- [Announcer] "Percy Green" Man of Action" made possible by a generous gift made in memory of Mr.

and Mrs.

Theodore P. Desloge, Jr., and the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation.

(no audio) (no audio) - ACTION was a civil rights human rights protest organization.

And our thinking at the time was there was a drastic need for confrontational politics here.

Our role was one of developing issues, trying to convey those issues to the larger community, and to punish the adversary.

- And to the punish the-- - That's right.

To punish the adversary.

(audience laughing) (lively music) - Genius.

He is an organizational genius.

When it comes to tactics and strategy, he's a genius.

- I think of him as an artist.

He really was thinking in much more creative ways than anybody in the Civil Rights Movement.

- He was a visionary way before his time, and I think he's an incredible missionary for human justice.

- Percy Green is somebody for whom the presence of injustice is not psychically bearable for him.

He's a man who dedicated his life to the struggle, and still does.

- You can't talk about St.

Louis without hearing someone talk about the name of Percy Green.

- Percy put his life on the line.

Percy put his reputation on the line.

And for that there's really no words, almost.

To have somebody who was that committed is a reason why he is the legend that he is.

- There was never anybody like him before, and there hasn't been anybody like him since.

When we call him an icon, that's not hyperbole, it's who he is.

(lively music continues) (no audio) - And I'm looking at the camera.

(steady music) I am now 88.

In a few more weeks, I'll be 89.

I was born August the 28th, 1935.

Growing up in St.

Louis, I visited the white community when I was selling papers.

My father at the time, he told me that "This is the white neighborhood.

"You don't go over there.

"You stay on this side of the street."

Now, we could sell papers, but then after we sold the papers like a Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then it would be in your best interests to not be in that neighborhood.

- St.

Louis was segregated.

St.

Louis is very southern as far as race is concerned.

Now, it was different in that we didn't necessarily have the Jim Crow laws that they had in Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama.

But just because those laws were not there, it does not mean that it didn't exist.

Black people and white people knew that there were certain places that Black people could not go.

(soft music) Well, St.

Louis was what the activist Margaret Bush Wilson called a Northern city with a Southern exposure.

So, the place that Percy Green grew up was a place that was fiercely segregated But, as the saying goes, African-Americans in St.

Louis turned segregation into congregation.

The neighborhoods were full of Black joy and Black greatness.

These are neighborhoods that nurtured young Black geniuses like Percy Green.

(steady music) - [Percy] I had graduated from Vashon High School, January 1954.

Started work at McDonnell Douglas in 1956.

I became acquainted with a person that was working at McDonnell's, was a white guy, and he was going to CORE meetings, and he asked me to attend.

- CORE is the Congress of Racial Equality.

They're primarily concerned with the kind of respectability politics in which the businesses that are not hiring Black workers or not serving Black customers need to be confronted and sort of formally picketed or boycotted.

And this all comes to a head at the Jefferson Bank protest.

- [Man] Jefferson Bank was a bank in which a lot of the African American people in St.

Louis had their money, but there were no Black tellers at the bank.

(lively music) - [Percy] So the leadership in CORE then said, "We were going to demand "that they hire four Black tellers at Jefferson Bank."

(lively music continues) - Percy and I were both at the meeting the night before the Jefferson Bank demonstration.

And the lawyer that was a member of CORE, Charlie Oldham, didn't think we should violate a court order against the demonstration at the bank.

And Charlie, as a lawyer, told us that you really can't go against the court's injunction.

And I remember that Percy said, "No, we're gonna go."

(lively music continues) - [Man] Jefferson Bank protest kicked off with marches in front of the bank.

And as it went on, it became more and more confrontational.

One day the activists would lie down on Jefferson Avenue and shut down traffic.

One day they would lie down in the parking lot and shut down the bank.

One day they would occupy the lobby of the bank.

- Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the court's order.

It is very clear that you are not obeying this order.

And we ask you, as officers and employees of this bank, to please leave our premises forthwith.

