The Six-Foot Wedge

For Mississippi, the Civil War marked not only the end of glory, but also the beginning of a dismal record as the hindmost state of the reconstructed union in wealth, education and social progress. For

Mississippians who have waited long to be led to glory, the rising hero of the day is James Plemon Coleman, their amiable, husky (6 ft. 2 in., 230 lb.), 43-year-old governor. J. P. Coleman reveres the tactics and tragedy that he learned as a child at the feet of ancient Confederate veterans in his native Choctaw County, 100 miles northeast of Jackson. He has built a 400-volume war library, reads himself to sleep with war stories and Reconstruction history. But J. P.. Coleman, in tune with the past, is also much in tune with Mississippi's present and its hopes for the future. Last week, sighting on a brighter future, he tackled a problem no governor has cared to grapple with in 25 years. He called for a state constitutional convention to replace 1890's "oxcart" constitution with a 1957 "jet plane" model.

Coleman wants to revamp the state's judicial system, clarify obscure provisions enacted in horse-and-buggy days, and make adjustments favorable to industry. He expects plenty of opposition from Mississippians who believe that "the brains which designed the previous constitution can never be duplicated, much less improved on." But, says Governor Coleman, "weaklings do not write history, and the timid do not ordinarily point towards progress."

Cowing the Satraps. J. P. Coleman is neither a weakling nor timid, as some 2,000,000 Mississippians have discovered ever since the day that he tramped down from the red clay hills of the northeast a year ago to best the entrenched politicos of the rich Delta country, and become the hill country's first governor in 36 years.

Since inauguration (TIME, Jan. 30, 1956), Coleman has worked tirelessly to bring Mississippi's government into the 1950s, to knit the state together with the kind of unified administration and purpose that most states take for granted. By threatening state action, he corrected a statewide disgrace by cowing some 500 locally elected justices of the peace, most of them inept and many of them corrupt, who have traditionally acted like local satraps.

He frightened those local princelings, the county sheriffs, by pushing through a law authorizing their removal through local recall. He built up the state highway patrol as a strong statewide law-enforcement agency. He did not hesitate to use National Guardsmen to smash stocks of bootleggers in counties where prohibitionists were not getting help from local law enforcement officers. He closed down Gulf Coast gambling so that tourists who bring $300 million a year into the state would spend it on legal pleasures, benefiting more Mississippians. He streamlined the executive departments to produce a $20 million budget surplus with no new taxes. He stopped brutality at the state penitentiary farm at Parchman.

Raising the Level. Above and beyond these achievements, Coleman considers that he has a far more serious mission to fulfill. Mississippi has the most lopsided economy in the South: 42% of its work force is on farms. Striving to eliminate illiteracy and grinding poverty, and determined to raise the lowest per-capita income in the nation and halt an exodus of 40.000 citizens each year, the state has tried to balance agriculture with new industry ever since the first term of Governor Hugh White (1936-40).

To Coleman's mind, the program has just begun to be effective (26,000 new jobs in ten years; annual per-capita income increased to $946), and Mississippi needs more time to effect the changeover --time that will be swept away if the racial crises fireballing through the South reach at last into the state with the highest percentage (45%) of Negro population in the U.S. To win time, J. P. Coleman has set himself as the wedge between White Citizens' Councils and the N.A.A.C.P. "What we need." says Coleman, "is peace and quiet. What happened in Clinton, Tenn. will be like a boil on the side of Mount Everest compared to what could happen in Mississippi." Coleman's strategy--difficult to understand in the North, but bold for the Deep South--is to work for racial peace and quiet. Unlike many of his political predecessors, he refuses to exploit segregation as a political issue. Of five candidates for governor in the 1955 primary, only Coleman pointedly refused to indorse the racist White Citizens' Councils; he won in the runoff election by a record 48,000 votes, the first governor in 32 years elected in his first try. He has since firmly refused to make speeches on the segregation issue, either inside or outside Mississippi. And no scholar is quicker to remind the South that during Reconstruction the Supreme Court was its friend and protector.

Under Coleman there has been no letup in segregation for the Negroes. In the shining new factories, few get better jobs than floor sweeping. Disgruntled, some 25,000 Negroes a year are leaving for opportunities elsewhere. Yet the bulk of an estimated $100 million to be spent on schools in the next five years will be used to bring Negro schools up to white levels. The state grants Negro teachers salaries equal to their white counterparts (but local school boards frequently add discriminatory differentials). Unlike governors in Louisiana. Alabama and Texas, Coleman disapproved of banning the N.A.A.C.P. Says a Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. official grudgingly: "For Mississippi. Coleman's an exceptional man."

Proving the Difference. The roots of Coleman's success as governor are buried in his earlier training. Colemans have farmed in Choctaw County for 122 years; Great-Grandfather Daniel Coleman held 105 taxable slaves, worked 1,725 acres. Introduced to courthouse politics at ten by his grandfather, J.P. was taught at 15 to read the Congressional Record every day. At 17 he enrolled in the University of Mississippi, the first Coleman to attain college since pre-Civil War days. At 17 he was also on the hustings rounding up audiences for Gubernatorial Candidate Martin Conner; at 21 he went to Washington as Mississippi Congressman Aaron L. Ford's secretary. Returning home with an Indiana-born wife, Coleman progressed from district attorney to Circuit Court judge to Supreme Court commissioner. He became attorney general under Governor Fielding Wright, in 1948 Dixiecrat vice-presidential nominee. In 1955 Coleman defeated Wright and three other candidates to become Mississippi's 51st governor.

At term's end Coleman is ineligible to succeed himself. The word in country store and courthouse is that he will run in 1960 against Senator James Eastland, a Delta man for whom Hill-Countryman Coleman holds no particular affection. So far, the governor has not announced such an intention. But if Coleman does make the run, and does, as the odds would indicate, beat Eastland, nothing could better convince the rest of the U.S. that a thoroughly awakened Mississippi knows the difference between an 1890 oxcart and a 1957 Jet plane.

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