William Forrest Winter (February 21, 1923 – December 18, 2020) was an American attorney and politician who served as the 58th governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984. A member of the Democratic Party, he also served as the lieutenant governor, state treasurer, state tax collector, and as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives.
Born the son of a legislator and school teacher in Grenada, Mississippi, Winter was educated at the University of Mississippi. He enlisted in the United States Army after graduation and assumed responsibility for training troops before being posted to the Philippines. Upon his return to the United States, Winter enrolled in law school and became increasingly involved in politics, winning election to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1947. Re-elected twice, he supported bills aimed at governmental reform. Following an unsuccessful bid to become Speaker of the House, in April 1956 he was appointed to the lucrative post of state tax collector. Feeling the office was wasteful, he convinced the legislature to abolish it and was elected state treasurer in 1963. He also became the chair of the board of trustees of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 1969, which he served as until 2007.
Winter launched an unsuccessful campaign in the 1967 gubernatorial election. He was elected as lieutenant governor in 1971, and made another unsuccessful bid to become governor in 1975. He was elected to the governorship in the 1979 election, and during his tenure he supported civil service protections for state employees, reformed the judicial appointment process, removed racial considerations from state hiring process, and dealt with continuous budget deficits. Mostly focused on education reform, he pushed the 1982 Education Reform Act through the legislature, which increased spending on public education and established public kindergartens. Winter unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the United States Senate in the 1984 election. Later in his life he taught at the Harvard Institute of Politics, co-chaired Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns in the 1992 and 1996 elections, co-chaired Clinton's Advisory Board on Race, supported altering the flag of Mississippi.
Early life Upbringing and education
William Forrest Winter was born on February 21, 1923, in Grenada, Mississippi, United States as the son of Mississippi state legislator and cotton broker William Aylmer Winter and school teacher Inez Parker. His grandfather, William H. Winter, suggested that he be given the middle name Forrest after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Almyer Winter was a successful farmer, and amassed around 1,500 acres of land in Grenada County, Mississippi. By the 1930s, the Winters had about a dozen tenant and sharecropping families, most of them black. Almyer had a reputation as a fair landlord and, despite Jim Crow racial segregation, was viewed as friendly by the local black families.
William F. Winter's mother homeschooled him for his first year of education, and he was later educated at the one-room white Kincannon School on the family property after she was hired by the county government to teach there. Beginning in 1930, Granada County he and other white children in the county were bused into the city of Grenada to attend its more modern school. Winter excelled as a student and served as class president in his senior year of high school, graduating as valedictorian in May 1940.
Winter attended the University of Mississippi. As an undergraduate, he was an active member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity; Phi Eta Sigma, a scholarly fraternity; and the International Relations Club. He was elected president of the Hermean Literary Society during his junior year. In the summer of 1942 he worked as a driver for James Eastland's successful United States Senate campaign. He graduated in September 1943. He enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law in the fall of 1946 after serving in United States Army. While there he was elected president of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity and chaired its speaker's forum. He also chaired a history club and was elected freshman class president, though his bid to become the law school's student body president failed. From 1948 to 1949 he served as editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Law Journal. He graduated in May 1949 with the Phi Delta Phi Award.
Military service Immediately after receiving his undergraduate degree, Winter and several of his classmates enlisted in the army with the hopes of fighting in World War II. He was assigned to the 65th Infantry Regiment and went to Camp Blanding, Florida for basic training. He performed well and after six weeks was made acting corporal of a squad. At the end of basic training he and other University of Mississippi alumni were posted to Oxford, Mississippi, to participate in the Army Specialist Training Program. Shortly after the Normandy landings, he was accepted into a class at the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Winter graduated first in his officer training class, becoming a second lieutenant. Thereafter he was assigned to the Infantry Replacement Training Center at Fort McClellan, Alabama and was tasked with commanding a platoon of the First Regiment, an all-black, white-officered unit undergoing basic training. The army officially maintained a policy of racial nondiscrimination, and while Winter was generally successful in following these instructions, he tended to have more difficulty commanding northern blacks resentful of orders from a southern white. He did well as an instructor, but was dismayed that he was not seeing conflict and that there was a strong likelihood the black troops he commanded would only be assigned to noncombat roles. Over time, he gradually befriended a few of his black comrades, and began to consider "how unreal was the world in which I had grown up, the segregated world."
