Domestic spying? Two books show that it happened in Mississippi not so long ago

In secret, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (1956-1977) harassed and spied on Civil Rights activists and quiet citizens as well, branding many of them racial agitators and communist infiltrators. After a 21 year long legal battle the ACLU was able to get thousands of files released. Shades of current National Security Agency domestic spying activities?

(December 27, 2005) --The volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged The New York Times reports. While mention of Watergate and impeachment may pervade the holiday’s political ether, it is a familiar story when compared to revelations of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a retired Civil Rights-era spy agency specifically created to maintain segregation and white supremacy.

Mississippi leaders, public and private, established the commission in 1956 to spy on citizens and deal with anyone, black or white, who challenged Jim Crow segregation. Former FBI and military intelligence gatherers and paid informers hired by the commission (including school superintendents, college officials, ministers, teachers and others, black and white) were used to hassle Civil Rights workers and individuals, the records show. Files were accumulated that violated individual privacy and that could be used to destroy and even kill those who advocated for social change; the commission was authorized to “do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government.”

The actions of the Sovereignty Commission were secret and known to only a select few in state government, including the governor who was a commission member. It was a small agency with tremendous influence on the state -- its culture and politics in the late 1950s and 1960s. Nearly every county and town throughout the state was infiltrated but most citizens had no idea of the commission’s existence. Those who worked for voting rights were spied on and taken down. Outspoken academics, doctors who treated people who were brutally beaten by the Klan or police, ministers who registered voters, sympathetic journalists and so many others were watched and reported on. Their color often did not matter. If they tried to influence social change -- to bring down Jim Crow -- they were ruined. Driven out of the state or much worse.

The worse came as the commission documented the whereabouts, finances and sexual habits of civil rights leaders. Some of the information was fed to employers and the Ku Klux Klan. Untold numbers of people were fired and others beaten and perhaps even killed after becoming targeted by the commission‘s spies and investigators.

Vernon Dahmer Sr. of Hattiesburg was probably a Sovereignty Commission victim; the commission’s files certainly reflect constant interest in the NAACP leader. In January 1966 two carloads of thugs tossed lighted Molotov cocktails into his home. Dahmer had announced earlier that day that poll taxes could be paid at his shop. Dahmer shot at the attackers while his family escaped, but Dahmer died of smoke inhalation later that day. Four men were convicted in the case while several others escaped trial. Former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, believed to be the mastermind, was freed after two mistrials.

The same day of Dahmer’s death, two Charleston women were murdered and mutilated by Klansmen as they returned home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Both women had Sovereignty Commission files; both were early voting rights advocates. The bodies of Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett were both found decapitated. Hamlett, a retired teacher in her mid seventies, had both of her arms cleanly severed from her body, relatives and her minister say. The deaths were formally reported by highway patrolmen as resulting from a car accident. It was later determined by the FBI that dozens of Mississippi patrolmen, particularly in the Mississippi Delta, were also Klansmen.

Hundreds of Sovereignty Commission records show continued spying on a white minister, Horace Germany, whose crime was to try and build a small, self-contained college for black missionary-ministers who would also be trained in agriculture. At graduation, students were to go into rural areas of the state and teach poor blacks how to feed their families. The Mississippi native was beaten nearly to death by Klansmen. Other of the Sovereignty Commission’s 132,000 pages made public shed light on the abuse of power by those in charge. For instance,

The successful trial of Byron de la Beckwith, officially the man who murdered early civil rights hero Medgar Evers, finally came about in 1994, after two mistrials three decades earlier, when released Sovereignty Commission records revealed previous jury tampering by one of the commission’s agents. Evers, a 37-year-old NAACP field secretary who pushed for an end to segregation, had stepped out of his Oldsmobile when he was shot in the back on June 12, 1963. He was walking to his house with an armful of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts.

Another Sovereignty Commission report dated in March 1964 shows that one of Mississippi’s most ardent racists, W.J. Simmons, was able to get his hands on grand jury testimony about Evers that included “considerable information relative to the NAACP in Mississippi in this testimony.” Simmons, once tagged "extremist … even by Mississippi standards" by the New York Times, was considered the shadow ruler behind Governor Barnett who fought James Meredith’s entry into the University of Mississippi.

Years earlier, on September 18, 1959, commission records show that Simmons contacted the commission about an upcoming Southern Christian Ministers Conference of Mississippi that included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with other speakers from around the country. Simmons wanted "these speakers coming here from out of the state … harassed as much as possible.”

Regular people were spied on, too -- ordinary, middle-class folks who sometimes were NAACP members back then. These were not front-line activists but were people like the parents of Ralph Eubanks, a native of Mount Olive Mississippi and director of publishing at the Library of Congress. Eubanks wrote about his early life in Mississippi and the later impact of learning that his parents were spied on. In Ever is a Long Time, Eubanks told how an internet search took him to the Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union where he discovered an Orwellian list of the 87,000- names collected by the Sovereignty Commission during its existence. Included were the names of his parents: Warren Eubanks and Lucille Eubanks.

Eubanks recalled feeling physically ill when he discovered how close his own parents came to crossing the line. Both were quiet members of the NAACP through their church; they were not civil rights activists in any way, but just quiet people who wanted to see social change. When Eubanks returned to Mississippi in the late 1990s, he found an atmosphere that was still uneasy about his mixed marriage; he and his wife were mistreated in a bed and breakfast, once the innkeeper saw them together. Eubanks left his home state believing that little had really changed in the hearts and minds of white Mississippians.

