Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol

Established by the state legislature in 1938, the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol is Mississippi’s state police force, composed of investigators and rank-in-file law enforcement officers, known as state troopers.

Paramilitary force dates to the foundation of the Mississippi Territory. In 1799 Gov. Winthrop Sargent signed a law creating a permanent militia consisting of “all free male inhabitants between the age of sixteen and fifty.” Settlers were to arm themselves and drill monthly in anticipation of “invasion . . . or domestic disturbances, actually existing or apprehended.” As was the case across North America, settler militias often made war on Indigenous populations and aided in their dispossession and clearance.

As Mississippi became America’s cotton kingdom, these state troops became slave patrols. In 1822 legislators ordered that “every owner of slaves, and all other persons . . . liable to perform militia duty” were also “liable to perform patrol duty.” The militia’s duties were again expansive: “Visit all negro quarters, or places suspected of containing unlawful assemblies of slaves, or other disorderly persons unlawfully assembled.” Patrolmen could administer up to fifteen lashes to any enslaved person thought to be out without the permission of their enslaver.

By 1890 the framers of Mississippi’s Jim Crow constitution fused these two traditions into a centralized and segregated National Guard. One delegate to the constitutional convention, Winfield Scott Featherston, had fought the Creek as a militiaman in Georgia and served as a Confederate general in the Civil War. He predicted growing lawlessness “between the two races which now occupy our territory.” Featherston feared “the occasional resistance made by both races to the enforcement of the law through the courts” and hoped lawmakers would pay to keep a force of one thousand professional militiamen “to enforce the laws, to suppress riots and unlawful assemblies.” Though the state legislature refused to appropriate funding, professional militiamen replaced volunteers in the Jim Crow period.

One such man was the founder of the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol. Thomas Butler Birdsong Jr. joined Mississippi’s militia at age sixteen. He went on to fight with the National Guard at the US-Mexico border during World War I and led the National Guard’s Riot Division against lynch mobs in the 1930s. By 1938 Gov. Hugh White tapped Tom Birdsong to create a state police force. Birdsong recruited law enforcement experts from across the country to train Mississippi’s first state troopers. Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation taught the basics of surveillance while Texas Rangers offered “military instruction.” Only fifty-three troopers graduated training camp to be sworn in on 16 June 1938. State law restricted their jurisdiction to traffic duty on state highways. Birdsong only resigned his post in 1968.

Mississippi’s Black freedom movement recognized the highway patrol as a force for white supremacy. In 1952 activists with the NAACP decried the “contagion” and “increasing tendency” of police brutality on roadsides. By 1955 T. R. M. Howard of Mound Bayou’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership mocked the Highway Safety Patrol as the Highway Brutality Patrol. Numerous Black drivers reported beatings and whippings on state roads. Though non-elite whites also resented highway patrol interference in matters of local law enforcement (often likening it to the Nazi Gestapo) troopers reserved the harshest treatment for Black men and women involved in organized protest.

On 9 June 1963 a trooper named John Lutellas Basinger arrested Fannie Lou Hamer in a group of Black voter registration volunteers involved with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Winona. For two days, Basinger joined local police officers to torture Hamer and other activists in the Montgomery County jail. Only on June 12 was the group released. Hamer, however, testified to the physical and sexual violence she endured for the rest of her life. Most famously, she described her ordeal to a national audience at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She called her torture by Trooper Basinger “the most horrifying experience I’ve ever had in my life.” Later in 1964 Hamer joined other activists in a class-action lawsuit against Tom Birdsong and the highway patrol in COFO v. Lawrence A. Rainey. “Acting under the color and authority of the State of Mississippi,” activists argued, troopers had “engaged in widespread terroristic acts . . . in a concerted effort to intimidate, punish, and deter [its] Negro citizens.” Though ultimately unsuccessful, Hamer and others hoped the federal government would use the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act to protect Black lives from state and local police.

Segregationists expanded the highway patrol into the agency recognizable today. On 3 March 1964 Gov. Paul B. Johnson Jr. asked the state legislature to triple the force of all-white troopers to three hundred men, to grant troopers general police powers, and to expand the Patrol’s legal jurisdiction beyond state highways. Referring to COFO’s upcoming Freedom Summer and fearing widespread Ku Klux Klan disorder, Paul Johnson said, “If we permit a motley pack of troublemakers to prove to the people of this nation that a state . . . is unwilling or incapable . . . of protecting the lives and property of its citizens, then what is left of states’ rights belongs in a museum.” The legislature met the governor’s request, and the state police has only grown in scale, budget, and jurisdiction since.

Arguably, the highway patrol was the last state institution to formally desegregate. It did so in the aftermath of the Jackson State shootings of 15 May 1970, where forty-three troopers shot into a Jackson State College dormitory for almost thirty seconds. Two Black men, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, died in the gunfire. Eleven more unarmed men and women were wounded. Afterwards, lawyers like Constance Iona Slaughter-Harvey sued the highway patrol to hire its first Black troopers, which it did in the face of a 1972 federal court order. They were Walter C. Crosby, Richard O. Williams, and Lewis T. Younger Jr. The patrol hired its first women in 1980—Felicia D. Breland, Linda D. Freeman, and Barbara J. Roby.

Today, according to the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol’s website, the mission of the patrol is, in part, “to maintain a positive relationship with the residents of Mississippi via highly ethical conduct, professional public service, meaningful public awareness campaigns, effective communication, and responsive leadership and assistance in cases of emergency and disaster.”