tireless prosecution of the case". Despite this, he won some national acclaim for convincing several white jurors to vote for conviction and ingratiated himself to Mississippi's black population. Beckwith was later convicted after a third trial in 1994. By the mid-1960s, Waller was disenchanted with Mississippi's political leaders' hardline efforts to resist desegregation. In 1967, he ran for the office of governor in the Democratic primary. Not backed by a significant campaign organization, he was low on resources and confined to active campaigning on the weekends. The contest was dominated by issues of race. Waller attempted to straddle both sides of the issue, becoming the first Mississippian gubernatorial candidate to ever publicly condemn the Ku Klux Klan while also criticizing civil rights activists and praising the work of Citizens' Councils. Largely ignored by the public in favor of other segregationist candidates, he placed fifth in the primary, earning 60,090 votes, only nine percent of the vote. Gubernatorial career 1971 campaign and election In 1971, Waller mounted another campaign for gubernatorial office, facing Lieutenant Governor Charles L. Sullivan, Jimmy Swan, and four others in the Democratic primary. While Swan resorted to racist appeals and declared his opposition to integration, Waller and Sullivan focused on other matters, though they both affirmed their support for "law and order" and segregation academies, and opposed desegregation busing. They also pledged to appoint blacks to state offices. Waller stated that he was running against the "Capitol Street Gang", establishment industry leaders and lawyers in Jackson he said had acted as a political machine and captured control of state government, preventing Mississippi from economically developing. He declared his support for raising teacher salaries and investing more funds in state highways. He hired Deloss Walker of Memphis, Tennessee, as a campaign consultant, beginning a trend of gubernatorial candidates using out-of-state advertising agencies which lasted into the 1980s. The primary went into a runoff between Waller and Sullivan, Waller garnered the endorsements of U.S. Senator James Eastland and former governor Barnett, and relied on a network of Eastland supporters to organize grassroots backing for himself. He attacked Sullivan as an "establishment" figure and won the runoff with 54 percent of the vote, taking 389,952 votes to Sullivan's 329,236. In the general election Waller faced two independents, civil rights activist Charles Evers (the brother of Medgar) and segregationist judge Tom P. Brady. Evers was the other major candidate and, despite