Joe T. Patterson and the White South's Dilemma

As Mississippi's attorney general from 1956 to 1969, Joe T. Patterson led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launch of the Sovereignty Commission—charged “to protect the sovereignty of Mississippi from encroachment thereon by the federal government”—which made manifest a century-old states' rights ideology couched in the rhetoric of massive resistance. Despite the dubious legal foundations of that agenda, Patterson supported t