Thought Control

Voted into being in 1956, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was assigned to "protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi from encroachment by the Federal Government." To do the job, it has plenty of political muscle --Governor Ross Barnett, his lieutenant governor and the attorney general are among the members--and ample funds, from a two-year budget of $350,000. It works hand in glove with the state's White Citizens Councils, whose educational foundation it subsidized with $50,000 last year. It also has a private, secret network of paid spies, who report the attitudes of individual Mississippians toward racial issues and have created a chilling climate in the heart of the Deep South.

"Subversive." The commission is frank about its aims. In addition to keeping track of desegregation efforts, reports the commission's standard publicity speech, "the commission is engaged in a detailed investigation program to build a file on persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes." In the last nine months, the commission has made 228 such investigations in 82 counties. In one a task force of investigators worked for weeks, eventually proved that a child from a supposedly white family was actually Negro, and thus ineligible for an all-white school.

In towns and hamlets throughout the state, the commission's use of paid informers has long been general knowledge. At the University of Mississippi, for example, students refer casually to classmates in the commission's pay who take notes on "subversive" conversations and to the former graduate student who gets $35 a week for removing allegedly pro-Communist literature from the library. But not until the case of Ole Miss Senior Billy Barton was the commission caught so openly trafficking in "investigations" that Mississippians grew actively alarmed.

"Right Serious." Barton, 20, a journalism student and managing editor of the university paper, the Mississippian, worked last summer as a reporter trainee for the Atlanta Journal. From the Georgia States' Rights Council the Mississippi commission heard ugly rumors of Barton's Atlanta activities. Augmented later by commission informers at Ole Miss, the rumors were combined into a confidential report that bumbling Commission Director Albert Jones mistakenly released. The report accused Barton of belonging to the N.A.A.C.P. (which he does not) and of leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta (he helped cover one for the Journal). Last week, partly because of the charges against him, Barton lost the election for the Mississippian editorship.

The Barton case revelations were clearly too much for many a confirmed segregationist to swallow. State Representative Philip Bryant damned the commission as a "private Gestapo." The influential Jackson State Times asked editorially: "Has the State Sovereignty Commission developed into a secret police organization? What right has the commission to maintain files on any Mississippian?" Suddenly aware that what could happen to Barton could happen to them, more and more Mississippians seemed to be agreeing with I. H. Howell, editor of the Batesville Panolian. "When they organized the Sovereignty Commission,", he said, "I had no kick. But when they start having spies on campus, things are right serious."

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