William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography

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275 NOTES Abbreviations DUKE — Rare Book, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina LRB — Legislative Reference Bureau, Mississippi State Capitol, Jackson MDAH — Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson MOHP — Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg NA — National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. NA-CP — National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland RG — Record Group SHC — Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Libraries, Chapel Hill MSU — John C. Stennis Collection, Congressional and Political Research Center, Mississippi State University, Starkville UM — Department of Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford USM — McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg WWPC — William Winter personal collection Introduction 1. Charles C. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), introduction. 2. William Winter memoir, WWPC; William Winter, Bolton interview, May 18, 2006; William Winter, Bass interview. 3. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, introduction; William Winter memoir; William Winter, Bolton interview, May 18, 2006; William Winter, Bass interview; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 119–31; Homer Bigart, “13 Whites Seized in Grenada Strife,” New York Times, September 18, 1966. 4. Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2006), 4. Notes 276 5. Although white Southerners often labeled those whites who offered any criticism of existing social arrangements as “liberals,” I have used the term “moderate” to describe William Winter. While some of his political positions could certainly qualify as “liberal,” Winter typically thought of himself as a moderate, as someone who sought compromise and consensus. In 1969, he told the Mississippi Freelance, a small progressive publication, “I do try to take a reasonable, rational, common-sense approach, steering between the shoals. History shows that our government has always operated best on that basis. . . . When moderation was forsaken, the result was the Civil War.” See “Winter,” Mississippi Freelance, October 1969. 6. Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Charles W. Eagles, Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letters From Birmingham Jail” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002). Some white Southerners, including many involved in the labor movement, were even more actively involved in efforts to transform southern race relations and southern power in the decades before the Brown decision, though few white politicians could be counted among this group. See Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 7. Tony Badger, “‘Closet Moderates’: Why White Liberals Failed, 1940–1970,” in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, ed. by Ted Ownby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 105; Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Crespino, In Search of Another Country, esp. ch. 1; Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 8. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 266–75; Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 206–12. Chapter 1 1. William Winter memoir, WWPC; William Winter, Crews interview; William Winter, Bass interview; “Eyes on Mississippi,” Time 42 (August 16, 1943): 19–20. Winter’s account of the 1932 battle to enact the Mississippi sales tax can be found in William Winter, “Governor Mike Conner and the Sales Tax, 1932,” in Dean Faulkner Wells and Hunter Cole, eds., Mississippi Heroes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980), 159–76. 2. William Winter memoir; William H. Winter to his mother, September 8, 1816, and January 26, 1819, both in WWPC; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Notes 277 Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. 6; Mary Wallace...