The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's Online Files

[John Bevilaqua]

Wall Street Journal - June 11, 1999

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/

How the South's Fight to Uphold

Segregation Was Funded by North

By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

JACKSON, Miss. -- On the afternoon of Sept. 12, 1963, a vice president of

Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. sent a telegram to the Mississippi State

Sovereignty Commission, the agency created by local politicians to fight

the civil-rights movement and preserve racial segregation.

A Morgan client, the telegram said, was "setting aside as an anonymous

gift" stock valued at $100,000. There was one condition: "Donor would like

the fact and amount of the gift to be kept confidential."

The matter was referred directly to Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who

agreed to the terms and, that same day, sent Morgan instructions on where

to send the cash.

Once the money arrived in Mississippi, it was funneled to an account in

Washington, D.C., where segregationists were launching a fierce campaign to

defeat landmark civil-rights legislation abolishing segregation in most

public facilities. And in the ensuing months, the mystery contributor would

follow up with additional, substantial gifts to help the cause.

For nearly four decades, the role of that donor remained concealed in the

files of the now-defunct Sovereignty Commission. But last year, a federal

judge ordered the unsealing of more than 130,000 commission files. The

documents triggered a painful examination of some of the South's most

heinous racial crimes. Little explored, though, was the trove of ledgers,

invoices and correspondence recording the commission's finances.

Those records show large transfers of money by Morgan on behalf of a client

who turns out be a wealthy and reclusive New Yorker named Wickliffe Preston

Draper. Mr. Draper used his private banker to transfer nearly $215,000 in

stock and cash to the Sovereignty Commission for use in its fight against

the Civil Rights Act. The entire budget for the effort amounted to about

$300,000. Adjusted for inflation, Mr. Draper's contributions would be worth

more than $1.1 million today.

The Sovereignty Commission files do more than simply document one man's

role. They show that some of the most virulent resistance to civil-rights

progress in the 1960s was supported and funded from the North, not just the

South. The files also highlight the ethical issues that confront an

institution like Morgan Guaranty, the private-banking unit of J.P. Morgan &

Co., when it is drawn, even unwittingly, into a client's support for

repugnant causes.

Since the 1930s, Mr. Draper had been a client of Guaranty Trust, which

became Morgan Guaranty when it merged with J.P. Morgan in 1959. It isn't

clear whether he used Guaranty to help with funding some of his earlier

race-related efforts, such as a program in the 1930s to encourage white

military pilots to have more children, or research in the 1950s to prove

the superiority of whites and the dangers of mixed-race marriages.

When Mr. Draper died in 1972, Morgan was an executor of his estate,

overseeing distributions totaling about $5 million to two race-oriented

foundations. The primary beneficiary was the Pioneer Fund, an organization

Mr. Draper helped found and which became known in recent years for funding

research cited in "The Bell Curve," a book arguing that blacks are

genetically inclined to be less intelligent than whites or Asians. In his

will, Mr. Draper instructed that after his death, the Pioneer Fund use

Morgan for financial advice; the fund did so for two decades.

Morgan today says that "racism is deplorable" and that the bank doesn't

"support institutions that further racist causes." Moreover, the bank notes

that it has been a consistent donor to African-American causes, giving more

than $3.3 million of its own money to civil-rights-related groups since the

late 1960s.

Morgan insists that the Sovereignty Commission transactions it processed

for Mr. Draper were routine procedures carried out on behalf of a client,

over which the bank had no influence or control.

"A thousand times a day, somebody sends money to an organization that 30

years later looks really terrible," says Morgan spokesman Joe Evangelista.

"We can't tell our customers how to spend their money."

Mr. Evangelista says the role Morgan played was no different from the way

Wall Street banks today facilitate gifts to organizations that could be

equally controversial. He cites donations made to Planned Parenthood (often

criticized for its pro-choice stance), or to the Boy Scouts of America

(which prohibits gays from becoming troop leaders). Morgan's policy, he

says, is to pass no judgment on any client's activities, except in the

"rare situation" when "the wishes of a client ... conflict with the

principles that we stand for as a firm." In those cases, the firm may close

a client's account, Mr. Evangelista says.

Since the Sovereignty Commission was a legal, state-created entity, says

Hildy J. Simmons, a managing director at Morgan Guaranty, the bank had no

choice but to follow its client's wishes. It would be no different today.

"As long as the receiving party is legal, we have no discretion," says Ms.

Simmons.

Morgan did close the asset-management account it maintained for the Pioneer

Fund after the furor erupted over "The Bell Curve" in 1994, according to

people familiar with the situation. The bank won't give details on why it

did so.

That option is something banks should consider, says Thomas Donaldson, a

business-ethics professor at the Wharton School of the University of

Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Good bankers should have the words 'Know thy

client' tattooed somewhere on their chests," Mr. Donaldson says. "When the

activities of the client or customer reach the point where they offend

vital, deeply held values of the institution, you have to say no."

But many banks aren't comfortable with that posture, and with good reason,

says George J. Benston, a banking professor at the Goizueta Business School

at Emory University in Atlanta. "One would like any institution to operate

with its customers neutrally. You don't want some bank officer making a

judgment on whether a customer's donations are moral."

