After a 21-year court fight, the state of Mississippi on Tuesday unsealed more than 124,000 pages of previously secret files from a state agency that used spy tactics, intimidation, false imprisonment, jury tampering and other illegal methods to thwart the activities of civil rights workers during the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s.
Like an eerie journey into a shadowy past, the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission provide a profoundly unsettling reminder of the state’s determination to maintain a segregated society.
The commission’s investigators made note of the pigmentation, associations, religious beliefs and sexual proclivities of the civil rights workers they tracked. They jotted down the license plate numbers of cars parked at civil rights meetings and peeked into bank accounts.
Informants, many of them black Mississippians, reported to the commission about plans for marches and boycotts.
In some cases, the potential for using violence against civil rights workers is discussed in commission memorandums. Although none of the documents reviewed Tuesday shows a direct state hand in the numerous deaths of activists in Mississippi during those years, they clearly reflect the mindset of the day.
In one 1959 memorandum, for example, commission investigator Zack VanLandingham tells of a conversation he had with a Hattiesburg lawyer, Dudley Connor, about Clyde Kennard, a Mississippi man who attempted to desegregate Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg in the late 1950s.
“If the Sovereignty Commission wanted that Negro out of the community and out of the state they would take care of the situation,” VanLandingham quoted Connor as saying. “And when asked what he meant by that, Connor stated that Kennard’s car could be hit by a train or he could have some accident on the highway and nobody would ever know the difference.”
In another memo, written by VanLandingham to Gov. J.P. Coleman in 1959, the investigator relates a conversation he had with John Reiter, a campus police officer.
“Reiter had several weeks ago told me that when Kennard was attempting to enter Mississippi Southern College in December 1958 that he had been approached by individuals with possible plans to prevent Kennard’s going through with his attempt,” he wrote. “One of the plans was to put dynamite to the starter of Kennard’s Mercury. Another plan was to have some liquor planted in Kennard’s car and then he would be arrested.”
In fact, Kennard was arrested on Sept. 15, 1959, on charges of illegal possession of whiskey in a dry county after police officers claimed to have found liquor in his car.
Several civil rights activists who were the subjects of Sovereignty Commission investigations said Tuesday that they may use the newly released records to file lawsuits against the state. Prosecutors said it also is possible that information found in the files could be used to press criminal charges.
“Certainly, if there’s evidence that comes to light regarding any crime that occurred in our jurisdiction, then we’ll certainly investigate that, take a look at it to see whether it’s prosecutable, just like we did in the Beckwith case,” said Bobby DeLaughter, a Hinds County assistant district attorney in Jackson.
In 1994, DeLaughter won a conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers after learning that the Sovereignty Commission had aided Beckwith’s defense in previous trials.
The unsealing of the Sovereignty Commission files Tuesday concluded a two-decade legal battle that began in 1977, the year the state legislature voted the commission out of existence and sealed its records for 50 years. The American Civil Liberties Union and several individual plaintiffs filed suit to open the records, and in 1989 U.S. District Court Judge William Barbour ordered that they be released.
It took nine more years to satisfy court appeals.
The Sovereignty Commission was created in 1956 with a $250,000 budget “to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the federal government.”
