First Non-Racist Gov. Of Mississippi & My Former Boss Dies
From the New York Times today:
“William L. Waller, who as a prosecutor in 1964 twice tried to convict the segregationist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and who in 1971 forged a coalition of poor whites and newly enfranchised blacks to become governor of Mississippi, died Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. He was 85.
“Mr. Waller, a Democrat and self-described “redneck,” used his governorship from 1972 to 1976 to appoint blacks to administrative boards and commissions for the first time in post-Reconstruction Mississippi. He elevated three historically black colleges to university status, and he abolished the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which had fought integration.”
Please read the rest of this obituary.
I was teaching journalism and writing at Cornell University in early 1973 when I got a call I had never expected that prompted me do do something I had vowed never to do.
I never expected that an Ivy League degree (except maybe from Princeton) would ever be acceptable in Mississppi. The Ivies sent a whole lot of civil rights workers and Freedom Riders to the state in the 1960s. To the old-time segregationists and Klansmen who ran the state, Ivy leaguers were just a bunch of “nigger-loving, trouble making Communist agitators.”
So when I got a call from one of Bill Waller’s top people asking me to come back to Mississippi and work in his administration, I said “no.” I had vowed never to go back to Mississippi.
That resolve grew stronger every time I looked at a stained glass window in Sage Chapel on the Cornell Campus honoring Michael Schwerner (Cornell, ’61), James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman whose murders in Mississippi were immortalized in Mississippi Burning and etched into my heart.
If anyone wonders why I vowed never to go back, the answer is not a short one and not appropriate here, but is explained in my thriller, Perfect Killer.
But Gov. Waller was something of a hero of mine and hard to say “no” to. He stood tall in my mind as the foolishly brave man who defied death threats and social ostracism and had stood up to the racists and the Klanners and the Citizen’s Council and the school-house-door-standers and the other bush-league demagogues.
He was persuasive. I went back.
I am thankful I did. It was hard and filled with my own very public slugfests with some of the dinosaurs in the state legislature. I won some, I lost some. But some of those old farts ended up in federal prison thanks Bill Minor, the only journalist in the state who paid any attention to my battles and followed up on some of the skeletons I had unearthed.
The experience working for Bill Waller changed my life in ways I still offer thanks for. He was certainly not perfect and had his own visible flaws. But he had courage. And unlike way too many politicians of today at every level, he wasn’t just a man of words, but a man of action. Results counted with him, not rhetoric. Action mattered, not promises, positions, or pontifications. And when he made a threat, by damn, retribution was never far behind.
God bless him!
