In 1956, years after the U.S. preferrred court docket unanimously outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public faculties, Mississippi created the country Sovereignty fee.

This was once the administrative supplier confirmed "to defend the sovereignty of the kingdom of Mississippi . . . from encroachment thereon via the Federal Government." The code observe encroachment implied the state's powerful unravel to maintain and defend the racial establishment. within the nomenclature the formality of the observe sovereignty supposedly lent dignity to the activities of the fee. For all useful reasons the Sovereignty fee meant to salary this Deep South state's monolithic resistance to desegregation and to the ever-intensifying campaign for civil rights in Mississippi.

In 1998 the papers of the fee have been made on hand for exam. No different nation has such large and certain documentary documents from the same business enterprise. uncovered to public gentle, they unmasked the fee as a counterrevolutionary division for political and social intrigue that infringed on person constitutional rights and labored towards discrediting the civil rights flow by means of tarnishing the reputations of activists. because the eyes of the citizenry studied the files, the fee slid from sovereign and segregated to unsavory and abominable.

This booklet, the 1st to provide a accomplished background of this watchdog organisation, exhibits how, to this present day, the Sovereignty fee continues to be imprecise, debated, and for plenty of voters a celebrity chamber of the main sinister kind. Why used to be the fee created? What have been many of the political and social climates that initiated its production? What have been its actions in the course of its seventeen years? What was once its impression at the process Mississippi and southern heritage?

Drawing at the newly opened fabrics on the Mississippi division of files and heritage, this exam offers solutions to such questions and lines the vicissitudes that took the fee from governmental limelight to public opprobrium. This e-book additionally seems to be on the attitudes of the state's white citizenry, who, upon figuring out the Commission's failure, observed the significance of a nonviolent lodging of civil rights.