Voices in Our Blood (85 page)

“Your recent letter and your situation fills me with great apprehension,” the Governor wrote back at once. “I am having this matter investigated to the fullest.” Tom Scarbrough had already been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to investigate the lineage of the suitor—presumably under orders to exercise a level of discretion that would have made a close inspection of fingernails out of the question. In a three-thousand-word report Scarbrough concluded that the young man was from a group of people in Vancleave, Mississippi, who were sometimes called “red-bones” or “Vancleave Indians”—people who had always gone to white schools and churches but had always been suspected by their neighbors of being part black. (I once did a piece about a similar group, called the Turks, in South Carolina, and the standard opinion of longtime neighbors was reflected by a woman who told me, “Oh, they got some of it in 'em, all right.”) The possibility of arranging to have the suitor drafted—a solution hinted at in the letter from his girlfriend's distraught parents—was looked into and dropped when it became apparent that he was too young for the draft. I couldn't find any indication in the McCain Library files that the Sovereignty Commission was able to break up the romance, but in what other state in what other period of American history could parents of no great influence write to the governor about a suitor they considered inappropriate and have the governor get right on the case?

At the McCain Library, the people who brought me a library cart full of files and collected documents to be photocopied could not have been more helpful—a fact that I would have found unremarkable except that, not having been in Mississippi on matters concerning race since the summer of 1964, when I reported on the Mississippi Summer Project for
The New Yorker,
I still remembered the narrowed eyes and suspicious looks that had in those days made me long for the moment when I could slip over the border. The University of Southern Mississippi is now integrated, of course. There are a thousand black students at Ole Miss, where the admission of one, James Meredith, once caused something close to an insurrection—unless you accept the argument of the film the Sovereignty Commission distributed about those events, which was that the federal marshals were responsible for the violence. If the librarians helping me had heard on the radio news that morning about a court ruling against a man who said he had been passed over for the job of Jackson chief of police because of racial bias, they probably hadn't been startled even for a moment by hearing later in the account that the man in question is white and the new police chief and the former police chief are both black.

Some of the people helping me with my copying weren't yet born in 1960, when W. D. McCain, the Southern Mississippi president after whom the library is named, went to Chicago to deliver a State Sovereignty Commission speech that said, among other things, “We maintain that Negroes receive better treatment and more consideration of their welfare in Mississippi than in any state in the nation” and “The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands.” Unless members of the library staff had reason to go through the files themselves, they would have no way of knowing that it was President McCain who received a memorandum from the director of the Sovereignty Commission dated March 2, 1964, with instructions on how to handle a black man who had announced that he was applying to the university. Confirming a conversation, the director wrote that McCain or his registrar should say to the applicant, “We have information that you are a homosexual. We also have sufficient information to prove it if necessary. If you change your mind about enrolling at an all-white university we will say no more about it. If you persist in your application, we will give this information to the press.”

What I had missed in Mississippi was the transition. That took a while, the pace set partly by the gradual increase in registered black voters. In 1973, a Mississippi governor vetoed the appropriations bill for the State Sovereignty Commission, although his public explanation was not that its activities were wrong or silly but that they overlapped with the activities of other agencies. In 1977, the Commission, by then moribund, was finally abolished. That left the question of what would become of its files. This was only fifteen years after Mississippi university presidents were delivering Sovereignty Commission speeches in the North and bar-association leaders were presiding over Citizens Council chapters in the Delta and virtually all Mississippi politicians were behaving in ways that black voters would have found distinctly unappealing. By an overwhelming majority, the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill that read, in part, “The Secretary of State is hereby directed to destroy the said files in their entirety.”