In Mississippi there remain dozens of unexamined brutalities including the 1997 murder of Cleve McDowell, a civil rights attorney who was close to both Evers and Meredith. McDowell was the first black graduate student in Mississippi; he was admitted to the James O. Eastland School of Law just as Meredith was leaving “Ole Miss.” Twice I’ve been refused access to McDowell’s records by the district attorney in Sunflower County where McDowell was murdered, even though he had been dead for over five years. The law school has also refused sharing any of McDowell’s records, including a letter of recommendation by the dean after McDowell was kicked out.

But after pulling other records surrounding the crime and speaking to McDowell’s friends and associates, it is obvious there are many unanswered questions about his more recent death: McDowell’s best friend, a Montgomery, Alabama attorney, also born in Drew, Mississippi, was murdered three years before McDowell was killed. His death was reported a suicide but after speaking to half a dozen people in both states it is apparent that McDowell saw his friend’s body and realized this was not a suicide. McDowell, reporting evidence of torture, told a minister friend that he would be murdered next.

McDowell’s files that he stored in piles of boxes in his Drew officer over the years -- records he gathered for his own investigations on the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and others active in the Civil Rights Movement -- were burned in a fire during the same week the first batch of Sovereignty Commission files were released to the public in 1998, six months after McDowell was killed. Some suggest the fire was perhaps a ruse, used to steal McDowell’s records.

Mississippi’s past is too often its present; too many questions from the past remain unanswered. Too few racist attitudes have changed in this state that continues to suffer from horrific poverty, the poorest education and all of the accompanying results. But even worse, we seem to have a much larger sovereignty commission operating throughout our entire country. I only hope that we take heed from Mississippi’s mistakes. This must be our New Year's goal. The most important one of all.
* * *

Susan Klopfer is an author, journalist and blogger. The former Prentice-Hall editor is the author of two new civil rights books, “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited” and “The Emmett Till Book.” She lived on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta for two years while writing her books. Klopfer maintains blogs on Emmett Till, Murders Around Mississippi, and Voting Rights and is currently working on a book that focuses on Mississippi Delta cold case files. Her web page is at http://themiddleoftheinternet.com. She can be contacted by email at sklopfer@earthlink.net and by telephone at 775-340-3585.

Dreams of an all-white Christmas fail

Left, Aaron Henry, popular civil rights leader
from the Mississippi Delta



AS 1961 CAME to a close, some white folks in the Mississippi Delta were dreaming of a "white" Christmas when they decided to keep their black customers away from the city of Clarksdale’s annual parade.

Their tune changed when Coahoma County’s NAACP chapter led by popular civil rights activist Aaron Henry sponsored a major boycott over the Christmas shopping season of 1961. Downtown stores were all heavily dependent on black trade giving the boycott both immediate and lasting effects.

Medgar Evers, head of the state's NAACP, and Henry had met with President Kennedy over the summer during the NAACP convention in Philadelphia. National board members traveled from Philadelphia to Washington, D. C. on a "freedom train" where they talked with the president and others over the severity of their problems.

"President Kennedy listened to us intently, was very cordial, and gave us a tour of the White House," Henry later wrote in his autobiography, "The Fire Ever Burning."

Several months later, Clarksdale’s mayor decided there would be no Negro participation in the local Christmas parade: his decision would result in the first major confrontation in Clarksdale since 1955.

Aaron Henry and others were stunned and affronted by the mayor’s edict. It was tradition for the black band to play at the end of the parade, followed by floats from their community. There seemed to be no reason for this decision, except that the mayor "apparently resented the progress we were making all over the state," Henry said.

The announcement came in November and was supported by the Chamber of Commerce. Henry and Evers called for a boycott of downtown stores with the slogan: "If we can’t parade downtown, we won’t trade downtown." Handbills were printed and a newsletter sent out asking for blacks to join in the boycott; merchants felt pressure from the start.

The white community leaders would not come to terms with the black community and the boycott dragged on. Aaron Henry voiced the black community’s view, when he said it could go on forever unless there were real changes in hiring practices. When the county’s attorney Thomas H. (Babe) Pearson asked Henry to come to his office and talk over the boycott,

"We met at his office at seven-thirty the next morning. He told me he knew I was leading the effort, and he wanted to advise me that it was illegal. He read something from a law book but did not explain how it was related to the boycott, and I told him our lawyers had advised us that we were not violating the law, unless we used threats, force, or intimidation to try and make people participate. He finally told me he would put me in jail if I didn’t use my influence to call off the boycott. He gave no explanation of the legal process involved in such an arrest and was clearly relying on his ability to put a Negro in jail anytime he wished. I told him he would have to do just that because I had no intention of calling it off."

Aaron Henry would not budge, so Pearson called out for Clarksdale Police Chief Ben Collins to come out from the side room, instructing him to "Take this nigger to jail."

The arrest was illegal, since no warrant was issued, "and I was not committing a crime in their presence, but I knew even better not to argue with an armed policeman. And I didn’t mind going to jail, since I believed it would result in an intensification of the boycott," Henry wrote.

When they got to the jail, Henry was left standing in the lobby because no one was certain whether or not to book him and if so, what charge to press. Then seven more Clarksdale civil rights leaders were brought in and all were locked up, despite the lack of charges.

When Coahoma County Sheriff L.A. Ross arrived at the jail, he was angered over the forced detention and "genuinely outraged at the entire situation." Ross demanded an explanation from Pearson who told him that the boycott was illegal.

Two hours later, Henry and others were finally charged with restraint of trade and released. After this, the boycott reached its peak. Merchants felt the economic pinch as they missed one-half of their customers. But Pearson had other ideas, and several days later insisted Henry and others be put "under tangible bond" of $2,000 each awaiting their appearance in court.