Brahmin Roots

Wickliffe Draper was, in many ways, a typical Yankee aristocrat. He was

born in Hopedale, Mass., in 1891. His father was a top executive in the

textile-machinery giant Draper Corp. His mother was from a blue-blood

Kentucky family. An uncle was a Massachusetts governor. His younger sister

married a nephew of President William Howard Taft.

Mr. Draper reveled in adventure. At Harvard College, from which he

graduated in 1913, he excelled in shooting. A volunteer in both world wars,

he used the title "colonel" for most of his life. In 1924, he inherited

about half of his father's estate, which was valued at the then-enormous

sum of nearly $11 million. In 1938, he reported to his Harvard classmates

that his diversions over the 25 years since college included "shooting

jaguar in Matto Grosso and deer in Sonora, elephant in Uganda and chamois

in Steiermark, ibex in Baltistan and antelope in Mongolia; ... pigsticking

in India."

By the late 1930s, for reasons that still aren't clear, Mr. Draper had also

developed a fascination with racial genetics. In 1937, he helped found the

Pioneer Fund. The foundation was devoted to supporting eugenics, a school

of thinking that held that races can be genetically "improved" through

mating practices, such as encouraging intelligent people to marry, or

sterilizing handicapped individuals. Many eugenicists of the day, including

some Pioneer founders, believed that whites were superior to blacks in

intellect and other attributes, says Barry Mehler, a historian at

Minnesota's Ferris State University, who has studied the fund extensively.

The charter of the Pioneer Fund said the organization would support

research and programs aimed at "race betterment." Scholarship programs

would give special consideration to "children who are deemed to be

descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13

states." (In 1985, Pioneer amended its charter, saying it supports programs

aimed at "human race betterment," and also deleting the reference to "white

persons.")

Today, officials of the fund deny that it seeks to prove the inferiority of

any race and maintain that it funds only legitimate genetic research,

regardless of its findings. The organization says its past and present

leaders were not biased for or against any race.

One of the first major projects of the Pioneer Fund under Mr. Draper was a

program to encourage officers of the all-white U.S. Army Air Corps,

predecessor of the Air Force, to have more children. Mr. Draper and other

directors of the foundation believed that the Pioneer Fund should encourage

a higher birth rate among the best of the white race. So the fund offered

to establish annuities to pay for the education of any child born in 1940

to a pilot who had already fathered at least three children.

Among the original Pioneer Fund directors who endorsed the plan was John

Marshall Harlan II, a prominent New York attorney who would be appointed to

the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary

of war, Harry H. Woodring, personally approved the plan, according to

Justice Harlan's papers, now stored at Princeton University.

Memos to Mr. Harlan make clear that the plans were fulfilled. "During the

calendar year 1940 there were 12 children born to officers in the Army Air

Corps ... eligible to receive scholarships," wrote a psychologist hired to

oversee the program. Mr. Draper made arrangements, according to records

kept by Mr. Harlan, for an annuity to be established for each of the

children at Guaranty Trust, the predecessor to Morgan Guaranty.

After World War II, the never-married Mr. Draper became increasingly

reclusive. He stopped submitting updates to his Harvard class and lived

alone in Manhattan, in a spacious East 57th Street penthouse duplex,

surrounded by hunting weapons and mounted animal heads. For several years,

he paid young researchers to visit his apartment and teach him genetic

theory.

"For $10 an hour, I tutored Draper ... every time I was in New York," says

Bruce Wallace, a retired Virginia Polytechnic University professor who adds

that he disagreed with Mr. Draper's views. "His contention was that the

geneticists had all the figures but they were afraid to add them all up...

. He was quite set on the idea that there was superiority and inferiority.

I don't think he would have placed blacks among the superior."

The theories embraced by Mr. Draper fell out of favor after the war, and as

the horrors of the Nazi regime became apparent, many of his old allies

distanced themselves from their previous work. But through the 1950s, Mr.

Draper continued to push for research to demonstrate white superiority; he

also espoused sending American blacks, on a voluntary basis, to live in

Africa, says the Pioneer Fund.

In 1957, the state of Mississippi created the Sovereignty Commission.

Operating on an appropriation of about $100,000 a year, the commission

penetrated most of the major civil-rights organizations in Mississippi,

even planting clerical workers in the offices of activist attorneys. It

informed police about planned marches or boycotts and encouraged police

harassment of African-Americans who cooperated with civil rights groups.

Its agents obstructed voter registration by blacks and harassed

African-Americans seeking to attend white schools. On occasion, the

commission also took steps to discourage violence by the Ku Klux Klan and

other extremist groups.

Precisely how Mr. Draper became connected to the commission isn't clear.

But the relationship appears to have blossomed shortly after a national

address by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. The president proposed

wide-reaching legislation to outlaw segregation in public facilities.

Mississippi leaders scrambled to mount a vigorous fight.

They turned to John C. Satterfield, a brilliant litigator from Yazoo City,

Miss., and the immediate past president of the American Bar Association. By

the end of the 1960s, Time magazine would label him "the most prominent

segregationist lawyer in the country."

