A Busy Spring in the Magnolia State
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Description
The State Capitol in Jackson, where the Mississippi House and Senate sit, is a monument to the Mississippi legislative mind. A handsome building, finished in 1903 at what was then the terrific cost of a million dollars, it is a delicious combination of the humbug of the back-country politician and the pomposity of the Victorian swell. The floors and walls contain sixteen different kinds of marble, and the archways under the rotunda are set with thousands of light bulbs (which cause the temperature to go up above the point of endurability in the summer). If one goes in the doorway at ground level, one faces a bronze statue of the late Theodore Bilbo in a double-breasted suit, striking an oratorical stance. If one walks up the broad marble steps and through the main entrance, on the other hand, one is flanked on either side by an immense color transparency of one of the two Miss Americas who have come from Mississippi. The legislative activities of the Mississippi House and Senate have been in keeping with their decorative instincts. They have always tried to protect southern womanhood and the southern way of life, though they have devoted increasing energy to the job since 1954. After the House and Senate were convened in January, 1964, they passed the spring in prodigies of legislation designed to terrify Negroes and civil rights workers and to give law enforcement agencies the power to prevent demonstrations. Much of this activity had been completed by the time the summer volunteers arrived late in June of that year. Newspaper reporters were unable to resist the temptation to speak of the Council of Federated Organizations and its efforts to register voters in terms of a military operation. But the fact is that, aside from the lack of firearms, the COFO campaign failed in its resemblance to a military attack in one signal respect: surprise. The COFO operation was one of the major news stories of the year, and Mississippi had heard much about each step in the invasion, beginning with the initial dispute among the civil rights groups as to whether Mississippi really was the best target for the movement and including the details of the training of the summer volunteers. Furthermore, a group of SNCC, CORE and NAACP workers had been there all year, and some of them for years before, quietly trying to organize Negroes to register. White Mississippians knew a great deal more than they cared to know about field secretaries, Freedom Houses, Freedom Schools, and Negro voter registration. Their elected representatives, most of whom obtained office by being more rabid race-baiters than any of their opponents, not to speak of their constituents, undertook to throw up a wall against the foreign invasion. As the bills were proposed and passed, the COFO office at 1017 Lynch Street in Jackson kept a running record of them, together with newspaper clippings. Law students went filched copies of the bills. These were no Black Codes; they were a good deal more subtle than that. Though there are still a few segregation statutes scattered through the volumes of the Mississippi Code, the legislature has learned that raw segregation by state action will be declared unconstitutional by the Federal courts, even in Mississippi. The Mississippi legislators have shifted from trying to limit civil rights to trying to limit what are loosely denoted civil liberties, although their real purpose was never in doubt. Instead of perpetuating the system of segregation directly, the legislature passes bills of attainder and impairs contracts; it interferes with the liberties preserved in the Bill of Rights, including the rights to freedom of speech, press and assembly, as well as the prohibitions against excessive fines and bail, and cruel and unusual punishment. In short, the legislature sets out to maintain segregation indirectly by controlling the protest against it. This raises the question why, if they know that segregation laws are unconstitutional, the legislators do not know that laws which infringe civil liberties are unconstitutional as well. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the purpose of the statute is often hidden, sometimes artfully and sometimes not, under a thicket of pious verbiage intended to show that the law is a health measure or a police reform. Those cases where the unconstitutional intent of the statute is obvious must be explained by the fact that the legislators in Mississippi have not had as much practice with the rest of the Constitution as they have had with the equal protection clause. Part of the civil rights lawyers' job is to give them a little more experience with the rest of the Constitution.
Source Publication
Southern Justice
Source Editors/Authors
Leon Friedman
Publication Date
1965
Recommended Citation
Chevigny, Paul G., "A Busy Spring in the Magnolia State" (1965). Faculty Chapters. 1138.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1138
