Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms
Washington lobby against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, chaired by the publisher William Loeb, that drew three quarters of its 343,191 dollars through the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, most of it from Wickliffe Draper.
The Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms was founded in July 1963 to defeat the civil rights bill then before Congress. It took offices in the Carroll Arms Hotel in Washington. Its chairman was the New England newspaper publisher William Loeb, and its vice chairman the Virginia editor James J. Kilpatrick. John C. Satterfield of Mississippi was secretary and treasurer, and John S. Synon, founder of the Patrick Henry Club of Richmond, was the full-time director. The state archive of Mississippi credits the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission with "establishing and providing funds for" it.12
Origins and Money
The committee came out of a month of discussions among Senator James Eastland, the commission's director Erle Johnston, Satterfield, and Hugh V. White Jr., formerly of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government. It spent 343,191 dollars. Of that, 262,581 came through the Sovereignty Commission, and more than 200,000 of the commission's share was given anonymously by Wickliffe Draper, founder of the Pioneer Fund, in stock transferred by Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York on condition that his name be kept confidential. Satterfield banked the first contributions in a special account in the state treasury and drew 2,000 dollars a month from the commission.13
Campaign
By April 1964 the committee had sent out 1.4 million pieces of mail. Its pamphlets included The Federal Eye Looking Down Your Throat, Blueprint for Total Regimentation, and Due Process of Law or Government by Intimidation?, the last a speech Satterfield had given to the Jackson Rotary Club in November 1962. An advertisement headed "$100 Billion Blackjack" ran in 215 newspapers outside the South. Senator Kenneth Keating of New York said it turned his mail from five to one in favor of the bill to five to two against. Satterfield's internal memorandum gave the ground of opposition as "heredity" and "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro."13
After the act passed, Draper offered money for a permanent successor. Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. ignored the proposal. The committee considered directing the white reaction of that year into the presidential campaign of George Wallace, and dissolved.1
Sources
- Lewis, George. "Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms," Mississippi Encyclopedia, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 2017. ↩
- Mississippi Department of Archives and History, "Agency History," Sovereignty Commission Online. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/scagencycasehistory ↩
- Blackmon, Douglas A. "Silent Partner: How the South's Fight to Uphold Segregation Was Funded Up North," The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 1999, p. A1. ↩
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