Within days of President Kennedy's speech, Mr. Satterfield headed to

Washington to meet with top politicians and leaders of major trade

organizations and business groups. The response was encouraging. "We in the

South now have new and important allies who never before seemed seriously

concerned," wrote Erle Johnston Jr., director of the Sovereignty

Commission. "It was a thrill to me to see how the gentlemen at these

meetings looked to Mississippi for leadership."

The result was a new national lobbying organization, called the

Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms. The Sovereignty

Commission provided money to rent a Washington office and hire staff, and

largely controlled the group from Mississippi.

On July 22, 1963, Mr. Satterfield received the first private contribution

to the cause, a $10,000 Morgan Guaranty cashier's check drawn from Mr.

Draper's accounts. It was deposited into a special account in the

Mississippi state treasury and logged into Sovereignty Commission records

with a simple notation: "Morgan Guaranty Trust Co."

Over the next year, Mississippi leaders repeatedly claimed that the

campaign was being financed by broad grass-roots support in Mississippi and

across the U.S. In truth, contributions from Mississippi citizens never

topped $30,000. A surviving partner of Mr. Satterfield's law firm says the

attorney obliquely referred to the source of the big money simply as "the

Wall Street gang."

On Sept. 12, Mississippi Gov. Barnett received the telegram in which Morgan

Vice President Arthur W. Rossiter Jr. said $100,000 in stock had been

earmarked for the Mississippi commission. After the shares were sold, the

gift totaled $98,612. It was entered into Sovereignty Commission records as

"Donation from Morgan Guaranty Trust Company." Four months later, another

telegram arrived from Mr. Rossiter, this time signaling the impending

arrival of an additional $105,000 from Mr. Draper.

The money was derived from Mr. Draper's shares of Reynolds Tobacco, General

Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Addressograph-Multigraph. Morgan

sold the stock at Mr. Draper's direction, collected commissions on the

sales, and moved the proceeds into what it calls a temporary Sovereignty

Commission account at Morgan Guaranty. The Sovereignty Commission

eventually forwarded the funds to Washington.

Throughout, Mr. Rossiter insisted that the source of the money never be

disclosed. "This represents an anonymous gift to your Commission and the

donor has specifically requested that the fact and the amount of the gift

be kept strictly confidential," he wrote in one letter.

Mr. Draper's money buoyed a sweeping attack on the civil-rights bill. The

Sovereignty Commission's Washington arm coordinated opposition efforts

among less-organized groups, pushed trade associations to fight the bill

and lobbied Congress. It sent ghost-written editorials to newspapers around

the country and bought ads in 500 daily and weekly papers. By April 1964,

the group had distributed 1.4 million pamphlets and mailings, Sovereignty

Commission records indicate.

The opposition effort was swathed in the issues of protecting states'

rights and reining in an overreaching federal government. The

advertisements said the bill would create an "omnipotent president" and a

"dictatorial attorney general."

But commission records make clear that the effort co-financed by Mr. Draper

was grounded on bitterly racist notions. Citing several white-supremacist

tracts, an internal memorandum by Mr. Satterfield said Americans had to be

shown that the conditions of blacks in the U.S. were the result of

"heredity ... not discrimination." At the heart of the matter, the memo

said, were "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro."

The Sovereignty Commission campaign triggered thousands of letters. Despite

that, Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and President Lyndon

B. Johnson signed it into law.

Frustrated by the defeat, Mr. Satterfield pressed Mississippi's new

governor, Paul Johnson, to help start a new national organization, designed

to demonstrate that the plight of blacks in the South was the result not of

"mistreatment and discrimination" but the "completely different nature of

Negro citizens and white citizens," he wrote the governor.

"Certain groups in the east who prefer anonymity" were ready to back the

effort with $200,000, Mr. Satterfield wrote, if the state would match the

contribution. As a gesture of seriousness, an unnamed northern benefactor

had sent $50,000.

The donor was, again, Mr. Draper. His gift arrived via Morgan on June 2,

1964. Gov. Johnson endorsed the plan, and the Legislature quickly

appropriated $200,000.

But the segregationists suffered another setback, this time at the hands of

their most rabid elements. Klan members abducted civil-rights workers

Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in the town of

Philadelphia, Miss. The three were beaten, shot to death and buried in an

earthen dam. Six weeks later, the workers' 1963 Ford station wagon was

found burned along an isolated road, still bearing Mississippi license tag

H 25503, a number logged into Sovereignty Commission files by an informant

a few weeks earlier.

The national outcry brought an end to the new alliance between Mississippi

officials and Mr. Draper. Gov. Johnson's office was flooded with telegrams,

many simply repeating the words "justice, justice, justice." Increasingly

isolated, Mississippi leaders took at least symbolic steps to halt

violence. The state's own $200,000 appropriation was quietly returned to

the Mississippi treasury.

Later, the $50,000 from Mr. Draper was returned to his attorney in New

York, Harry F. Weyher, who deposited it into the escrow account of his

firm, records show. Mr. Weyher, who has been president of the Pioneer Fund

for more than 40 years, says he doesn't recall the flow of funds, though he

did remember meeting with Mr. Satterfield in the 1960s.

