Jonathan Eig and Jeanne Theoharis, in a beautifully crafted column for the New York Times recently, noted that periodically throughout history we have seen the ugliness of racism, classism, and misogyny on full display. As a society and as historians, we tend to discuss these episodes through colorful, cinematic characters, good guys and bad guys.
Eig and Theoharis argued we also tend to declare these dark chapters as a series of victories along the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s long arc toward an inevitable just society. Hence, the repeated historical examinations depicting a sordid J. Edgar Hoover surveilling and harassing a defiant King.[1] They contend there is a better, deeper truth out there.
I agree, and it is found in our archives. It is correct that our collective records reveal heroes – I will point out one below – as well as sinister dark overlords. The documents also show how racism is distressingly ingrained, entwined, and intermixed in our system. Concentrating on the individual often is a necessary device for telling a story. But if we are not careful, that focus can distort the deeper meaning, the structural aspect of how discrimination actually works, which I argue can be equally as cinematic and potentially as powerful in our nation’s stories as the hero and villain.
I further argue that journalism practitioners and journalism historians have a special responsibility to help the nation understand these forces beyond the origin stories of individuals. The battles for justice, a more perfect union, take place in a sphere where the public can debate only what they know about. Dismissive sniffs at critical race theory or even the outright banning of teaching systemic racism in our nation’s classrooms defies uncomfortable facts and the evidence readily at hand.
I have spent the past couple of years spending too many hours in the records of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, Exhibit 1, in the case for what structural racism looks like and why it and other agencies and government actions should be studied within the context of the current political debate. The first of what I hope is a series of articles about the Commission and its relationship to the state’s and nation’s press has recently been published in Journalism History.[2]
The Sovereignty Commission was formed by Mississippi’s Legislature in the months following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended the separate-but-equal doctrine. The Commission operated for 17 years, running out of funding in 1973 and formally closing in 1977. Its records, however, did not become public until 1998, after a lengthy court fight.[3] Even now, hundreds of documents remain sealed. (The debate over closing the records and the state’s press coverage of it is one of the studies on the list).
What the records reveal is a harrowing banality: White men, some with crew cuts, skinny ties, dark-rimmed glasses, and narrow lapel sports coats, sitting in government offices blithely discussing how to maintain a system and culture most accurately described as apartheid.
Early on, these men decided the Commission would operate on two levels. The first would be as a secret spy agency working directly with state and local law enforcement and other groups and agencies to coordinate and support harassment campaigns against those they deemed traitors to segregation. The second level was as an advocacy organization, the smiling front for the legal argument to overturn Brown and let the states decide their own race relations.
What the American Civil Liberties Union pried open were not just the racist utterings of long-past bigots, nor a dry list of bureaucratic functions. The documents represent a blueprint for systemic discrimination. The database is perhaps unique in allowing the nation to see a racist system at work, individuals operating within a paradigm. With just a little imagination and a smidge of cross-referencing, cinematic scenes roll out of the Sovereignty Commission files:
On May 15, 1956, a group of 12 white men gathered at the Capitol in Jackson for the first-ever meeting of the Sovereignty Commission. It had rained overnight and damp still clung to the humid air of late spring. Governor J.P. Coleman, tall, lanky, and soft-spoken, started the meeting with a brief but hefty agenda: hiring the Commission’s staff and deciding the overall mission of the agency. Among the first staff members approved was Hal DeCell, the owner/editor of a small weekly newspaper, who had served as Coleman’s spokesman during his run for governor. The men also decided they would ask the new Sovereignty Commissioner to “employ Special Investigators for the Commission, known only to him, and to work at his sole discretion.”[4]
As storytellers, we might be tempted to focus on Coleman as the leader and chair of the commission. Should the camera zoom to his thin, pleasant features? Was he a good guy or a bad guy? A man of his time, merely expressing an ugly ignorance? Maybe he was something else. Or, perhaps, the camera could take a tight shot of DeCell, a small, bespectacled man and a newsman of some rhetorical power? Had he violated the central tenets of his journalism roots by engaging in what would become a propaganda hate campaign? (In fact, I have completed a study featuring DeCell that I hope will be available soon).
What both of these shots miss are the others around the table. They include not just the governor as chair, but the state’s lieutenant governor, attorney general, speaker of the House of Representatives, two state senators, three other House members, and three Coleman loyalists, such as attorney Hugh N. Clayton. In other words, the legislative and executive branches of government. This was not a conspiracy, an errant group of disturbed citizens seeking to find their way in a new world. This was government itself.
