Spies of Mississippi by Rick Bowers

better to wait another day before picking up this literature.”
    At an opportune moment, Agent X secretly copied the applications of student activists accepted into the Freedom Summer program. He passed the names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and photographs on to the Commission.
    As the clock continued to tick, Agent X wrangled an invitation to an extensive training seminar for several hundred student activists to be held at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, on June 16, 1964. On that date, Director Johnston was informed that “X is departing this date for Oxford, Ohio, with wife and will forward reports to a blind P.O. Box here in Jackson and make periodic telephone reports on activities.”
    Upon arriving on the campus on June 17, X seamlessly blended in to sessions preparing the student activists for the danger ahead. Posing as one of the few black activists from Mississippi, he gained access to sessions on registering voters, dealing with police brutality, and opening the Freedom Schools.
    During one session his friend R. Jess Brown, a black lawyer from Jackson, told the students, “Now get this in your heads and remember what I am going to say. They—the white folk, the police, the state police—they are all waiting for you. They are looking for you. They are ready. They are armed. They know some of your names and your descriptions even now, even before you get to Mississippi.”
    Naturally, Agent X knew that all too well. He was one of the secret operatives making sure that the state was fully prepared. He and his confederates had supplied the Commission with extensive information on Freedom Summer throughout that spring and had filed more extensive reports through his 11 days at the training seminar. He revealed the names, descriptions, and destinations of key activists; the role to be played by volunteer lawyers; the plans of key reporters covering the initiative; and the mounting fears of students destined for hostile territory.
     
    As X fed the pipeline, the Commission staff worked diligently to prepare the state to repel the invaders. Commission agent Tom Scarborough set up meetings across the state to prepare public officials and civic leaders for the onslaught of northern college students. “The purpose of these meetings has been to organize the city and county officials to work in a coordinated unit to handle the racial agitators who have promised to invade Mississippi this summer,” Scarborough reported. In Lafayette County, Scarborough warned community leaders that the invasion would be led by “communists, sex perverts, odd balls, and do-gooders.” Meeting with a group of newly elected county sheriffs, Scarborough warned the incoming lawmen that many of their counties were destined to be overrun by radicals. The law enforcement community was getting edgy.
    Commission agents also set out to visit sheriff’s offices in all 82 counties to prepare law enforcement officers for potential trouble. The agents provided police with a summary of 19 state laws that could be used to arrest or detain troublemakers. Their goal was to strengthen the hand of county sheriff’s offices statewide, which had been fortified with hundreds of newly deputized auxiliary officers. The police were gearing up for a virtual war with the “outside agitators.”
     
    As the Commission fueled the fevered preparations, a new development arose. Agent Andy Hopkins had been investigating the intense competition for recruits between violent new factions of the Klan. One night shots were fired into Hopkins’s house, and Klan literature was left in his yard. It appeared that the resurgent Klan was gearing up for war, too. The new Klan was so extreme that it was ready to take on the Commission itself—on top of their common enemy—in defense of white rule.
    The wild swirl of events was cascading out of the control of a state leadership that had changed dramatically over the past six months. Former lieutenant