Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s Post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against ‘Agitators,’ 1956-1960

Abstract

After the US Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the Mississippi Legislature approved several laws designed to fight integration and federalize civil rights. Among the legislation was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission, which saw preserving white supremacy as good public policy. This study examines the efforts of the agency’s first public relations director to carry out that mission through both standard public relations practices and far more nefarious methods of coercion and intimidation against those perceived as threats to segregation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-5-1-1, State Sovereignty Commission Online files, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS, (hereafter Sovereignty Commission Online), https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

2 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 10-6-0-11-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

3 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 10-6-0-11-1-1-1.

4 “DeCell, Hal,” Mississippi Civil Rights Project, https://mscivilrightsproject.org/sharkey/person-sharkey/hal-decell/.

5 Minutes, May 15, 1956, SCR ID # 99-14-0-1-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

6 Minutes, June 20, 1956, SCR ID # 99-14-0-4-3-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

7 “History of the PRSA Code of Ethics,” https://archive.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-ethics/professional-codes-of-ethics/lesson-2-tbd-waiting-on-edits/history-of-the-prsa-code-of-ethics/.

8 Minutes, June 20, 1956, SCR ID # 99-13-0-4-2-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/. The commission agreed to see “what arrangements can be worked out for some sort of liaison” with the Black press.

9 Minutes, September 5, 1956, SCR ID # 99-13-0-2-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

10 “Agency History,” Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/scagencycasehistory.php.

11 The Citizens Councils, sometimes called White Citizen Councils for their supremacist views and mission, were an integral part of the Sovereignty Commission and highly influential across the state. See Robert B. Patterson, “The Citizens Council: A history,” 1963, Digital Collections, University of Southern Mississippi, https://usm.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_8fe41fc8-8f94-464b-b9f6-6be0a365ee1e.

12 Susan Weill, “Hazel and the ‘Hacksaw’: Freedom Summer Coverage by the Women of the Mississippi Press.” Journalism Studies 2, no. 4 (November 2001): 545–61.

13 William David Sloan and Michael Stamm, Historical Methods in Communication (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2010).

14 Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States Rights (Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 12.

15 Sarah Rowe-Sims, “The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,” September 2002, Mississippi History Now, https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/mississippi-sovereignty-commission-an-agency-history.

16 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1962,1989).

17 Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 12.

18 Katagiri, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, 6.

19 Jurgen Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research,” Communication Theory 16, no. 4 (2006): 411–26.

20 Habermas, “Political Communication,” 411–26.

21 Vilja Hulden, “Employer Organizations’ Influence on the Progressive-Era Press,” Journalism History 38, no. 1 (2012): 43–54.

22 Dale E. Zacher, The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914–1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 63–67.

23 Edgar C. Simpson, “‘Predatory Interests’ and ‘The Common Man’: Scripps, Pinchot, and the Nascent Environmental Movement, 1908 to 1910,” Journalism History 39, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 145–55.

24 Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

25 John Keane, “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere,” Communication Review 1, no. 1 (1995): 1–22.

26 James Curran, “Rethinking the Media as the Public Sphere,” in Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, ed. Peter Dalhgren & Colin Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 27–57.

27 Alexander Buhmann, Oyvind Ihlen, Craig Aaen-Stockdale, “Connecting the dots: A bibliometric review of Habermasian theory in public relations research,” Journal of Communication Management, 23, no. 4 (2019): 444–467.

28 S.C. Mitchell, “The Educational Needs of the South,” Outlook, no. 77 (1904): 415–419.

29 James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Managing Public Relations, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).

30 Margot Opdycke Lamme, Jacquie L’Etang, and Burton St. John III, “The State of Public Relations History,” American Journalism, 26, no. 1 (2009): 156-159.

31 Lamme, L’Etang, and St. John, “The State of Public Relations History,” 157.

32 Roy V. Leeper, 1996. “Moral Objectivity, Jurgen Habermas’s Discourse Ethics, and Public Relations.” Public Relations Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 133.

33 Vanessa Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations, (New York: Routledge, 2007).

34 Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 3.

35 See Special issue on Brown vs. Board of Education. American Law and Economics Review 8, no. 2 (2006): 181–437.

36 Jason Bailey, “Gone with the Wind Controversy: What you need to know,” New York Times, June 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/movies/gone-with-the-wind-controversy.html#:∼:text=Selznick%2C%20while%20the%20film%20was,picture%2C%20present%20and%20future.%E2%80%9D.