A court injunction prevented that, and the legislature instead voted to seal the files for fifty years. The injunction was part of a suit to open the files, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, among others, on behalf of all those who had been spied on or smeared or harassed by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The plaintiffs eventually included a collection of old comrades from the civil-rights movement. There was the Delta Ministry, a National Council of Churches project, and two of its staff members. There was Ken Lawrence, the Mississippi director for an American Friends Service Committee project on government surveillance that had been one of the inspirations for the suit. There was the A.C.L.U. itself. There were two non-blacks who had been faculty members at Tougaloo—Edwin King, the college chaplain, and John R. Salter, Jr., sometimes known in Jackson as “the mustard man” because of a noted newspaper picture in which he is shown covered with condiments poured on him during a lunch-counter sit-in. It's a picture that brings into focus one of the strongest images I have of those days in the South: black college students, dressed in what they might wear to church on Sunday, are sitting at a lunch counter, staring straight ahead, their backs to the white hoodlums who are tormenting them. Recalled thirty years later, the image seems to have an improbable clarity—as if the production designer of a morality play had gone overboard in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.

The suit to open the files of the State Sovereignty Commission has now been going on for eighteen years. The bare outline of its history has something in common, I think, with the history of the civil-rights movement itself—challenging what seems to be a powerful, and even monolithic, institution, persevering despite delay after delay, and breaking up into internal discord by the time the prize seems to be at hand. In this instance, the powerful and monolithic institution presented itself in the form of Federal District Court Judge W. Harold Cox, the most openly racist jurist on the federal bench. Judge Cox's response to the suit strikes me as more or less the equivalent of the policy put together by Southern white politicians in the years just after the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision of 1954—a policy that went by the name of massive resistance.

Harold Cox was one of the first judges appointed by two politicians whose pictures still occupy a place of honor in the homes of some Mississippi black people—John and Robert Kennedy. His selection was supposed to clear the way for action on other judicial nominees in the Senate Judiciary Committee, then run by Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, a friend of Cox's from the time they were students. As it turned out, many of the Southern judges who were then nominated by the Kennedys and passed on expeditiously by the committee were considered by the civil-rights community to be nearly as hostile as Cox was; Cox, though, was the only one who referred to black people from the bench with words like “niggers” and “chimpanzees.” In those days, the federal judges who were the most resolute about dismantling the South's system of legal white supremacy tended to be Republicans appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower—the old sort of Southern Republicans, whose party affiliation might have signified nothing more ideological than having been born in a hill county that had been unenthusiastic about Secession in the first place. I once wrote that a foreign traveller who knew nothing about the Republican Party except what he gathered from observing federal judges in the South in those days could have easily mistaken it for the party of Lincoln.

Judge Cox's response to the suit asking for access to the State Sovereignty Commission files was to dismiss it on his own motion. There was a successful appeal to the Fifth Circuit, of course, but in the six years until Cox's retirement little progress was made. In 1984, the judge who inherited the case, William H. Barbour, Jr., granted the plaintiffs the right to discovery, meaning that Ken Lawrence could read every bit of what had survived as the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—eight filing cabinets full of documents, locked in a vault at the state archives. Lawrence, a white radical from Chicago who had spent many years in Mississippi, was peculiarly suited to the task. He had always had an interest in government attempts to spy on and harass the left, and, even before the A.F.S.C. project began, he had accumulated a number of Sovereignty Commission documents. He is, by nature, a collector. He now lives in State College, Pennsylvania, because it is home to the American Philatelic Society; he serves on the society's board and writes a column on United States stamps for its magazine. He owns what he believes to be one of the country's finest collections of Holocaust mail. When he was given access to the Sovereignty Commission files, he assembled photocopies in a twelve-volume plaintiff's exhibit, organized into nearly a hundred categories. Some of the categories were general, such as Spying on Organized Labor and Spying on Elementary School Curricula and Invasion of Personal Privacy and Interference with and Denial of Voting Rights. Some were specific, such as Developing an Informer on Freedom Riders in Prison and Investigating B'nai B'rith and Targeting Michael Schwerner and Targeting Rust College and Spying on an Italian Filmmaker in Natchez.

