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

tactical acumen. In autumn , for example, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC) a propaganda agency set up and sponsored by the Magnolia state’s segregationist legislature in March , began a public relations charm offensive that was specifically designed to court support for southern segregation beyond the MasonDixon line. The MSSC had taken the unprecedented step for a statesponsored resistance organization of appointing its own public relations director, Hal C. DeCell, who invited the editors of twenty-one New England newspapers to Mississippi in October . DeCell’s plan was to allow them to see segregation at work firsthand, and was predicated on the deeply flawed and highly paternalistic assumption that northerners opposed segregation only because their view of it was colored by misrepresentation and inaccurate reportage, and that personal experience of the situation in the South would at the very least soften their opposition to the region’s racial mores, and very likely overturn it altogether. Any objective analysis of DeCell’s proposal would have exposed its inherent weaknesses and limitations, but the NAACP’s executive officers were unwilling to risk the damage that a successful segregationist propaganda coup might inflict. In testament to the premium that both sides were now placing on winning over public opinion, the NAACP and the MSSC joined battle.On Moon’s suggestion,Wilkins wrote personally to each of the New England editors before their due departure dates,explaining that he was glad that each would“get a first-hand view of what goes on in Mississippi” while warning them to remember that “the sponsors of conducted tours show to the visitors only those aspects of the community which they wish tourists to see.” To complete the Association’s targeted intervention against the MSSC’s campaign, Wilkins’s letter urged the editors to find ways to “try to talk freely with some Negro citizens of Mississippi,”and offered seven questions for the editors to ask their hosts that would highlight racial inequalities in Mississippi.Finally,Wilkins enclosed three NAACP pamphlets with his letters, M is for Mississippi and Murder, A Southerner Looks at Moderation, and The NAACP: An American Organization.30 The pamphlets were carefully selected,for each performed a different task: the first highlighted the lawless brutality that characterized black-white relations in the Delta; the second suggested that segrega-  GEORGE LEWIS tion was neither inevitable nor the only way in which southern society could feasibly exist,despite segregationists’dogmatic claims to the contrary ; and the third was a preemptive strike aimed at disarming any claims that the MSSC might make in reference to the subversive nature of the NAACP. The first, known internally as the“three Ms”pamphlet, had already caused a stir when it was sent in January  to each member of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the NAACP’s regular mailing list.It presented a potent mixture of newspaper accounts of the racially motivated murder of African Americans in Mississippi, including Emmet Till and the Reverend George W. Lee, and further examples of re-contextualized segregationist remarks,the most notable of which were those made by the executive secretary of the Mississippi Citizens’ Council to reporter Homer Bigart that “Sir, this is not the United States. This is Sunflower County, Mississippi.” The pamphlet infuriated segregationists. Many conveniently turned a blind eye to the increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts of their own side to castigate the NAACP for going beyond its legal remit to indulge in such pamphleteering.Mississippi native John BellWilliams,for example,theatrically waived aloft what he termed this“filthy little document”on the floor of the House,calling it the“latest shot to be fired in this libel campaign .”A Texan attorney on the NAACP’s mailing list was blunter still: “I assume from your propaganda,”he wrote toWilkins,“that you aspire to be the Dr. Goebbels of America.”31 The majority of the New England editors responded healthily to Moon’s and Wilkins’s attempts to undermine the MSSC’s planned junket .A number of them did indeed manage to slip away from their official hosts to talk to black Mississippians, whose version of local conditions would most certainly not have chimed with those of the MSSC’s members and supporters,and many wrote in disparaging terms of both Mississippi’s race relations and the MSSC’s conceit. The editor of Milford, New Haven’s Cabinet Press, for example, later told Wilkins that he and his colleagues were indeed told “that...

Share