LeRoy Percy
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LeRoy Percy (November 9, 1860 – December 24, 1929) was a wealthy planter from Greenville, Mississippi in the heart of the Delta. He attended the University of Virginia where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. He served as United States Senator from Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.
Following the vacancy of the seat held by Senator James Gordon, the Mississippi legislature convened to fill it. A plurality of legislators at the time backed white supremacist James K. Vardaman, but the fractured remainder sought to thwart his extreme racial policies. A majority united behind Percy to block Vardaman's appointment. Percy became the last senator chosen by the Mississippi legislature, prior to the adoption of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution mandating popular election of senators.
Percy held office until 1913. In 1912 he was challenged in the Democratic Primary under the new direct elections system by the populist Vardaman, whose campaign Theodore Bilbo managed, stressing class tensions and racial segregation. The tactic resulted in defeat for Percy, who was attacked as a representative of the aristocracy and for taking a progressive stance on race relations; advocating education for blacks working to improve race relations by appealing to the planters’ sense of noblesse oblige.
Percy retired from politics to run his model plantation at Trail Lake and to practice law for railroads and banks. British investors hired him to manage the largest cotton plantation in the country[citation needed], for which he received 10% of the profits.
In 1922 he rose to national prominence when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to set up in Washington County, Mississippi. On March 1, 1922 the Klan attempted to hold a recruiting session at the Greenville courthouse. Percy arrived there during a speech by Klan leader Joseph Camp attacking blacks, Jews, and Catholics. After Camp finished, Percy approached the podium and proceeded to dismantle Camp's speech to thunderous applause, concluding with the plea "Friends, let this Klan go somewhere else where it will not do the harm that it will in this community. Let them sow dissension in some community less united than is ours."
After Percy stepped down, an ally of his in the audience rose to put forth a resolution, secretly written by Percy, condemning the Klan. The resolution passed and Camp ceased his efforts to establish the Klan in Washington County. Percy's speech and victory drew praise from newspapers around the nation.
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[edit] Involvement in the 1927 Flood
During the 1927 flood, to save the land, frantic efforts to raise the levee by stacking sand bags on the top were begun. Charles Williams was an employee of former Mississippi Senator Percy's on one of the largest cotton plantations in the Delta. He set up camps on the levee protecting Greenville, complete with field kitchens and tents, for thousands of plantation workers - all African Americans - to live as the men handled sand bags.
The river, not the men, won the battles. On April 21, 1927 it broke through the levees. Major John C. H. Lee, the Army district engineer at Vicksburg (and in World War II in command of the Services of Supply in the European Theater of Operations--there the chief quartermaster and called by the enlisted men, who halted hated him, "Jesus Christ Himself Lee" wired the chief of the Corps of Engineers, General Edwin Jadwin, "Levee broke ... crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."
The crevasse, just upriver from Greenville was huge, a 100-foot (30 m) channel half a mile in width. Water poured through, more than double the amount of Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper river ever. In 10 days it covered one million acres (4,000 km²) with water 10 feet deep--and the crevasse continued to pour water for months.
Panic. Hundreds of workers on the levee climbed into a barge below the break to escape. A tugboat tried to push the vessel downstream, but the flow through the crevasse pulled it upstream. One white man called out "Let's put all the niggers on the barge and cut it loose." Another man, Charlie Gibson, interceeded. "We ain't goin' to cut the barge loose. I'll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together."
Senator Percy's son Will, a World War I hero and a noted poet, took charge of the Red Cross relief efforts for the blacks stuck on the levee. His first impulse was to evacuate them on steamers.
The planters protested. They persuaded Le Roy Percy to instruct his son to leave those blacks on the levee. Cotton was the principal, indeed almost the only crop grown in the Delta. Cotton was labor intensive--it was planted, cultivated, and picked by hand. The planters grew rich because of it. The workers got $1 a day for their sunrise to sunset labor.
The planters knew that if the blacks got out of the Delta, they would never return. They had nothing to come back to and anyplace was better than the Delta. Keep them here, the planters declared. Le Roy Percy backed them. Will Percy, after some feeble protests about putting their own economic welfare ahead of people's lives, gave in.
In 1942, those same planters, or their sons, paid the local police to patrol the Illionois Central railroad depots to prevent the blacks from getting on the train to go to Chicago, where they could get work at, for them, big wages, in the war industries. In 1944 the first cotton picking machine came to the Delta. By 1945, the planters were buying one-way tickets to Chicago for the blacks.
On the levee the blacks filled and stacked sandbags, for which Percy set a pay scale of 75 cents per day. Those who were put to unloading and distributing Red Cross food parcels, which were starting to come to Greenville by barge to feed 180,000 people and thousands of animals.
Percy ordered all Greenville blacks to the levee. The camp stretched seven miles. Percy ordered that all the Red Cross work be done for free. There were too few tents, not enough food, no eating utensils or mess hall. Black men were not allowed to leave--those who tried were driven back at gunpoint by the National Guard.
The food they received was inferior to what the whites got. Canned peaches came in, but were not distributed to blacks for fear it would "spoil them. Whites kept the good Red Cross food for themselves. Giving it to the blacks, one white man explained, "would simply teach them a lot of expensive habits".
[edit] Children
Percy was the father of poet William Alexander Percy as well as the great-uncle and adoptive grandfather of famed novelist Walker Percy.
[edit] Legacy
Leroy Percy State Park, a state park in Mississippi, is named after him.
[edit] Other Percys
- Charles "Don Carlos" Percy
- Sarah Dorsey
- Kate Ferguson
- Eleanor Percy Lee
- Thomas George Percy
- Walker Percy
- William Alexander Percy
- Catherine Anne Warfield
[edit] Bibliography
- Baker, Lewis. The Percys of Mississippi: Politics and Literature in the New South. LSU Press, 1983.
- Barry, John. Rising Tide. New York, Simon&Schuster, 1998.
- Kirwan, Albert Dennis. The Revolt of the Rednecks. P. Smith, 1964.
- Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. New York, Knopf, 1941. (Reprinted with new introduction by Walker Percy, LSU Press, 1973).
- Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.
[edit] External links
- Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress
- American Experience: "Fatal Flood" - bio and involvement in the Mississippi Flood of 1927
- 1927 Flood
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