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The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission - Civil Rights and States' Rights (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,077
Discovery Miles 10 770
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The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission - Civil Rights and States' Rights (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,097
Discovery Miles: 10 970
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In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously
outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public schools,
Mississippi created the State Sovereignty Commission. This was the
executive agency established ""to protect the sovereignty of the
State of Mississippi . . . from encroachment thereon by the Federal
Government."" The code word encroachment implied the state's strong
resolve to preserve and protect the racial status quo. In the
nomenclature the formality of the word sovereignty supposedly lent
dignity to the actions of the Commission. For all practical
purposes the Sovereignty Commission intended to wage this Deep
South state's monolithic resistance to desegregation and to the
ever-intensifying crusade for civil rights in Mississippi. In 1998
the papers of the Commission were made available for examination.
No other state has such extensive and detailed documentary records
from a similar agency. Exposed to public light, they unmasked the
Commission as a counterrevolutionary department for political and
social intrigue that infringed on individual constitutional rights
and worked toward discrediting the civil rights movement by
tarnishing the reputations of activists. As the eyes of the
citizenry studied the records, the Commission slid from sovereign
and segregated to unsavory and abominable. This book, the first to
give a comprehensive history of this watchdog agency, shows how, to
this day, the Sovereignty Commission remains obscure, debated, and
for many citizens a star chamber of the most sinister sort. Why was
the Commission created? What were some of the political and social
climates that initiated its creation? What were its activities
during its seventeen years? What was its impact on the course of
Mississippi and southern history? Drawing on the newly opened
materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History,
this examination gives answers to such questions and traces the
vicissitudes that took the Commission from governmental limelight
to public opprobrium. This book also looks at the attitudes of the
state's white citizenry, who, upon realizing the Commission's
failure, saw the importance of a nonviolent accommodation of civil
rights. Yasuhiro Katagiri, an associate professor of American
history and government at Tokai University in Kanagawa, Japan, has
been published in such periodicals as American Review and 49th
Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies.
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