Secret Agency Glossed Over Evidence

After examining the burned-out station wagon of three civil rights workers who vanished in Mississippi, an investigator from a secret state agency concluded in 1964 there were no signs of foul play.

The revelation about the infamous case, in which the three turned out to have been slain, was included in 1,800 pages of documents released Thursday from the files of the state-funded Sovereignty Commission.

It was the third and final cache of papers released by the state and shed new light on some of the darkest days of the civil-rights struggle.

Documents show the commission, which was created in 1957 and disbanded in 1973, kept tabs on more than 87,000 suspected subversives and civil-rights sympathizers.

Headed by state legislators, governors and white businessmen opposed to desegregation, the group was pledged to preserve the status quo in the segregated South.

“It’s a very important story that needs to be told so that Mississippians can understand what happens when the government is allowed to operate in secrecy,” said David Ingebretsen of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Documents show the group played on the fears of blacks and others by using tactics that sometimes cost civil-rights sympathizers their jobs.

In one document, a commission agent who examined the three freedom riders’ station wagon said there was “no physical evidence that these three civil-rights workers have met with foul play other than the burned car, which could easily be part of a hoax.”

The bodies of the workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were later found buried beneath an earthen dam. No one has been convicted of the murders, although seven Klansmen were convicted of federal conspiracy charges.

Some scholars said the agency appeared to be a cross between the Keystone Kops and the Soviet Union’s KGB.

“It had a certain comic quality to it, but their actions also had some vicious results,” said Joe Parker, a political science professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Parker said the spy group had produced a primitive documentary-style segregationist propaganda film called “Message from Mississippi.”

“They were nefarious on the one hand and inept on the other,” said Jerry Mitchell, a veteran newspaper reporter portrayed in the 1996 civil-rights movie “Ghosts of Mississippi.”

The spy agency was disbanded after Gov. William Waller vetoed funding in 1973. The Legislature tried to seal the documents but a federal judge ordered them made public in 1998. Some are available on the Internet.

“We’re now filling in the gaps in what is probably the most important chapter in this state’s history,” Ingebretsen said.

A total of 132,000 pages of commission documents have been made public since 1998.

On the Web:

https://www.mdah.state.ms.us