Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

1. "Nothing to Hide": Whiteness and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

1 Chapter 1 “Nothing to Hide” Whiteness and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission On June 19, 1956, the director of the newly formed Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), Ney Gore, wrote to U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, a member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on civil rights legislation. The letter was part of a campaign Gore was waging to persuade the subcommittee to visit Mississippi and gain “first hand knowledge of conditions as they actually exist.” On behalf of white Mississippi, Gore fought to counter Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who had testified before the committee about the backlash that black Mississippians experienced when they tried to register to vote. Gore expressed his disbelief that accurate knowledge about his home state “could be obtained from the deliberate misrepresentations of Roy Wilkins and others of his ilk.” Gore boldly concluded, “We have nothing to hide in Mississippi.”1 Nothing to hide, in 1956, in Mississippi. Months before Gore’s letter was written, two white men earned $4,000 from Look magazine for admitting they had murdered Emmett Till a year earlier, although an all-white jury had acquitted them of the crime.2 Black families who had signed petitions to desegregate local schools in 1955 following the Brown v. Board of Education decision were harassed by local whites and sometimes forced to leave town. Less than 5 percent of the voting-age black population in Mississippi was registered to vote. In 1956, Roy Wilkins brought information to Congress that every black person in Mississippi knew was the truth: if 2 Reconstituting Whiteness you tried to register to vote, you were likely not only to fail in your attempt but also to lose your job and possibly your life. Nearly ten years later, the third director of the MSSC, Erle Johnston, perpetuated the pretense that Mississippi had nothing to hide, albeit in a different way. In May 1965, Johnston, along with the state highway patrol, the FBI, and local officials, responded to reports in Forest, Mississippi, that two crosses had been burned—one in front of a lumber company and one in front of the home of the company’s executive vice president and manager. Weeks prior, the company had hired “two colored males for positions formerly held by white personnel.” Investigators found a Bible owned by a recently fired white employee by the side of the road in front of the lumber company owner’s home, and Johnston noted that arrests would likely be made soon. The flames had been extinguished quickly, and all present agreed that “there would be no publicity on the cross burnings .”3 While the commission paid some attention to the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, the organization mostly turned a blind eye to violent white resistance. If such events were acknowledged in the files, they were intentionally masked from public visibility. If acts of violence became publicly visible, they were characterized as the lone deeds of deviant individuals. In this case, a notable point is that the victim was a white business owner, not a white civil rights activist; thus, he was deemed worthy of state actors’ concern. Johnston’s efforts in dealing with this cross burning represent the MSSC’s frequent involvement in masking incidents that threatened to expose the fiction of the dominant story told about race in Mississippi: segregation was mutually beneficial for blacks and whites alike, and blacks were content to depend on the leadership of morally superior whites. The claims and actions of MSSC directors and agents, both in public and behind the scenes, maintained this fiction of white superiority in multiple ways. In effect, these men told stories to themselves and to the public about the “racial situation” in Mississippi that articulated the distinction , grounded in the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow, between “blackness” and “whiteness” as natural and unequal. “Blackness” was the inferior category, marked through denigration to affirm the superiority of “whiteness” in multiple ways. This was the Jim Crow version of whiteness, advanced by the state through its members and policies. Historical studies of whiteness have tended to focus on how the definition of “white” in the United States has changed over time to include or exclude those who sought privileges associated with the racial designa- Cross burned in the driveway of the white executive vice president and manager...