by Jon Meacham
Judge Cox’s response to the suit asking for access to the State Sovereignty Commission files was to dismiss it on his own motion. There was a successful appeal to the Fifth Circuit, of course, but in the six years until Cox’s retirement little progress was made. In 1984, the judge who inherited the case, William H. Barbour, Jr., granted the plaintiffs the right to discovery, meaning that Ken Lawrence could read every bit of what had survived as the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—eight filing cabinets full of documents, locked in a vault at the state archives. Lawrence, a white radical from Chicago who had spent many years in Mississippi, was peculiarly suited to the task. He had always had an interest in government attempts to spy on and harass the left, and, even before the A.F.S.C. project began, he had accumulated a number of Sovereignty Commission documents. He is, by nature, a collector. He now lives in State College, Pennsylvania, because it is home to the American Philatelic Society; he serves on the society’s board and writes a column on United States stamps for its magazine. He owns what he believes to be one of the country’s finest collections of Holocaust mail. When he was given access to the Sovereignty Commission files, he assembled photocopies in a twelve-volume plaintiff’s exhibit, organized into nearly a hundred categories. Some of the categories were general, such as Spying on Organized Labor and Spying on Elementary School Curricula and Invasion of Personal Privacy and Interference with and Denial of Voting Rights. Some were specific, such as Developing an Informer on Freedom Riders in Prison and Investigating B’nai B’rith and Targeting Michael Schwerner and Targeting Rust College and Spying on an Italian Filmmaker in Natchez.
Judge Barbour decided in favor of the plaintiffs. In 1989, he ruled that the evidence—“generally unrebutted by the defendants”—proved that “the State of Mississippi acted directly through its State Sovereignty Commission and through conspiracy with private individuals to deprive the Plaintiffs of rights protected by the Constitution to free speech and association, to personal privacy, and to lawful search and seizure.” He said that opening the files “would further the general principle of informed discussion of the actions of government, while to leave the files closed would perpetuate the attempt of the State to escape accountability.” Those referred to in the files would have the opportunity to add corrective information, Judge Barbour ruled, and then the public would have the same access to the documents that it had to other papers in the state archives. At the time of Barbour’s decision, the governor and the attorney general were young, reform-minded men who carried no baggage from the sixties; the attorney general announced that the State of Mississippi would not appeal.
That would have been that, except that by the time Judge Barbour handed down his decision a split among the plaintiffs had divided them into two subclasses, which the Judge called the access class and the privacy class. The access class, which represented those who wanted the public to have virtually unrestricted access to the files, included the A.C.L.U. itself and almost everyone else on the plaintiff side. The privacy class consisted of John Salter and Ed King, the two former Tougaloo faculty members. Their view was that unlimited access would be a way of recirculating the Commission’s dirt—compounding the damage that the spying and smearing had done to innocent people in the first place. The privacy class appealed Barbour’s ruling, and the Fifth Circuit directed Barbour to construct a plan that would protect privacy. The plan that Judge Barbour came up with included mechanisms by which victims of the State Sovereignty Commission—but not informers or people who had been acting for the state—would be given an opportunity to ask that their names be blocked out. Salter, who is now retired in North Dakota, dropped out of the case, but King, maintaining that the plan would not go far enough in protecting the privacy of innocent parties, appealed to the Fifth Circuit again. Because of that appeal, the case continues, and so does the disagreement between Ed King and the rest of the plaintiffs about just how much of the secret past needs to be uncovered.
“I don’t think I’m either insane or a traitor,” Ed King said within a few seconds of our meeting. He is aware that people say that he must have something to fear from public access to the files, or that he can’t bear to see the case end because he is still living in the sixties, or that he has simply gone over the edge. Ken Lawrence, who believes that opening the files is “a weapon of the struggle,” makes no bones about considering King the enemy. “People assume that I couldn’t be carrying on this fight on principle,” King told me. “I must be covering something up.” But among those who disagree with him there are some people who do believe that he is carrying on the fight on principle—that he is, in the words of one of them, “pure of heart.” Even those people, though, are tired of looking at documents about the case that King has annotated. Even those people tend to respond to the mention of Ed King’s name with a sigh and a rolling of the eyes. King is aware of that, too.
King’s bitterest critics would not deny that he was an authentic hero of the civil-rights struggle. At a time when few white Mississippians would have publicly supported even the theoretical right of black people to demonstrate, he was active in the sit-in movement. He was the only white candidate on the slate of a statewide mock election carried on in November of 1963—an election that turned out to be the precursor of the Mississippi Summer Project. In those days, I was always curious about what might cause a white person in a place like Mississippi to abandon the views on race he had grown up with and openly join the movement that his family and friends and neighbors so despised. King tends to credit his apostasy to the Methodists—an indication that the subversion hunters of the Citizens Council might have been, in their own special way, on the right track. Growing up in a conventionally segregationist family in Vicksburg, King went to Millsaps, a liberal-arts college in Jackson connected to the Methodist Church. The very fact that the Methodists had healed their Civil War split—unlike, say, the American Baptists and the Southern Baptists—meant that, even in Mississippi, Methodists were exposed to a national-church point of view on race. King, who was heading toward divinity school, says he found that view persuasive. On the other hand, among the Paul Johnson papers at U.S.M. I came across the report of a surprise visit to King’s mother made by the State Sovereignty Commission director, who concluded from the conversation that one of two Millsaps sociology professors named in the report must have been the prime influence in transforming Ed King into a race mixer.