37 Margaret Spratt, Cathy Ferrand Bullock, Gerald Baldasty, Fiona Clark, Alex Halavais, Michael McCluskey, and Susan Schrenk. “News, Race, and the Status Quo: The Case of Emmett Louis Till.” Howard Journal of Communications 18, no. 2 (2007): 169–92.

38 Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 263–86.

39 Agency History, “Sovereignty Commission Online,” https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/scagencycasehistory.php.

40 Robert B. Patterson, “The Citizens Council: A history,” 1963, Digital Collections, University of Southern Mississippi, https://usm.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_8fe41fc8-8f94-464b-b9f6-6be0a365ee1e.

41 Patterson, “The Citizens Council,” 3.

42 “Sovereignty Commission Files Released,” The News Media & The Law 22, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 9–10.

43 Tom Scarbrough, “Investigation of Herman Bufurd…,” SCR ID # 2-19-0-5-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/. This is a single-spaced, three-page report from Commission Agent Tom Scarbrough on his investigation of a call from a local police officer. The patrolman reported that a local Black man had asked for vacation days from work so he could go swimming July 4, 1960, on a white public beach on the Gulf Coast. Scarbrough interviewed the man’s employer, the local sheriff, and several others. Scarbrough reported that he believed the man had said he would go swimming but had since changed his mind.

44 A number of documents in the digital archive are simply lists of license 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 for an example, SCR ID # 2-55-2-13-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

45 See for example Erle Johnston Jr. to Mayor Roy Pitts, March 25, 1965, SCR ID # 2-38-1-97-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/. This is a letter written from the director of the Sovereignty Commission to the mayor of Indianola, Mississippi. The note is carbon-copied to Jimmy Ward, editor of the Jackson Daily News. Ward was among the most strident pro-segregation editors in the state. His file consisted of several notes and letters exchanged with the commission, including one in which he reported seeing a Black woman eating at a lunch counter. The agency investigated and concluded the woman sat there by mistake.

46 Jason A. Peterson, “Mississippi’s Forgotten Son: Billy Barton and his Journalistic Battle for Redemption in the ‘Closed Society,’” American Journalism 37, no. 1 (2020): 66–97.

47 Laura Richardson Walton, “Organizing Resistance: The Use of Public Relations by the Citizens’ Council in Mississippi, 1954-64,” Journalism History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 23–33.

48 J. M. Butler, “The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and Beach Integration, 1959-1963: A Cotton-Patch Gestapo?” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 1 (2002): 107–148. For examples on medical research, see Amy Wiese Forbes and Amanda Smithers, “Combatting the ‘Communistic-Mulatto Inspired Movement to Fuse the Two Ethnic Groups’: The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sickled Cells, and Segregationists’ Science in the Atomic Age,” Social History of Medicine: the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 31, no. 2 (2018): 392-413.

49 Katagiri, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: 241.

50 Katagiri, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, XI.

51 Jenny Irons, Reconstituting Whiteness: The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010).

52 Irons, Reconstituting Whiteness, 138.

53 Hal C. DeCell, correspondence to Ney M. Gore, Jr., March 14, 1957, SCR ID # 10-0-1-103-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

54 Note to File, Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR ID # 7-0-1-27-1-1-1, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

55 Zack J. Van Landingham, memo to director, September 30, 1959, SCR ID # 9-1-1-74-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/. For details on the improvement in Black living conditions, see “Hear the Truth: Mississippi Negro Program,” Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR ID # 2-16-0-13-1-1-1, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

56 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Governor J.P. Coleman, November 12, 1957, SCR ID # 10-0-1-110-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

57 Hal C. DeCell, correspondence to Ney M. Gore, June 12, 1957, SCR ID # 10-0-1-108-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

58 Dan Linke and Brenda Tindal, “Lost and Found: Segregation and the South,” May 29, 2014, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, https://blogs.princeton.edu/reelmudd/2014/05/lost-and-found-segregation-and-the-south/.

59 Charles C. Bolton, “Mississippi’s School Equalization Program, 1945-1954,” The Journal of Southern History, 66 no. 4 (November 2000): 781-814.

