Jo Freeman Reviews Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

A review of
Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission
by Jenny Irons
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010, xviii, 260 pp

by Jo Freeman

On August 18, 1966, I was a civil rights worker in Mississippi when the Jackson Daily News devoted two-thirds of an editorial page to outing me as a “professional agitator” with Communist associations. Five photos accompanied the editorial. 

Over 30 years later I learned that this material was prepared by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), an official agency using taxpayer money to preserve white supremacy in Mississippi. In 1989 a federal court ordered what was left of the MSSC files to be deposited with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for public viewing though legal challenges delayed their actual availability until 1998.

Jenny Irons became intrigued with the MSSC in part due to her own Mississippi roots. Since she started going through the files, a few books and articles have been written about this agency and its activities, each of them lifting one more layer of mystery to see what’s underneath. 

Irons is a sociologist, and her book is not a history so much as an attempt to put the MSSC into the context of Mississippi’s attempts to resist the federal government and retain segregation. As such it is less about what the Sovereignty Commission did to blacks and civil rights workers than to the internal struggles of whites involved in the Southern campaign of “massive resistance.” 

Outraged by the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippians founded the White Citizens’ Councils in July. Two years later the state legislature created the MSSC, one purpose of which was to fund the WCC. Almost two hundred thousand dollars in state funds was given to the WCC by the MSSC before the latter was defunded in 1973 and officially closed in 1977. (The WCC became the Council of Conservative Citizens in 1988).

Initially the MSSC was mostly an investigating agency, looking for “racial agitators” among blacks and exposing race traitors among whites. It cultivated informants of both races. When Ross Barnett became governor in 1960, the agency embarked on a massive public relations campaign to sell the Mississippi point of view to the country. 

Barnett brought in Erle Johnston, his campaign publicist, to do this. By the time Johnston became MSSC Director in 1963, his primary program was promoting a more positive image of Mississippi. He wanted to end state funding of the WCC.