Originally, the Clarksdale black leaders were brought to trial in a justice of the peace court and found guilty of restraint of trade. When the county court upheld the conviction, it was appealed to the circuit court, which ruled the petition should be amended or Henry and others would be freed. But there was no amendment, and Henry and the others were neither acquitted nor found guilty, while the bond money was held. "We were out of jail but unsure of our legal status," Henry wrote.

While Henry and others were being arrested, another group – all white –launched a boycott of their own. The Mississippi State Legislature passed a resolution "with scarcely no dissent" that no loyal Mississippian should shop in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line, and quite close to Clarksdale.

Angry because public accommodations and other facilities in Memphis were quietly desegregating, the Mississippi legislature had already "distinguished itself," wrote Tougaloo professor John Salter, "by publicly investigating conditions at the University Hospital in Jackson, where white and black children were leaving their segregated wards and playing together in the corridors."

The Clarksdale boycott continued for three years, eventually slowing. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was found to be "a dramatic way of ending it." Along the way, farm labor mechanization was heading to the Delta and as the need for black laborers lessened, the meanness of whites increased.

On June 12, 1963, as he was returning home, Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin’s bullet.


(Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," Susan Klopfer)

Susan Orr-Klopfer, journalist and author, writes on civil rights in Mississippi. Her newest books, "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" and "The Emmett Till Book" are now in print and are carried in most online bookstores including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. "Where Rebels Roost" focuses on the Delta, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore and many other civil rights foot soldiers. Both books emphasize unsolved murders of Delta blacks from mid 1950s on. Orr-Klopfer is an award-winning journalist and former acquisitions and development editor for Prentice-Hall. Her computer book, "Abort, Retry, Fail!" was an alternate selection by the Book of-the-Month Club.

Katrina and Genocide? Looking for Clues in Mississippi's Past

By 1962, there had been a definite shift in the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, with SNCC representing a more pro-active stance. James Farmer, a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), offered his insight on how this transformation partly came about:

"I was in jail in Mississippi. Bobby Kennedy called a meeting of CORE and SNCC in his office. I could not be there, of course. I was in the clink. But several people from CORE went. And several from SNCC went, just those two because they were the activist groups in the freedom rides. This was the summer of ’61 and at that meeting what Bobby said to them according to the reports, he said, “Why don’t you guys cut out all that shit Freedom Riding and sitting-in shit, and concentrate on voter education.” Says “If you do that I’ll get you a tax exemption.” The SNCC guy almost hit him…. ”Tell us that we concentrate on voter registration when we’re fighting a tiger down there, in Mississippi and Alabama. You’re trying to buy us off.”

As in most Delta communities, initial local support of SNCC came from Greenwood’s young and from the uneducated. Some joined because they were interested in freedom, and others found participation a way of challenging parents or even getting thrown out of school. Soon, country people who were tired of making crops for white plantation owners were joining others from Gee Pee, Gritney and Baptist Town – “in other words, people who thought they had nothing to lose – were quick to join, too.”

Often, those with education or a good job such as teachers, were hesitant to rock the boat, since once a person was tagged as a “Righter,” they were perceived as dangerous by the rest of the community, according to author Endesha Ida Mae "Cat" Holland. In most schools, principals suspended or expelled any students who participated in a demonstration and teachers dare not be involved, unless they worked in secret. Teachers were also forced to sign “loyalty oaths” or they would be fired.

(Years later, Jeanette Cunningham told Holland that her teacher at Stone Street School took a risk by telling students to get up and look out the window during a march so they could watch history while it was being made.)

“Brothers lied to brothers, and daughters lied to mothers. Friends and relatives who betrayed them thought of themselves as protecting their families. Some local blacks even curried favor with the police by tipping them off about SNCC’s movements and plans, often for a ‘reward’ of several dollars.”

Greenwood was not alone in white opposition to the Delta campaign. Ruleville’s mayor, C. M. Dorrough, represented many Delta whites who for all accounts were “unmatched in their belligerence and resistance to change.”

“We gonna see how tight we can make it,” Dorrough warned, after learning of COFO’s plans that would bring voting rights workers into other towns besides Greenwood, including his own.

“Gonna make it just as tight as we can, it’s gonna be rougher, rougher than you think it is.”

On August 29, SNCC field secretary Charles McLaurin accompanied a busload of black plantation workers from Ruleville to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola. The plantation workers from Ruleville were allowed to fill out voter registration forms, but none did so to the registrar’s satisfaction and were not allowed to register.

Leaving Indianola, a highway car stopped the bus and fined the driver a hundred dollars for driving a bus with “too much yellow in it,” meaning it too closely resembled a school bus. Clearly, this was harassment, since the same bus was used for years to haul plantation workers back and forth across the county.

By the time Fannie Lou Hamer arrived back to her plantation home, owner B. D. Marlowe was waiting for her, “blazing mad.” If she would not remove her name from the list of people attempting to register, he warned would fire her and her husband, Pap, as well. Mrs. Hamer stated she did not go to Indianola to register for him, but to register for herself and so she was ordered off the plantation.

Less than two weeks later, on September 10, night riders raided Ruleville’s black neighborhood,looking for Mrs. Hamer.

Witnesses saw a black sedan speed into the area along Reden Avenue shortly after midnight. A white man was observed leaning from the car with a shotgun fired at several homes before heading away towards Drew. Two young women, Marylou Burke and Vivan Hilly, were not involved in the movement but were in Ruleville waiting for a bus ride to Jackson. In the wrong place at the wrong time, they were shot at and hit, nevertheless.

Both were taken to a local hospital where Burke was declared in critical condition with a head wound. As COFO people huddled near the intensive-care part of the hospital, C. M. Dorrough, the Ruleville mayor, ordered the arrest of Charlie Cobb, an activist, on suspicion of being the sniper.

