Coming to the WORLD Channel’s American Equality series tomorrow, Friday, August 14: SPIES OF MISSISSIPPI
Dawn Porter’s look at state-sponsored surveillance during the civil rights era had its world premiere at Little Rock in 2013. Screenings followed at Sidewalk, New York African Diaspora, and the United Nations Association fest before the doc made its broadcast debut on PBS’s Independent Lens in February 2014.
In 1956, lawmakers, faced with the reality that segregation was under threat, created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency that was tasked with maintaining the “Mississippi way of life.” Though seemingly innocuous, those in the state working toward fuller civil rights did not realize at the time that they were facing a clandestine political machine that would grow to become a de facto spy network, keeping tabs on “agitators” and willing to resort to intimidation and violence to prevent change. Porter’s revealing – and still sadly topical – doc details the modus operandi of the Sovereignty Commission, including the practice of recruiting African Americans to report on civil rights groups’ activities from within, employing the same tactics used by the FBI’s covert COINTELPRO operations, and their close ties with the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership had infiltrated positions of power in law enforcement and government. As noted here, these abuses of civil liberties would have stayed hidden for decades to come were it not for the intrepid work of Jackson MS’s Clarion-Ledger, which exposed documents linking the Commission to the deaths of voter-registration workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, which helped turn the tide of public opinion; as well as the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
what (not) to doc 