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- Richard Henderson Molpus Jr. (born September 7, 1949) is an American businessman and Democratic Party politician who served as Secretary of State of Mississippi from 1984 until 1996. He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1995 against Republican incumbent Kirk Fordice. He later established a timberland management company. Throughout his public life he has pushed for reforms to support public education and promote racial reconciliation. Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and educated at the University of Mississippi, Molpus worked at his family's lumber company before its sale in the 1980s. A staffer for William F. Winter's gubernatorial campaigns in 1967, 1975, and 1979, the governor appointed him executive director of the Governor's Office of Federal-State Programs. He also lobbied on the governor's behalf for education reform in the state legislature. Molpus successfully ran for secretary of state in 1983, campaigning on his managerial experience and promises to reform the office. Reelected in 1987 and 1991, he reorganized the office through the creation of four departments and shifted its purpose away from clerical duties and towards more active policy engagement. He oversaw the digitization of the office's records, the renegotiation of thousands of leases on public lands to raise money for public education, reformed the state's election laws, and sought reforms in corporate law and lobbying rules. Molpus unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 1988, losing the Democratic nomination to Wayne Dowdy and accruing the third highest campaign debt for any senatorial candidate nationwide. In his unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1995, his apology for the Mississippi Burning murders, the first by a statewide office holder, was used against him. He started a timberland investment management organization in 1996 and was appointed to the United States Endowment for Forestry and Communities in 2006. (en)
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