Please consider attending the film mentioned below. It is a very, very good film, timely and well done.
Wednesday, October 8 at 12 noon and at 7 p.m. (potluck at 6:30), at the Center for Nonviolence, 1584 N. Van Ness Ave (SE Corner McKinley and Van Ness) (Open to the public and wheelchair accessible)
Our 2nd Wednesday video will be “Spies of Mississipi” This documentary reveals in shocking detail the state of Mississippi’s effort to undermine the civil rights movement using a vast network of spies. Their identities will shock you. Whites and Blacks spied for Old Dixie. And the Sovereignty Commission would stop at nothing, even murder, to retain the “Mississippi way of life”.
In the spring of 1964, the civil rights community geared up for “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” during which hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly white student activists from the North linked up with mostly black freedom workers to accomplish what the Mississippi power structure feared the most: registering black people to vote. For the segregationists, Freedom Summer was nothing less than a declaration of war. The state responded by swearing in hundreds of new deputies, stockpiling tear gas and riot gear, and preparing the jails for an influx of summer “guests.”
But the most powerful men in the state had another weapon to fight integration. They quietly created a secret, state-funded spy agency, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, answering directly to the Governor. During the height of the civil rights movement, sovereignty commission operatives employed a cadre of black operatives who infiltrated the movement, rooting out its future plans, identifying its leaders, and tripping up its foot soldiers. By gaining the trust of civil rights crusaders, they gathered crucial intelligence on behalf of the segregationist state. 60 minutes long, 2013.