♪ We shall not, we shall not be moved ♪ ♪ We shall not, we shall not be moved ♪ ♪ Just like a tree that's planted by the water ♪ - [Gwen] Jefferson Bank protest turned out to be the largest civil rights demonstration in the history of St.

Louis.

This was different because they started arresting people.

500 people is a lot of people to arrest.

And, of course, it went on longer than any other demonstration, seven months.

And of course, the bank finally did give in.

(funky music) - After the Jefferson Bank, there was a dispute as to whether or not CORE should abandon direct action protests because of the expenditures and the hardship that it puts on groups with people going to jail and having to pay the fines and so on and so forth.

- Eventually, there was a split within CORE between people who favored more engagement with the white capitalist class and who thought those people could be brought around to pursuing economic justice or a proxy for economic justice in the form of hiring more Black people.

Percy and a number of the other members of CORE began to favor a strategy of more direct action.

- Percy was really the theorist that we all were listening to in CORE, at least the younger people, not the older people, but the younger people were listening to Percy.

He had ideas about using the media to amplify the message we were trying to get across.

And a lot of the older demonstrations weren't covered by the media.

No one was notifying the media, and there wasn't much drama to a lot of them.

People marching around in circles, not very newsworthy.

So Percy had a very keen instinct for how to get the media to cover the message.

- I was able to determine that the news media, too, was part of the white power structure.

And I also know that they liked to play the race card.

So a lot of times during my demonstrations, I point out the fact to them that, "Hey, news media, "we're gonna have some Black folks arrested."

Then the news director, he's gonna have a camera crew there.

- He was such a skilled image manipulator.

And at the time, Percy wants to create a group that is much more confrontational, that's going to create more resonant images and get more attention.

- Well, myself and about 25 other Black and whites that were in CORE, we decided to formulate this other organization, ACTION.

ACTION stood for Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes.

It was a Black-led interracial protest organization.

But we were proactive as opposed to reactive based upon the mandate that we set for ourselves.

(steady music) - It was important to me to be part of ACTION at the beginning.

It felt significant that we could be a secondary player in the Civil Rights Movement.

We didn't have to be the people out front.

That the Black people were perfectly capable of organizing and carrying out protests.

- I was really interested in an organization that was Black-led but wanted white allies and wanted white participation 'cause I was white.

So I went to the first ACTION meeting, and Percy's extremely charismatic, and I was just in the first meeting.

He did listen to other people, but he also made it clear he was in charge.

- Black people were told that we were intellectually inferior, that we were not capable of leadership, and he wanted to just tear that stereotype apart.

- I was in ACTION from 1968 to 1974.

I lived in an apartment building, and one of the people in the apartment building was one of the activists in ACTION.

He persuaded me to go along to some of the meetings, and at that point I was hooked.

In fact, it was through Percy that I learned a lot about what was happening that I didn't see as a white middle-class person.

- I wanted to be active in the community, so it sounded like an organization that I wanted to get involved in because it was not just rhetoric, it was actually action.

It was actually being in the community, writing press statements.

It was targeting companies that, in fact, were practicing racial discrimination.

- We targeted the utility companies.

Whereas the NAACP, Urban Leagues were fighting for Blacks in professional jobs, we felt that there were plenty regular jobs that paid a decent salary like telephone installers, meter readers, that if blacks had a fair opportunity at these particular jobs, that we could develop a sound Black community where a family structure could be viable.

We know for the most part that the majority of the jobs that exist, it takes only a normal average intelligence.

But when, (clears throat), whenever a negro go and apply for a job, the first thing he want to do is he wanna tell you that you're not qualified.

Now, what does that mean?

You know, how much intelligence does one need in order to install a telephone?

You only have about four or five wires.

And you know, if one does it long enough, you know, it's just like walking, just like a baby walk.

I mean, how does a person walk?

You only do it by, you only learn by practice.

(lively music) - My dad used to drill it in me: Equal paying jobs for Black men so they can take care of their family.

