Dixie's Dirty Secret: The True Story of How the Government, the Media, and the Mob Conspired to Combat Integration and the Vietnam Antiwar M

Bound to rekindle anger over recent American history, this tersely written investigative account attempts to show how such forces as the so-called Dixie Mafia, together with such high-level institutions as Hoover's FBI, sought to halt integration in the South after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Southern writer Dickerson (North to Canada: Men and Women Against the Vietnam War) focuses on the secret spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which engaged in a slew of Keystone-cop-style tactics and dirty tricks over 17 years, including the planting of slanted stories in the media; the monitoring of the investigations of three civil rights workers slain in 1964 in order to unearth ""troublemakers""; and setting up a private bank account with the ""ability to launder money from private benefactors."" The commission was advocated by Mississippi senator James Easton--who had stumped the state by trumpeting ""You are not required to obey any court which passes out such a [integrationist] ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it""--and created in a 1956 bill submitted by Governor J.P. Coleman. Though Dickerson does a good job of detailing the commission's ugly excesses, much of his book is a rewrite of previously documented hate crimes and corruption with a not entirely credible conspiracy spin and too many ""confidential"" sources. (Sept.)