Free The Ghosts of Mississippi by Maryanne Vollers Page B

often added that he found the group to be a wholesome outfit.
    Back in the fifties there was not much of a Klan in Mississippi. There wasn’t any reason to have one. The state government was so radically segregationist, and the Citizens’ Councils, often called the white-collar Klan, were so firmly in control of business, that a Ku Klux Klan would have seemed redundant.
    There was a group across the border in Louisiana called the Original Knights of the KKK, and some scattered members of old, traditional outfits like the Knights of the White Camellia in southern Mississippi. People joined out of family tradition more than anything else. It was a racist’s low-rent fraternity, with costumes and funny titles. All that would change after John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to Oxford in 1962 to integrate Ole Miss. But back in the halcyon fifties, a racist could be fairly secure without organized vigilante groups. The violence was ad hoc and applied as necessary.
    By 1956 the State of Mississippi had organized itself to battle integration by creating the Sovereignty Commission. It had a broad mandate and a long leash. Nowhere in its charter were the words integration or segregation mentioned. The code words were encroachment and sovereignty.
    The law that the state legislature passed in establishing the commission read, in part, “It shall be the duty of the Commission to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi . . . from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof; and to resist the usurpation of the rights and powers reserved to this state.”
     

    The original purpose of the Sovereignty Commission was to serve as a big PR agency, to educate the nation about the benefits of the southern system, and to lobby against outside interference. It quickly became much more than that. An investigative department was established, headed by L. C. Hicks, the former head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol (which had its own intelligence unit). A former FBI agent named Zack Van Landingham was hired to do the “investigations.” A two-year appropriation of $250,000 was set aside for the commission, some of which was quietly diverted to the Citizens’ Councils. People quickly caught on to the true nature of the Sovereignty Commission. It was Mississippi’s state spy agency.
    Now here was an organization Byron De La Beckwith could get behind. He wrote to Governor Coleman on May 16, 1956, asking for a job as an investigator to help in “uncovering plots by the NAACP to intergrate [sic] our beloved State.”
    The letter was written in a distinctive style that would be recognized by prosecutors and FBI agents in the years to come. Beckwith outlined his current obsession: “To me [ the fight for segregation ] is a life or death struggle and NOTHING ELSE IS MORE IMPORTANT AT THIS TIME! I. . . will tear the mask from the face of the NAACP and forever rid this fair land of the DISEASE OF INTEGRATion with which it is plagued with.”
    He wrote that it would be a sin to squander his talents selling tobacco when his “useful energy may be expended in acquiring the information needed to thwart efforts of the power mad integration mongers.”
    He mentioned in his resume his favorable war record, his happy home life, and that he was on the Membership Committee of the Greenwood Citizens’ Council (it later booted him out for his overly zestful recruitment techniques). Other skills that he felt qualified him for the job were “expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun — and — RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION!”
    The letter was found many years later in Coleman’s papers after the governor’s death. The Sovereignty Commission sent Beckwith a form letter saying that it would consider his application. It is not generally known whether he was ever called upon to help out.

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