Governors and Senators

In the early 1970s after the Civil Rights Movement had run its course and had brought enormous changes to the South, a group of young and progressive southern governors attracted national attention. Among them were Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reuben Askew of Florida, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and William Waller of Mississippi. Governor Waller was elected at a crucial time in the state’s history and his constructive leadership helped chart a new direction for Mississippi.

John Bell Williams’s political career took an unusual route to the office of governor. Most politicians first run for state or local office and then use those offices to launch a national career. Williams took the opposite approach. He served in the United States Congress for twenty-one years prior to his election as governor in 1967.

When Paul B. Johnson, Jr. was inaugurated as Mississippi’s fifty-fourth governor on January 21, 1964, he became the only son of a Mississippi governor to follow his father to the state’s highest office.

“Little Paul,” as he was fondly known among his supporters, was born at Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on January 23, 1916. He received an undergraduate degree and, in 1939, a law degree from the University of Mississippi. During his father’s term in office, he was married in the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion.

The office of governor is the only public office Ross Barnett ever held and the only political office for which he ever campaigned. He is also one of only two Mississippians who ran for the office four times. He ran and lost in 1951 and 1955, he was elected in 1959, and he ran again unsuccessfully in 1967. Governor Barnett was also the last governor who was born in the century in which Mississippi was admitted to statehood.

Not since George Poindexter had there been a Mississippi governor with a broader range of political experience than Governor James Plemon Coleman. He was also one of the few governors in the 20th century elected in his first campaign for the office.

At the time of his election in 1955, Governor Coleman, who was born near Ackerman on his family farm in Choctaw County, Mississippi, on January 9, 1914, had already served as an aide to a United States congressman, as a district attorney, circuit judge, state attorney general, and justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

When the Democratic Party nominated Harry S. Truman and adopted a strong civil rights platform in 1948, Southern Democrats organized the States’ Rights Democratic Party. Better known as “Dixiecrats,” the Southern Democrats nominated Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for vice-president and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Thurmond and Wright carried only four southern states and failed in their effort to throw the presidential election into the U. S. House of Representatives.

Before his election to the state's highest office in 1943, Thomas L. Bailey served twenty-four years in the Mississippi House of Representatives. For twelve years, he was Speaker of the House. Bailey was a member of a small but powerful group of lawmakers known as The Big Four, which included Walter Sillers, Joseph George, and Laurence Kennedy. The members of The Big Four held key committee chairmanships in the state House of Representatives and virtually controlled the flow of legislation during the two to three decades they were in power.

During his 1931 and 1935 races for governor, Paul Burney Johnson Sr. called himself the “Champion of the Runt Pig People,” and in his successful campaign of 1939, he promised to inaugurate several New Deal measures in the state of Mississippi. In supporting government programs for the poor and unemployed, Johnson explained that he was trying to give the common people their fair share of the nation’s wealth and pledged, “I will never balance the budget at the expense of suffering humanity.”

Hugh Lawson White was perhaps the wealthiest man to hold the office of governor in Mississippi’s history, certainly in modern times. An industrialist and lumberman,  White served two nonconsecutive terms and was among the oldest men elected governor. When he was elected to a second term in 1951, Governor White was age seventy.

During the depths of the worst depression in American history, Martin S. Conner was inaugurated governor of Mississippi on January 19, 1932. “We assume our duties,” he said, “when men are shaken with doubt and with fear, and many are wondering if our very civilization is about to crumble.”

Governor Conner inherited a bankrupt treasury and a $13 million deficit. At age forty-one, Martin Conner was one of the state’s youngest governors, but few had entered the office better trained or with more experience in public service.