Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

He wasn't a civil rights historian by training.

He was a newspaper reporter who had developed sources inside the state government, and those sources pointed him toward a set of files that the State of Mississippi desperately wanted to stay sealed, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

If you've never heard of it, that's by design.

The commission did its work in the dark, and Mississippi spent decades trying to keep its records sealed.

The Sovereignty Commission was created by the Mississippi Legislature in March 1956, two years after the Brown versus Board ruling.

Its official purpose was to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi.

Its actual purpose was to preserve segregation by any means necessary, using the full resources and authority of state government.

Through sources he had cultivated inside state government, he gained access to information from those sealed files.

Wickliffe Draper, the reclusive millionaire behind the Pioneer Fund, never actually came up in the source material I was reading while I was writing that series of episodes about Mississippi in the 1960s, because he tried very, very hard to keep his name out of it.

But he was, in fact, the single largest private donor to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, almost single-handedly bankrolling the State of Mississippi's lobbying and propaganda efforts to block federal civil rights legislation.

If you did listen to that recent series about the murder of Medgar Evers, you already know that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state agency dedicated to surveilling civil rights activists from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.

And in those episodes, we talked about the commission's symbiotic relationship with the Citizens' Councils, those local civic organizations formed in the aftermath of the Brown versus Board of Education decision to resist integration by any means necessary.

The Citizens' Councils relied on information and funding provided by the Sovereignty Commission.

They were separate entities, but their work was inseparable.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission never had an annual budget of more than $350,000, and even that was an outlier year.

It was typically allocated between 150,000 and $250,000 per year during its 17 years in operation.