60 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

61 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-2-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

62 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-4-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

63 “Report to the People,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-5-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

64 “Report to the People.” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-15-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

65 “Report to the People.” SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-6-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

66 “The Press: On the Spot,” Time magazine, October 22, 1956, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,824509,00.html

67 State of Siege, “The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,” http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/mississippi/d1.html

68 Julian Williams, “Percy Greene and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,” Journalism History 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 66-72.

69 Zack J. Van Landingham to Director, March 26, 1959, SCR ID # 2-5-2-40-1-1- 1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

70 Zack J. Van Landingham to Director, SCR ID # 3-1-0-1-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

71 To Hal DeCell from F.H. Miller, May 31, 1958, SCR ID # 2-9-0-40-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

72 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Governor J.P. Coleman, February 4, 1958, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

73 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Ney M. Gore, August 7, 1957, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

74 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Governor J.P. Coleman, November 12, 1957, SCR ID # 10-38-0-1-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

75 “Unsung Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement,” Buford Posey, Oral History Interview, UNC-Greensboro Walter Clinton Jackson Library, http://libresearch.uncg.edu/unsung_heroes/participants/bPosey.html

76 Hal C. DeCell to Governor J.P. Coleman, April 7, 1958, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

77 “Unsung Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement,” Buford Posey, Oral History Interview, UNC-Greensboro Walter Clinton Jackson Library, http://libresearch.uncg.edu/unsung_heroes/participants/bPosey.html

78 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Governor J.P. Coleman, January 21, 1958, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

79 Audit of State Sovereignty Commission, SCR ID # 97-1-0-2-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

80 Maurice L. Malone, memo to Office Employees, October 27, 1958, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

81 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Maurice Malone, October 28, 1958, SCR ID # 99-95-0-9-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

82 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Director Malone, October 3, 1958, SCR ID # 99-95-0-13-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

83 Maurice L. Malone, memo to Hal C. DeCell, October 28, 1958, SCR ID # 99-95-0-6-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

84 Zack J. Van Landingham, Report on: Rev. J.H. Parker, SCR ID # 9-4-0-4-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

85 Zack J. Van Landingham, memo to director, Sovereignty Commission, November 6, 1958, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

86 Minutes, July 16, 1959, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

87 Erin Blakemore, “How the assassination of Medgar Evers galvanized the civil rights movement,” June 12, 2020, National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/medgar-evers-assassination-galvanized-civil-rights-movement.

88 Brian J. Daugherity and Charles C. Bolton. With All Deliberate Speed Implementing Brown V. Board of Education (Little Rock, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2008).

89 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Ney M. Gore, September 25, 1957, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

90 Sovereignty Commission Online has 846 separate records under the names Medgar Evers, Medgar Wiley Evers and Medgar W. Evers. Content ranges from a number of published clips quoting Evers to confidential internal reports to investigative reports.

91 United Press International, “Publication of liberal Negro newspaper explored,” January 5, 1961, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/result.php?image=images/png/cd12/105700.png&otherstuff=1

92 Zack van Landingham, memo to director, “NAACP, Mississippi,” May 18, 1959, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

93 “NAACP, Mississippi.”

94 “J.P. Accused of Blocking Arrests,” Jackson Daily Times, May 19, 1959, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/result.php?image=images/png/cd01/001058.png&otherstuff=2

95 State Sovereignty Commission, “Report to the Members of the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Mississippi,” SCR ID # 99-111-0-1-1-1-1. Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

96 Hal C. DeCell, memo to Ney M. Gore, March 7, 1957, SCR ID # 1-28-0-1-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

97 Paul Pittman, Tylertown Times, January 6, 1966, “New image building role seen for sovereignty commission,” SCR ID # 99-118-0-101-1-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

98 “Agency History,” Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/scagencycasehistory.php

99 John C. Bond, The Rockford Standard, “Report to the People,”, SCR ID # 99-111-0-18-7-1-1, Sovereignty Commission Online, https://da.mdah.ms.gov/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edgar Simpson

Edgar Simpson is director of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Rise of the Audience: News, Public Affairs and the Public Sphere in a Digital Nation. A longtime journalist before getting his Ph.D. at Ohio University, he has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, Convergence, and other scholarly publications.