Book Review

Canada and the United States

In recent years, civil rights scholars have increasingly investigated the diverse nature of southern white responses to desegregation. Yasuhiro Katagiri's study of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission adds to the literature by demonstrating that even in the Magnolia state, notorious for its fierce defense of Jim Crow, segregationists differed in their commitment to and favored means of protecting racial separation.

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Created by the state legislature in 1956 to defend segregation against challenges from the federal government and the civil rights movement, the Sovereignty Commission relied on a director, a public relations director, a small team of investigators, private detective agencies, and a network of paid and unpaid informants. The commission's activities and approaches varied according to the priorities of Mississippi's governors and the disposition of its several directors, before Governor William L. Waller vetoed its appropriation in 1973, recognizing that the end of legal segregation had made it an anachronism. Based on the commission's records, first released in 1998 after years of litigation by the Mississippi branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and former civil rights activists seeking access, this is the first scholarly book-length study of an important agency in Mississippi's attempt to preserve Jim Crow and, after the early 1960s, to limit desegregation and manage it peacefully when change could not be avoided.

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