In “Local People,” a study of the civil-rights struggle in Mississippi, which recently won the Bancroft Prize, the historian John Dittmer wrote that King became “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement, and he paid a heavy price for honoring his convictions. King was ostracized by his family, scorned by his colleagues in the clergy, and later shunned by the ‘New South’ white moderates who entered the political arena only after it was safe to do so.” He still bears the scars of a dreadful car wreck that occurred at the height of the Jackson demonstrations. At one point, he went through an acrimonious divorce. He now works for the University of Mississippi Medical Center, in Jackson, teaching sociology to people who are studying to be physical therapists and medical technicians. Those who feel kindly toward him tend to say, even if they are about to say that he is insane or is living in the past, that he is one of the many people who might have been damaged in the movement.
To me, Ed King didn’t sound insane—just highly focussed. He says that, far from having changed his mind about access as it became clear what was in the files, he had simply assumed from the start that the names of innocent parties would be blocked out, as they are in F.B.I. files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. He has any number of specific problems with the privacy protections proposed by Judge Barbour. He thinks, for instance, that insufficient distinction is made between “the dirty spies who each week turned in their neighbors” and someone who might have made a remark at a party which found its way into a report after some phrase like “Information was received from . . .”
He says that notification in newspaper advertisements about how to arrange to have your name blocked out would mean nothing to people who have no reason to think that their names would be in such files in the first place. What if, he says, a report on a black minister who allowed COFO to use his church for mass meetings in 1964 includes the allegation that he dipped into church funds and had affairs with certain women in the congregation? Why would those women, who may have had nothing at all to do with the civil-rights movement, think that their names might be in the files of the State Sovereignty Commission? How would a veteran of the movement who might think it amusing to have been called a Communist by the Sovereignty Commission know that he was also called a drug addict or an adulterer? What about those whose request to have their names blocked out is denied on the ground that they were informers or state agents? Should they have to hire a lawyer just to protect their privacy? King and his former allies have talked about these points for hours—for instance, they have discussed one formula or another for defining an informer by, say, number of contacts or whether payment was received—but he says he will not be satisfied unless it is agreed to block out the name of everyone who could be in any way considered a victim or a bystander rather than an oppressor. He often repeats the simplest formulation of his viewpoint: “We need to know what the government did, but not to whom.”
Whatever dangers unrestricted access would bring are, of course, already present in the several years’ worth of Sovereignty Commission documents accessible to anyone willing to go to the McCain Library at the University of Southern Mississippi and ask for the Paul Johnson papers. If the ready availability of the Johnson collection since 1989 has caused any instances of divorce or mortification or blackmail, they have not become public knowledge. What I saw in the Johnson documents seemed to confirm what I’d heard from people familiar with the files as a whole: there is relatively little material that people would find personally embarrassing or damaging, particularly thirty years after the fact. One report from someone who spied for the Commission during the summer of 1964 says that the students occupying what the civil-rights volunteers called Freedom Houses were especially careful not to engage in any behavior that would give the police an excuse to arrest them. In King’s view, though, “if only a dozen people are affected, they have their rights.”
I did feel uneasy about reading a few of the documents I saw in the McCain Library—a report that mentioned the treatment of one jailed demonstrator for a social disease, for instance, and a medical report that seemed to be a psychiatric workup of a young man admitted to the state mental hospital. On the other hand, I felt exhilarated by another document. It was the report of a spy in the COFO office which mentioned someone I knew—a woman who had come to the South even before 1964 to work with the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee. The spy, who was identified on his reports as “Operator #79,” wrote, “The ‘strong’ females on the permanent office staff have told me earlier of a revolution among females, ‘the women’s fight for equality with men.’ To the students, this is a deeply serious matter. I have watched it gain momentum over the past months. There are many male supporters of this new ‘thing.’ ” My acquaintance was named as one of the new thing’s ringleaders. I sent her a copy of the report. I figure that if she ever gets into a dispute with other feminists about who does and who doesn’t have bona fides in the movement, the report that Operator #79 filed in July of 1964 will trump anything in the room.
