Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

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The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a Mississippi state agency that existed from 1956 to 1977. It acted as a de facto intelligence organization, working to keep segregation in place. The commission's objective was to “do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states” from a perceived “encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof; to resist the usurpation of the rights and powers reserved to this state and our sister states by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof.”

During the years of the civil rights battles in the South and in the courts, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission operated in secret to try to thwart Federal desegregation efforts. Ostensibly, the Commission functioned to “protect” Mississippi from Federal Intervention and to uphold state’s rights, but effectively it was an intelligence agency with wide-ranging powers.

The Mississippi Legislature created the commission in 1956 (two years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision) to “protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi and her sister states.” The commission had 12 appointed members, including the Governor who functioned as commission chairman; an executive director, and a Security Director. It was funded with $250,000 a year from state coffers.

The Commission staff collected information through its own agents, a network of spies, by exchanging information between intelligence and law informant agencies, and through informants.^{[citation needed]}

One of the tenets of the organization was that its work remain hidden from the public and from the targets of its investigation. The ACLU sued for release of the commission’s files but it took years to get the material. The commission officially closed in 1977, four years after then-Governor Bill Waller vetoed funding.

After the agency was disbanded, state lawmakers ordered the files sealed until 2027. In 1989 a federal judge ordered the records opened, but legal challenges delayed release of the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents for years.