Digital Snapshots

Agency History

A Brief History of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

An essay by William Sturkey, Ph.D.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC) was a state-sponsored investigative unit created to combat racial desegregation. During its existence between 1956 and 1977, the Sovereignty Commission employed former law enforcement officials to observe and report the activities of private citizens suspected of engaging in civil rights activism. The Sovereignty Commission was funded by public tax dollars, but it operated in secret. Although citizens knew of its existence, the organization was not accountable to the public. It functioned as a secret investigative unit, working behind the scenes to funnel resources and information to a variety of organizations fighting against the Civil Rights Movement.

The MSSC was created in 1956 during a wave of hysteria that emerged in the wake of the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board, which ruled that racially-segregated public schools were unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. White Southern segregationists responded to this ruling with calls to resist school desegregation. Mississippi’s white elected officials led a movement against Brown that is commonly known as “Massive Resistance.” Because Jim Crow laws prevented almost all black citizens from voting, all Mississippi representatives were white. These white officials chastised the Brown decision as federal overreach and promised to fight school desegregation through any means necessary.

In the spring of 1956, Mississippi legislators passed a bill creating the MSSC. The organization was formally led by Governor J.P. Coleman who oversaw a twelve-man committee that was given the authority to investigate any people or organizations that might threaten racial segregation. The unit conducted not only its own investigations but also worked with various white supremacist organizations—including the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan—and local law enforcement officials to fight against racial equality.

The actions of the MSSC represent some of the most egregious invasions of privacy in modern American history. They spied on private citizens, spread lies and misinformation, and paid informants to infiltrate civil rights organizations. By providing information to anti-civil rights activists, the MSSC also helped enable white supremacists to enact retribution against citizens who advocated for racial equality. The MSSC shared information to local actors that led to arrests, threats, or economic sanctions against civil rights activists. In some cases, MSSC reports were directly tied to physical assault or even murder, as was the case with the killing of three civil rights activists in Neshoba County in June of 1964. The MSSC's actions helped delay equal rights in the state of Mississippi and caused great harm to thousands of citizens.

In 1977, the Mississippi State Legislature voted to abolish the MSSC, effectively ending the organization’s activities. Debates ensued over the fate of the organization’s records. Because of the secretive and illegal nature of MSSC activities, some Mississippians wanted the records destroyed to protect those who had orchestrated these efforts to surveille and punish private citizens. Others argued that they should be preserved for future generations of scholars and students. Ultimately, the records were sealed. After more than twenty years of legal challenges, in 1998 the public finally gained access to more than 132,000 pages of MSSC records, thus revealing the full extent of this organization’s role in fighting against the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.

About the Author

William Sturkey is an historian of Modern America who specializes in the history of race in the American South. He is most recently the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, a biracial history of Southern Jim Crow that was published by Harvard University Press in March of 2019.