“I think y’all shot at those houses,” Dorrough asserted to Cobb. “You were disappointed at the lack of violence here, and you need the publicity to get money from the North.”
* * * * *


LEFLORE COUNTY WHITES running the federal Surplus Food Program began withholding food as punishment for increased civil rights activities; food was being held back in other Delta counties as well. Hardliners on the county’s Board of Supervisors were determined to halt distribution of all federal food commodities to the county’s poor – of which 98 percent were black.

“To the traditional segregationist arsenal of intimidation, economic reprisal, beatings, lynching, and legal brutality, Leflore County appeared ready to add genocide. Leflore County whites, it seemed, would starve black children to death before they would allow their parents to vote.”

Most poor people, black and white, were dependent on commodities for the cheese, flour, milk, rice, beans and canned meats, critical in feeding families in Greenwood and outlying districts. The county’s decision meant that more than twenty-two thousand farm and sharecropping families would be affected – families that had relied on the commodities to make it from one cotton harvesting season to the next.

The scope of potential starvation and malnutrition did not draw attention outside of Mississippi – a news article appeared in the Jackson Press that discounted the decision as a “simple debate over regional welfare practices.”

Others declared the black families were “freeloaders” who wanted “something for nothing.” In the same year, Mississippi drew some $750 million in U. S. government funds, with millions of federal dollars going into the Delta as agricultural subsidies to cotton farmers.

There were predictions of wholesale starvation in the Delta. Mothers about to give birth were particularly concerned about the consequences. Fannie Lou Hamer pointed out it was the labor and sweat of blacks that had “made them white folks creamy rich,” and concluded: “There’s so much hate. Only God has kept the Negro sane.”

The Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Council, working to halt any more blacks from registering to vote, pressured the county officials into stopping food distribution and locking up the commodities, in the first place.

This practice continued in the Delta as late as 1966, according to Sovereignty Commission records and oral histories. Yet, Sovereignty Commission records show continued attempts by white leaders to “prove” there was no starvation in the Delta.

As starvation worsened and word of the food cabal moved outside of Mississippi, two black students from Michigan State University, Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor, tried to bring a pickup truck filled with food and clothing into Greenwood in December of 1962, challenging the Leflore County supervisors “strike” against federal assistance to poor people.

Coahoma County officers said the truck’s medical supplies – bandages and aspirin – were dangerous contraband and arrested the Michigan visitors. Police impounded the truck and locked the two in the city jail. The Michigan men were terrified and after several days were finally able to slip a note to Aaron Henry, who arranged for their bail.

They were lucky. Six months earlier, attorney Bill Higgs was arrested in Coahoma County for driving an integrated vehicle. While in his cell, Higgs ran into an “overlooked” black Freedom Rider from California who was languishing in the Clarksdale jail.

Law student Dewey Peterson had been arrested during the summer of 1961 as he tried to integrate the city’s bus depot. He was held incommunicado in Clarksdale for nearly a year before Higgs found him, by chance. The black Mississippi attorney was able to get Peterson bailed out.

The county’s attempt to use starvation against blacks unexpectedly helped COFO and SNCC become entrenched in the area, attracting more supporters among local blacks, particularly after November, when a black child died of starvation.
Justice Department lawyers and reporters came in and toured the county, urged to do so by COFO, to find “shocking health conditions and dire shortages of milk and other staples in black homes.”

In a letter that Moses wrote to a friend back home, he told of finishing a bowl of soup and seeing a “black, leathery hand reach over from behind him and fumble for a remnant of the meal.”

National interest was aided by Harry Belafonte, who responded with a relief concert in New York City, and Dick Gregory, who chartered a plane to personally deliver emergency rations to Greenwood.

Recognition from the outside brought new optimism among SNCC workers, who worked longer days at bigger risks. Milton Hancock, a black Greenwood cab driver who hauled around freedom workers for free, was stopped by a deputy on a traffic violation and told to get out of town – “You know what happened to Emmett Till!” he was warned.

A few months later, SNCC gave out four tons of food in just one day – a record. Then four black-owned businesses in Greenwood were firebombed. Sam Block, giving a press conference on the smoldering ruins, was arrested and charged with “inciting a riot.” Five days later, one hundred workers and supporters marched on Greenwood City Hall in protest.

This was a bold demonstration, for the times, stunning both white and black communities. But the police chief was out of town, and the march dispersed, according to Holland.

(Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by Susan Klopfer.)

Leonard Peltier in his own words

My Life is My Sun Dance: Prison Writings of Leonard Peltier
Read by Harvey Arden, music by Reverend Goat and New Orleans LightMi Abuelo Records

REVIEW BY NORM DIXON

Leonard Peltier is one of the United States' longest-serving political prisoners, jailed in 1976 in a blatantly rigged trial, during which the US government and the FBI refused to put any limits on the depths they would stoop to see this militant leader of the Native American people silenced for life. Almost 30 years later, Harvey Arden has done his bit to break that silence with the release of My Life is My Sun Dance, a series of readings from Peltier's prison writings.

Arden's expressive voice creates an emotional connection between the listener and the author of the words, who has been bricked up in high-security prisons and kept isolated from his people and his many supporters. Through Arden, accompanied by the smooth jazz moods of New Orleans Light, Peltier talks directly to us and you can feel and share his humanity, defiance and fears.

Peltier's writing is conversational and poetic, it is hopeful and inspiring. One listen of this CD and you will really care about this humane and gentle, but fierce warrior for social justice. Peltier tells us about the terrors and uncertainties of prison life, about the history of Washington's long oppression of the Native American people and how his individual oppression is simply a continuation of it. He discusses his people's spirituality and how it is bound to the struggle to end the oppression of all peoples. And Peltier outlines the specifics of the events that landed him in jail, and the details of what must be one of the most outrageous frame-ups in US history.

