The Sovereignty Commission
Near Jackson, Mississippi
On March twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-six, less than two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus Board of Education, the Mississippi legislature created the State Sovereignty Commission. The commission's stated purpose was to protect Mississippi's sovereignty and preserve its way of life. Its operational purpose was to prevent integration, destroy the civil rights movement, and report on anyone who might be sympathetic to either.
At its peak, the commission employed a network of investigators and paid and unpaid informants across the state. It photographed license plates outside NAACP meetings. It investigated the backgrounds of jurors in civil rights cases. It pressured employers to fire activists. It had people evicted from rental housing. It accumulated thousands of index cards documenting individuals, organizations, activities, and associations, much of it unverified rumor. By the time it was dissolved in nineteen seventy-three, its files contained information on more than eighty-seven thousand people.
One of those files concerned the jury pool in Byron De La Beckwith's first trial for the murder of Medgar Evers in nineteen sixty-four. A nineteen eighty-nine newspaper investigation revealed that the commission had provided information to Beckwith's defense attorneys, helping them identify and select jurors who would not convict. Both nineteen sixty-four trials ended with hung juries. De La Beckwith went free for thirty years. When Myrlie Evers learned what the Sovereignty Commission had done, she pushed for a new trial. That evidence helped justify reopening the case.
After the commission was dissolved, the Mississippi legislature voted in nineteen seventy-seven to seal its records at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History until twenty twenty-seven, fifty years. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit challenging the seal. After twenty-one years of litigation, a federal judge ordered the records opened in nineteen ninety-eight. They were put online. Researchers, journalists, descendants, and the surveilled themselves could search the database and learn what the state had compiled about them.
The files are searchable now at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. They are worth reading.