That's what he was fighting for.

Don't have any money, how can you take care of your kids?

How can you take care of your family?

How can you take care of yourself?

And so, when you rob a person of, being able to do economics, then what else do they have other than the streets?

- He certainly saw it as critical in the sense that the Black men were not getting the good enough jobs in order to support a family.

His emphasis on good paying jobs for Black men, and compared to today's attitudes, that seems a bit... a bit reactionary, but it wasn't reactionary then at all.

- Percy's politics were very much formed, and his outlook is very much tied to notions of the nuclear family.

A father at the head of the household, a wife who keeps the household, and the children who are being raised by the wealth created by the father's job.

That schema is what Percy in his activism has always tried to apply to the Black community.

And so in the aftermath of the war when St.

Louis is being de-industrialized and those jobs are going away, you can see how the domino effect of the father loses his job, the household falls apart.

That's where the suffering of poverty comes in.

So if we could fix that first link, maybe we could change the way things are going.

- Putting that focus on economics, putting that focus on jobs, that's important because if you're not able to take care of yourself, if you don't have the means to live a decent life, you'll never be equal.

- The entire structure of ACTION was focused on getting Black people jobs within the existing economy.

So it was an organization that was particularly focused on economic justice and defined economic justice as ending discrimination in employment in St.

Louis.

So at this time, the Arch was under construction, and of all the workers being employed on the Arch, none of them were Black.

And so Percy's protest was, there should be 10% Black workers employed in building the Arch.

And that then spun off into one of the great civil disobedient actions in the history of the United States.

- [Reporter] Led by former CORE member Percy Green, ACTION's first direct confrontation was climbing the Gateway Arch.

On July 14th, 1964, Green and activist Richard Daly spent four hours on a construction ladder, about 100 feet up the Arch.

(flowing music) - Yeah, this is where the ladder was.

Going up to the 300-foot mark.

I just can't believe that it's been 60 years, you know?

And it seems like to me right now, it was just only a few weeks ago that Daly and I carried on this protest.

- They had an elevator bolted to the side of the ladder.

And it was a policeman actually who came up and said, "You have to come down now."

And we said, "No, we don't."

(chuckles) - When the policeman came up to try to talk us down, I told him we were gonna remain there until 1,000 Blacks were hired in all job classifications within the construction industry.

- What are they trying to prove?

What is it that they are seeking in this particular type of demonstration?

- Well, this is their method of calling attention to the fact that they want jobs.

They feel that this hit-and-miss proposition is no good, that's the words that Mr.

Green used, and that they want a lot of jobs.

They feel they're entitled to a lot of jobs and they want them now.

- I knew I had to be down and arrested and bonded out so I could be at work on time at McDonnell Douglas.

I was on the midnight to seven in the morning shift.

So we climbed the Arch at about 12 o'clock noon, and we remained there until about six o'clock.

(steady music) - [Percy] When I came down, I went limp, informing the authorities that I was not going to walk to jail because whatever crime that I'm supposed to have committed, the crime of them denying Black folks decent paying jobs is a greater crime than what crime that I'm being charged with.

I was placed under arrest immediately, but Daly, he was not placed under arrest immediately.

So that's why in the pictures that he is still standing.

It wasn't until he was informed that he too was gonna be arrested before he went limp.

And so we both had to be carried away to jail.

The government was embarrassed and they then ordered to get some Black contractors on the job as well as some workers.

- It takes a lot of planning to climb that Arch and make it successful.

Not just that he did it, but that he was successful in doing it.

That was impressive.

That to me made Percy Green more than just a civil rights activist.

Percy Green became a hero.

(soft music) - 30 days after the Arch, I then learned from McDonnell that they were gonna have a layoff, and I happened to be one of the ones being laid off.

That layoff took place on my 29th birthday, August the 28th of 1964.

(dramatic music) - McDonnell Douglas is an aerospace company based out of St.

Louis, and was the number one employer in Missouri.