In the early 1970s, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota was the scene of a serious conflict between the corrupt, pro-government, assimilationist reservation authorities and militant reservation residents who were demanding that Native Americans control their own affairs. The residents were also demanding that they be permitted to continue to practice their traditional culture without hindrance.

It emerged that uranium had been found on the reservation land, and the federal government and its Indian puppets were determined to crush the militants in order to get their hands on it. Rich ranchers were also being allowed to graze the sensitive semi-arid country for minimal or no fees.

In 1973, the residents sought the assistance of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) and together they occupied the village of Wounded Knee (the same site where, less than 100 years earlier, a horrific US Army massacre of 300 Native Americans had taken place). The response of the US government was to launch a paramilitary attack in which two residents were killed. The stand-off lasted 71 days, before the government promised to investigate the residents' complaints. It was another promise made to Native Americans that was never kept. In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee occupation, the reservation authorities outlawed the AIM and banned traditional ceremonies and practices.

A reign of terror was instigated, in which thugs known as Guardians of the Oglala Nation (literally spelled GOON), attempted to drive out all opponents of the pro-government reservation leaders. Between 1973 and 1976, more than 60 "traditionalists" were murdered. The FBI refused to investigate these deaths and continued to arm the GOONs with weapons and information in order to prevent AIM again gaining a foothold at Pine Ridge.

In desperation, Pine Ridge residents again appealed for AIM activists to help them defend themselves. Leonard Peltier was among the dozens of militants who responded. The traditional people, many of whom were elderly, feared for their lives. AIM provided support such as cutting fire wood, collecting water and preparing meals, as well as offering protection from attacks by GOONs. AIM activists were armed for their own protection.

On June 26, 1975, two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull ranch at Pine Ridge, the home of a number of families being defended by AIM. It later emerged that the cars were driven by FBI agents, who were supposedly chasing a person accused of the heinous crime of stealing cowboy boots. The agents opened fire on the ranch and its residents, who fired back in self defence. Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs police and GOONs had surrounded the ranch and a fierce, largely one-sided fire-fight erupted.

When the smoke cleared, AIM member Joe Killsright Stuntz and two FBI agents were found shot dead. Miraculously, Peltier and the other people in the camp escaped. Following the largest hunt in FBI history, three AIM activists -- Dino Butler, Robert Robideaux and Leonard Peltier -- were charged with the murder of the agents. However Robideaux and Butler were tried in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the jury found them not guilty of murder because they had simply returned fire in self-defence when fired upon by unknown assailants.

Meanwhile, Peltier had escaped to Canada knowing that he would never get a fair trial in the US -- that is if he wasn't gunned down by the FBI first. He was captured in Canada on February 6, 1976. The US government presented the Canadian court with affidavits signed by a woman claiming to be Peltier's companion, who claimed that she had seen Peltier shoot the FBI agents. This was a blatant lie. The woman had never met Peltier and she was not present at Pine Ridge during the shoot-out. She later revealed that the FBI forced her to sign the lies written for her by the FBI.

Peltier was tried before an all-white jury in North Dakota, before a hostile judge who refused to allow use of the self-defence argument. The FBI created a climate of fear around the proceedings in an attempt to convince the jurors that Peltier was a terrorist. The government withheld evidence that pointed to his innocence. This evidence was finally released from FBI files seven years later under the Freedom of Information Act.

Prosecutor Lynn Crook failed to produce a single witness who 's rifle could not be linked to shell casings found near the scene. Yet in his summation, Crook accused Peltier of firing the fatal bullets that killed the agents. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Seventeen years later, in November 1992, Crook admitted to the court reviewing Peltier's case, "We don't know who killed the agents."

Despite Crook's admission, and even though the appeals court found that Peltier may have been acquitted had evidence not been improperly withheld by the FBI, a new trial was denied. In 2000, US President Bill Clinton stated that he was considering Peltier's request for clemency. However, the FBI launched a massive disinformation campaign, which included a march by more than 500 FBI agents outside the White House in December 2000. Peltier's name was not among those granted clemency by Clinton a month later.

Peltier may become eligible for parole in 2008, but it will be fought tooth and nail by the FBI and other powerful forces who want to keep this inspiring liberation fighter silent. The US authorities continue to make life difficult for Peltier and his supporters. On June 30, he was suddenly transferred from Leavenworth prison in Kansas to Terre Haute in Indiana. His lawyers were not informed and he has been kept in solitary confinement for more than month. Yet no matter how hard they try, such repression cannot keep Peltier silent, as Harvey Arden's brilliant tribute shows.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Penguin Books) is well worth searching out, as is the documentary Incident at Oglala, produced by Robert Redford.

From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005. http://www.greenleft.org/
http://cdbaby.com/cd/harveyarden


For more information, visit http://www.leonardpeltier.org/ where Peltier's prison writing in book form can be purchased. Peter Matthiessen's classic In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Penguin Books) is well worth searching out, as is the documentary Incident at Oglala, produced by Robert Redford.

The Nixon Civil Rights Record: Better Than Many Remember or Believe

Second only to the man himself, it was Herblock, the recently deceased Washington Post political cartoonist, who fixed our cultural impression of Richard M. Nixon. The hollow cheeks, the cleft of black hair, the menacing jowls set like a bat's wings. Could such a man have given a hoot about civil rights?

The answer is yes. A timid, pragmatic yes, but a yes nonetheless. Our cultural impression is so much a fixed caricature that this revelation in itself makes Dean Kotlowski's encyclopedic and exhaustively researched study of Nixon's civil rights record a rewarding read.

