Digital Snapshots

This “Digital Snapshot” Exhibit features documents from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission digitized collection.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC) was a state-sponsored investigative unit created in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education to combat racial desegregation in the Magnolia State. Between 1956 and 1973 the MSSC, directed by the governor and other top elected officials, employed former law enforcement officials and others to observe and report on the activities of private citizens suspected of engaging in civil rights activism. In the ensuing years, this expanded to include investigations into suspected communism, homosexuality, religious activity, and more. For nearly twenty years, the MSSC was funded by public tax dollars, but unaccountable to the public. It operated as a clandestine investigative unit that worked behind the scenes to funnel resources and information to a variety of organizations fighting against fundamental civil rights across Mississippi and the larger United States.

The Digital Snapshot partners designed this site to improve the public's ability to understand and explore this critically important MDAH collection. The records have been available to researchers since their contested release to the public in the late 1990s, but the scale (approximately 133,000 images) made the collection difficult to navigate. Initially made available for public research on computers in the library of the state archives in Jackson, in 2002 MDAH made the records available online with full-text access.

That need and a determination to help site visitors explore the records and understand the invasive nature of the MSSC's actions inspired the MSSC Digital Exhibit you see here. It serves as an introduction to the full collection, beginning with a brief historical essay by a subject expert about the MSSC and its actions. You'll also find links to additional information and a list of recommended sources. Scholarly experts selected a sampling of about twenty documents from the collection that offer users a sense of the breadth of the agency's interests. The exhibit also provides standards-based lesson plans, focusing on primary source analysis, to help educators and students more easily use these materials in classrooms. After exploring this exhibit and gaining a better understanding of the MSSC, we encourage you to visit the full collection at the MDAH Digital Archives where you can search the records by personal name and folder title.

Funding for this Digital Snapshot Exhibit was provided by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.