As an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, he attended The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as did three previous generations in his family.

Percy was a sort of godfather to the Fugitives at Vanderbilt, or Southern Agrarians, as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren often were called.

One of his poems, originally part of "In April Once", was re-published in a revised form under the name A. W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry (privately printed, New York, 1934).

During the flood, thousands of blacks, fleeing farms and plantations under water, were forced to seek refuge on the narrow rim of the levee in Greenville.

Percy believed that the Black citizens of Greenville needed to be evacuated to Vicksburg to receive better care and food, and he arranged for ships to prepare to remove them.

However, LeRoy Percy and local planters prevented the evacuation, and the Black citizens remaining on the levee were forced to work in conditions that many compared to slavery.

[3] The Colored Advisory Commission led by Robert Russa Moton, formed to investigate abuses that had taken place during the flood, named the Greenville camp as one where black refugees complained of poor treatment.