Reporter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, 1956-1980. Criss discussed: the pressure on white Southern newspaper reporters; the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Greenwood; the role of various white officials in Greenwood, including former City Attorney Hardy Lott and former mayor Charles Sampson; reaction to the Beckwith trial (for the murder of Medgar Evers); the membership of the White Legal Defense Fund formed to support Beckwith; Hardy Lott's influence on the Greenwood Citizens Council; Greenwood's reaction to the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the tension between large plantation owners and other civic leaders in Greenwood over the issue of recruiting manufacturing jobs to the town in the late 1940s and 1950s.
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