Southern ‘Sovereignty Commissions’
Resurrected To Limit Voting Freedoms
They called them “sovereignty commissions,” secret agencies created in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in the 1950s to harass and intimidate tens of thousands of Civil Rights workers and African Americans, to “protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states” from “encroachment thereon by the Federal Government.”
There are striking and frightening similarities between then and now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Different names, same goals, to limit and intimidate African Americans from exercising their rights as voters and to keep the federal government from enforcing federal laws.
A principal goal of the sovereignty commissions was to coerce African Americans not to vote, an effort that has become a major initiative of many states since the defeat of trump who falsely claimed widespread election fraud.
In 2021, 33 laws were enacted particularly in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Texas to provide added obstacles to voting, from making mail voting and early voting more difficult, imposing harsher voter ID requirements, and making faulty voter purges more likely and even making it a crime in Georgia to hand out water or snacks for voters waiting in long lines at the polls.
And this year, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed spending $5.7 million for a new Office of Election Crimes and Security that would investigate “election crimes and irregularities,” triggered by trump’s baseless claims of widespread vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The new office will have the power to refer findings to a statewide prosecutor.
In 1964, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was on trial for the murder of Civil Rights worker, Medgar Evers, in 1963. Then Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who oversaw the state sovereignty commission, interrupted the trial to show support and shake hands with De La Beckwith.
In fine Barnett fashion, last August, trump praised Kyle Rittenhouse, a white, self-appointed militia member, who shot and killed two people in Wisconsin, who were protesting over the shooting of an unarmed African American man.
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, also called the “Sov-Com,” operated from 1956 to 1977 and was created by newly elected Gov. James P. Coleman to resist federal efforts to force integration in schools, following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to monitoring civil rights workers and African Americans, its goal was to “portray the state and racial segregation in a more positive light.”
During its existence, the 12-member commission had an annual budget of $250,000 and profiled more than 87,000 people associated with, or suspected to be associated with, the civil rights movement. It informed police about planned marches or boycotts and encouraged police harassment of African-Americans who cooperated with civil rights groups. State commission agents obstructed voter registration and harassed African-Americans seeking to attend white schools.
It investigated work, credit histories and personal relations and collaborated with local white officials of government, police, and business to pressure African Americans to give up activism, especially by economic pressures, such as causing them to be fired, evicted from rental housing, or to have their businesses boycotted.
Staff of the commission worked closely with the notorious White Citizens’ Councils, local groups that often attracted a more “respectable” middle and upper class membership than the Ku Klux Klan while using similar tactics of violence and intimidation to counter civil rights goals and to economically and socially oppress African Americans. From 1960 to 1964, the commission secretly funded the private White Citizens Council with $190,000 of state funds.
Among its more heinous activities, the commission used its intelligence-gathering capabilities to assist in the defense of De La Beckwith and passed on information to defend the conspirators accused of killing civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.
The commission shut down in 1977, four years after Gov. Bill Waller vetoed further funding. After the agency was disbanded, state lawmakers ordered the files sealed until 2027 but many were ordered released in 1989 as a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. However, Legal challenges delayed the records’ availability to the public until March 1998.
Once unsealed, the records revealed more than 87,000 names of citizens about whom the state had collected information, or classified as “suspects.”
Among the most reprehensible revelations, the records revealed the state’s complicity in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner at Philadelphia, Miss. The commission investigator, A. L. Hopkins, provided the car license number of one of the new civil rights workers which was passed on to the Sheriff of Neshoba County, who was implicated in the murders.
A 2014 documentary film, “Spies of Mississippi,” detailed Mississippi authorities’ efforts to subvert the civil rights movement, using a range of spy tactics to maintain racial segregation, preserve Jim Crow laws, and prevent “federal encroachment” in Mississippi.
The Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission was modeled after the Mississippi commission. In Louisiana, it called on the citizens to support segregation efforts, typified in one poster that featured an image of Robert E. Lee along with the text “This is Your Heritage — Protect It!” The Louisiana commission also commissioned creation of a propaganda film in 1961 which defends segregation and claims to show the peaceful coexistence of black and white citizens within Louisiana. The film claims separate facilities are equal for black and white citizens and ends with Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis railing against federal interference in the southern way of life.
The Alabama State Sovereignty Commission was established in 1963 to “protect the sovereignty of the state from encroachment and usurpation by the federal government and making special inquiries, investigations, and examinations into means of protecting the state’s rights.” The commission was terminated in 1978.
A current day iteration is the so-called, Louisiana State Sovereignty Committee, a private group formed by a chemical engineer, Walt Garlington, and focusing largely on opposition to government COVID-19 policies. A statement by the committee notes that “even the most basic human rights — to worship God in a church with other Christians, to breath unimpeded, to refuse to be injected with an experimental drug — have been grossly violated.”
The committee also is involved with “The Imaginative Conservative,” described as an on-line journal “for those who seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.” One of the journal’s featured columnists is the right wing commentator, Patrick J. Buchanan, who has waxed on such topics as “Trump: The Once and Future King?”
Florida had its own version of the sovereignty commission in its Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, created in 1956, by segregationist Gov. Charley Eugene Johns. It was tasked with investigating allegedly subversive activities by academics, Civil Rights movement groups, especially the NAACP, and suspected communist organizations while also collecting information to screen out homosexuals from employment in state government and colleges. By 1963, the committee had forced the dismissal or resignation of more than 100 professors and deans at the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. The committee was disbanded in 1964.