereignty Commission had written to the chairman of the university’s board of trustees outlining what a Commission report described as “various reasons why Dr. James Silver could be terminated from his position at the University of Mississippi without any risk of losing the University’s accreditation.”) Being guilty of an error of opinion did not require a drastic deviation from the Mississippi mainstream: at the time, the Citizens Council’s definition of subversive organizations was broad enough to include both the Methodist Church and the United States Air Force. In other Southern states, agencies similar to the State Sovereignty Commission tended to be modest operations that left it to law-enforcement agencies to keep extensive files on people suspected of being potential “race mixers.” The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which had no law-enforcement duties, estimated that its files included information on ten thousand people. Mississippi was the only place where a state agency saw its duty as coördinating all aspects of the effort to maintain white supremacy, including propaganda films, thought control, and baby inspection. A completely closed society in one out of fifty states was not possible, of course, but any effort in that direction had to include the attention to minutiae which I found so fascinating.
After I began going to Mississippi, there were times when I had to remind myself that I was in one of the fifty states. In those days, a reporter from a magazine published in New York could feel like a visitor to a foreign land almost anywhere in the Deep South. White people who weren’t simply hostile would often explain certain fundamental truths in the tone that a citizen of some exotic but long-established country might use to enlighten a slightly dim American tourist on rudimentary history: Northerners didn’t understand Negroes the way Southerners did; local Negroes were perfectly content; race trouble was caused by outside agitators, who were mostly Communists. In almost any Southern state, there were leaders who made daily pronouncements that seemed foreign to what American children were supposedly taught in school (even the schools I went to in Missouri, which were segregated by law at the time) about equality and opportunity in the Land of the Free. But only Mississippi seemed to have come close to shutting out the rest of the country.
In Mississippi in 1961, there didn’t seem to be any other side; it was as if a secret agreement had been made to insist that day be called night, and the entire white population of the state had been in on it. Everything appeared to be under control. The segregation of the races was complete. Voting was essentially a privilege limited to white people. Until a sit-in at the Jackson public library by students from Tougaloo, a black college on the outskirts of town, the demonstrations then sweeping other Southern cities were not seen in Jackson. Those who ran the state operated as if the Mississippi way of life were invulnerable. The State Sovereignty Commission was actually sending various prominent Mississippians to Northern service-club luncheons to talk about the tranquillity of Mississippi’s race relations. The premise was not that the movement had not yet arrived in Mississippi but that it would never arrive.
In Alabama, the Freedom Riders, who came through a couple of months after the Billy Barton controversy, were attacked in Anniston and Birmingham and Montgomery; in Mississippi, residents lined the road as the bus passed, like an army under orders to stand down, and the Freedom Riders were politely arrested in the Jackson bus station for breach of peace. The next day, the governor, Ross Barnett, welcomed the reporters who were covering the Freedom Ride, and the mayor of Jackson gave each one an honorary Jackson police badge. I still have mine. (There were three black reporters on the bus, and they had not been arrested. “Professional courtesy,” the police chief explained.) Among reporters in the South, Alabama was considered more dangerous then, but Mississippi, where strangers might say hello on the street and ask you how you were enjoying your visit, was somehow more ominous. Sometimes after working in Mississippi for a few days I’d drive to Memphis to write my copy and send it out. When I called my office, in Atlanta, I’d say, “I’ve slipped over the border.”
By 1964, when Paul B. Johnson, Jr., became governor, the Mississippi monolith was beginning to show cracks. It had taken some serious hits, like the desegregation of Ole Miss, and there was enough activity by the race mixers to make Johnson’s term among the busiest four years in the State Sovereignty Commission’s history. Documents and report
s and correspondence that the Commission routinely sent to Governor Johnson’s office constitute the largest collection of Commission papers now accessible to the public. They were among the papers that the Johnson family donated to the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, and they were made accessible in 1989 through a state court order obtained by the Clarion-Ledger. The picture that emerges from the Paul Johnson papers is of a Sovereignty Commission staff, which was never very large, dashing around the state in an effort to spy on a voter-registration drive here and put an end to a boycott there. Still, as I went through the files in the W. D. McCain Library and Archives of U.S.M. one day not long ago, I found that the Commission always seemed to have time for missions of the baby-inspection variety. In 1965, for instance, Governor Johnson received a letter, written in longhand, from a couple in Biloxi. “Dear Governor Johnson,” it began. “We regret to say that for the first time in our lives we need your help very badly. We are native Mississippians and are presently living in Biloxi. Our only daughter is a freshman at the University of Southern Miss. She has never before caused us any worry. However, she is in love with a Biloxi boy who looks and is said to be part Negro. . . .”
“Your recent letter and your situation fills me with great apprehension,” the Governor wrote back at once. “I am having this matter investigated to the fullest.” Tom Scarbrough had already been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to investigate the lineage of the suitor—presumably under orders to exercise a level of discretion that would have made a close inspection of fingernails out of the question. In a three-thousand-word report Scarbrough concluded that the young man was from a group of people in Vancleave, Mississippi, who were sometimes called “red-bones” or “Vancleave Indians”—people who had always gone to white schools and churches but had always been suspected by their neighbors of being part black. (I once did a piece about a similar group, called the Turks, in South Carolina, and the standard opinion of longtime neighbors was reflected by a woman who told me, “Oh, they got some of it in ’em, all right.”) The possibility of arranging to have the suitor drafted—a solution hinted at in the letter from his girlfriend’s distraught parents—was looked into and dropped when it became apparent that he was too young for the draft. I couldn’t find any indication in the McCain Library files that the Sovereignty Commission was able to break up the romance, but in what other state in what other period of American history could parents of no great influence write to the governor about a suitor they considered inappropriate and have the governor get right on the case?
