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107  Mississippi on My Mind W. Ralph Eubanks “Mississippi Reveals Dark Secrets of a Racist Time,” read the headline on the front page of the New York Times that March morning. It was 1998, and the files of the once-secret Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission had just been opened. Up until I began to read the Times that morning and other newspaper articles throughout the spring of that year, I had never even heard of this thing called the “Sovereignty Commission.” Even the name seemed a bit odd, but not out of character with the racially charged history of Mississippi. One thing I did remember was that “sovereignty” was often used as a code word for segregation. It made sense for an organization in Mississippi devoted to maintaining segregation to make use of the coded speech of the era. When I gazed at that headline, it had been nearly ten years since I had set foot in Mississippi. I was comfortably middle-aged and happy with my life in Washington, D.C., as a southern expatriate. This talk of an organization that spied on its own citizens for the sake of maintaining a segregated society did not engender warm thoughts about the land of my birth, only disdain. Yet the more I read of the Sovereignty Commission, the more intrigued I became with this organization. The numerous news stories I began to devour revealed that the Sovereignty Commission was linked to some of the major crimes of the civil rights era, including the murder of Medgar Evers (it helped with jury tampering in the first trial) and the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi (it held information on those three young men that Neshoba County law enforcement provided to their murderers to track them down). Although unknown to me during my childhood, this thing called the Sovereignty Commission had been authorized to keep integration out of Mississippi at any cost and created a climate of fear and suspicion among blacks and whites. In the weeks that followed the opening of the Sovereignty Commission files, I noticed a great deal of national coverage about the files in several other major East and West Coast newspapers, in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and the New Republic, and across the South. But like many events in American life, once the news cycle surrounding the opening of the secret W. Ralph Eubanks 108 files was over, the fanfare died down, and awareness of this archive documenting the culture that created massive resistance to integration in Mississippi fell into the dustbin of cultural amnesia. Although the Sovereignty Commission was out of the news, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d largely separated myself from my home state, but the opening of these secret files that covered most of my life in Mississippi began to draw me back in. I began to read everything I could possibly find on the Sovereignty Commission, amassing a large file of newspaper and magazine articles. And I started to read lots of books about Mississippi: Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the stories of Eudora Welty. As the books began to stack up in my living room, I started talking about Mississippi at the dinner table with my family, trying to engage my children with stories about my home state. Then, one night at bedtime, my son Patrick asked me, “Daddy, what’s Mississippi like?” So I began to tell him about life on my farm, some of my family’s lore from those days, but nothing about what Mississippi is really like. Then his brother piped in from the bottom bunk: “Can we go there sometime?” I told them they could but not until they were older. By then, I thought, I would have figured out the answers to my questions about the Sovereignty Commission. Several months later, I decided to find out if my parents were on the list of 87,000 names I had read about in all those articles on the Sovereignty Commission that dotted my cluttered desktop. At this point, the editor and publisher in me began to ponder a book about the organization, but I was still too afraid to even think about the horrors that might be in the files I had read so much about. It took me until the fall of 1998 to get up...

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