They had tens of thousands of employees, and almost exclusively the janitorial staff was Black and that was the only job for African Americans in the company.

Percy Green is an anomaly in this because he goes to technical school and gets hired as an engineer for McDonnell Douglas while he is also participating in his political career.

- Anybody in St.

Louis, white or Black, who understood how St.

Louis worked in the mid sixties, knew that he had been fired because of his activism.

That struggle over the terms of the reason for Percy Green's firing at McDonnell Douglas became the basis of Green versus McDonnell, which was an unfair employment practices lawsuit that Green filed against McDonnell Douglas that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

(tense music) - My father was Percy's attorney, and I was there in the courtroom in the Supreme Court the day that my father argued that case.

- [Louis] In August of 1964, when this totem pole was drawn up, the vice president of McDonnell Douglas drew a line over Green's name, and he was the highest senior man in a whole department of 100 white men in a research department, the only Black man, and they drew the line over his name as the man to be laid off.

- When the decision came down, unanimous, nine-zero in favor of Green, it was like an explosion.

(people cheering) (people applauding) No one could have predicted that.

- I never thought that the courts was ever going to be supportive of a person like me.

And keep in mind that it was my case of Green versus McDonnell made it possible to be able to prove racial discrimination.

- Up to this time, the offending party had to basically admit that they were discriminating, which, of course, is ridiculous.

Of course, they're not gonna admit it.

Well, the Supreme Court agreed with Percy that if there's enough evidence to demonstrate discrimination, then you don't have to admit it.

It's obvious.

You've admitted it in your actions.

- It changed the landscape of race discrimination and employment in this country.

And it created a world of affirmative action within employment that exists and is still controversial to this day.

(soft tense music fades) (funky music) - We was deeply involved with ACTION.

We was one of the so-called upper echelon members of ACTION.

- [Percy] Carr twins was very much active in our regular protest demonstrations, but they were mainly the leaders of our Guerrilla Force.

That was our youth organization.

The establishment had the American Boy Scouts and ACTION had ACTION's Guerrilla Force.

We was teaching them about civil disobedience, and they participated very actively in our church demonstrations.

(soft music) - We had priests, we had nuns who were part of our organization.

If there were any doubt about what the prejudice were within the various religious groups in St.

Louis, we learned from people that were from within that whatever thoughts we had, whatever our perceptions were, were accurate.

And probably what went on internally were worse than what we thought.

- We discovered that they were profiting from racism in terms of the housing and property ownership, and we wanted them to cease and desist.

And so we used to carry on some disruptions of the denominations, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Jewish community, and then we switched over and hit the Black churches.

- He was equally critical of the Black churches for not protesting.

And this group of young Black guys took part in criticizing them.

Obviously, white folks going in to criticize them would not have gone over very well.

(steady organ music) - We went into the Negro churches, and here they had statues of Jesus Christ being white.

So we went in and painted them black.

Remember, we felt as if that, why should these churches continue not to pay any taxes to the community, when they have all of this investment in businesses where they were profiting as well.

So that's a question that some of us have to this day.

(bell tolling) (film reel whirring) (TV static hissing) - What we're doing right now is we're doing a reconnaissance, searching for some Wonder Bread or Hostess trucks in the neighborhood.

And what we plan to do is to let them lead us to the stores that they are still putting the bread in.

And we're boycotting all Wonder Bread and Hostess product for fair and equal employment for Blacks.

We plan to visit a couple of other stores that we know that is still carrying the product and we will go in and ask the merchant once again to withdraw the product.

- We were protesting Wonder Bread and Hostess Cupcakes for more and better paying job for Black males, but the overwhelming effects of our boycott engaged in the trucks in the community that was delivering Wonder Bread and Hostess.

- I remember reading a flyer where they had this campaign against Wonder Bread for not hiring Black people, and they were passing out these flyers telling people just not necessarily their members, but just people, "Hey, you see a Wonder Bread truck, "let the air out of the tires."

- We would follow it around.