Mr. Draper maintained his interest in the fight to preserve segregation in

the South. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he sent dozens of checks to private

academies that had opened up to accommodate white families fleeing newly

integrated public schools, estate records show.

After Mr. Draper died in 1972, Morgan continued to manage his holdings

while the will was being sorted out. Five years later, his assets were

distributed according to Mr. Draper's wishes.

He gave about $1 million to family members, and also bequeathed $3.3

million to the Pioneer Fund and $1.7 million to the Puritan Foundation.

(The Pioneer Fund isn't related to the mutual fund of the same name.) The

Puritan Foundation listed as its address the law firm of Mr. Satterfield,

the Mississippi lawyer. In 1978, the fund was merged into another nonprofit

called the Council School Foundation, according to Rutgers University Prof.

William Tucker, who is researching Mr. Draper's activities. That

Mississippi group was created to support private schools that catered to

white students.

A State's Stigma

Citing bank policy, executives at Morgan won't discuss whether the bankers

who worked with Mr. Draper knew of his racial leanings or the true nature

of the Sovereignty Commission.

Still, Morgan was dealing with prominent Mississippi segregationists at a

time when the national media were focused on the state, and when some on

Wall Street and in New York's political community were concerned about

maintaining business ties there. Mr. Barnett, the governor of Mississippi,

had been pictured on the front page of the New York Times in 1962 during a

bloody standoff with federal troops forcing the integration of the

University of Mississippi.

The Mississippi state treasurer at the time, William F. Winter, said that

Wall Street firms charged higher interest rates on the state's bonds, due

to the stigma of having ties to Mississippi. In 1965, one such issue was

canceled due to a lack of bids on Wall Street.

Morgan says none of that is relevant. The bank likely had clients

supporting the civil-rights movement as well, executives say. And, adds Mr.

Evangelista, "doing business with a particular client doesn't mean that we

endorse that client's beliefs of actions." It would be "offensive" for a

bank to police how its clients conduct their affairs.

"That's a privilege of being rich in America," says Ms. Simmons at Morgan.

"You can spend your money the way you want to."

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

John, Im pretty sure John Dolva already has a thread going on this. Very worthwhile site, though.

[William Kelly]

http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/law_misc/feturMsA.htm

xxxx

Bobby DeLaughter :

Setting things right had been uppermost in DeLaughter's mind since Oct. 1, 1989, when he read a Clarion-Ledger article that alluded to jury tampering by the State Sovereignty Commission in Beckwith's first trial. After a subsequent meeting with the slain civil rights worker's widow, the attorney said he became "a man obsessed."

[Thomas H. Purvis]

John, Im pretty sure John Dolva already has a thread going on this. Very worthwhile site, though.

John, Im pretty sure John Dolva already has a thread going on this. Very worthwhile site, though.

Having been responsible for "opening" this door to important links, John Dolva certainly recognized that there existed a wealth of background information there.

Might I add, it is a sight for those who conduct RESEARCH!

Such as Robert Oswald, Lawyer; Judge; as well as distant cousin of LHO, and a member of those groups fighting to keep Gulf Coast Beaches for "White Only" at the same period of time that LHO was at Keesler AFB, Biloxi, mS.

And, since the head of the Soverignty Commission was originally a Lucedale, MS native and is buried here, as well as having known him personally, then one could, not unlike other aspects, say that I had a "heads up" on exatly what was going on down here in MS. The original "home" of the Oswalds.

So, those who are actually into research, have known about the Soverignty Commission for a long, long time, provided that they read this forum.

And, John Dolva has recognized the "worth" of that research.

If he does not get lost in looking for "Postmaster Assassins", then he just may find additional information of value there, as it most assuredly exists and has yet to be revealed.

As example: One certainly has to honor any organization which has as it's initials "CSA"!

[William O'Neil]

John, Im pretty sure John Dolva already has a thread going on this. Very worthwhile site, though.

John, Im pretty sure John Dolva already has a thread going on this. Very worthwhile site, though.

Having been responsible for "opening" this door to important links, John Dolva certainly recognized that there existed a wealth of background information there.

Might I add, it is a sight for those who conduct RESEARCH!

Such as Robert Oswald, Lawyer; Judge; as well as distant cousin of LHO, and a member of those groups fighting to keep Gulf Coast Beaches for "White Only" at the same period of time that LHO was at Keesler AFB, Biloxi, mS.

And, since the head of the Soverignty Commission was originally a Lucedale, MS native and is buried here, as well as having known him personally, then one could, not unlike other aspects, say that I had a "heads up" on exatly what was going on down here in MS. The original "home" of the Oswalds.

So, those who are actually into research, have known about the Soverignty Commission for a long, long time, provided that they read this forum.

And, John Dolva has recognized the "worth" of that research.

If he does not get lost in looking for "Postmaster Assassins", then he just may find additional information of value there, as it most assuredly exists and has yet to be revealed.

As example: One certainly has to honor any organization which has as it's initials "CSA"!

There are also files of the MSC at the Univ. of Southern Missisippi. I looked at those before the main collection became available. I think most of the material at USM, is also contained in the main collection in Jackson MS.

