Erle E. Johnston Jr. was a newspaper publisher, author and political figure whose long career reflected both the conflicts of Mississippi’s civil rights era and the gradual evolution of attitudes that followed it.
Born Oct. 10, 1917, in Garyville, Louisiana, Johnston moved with his family to Grenada in 1928. After graduating from high school, he worked for newspapers in Grenada and Jackson before joining the Scott County Times in Forest. He purchased the newspaper in 1941 and remained closely associated with it for more than four decades.
Johnston also became deeply involved in Mississippi politics. He managed James Eastland’s successful 1942 campaign for the U.S. Senate and later worked on campaigns for Fielding Wright, John Stennis and Ross Barnett.
His most controversial public role began in 1960, when Gov. Barnett appointed him public relations director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the state agency created to resist racial integration. Johnston became its director in 1963 and remained in that position through some of the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement.
Johnston’s legacy from those years is a conflicted one. A staunch segregationist, he used his considerable skills as a journalist and public relations practitioner to defend Mississippi’s system of racial segregation. Under his leadership, the Sovereignty Commission opposed civil rights legislation and school desegregation, investigated civil rights activists and organizations, and employed informants to infiltrate the movement.
Describing himself as a “practical segregationist,” he criticized the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, opposed violence and intimidation, and argued that Mississippi should obey federal law. In 1965, he urged young Mississippians to learn from the mistakes of his generation. He resigned from the Sovereignty Commission in 1968.
That evolution became more apparent in Johnston’s later writings. His first book, I Rolled with Ross: A Political Portrait, published in 1980, offered an affectionate account of Barnett and Mississippi politics. A decade later, Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1953–1973 presented a markedly broader examination of the civil rights struggle and the state’s resistance to change. Drawing on voices from across Mississippi’s racial and political divisions, Johnston made no attempt to defend massive resistance and included tributes to civil rights leaders Aaron Henry and Charles Evers. His final book, Politics: Mississippi Style, was published in 1993.
Johnston also served as mayor of Forest from 1981 to 1985. His wife, Fay, edited the Scott County Times during his absences from the newspaper, and their son later succeeded her as editor. The family sold the newspaper in 1983.
Erle Johnston died Sept. 27, 1995. His career remains inseparable from one of the darkest chapters in Mississippi history, but his later work also documents a significant evolution in perspective. From an outspoken defender of segregation to an author increasingly willing to confront the failures of massive resistance and present the civil rights struggle with greater fairness and complexity, Johnston left behind a record that reflects both the contradictions of his time and the capacity for change.
— Source: The Mississippi Encyclopedia
