Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement. Rick Bowers

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       THE DELTA BLUES

      The Mississippi River Delta is a study in contrast. The vast stretches of green and white cotton fields are interspersed with eerie, moss-draped cypress swamps. The white-pillared mansions of the plantation elite stand near the huts of the poor dirt farmer. The Delta is home to debutante balls and backroom gambling dens, ramshackle houseboats and majestic paddle wheelers. This sweltering, insect-ridden, and amazingly fertile stretch of bottomland forms, in the words of author James C. Cobb, “the most Southern place on earth.”

      Back in the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of slaves worked the vast cotton fields. They were afraid to resist or to run for fear of being whipped, beaten, or sold away from their families. Each day, more black men, women, and children were delivered to the plantations by slave brokers, who purchased their human cargo in the bustling markets of New Orleans and Natchez and marched them in groups of about 30 for hundreds of miles to their oppressive new homes. The seemingly endless supply of slave labor and a ravenous demand for cotton fueled a robust economy dominated by wealthy planters, powerful politicians, and influential businessmen.

      The legacy of slavery, the grip of poverty, and widespread illiteracy made it virtually impossible for civil rights workers to organize effectively in the Delta prior to the 1950s. The small cotton-processing towns and thinly populated enclaves seemed destined to be racially segregated and brutally oppressive for African Americans for generations to come. But by the late 1950s, in the hardscrabble river town of Clarksdale, change was in the air. Aaron Henry, president of the Coahoma County Chapter of the NAACP and executive secretary of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, was organizing the black community. The mild-mannered activist was petitioning the local school board to integrate schools, urging the sheriff to crack down on the harassment of black voters, and demanding that newspaper editors refer to black people in their columns with the courtesy titles of Mr., Mrs., and Miss.

      Henry, a registered pharmacist and owner of the Fourth Street Drug Store, had turned his pharmacy into a makeshift community center and citizenship school, where he prepared poor sharecroppers, shopkeepers, and household servants to vote for the first time. Affectionately known in the community as Doc, Henry had a unique ability to work across the racial divide and a talent for forming unlikely alliances.

      Henry had grown up in a sharecropping family on the Flowers Brothers Plantation outside Clarksdale. He escaped poverty by joining the army and learned his pharmacy craft at Xavier College in New Orleans. After college, drawn by the lure of the land and a determination to end racial prejudice, he returned home to the Delta. “You know that old Mississippi River has never had an ounce of racial prejudice,” he liked to say. “When it comes to bursting over those levees, it doesn’t stop to ask where the colored section is. It just takes all.”

      The Commission spies initially underestimated Henry’s effectiveness. They bragged of duping him into divulging valuable information without even knowing it. But over time, Henry’s relentless organizing and alliance building forced the spies to enhance their surveillance. In early 1958, Commission agent Zach Van Landingham traveled to Clarksdale to meet three men—a judge, a candidate for sheriff, and a leader of the Clarksdale chapter of the White Citizens’ Council. The prominent local leaders told the agent that the pharmacist-turned-organizer was stirring up needless trouble in the black community and laid out a plan to rid themselves of the agitator.

      The Council would pressure wholesalers to stop selling supplies to Henry’s drugstore and would press doctors to refuse to write prescriptions for patients who shopped there. The economic squeeze would bankrupt Henry and force him to leave town in search of work. The Council also planned to persuade the superintendent of the Coahoma Country Negro School District to fire Henry’s wife, Nicole, from her teaching job just to make sure the couple had no reason to stay in town. “It is believed that if Henry leaves the area,” Van Landingham reported to his superiors at the Commission, “the NAACP will die.”

      The Commission surrounded Henry with black informants, who infiltrated his meetings and intercepted his documents. One report noted that an informant code-named J1 “advised that he had been listening very closely in his church,” and it appeared that NAACP meetings were “not well attended” and that Henry was not “doing very well with his drugstore.” But Henry kept holding meetings, signing up members, registering voters, and speaking out in the press. NAACP membership and black voter registration in the region crept upward.

      Then, late in 1958, Henry was elected president of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, thus becoming one of the most important civil rights leaders in the state. He forged alliances with multiple civil rights organizations, developed relationships with federal authorities, and made friends with sympathetic journalists.

      Despite the recognition and the stature, his struggle was really just beginning. After the mayor and Chamber of Commerce of Clarksdale moved to ban blacks from participating in the 1961 Christmas parade, Henry launched a boycott of white-owned businesses, with the slogan, “If we can’t parade downtown, we won’t trade downtown.” The boycott triggered an unprecedented three-year reign of terror against the black community. During that time, Henry’s wife was fired from her teaching job, his drugstore was firebombed, his house was torched, and he was arrested and jailed on false charges. As punishment, he was tied to the back of a garbage truck and forced to load trash in full view of his neighbors. But the attempt to humiliate him backfired on his tormentors. The sight of an unrelenting freedom worker tethered to a trash truck only enhanced his stature in the black community.