Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

7. "Determined to Perpetuate Itself": Continuity in Investigations despite Change

158 Chapter 7 “Determined to Perpetuate Itself” Continuity in Investigations despite Change By 1964, the MSSC’s investigative program was operating at full force. Although Governor Paul Johnson did not officially call an MSSC meeting until 1966, director Erle Johnston maintained the organization , passing along reports and memos to the governor’s assistant. The MSSC continued to monitor civil rights organizations and “racial agitators ,” although Johnston had written a new policy directive. In August 1964, Johnston reported that he and his fellow MSSC agents had “attempted to operate the office as a preventative program to avoid incidents and situations where they could be averted by advance information in the hands of proper authorities. We have assumed the role . . . of trouble shooter for communities, boards, or commissions requesting official guidance in working out solutions to racial problems.”1 In one example of such an action, the MSSC passed along information to another state agency to thwart civil rights activists’ access to resources. Johnston intimated that his organization had kept a motel in Philadelphia, Mississippi, from being rented out to Freedom Summer participants. The MSSC had suggested that the Public Service Commission use its power to keep the motel owner, a trucker (designated “c/m” in the report) under that agency’s regulation, from following through with the lease. The memo reporting on the situation concluded with a statement that the motel had not been leased. Such actions served to carry out the stated program of preventive medicine, but not necessarily in a way meant to prevent violence and protect activists. Much of the time, the MSSC’s new policy meant preventing situations that might bring negative attention to Mississippi and threaten the state’s legitimacy. “Determined to Perpetuate Itself” 159 By 1965, the MSSC was increasingly concerned about activities in the economic realm, and intervention took two different forms. First, the MSSC tried to thwart negative effects of economic boycotts, whether instigated by civil rights forces or white segregationists. Second, the organization worked to diffuse civil rights activists’ involvement in new poverty programs, often by sharing investigative information with federal government officials or the local press. For example, investigators spent a significant amount of time monitoring Mount Beulah, the small community where many Head Start programs (federally funded childhood development programs for preschool-age children) were organized. The MSSC then arranged for publication in the local press about the “shocking and immoral behavior” reportedly occurring there and bragged to state legislators that the leaked information had led “many colored citizens [to change] their attitudes about this center.”2 By 1966, the MSSC was actively sharing information about local poverty programs collected through its investigations with U.S. senators; the goal of these efforts was to ensure that federal money for these programs was not controlled by former civil rights activists. Finally, by the late 1960s, the MSSC was less explicitly concerned about racial problems, more concerned about the general category of subversion, and as a whole, less active . A director’s report on the years 1968–1971 reported surveillance of the Republic of New Africa, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Civil Liberties Union. In addition, the MSSC monitored “drug abuse” and other situations on college campuses.3 Until the shift to slowed activity in the late 1960s, MSSC investigative activity escalated, even as Erle Johnston instituted his policy shift and the public message sounded faint bells of accommodation. Katagiri offers a detailed history of many of these efforts.4 Here, I focus on the three counties discussed in Chapter 4—Holmes, Madison, and Sunflower—to examine how the identity work of whiteness was achieved and reconstituted behind the scenes, in the director’s and investigators’ construction of the transcript of social control. Three important shifts in relational positioning were reflected in the process of social control and the accompanying constitution of identity work. First, the federal government increasingly exercised its interventionist powers, making itself a relevant, unavoidable relational tie for the state of Mississippi and the MSSC. Second, Johnston worked to portray the MSSC as a legitimate state actor to suspicious white businessmen who wanted to ensure the state’s economic progress amid change. Finally, the 160 Reconstituting Whiteness MSSC was noticeably less responsive to the Citizens’ Council, although its members still served on the MSSC board and in the state legislature; consequently , contact between the MSSC and the civic organization during the...