FROM A Review of Dean Kotlowski's "Nixon's Civil Rights"

... (By MATTHEW HERRINGTON)

Rebels Roost Book Gains Attention

New office would open cold cases from civil rights era

By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
September 29, 2005




WASHINGTON - In the Mississippi Delta during the tumultuous 1960s, voting rights advocate Birdia Keglar never made it home after meeting with then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.Highway patrolmen said Keglar, a businesswoman and the first black person in her county to vote since Reconstruction, and her friend Adena Hamlett, an elderly former teacher, died in a car accident.

But when the bodies of the two black women were found they bore the signs of intentional mutilation and murder. The fact that both had been warned by the Ku Klux Klan to stop pushing for voting rights added to the suspicion they had been killed.

Nearly 40 years after their deaths on Jan. 11, 1966, the case has remained unsolved, and essentially uninvestigated until the publication this year of "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" by author Susan Klopfer, who also probed other still-open violent crimes from that era.Now, a bipartisan push has begun in Congress to create a new Department of Justice office that would be dedicated solely to investigating such very cold civil rights cases.--------

This story continues ...

Author Applauds New Possibilities for Solving Civil Rights "Cold Cases"

September 17, 2005 -- Sixties voting rights advocate Birdia Keglar was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen on her way home to Charleston, Mississippi after meeting with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson.

Keglar's January 11, 1966 death and the murders of her best friend and then her youngest son have never been resolved or even investigated by law enforcement agencies - local, state or federal.

Susan Orr-Klopfer, author of a new book on civil rights in the Mississippi Delta, believes these three "cold case" murders should get the immediate attention of a new Unsolved Crimes Section of the Justice Department.

Under a measure approved Thursday by the U.S. Senate, the new office would target such pre-1970 racially motivated homicides that remain unsolved because of lax state and federal prosecution at the time they occurred.

The bill was inspired by recent efforts to reopen the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American youngster who was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in the Delta.

"Young Till’s crime was whistling at a white woman while inside a small grocery store. For this, he was lynched and the men who admitted committing the crime went free.

"Birdia Keglar’s crime, 11 years later, was to advocate for voting rights. She and her friend Adlena Hamlett were driving home from Jackson after meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy to talk over civil rights issues. But their car was stopped in a small Delta town where they were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Klansmen.

"Very likely, the Klansmen who killed Keglar and Hamlett were also highway patrolmen. Both women’s bodies were mutilated – both were decapitated and Hamlett’s arms were cleanly severed from her body," Klopfer said.

"Their deaths were attributed to a car wreck by officials. But the car disappeared along with Keglar’s briefcase and witnesses were threatened with murder if they did not remain quiet."

Three months later, after Keglar’s youngest son went to Washington D.C. trying to learn what happened to his mother, he was murdered.

"James Keglar was knocked unconscious and burned alive in his house. This happened hours after he was released from a Clarksdale, Mississippi jail on a bogus charge. He was expecting help from the FBI but it never came, according to his brother."

Klopfer’s book, "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," details these Mississippi Delta murders and dozens of others, including the lynching of young Till.

The book contains newly discovered information on several other Mississippi civil rights murders including "strong evidence that civil rights leader Medgar Evers was not murdered by Byron de la Beckwith who was finally convicted for the crime, but by a friend of Beckwith’s, another member of the Klan who was Beckwith’s superior," Klopfer said.

Klopfer lived in the Mississippi Delta in employee housing on the prison grounds of Parchman Penitentiary for two years while she researched and wrote her 680-page book that contains over 1,400 footnotes as well as names and information regarding nearly 1,000 black people who were lynched in the state – "a small representation of the racial murders and lynching that have taken place in Mississippi," Klopfer said.

Senator Jim Talent, R-Mo., sponsored Thursday’s legislation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. The Senate voted by unanimous consent to add the measure to an appropriations bill that is expected to pass the Senate this week, according to Associated Press reports. The bill was introduced by Talent and Dodd in July after a Mississippi court sentenced former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in jail for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

"There are 13 Klansmen mentioned in the book who are known to the FBI and still living in Mississippi who helped murder Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Robert Goodman. Yet no one has been prosecuted except for Preacher Killen who was not at the murder scene. Maybe some progress will finally come about because of this Senate bill," Klopfer said.

Klopfer said she feels closest to the Keglar and Hamlett murders, however. "These were two older, established Mississippi black women – Adlena Hamlett was 77-years-old and was a well-respected teacher for many years.

"Birdia Keglar was a business woman who was trying to start a local chapter of the NAACP. She was the first black person in her county to vote since Reconstruction following the Civil War. She was earlier represented in federal court by John Doar of the U.S. Department of Justice and was Doar’s first voting rights test case when he came into Mississippi after the election of President John F. Kennedy."

One of Adlena Hamlett’s granddaughters in August told Klopfer about going with Hamlett to the courthouse square as a child to request a ballot.

"Nina Zachery said the clerk tore up the ballot and ordered their departure. But Zachery’s grandmother said not to worry because she – Nina – would be able to vote one day, and that was all that mattered. Hamlett and Keglar were later hanged in effigy at the Tallahatchie Courthuse and were strongly warned by Klansmen to stop their voting rights activities."

Klopfer is the first journalist to write about Keglar and Hamlett. "I learned about this story from a nurse at Parchman whose wife was a relative of Mrs. Keglar. Very little was known about them and it took the entire two years to piece this story together – it was very complicated with numerous entanglements that reached from the Delta to Washington, D.C."

Klopfer also asserts it was significant that Sen. Edward Kennedy led off the questioning of Chief Justice nominee John Roberts on his Senate confirmation hearing this past week.

