In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Z 77 Z chapter 8 fOr The defendanTs Dugas Shands and M. M. Roberts Amazing as it might seem, the job title for Dugas Shands was head of the Mississippi attorney general’s Civil Rights Division. “God, what a racist he was” was the way Bill Minor described Jesse Stegall’s antagonist.1 A differZ ent Jackson reporter wrote: “A whiteZhaired, slowZspeaking lawyer stands between Mississippi and racial integration.”2 They were really saying the same thing. Shands was born in Panola County in the northern part of the state in 1906, and moved to Cleveland in the Delta at an early age. His bachelor of arts degree was from Vanderbilt, and he attended the first year of law school there. But his law degree came from Ole Miss, where in 1929 he served as the first student editor of the Mississippi Law Journal.3 He was also a member of a national fraternity chosen on the basis of literary ability. Not just in Shands’s law school class, but appearing on his page in the 1929 annual, were John C. Satterfield, the 1961–1962 president of the American Bar Association, and Allen Thompson, later mayor of Jackson. In 1950, Shands moved to Jackson and represented various public agenZ cies and utilities. At one point Senator Eastland brought him to WashingZ ton to serve on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mississippi’s then attorney general J. P. Coleman appointed Shands an assistant attorZ ney general in 1954. In 1959, Joe Patterson, who succeeded Coleman when the latter became governor, picked Shands to be the first chief of his Civil Rights Division. He was the second Garvin Dugas Shands. His grandfather and nameZ sake, born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1844, fought in the Civil War, first as a private, then a sergeant of the Second South Carolina Cavalry. For ten years after the war, he practiced law in Senatobia, Mississippi, serving from 1871 to 1875 as the area’s state representative. Shands was lieutenZ ant governor from 1882 until 1890 and in 1894 joined the law faculty of for the defendants: dugas shands, M. M. roberts Z 78 Z the University of Mississippi, becoming the Law Department’s first dean in 1897.4 In 1906, he became the first president of the newly created MissisZ sippi State Bar Association.5 A student said Shands had “the most inexhaustible supply of words” he had “ever heard from a man’s mouth.”6 His grandson took after him. A cenZ tury later, the younger Dugas Shands was still fighting what his grandfather considered the “War of Northern Aggression.” James Meredith had his own thoughts about the Dugas Shands he enZ countered. Meredith’s legal route to becoming the first African American undergraduate at Ole Miss was tortuous despite his having the superb repZ resentation of the litigating leaders of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg.7 A plaque at the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the site of Memphis’s former Lorraine MoZ tel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968, sets forth Meredith’s view about the manner in which the second Dugas Shands deZ posed him June 8, 1961: [Shands’s] pattern was crystal clear. It is what I always refer to as the “Nigger Treatment, ” the most common and basic system used in dealing with Negroes in the Mississippi courts. The tactic is used to provoke the Negro, to frighten him, and then to break him down and cross him up. The aim is to imply that the Negro is dishonest, immoral, a thief by nature, and generally unworthy of being considered fully human. Meredith, an air force veteran who had attended Jackson State and found it inadequate, had to wait until February 3, 1962, for his case to be decided in federal district court, where Judge Sidney Mize famously ruled that the “University (of Mississippi) is not a racially segregated institution.”8 On June 25, 1962, Judge John Minor Wisdom of New Orleans, appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by President Eisenhower, emphatically rejected that absurd conclusion on behalf of his court. That fall, Shands advised Governor Ross Barnett on how to resist Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss. Before appearing in the Forrest County case, Shands represented the state in a case involving Freedom Riders who hoped to end segregation in transportation facilities. While preparing the case, Shands was hospitalized...

Share