JACKSON - A note on White House stationery written in 1970 by Mississippi GOP leader Clarke Reed to Jerris Leonard, then head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights section, almost put this state's elections under the open primary system now used in Louisiana.
Reed, then a heavyweight in Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," asked Leonard to sign off on a bill passed by the 1970 Mississippi Legislature to install open primaries starting in the state's 1971 statewide elections.
Leonard as the Justice Department top guy in election matters had the power under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give or reject pre-clearance of voting law changes in Mississippi.
Overriding his own staff and Mississippi blacks' objections to the proposed new system, Leonard did what Reed asked in a letter he thought gave legal clearance of the state's open primary law. But later, a bizarre ruling by a three-judge federal panel sitting at Biloxi derailed what could have brought monumental changes in Mississippi politics.
The court panel, headed by then Circuit Court Judge Charles Clark, decided Leonard's letter was too vague, and ruled the new law would remain in "suspended animation" until either the Justice Department clarified its position or a higher court determined otherwise.
Ironically, the 1970 Mississippi open primary law has remained in "suspended animation" for 36 years. (A footnote: Another attempt in 1979 by the Mississippi Legislature to adopt an open primary system failed to get Justice approval.)
The 1970 open primary fiasco would not be the only instance that Jerris Leonard, an outspoken GOP ally of Richard Nixon, figured in Mississippi history of the 20th century. More on that later.
An Aug. 3 obituary in the Washington Post reported that Leonard, at age 75, died in Washington on July 27 of complications from liver cancer.
My own memory of Jerris Leonard goes back to seeing him become the mediator in a confrontation with angry student leaders outside a women's dormitory on the campus of Jackson State University at dawn one morning in April, 1970.
Several days before, bullets fired by a small army of Mississippi Highway Patrol and Jackson police officers had riddled the aluminum-paneled facade of the dormitory during a campus disturbance. Two people died, and a dozen students were wounded.
Tensions on the campus threatened to again erupt in violence when State Building Commission authorities one day announced a work crew would begin the next morning removing the bullet-riddled panels. Student leaders vowed to position themselves to block the workmen from taking the panels.
Overnight, under orders from the White House, Leonard flew into Jackson as President Nixon's troubleshooter to be on hand and negotiate a settlement with the students and avoid violence when the state workmen and their equipment arrived on the campus. Back at his office, Gov. John Bell Williams stood by to send in National Guardsmen.
Though obviously exhausted from lack of sleep, Leonard patiently offered student body president Warren Buxton a deal: allow the FBI to take the panels until their investigation into the shooting was completed, then the panels would be returned to the students for a memorial.
Buxton conferred with the other student leaders, and they agreed to accept the deal and stepped aside, ending the confrontation.
Years later when I checked, I found that the bullet-riddle panels had never been returned to the campus.
That was not the last time Jerris Leonard would be entwined with Mississippi's history. After leaving government, Leonard went into private law practice in Washington, D.C.
Would you believe that in 1977 he was hired by then-Attorney General A.F. Summer to represent the state before federal courts and the Justice Department in voting and legislative apportionment cases?
Back in 1980, I calculated in the previous two years Leonard had been paid $156,000 by the state, a tidy sum back in those days.
Ironically, one of the cases Leonard handled for the state was to seek Justice Department clearance for the Open Primary Act of 1979 passed by the Legislature, which Mississippi blacks again objected to on grounds they would be deprived of running as independents in general elections.
Leonard, the guy who once before had sought to install open primaries in Mississippi, again failed.
Meantime, Clarke Reed, the GOP elder statesman from Greenville, has changed his mind about open primaries.
