Josh Lucas plays The Firm's Mitch McDeere.
I don't know if I can stand the wait! This Sunday is the two-hour premiere of John Grisham's new television series on NBC.
Sometime back, I wrote the following blog post -- begging Grisham to write a book about Emmett Till, a book that would be made into a movie. He hasn't done this yet, but at least we now have The Firm every Sunday on television to look forward to.
Here's what I have learned, so far, about this new series (Jan. 8, 9/8 central):
Based on the blockbuster feature film and best-selling novel by world-renowned author John Grisham ("The Pelican Brief," "The Client"), "The Firm" continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel. As a young associate, McDeere brought down the prestigious Memphis law firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which operated as a front for the Chicago mob -- and his life was never the same. After a difficult decade, which included a stay in the Federal Witness Protection program, Mitch and his family now emerge from isolation to reclaim their lives and their future -- only to find that past dangers are still lurking and new threats are everywhere. "The Firm" is produced by Entertainment One in association with Sony Pictures Television and Paramount Pictures. The executive producers are Grisham, Lukas Reiter ("Law & Order," "Boston Legal"), John Morayniss ("Haven," "Hung"), Michael Rosenberg ("Hung," "Skins") and Noreen Halpern ("Rookie Blue," "Hung").
Here's my original blog post:
This is a plea to my favorite author, John Grisham. Write a book about Emmett Till – the 14-year-old Chicago, Ill. pupil brutally murdered 56 years ago while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta. You could bring us up to date on the FBI, cold cases and what went on in Sunflower County when the prosecutor would not accept help from the FBI to make the case.
It would make a wonderfully intriguing Mississippi murder mystery, since no one has ever really determined exactly what happened in those early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955 and who all was involved.
While an updated Till's story alone would make a great, new Grisham novel, what keeps me going is the murder of a Mississippi lawyer, Cleve McDowell, shot to death in his home some 42 years later – a man who was born in the same year as Till and who became a civil rights lawyer because of Emmett Till’s murder.
On the morning of March 17, 1997 the naked, lifeless body of Cleve McDowell was discovered by his youngest sister, propped up against an upstairs bathroom wall.
Throughout his Mississippi Delta home, dozens of powerful handguns and rifles –"always one within his reach" his secretary told me – had been strategically placed by McDowell for self-protection.
So why didn't McDowell use one of his guns to save his own life?
What happened to bullets taken from McDowell's body during the state's autopsy? What happened to McDowell's guns?
Why do county officials still maintain a gag order on all investigation records of this murder? How is this even possible when the man is dead?
McDowell served as a public defender in Sunflower County for three decades. He was part of a group of black leaders organizing to pressure district attorneys and revive interest in many never-prosecuted cases in which Blacks were killed for doing civil rights work, as well as the murder of Emmett Till.
For over forty years, McDowell studied hate crimes and murders taking place during the modern civil rights movement. Where is all of the information he collected about the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and so many others?
Had this Mississippi lawyer and his friend been working to solved Dr. Martin Luther King’s murder? McDowell once worked for King. He was an SCLC man and worshiped this civil rights leader.
Did his partner really commit suicide, over in Montgomery Alabama? What about the signs of torture, McDowell discovered and reported about his friend, to others?
Why did McDowell tell his closest friends that he would be next?
Why is McDowell’s name being erased from Mississippi history? Why do some Mississippi officials and reporters get so uptight when I mention his name? And why aren’t they writing about McDowell?
So many questions wait to be answered. Would John Grisham see the story emerge? I have faith that he would.
Doing research in Mississippi on people like Till or McDowell, is a challenge. I’ve had my own fights when trying to pull up records in the Magnolia state, and I will share a few...
Back in November of 2005, writing about Who killed JFK, I kept running into intriguing facts and questions involving a Vicksburg, Miss. private detective who once worked for the state’s double secret spy organization, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency formed soon after the murder of Emmett Till, partly to stave off questions from the Feds.
This detective had gone on to work for the rather famous detective agency in New Orleans that later would be linked to Kennedy’s assassination. He returned home to Vicksburg, told his son that he had learned something about the assassination that scared the hell out of him, and then… the detective “accidentally” shot himself in the groin with his rifle and died.
Sullivan's death was reported as a hunting accident, since it happened while he was cleaning his rifle after a duck hunt, the report states. Sullivan's daughter once told me she and her brother absolutely believe their father was murdered because he knew too much. “He knew enough about guns to not have an accident like that,” the daughter said.
Now THAT would be a great book for Grisham's fans. It would put this story to rest for Sullivan’s family. While JFK conspiracy theorists keep the debate alive, few mention Mississippi's links to the president’s murder. I know Grisham could make it come alive in his own unique way.
My intrigue with the Mississippi connection to JFK's assassination began while discovering information that linked a true Delta icon, U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland, to several others often associated with the tragic Dallas event, including this Vicksburg detective.