Once the driver get out to deliver the bread or Twinkies or cupcakes, that's where we took the stems out of it.

So when he came back out, that mean he was on a flat.

That was a funny thing to see, the Wonder Bread truck leaning.

- With that strategy, you start to see a little bit of the kind of comedic element creeping in.

So climbing the Arch, that's spectacular and disruptive.

But with this attack on Wonder Bread, there's a little bit of the prankster element coming into Green's activism.

And then it was that prankster element that started to characterize a lot of the other actions.

- ACTION protested Union Electric right along with the Laclede Gas and Southwestern Bell.

And we announced to all three companies that we were going to carry on acts of civil disobedience, but we kept them guessing.

- Union Electric, I mean this is beautiful action.

They walk in, look like maintenance men.

They spray ammonia all over the place.

And the idea is they're gonna clean up the racism, right?

A group of Black people who have been caricatured in the history of St.

Louis and the history of the United States as being dirty, being disorderly, they're gonna walk into Union Electric and clean it up.

But it's like the revenge of the maintenance men.

The maintenance men are not here to work for you.

They're not here to live in proximity to your dirt.

It's you who's dirty, and they're gonna clean you up.

- At Southwestern Bell ACTION protestors got into the offices and poured molasses all over.

And it was a stick in because racism is sticky.

And the message is that racist hiring practices and the way that the structure of St.

Louis businesses were, was actually hurting everybody.

By not integrating, you were slowing things down.

By not acting as one community, you're getting in your own way.

- I guess the only protest that I ever felt that Percy went too far with, I think it was Laclede Gas.

(funky music) - It doesn't get any better than the stinking.

Racism stinks, you know.

Laclede Gas is a degraded company that will not hire Black people.

Walks in there with buckets of dog (bleep) and smears it all over the walls.

- [Percy] We walk right on past the security with the buckets, and then we dipped our paint brushes down in it and put it all on the windows, "Tired of your bull (bleep)."

We printed on the windows.

Well, folks were shocked.

They couldn't believe what they were seeing, you know.

- It's an action which is so noteworthy that people had to talk about it.

All of a sudden, everything that polite white Midwestern society didn't wanna talk about, injustice, black people, black radicalism, black uprising, and most of all, (bleep), all of a sudden they had to talk about it.

(funky music continues) (funky music ends) - Sometimes I think with Percy, his antics were so out there that the message got lost.

So, I think in that sense there were parts of Percy that would do anything to get the attention to the issues that he was trying to get across.

And so it didn't stem from a lot of the more traditional mechanisms that some of the other sort of more staid civil rights advocates might have taken.

- We have to understand what was happening in the mid-century in St.

Louis, and how much of an emergency it was for the Black community.

We're talking about a part of the city on the north side that was all being systematically destroyed by the St.

Louis City elites.

And Percy's protest of this comes towards the upper middle section of it in which the pain and the violence that's being done in North St.

Louis are not being heard by anyone.

It is a real five-alarm fire that's happening economically.

So any protest or any amount of calling attention to that emergency, I think is pretty warranted.

(commanding music) - This is VP headquarters where the history of the VP Ball and Parade are preserved for future generations.

The year was 1878, and if you were among the St.

Louis elite, the outstretched arms of the Royal Messenger would've invited you to that first VP Ball.

The mystery of the Veiled Prophet was the talk of the town.

- The Veiled Prophet is a mascot for a men's club, and this men's club goes all the way back to the 1870s.

And this men's club is full of the city elites, and they're all in the Veiled Prophet Society together, in a big club that you and I are not invited to join.

(flowing orchestral music) - It's rituals include a debutante ball, a parade, and the annual revealing of a Veiled Prophet.

And so when they say veiled, what they mean is that this is somebody who comes out dressed up in some kind of weird orientalist robe with a mask on, with a full kind of, I mean, I'm really, really trying not to say the word Klan, but the robes from the beginning were reminiscent of the sort of hooded robes worn by the Klan.

- It was unmistakably KKK leaning.

