Mississippi University for Women on Thursday will host the producer and director of “Spies of Mississippi,” a documentary about the defunct Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which spied on Civil Rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.
Dawn Porter will speak at 6 p.m. as part of the Gordy Honors College Forum Series. The event is open to the public.
“Spies of Mississippi” is based on Rick Bowers’ book by the same title. The documentary tells the story of the MSSC and how they paid informants to feed them information on Civil Rights activists and sympathizers, and in turn fed that information to state and local law enforcement, newspapers and whoever else had influence in keeping the state segregated.
The film features interviews with Civil Rights activists, politicians, journalists and more. It suggests that the MSSC infiltrated the NAACP and even implicates the agency in the deaths of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were killed by white supremacists in Philadelphia in 1964.
MUW hosted a public showing of the documentary on Feb. 5. Following the film was a question and answer session during which audience members shared their views of the film and, in the case of some older viewers, their memories of what Mississippi was like during the 1960s.
After Gov. Bill Waller terminated the commission’s funding in the early 1970s, the MSSC went under ,according to journalist Curtis Wilkie, who reported on the Civil Rights Movement from Clarksdale in the 1960s.
The MSSC’s files were supposed to be hidden for 50 years, according to Porter’s documentary.
The files became public in the 1990s. Wilkie reported in 1994 that there was controversy over the files because of the inaccurate information and the possibility that individuals named in the files could be embarrassed or falsely accused of participation.
This was a legitimate possibility, according to Wilkie. During the 1960s, Wilkie and the Civil Rights leaders in Mississippi knew about the MSSC and its attempts to preserve racial segregation and to intimidate blacks and liberal whites. Wilkie likened them to the Citizens Council, the main difference being that the MSSC, unlike the Citizens Council, was a government agency.
“They were responsible for some very evil stuff,” Wilkie said. “But they were not as bad as they could have been if they’d been effective.”
Wilkie called them “bumbling,” “clownish” and “redneck detectives that played James Bond,” adding that they “couldn’t have spied effectively on a Boy Scouts meeting.”
The MSSC’s files are available online to search at mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/.
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