More than 3,000 Pentecostals had gathered under their giant
tabernacle in Raymond, Miss., that July night back in 1985. It was what one
preacher called an “old-fashioned, God-sent, Holy Ghost camp meeting,” and on
the stage was Mississippi Gov. Bill Allain, a devout Catholic.
Allain died at the age of 85 this past week, and it brought
back memories of that long-ago Mississippi District United Pentecostal Church
Revival Camp Meeting.
It was a night of foot-stomping, hand-clapping and
palm-waving. Choirs sang songs like “He Ain’t Never Done Me Nothin’ But Good”
and “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me”. As 74-year-old Christine Craig told me that
night, a man has “got to have the Holy Ghost, speak in tongues and be baptized
in Jesus’ name” to get into heaven.
“Y’all better sit down,” the governor told the crowd as he
stepped behind the microphone. “I might preach a little.”
Just two years before, Allain had suffered through the
dirtiest campaign this reporter has ever seen in a nearly 40-year career as a
journalist.
A fiery former state attorney general who had shaken Mississippi’s
political elite to its core, Democrat Allain was coasting to an easy victory
over Republican Leon Bramlett when just weeks before the election,
deep-pocketed Republican financiers went across the state in an effort to tar
brush him as a man who not only kept pornography in his Jackson apartment but
who had paid for sex with three black male transvestites.
The Republican operatives held press conferences and dumped
hundreds of pages of so-called “testimony” by Allain’s accusers on reporters. Television
journalist Geraldo Rivera even came to the state to report on the sordid
accusations, which evoked all the ghosts of Mississippi’s tortured past of
race, prejudice and demagoguery. The Mississippi people didn’t buy it, however.
On election day, 55 percent of them voted for Allain. He won 74 of the state’s
82 counties.
I’ve never been prouder of Mississippi. The prostitutes later recanted their stories.
“If you are not clapping your hands … I said if you go out
there and you’re not clapping your hands, you either took the wrong road and
are on the wrong campgrounds or you are spiritually dead inside,” the Catholic
governor told his Pentecostal audience that night. An organ played in the
background, and cries of “Amen” came from the crowd.
Jesus “fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick
and infirm,” Allain told them. “That is the standard by what we must love one
another.”
As much as any political leader in Mississippi’s modern
history, Allain tried to live by those rules.
“Many times I sit in my office and think I only have four years,” Allain
said. “Then I think: Jesus did what he did in three short years. Look at all
the good things that can be done.”
As a young assistant attorney general in the early 1960s,
Allain found himself on the wrong side when he had to represent the state in
such cases as segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett’s fight to keep James Meredith
from becoming the University of Mississippi’s first black student.
However, as attorney general and later governor in the
early-to-mid 1980s, Allain fought the good fight – taking on the big utilities
and the all-powerful state Legislature, led as it was then by entrenched pols
such as state House Speaker C.B. “Buddie” Newman from the Mississippi Delta. Allain
succeeded in getting legislators kicked off executive branch committees and
winning approval of successive terms for governor (although he himself declined
to run for a second term). He also appointed women and blacks to important
positions. That includes appointing Reuben Anderson as the first black member
of the state Supreme Court.
“He overcame a lot of stuff,” said Faye Moser, a 52-year-old
housewife from Jackson, at that camp meeting back in 1985. “When a Christian
has a trial and they overcome it, it makes them stronger.”
Allain did overcome his trial, and he helped Mississippi become
stronger, too.
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