-Bill

[John Bevilaqua]

Wall Street Journal - June 11, 1999

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/

How the South's Fight to Uphold

Segregation Was Funded by North

By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

JACKSON, Miss. -- On the afternoon of Sept. 12, 1963, a vice president of

Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. sent a telegram to the Mississippi State

Sovereignty Commission, the agency created by local politicians to fight

the civil-rights movement and preserve racial segregation.

A Morgan client, the telegram said, was "setting aside as an anonymous

gift" stock valued at $100,000. There was one condition: "Donor would like

the fact and amount of the gift to be kept confidential."

The matter was referred directly to Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who

agreed to the terms and, that same day, sent Morgan instructions on where

to send the cash.

Once the money arrived in Mississippi, it was funneled to an account in

Washington, D.C., where segregationists were launching a fierce campaign to

defeat landmark civil-rights legislation abolishing segregation in most

public facilities. And in the ensuing months, the mystery contributor would

follow up with additional, substantial gifts to help the cause.

For nearly four decades, the role of that donor remained concealed in the

files of the now-defunct Sovereignty Commission. But last year, a federal

judge ordered the unsealing of more than 130,000 commission files. The

documents triggered a painful examination of some of the South's most

heinous racial crimes. Little explored, though, was the trove of ledgers,

invoices and correspondence recording the commission's finances.

Those records show large transfers of money by Morgan on behalf of a client

who turns out be a wealthy and reclusive New Yorker named Wickliffe Preston

Draper. Mr. Draper used his private banker to transfer nearly $215,000 in

stock and cash to the Sovereignty Commission for use in its fight against

the Civil Rights Act. The entire budget for the effort amounted to about

$300,000. Adjusted for inflation, Mr. Draper's contributions would be worth

more than $1.1 million today.

The Sovereignty Commission files do more than simply document one man's

role. They show that some of the most virulent resistance to civil-rights

progress in the 1960s was supported and funded from the North, not just the

South. The files also highlight the ethical issues that confront an

institution like Morgan Guaranty, the private-banking unit of J.P. Morgan &

Co., when it is drawn, even unwittingly, into a client's support for

repugnant causes.

Since the 1930s, Mr. Draper had been a client of Guaranty Trust, which

became Morgan Guaranty when it merged with J.P. Morgan in 1959. It isn't

clear whether he used Guaranty to help with funding some of his earlier

race-related efforts, such as a program in the 1930s to encourage white

military pilots to have more children, or research in the 1950s to prove

the superiority of whites and the dangers of mixed-race marriages.

When Mr. Draper died in 1972, Morgan was an executor of his estate,

overseeing distributions totaling about $5 million to two race-oriented

foundations. The primary beneficiary was the Pioneer Fund, an organization

Mr. Draper helped found and which became known in recent years for funding

research cited in "The Bell Curve," a book arguing that blacks are

genetically inclined to be less intelligent than whites or Asians. In his

will, Mr. Draper instructed that after his death, the Pioneer Fund use

Morgan for financial advice; the fund did so for two decades.

Morgan today says that "racism is deplorable" and that the bank doesn't

"support institutions that further racist causes." Moreover, the bank notes

that it has been a consistent donor to African-American causes, giving more

than $3.3 million of its own money to civil-rights-related groups since the

late 1960s.

Morgan insists that the Sovereignty Commission transactions it processed

for Mr. Draper were routine procedures carried out on behalf of a client,

over which the bank had no influence or control.

"A thousand times a day, somebody sends money to an organization that 30

years later looks really terrible," says Morgan spokesman Joe Evangelista.

"We can't tell our customers how to spend their money."

Mr. Evangelista says the role Morgan played was no different from the way

Wall Street banks today facilitate gifts to organizations that could be

equally controversial. He cites donations made to Planned Parenthood (often

criticized for its pro-choice stance), or to the Boy Scouts of America

(which prohibits gays from becoming troop leaders). Morgan's policy, he

says, is to pass no judgment on any client's activities, except in the

"rare situation" when "the wishes of a client ... conflict with the

principles that we stand for as a firm." In those cases, the firm may close

a client's account, Mr. Evangelista says.

Since the Sovereignty Commission was a legal, state-created entity, says

Hildy J. Simmons, a managing director at Morgan Guaranty, the bank had no

choice but to follow its client's wishes. It would be no different today.

"As long as the receiving party is legal, we have no discretion," says Ms.

Simmons.

Morgan did close the asset-management account it maintained for the Pioneer

Fund after the furor erupted over "The Bell Curve" in 1994, according to

people familiar with the situation. The bank won't give details on why it

did so.

That option is something banks should consider, says Thomas Donaldson, a

business-ethics professor at the Wharton School of the University of

Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Good bankers should have the words 'Know thy

client' tattooed somewhere on their chests," Mr. Donaldson says. "When the

activities of the client or customer reach the point where they offend

vital, deeply held values of the institution, you have to say no."

But many banks aren't comfortable with that posture, and with good reason,

says George J. Benston, a banking professor at the Goizueta Business School

at Emory University in Atlanta. "One would like any institution to operate

with its customers neutrally. You don't want some bank officer making a

judgment on whether a customer's donations are moral."

