[1] Bill Waller, who prosecuted Byron De La Beckwith and attacked the Ku Klux Klan, additionally railed against civil rights "rabble-rousers".

"[1][2] The most openly segregationist candidate was Jimmy Swan, running on a promise to establish "FREE, private, SEGREGATED SCHOOLS for every white child in the State of Mississippi" in the first twelve months of his term, or else he would resign and publicly apologize.

He proposed to save Mississippi "from the moral degeneracy of total mass integration that Washington has decreed for our children this fall", saying that granting equality to the blacks was to make savagery the equal of civilization and promising to use extreme force against any black urban riot, which he viewed as a "Communist monster", and openly courted the Klan, of which his campaign bodyguard Pat Massengale was a member.

[5] Vernon E. Brown, a 65-year-old tax assessor from Stone County, Mississippi,[6] and C. L. McKinley, a Creole pipefitter living in Pennsylvania, had no campaign organization.

[11] Clarke Reed of Greenville, who succeeded Yerger as state chairman in 1966, recalled that Phillips did not wish to run for governor again in 1967 but was persuaded to do so by party leaders in need of a candidate though there was little expectation of success.

[18] Presidential politics played some role in the 1967 campaign, as Williams stressed his friendship with George C. Wallace of Alabama, who was preparing for an independent candidacy in 1968.

Phillips countered that only a Republican, perhaps Nixon or Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, could defeat a national Democratic presidential nominee.

[22] At a $40 per person fundraiser attended by some five thousand and hosted by the state's congressional delegation, Williams vowed to "destroy that Republican crowd so bad that they won't be able to find a Rubel in the rubble.

[24] The Freedom Democrats backed Phillips because he had expressed doubts that Williams as governor would be able to fight the desegregation policies of the then United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

[26] An unidentified Republican told U.S. News & World Report that the GOP had "thrown off the tag of being a racist, segregationist party in the South.