The Yockanookany Moderate

It was a great day in Jackson. The temperature was a nippy 43DEG--downright cold by Mississippi standards--and only a wan sun seeped through the mackerel sky to fire up the golden eagle that perches (facing resolutely south) on the State Capitol dome. A crowd of 3,000, including a very few Negroes, turned up for the occasion. The first official guests to arrive were a phalanx of Mississippi's 1,200 colonels, in battalion strength, dressed in identical charcoal flannel suits and grey felt hats. The natty new look, it was explained, was a substitute for the old military uniforms, which did not seem to fit the unmilitary stance of the colonels. Among those reporting for duty were four of the principals of the Emmett Till murder trial--the prosecutor, the Tallahatchie County sheriff, the jury foreman and one of the defense attorneys.

The Band Played Dixie. After the colonels had settled themselves on the steep Capitol steps, Governor-elect James Plemon Coleman arrived. The Blackwood Brothers Quartet warmed things up with a program of hymns (The Lord Is Counting on You, Deep Like a River, Jesus Loves Me), wound up with one that was described as the favorite of Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement, Take My Hand, Oh Precious Lord, and Lead Me Home. Then the combined bands of the Universities of Mississippi and Mississippi State raised the local temperature with a rousing rendition of Dixie.

Promptly at noon, with his hand on his mother's Bible, J. P. Coleman took the oath of office as Mississippi's 51st governor. He was an impressive figure (6 ft. 2 in. tall, 235 lbs.) towering over most of the nearby dignitaries. Coleman can be distinguished from most Mississippi politicians in another way: he does not inflame or make political capital out of the segregation issue, although he is, like nearly all white Mississippians, a convinced racist.

Coleman was born 42 years ago this month on a 120-acre red-clay farm that had been in his family for five generations, on Yockanookany Creek, near the hamlet of Fentress in east-central Mississippi. The Colemans are a large and vigorous clan, spread over most of the South (the Governor is president of the Coleman Family Association), and J. P.'s parents gave him a sturdy body, a happy home, and a solidly Prohibitionist Baptist upbringing. After chores and school, Coleman liked most to read, spent much of his leisure time perusing the Congressional Record and borrowed histories.

After he finished high school, he set off hopefully for the University of Mississippi, 100 miles away, with a truckload of yams, which he planned to barter for his tuition. The potatoes rotted unsold, but Coleman worked his way through Ole Miss just the same, waiting table, planting WPA shrubbery, delivering newspapers and sleeping on a cot in a Y.M.C.A. attic. In 1935 he went off to Washington as secretary to a Congressman. Four years later he was back in Choctaw County with a law degree and a bride--a pretty Indiana girl who had been a Capitol Hill secretary.

The Calmest of Five. Coleman, intensely ambitious, plunged into politics. He moved up from district attorney to circuit judge to attorney general. At the 1952 Democratic convention, he impressed the political bigwigs, and almost single-handed kept the rebellious Mississippi delegation from bolting the party, by his forcefulness and negotiating skill. In last summer's gubernatorial race (TIME, Aug. 1), he was the calmest, least racialistic of the five candidates, won the runoff handily.

In his inaugural address, Coleman showed a wistful yearning to resuscitate his state's national reputation. "Mississippi," he cried, "will be a state of law and not of violence . . . Despite all the propaganda which has been fired at us, the country can be assured that the white people of Mississippi are not a race of Negro killers. Official figures . . . for 1954 show that in that year eight white people were killed by Negroes, while 182 Negroes were killed by members of their own race."

He is as flatly opposed to the Supreme Court's integration as the wildest-eyed advocate of Civil War II, and, in his quiet way, he is probably a more effective foe of desegregation. "There will be no necessity to abolish public schools nor will there be any mixing of the races in, any of the state educational institutions," he said in his address. "This is no task for the amateur or the hothead . . . Those who propose to mix the races in our public schools might as well try to dip the Atlantic dry with a teaspoon." But later, while he was being rubbed down before going to two inaugural balls (one for the public, one for the colonels), Coleman explained. "I believe in preserving segregation," he said, "but I don't believe in making war [over it]. In the first place I am a loyal American, and in the second place you can't win. I am a Southerner, all right, but I am also an American. This city of Jackson, our capital, was named after a man who said, 'Our Federal Union must and shall be preserved.' That's what I believe."

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