Dick Molpus
Richard Henderson Molpus Jr. is an American businessman and Democratic Party politician who served as Secretary of State of Mississippi from 1984 until 1996. He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1995 against Republican incumbent Kirk Fordice. He later established a timberland management company. Throughout his public life he has pushed for reforms to support public education and promote racial reconciliation.
Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and educated at the University of Mississippi, Molpus worked at his family's lumber company before its sale in the 1980s. A staffer for William F. Winter's gubernatorial campaigns in 1967, 1975, and 1979, the governor appointed him executive director of the Governor's Office of Federal-State Programs. He also lobbied on the governor's behalf for education reform in the state legislature.
Molpus successfully ran for secretary of state in 1983, campaigning on his managerial experience and promises to reform the office. Reelected in 1987 and 1991, he reorganized the office through the creation of four departments and shifted its purpose away from clerical duties and towards more active policy engagement. He oversaw the digitization of the office's records, the renegotiation of thousands of leases on public lands to raise money for public education, reformed the state's election laws, and sought reforms in corporate law and lobbying rules. Molpus unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 1988, losing the Democratic nomination to Wayne Dowdy and accruing the third highest campaign debt for any senatorial candidate nationwide. In his unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1995, his apology for the Mississippi Burning murders, the first by a statewide office holder, was used against him. He started a timberland investment management organization in 1996 and was appointed to the United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities in 2006.
Early life and education
Richard Henderson Molpus Jr. was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on September 7, 1949, to Richard Henderson Molpus Sr. and Frances Blount. He graduated from Philadelphia High School in 1967, and from the University of Mississippi with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1971. While there he served as president of the Sigma Chi fraternity chapter, and unsuccessfully pushed for the fraternity to racially integrate. He married Sally Galbraith Nash, with whom he had two children, in 1971.His grandfather, Richard Hezekiah Molpus, established the first sawmill in Philadelphia in 1905 as part of a general merchandise venture, the Henderson-Molpus Company. The corporation later transformed into the Molpus Lumber Company in 1957, focusing its business in wood, and passed to Dick's father. Molpus began working for the company at a young age. By the time he was a teenager, he was a certified lumber inspector. He returned to work for the company after graduating from college, assuming temporary control after his father suffered a stroke. He rose to the position of vice president for manufacturing and oversaw the establishment of a second lumber facility in Morton in 1975. The lumber company was sold in the mid-1980s. Molpus served on the board of directors and executive committee of the Mississippi Forestry Association, vice-president of the Mississippi Lumber Manufacturers Association, and on the board of directors of the Morton chamber of commerce.
Political career
Early activities and Winter administration
During the 1967 Mississippi gubernatorial election, Molpus worked as a youth coordinator in Neshoba County for Democrat William F. Winter's unsuccessful campaign. He co-chaired a blue ribbon highway study committee during Governor Bill Waller's tenure. He volunteered for Winter's 1975 campaign and for his successful 1979 gubernatorial campaign. His father was one of Winter's leading supporters during the 1967 and 1975 elections, but later supported Republican nominee Gil Carmichael in the 1975 election and Jim Herring in the 1979 Democratic primary. Molpus was Winter's first announced appointee when he was selected as executive director of the Governor's Office of Federal-State Programs, on November 15, 1979. The office coordinated actions between federal and state agencies.Together with the state director of administration, Molpus consolidated the office's 17 agencies into seven, reducing administrative expenses by 25%. For his work in reducing staff and improving the agency's efficiency, he was selected in 1983 as Mississippi's Public Administrator of the Year by the American Society for Public Administration. He also helped Winter lobby the Mississippi State Legislature to pass the 1982 Education Reform Act, hosting the governor's staff at a cabin he owned for strategy sessions, delivering over 35 speeches to build public support for the bill, and organizing a phone call campaign to pressure a state senator to support the creation of public kindergartens. State Senator Ellis B. Bodron, who was broadly opposed to the legislation, denounced Molpus and other young Winter aides—including Ray Mabus, David Crews, Bill Gartin, Andy P. Mullins, and John Henegan—as the "Boys of Spring", a moniker in which they thereafter took pride.
