Spies of Mississippi

Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement by Rick Bowers is a non-fiction book told through a series of vignettes about state spies in Mississippi that attempted to preserve segregation in the state and end the movement led by civil rights workers in the 1960s. Marketed for young adults, Bowers tells the stories of many lesser-known civil rights activists using primary source material and interviews with surviving members of the movement. The focus is on the idea of spying as a means to maintain the status quo and racial bias, which occurred all over the south, and particularly in Mississippi during this period.

Ultimately, of course, Bowers's mission is to convey the hardships that many civil rights activists had to undergo in order to end segregation in the United States, and to tell the true story of the movement through interviews and real source material in newspapers and once-hidden government documents. The catch, however, is that unlike most young adult non-fiction texts that deal with the civil rights movement, Bowers is interested in teaching children about some of the institutional and government barriers that made the task near-impossible for many activists. He writes about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to get this message across. In essence, the state of Mississippi created this commission for the purpose of maintaining segregation statewide; the agents assigned to the commission were responsible for reporting on the plans of civil rights activists in order to stop them and to avoid the coming change at all costs.

JP Coleman, the governor of Mississippi created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1956. He made it clear that his sole purpose in forming the commission was to protect the current state of segregation in Mississippi – he wanted to avoid integration of public spaces, including water fountains, buses, restaurants, and bathrooms, and was particularly concerned about maintaining segregated public schools. Essentially, with this commission, the governor had created a publicly-funded team of spies charged with the task of infiltrating civil rights movement meetings, gathering information, and reporting back so the governor could stop protests before they could gain notoriety on a state or national scale.



Perhaps the most disturbing parts of this book – beyond the tales of physical and psychological abuse that many protesters underwent in the struggle for their own freedom – are the moments when Bowers directly cites the 134,000-page file that was kept by the Sovereignty Committee. The document, only recently released to the public, offers a disturbing look into the statewide conspiracy to maintain a racist society in Mississippi through collaboration with organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen's Council. The files also illustrate the power commission spies had to invade the privacy of activists and black Americans, make arrests, and force people to testify to protect a cause they did not believe in. Bowers also links the commission to a number of deaths, including the assassination of Medgar Evans, Mississippi's field secretary for the NAACP, and the mysterious deaths of three volunteers for the Freedom Summer campaign, which sought to register as many black voters in the state of Mississippi as possible before the election date.

Bowers tells the stories of James Meredith, Clyde Kennard, Medgar Evans, and many other activists who are lesser known today but played a critical role in the civil rights movement. He describes the way the Sovereignty Commission inspired fear in the hearts of many who would otherwise be sympathetic to the civil rights movement, and how teachers, preachers, and other public officials were co-opted as spies during this time. Though this is a well-researched and much more honest book for young adults than many sugar-coated books about the civil rights movement, some reviewers did note that Bowers focuses more on the idea of maintaining segregation as the reason for the development of this commission, without discussing the underlying racism that led to those beliefs in the first place.

Rick Bowers is the author of two young adult non-fiction books published by National Geographic. Spies of Mississippi, his first book, was named a finalist for the 2011 YALSA Award for Excellent Non-fiction for Young Adults. It was also adapted into a PBS film and an “appumentary” – essentially an app that allows users to interact with the story on their phones and tablets. His second book, Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan describes how the story of Superman was used on the radio in 1947 to counteract racist ideology in the United States. A newspaper reporter and journalist, Bowers’s articles have been published in a number of prominent magazines. He lives in California.