Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, State Government Funded Racist Department

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was a secret state police force operating from 1956 to 1977 to suppress the civil rights movement and maintain segregation. The commission kept files, harassed and branded many as communist infiltrators via agents who were retired FBI, CIA and military intelligence. No one was safe in Mississsippi. A form of the Sovereignty Commission continues today in Mississippi. Ask Haley Barbour.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

MBURN: Mississippi Patrolman Dies

Casket holding the deceased mother of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers murdered in Meridian, Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The FBI file's name for the case is MBURN. (photo, Susan Klopfer)

Harry J. Wiggs,73, of Philadelphia,Mississippi died Thursday, July 23, 2009, at Neshoba County General Hospital. He was born and reared in Decatur, and had made his home in Philadelphia since 1963. He retired from the Mississippi Highway Patrol in 1990.

Wiggs was one of the two Mississippi Highway Patrol officers reported by some sources as having been involved in the conspiracy to murder civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerne, The Meridian Star reported.

"These sources have concluded that although the two highway patrol officers abandoned the plot shortly before the murders, they did nothing to stop them," the Star's reporter stated.

General Link to archives

Wiggs/ Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Link 1
Link 2

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Book Signing on Dr. T. R. M. Howard; author, Linda Royster Beito

Linda Royster Beito will appear for an author book signing and talk on the life of Mound Bayou's Dr. T.R.M. Howard: Mentor of Medgar Ever and Fannie Lou Hamer. David Beito is the book's co-author.

Time and Location: Friday, July 10, 6:00 p.m., Kemetic Institute, Mound Bayou, Historic Hwy 61, Across from the John F. Kennedy Memorial High School. For more information, call 205-292-2902.

For more photos on Howard's life, see here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/album.php?aid=2346376&id=27435697

* * *

The Sovereignty Commission kept plenty of files on Dr. Howard.

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/

Check out

HOWARD, T. M.
HOWARD, T. R. M.
HOWARD, T. R.
HOWARD, T. R.M
HOWARD, T. R.M

Here's one to start --police arrest Dr. Howard

Location: Book Signing in Mound Bayou (July 10, 2009)

Monday, July 06, 2009

Good Ol' White Citizens Councils Still Operating in Mississippi (and Elsewhere)

Mississippi Senator Belongs to Uptown Klan (White Citizens Councils, Now Called Council of Conservative Citizens -- Same Folks, Same Message)

Last weekend, Sen. Lydia Chassaniol (R-Winona) was the keynote speaker at the annual convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that has been classified as a white separatist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and described as having “a thinly-veiled white supremacist agenda” by The New York Times. On the CCC web site, you can buy a “white pride” T-shirt; their platform praises America’s “European” heritage and condemns “mixture of the races”; a previous incarnation of their web site described African Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity”; and so forth. The organization’s agenda is fairly transparent.

Sen. Chassaniol has refused to disavow the organization, praising it as a group of “lone wolves crying in the wilderness” during her keynote and stating that its presence “gives [her] hope.” When she was later asked about her membership in the group, she replied that “a person’s membership in any organization is a private matter.”

Why should we care?

More Reading

Link to Mississippi Council of Conservative Citizens
http://msccc.wordpress.com/about/

Trent Lott was a member ..
http://www.anusha.com/lottties.htm

And of course, Mississippi's Governor, soon to be Republican Presidential Hopeful, Haley Barbour, hangs with this group, too ..

From Sovereignty Commission Files ...

Search on Robert "Tut" Patterson, and Robert Patterson, founder of this group, from Indianola.
http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/

Mississippi Sovereignty Commission Links

On Wikipedia: ” The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state agency directed by the governor of Mississippi that existed from 1956 to 1977. The commission's stated objective was to "[...] protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states" from "federal encroachment." Initially, it was formed to coordinate activities to portray the state, and the legal racial segregation enforced by the state, in a more positive light.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_State_Sovereignty_Commission Facts About Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: Some facts about the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, whose files were opened to the public Tuesday. FOUNDED: Created by legislative act in 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education outlawed segregated schools. MISSION: The Legislature created the commission to "protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi and her sister states" from federal government interference. In practice, it worked to preserve a segregated society and to oppose school integration. In secret, the commission harassed and spied on activists, branding many of them racial agitators and communist infiltrators. http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/bh/badco/missSov.htm MDAH Digital Collection: Sovereignty Commission Online http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/ The Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission by Jo Freeman (2001): “On Thursday, August 18, 1966 I entered the Bellflower Church in Grenada, Mississippi, which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was using as its headquarters for a voter registration project. I had been a fieldworker for SCLC for over a year but in Mississippi only since June.” http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/sixtiesprotest/FSMMiss.htm