The closing night film of this year’s NYADIFF is a documentary that is, at its core, about how
completely delusional racists are. It is, after all, only delusion that could make a thinking
human being believe that a racially segregated world is the only kind of world worth living in. In
Dawn Porter’s Spies of Mississippi, the height of racist delusion is reflected in the
history of Mississippi’s Sovereignty Commission, an entity created In 1956 to enable the state
government to “maintain a successful fight to preserve the separation of the races,” using “any
and all powers.” Those powers, it is revealed throughout the course of the film, involved the
construction of a clandestine spy organization which investigated, infiltrated, and sabotaged civil
rights organizations throughout Mississippi.
Beginning with a handful of white agents, some former highrollers for the FBI, by 1960 the
Commission had grown into a legitimate, secret institution comprised of dozens of agents, also
hiring out much of its investigative work to at least five detective agencies. With the Civil Rights
movement reaching its height at the time, the agency also began to hire black agents to help
with the internal investigation of activist organizations such as the NAACP.
Every documentary, especially those about the time of the Civil Rights movement, have the
difficult task of having to be truthful and unbiased despite residing on the other side of history,
where we all believe we may “know things” about the past. But with the revelation of the black
secret agents who helped the Commission in its surveillance of protesters, the title Spies
of Mississippi is thrown into an entirely new light.
Because we often forget, or perhaps refuse to acknowledge, that there were some black people
during the days of the Civil Rights movement who did not march or sit-in. Some believed in the
movement, but were themselves (reasonably) afraid to take action. Others, as the documentary
takes special care to highlight, were as conservative about integration as their white, racist
counterparts.
What’s amazing, and disturbing, is that many of the black spies are revealed to be religious
leaders of the day who were afraid of losing their social standing with integration, people like
people like Reverends B.L Bell, H.H. Humes, and Baptist Convention leader Percy Greene, all
were paid by the Commission to spy on the movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. puts it in the
archival footage that strings throughout the piece, the tragedy of segregation for the black man
is, “Not only the physical inconvenience, but what it has done to his soul, what it has done to
him psychologically.”
The most damning section of Spies of Mississippi deals with the infamous murders
of civil rights workers Michael Henry Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. The
story of these three young activists who went missing in Mississippi only to be found dead
months has been explored elsewhere (Mississippi Burning), but here, as we learn
more about the connection between their deaths and the Commission, the senselessness and
injustice of their murders is only further compounded
There are several authoritative voices throughout this documentary that paint a vivid portrait of
life in Mississippi under the secret eye of the Commission, interviews with activists including
Lawrence Guyot, Bob Moses, former Governor of Mississippi William Winter, and investigative
reporter Jerry Mitchell, who in the 1980s revealed files about the Commission that would later
bring the assassin of Medgar Evers to justice.
Porter also includes interviews from people who were actually involved with the Commission,
RL Berger, a former NAACP officer who many believed was a black informant (he denies this
despite damning evidence), and white Sovereignty Commission agent Horace H. Harned, Jr,
who even now in his old age is clearly unrepentant in his work to undermine the progress of
racial equality in the South. “We weren’t intimidated.” he says, “The important thing was not to
be intimidated. If you’re intimidated, you can’t control anything.”
Weaving together fascinating interviews with images of the Commission’s surveillance photos
and thousands upon thousands of files on the people they watched – some of them active civil
rights workers, others everyday people – Spies of Mississippi is as cohesive as it
is engaging, another interesting portrait of a time in our past too often regarded as a sort of
ancient history. Here, the links between the activities of the Sovereignty Commission and our
government’s activities today are made clear, ending on a disturbing but thought provoking
final note that asks the viewer to always question the morality of a government that spies on its
citizens.
Zeba Blay is a Ghanaian-born film and culture writer based in New York. She runs a personal movie blog, Film Memory, and co-hosts the podcast Two Brown Girls. Follow her on Twitter @zblay.