Carroll Gartin
Carroll Gartin was an American Democratic politician from Laurel in Jones County in southeastern Mississippi, who served three terms as the 22nd lieutenant governor of his state. He was born in Meridian in eastern Mississippi.
He served his first two terms from 1952 to 1960 under fellow Democrats, Governors Hugh L. White and James P. Coleman. He returned to the office for two years under Paul B. Johnson Jr., but died midway in the term. In the 1963 campaign, Gartin accused Johnson's opponent, the Republican nominee Rubel Phillips of Corinth and Jackson of having created an unnecessary general election, a scenario then new to Mississippi. As a former Democrat, Gartin said that Phillips could have simply remained in the Democratic primary and hence voided the need for a third election.
Johnson's campaign was buoyed by outgoing Governor Ross Barnett and Democratic state chairman Bidwell Adam. Johnson topped Phillips, 62-38 percent, and Gartin defeated the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, Stanford Morse, a state senator from Gulfport by an even larger 74-26 percent.
Gartin was a staunch white supremacist and a former supporter of Governor and U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo. He was a member of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was devoted to preserving racial segregation in the state.
Gartin was a delegate to the 1956 Democratic National Convention, which nominated the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket.
Gartin died of a heart attack in 1966 at Jones County Community Hospital, hours after checking in for chest pains.
The Carroll Gartin Justice Building in the state capital of Jackson is named after him and houses the Mississippi Supreme Court and the Mississippi Court of Appeals as well as the state law library. Gartin was an attorney; he practiced law with Republican Charles W. Pickering.
