In March 1933, a tall, lanky, sandy-haired man stepped off the train at the Washington, D. C. station. No one greeted him, no band played, hardly anyone knew he had arrived. William M. Colmer had come to the nation’s capital to witness the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and then to represent the people of the sixth congressional district of Mississippi in the Seventy-third Congress.
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
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.
While a student at the University of Mississippi, Lee Russell was a leader in the movement to abolish Greek fraternities. When he later became a member of the Mississippi Legislature from Lafayette County, he introduced a bill in 1912 to prohibit secret and exclusive societies at the public institutions of higher learning. Russell’s anti-fraternity law was enacted and remained in effect for fourteen years.
Although he was only five-feet, two-inches tall, Theodore G. Bilbo, in life as in legend, is a towering figure who stalked across the pages of Mississippi history. For forty years, from 1907 to 1947, “The Man,” as he was called by friends and foes alike, occupied a prominent place in Mississippi politics. He is notorious in history for his views on race.