Content area
Full Text
This article focuses on the relationship between Percy Greene, the black editor of the Jackson Advocate, and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission from 1956 to 1965. He was a paid informant of the commission, which was a state-funded segregationist organization that secretly gathered information on individuals who supported the civil rights movement. An examination of commission files reveals that it considered Greene, a conservative, to be an important contact person, and he was relied upon heavily to help the agency carry out its mission. This study provides insight into what motivated him to work for the commission and what activities he was involved in as an agent. It concludes that the relationship between Greene and the commission grew more complex as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s.
During the civil rights era, mainstream newspapers through out Mississippi spoke out against the "evils" of integration and charged that Communists were responsible for stirring up trouble. It was not unusual for the press to take this position because it reflected and encouraged the maintenance of a segregationist system that had been woven into the social structure of the South. However, the editor of the largest black newspaper in Mississippi1 created a controversy not only because he endorsed segregation but because he went to great lengths to align himself with a power structure that was based on white supremacy.
This article focuses on the relationship between Percy Greene, the black editor of the Jackson Advocate, and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission from 1956 to 1965. The commission was established by the state legislature in 1956, two years after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board ofEducation decision outlawing segregated public schools. Commonly referred to as the state's "segregation watch-dog agency," the commission created an investigative division for the purpose of gathering information on civil rights activities and individuals who threatened to do away with the "Southern way of life."
Much has been written about Greene's association with the commission. For example, Erie Johnston, in Mississippi's Defiant Years, gave a brief description of Greene's duties. Johnston, who served as public relations director of the commission, portrayed him as an "honest" man, one who provided "an offsetting voice to those who could find only racial wrongs in Mississippi."2...