[15] 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.

[33] 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.

[39] 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.

[42] 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.

[43] 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.

[48] He also supported a "Subversive Act" introduced amid Cold War fears of communist infiltration of government, which would require all state workers to sign a loyalty pledge.

[1] Upon his return in the 1952 session, he was appointed chairman of the Agriculture Committee, which produced a law that offered loans to farmers seeking to expanding their poultry and livestock operations.

[54] Unnerved by the cold response to his remarks, he left the meeting convinced he had to make "no pretense about not being for segregation,"[54] though he subsequently refused an invitation to join a segregationist Citizens' Council in Grenada, saying "I don't know where that's going.

[60] During this time Winter and other younger lawmakers began mulling over the possibility of challenging Sillers' speakership, feeling he held too much power and allowed the House to be distracted by unimportant business.

In January of that year circuit court Judge Sebe Dale, an avowed prohibitionist, denounced the tax collector office's arrangement with Louisiana as a felony conspiracy to violate state liquor laws and asked a Lamar County grand jury to indict Winter.

Though privately disagreeing with white extremism and massive resistance to federal integration efforts in favor of more subtle delay, he publicly supported segregation and otherwise tried to avoid addressing the issue.

[82] With his tenure as tax collector soon to end, Winter considered turning to full-time legal practice before ultimately deciding to run in 1963 for Mississippi State Treasurer.

[83] He spent three months travelling the state to give stump speeches, and won the primary with 60 percent of the vote, winning eighty-one of Mississippi's eighty-two counties.

He was also in charge of issuing state bonds, though he encountered difficulty in selling them on New York financial markets due to Mississippi's lackluster national reputation for its opposition to civil rights.

[88] By early 1965 he had begun public appealing to Mississippians to stop resisting federal civil rights measures, saying to one gathering that the state needed "to lay aside old slogans and myths".

[92] Former governor Barnett (who had been out of office the four previous years due to limits on gubernatorial succession), radio personality Jimmy Swan, and prosecutor Bill Waller also ran in the primary.

Many Mississippians opposed a second Barnett term and recruited Congressman John Bell Williams, a segregationist with a reputation as an effective campaigner, to run, much to Winter's disappointment.

"[100] He finished by saying that it would be "the greatest disservice" if racial issues became "a political football" and said "The people of Mississippi want a man who is not afraid to fight [...] but one who has common sense enough to win.

[104] Winter tried to counter segregationists' doubts about him by tying himself to Senators James Eastland and John Stennis—both clear segregationists—and by stressing law and order—a position which placed him in contrast to disorderly civil rights protests and riots elsewhere in the country.

[106] In anticipation of the runoff primary, Winter and his team decided that they would need to pick up the votes of segregationist who had sided with Barnett and Swan by characterizing Williams as an inadequate defender of segregation.

[108] Winter initially adopted a hardline stance on segregation, saying he opposed Johnson's presidency and would support Alabama Governor George Wallace or Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1968 presidential election "to preserve conservative government".

Winter was concerned about what "commitments" he would have to make by entering the race with the endorsement of such conservative politicians and he was still focused on retiring outstanding debts from his previous gubernatorial campaign.

[124] He also used legislative maneuvers to ensure the passage of a small loan reform bill[125] and supported improvements to social services, increased protection for natural resources, and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (which did not occur).

[131] Despite advice from a pollster and other politicians that Mississippians wanted a candidate who represented "change" in wake of the Watergate scandal, Winter's campaign focused on his record and experience.

[143] Due to the latter factor, Winter's campaign organization attempted to craft an image of "toughness" for him, and released television commercials that showed him posing with tanks and firing a gun at a weapons range.

[167] The proposals died in the 1981 session,[168] though Winter convinced the legislature to adopt an open records law which classified all government papers as public property and placed them in the care of the Department of Archives and History.

[176] The approval of the November referendum encouraged him enough to convince him to call the legislature into a special session on December 6 solely to consider education reform, thus giving him the political initiative.

[184] Continuing to struggle with budget deficits, he called another special session of the legislature in November 1983 and convinced it to temporarily raise sales taxes and impose an individual and corporate income surtax to resolve an impending $120 million shortfall in the next fiscal year.

[193] Winter played a key role in maintaining Democratic unity during Mississippi's 1983 state elections and enlisted numerous candidates of similar attitude to him—many of them proponents of education reform—to run for office.

[234] Reform continued to dominate political activity in Mississippi for over a decade after Winter's departure from office until falling out of favor in the 1990s as conservatives such as Kirk Fordice became increasingly predominant.