LeRoy Percy

LeRoy Percy (November 9, 1860December 24, 1929) was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator from the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.

Percy was a grandson of Charles "Don Carlos" Percy. He 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. He was admitted to the bar later that year and achieved wealth as an attorney. Often being paid in land, he became a major planter in Greenville, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. His plantation of Trail Lake eventually covered 20,000 acres and was worked by black sharecroppers and Italian immigrants. He also leased land in Chicot County in the Arkansas Delta.

Percy's influence led him to become active in politics. He was elected by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1910. In 1912, he was defeated in the first popular election of a U.S. 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. Vardaman, also a Democrat, ran unopposed in the general election.

In 1922, Percy came to national notice by confronting Ku Klux Klan organizers in Greenville and uniting local people against them. During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Percy appointed his son, William Alexander Percy, to direct the work of thousands of black laborers on the levees near Greenville. Provided by Wikipedia