「ミシシッピー州主権委員会」と南部の抵抗 : 公民権と州権,1956年-1973年
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In 1956, two years after the United States Supreme Court unanimously outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public schools in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Mississippi -the citadel of racial segregation- created an executive agency called the State Sovereignty Commission "to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi... from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government." While the code word "encroachment" implied Mississippi's strong resolve to preserve and protect the racial status quo in the state, the formality of the word "sovereignty" supposedly lent dignity to the unsavory activities of the State Sovereignty Commission. For all practical purposes, the State Sovereignty Commission intended to wage Mississippi's officially sanctioned campaign against the Supreme Court's Brown ruling and the ever-intensifying crusade for civil rights in this Deep South state. The birth of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission embodied the mind-set of most white Mississippians, who were determined to resist any meaningful change in the state's racial status quo after the Second World War. The State Sovereignty Commission, in other words, was a product of Mississippi society in the 1950s and the 1960s -a society where the fears, angers, and sometimes unreasonable reactions of white citizenry in pursuit of their dogmatic cause of white supremacy dominated the course of the state's politics. People ordinarily assert their faith in constitutional government. But when confronted with a constitutional crisis, they often become frightened, turn to dictatorial tactics, and lose their faith in freedoms- freedom of speech, freedom of dissent, and freedom of assembly. As a result, their intelligence, kind hearts, and even sanity vanish in the name of conformity. Unfortunately, this is exactly what plagued Mississippi in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation mandate, with its State Sovereignty Commission being a product and playing a role as keeper of the state's rigid racial conformity. This article, dealing with the institutional history of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission from its inception in 1956 to its virtual demise in 1973, describes the state agency's emphatic but eventually failed attempt to resist the civil rights crusade in the Magnolia State. The primary objectives of the article are to pose and attempt to answer the following questions: Why was the State Sovereignty Commission created, and what were some of the political and social climates that initiated its creation? What kind of activities did the State Sover-eignty Commission engage in during its seventeen-year existence? What was its impact on the course of Mississippi and southern history? While offering answers to these questions in tracing the vicissitudes that took the state agency from governmental limelight to public oblivion, this article also looks at the attitudes of Mississippi's white citizenry who, upon realizing the State Sover- eignty Commission's eventual failure, saw the importance of a nonviolent accommodation to the reality of the late 1960s.
- 2004-03-30
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関連論文
- 「ミシシッピー州主権委員会」と南部の抵抗 : 公民権と州権,1956年-1973年
- "Gentlemen, You Are Tramping on the Sovereignty of This GreatState" : Revisiting the 1962 University of Mississippi DesegregationCrisis