Seven years before John F. Kennedy's murder, the magnolia state's infamous senator (a Delta planter whose paths crossed with McDowell’s more than once) met for the first time with Guy Banister, a controversial CIA operative and retired FBI agent in charge of the agency’s Chicago bureau. Banister was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Eastland through involvement with Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS (sometimes called "SISSY”).
Okay, this is a little weak, but some conspiracy theorists have no trouble at all, making this connection.
Here is what I know:
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956 reported that Robert Morrison, a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi in the heart of the Delta, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours.
Describing the conference as "completely satisfactory," Morrison told the New Orleans reporter "Mr. Banister has complete liaison with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip."
Don’t you think this alone would fire up John Grisham? I sure do.
Known as a notorious political extremist who was later described as the impetus for James Garrison’s 1967-1970 Kennedy assassination probe, Banister earlier became a brief focus of Mississippi's secret spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission, when it was suggested Banister should be hired to set up an "even tighter" domestic spying system throughout the state. This report was hidden away in the state's Sovereignty Commission records.
If Mr. Grisham wants to discover more about these records, I have put up the link online at http://mississippisovereigntycommission.com and yes – I own this domain and I know, for fact, it pisses off the state library, which houses the commission’s records (at least the records that were not stolen by former state officials or the FBI).
A second Eastland operative, private investigator John D. Sullivan, the detective from Vicksburg who was mysteriously killed after JFK’s assassination, made this suggestion (to hire Banister) to the Sovereignty Commission just months after the JFK assassination, also reported in released Sovereignty Commission records.
Sullivan once worked for Banister (both inside the FBI, as an agent, and then privately, in New Orleans) and also as a private self-employed investigator for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Sullivan got around -- he also worked for the private white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member; and for Eastland’s SISS, as had Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Citizens Councils (and Grisham writes about them) came together after Brown V. Topeka Board of Education. Everyone in Mississippi was madder than hell about the Court’s decision to open up schools to black children, and so the Councils formed to “let others know what a good job Mississippi is doing with its segregation” and of course, to fend off any attempts to integrate.
The Councils, in effect, were the uptown Klan, as one famous Mississippi journalist, Hodding Carter, Jr., would write. For a few years, Councils got their money from the Sovereignty Commission, which received and channeled money to them through a famous New York financier (per Sovereignty Commission records). Oh, it gets so sticky in Mississippi.
When Sullivan reportedly shot himself soon after the Kennedy assassination, Sovereignty Commission investigators went to his widow and tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were either reportedly burned by his widow or they had been lent out, and she “could not remember” who had them, Sovereignty Commission files once again disclose.
Some twenty-nine years later, in testimony before the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board during a Dallas hearing on November 18, 1994, the late Senator Eastland was directly implicated in the president’s assassination by one of the author/theorists invited to testify.
"Lee Harvey Oswald was quite possibly an agent of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and he was doing the bidding of [Sen. Thomas J. Dodd and Eastland and Morrison,” author John McLaughlin swore. Of course, McLaughlin has been vilified repeatedly since he made that statement. This guy would be a great character in a Grisham novel.
But back to Mississippi and the fight over McDowell and Eastland secret records.
Documentation that could support or even discredit such assertions as McLaughlin’s might have been found in the Eastland archives at the University of Mississippi, but for many years, no objective scholar was allowed to search these archives since the day they arrived on campus. I was told that the well-known Mississippi newspaper investigative reporter, Jerry Mitchell, was allowed to go through the Eastland papers at will, threatening to report some nasty stuff if he was not allowed to do this at his pleasure.
Once I tried to blow past the law school’s dean who was in charge of the records. However, it did not work. I do not have Mitchell’s chutzpah or, more important, his power base.
But that day my son, a just-out-of-law-school graduate who had left New York, and I tried to present the Ole Miss law school dean (used to be called the Eastland School of Law) with a FOIA to gain a peek at some of McDowell’s records, hoping we could slide into senator’s stuff, too. We walked into the dean's office, requesting that we see some records on McDowell, who was kicked out of the law school back in the early 60s.
McDowell was a friend of James Meredith (the Black student at Ole Miss who nearly caused a second Civil War because of his admission to that infamous university). When Meredith left school (the day after their close friend Medgar Evers was assassinated), McDowell (the first Black admitted to the law school) was left alone.
To make matter worse, Meredith’s security guards were released from duty when Meredith split. After numerous chases and threats by students welding guns, McDowell finally ordered a gun for his personal protection. Campus security reported this, and McDowell was booted out. He later proved that a number of students actually carried guns on campus, especially during the Meredith clash, and were not kicked out of school. But this did not matter, and McDowell lost his case.
Back then, the former law school dean wrote a glowing letter of support (used to get McDowell into another law school). I learned about this letter from another author and I wanted to see it, but the current dean refused access. He said it did not exist.
So Barry and I are sitting in the office, watching Dean So-and-So read the Freedom of Information Act request to himself. He looks at my son’s paper for one second and then wads it up and pitches it into his garbage pail.
“That’s why I told the last person who gave me one of these,” the dean says.
