Forging Ahead, 1946–Present

Although Ray Mabus was the youngest governor in America at the time of his inauguration on January 12, 1988, he had accumulated an impressive record of public service and academic achievements.

While serving as attorney general of the state of Mississippi in the early 1980s, Bill Allain filed a suit asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to separate the functions of the executive and legislative branches of state government, especially in the budgetary process. Prior to that suit, members of the Mississippi Legislature served on boards, commissions, and agencies in the executive branch. Attorney General Allain asserted that Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution required a separation of powers and that legislative officials could not serve in the executive branch.

For all of William Winter’s many contributions to the state of Mississippi, he will best be remembered for the Education Reform Act of 1982. After the legislature failed to enact his educational reforms during the regular session in 1982, Governor Winter called a special session. Under the authority given him by the state’s 1890 Constitution, Governor Winter restricted the legislation that could be introduced in that special session to education bills.

Cliff Finch campaigned for governor in 1975 on the promise of more and better-paying jobs for Mississippi’s working men and women. To dramatize his concern for the hardships of Mississippi’s working people, Finch spent one day a week during the late stages of his campaign sacking groceries at supermarkets, driving bulldozers, or working at other jobs that were associated with the ordinary working man and woman. He took a sack lunch with him on those special work days. His campaign tactics were very popular and he was elected governor in his first try for the office.

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.

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.”