Of course, there are many scenes in the files. Some quite common place. Local law enforcers, for instance, strolling through church parking lots during meetings of the NAACP, their notepads open, scribbling down license numbers of cars.[5] These numbers would be forwarded to the Commission, run for identifying information and then filed. Should anyone, say a county sheriff or local school superintendent, want to know whether a citizen was sympathetic to integration, the Commission could respond with a fact: A car registered to so-and-so was observed parked outside an NAACP meeting.
Other scenes are chilling, but only in hindsight. On September 25, 1957, now well settled into his job as chief of publicity for the Sovereignty Commission, DeCell sat behind his state-issued manual typewriter. It was an unusually beautiful day in Jackson, clear blue skies and a high of 80 with a slight breeze coming from the southeast. He was dashing off a memo to his boss, Commission Director Ney M. Gore. Perhaps, DeCell tapped out, the Commission could ask a local police chief to collect the license number of the car driven by Medgar Evers, then the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. This information could be used by the State Patrol to “begin a quiet harassment” campaign against him. It might also be a good idea to loop in the legislators of Evers’ home county so they “could take whatever undercover steps they wish to.”[6]
It is tempting, as storytellers, to focus on DeCell. But, what we are in danger of missing is the collection of a voluminous file on Evers over the next six years and ultimately his assassination June 12, 1963. Evers is the hero I was referring to earlier. The Commission files show clearly that he understood he was the subject of intense attention from the state, as a government, and that he knew this attention gave license to violent elements. Yet, he continued his work, which included helping to found the Mississippi Free Press. The records also make clear that he understood something else: He was a representative of another system, another culture, one demanding a more perfect union.
If democracy dies, historians will do the autopsy in our archives. They will find, like many types of cancer, a disease that has long been disastrously present but only visible under light. We know this because, to torture my metaphor, these pathogens have long plagued our promises as a nation and community of journalists, preventing the full blossoming of our ideals. This is common knowledge, but – I would argue – framed too often inaccurately as battles between good guys and bad guys.
Yet another episode is playing out before us. On May 2, 2023, former President Donald Trump issued on his Facebook page his manifesto on higher education, which he labeled “Agenda47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs.” The 2:42 video outlined a use of state power to install his own accreditation agency in order to force curriculum changes that would stifle social justice issues.[7] In their guest column, Eig and Theoharis wrote that a view of history that “isolates a few bad actors … fail(s) to acknowledge the institutionalized, well-organized resistance to change.”
We can now feel democracy shudder, as an institution, jostled not by a single person but by the system that is supposed to nurture it. The view, however, is murky; our nation’s records can help us see more clearly. We know this is true because the evidence is searingly, achingly, sadly available in our archives. As journalism practitioners and historians, we need to bring these facts, these scenes, as best we can, to the public in full technicolor.
About the author: Edgar Simpson is director of the School of Media & Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is author of the book, “Rise of the Audience: News, Public Affairs and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation.” His work has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, Convergence, and a variety of other publications.
Featured image: Mississippi State Capitol, where the Sovereignty Commission met. Photo by Chuck Kelly, via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Notes
[1] Jonathan Eig and Jeanne Theoharis, “The Man Who Knew Exactly What the F.B.I. was doing to Martin Luther King Jr.,” New York Times, April 12, 2023, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opinion/lyndon-johnson-martin-luther-king-jr.html
[2] Edgar Simpson, “Manipulating the sphere: Mississippi’s post-Brown offensive against white journalists.” Journalism History 49 (1): 4-27.
[3] Agency History, Sovereignty Commission Online, found at https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/scagencycasehistory.php. The online archives are exceedingly helpful and also exceedingly difficult to use. A full explanation of how to use the digital archives is at the beginning of the notes section in the publication in the prior note.
[4] Minutes, Sovereignty Commission Online, May 15, 1956, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/result.php?image=images/png/cd06/042974.png&otherstuff=99|14|0|1|1|1|1|42347|
[5] A number of documents in the digital archive are simply lists of license plate numbers and names. For instance, Sovereignty Commission investigator Virgil Downing was sent to scour the parking lot of the Pratt Memorial Methodist Church on March 30, 1961, to take down the car license tags of every vehicle there during a meeting of the NAACP. The tags were then run through the state Department of Motor Vehicles for owner information. What resulted were long lists of vehicle numbers followed by names and addresses. See, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/result.php?image=images/png/cd02/015413.png&otherstuff=2|55|2|13|1|1|1|15064|.
[6] Hal C. DeCell, memo to Ney M. Gore, September 25, 1957, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/result.php?image=images/png/cd01/001388.png&otherstuff=1|18|0|1|1|1|1|1359|#
[7] Team Trump, “Agenda47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs,” May 2, 2023, available at https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=236304848989908
Journalism History journal 