At the McCain Library, the people who brought me a library cart full of files and collected documents to be photocopied could not have been more helpful—a fact that I would have found unremarkable except that, not having been in Mississippi on matters concerning race since the summer of 1964, when I reported on the Mississippi Summer Project for The New Yorker, I still remembered the narrowed eyes and suspicious looks that had in those days made me long for the moment when I could slip over the border. The University of Southern Mississippi is now integrated, of course. There are a thousand black students at Ole Miss, where the admission of one, James Meredith, once caused something close to an insurrection—unless you accept the argument of the film the Sovereignty Commission distributed about those events, which was that the federal marshals were responsible for the violence. If the librarians helping me had heard on the radio news that morning about a court ruling against a man who said he had been passed over for the job of Jackson chief of police because of racial bias, they probably hadn’t been startled even for a moment by hearing later in the account that the man in question is white and the new police chief and the former police chief are both black.
Some of the people helping me with my copying weren’t yet born in 1960, when W. D. McCain, the Southern Mississippi president after whom the library is named, went to Chicago to deliver a State Sovereignty Commission speech that said, among other things, “We maintain that Negroes receive better treatment and more consideration of their welfare in Mississippi than in any state in the nation” and “The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands.” Unless members of the library staff had reason to go through the files themselves, they would have no way of knowing that it was President McCain who received a memorandum from the director of the Sovereignty Commission dated March 2, 1964, with instructions on how to handle a black man who had announced that he was applying to the university. Confirming a conversation, the director wrote that McCain or his registrar should say to the applicant, “We have information that you are a homosexual. We also have sufficient information to prove it if necessary. If you change your mind about enrolling at an all-white university we will say no more about it. If you persist in your application, we will give this information to the press.”
What I had missed in Mississippi was the transition. That took a while, the pace set partly by the gradual increase in registered black voters. In 1973, a Mississippi governor vetoed the appropriations bill for the State Sovereignty Commission, although his public explanation was not that its activities were wrong or silly but that they overlapped with the activities of other agencies. In 1977, the Commission, by then moribund, was finally abolished. That left the question of what would become of its files. This was only fifteen years after Mississippi university presidents were delivering Sovereignty Commission speeches in the North and bar-association leaders were presiding over Citizens Council chapters in the Delta and virtually all Mississippi politicians were behaving in ways that black voters would have found distinctly unappealing. By an overwhelming majority, the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill that read, in part, “The Secretary of State is hereby directed to destroy the said files in their entirety.”
A court injunction prevented that, and the legislature instead voted to seal the files for fifty years. The injunction was part of a suit to open the files, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, among others, on behalf of all those who had been spied on or smeared or harassed by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The plaintiffs eventually included a collection of old comrades from the civil-rights movement. There was the Delta Ministry, a National Council of Churches project, and two of its staff members. There was Ken Lawrence, the Mississippi director for an American Friends Service Committee project on government surveillance that had been one of the inspirations for the suit. There was the A.C.L.U. itself. There were two non-blacks who had been faculty members at Tougaloo—Edwin King, the college chaplain, and John R. Salter, Jr., sometimes known in Jackson as “the mustard man” because of a noted newspaper picture in which he is shown covered with condiments poured on him during a lunch-counter sit-in. It’s a picture that brings into focus one of the strongest images I have of those days in the South: black college students, dressed in what they might wear to church on Sunday, are sitting at a lunch counter, staring straight ahead, their backs to the white hoodlums who are tormenting them. Recalled thirty years later, the image seems to have an improbable clarity—as if the production designer of a morality play had gone overboard in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.
The suit to open the files of the State Sovereignty Commission has now been going on for eighteen years. The bare outline of its history has something in common, I think, with the history of the civil-rights movement itself—challenging what seems to be a powerful, and even monolithic, institution, persevering despite delay after delay, and breaking up into internal discord by the time the prize seems to be at hand. In this instance, the powerful and monolithic institution presented itself in the form of Federal District Court Judge W. Harold Cox, the most openly racist jurist on the federal bench. Judge Cox’s response to the suit strikes me as more or less the equivalent of the policy put together by Southern white politicians in the years just after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954—a policy that went by the name of massive resistance.
Harold Cox was one of the fir
st judges appointed by two politicians whose pictures still occupy a place of honor in the homes of some Mississippi black people—John and Robert Kennedy. His selection was supposed to clear the way for action on other judicial nominees in the Senate Judiciary Committee, then run by Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, a friend of Cox’s from the time they were students. As it turned out, many of the Southern judges who were then nominated by the Kennedys and passed on expeditiously by the committee were considered by the civil-rights community to be nearly as hostile as Cox was; Cox, though, was the only one who referred to black people from the bench with words like “niggers” and “chimpanzees.” In those days, the federal judges who were the most resolute about dismantling the South’s system of legal white supremacy tended to be Republicans appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower—the old sort of Southern Republicans, whose party affiliation might have signified nothing more ideological than having been born in a hill county that had been unenthusiastic about Secession in the first place. I once wrote that a foreign traveller who knew nothing about the Republican Party except what he gathered from observing federal judges in the South in those days could have easily mistaken it for the party of Lincoln.