Certainly, like if I were to make a drawing what a KKK face covering looked like, it would be just what the Veiled Prophet wore.

And I'd put some sequins and jewels on it and little glitter and I'd have it.

And the fact this was an all-white Christian organization, it'd be very hard to find another interpretation.

- There was no more pronounced embodiment of white privilege than the Veiled Prophet Ball.

They didn't take Jews, they didn't take Blacks.

So to take down this example of white supremacy, it's paramount for Percy.

I mean, it's the perfect foil for him.

And yeah, he was gonna get 'em.

- [Percy] We saw the Veiled Prophet as a symbol of all of the things that we were fighting.

And we always said that when we picketed the ball, that we would unveil it.

(funky music) - Of course, I mean that brought about laughter to the people as they entered the VP in their tuxedos and all of the other.

Never in their mind that they ever thought that we would ever come upon the wherewithal to do it.

And neither did we at the time.

But this particular year, 1972 I believe it was, through the mail we received what appeared to be invitations.

- Someone, who I still do not know who the someone is, gave Percy two tickets to the Veiled Prophet event at Kiel Auditorium.

I don't know what the discussion was that made Percy choose Gena Scott and me to do it.

Partly because we were white, because we were young, because we could look the part and we were both pretty gutsy and we were seasoned.

We had participated in a number of events with ACTION.

(veiled music) - [Walter] Gena Scott and Jane Sauer infiltrated the ball.

And at one moment, Jane Sauer went down to one end of the auditorium and threw out leaflets and caused a sensation down at that end of the auditorium.

- [Percy] So Gena then come upon these stage cables that was located close to the balcony, and then she comes down and then one of the cables broke from the wall and she fell about six feet, knocking the wind out of her.

- [Jane] But even though she was in a lot of pain, she jumped up and she just grabbed his veil and pulled it off of him.

- [Percy] And the people throughout the whole entire Kiel Auditorium said, "Ooh."

- From ACTION standpoint, this was highly successful in that for the first time in the newspaper, instead of the front page being filled with pictures of the queen and the Veiled Prophet, it was filled with the unveiling.

Subsequent to all this publicity, of course they identified us, Gena's car was set on fire, and the outside of her home was vandalized.

She received a number of threatening phone calls.

- The level of payback, they're bombing a woman's car because she pulled a satin hood off a old man at a debutante ball, it's ridiculous, it's absurd.

It's a massive overreaction.

It shows the humorlessness and the self-importance of the white leaders of the city.

(tense music) - Two years before the whole Veiled Prophet thing, my husband received a letter in the mail, "Dear Mr.

Simon, "look man, I guess your old lady doesn't get enough at home "or she wouldn't be shucking and jiving "with our black men in ACTION, you dig?

"Like all she wants to integrate is the bedroom, "and us Black sisters ain't gonna take no second best "from our men.

"So lay it on her, man, our get her the hell off Newstead.

"A soul sister."

(tense music fades) - [Percy] They called them poison pen letters that the FBI sent to the married members to try to create problems within the organization.

- There's no question that there were informants inside of ACTION.

COINTELPRO was very active here in St.

Louis, specifically under J. Wallace LaPrade, who was an acolyte of J. Edgar Hoover's.

- Hoover was the director of the FBI from its foundation up through the mid 1970s.

And COINTELPRO was sort of Hoover's little secret kingdom of surveillance, blackmail, manipulation.

- COINTELPRO refers to the counterintelligence program.

This is a FBI program that is an unprecedented amount of surveillance that was conducted against the counterculture in the 1960s, the new left.

It was a coordinated effort with field offices in St.

Louis and Minneapolis, Chicago, New York.

All of these field agents would survey their local landscape and pick out individuals to keep track of and build case files on.

- They thought Percy Green had the potential to become like a black messiah.

They were afraid of his power, much as they were afraid of a Malcolm X's power, and that what he could do.

So they wanted to stop these people and these movements because they saw them as dangerous.

