Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Fully appreciating the importance of Carroll Gartin and his work "converting" Charles Pickering to the Republican Party requires understanding Mississippi politics of 40 years ago. It has long been a matter of public record that Pickering supported the lily-white pro-segregation Mississippi Regular Democrats in 1964, the official state party organization. The so-called Regular Democrats openly discriminated against blacks and excluded them from party activities and meetings. In 1964, black Mississippians, with some white supporters, organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and selected their own slate of delegates to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
The conflict between the rival slates became an event of national importance, highlighted by the electrifying testimony of MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer before the convention's credentials committee. It's not an exaggeration to call Hamer's remarks a pivotal moment in American history. President Lyndon Johnson offered a compromise giving the MFDP two at-large seats and pledging that the Mississippi party would support the national ticket and eliminate racial discrimination in future delegate selection. Neither slate of delegates agreed to the deal, and in dramatic fashion, the all-white Regular delegation walked out of the convention hall. And some of them walked out of the Democratic Party.
The walk-out came at a time of prolonged political crisis in Mississippi. The summer of 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, when with the aid of white and black supporters from around the country, pro-civil-rights Mississippians attempted to register blacks to vote and to participate in the precinct, county and state conventions of the Democratic Party. (It was this effort that led to the creation of the MFDP.) Political tensions rose early in July, when Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act into law. There was also violence in Mississippi that summer, most notoriously the murder of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.
During the weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and before the Democratic National Convention, several leading Mississippi Democrats either endorsed the Republican national ticket or joined the Dixiecrat candidate, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, in leaving the Democratic Party altogether. Their statements were often couched in code words -- resisting the Democrats' alleged "socialism" was one of the most common -- but the issue was clear. They rejected what they saw as unjust federal efforts to end racial segregation in Mississippi. The fight was not about foreign policy, or tax rates, or anything other than racial segregation.
After the Democratic convention in late August, more pro-segregation Democrats either announced their support for the Republican ticket or left the Democratic Party, blaming the attempted compromise in Atlantic City and its offer of token recognition to the civil rights Mississippi delegates.
One of the most conspicuous pro-segregation Democrats was Lt. Gov. J. Carroll Gartin. As lieutenant governor, he wrote to Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus to express his admiration and support for Faubus' defiance of federal authority in the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957. Eight years later, the year before his death, Gartin praised Alabama's segregationist governor, George C. Wallace, for his "great American message."
Between those dates, Gartin devoted himself fully to the segregationist cause. In 1959, pledging himself as a "total and absolute segregationist," Gartin ran unsuccessfully for governor in the Democratic primary against Ross Barnett, who would go on to great notoriety during the violent desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi in 1962. One of Gartin's chief arguments in that campaign was that, unlike Barnett, whom he called "a headline segregationist," he, Gartin, was "a successful segregationist." ("Mr. Gartin believes in speaking low and carrying a big stick," one piece of campaign material declared about segregation. "Mr. Barnett believes in speaking loud with no stick at all.")
Gartin did not confine his segregationism to the campaign stump. As lieutenant governor in the 1950s and 1960s -- and as a leader of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the semi-secret state agency dedicated to resisting integration and the civil rights movement -- Gartin endorsed massive resistance to desegregation. In 1962, when his former primary opponent, Gov. Barnett, defied federal authority during the Ole Miss crisis -- which quickly degenerated into mob violence -- Gartin made a point of sending a wire to Barnett to pledge his support and congratulate him for his "determination to keep our schools and colleges open and segregated." And when faced, in 1964, with a choice between token integration leading to an eventual dismantling of racial discrimination inside the Democratic Party, and the continuation of segregation, Gartin sided unequivocally with segregation.
