John C. Satterfield

John Creighton Satterfield (July 25, 1904 to May 5, 1981) was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, graduated from Millsaps College in 1926 and the law school of the University of Mississippi in 1929, and practiced in Jackson and Yazoo City. He sat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1928 to 1932, was president of the state bar in 1955 and 1956, and was president of the American Bar Association in 1961 and 1962, the only Mississippian to hold the office. Time called him "the most prominent segregationist lawyer in the country."¹

Segregation

Satterfield belonged to the Citizens' Council, served on the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and was personal attorney to Governor Ross Barnett during the crisis over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962. In July 1963, after a month of talks with Senator James Eastland, the commission's director Erle Johnston, and Hugh V. White Jr. of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, he organized the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms and became its secretary and treasurer. He deposited its first contributions in a special account in the Mississippi state treasury. The commission paid him 2,000 dollars a month for the committee's first four months. More than 200,000 dollars of the committee's money came anonymously from Wickliffe Draper of New York through Morgan Guaranty Trust. An internal memorandum of his described the case against the civil rights bill as resting on "heredity" and on "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro."¹²³

After the bill became law he urged a new national organization to demonstrate that black southerners were inherently inferior, and Draper advanced 50,000 dollars for it on June 2, 1964. The murders in Neshoba County that month cost the project its support, Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. ignored it, and the money went back to an escrow account at the firm of Draper's lawyer, Harry Weyher. When Draper died in 1972 his estate left 1.7 million dollars to the Puritan Foundation, whose address was that of Satterfield's law firm. It merged in 1978 into the Council School Foundation, which financed the segregated private academies of the Citizens' Councils.¹³

In 1969 Satterfield volunteered to defend the school board of Holmes County in the case that became Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ordered the immediate end of dual school systems. Ill with Parkinson's disease, he killed himself on May 5, 1981.¹