By the time Winter was up for reassignment in the summer of 1945, the war had ended. In late September, he was sent to the Philippines and, upon arrival, attached to the 24th Replacement Depot. Shortly thereafter he was made assistant aide de camp to Major General in Manila. At his request, he was reassigned to the 86th Infantry Division. In this capacity he was responsible for assisting efforts to keep the troops occupied and to reestablish communication and transportation networks. As the army began demobilizing its forces in early 1946, Winter became responsible for managing soldiers' departure. He returned to the United States two weeks after Philippine independence was granted on July 4, 1946. He left his first stint in the army still supporting white supremacy, but having been around black soldiers, was increasingly doubtful of the merits of Jim Crow segregation.
In June 1951 Winter was called upon by the government to return to active duty, due to the outbreak of the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he attended to courts-martial and trained a support regiment. Upon hearing of his father suffering a heart attack in October 1951, he applied for a hardship discharge, which was granted two months later. With the elder Winter's health in decline, he took over most responsibilities for managing the family farm in Grenada County. Winter joined the 31st Infantry Division of the Mississippi National Guard in 1953, where he served until his retirement with the rank of major in 1957.
Early political involvement Early interest When he was eight years old, Winter accompanied his father to the Mississippi State Senate in Jackson and watched debates on the Senate floor. They also attended the inauguration of Governor Martin Sennet Conner and met the governor the following day. The trip made an impression on him and piqued his interest in politics. By the time he was in high school he had open ambitions to become an elected official. Unlike his father, Winter supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal platform and saw the president's actions as proof "that politics is a worthy profession". While stationed in the Philippines, he wrote to his father to discuss his chances at having a political career.
Legislative career
After completing his first year in law school, Winter returned to his family's home in the summer of 1947 to launch his campaign for a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives, which was then held by Ed McCormick. He campaigned mostly by printing handbills, visiting homes, and delivering a few speeches. He also became acquainted with Judge John C. Stennis. Winter won the Democratic primary against McCormick, 2,160 votes to 597 and won in the general election. That year U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo died and Stennis campaigned to replace him in the special election. Winter led a university student "Stennis for Senate" group and actively campaigned for the judge. Stennis won and became lifelong friends with Winter.
Winter was seated in the legislature in January 1948. For the duration of his tenure he lodged at the Edwards Hotel and wrote a political column for the Grenada County Weekly. His father offered him frequent advice on legislative matters and political etiquette. Probably owing in-part to his father's influence, Speaker of the House Walter Sillers Jr. appointed him to several key committees, including Ways and Means, Agriculture, Military Affairs, and one of the Judiciary Committees. He was also made chairman of the Interstate Cooperation Committee, which did little business. Winter and some of his other young freshmen contemporaries sought to use their new positions to push through reforms for the state, though this position placed them in opposition to Siller's conservative leadership of the House. In his first year Winter pursued penal reform, writing a successful bill to separate juvenile and adult inmates at the Mississippi State Penitentiary and backing another measure which required the prison to hire outside guards instead of relying solely on trusties. He worked with three other freshmen to pass a workers' compensation law and supported a relaxation of the state's blue law and an unsuccessful attempt to allow local option consideration of alcohol prohibition.
At the time Winter took office, the state was in the throes of the Southern Dixiecrat breakaway from the national Democratic Party over President Harry Truman's consideration of civil rights proposals for blacks. Winter joined most of the legislators in supporting motions to denounce federal civil rights measures. He also supported the holding of a referendum to add a "good moral character" test for voting procedures to the state constitution, which was widely viewed as a mechanic to be used to further disenfranchise blacks. The legislature scheduled the referendum, but the proposal was defeated by the public, who feared its potentially broader implications. Outside of the legislature he generally avoided Dixiecrat activities and did not attend the state's Democratic convention in June 1948 despite being a delegate. He also wrote an analysis of litigation concerning the United States Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Allwright for the Mississippi Law Journal, in which he concluded that "any attempt through party machinery, unfettered by statutory provisions, to keep negroes from voting will be declared by the federal courts [...] a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He voted for the Dixiecrat candidates, Strom Thurmond and Fielding L. Wright in the 1948 United States presidential election, mostly as a gesture of loyalty to Wright, who was a colleague of his father's. He later explained his legislative support for Jim Crow by saying that any attempt to oppose it "would have killed me in politics forever."