"Sen. Kennedy reminded Roberts that people died for the right to vote. Sen. Kennedy is concerned about reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and opposition to equal voting rights and other civil rights supplied the motives for all of the murders listed in this book."

Klopfer left Mississippi at the end of August and said she added newly discovered information to the book even as she was packing to leave.

# # #

Eye Of The Storm

Eye Of The Storm: "Eye Of The Storm "

Bloggers give the inside story of what is happening right now in Mississippi ...

HungryBlues Review

HungryBlues: "Foreword for Susan Klopfer's Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited (2005)"

Or to order, visit LULU

New Book Announcement: "The Emmett Till Book"

New Information, stories, new facts.

Visit HERE for more information. 

ONE LATE AUGUST NIGHT IN 1955 around a Boy Scout campfire burned down to its last embers, Robert Keglar and his campers heard a story they would not forget. A “very shaken” man came into camp in the early morning hours and told of hearing the screams of a teenage boy being tortured and beaten to death only hours earlier in a machine shed outside of Drew, over in Sunflower County.

There were horrible screams, the visitor said, and when the men finished killing the young boy, they took his body from the barn and hauled it off. More than two men were in the lynching party, he told Keglar and others as the fire smoldered. Campers finally went to sleep and when they awoke for breakfast, the visitor was gone.

AT MIDNIGHT that same day, forty-six miles away from the scout camp, the parents of a seventeen-year-old Ruleville girl let early-morning visitors stay in their home for the night. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the latter her mother’s relative by marriage, were loud and nervous, she remembered.

“My parents didn’t tell me then what was going on at the time. J.W. had a full brother, Bud, and I am very sure he was with them, too. I was in bed but I could hear their voices.”

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said that years later her father told her that Milam and Bryant let him know what they had done to Emmett Till. “They knew the law was looking for them. They also said that Carolyn Bryant was with them when they killed Emmett Till. I don’t know when Bud joined them. I think they caught up with him later. He was a nicer person than his brother, and I don’t think he would have killed someone – I hope not.”

When she awoke at sunrise, all three men were gone. “I never knew what happened to them after they left our house. I think they knew the law was going to catch up with them. And I think they felt safe, since most of the officers were covering for them, anyway. I don’t know if they turned themselves in, let themselves be found or if they were picked up by the sheriff and charged.

“I still can’t believe how they put our family in such danger; there was so much turmoil after Emmett Till was killed. People in Drew – black and white – were threatening to kill each other’s entire families. Some were threatening to kill as many as ten members of another person’s family as payback.”

“I know that my parents would have never covered for them. They came to our house and sat there all night. Later my parents told me what was going on. But I would never want anyone to think that our family helped them out.”

“Most people in Drew and Ruleville felt the same way,” she said. “After the trial, the only support Milam and Bryant had been from the Klan because they were members. Most people didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They had killed a 14-year-old child, after all. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it, but they did kill him.”


ACCORDING TO SOME news reports, Till’s murderers were identified as being in the same car that drove Till from his great-uncle’s home in Money where he was visiting. In Greenville, Pulitzer prize-winning publisher Hodding Carter pulled a story off the newswire and placed it on the front page of his newspaper:

Two White Men Charged with Kidnapping Negro

Greenwood, Miss. (UP) – Two white men charged with kidnapping a 15-year-old [sic] Chicago Negro because they claimed he insulted the wife of one of the men, claimed today they released the missing boy unharmed. Sheriff George Smith said Roy Bryant, a storekeeper in nearby Money community and his half-brother, J.W. Nilan [Milam], were held on kidnap charges in the mysterious disappearance of Emmett Till of Chicago. They were arrested yesterday …

---------------- THE CHAPTER CONTINUES -------------

HELLO.

The Emmett Till Book is a quick and unique read about the 14-year-old from Chicago and related Mississippi Delta murders. I live in the Delta, actually on the grounds of Parchman Farm, the infamous state penitentiary that has been the home to many Delta bluesmen. Our home is about ten miles from the plantation outside of Drew (in Sunflower County) where Emmett Till was murdered and about fifteen miles from Sumner, site of the trial of Milam and Bryant.

Some of the older people who remember those days are still around. I’ve talked to many of them, looked through archives and have picked up many new pieces of this story that are included in the book. Other murders are covered as well, including those of

•High school senior Jo Etha Collier (a young black girl killed in Drew on graduation night, 1973, by a white men accompanied by two white friends);

•Clinton Melton, a father of four who was killed by one of Milam’s drunk friends, and of course acquitted by an all-white male jury;

•Melton’s young wife who was run of the road into a bayou before she could testify in court;

•Cleve McDowell, a civil rights lawyer who was born in Drew the same summer as Till and shot to death in Drew in 1997. McDowell was investigating hundreds of civil rights murders, including Till’s. He kept in contact with Till’s mother, often exchanging information about the crime. Six months after he was killed, all of his papers were burned (or disappeared) when his office caught on fire. His murder is so mysterious that local court officials still refuse to remove a gag order from the records – strange, since he is certainly dead. But I found some fascinating new information, anyway.

This book also includes dozens of names of people lynched in Mississippi over civil rights activities, such as registering to vote; an Emmett Till timeline, and of course dozens of book and related references.

* * *


Fred and I moved to the Delta two years ago when he went to work at Parchman (he’s a psychologist). As a former news reporter it did not take long for me to start snooping around and discovering some of the hundreds of unsolved civil rights murders in “the Magnolia State,” particularly those that occurred in the far reaches of the Delta.

The Emmett Till Book is the first of two.