Brahmin Roots

Wickliffe Draper was, in many ways, a typical Yankee aristocrat. He was

born in Hopedale, Mass., in 1891. His father was a top executive in the

textile-machinery giant Draper Corp. His mother was from a blue-blood

Kentucky family. An uncle was a Massachusetts governor. His younger sister

married a nephew of President William Howard Taft.

Mr. Draper reveled in adventure. At Harvard College, from which he

graduated in 1913, he excelled in shooting. A volunteer in both world wars,

he used the title "colonel" for most of his life. In 1924, he inherited

about half of his father's estate, which was valued at the then-enormous

sum of nearly $11 million. In 1938, he reported to his Harvard classmates

that his diversions over the 25 years since college included "shooting

jaguar in Matto Grosso and deer in Sonora, elephant in Uganda and chamois

in Steiermark, ibex in Baltistan and antelope in Mongolia; ... pigsticking

in India."

By the late 1930s, for reasons that still aren't clear, Mr. Draper had also

developed a fascination with racial genetics. In 1937, he helped found the

Pioneer Fund. The foundation was devoted to supporting eugenics, a school

of thinking that held that races can be genetically "improved" through

mating practices, such as encouraging intelligent people to marry, or

sterilizing handicapped individuals. Many eugenicists of the day, including

some Pioneer founders, believed that whites were superior to blacks in

intellect and other attributes, says Barry Mehler, a historian at

Minnesota's Ferris State University, who has studied the fund extensively.

The charter of the Pioneer Fund said the organization would support

research and programs aimed at "race betterment." Scholarship programs

would give special consideration to "children who are deemed to be

descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13

states." (In 1985, Pioneer amended its charter, saying it supports programs

aimed at "human race betterment," and also deleting the reference to "white

persons.")

Today, officials of the fund deny that it seeks to prove the inferiority of

any race and maintain that it funds only legitimate genetic research,

regardless of its findings. The organization says its past and present

leaders were not biased for or against any race.

One of the first major projects of the Pioneer Fund under Mr. Draper was a

program to encourage officers of the all-white U.S. Army Air Corps,

predecessor of the Air Force, to have more children. Mr. Draper and other

directors of the foundation believed that the Pioneer Fund should encourage

a higher birth rate among the best of the white race. So the fund offered

to establish annuities to pay for the education of any child born in 1940

to a pilot who had already fathered at least three children.

Among the original Pioneer Fund directors who endorsed the plan was John

Marshall Harlan II, a prominent New York attorney who would be appointed to

the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary

of war, Harry H. Woodring, personally approved the plan, according to

Justice Harlan's papers, now stored at Princeton University.

Memos to Mr. Harlan make clear that the plans were fulfilled. "During the

calendar year 1940 there were 12 children born to officers in the Army Air

Corps ... eligible to receive scholarships," wrote a psychologist hired to

oversee the program. Mr. Draper made arrangements, according to records

kept by Mr. Harlan, for an annuity to be established for each of the

children at Guaranty Trust, the predecessor to Morgan Guaranty.

After World War II, the never-married Mr. Draper became increasingly

reclusive. He stopped submitting updates to his Harvard class and lived

alone in Manhattan, in a spacious East 57th Street penthouse duplex,

surrounded by hunting weapons and mounted animal heads. For several years,

he paid young researchers to visit his apartment and teach him genetic

theory.

"For $10 an hour, I tutored Draper ... every time I was in New York," says

Bruce Wallace, a retired Virginia Polytechnic University professor who adds

that he disagreed with Mr. Draper's views. "His contention was that the

geneticists had all the figures but they were afraid to add them all up...

. He was quite set on the idea that there was superiority and inferiority.

I don't think he would have placed blacks among the superior."

The theories embraced by Mr. Draper fell out of favor after the war, and as

the horrors of the Nazi regime became apparent, many of his old allies

distanced themselves from their previous work. But through the 1950s, Mr.

Draper continued to push for research to demonstrate white superiority; he

also espoused sending American blacks, on a voluntary basis, to live in

Africa, says the Pioneer Fund.

In 1957, the state of Mississippi created the Sovereignty Commission.

Operating on an appropriation of about $100,000 a year, the commission

penetrated most of the major civil-rights organizations in Mississippi,

even planting clerical workers in the offices of activist attorneys. It

informed police about planned marches or boycotts and encouraged police

harassment of African-Americans who cooperated with civil rights groups.

Its agents obstructed voter registration by blacks and harassed

African-Americans seeking to attend white schools. On occasion, the

commission also took steps to discourage violence by the Ku Klux Klan and

other extremist groups.

Precisely how Mr. Draper became connected to the commission isn't clear.

But the relationship appears to have blossomed shortly after a national

address by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. The president proposed

wide-reaching legislation to outlaw segregation in public facilities.

Mississippi leaders scrambled to mount a vigorous fight.

They turned to John C. Satterfield, a brilliant litigator from Yazoo City,

Miss., and the immediate past president of the American Bar Association. By

the end of the 1960s, Time magazine would label him "the most prominent

segregationist lawyer in the country."

