Documents
With profound love and joy to Wynn, Neva, and Helen
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my wife, Wynn, for her constant support and dedication to this endeavor. The compelling images in this book are due to her expert and relentless research. Special thanks to National Geographic editor Nancy Feresten, who immediately recognized the power of the concept and steadfastly guided the progress of the work. A special appreciation to the staff at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, who were always there to aid in the search for information and to open new pathways to insight and understanding. In fact, throughout the state, archivists, librarians, and historians openly shared important pieces of the civil rights story under their purview. Special thanks to friends who listened to the stories, provided encouragement, and even helped with early ideas and edits. Naturally, I offer a heartfelt thanks to the civil rights pioneers who shared their memories with me. It was a profound honor to hear their recollections of the past and to witness their continuing quest for justice.
FOREWORD
You are about to encounter the spies and counterspies, agents and double agents, informants and infiltrators of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—the secret, state-funded spy program formed to stop the march toward equality and justice in the 1950s and 1960s. You will also encounter dedicated civil rights workers and fearless student activists, truth-telling journalists and justice-seeking lawyers who dared to challenge the status quo imposed by the seemingly all-powerful state. The United States was founded on the ideals of equal opportunity for all—white and black, Hispanic and Asian, gay and straight, old and young. Achieving these ideals demands constant vigilance to protect our civil liberties against unwarranted government intrusion in our private lives. Standing on the shoulders of those who came before, we are called upon to defend—and to extend—those essential civil and human rights.
Wade Henderson
President and CEO,
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
PROLOGUE
Twelve of the most powerful men in the state controlled a secretive network of spies and informants. A cadre of covert operatives used code names like Agent X, Agent Y, and Agent Zero. Neighbors spied on neighbors. Teachers spied on students. Ministers spied on churchgoers. Spies spied on spies. This is not the description of a Cold War–era secret police force or a futuristic sci-fi dictatorship. This government-run spy network infiltrated the lives of private citizens right here in the United States and not too long ago—in the state of Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission operated as a clandestine investigative arm of the state government for more than a decade. It compiled secret files on more than 87,000 private citizens and organizations. Staffed by a team of professional agents and funded by taxpayers, the commission had a fundamental mission: to save segregation at all costs. In the process, its agents carried out the most extensive state spying program in U.S. history.
How do we know all this is true? The Commission itself tells us. The 134,000 pages and 87,000 names in its once-secret investigative file tell the story of its clandestine programs, its network of neighborhood informants, its brutal behind-the-scenes maneuvering, and its intervention in many of the most significant events of the civil rights era. In their own words, the agents reveal their tactics for infiltrating civil rights groups, forcing liberal college professors out of their jobs, collaborating with white racist organizations, and rewarding black leaders for supporting segregation.
The extensive investigative file does not tell the whole story, however. For this book, I’ve filled out the story with oral histories, personal memoirs, historical studies, academic dissertations, government documents, and newspaper and magazine articles from the era. In addition, I’ve traveled Mississippi—from the cotton fields in the Mississippi River Delta to the beach towns on the Gulf Coast to the capital of Jackson—interviewing people connected to the story. I’ve also uncovered surveillance documents and photographs, including a hand-drawn map showing the burial site of three murdered civil rights workers and photos of student protesters with red numbers scrawled next to their faces. Those numbers targeted the “subversives” for further investigation.
Despite the tracks left behind by the anti–civil rights spies and the excellent research and writing on the subject in Mississippi, the story remains largely unknown to the general public. It is usually relegated to a footnote in the history of the civil rights movement.
No longer.
This is how it happened.
At noon sharp on a bright, 43-degree day in January 1956, J. P. Coleman placed his right hand on his mother’s Bible and took the oath to become the 51st governor of Mississippi. The 6-foot, 2-inch gentleman farmer, lawyer, and Civil War historian cast an impressive figure as he stood at the podium preparing to deliver his inaugural address. Coleman looked out over the 3,000 people gathered in the public square in the state capital of Jackson. Virtually all the faces looking back at him were white.
A segregationist and skilled public speaker, Coleman launched into his inaugural address, vowing to “maintain the continued separation of the white and Negro races.” But aware that tensions between whites and blacks were threatening to flare into violence in a number of cities and towns across the state, Coleman also warned his audience—including both chambers of the state legislature and the state supreme court—that preserving segregation was “no task for the amateur or the hothead.” When it came to the tense relationship between whites and blacks in Mississippi, Coleman wanted “peace and quiet.” In Mississippi in 1956, that made him a moderate.
Once settled in to the governor’s mansion, Coleman waded through a stream of bills coming to his desk from the state legislature, which was fixated on shoring up the walls of segregation. House Bill 880 caught his eye. It called for the creation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a special agency that would preserve the state’s “sovereignty”—that is, its right to govern itself without undue interference from the federal government or private pressure groups. The lawmakers behind the bill had made it clear that sovereignty was really just a high-minded code word for segregation—the official state policy of keeping the races separate and keeping whites in a position of power over blacks. The Commission would be granted extraordinary powers, including the power to investigate private citizens and organizations, to maintain secret files, to force witnesses to testify, and even to make arrests.
From a legal standpoint, Coleman worried that such a potent and secretive investigative agency could trample on the rights of private citizens.
