STATE SECRETS
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Mississippi's racial policies in the '60s, and about the state's Sovereignty Commission. Of the hundreds of white …
On the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's baby inspection: "'I was looking at the child's fingernails and the end of its fingers very closely.' From this I assume that he believed African ancestry could be detected by the presence of distinctive half-moons at the cuticles." The mother's shrewd parry: the baby's father, she said, was Italian.