- Percy obviously, as the head of ACTION, was a primary target.

But St.

Louis was, oddly enough, one of the places that Hoover believed was a real hotbed of political activity, and political activity that Hoover himself was going to stop.

- That letter was written by the J. Edgar Hoover office.

It was never written by females in ACTION.

But the St.

Louis office had told the federal office that if they could have me get divorced, which they knew that my marriage was in difficulty, that ACTION would lose a vital member and it would further disable the organization.

It led to a lot of very unsettled feelings.

I think there was a tremendous effort on the part of the government to destroy this organization.

(tense music continues) (tense music continues) - The Globe-Democrat, they wanted to say that we were communists and that we, that the white folks were running the group.

And they tried to distort it and tried to demean the group.

(soft tense music) - The Globe-Democrat was the conservative newspaper, the conservative voice in St.

Louis.

Of course, they were hostile to Percy Green and ACTION.

They were hostile to any kind of progressive movements.

Very biased, I think that's a kind way of saying it.

- [Walter] There was actually a behind-the-scenes collaboration between the FBI and the St.

Louis Globe-Democrat to plant stories and to hype up the notion that ACTION was a communist infiltrated organization.

- The Globe-Democrat talks about Percy Green in explicitly antagonistic ways.

They recommend that the police teach him a lesson through violence.

- [Walter] The Globe-Democrat actually published an editorial where they called on the St.

Louis Police to beat Percy Green up.

That's a newspaper that is actively cooperating with J. Edgar Hoover.

(tense music) - A policeman named Dale Meyers pulled me over and put a gun up to my head after learning that I was Percy Green.

And Dale Meyers kept looking around.

He was trying to get up enough nerve to pull the trigger.

I went limp, he ran and called backup to have me arrested.

And then after they picked me up, since I wouldn't walk to the cruiser, he then hit me about four or five times in the stomach with the billy club.

(tense music continues) (tense music fades) (no audio) - [Interviewer] Did Percy ever talk to you about his personal life?

- No, I don't know anything about Percy's personal life.

- [Interviewer] Did Percy ever talk to you guys about his personal life?

- Not really, no.

- [Interviewer] Has Percy ever talked to you about his personal life?

- Never.

Never.

At that time, the FBI was attacking families, and Percy did not want his family exposed 'cause he was extremely active in participating in all types of forms of protests.

And many families were destroyed.

And I never heard him talk about his personal life.

- There was a campaign of harassment that is designed to politicize somebody's own domestic life, to continually set up a set of questions, to set up domestic tension, to try and make it seem as if their activism, which is of course being carried out to make everybody's lives better, is making the lives of those people closest to the activist worse.

- Agents would call Percy's house and they would tell his wife that he was dead and that she had to come and identify him.

That constant repetition of always being afraid that this is the day that you get the call hurt Percy and his marriage and his relationship to other people.

(poignant music) - My son's mother, they called her a number of times late at night for her to come to the morgue to claim the body.

And that became overbearing for her and our young son, so we thought it would be best that we would part company.

- Betti seemed to lead her own life very separate from Percy's.

And Percy got a lot of attention in the local newspapers and sometimes in national newspapers, and there were a lot of people that hated him.

And I... I was always kind of under the impression that was hard for Betti.

- I'm sure it was real difficult for him being out there in the streets and protesting and arrest, and... I mean, that can be very, very stressful, high anxiety on the family.

And so, I'm sure that was very, very hard for her to deal with.

And obviously she didn't wanna continue to deal with that kind of stuff.

- There's a long and storied history of civil rights action in St.

Louis that involves being arrested and going to the Workhouse.

The Workhouse is a prison that was just recently closed.

But the strategy of protests hinges on being arrested.

Percy was arrested over a hundred times.

- [Walter] This is somebody who's going continually to the Workhouse.

The Workhouse, it's a form of environmental torture.

It's freezing during the winter and it's sweltering during the summer.

And Percy was going there four or five times a year.

