William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography by Charles C. Bolton (review)

Civil rights historiography has taken several turns since the publication of the initial scholarly accounts of the movement, and Charles C. Bolton’s excellent biography of Mississippi governor William F. Winter reflects yet another approach to understanding that turbulent period in American history. Here one finds the struggle of the white southern moderate who, although tangential to the fight on the front lines for race reform, nevertheless played a crucial role in the saga of the long civil rights movement.

Born into a prominent political family from Grenada County in 1923, William Forrest Winter attended the University of Mississippi, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1943 and law degree in 1949. Named in honor of the Confederate general with whom his grandfather rode, and elected to the state legislature in 1947, just prior to the Dixiecrat revolt, Winter seemed one to man the barricades in defense of white supremacy. Yet this descendant of Mississippi Whigs, Unionists, and Reconstruction Republicans received from his parents a heavy dose of paternalism, Christian fairness, and New Deal liberalism. Such inherited ideals and the awakening of academic freedom he experienced under the mentorship of history professor James W. Silver at Ole Miss, where Winter defended Hodding Carter’s right to speak, nurtured an open-mindedness and honesty that marked his years of public service.

Bolton finds Winter’s lukewarm support for white supremacy “more a function of political survival than heartfelt belief,” for during the rise of massive resistance, the freedom rides, and Freedom Summer, Winter honed a reasoned approach as a racial moderate that kept him viable in hidebound Mississippi (p. 74). As a staffer under U.S. senator John C. Stennis, Winter learned the art of political survival. When friends encouraged Winter to join the White Citizens’ Council, he demurred, and he avoided the fray of racist campaigns by accepting a political appointment as Mississippi tax collector. Winter held the profitable job from 1956 to 1964, all the while advocating its abolition, something he accomplished by combining its tasks with those of the state tax commission. Winter was then elected state treasurer, holding the new position until 1968. Yet the plum he desired for the longest time hung out of reach. Winter ran his first campaign for governor using the playbook of Mississippi congressman Frank E. Smith, deflecting race and focusing on progress, but in 1967 obeisance to custom failed to persuade white voters who demanded a fiery defense of segregation. Nearly a decade later, after a stint as lieutenant governor from 1971 to 1974, Winter ran again, but this time the honest bond salesman lost out to a charismatic trial lawyer. The corruption scandals that ensued over the next four years convinced enough Mississippians to elect Winter to the office so that he might clean up state government.

Like New South governors Jimmy Carter of Georgia a decade earlier and Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Winter “transform[ed] the image of Mississippi in the eyes of her citizens and the rest of the nation” (p. 191). From 1980 through 1983, the Winter administration removed divisive symbols, celebrated black and white distinguished citizens, reorganized state government, and most significantly passed the Education Reform Act of 1982 that began the process of modernizing Mississippi’s schools. As Bolton makes clear, “Winter’s signal victory in his long crusade for educational improvement in his native state advanced the cause of racial reconciliation, which Winter’s political career had helped promote” (p. 231). Unable to serve a consecutive second term as governor, the Democrat Winter lost a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1984 to the Republican Thad Cochran, although Winter’s staffers, such “Boys of Spring” as Ray Mabus, Bill Cole, and Dick Molpus, continued in government (p. 193). As a senior statesman, Winter helped organize the Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi in 1998 that today bears his name and...