Barry looked stunned. It was a wonderful experience for him, I believe, but Barry quickly decided to leave Mississippi to study for the New Mexico bar. I really did not blame him, but as his mom, I was amused and believed it could be chalked up as a good lesson for later on.
What would John Grisham do?
Back to Eastland's records.
Once records were handed over to the University of Mississippi, they were “managed” for years by a former Eastland associate and devotee who followed the papers from Washington, D.C. to Oxford, I discovered.
There was so much I wanted to learn about Eastland, a planter from the cotton hamlet of Doddsville, in the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The old Senator was a talented racist who often blocked money from coming into the Delta to feed and employ the poorest of Mississippians. Yet he was quite good at collecting hundreds of thousands dollars of federal farming subsidies for himself. Shades of Michele Bachmann.
Eastland died in 1986 at 82 and even though he was once of the most powerful U.S. senators ever to work Washington, D.C. (at one time chaired multiple powerful committees) there has been very little written about Eastland; his family and friends seem to be protecting what information is allowed to the public.
Ole Miss sure did a bang up job of helping his family protect this man who best known for his strong support of states' rights and for his opposition to the civil rights movement.
Like most Southern Democrats, Eastland denounced Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, and even advised that no one had to obey this Supreme Court decision.
"On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court's decision. You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent sociological considerations,” he told voters in Senatobia, Mississippi.
When it came to races mingling or as they say in Mississippi, mixing, the older Senator did not mince words, testifying to the Senate 10 days after the Brown decision came down:
The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth, which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination... Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.
When three brave young civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were kidnapped and killed in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, Eastland reportedly told President Lyndon Johnson that the incident was a hoax and there was no Ku Klux Klan in the state, conjecturing that they young men had gone to Chicago.
Later released records of President Lyndon Johnson show this conversation:
Johnson: Jim, we've got three kids missing down there. What can I do about it?
Eastland: Well, I don't know. I don't believe there's ... I don't believe there's three missing.
Johnson: We've got their parents down here.
Eastland: I believe it's a publicity stunt...
President Johnson once said that, "Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he'd say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.”
I remain fascinated by Sovereignty Commission records showing that Eastland asked for a list of students who would be coming into Mississippi for Freedom Summer. It also intrigues me that Paul Goodman was the son of the Pacifica Radio executive who was earlier hounded by Eastland in special Senate hearings.
Would Grisham be so intrigued?
Well, after our unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act or FOIA bid to the University of Mississippi's law school, an ethical historian finally was hired by Ole Miss to organize the archives based in the law school. The records, by the way, were moved over to the school’s library, thus getting rid of the law school's
problem.
So we could finally see some records?
Not a chance.
One Ole Miss historian explained the current plan was to release first all of Eastland's press releases. (Old press releases are something I really want to dig through. I am kidding.) However, she was honest and admitted that many important files were “probably missing” – that the files looked pretty much “cleaned out."
There was something gained from our efforts, though. It did come back to me that “some people at Ole Miss were really angry” over the FOIA request. This was good news. Plus, I helped my son get over his angst before he left Mississippi by driving around together on campus blasting our CD version of Bob Dylan singing Dixie. If you have not heard the man sing it, do. He spent a Freedom Summer in the tiny cotton town of Drew, my friend Margaret Block told me, the same town where McDowell was killed years later. Very close to where young Till had been tortured in a planter’s shed only a few miles away from McDowell's home. Dylan got it, all right, and sings Dixie with a slight snarl.
I once spoke with historian Carol Polsgrove from Indiana University who wanted to see Eastland’s records. Polsgrove said she was interested in the white resistance to the civil rights movement, that it has not received the kind of attention from historians that the movement itself has—understandably, since there is nothing very heroic about this behavior.
She said she had thought about writing a biography of Eastland, terming him the political linchpin of the resistance, and going so far as to call the law school, asking to see his papers. Secretaries told her they were stowed in boxes in a basement—uncataloged and inaccessible. A library staffer whispered that Senator Eastland was not quite “politically correct”.
No kidding?
Polsgrove and I agreed we would really love to go through ALL of Eastland’s papers, someday. I felt a bond of sisterhood, at the time.
So, don’t you wonder what kind of a tax deduction his family got for donating these inaccessible and incomplete papers to this most southern university on Earth? Where students still dally in blackface, upon occasion?
Would John Grisham demand to see all of the Eastland papers? I would like to think so.
Damn, I wish my favorite author would go pay a visit to Oxford, Mississippi, maybe get some of Eastland’s good stuff and then pay a visit to Sunflower County to let his readers know just what happened to Cleve McDowell and to his lawyer-friend over in Alabama.
This would be truly an excellent reading adventure, a new John Grisham novel I could really get into. Something to download on my iPad for a good read on a rainy summer day.
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Susan Klopfer writes on civil rights history and current issues. She is the author of several civil rights books that related to the Mississippi Delta, including her newest book, "Who Killed Emmett Till," available in e-book, audio book and print.