I think at some point he did a 90-day stretch in the Workhouse for a civil disobedience action.

- It is astounding to me how many protests that Percy was involved in, how many times he went to jail, how many times he went to court.

It takes a toll on your body and on your mind.

And I think when I joined ACTION, Percy was not putting himself out there as much as when he was younger.

(tense music continues) (dramatic music) (no audio) - There is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St.

Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.

(steady music) - ACTION had dealt with police brutality and police abuse of authority in shooting youngsters and so on and so forth.

But the Michael Brown murder gave me an opportunity to see how others will step up to the plate and do things.

- If you look at the idioms of protest in Ferguson, the sitting down in the streets and stopping traffic, that's a 1960s St.

Louis tactic.

That's the Jefferson Bank struggle.

But there's a connection between Percy Green to a lot of the young activists who were on the street in Ferguson.

- Percy mentored a lot of us during that Ferguson days and told us what to look out for when you take to the streets.

First off, your safety.

First off, the safety of not just yourself, but others around you.

How do you do it?

By being smart, by being safe, but also ensuring that your message, you get across.

And that's a great thing about having legends still in the movement that is willing to give that knowledge and that support and be a role model.

(steady music continues) (poignant music) - I have always felt that Percy never did get his compensation for what he has sacrificed in his life.

Constantly, he was struggling to find employment.

But again, because he was so outspoken, individuals did not want to hire him.

- He never sold out.

I mean, he never tried to monetize the work that he did.

I don't think he cared about that.

He realized that he needed to make a living, of course, you need money to live in this society, but he wasn't willing to sacrifice his principles or what he believed in.

He sacrificed the paycheck.

- He saw a bigger mission in life than gaining political power, than gaining popularity, than gaining money.

He could have had all those things.

He could have easily had all those things.

He's smart as a whip.

I think he could have done anything he wanted to do.

But he really sacrificed.

He sacrificed a marriage, he sacrificed his life to do this.

- I think of somebody who is selfless.

If it wasn't for Percy, a lot of people would not be on the job sites that they are on making the type of wages that they're making now because he pushed a needle like no other person did in this region.

- Percy was good for the community, good for the city of St.

Louis, and he should be respected for it and honored for what he did.

And I think that's one of the reasons why the people got jobs at Laclede Gas, at Union Electric, as of the day, because of what Percy did.

- Percy Green altered the landscape for African Americans in this nation, whether it was through the courts or through his political activities.

And that is absolutely undeniable.

- What Percy represents is a very, very strong aspect of a call for economic justice that has been left out of many of our histories of civil rights, which have focused on the struggle to integrate public accommodations and the struggle for voting rights.

Both of those leave out the struggle for economic justice.

And so Percy focused on the economic aspect of the inequality in our society, which is the very place that the leaders of our society don't want us to look.

And I think that's precisely the reason that there's been so much silence around his legacy.

- He has a legacy that is unparalleled as far as I'm concerned.

And it's not over yet.

(chuckles) It's still going.

- 89 years old, still going to it.

He's not gonna stop until the good Lord takes him from this place.

It is who he is.

It's what he was meant to do on this Earth.

- I think it's just in his blood, you can say.

He gotta be out there doing something.

And protest is the way, it's what he does.

- This is his life's work.

His life's work is to communicate the problems of St.

Louis and the things that need to change to the power structure.

For an 89-year-old guy to be out there with a bullhorn, that's where he draws energy from.

And I think we still gotta listen to him.

- I think he's done so much that we don't even realize.

And I know that historians for decades, decades and decades to come, are gonna be studying Percy Green.

(dramatic music continues) (dramatic music ends) (no audio) (steady soulful music) (steady soulful music continues) (steady soulful music continues) (steady soulful music continues) (steady soulful music continues) (steady soulful music continues) (steady soulful music fades) (funky music) (funky music continues) - [Announcer] "Percy Green" Man of Action" made possible by a generous gift made in memory of Mr.

and Mrs.

Theodore P. Desloge, Jr., and the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation.