Mississippi’s Efforts to Foil Integration Detailed

Spies for Mississippi’s segregation agency collected an endless stream of names and rumors in a clandestine attempt to thwart integration, documents released Wednesday under federal court order show. The efforts ranged from gathering license tag numbers to claims that one tiny church raised $50,000 to stir racial unrest.

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was created by a nervous Legislature in 1956, two years after federally ordered school integration, and employed dozens of agents and informants to target those involved in civil rights and voter registration drives.

Twenty-one years later, lawmakers tried to bury the commission’s transgressions by sealing its files for 50 years. But civil rights activists and the American Civil Liberties Union sued to make them public.

Much that came to light were repetitious accounts of ordinary daily doings. Any meeting of blacks or civil rights sympathizers was sure to produce a list of license tag numbers of cars parked outside.

But some files are revealing in their intensity. The segregation gatekeepers were so disturbed when Clyde Kennard tried to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi, for example, that they unleashed investigators who dug up the most-minute details on him.

A 37-page report compiled in December 1958 starts with his birth certificate number and covers school, credit and work history and other facts.

Criminal charges were even manufactured--possession of illegal whiskey in a dry county--to keep the man called an “integration agitator” out of the university, the Sovereignty Commission records show.

The records show whiskey was planted in his car. The Mississippi Supreme Court cleared Kennard of the charge in 1990, 27 years after he died of intestinal cancer in Chicago.

Another individual receiving intense scrutiny was Michael Schwerner, one of three civil rights workers who disappeared June 21, 1964, in Neshoba County. Their bodies were found 44 days later in an earthen dam.

In July 1964, Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey told the Sovereignty Commission he expected to be arrested by the FBI for his involvement in the deaths of Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Six months later, Rainey and his chief deputy, Cecil Price, were behind bars.

Eight Ku Klux Klansmen went to prison on federal conspiracy charges. The state never brought murder charges in the case, which inspired the film “Mississippi Burning.”

Files containing the names of 42 individuals remain sealed pending federal court rulings on privacy issues.