1. LeRoy Percy was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator from the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.
22 Facts About LeRoy Percy
1. 2.
LeRoy Percy graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee in 1879, and the University of Virginia School of Law in 1881, where he was a member of the Chi Phi fraternity.
3.
LeRoy Percy was admitted to the bar later that year and achieved wealth as an attorney.
4.
LeRoy Percy leased land in Chicot County in the Arkansas Delta.
5.
LeRoy Percy was elected by the state legislature to the US Senate in 1910.
6.
In 1912, he was defeated in the first popular election of a US Senator in the state, by the populist James K Vardaman, a white supremacist, who attacked Percy for being relatively liberal on race issues and for being a member of the state's planter elite.
7.
In 1922, Percy came to national notice by confronting Ku Klux Klan organizers in Greenville and uniting local people against them.
8.
LeRoy Percy became an attorney in Greenville, Mississippi, the county seat of Washington County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta.
9.
LeRoy Percy gave them a better share than many others by setting up schools on the property for the children and allowing his tenants to buy land.
10.
LeRoy Percy worked to build a community on the plantation.
11.
LeRoy Percy served with distinction in World War I and was best known for his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son, but published poetry.
12.
Never married, William LeRoy Percy took in and adopted his cousin's three sons when they were orphaned as boys.
13.
The boys included Walker LeRoy Percy, who became a notable novelist and won the National Book Award for his first book, The Moviegoer.
14.
LeRoy Percy had interests in other plantations, such as by leasing Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, on the other side of the Mississippi River.
15.
In 1910, LeRoy Percy became the last senator chosen by the Mississippi legislature.
16.
The tactics caused the defeat of LeRoy Percy, who was attacked as a representative of the aristocracy of the state and for taking a progressive stance on race relations.
17.
LeRoy Percy advocated education for Black people and worked to improve race relations by appealing to the planters' sense of noblesse oblige.
18.
In 1922, LeRoy Percy rose to national prominence for confronting the Ku Klux Klan when it attempted to organize members in Washington County during the years of its revival in the South and growth in the Midwest.
19.
LeRoy Percy kept the Black workers in the area isolated on top of levees when the levee was breached.
20.
LeRoy Percy supplied the camps with field kitchens and tents for the many Black families to live while the men worked on the levee.
21.
LeRoy Percy died on Christmas Eve 1929 of a heart attack, at the age of 69.
22.
LeRoy Percy was a member of The Boston Club of New Orleans.