William F. Winter: February 21, 1923–December 18, 2020

Eudora Welty's assessment of Mississippi political leaders could be as harsh as it was accurate. In a 1945 letter to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, she called for her fellow Mississippians to vote Theodore Bilbo out of office, and in 1962 she declared to a friend that Ross Barnett made her long for an escape to Timbuktu (Welty 224; Marrs 293).

During the Mississippi gubernatorial campaign of 1979, however, Welty felt newfound hope for her state. She put a never-to-be-removed "William Winter for Governor" bumper sticker on her car and rejoiced when Winter was elected. Early in 1980, Eudora Welty wrote to fellow writer Ross Macdonald about the man soon to be inaugurated. Winter, she said, was a "good, first-rate, vigorously thoughtful and firmly spoken man. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't prove himself to be one of the best governors in the nation." And that is exactly what he did.

Born February 21, 1923, in Grenada, Mississippi, William F. Winter was the son of Inez Parker Winter, a teacher, and William Aylmer Winter, a farm owner who served six terms in the state legislature, three in each chamber. Winter graduated from the University of Mississippi, served in the US Army during World War II, and returned to graduate from the Ole Miss School of Law. He went on to be elected three times as a state representative, to serve once again in the army during the Korean War, and subsequently to be elected as state treasurer and later as lieutenant governor. He ran for governor three times and lost twice (1967, 1975) before being elected in 1979.

His inauguration signaled the "first-rate, vigorously thoughtful" tenure that Welty anticipated. Winter invited a distinguished and diverse array of Mississippians to take part in a symposium titled "Mississippi and the Nation, 1980." Both Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker Alexander were among the participants. At the inauguration itself, the internationally acclaimed Metropolitan Opera soprano Leontyne Price, a native of Laurel, sang the national anthem. And in his address after taking the oath of office, Winter declared: "There will be no place in this administration for bias or prejudice based on sectionalism or class or race or religion or anything else" (qtd. in Bolton 192). He went on to say: "We have spent too many of our years, too much of our energy being against things we did not understand, being afraid of change, being suspicious of the intellectual, and being oblivious to our image and reputation" (192; see also Welty, Introduction).

Winter's record as governor was to be as progressive and transformative as his words had promised. Seeking to reform the state's educational system with its racial inequities, he faced recalcitrance from the legislature but refused to accept defeat. He held hearings across the state, found support from the state's largest newspaper, and developed widespread enthusiasm for reform. Winter then called a special session of the legislature to be devoted only to the issue of education. The result was passage of the Education Reform Act of 1982—establishing public kindergartens, raising teacher standards and salaries, and providing reading aides. Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, told the New York Times that Winter's work reversed decades of discriminatory policy (Risen). And such accomplishments did not end with his term in office. Notably, his service on President Clinton's National Advisory Board on Race (1997) led the University of Mississippi to establish the William Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation.

Winter and Welty had long been friends. Winter joined the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 1957, the year Welty began to donate her papers to MDAH. Elected president of the board in 1969, he remained in that position for thirty-eight illustrious years. In 1986, he was instrumental in convincing Welty to donate her home to the state of Mississippi, and he oversaw the opening of the Eudora Welty House in 2006. Between these events so crucial to Welty's legacy, he became an original member of the Welty...