John C. Stennis
John C. Stennis was born in Kemper County, Mississippi, United States on August 3rd, 1901 and is the Politician. At the age of 93, John C. Stennis biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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John Cornelius Stennis (August 3, 1901 – April 23, 1995) was an American politician who served as a U.S. Senator from the state of Mississippi.
He was a Democrat who served in the Senate for over 41 years, becoming its most senior member for his last eight years.
He retired from the Senate in 1989, and is, to date, the last Democrat to have been a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. While attending law school, Stennis won a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives, holding office from 1928 to 1932.
After serving as a prosecutor and state judge, Stennis won a special election to fill the Senate vacancy that arose following the death of Theodore G. Bilbo.
He won election to a full term in 1952 and remained in the Senate until he declined to seek re-election in 1988.
Stennis became the first Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and also chaired the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Appropriations.
He also served as President pro tempore of the Senate from 1987 to 1989.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon proposed the Stennis Compromise, whereby the hard-of-hearing Stennis would be allowed to listen to, and summarize, the Watergate tapes, but this idea was rejected by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Stennis was a zealous supporter of racial segregation.
He signed the Southern Manifesto, which called for resistance to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
He also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
He supported the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 but voted against the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday.
Early life and education
John Stennis was born into a middle-class family in Kemper County, Mississippi, as the son of Hampton Howell Stennis and Margaret Cornelia Adams. His great-grandfather, John Stenhouse, emigrated from Scotland to Greenville, South Carolina, just before the American Revolution.
He received a bachelor's degree from Mississippi State University in Starkville (then Mississippi A&M) in 1923. In 1928, Stennis obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. While in law school, he won a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives, representing Kemper County, in which he served until 1932. Stennis was a prosecutor from 1932 to 1937 and a circuit judge from 1937 to 1947, both for Mississippi's Sixteenth Judicial District. He was the prosecuting attorney in a case where three African Americans had been beaten and tortured for a confession; in Brown v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court ruled that it was a clear deception of court and jury by the presentation of testimony known to be perjured, and a clear denial of due process.
Stennis married Coy Hines, and together they had two children, John Hampton and Margaret Jane. His son, John Hampton Stennis (1935–2013), an attorney in Jackson, Mississippi, ran unsuccessfully in 1978 for the United States House of Representatives, defeated by the Republican Jon C. Hinson, then the aide to U.S. Representative Thad Cochran.