Within days of President Kennedy's speech, Mr. Satterfield headed to

Washington to meet with top politicians and leaders of major trade

organizations and business groups. The response was encouraging. "We in the

South now have new and important allies who never before seemed seriously

concerned," wrote Erle Johnston Jr., director of the Sovereignty

Commission. "It was a thrill to me to see how the gentlemen at these

meetings looked to Mississippi for leadership."

The result was a new national lobbying organization, called the

Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms. The Sovereignty

Commission provided money to rent a Washington office and hire staff, and

largely controlled the group from Mississippi.

On July 22, 1963, Mr. Satterfield received the first private contribution

to the cause, a $10,000 Morgan Guaranty cashier's check drawn from Mr.

Draper's accounts. It was deposited into a special account in the

Mississippi state treasury and logged into Sovereignty Commission records

with a simple notation: "Morgan Guaranty Trust Co."

Over the next year, Mississippi leaders repeatedly claimed that the

campaign was being financed by broad grass-roots support in Mississippi and

across the U.S. In truth, contributions from Mississippi citizens never

topped $30,000. A surviving partner of Mr. Satterfield's law firm says the

attorney obliquely referred to the source of the big money simply as "the

Wall Street gang."

On Sept. 12, Mississippi Gov. Barnett received the telegram in which Morgan

Vice President Arthur W. Rossiter Jr. said $100,000 in stock had been

earmarked for the Mississippi commission. After the shares were sold, the

gift totaled $98,612. It was entered into Sovereignty Commission records as

"Donation from Morgan Guaranty Trust Company." Four months later, another

telegram arrived from Mr. Rossiter, this time signaling the impending

arrival of an additional $105,000 from Mr. Draper.

The money was derived from Mr. Draper's shares of Reynolds Tobacco, General

Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Addressograph-Multigraph. Morgan

sold the stock at Mr. Draper's direction, collected commissions on the

sales, and moved the proceeds into what it calls a temporary Sovereignty

Commission account at Morgan Guaranty. The Sovereignty Commission

eventually forwarded the funds to Washington.

Throughout, Mr. Rossiter insisted that the source of the money never be

disclosed. "This represents an anonymous gift to your Commission and the

donor has specifically requested that the fact and the amount of the gift

be kept strictly confidential," he wrote in one letter.

Mr. Draper's money buoyed a sweeping attack on the civil-rights bill. The

Sovereignty Commission's Washington arm coordinated opposition efforts

among less-organized groups, pushed trade associations to fight the bill

and lobbied Congress. It sent ghost-written editorials to newspapers around

the country and bought ads in 500 daily and weekly papers. By April 1964,

the group had distributed 1.4 million pamphlets and mailings, Sovereignty

Commission records indicate.

The opposition effort was swathed in the issues of protecting states'

rights and reining in an overreaching federal government. The

advertisements said the bill would create an "omnipotent president" and a

"dictatorial attorney general."

But commission records make clear that the effort co-financed by Mr. Draper

was grounded on bitterly racist notions. Citing several white-supremacist

tracts, an internal memorandum by Mr. Satterfield said Americans had to be

shown that the conditions of blacks in the U.S. were the result of

"heredity ... not discrimination." At the heart of the matter, the memo

said, were "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro."

The Sovereignty Commission campaign triggered thousands of letters. Despite

that, Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and President Lyndon

B. Johnson signed it into law.

Frustrated by the defeat, Mr. Satterfield pressed Mississippi's new

governor, Paul Johnson, to help start a new national organization, designed

to demonstrate that the plight of blacks in the South was the result not of

"mistreatment and discrimination" but the "completely different nature of

Negro citizens and white citizens," he wrote the governor.

"Certain groups in the east who prefer anonymity" were ready to back the

effort with $200,000, Mr. Satterfield wrote, if the state would match the

contribution. As a gesture of seriousness, an unnamed northern benefactor

had sent $50,000.

The donor was, again, Mr. Draper. His gift arrived via Morgan on June 2,

1964. Gov. Johnson endorsed the plan, and the Legislature quickly

appropriated $200,000.

But the segregationists suffered another setback, this time at the hands of

their most rabid elements. Klan members abducted civil-rights workers

Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in the town of

Philadelphia, Miss. The three were beaten, shot to death and buried in an

earthen dam. Six weeks later, the workers' 1963 Ford station wagon was

found burned along an isolated road, still bearing Mississippi license tag

H 25503, a number logged into Sovereignty Commission files by an informant

a few weeks earlier.

The national outcry brought an end to the new alliance between Mississippi

officials and Mr. Draper. Gov. Johnson's office was flooded with telegrams,

many simply repeating the words "justice, justice, justice." Increasingly

isolated, Mississippi leaders took at least symbolic steps to halt

violence. The state's own $200,000 appropriation was quietly returned to

the Mississippi treasury.

Later, the $50,000 from Mr. Draper was returned to his attorney in New

York, Harry F. Weyher, who deposited it into the escrow account of his

firm, records show. Mr. Weyher, who has been president of the Pioneer Fund

for more than 40 years, says he doesn't recall the flow of funds, though he

did remember meeting with Mr. Satterfield in the 1960s.

