Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created by an act of the Mississippi legislature on March 29, 1956, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, with the governor as chairman ex officio. It kept files that eventually named more than 87,000 people. Its doors closed on June 30, 1973, it was abolished in 1977, and its records were sealed by statute until 2027. A federal court opened them in 1998.¹

Informants

Staff investigators were supplemented by informants, a practice begun under Governor J.P. Coleman and expanded under Governor Ross Barnett. The state archive's history of the agency records that "payment to informants varied from a few dollars to cover expenses to regular monthly sums of $500," and that the commission "also employed private detectives, who often acted as intermediaries with informants." An investigator, A.H. Hopkins, photographed activity on the campus of Tougaloo College on June 4, 1963.¹

The Citizens' Councils

In 1960 the commission voted 20,000 dollars to the Council Forum of the Citizens' Councils. Monthly grants to the councils continued until December 1964 and came to 193,500 dollars.¹

The Anonymous Donor

In the summer of 1963 John C. Satterfield of Yazoo City, a former president of the American Bar Association, organized the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms in Washington to oppose the pending civil rights bill. The state archive credits the commission with "establishing and providing funds for" the committee. On July 22, 1963, a cashier's check for 10,000 dollars from Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York went to Satterfield. On September 12 a vice president of the bank, Arthur W. Rossiter Jr., telegraphed the commission offering a gift of stock worth about 100,000 dollars from a client who required that his name be kept confidential. Barnett accepted the same day. The shares, in Reynolds Tobacco, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Addressograph-Multigraph, brought about 98,612 dollars. The client was Wickliffe Draper, founder of the Pioneer Fund, who had banked with Guaranty Trust since the 1930s. His gifts through Morgan to the commission's campaign came to nearly 215,000 dollars, of a budget of about 300,000.¹²

An internal memorandum by Satterfield described the case against the bill as resting on "heredity" and on "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro." On June 2, 1964, Draper gave a further 50,000 dollars toward a permanent national organization that Satterfield proposed to build after the bill passed. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County that month. A state appropriation of 200,000 dollars for the plan was returned, and the 50,000 dollars was returned to an escrow account at the law firm of Draper's attorney, Harry Weyher. When the transfers were reported in 1999 a managing director of the bank, Hildy J. Simmons, called the handling of such gifts "a privilege of being rich in America."²

Cleaning the Files

Erle Johnston, director under Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr., instructed the removal of all "incriminating" reports, "especially those that indicated the Commission helped county registrars stop African-Americans from registering to vote." He proposed renaming the agency the Mississippi Information Agency, called its work "preventative medicine," and denied that it was "a super snooping agency." In 1966 a bill to abolish it and another to rename it both failed, and the legislature made a reduced appropriation conditional on the governor's formally activating the commission. He did so at a meeting on August 8, 1966, which he did not attend.¹

Closure and Opening

At its last official meeting the commission voted to seal its files and transfer them to the secretary of state. Governor Cliff Finch signed the bill abolishing it on March 4, 1977. The archive received "six filing cabinets, two unsealed pasteboard boxes said to contain fiscal records, two separate folders in a manila envelope, and a bound volume which was said to be a minute book," locked and bound with metal bands. The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, the Delta Ministry, and individual plaintiffs including Edwin King and John Salter had sued for the records that year. Judge William H. Barbour Jr. ordered them opened in 1989, and appeals and the design of a procedure allowing the people named to assert privacy claims took nine more years. Records not in litigation were opened on March 17, 1998, and further releases followed on July 31, 2000, and January 18, 2001. The archive put the collection online in 2002. The Morgan Guaranty telegrams were found in it.¹²³