Secretary of State of Mississippi
Elections
Winter's tenure sparked a decade of political interest in reforming state government and led to like-minded candidates—many being former members of his administration—to seek elective office. Mississippi Secretary of State Edwin L. Pittman announced that he would run in the 1983 gubernatorial election. Molpus was considered a candidate to succeed Pittman and he considered running for either secretary of state or public service commissioner from the Central District. Molpus announced his resignation from Winter's administration effective May 9, and launched his campaign for secretary of state on May 16, 1983. He was the second member of Winter's staff to run for statewide office after Mabus announced his campaign for state auditor. During the campaign he was endorsed by the National Women's Political Caucus and AFL–CIO. Pledging to reorganize the office, he won the Democratic nomination after defeating John Ed Ainsworth in a runoff. Molpus and Ainsworth did not engage in negative campaigning, stating that they had a mutual respect for each other. In the general election he defeated Republican legislator Jerry Gilbreath after he campaigned on his managerial experience and record of helping Winter's education reforms succeed.Molpus announced that he would seek reelection on May 5, 1987, and won in the election. In 1989, he announced that he would run for reelection in the 1991 election and was considering running in the 1995 gubernatorial election. He announced his campaign on January 11, 1991, and facing no opposition in the primary or general elections was elected unopposed.
Tenure
Before taking office Molpus announced a reorganization plan for the office in which he would create four new departments to handle administration, public lands and elections, policy development, and securities regulations. He wanted to shift the focus of the secretary of state from clerical and administrative duties to handling education, public lands, securities, and elections. Molpus assumed office on January 5, 1984. The director of the Mississippi NAACP criticized Molpus, among other state officials, for the low number of black people he appointed to office despite having significant black electoral support in the 1983 election.In 1989 The Neshoba Democrat editor Stanley Dearman invited Molpus to partake in a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an event which had stigmatized the town to outsiders and was regarded as politically controversial. Despite concerns from some of his advisers that his involvement in a commemoration would ruin his political career, Molpus agreed to attend and helped to organize a planning committee for the event. He also convinced Governor Mabus to attend with him. On June 21, 1989, Molpus officially apologized to the families of the murdered civil rights workers, saying, "We deeply regret what happened here 25 years ago. We wish we could undo it. We wish we could bring them back. Every decent person here feels that way. My heart is full because today we have found a way to ease the burden that this community has borne." The statement made him the first Mississippi state official to apologize for the murders.
Dearman summarized the public reaction to the speech, saying, "A lot of people were opposed to it, but a lot of people were glad he said it." Many white Mississippians disagreed with Molpus' remarks; he received several critical letters and threatening phone calls in response, including 26 death threats. Some Mississippians credited Molpus with restarting public discussion of the murders and their significance in the state. Reflecting on his statements and their impact on his political prospects in 2021, Molpus said, "It was not a mistake to say those words. Things are more important than winning. Governors come and go, but those words are something I still feel good about."
Molpus supported Steve Patterson's bid for the chairmanship of the Mississippi Democratic Party in 1984. He endorsed Mike Espy during his campaign for a seat in the United States House of Representatives during the 1986 election and Epsy's victory made him the first black person to represent Mississippi in the United States Congress since the Reconstruction era. He endorsed Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. After several potential candidates declined to serve, Molpus acted as the Mississippi delegation's secretary.
Molpus and 41 others founded a Mississippi chapter of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1990. He was elected to the board of officers of the National Association of Secretaries of State, being the only Southerner on the board and became its secretary in 1987, its treasurer in 1988, its vice-president in 1989, and was selected as its president in 1993. He was succeeded by Eric Clark at the secretariat of state on January 4, 1996.