Mr. Draper maintained his interest in the fight to preserve segregation in

the South. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he sent dozens of checks to private

academies that had opened up to accommodate white families fleeing newly

integrated public schools, estate records show.

After Mr. Draper died in 1972, Morgan continued to manage his holdings

while the will was being sorted out. Five years later, his assets were

distributed according to Mr. Draper's wishes.

He gave about $1 million to family members, and also bequeathed $3.3

million to the Pioneer Fund and $1.7 million to the Puritan Foundation.

(The Pioneer Fund isn't related to the mutual fund of the same name.) The

Puritan Foundation listed as its address the law firm of Mr. Satterfield,

the Mississippi lawyer. In 1978, the fund was merged into another nonprofit

called the Council School Foundation, according to Rutgers University Prof.

William Tucker, who is researching Mr. Draper's activities. That

Mississippi group was created to support private schools that catered to

white students.

A State's Stigma

Citing bank policy, executives at Morgan won't discuss whether the bankers

who worked with Mr. Draper knew of his racial leanings or the true nature

of the Sovereignty Commission.

Still, Morgan was dealing with prominent Mississippi segregationists at a

time when the national media were focused on the state, and when some on

Wall Street and in New York's political community were concerned about

maintaining business ties there. Mr. Barnett, the governor of Mississippi,

had been pictured on the front page of the New York Times in 1962 during a

bloody standoff with federal troops forcing the integration of the

University of Mississippi.

The Mississippi state treasurer at the time, William F. Winter, said that

Wall Street firms charged higher interest rates on the state's bonds, due

to the stigma of having ties to Mississippi. In 1965, one such issue was

canceled due to a lack of bids on Wall Street.

Morgan says none of that is relevant. The bank likely had clients

supporting the civil-rights movement as well, executives say. And, adds Mr.

Evangelista, "doing business with a particular client doesn't mean that we

endorse that client's beliefs of actions." It would be "offensive" for a

bank to police how its clients conduct their affairs.

"That's a privilege of being rich in America," says Ms. Simmons at Morgan.

"You can spend your money the way you want to."

And now it turns out that Draper was the principal backer of IAAEE the International

Association for the Advancment of Eugenics and Ehtnology (I think was the full title...)

The Journal of Social Issues (1998) reports that the IAAEE's key "benefactor was Colonel Wickliffe Draper, a segregationist who opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and sought to fund research that would provide scientific justification for segregation and revive the concept of racial hygiene which had been discredited as a result of the Nazis. In the 1970s, Gregor was criticised for accepting grants from the Pioneer Fund, which had been established by Draper to advance his views. IAAEE received $82,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund between 1971 and 1996. ... In the controversial book The Bell Curve, authors Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein recommend two books on race and intelligence by three Pioneer Fund recipients."240

GW Bush gave the eugenics crowd entry into his administration through his "Faith-Based Initiative" – an Orwellian term, like "New Freedom," that resulted in the hiring of Ananda Margan Steve McElravy at SAMHSA, under H&HS Secretart Tommy Thompson. Two men were placed in charge of the "Faith-Based" scheme, reports homeless activist Robert Lederman, "John J. DiIulio Jr. and Stephen Goldsmith. Both men are senior fellows of the CIA's Manhattan Institute and are colleagues of Charles Murray, author of the classic text of scientific racism, The Bell Curve."

In fact, "most of Bush's advisors are also associated with the Bell Curve. As just one of many examples, Murray was a consultant on Tommy Thompsons' Wisconsin Welfare Reform program, which Bush will make the national model." The New York Times has confirmed "the CIA origin of the Manhattan Institute, its influence on GW Bush and its very close decade-long association with Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve while a research fellow at The Manhattan Institute.Whether you are a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, a devout Muslim or an atheist you might question what part the CIA rightfully has in a multi-billion dollar 'religion initiative' or in any domestic US policy decisions. The best known modern example of government sponsored religion-based initiatives is Nazi Germany."

[Thomas H. Purvis]

For those who are into "coincidence"!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/...m/personnel.php

Directors

Maurice Malone, 1958-1960

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/fl/f159%7D4.htm

DESCRIPTION: TMss transcripts of research interviews performed by Henry Hurt for Edward J. Epstein's "Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald". Includes interviews with George Wilkins, Bud Persons, John Donovan, Hugh Cherrie, Peter Cassisi, Zack Stout, Charles Rhodes, Jerome Daniels, and Lonnie C. Bates.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://files.usgwarchives.net/ms/george/ce...s/magnolia1.txt

Directions: From Main Street in Lucedale, Mississippi,

Malone Maurice L., Sr. 05-24-1919 08-09-2004 (5-18-C) SSgt. US Army Air Forces WW2

Note: Director, Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

========================

Persons James Russell 05-13-1937 11-13-1985 (5-12- "Bud" US Marine Corps

Note: Associate of Lee Harvey Oswald in USMC. Killed in airplane crash in 1985.

=========================

Purvis Duane Chelous 07-21-1963 04-03-1980 (4-84-

Purvis Robert Anthony 06-27-1962 03-16-2000 (4-84- "Tony"

Note: My nephew's!