The largest chunk of Commission documents to have surfaced during the litigation over access to the files was put into circulation by Erle Johnston, who happens to be the only surviving director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. In 1989, Johnston borrowed part of Ken Lawrence’s plaintiff’s exhibit from an unsuspecting legal secretary and headed straight for the copying store. Liberator of the files is an unusual role for a former director of the Sovereignty Commission to play—it might be assumed that the people who actually worked for the Commission would have a strong interest in keeping everything locked tightly in the basement of the state archives—but Johnston was an unusual Sovereignty Commission director. Although he succeeded a former sheriff and preceded a former F.B.I. man, he himself was a former editor and publisher of the Scott County Times, in Forest, Mississippi. I had last run into him in the office of Governor Ross Barnett in 1961, the day I got my Jackson police badge; he was then the Sovereignty Commission’s public-relations director. I’ve always had vivid memories of that occasion because Governor Barnett, who was known for grandiloquent speech, said to me—in as gracious a way as he could manage, since all Mississippi officials were trying hard to be polite—that something Time had said about him a few years before was “a malicious, pusillanimous, herbivorous lie.” Johnston was amiable then, and he remains amiable. He has always been a man who tries to get along. A book he wrote on the period, Mississippi’s Defiant Years: 1953–1973, includes testimonials from both William F. Winter, a relatively liberal governor in the early eighties, and William J. Simmons, the longtime administrator of the Citizens Council. It also contains a tribute to Aaron Henry and Charles Evers, “the two most visible and aggressive black civil-rights leaders in Mississippi during the ‘defiant years’ ”—sort of in the spirit of a trial lawyer lifting a glass to his adversary after a particularly rancorous day in court.
Johnston maintains that he has nothing to fear from public access to the files, since they would portray him as a “practical segregationist” rather than an authentic hater. More or less retired at seventy-seven, he likes to talk about having hired black people when he was mayor of Forest and making speeches as Sovereignty Commission director that enraged the Citizens Council, but he seems half resigned to being considered a villain. “I’m the only one left,” he told me when I stopped by Forest to see him. “I’m the one they can point the finger at and say, ‘There goes that monster.’ ” Anyone who wanted to defend or condemn Johnston’s behavior at the Sovereignty Commission could find plenty of supporting material for either in the papers of Paul Johnson. This was in a period when thugs were beginning to crawl out of the cracks that had been made in Mississippi’s confident defense, and there are reports in the U.S.M. papers showing that the Sovereignty Commission under Johnston’s leadership quietly settled some confrontations before the dynamite-and-shotgun crowd could take over. There are papers reflecting the attempt of the Citizens Council and its even kookier cousin, Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, to get Johnston fired for suspicion of moderation. On the other hand, the U.S.M. files also show that it was Erle Johnston who wrote the University of Mississippi trustees trying to get James Silver fired and Erle Johnston, on a similar errand at Rust College, who sent the trustees a report smearing their president as “a known liar and ladies’ man.” The memo instructing McCain on how to blackmail an applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi into withdrawing his application was also signed by Erle Johnston.
It isn’t likely that the files under court seal hold documents that would drastically affect the reputation of Erle Johnston, and what is true of him is thought to be true of most people who were well known in what he calls the defiant years. Nobody I talked to in Mississippi believes that what remains secret includes many more front-page stories. Judge Barbour has estimated that three-quarters of the papers locked away at the state archives have already been seen in one way or another. Also, it is taken for granted that some of the more explosive material gathered by the State Sovereignty Commission was long ago weeded out. Most of the segregationist politicians of that era are out of politics by now, or dead. The paucity of dramatic stories about prominent black people who were discovered to have been spies is such that one man who seems to have been an operative known as Agent X, a congressional aide named R. L. Bolden, has been exposed in the media again and again—most recently last January by Dateline NBC, in the tone of voice that might have been used if a reporter for a TV news-magazine show had beat Stanley to Livingstone.
Among those familiar with the material, there is general agreement that a lot of what’s in the files amounts to newspaper clippings and turgid essays (“Comments on ‘Yesterday’s Constitution Today,’ a Textbook Taught at the University of Mississippi”) and spying reports so mundane that they have the sound of the “Social Notes” column in a country weekly. (“Bill Kopic, mentioned in previous reports, returned to Jackson the week of December 13,” wrote a spy placed as a secretary in the offices of some civil-rights lawyers. “You will recall that he went to New York to take his bar examination again. He does not know whether or not he passed this time. Henry Aronson was out of town during the Holidays. He was in New York and Seattle during this time.”)
Also, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, like any other government agency, generated a lot of paper that had more to do with justifying next year’s appropriation than with completing the job at hand. There are pages in the files, for instance, concerning Erle Johnston’s efforts to bring about the firing of A. D. Beittel, a Tougaloo president who had been openly supportive of civil-rights demonstrations; a week after Johnston flew to New York to put his case before Tougaloo trustees, it was announced that Beittel’s contract would not be renewed. But John Dittmer, who has studied the incident in some detail, is convinced that Johnston, finding out from a spy at Tougaloo that Beittel was going to be forced out, staged the campaign so that the State Sovereignty Commission could take credit—a theory that Erle Johnston has been only too happy to embrace. (“I was always looking for something I could do to satisfy the white power structure without doing something terrible.”)