Judge Barbour decided in favor of the plaintiffs. In 1989, he ruled that the evidence—“generally unrebutted by the defendants”—proved that “the State of Mississippi acted directly through its State Sovereignty Commission and through conspiracy with private individuals to deprive the Plaintiffs of rights protected by the Constitution to free speech and association, to personal privacy, and to lawful search and seizure.” He said that opening the files “would further the general principle of informed discussion of the actions of government, while to leave the files closed would perpetuate the attempt of the State to escape accountability.” Those referred to in the files would have the opportunity to add corrective information, Judge Barbour ruled, and then the public would have the same access to the documents that it had to other papers in the state archives. At the time of Barbour's decision, the governor and the attorney general were young, reform-minded men who carried no baggage from the sixties; the attorney general announced that the State of Mississippi would not appeal.

That would have been that, except that by the time Judge Barbour handed down his decision a split among the plaintiffs had divided them into two subclasses, which the Judge called the access class and the privacy class. The access class, which represented those who wanted the public to have virtually unrestricted access to the files, included the A.C.L.U. itself and almost everyone else on the plaintiff side. The privacy class consisted of John Salter and Ed King, the two former Tougaloo faculty members. Their view was that unlimited access would be a way of recirculating the Commission's dirt—compounding the damage that the spying and smearing had done to innocent people in the first place. The privacy class appealed Barbour's ruling, and the Fifth Circuit directed Barbour to construct a plan that would protect privacy. The plan that Judge Barbour came up with included mechanisms by which victims of the State Sovereignty Commission—but not informers or people who had been acting for the state—would be given an opportunity to ask that their names be blocked out. Salter, who is now retired in North Dakota, dropped out of the case, but King, maintaining that the plan would not go far enough in protecting the privacy of innocent parties, appealed to the Fifth Circuit again. Because of that appeal, the case continues, and so does the disagreement between Ed King and the rest of the plaintiffs about just how much of the secret past needs to be uncovered.

“I don't think I'm either insane or a traitor,” Ed King said within a few seconds of our meeting. He is aware that people say that he must have something to fear from public access to the files, or that he can't bear to see the case end because he is still living in the sixties, or that he has simply gone over the edge. Ken Lawrence, who believes that opening the files is “a weapon of the struggle,” makes no bones about considering King the enemy. “People assume that I couldn't be carrying on this fight on principle,” King told me. “I must be covering something up.” But among those who disagree with him there are some people who do believe that he is carrying on the fight on principle—that he is, in the words of one of them, “pure of heart.” Even those people, though, are tired of looking at documents about the case that King has annotated. Even those people tend to respond to the mention of Ed King's name with a sigh and a rolling of the eyes. King is aware of that, too.

King's bitterest critics would not deny that he was an authentic hero of the civil-rights struggle. At a time when few white Mississippians would have publicly supported even the theoretical right of black people to demonstrate, he was active in the sit-in movement. He was the only white candidate on the slate of a statewide mock election carried on in November of 1963—an election that turned out to be the precursor of the Mississippi Summer Project. In those days, I was always curious about what might cause a white person in a place like Mississippi to abandon the views on race he had grown up with and openly join the movement that his family and friends and neighbors so despised. King tends to credit his apostasy to the Methodists—an indication that the subversion hunters of the Citizens Council might have been, in their own special way, on the right track. Growing up in a conventionally segregationist family in Vicksburg, King went to Millsaps, a liberal-arts college in Jackson connected to the Methodist Church. The very fact that the Methodists had healed their Civil War split—unlike, say, the American Baptists and the Southern Baptists—meant that, even in Mississippi, Methodists were exposed to a national-church point of view on race. King, who was heading toward divinity school, says he found that view persuasive. On the other hand, among the Paul Johnson papers at U.S.M. I came across the report of a surprise visit to King's mother made by the State Sovereignty Commission director, who concluded from the conversation that one of two Millsaps sociology professors named in the report must have been the prime influence in transforming Ed King into a race mixer.