RESPONSIVE STATE GOVERNMENT?

Calvin Trillin, Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America (New York: Random House, 2016) (From "Jackson, 1964": "No sophisticated study of public opinion is needed to establish the fact that in the United States, North or South, a white life is considered to be of more value than an Negro life." Id. at 27. And, for those thinking that state government cannot be responsive to the needs of its citizens. From "State Secrets": "[A]s I went through the files in the W. D. McCain Library and Archives of USM one day not long ago, I found that the [Sovereignty] Commission always seemed to have time for missions of the baby-inspection variety. In 1965, for instance, Governor Johnson received a letter, written in longhand, from a couple in Biloxi. 'Dear Governor Johnson,' it began. 'We regret to say that for the first time in our lives we need your help very badly. We are native Mississippians and are presently living in Biloxi. Our only daughter is a freshman at the University of Southern Miss. She has never before caused us any worry. However, she is in love with a Biloxi boy who looks and is said to be part Negro . . .'  'Your recent letter and your situation fills me with great apprehension,' the Governor wrote back at once. 'I am having this matter investigated to the fullest.' Tom Scarborough had already been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to investigate the lineage of the suitor--presumably under orders to exercise a level of discretion that would have made a close inspection of fingernail out of the question. In a three-thousand-word report, Scarborough concluded that the young man was from a group of people in Vancleave, Mississippi, who were sometimes called 'red-bones' or 'Vanleave Indians'--people who had always gone to white schools and churches but had always been suspected by their neighbors of being part black. The possibility of arranging to have the suitor drafted--a solution hinted at in the letter from his girlfriend's distraught parents--was looked into and dropped when it became apparent that he was too young for the draft. I couldn't find any indication in the McCain Library files that the Sovereignty Commission was able to break up the romance, but what other state in what other period of American history could parents of no great influence write to the Governor about a suitor they considered inappropriate and have the Governor get right on the case?" Id. at 251, 260-262.).