On June 16, Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited will be published and you’re invited to return to lulu.com and learn more about this two-year research and writing project. Meanwhile, I’m posting new items to my civil rights blogs daily and will be attending special services June 19 in Philadelphia, honoring the lives of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. I will post pictures on all of the blogs for you to see.

http://themiddleoftheinternet.com/bookorder.html


I look forward to hearing from you.
Susan Klopfer

mailto:sklopfer@earthlink.net

New Book Announcement: Where Rebels Roost gives a fresh look at civil rights history in Mississippi with a focus on the Delta. Starts before the Civil War and ends in 2005. 

Neshoblog

Neshoblog: "Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Neshoba D.A.: Vast Majority Of Jury Pool Is White

Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan didn't have time to do the math on Tuesday, but he told the Associated Press after the day's court proceedings that more than three-fourths of the remaining jury pool is 'probably' white.

About 75 people remain in the jury pool.

From the AP:


The 2000 Census shows Neshoba County's population of about 28,700 is 75 percent white and 12 percent black, with the rest divided among other races. District Attorney Mark Duncan was asked if the group reflects the racial makeup of the county.

'Probably not,' he said.

Asked if the jury pool has a higher percentage of whites, Duncan said: 'Probably.'"

The Philadelphia Trial - Wasn't it About Time?

Overdue Mississippi Trial Finally Begins - Part 1:

"Mississippi Klansmen bared their worthless souls to the world when in the summer of 1964 they kidnapped and murdered civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, aged 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both from New York and James Chaney, 22, from Meridian, Mississippi.

Forty-one years later, one alleged Klansman in his seventies stands trial in Philadelphia, Mississippi for a long-ago crime that still symbolizes the Magnolia state for much of the nation.

As jury selection is underway in the Neshoba County Courthouse, so many questions surface. The most frequent? Why only prosecute 'Preacher' Edgar Killen when eight others, alleged to be party to the lynching, are still alive and prosecutable, too?

And this question: Is a recent community coalition, set up to begin race and reconciliation, motivated for the right reasons? Or is something fishy?

One early chapter of this story that seems so long ago, opens the evening of Sunday, June 21, 1964 when civil rights leaders Aaron Henry and Charles Evers, attending the national NAACP convention in New Orleans, received news about three missing civil rights workers and immediately went to work, trying to learn more. "

... Continues

Overdue Mississippi Trial Finally Begins - Part 1:

John Michael Doar and the Mississippi Burning Trial

John Michael Doar and the Mississippi Burning Trial

Very detailed information on the 1964 murder of three Mississippi summer volunteers.Written by a law professor.

Eastland and Pacifica Radio

Very good discussion of Sen. James O. Eastland and his harassment of Pacifica Radio. Ties to the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.

Blogger and Google

Excellent site for any questions about blogging. Easy to understand.

Blogger and Google

Pacifica Radio and Andy Goodman

Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost"
Vanatech Press, June 15, 2005
Susan Klopfer copyright 2005
All rights reserved, including electronic


ANDREW GOODMAN TRAVELED several thousand miles to come to Meridian. The twenty-year-old Queens College student, a musician and sometimes off-Broadway actor, was recruited by Aaron Henry to participate in Freedom Summer. Goodman had already marched in demonstrations, protesting unequal rights for blacks at one of New York’s Woolworth stores and at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

“Andy didn't come out of nowhere,” wrote Jonathan Mark, a columnist for the New York Jewish Week. “His two parents were activists, involved with everything from the Spanish Civil War to organizing New York State dairy farmers to being leading supporters and directors of Pacifica Radio, the parent network of radical radio station WBAI.”

.... Ninety miles away from Neshoba County in Jackson, Sovereignty Commission director Johnston was looking at a possible direct link between Andrew Goodman and "communists." The name "Goodman" had attracted Senator Eastland’s interest, since Goodman had family ties to Pacifica Broadcasting, a progressive, alternative-broadcasting network founded in 1949 by pacifists.

Goodman’s father, Robert, was President of the Pacifica Foundation. One year prior to Andrew Goodman’s death, The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Senator Eastland, completed a three-year investigation of Pacifica’s programming, looking for "subversion."

In 1962, Pacifica station WBAI was the first station to publicly broadcast former FBI agent Jack Levine's exposé of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The program was followed by threats of arrests and bombings, as well as pressure from the FBI, the Justice Department, and the FCC. Also that year, Pacifica trained volunteers to travel into the South for coverage of the awakening Civil Rights Movement. The station also took a strong anti-Vietnam war stance, helping to prompt the investigations.

Sovereignty Commission documents in fact show that Eastland knew the names and backgrounds of all volunteer workers in advance of their arrival, including Goodman. Records show the senator requested this information from the Sovereignty Commission well before the opening of Freedom Summer.

On February 26, 1965, Director Johnston wrote a letter to newly elected Congressman Prentiss Walker, requesting that he "ask the HUAC for any information about the Pacifica Foundation of New York…. We have reason to believe this foundation also is subversive."

Walker, whose district included Philadelphia, Mississippi, wrote back to Johnston that he had been in contact with Congressman John Ashbrook, HUAC chair, who offered a "thorough search … to obtain any information on the people and organizations mentioned."

Included on Walker’s list he sent to the Sovereignty Commission was the name of Robert Goodman (Andrew’s father) but the HUAC committee’s director reported he could find no records of any testimony by Goodman.

Johnston also mailed to Eastland a list of COFO workers "in the Mississippi Summer Project as of August 1964," explaining he had obtained this list through "one of our pipelines" and that it was possible "some of these names are in the files of the Senate Internal Security Committee or the House Un-American Activities Committee," referring, of course, to Goodman.

From "Where Rebels Roost ... Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," Klopfer, Klopfer & Klopfer. Vanatech Press, publication June 15, 2005

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney case reopened

Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on Friday, May 20, 2005 at 10:02 PM in civil rights movement, race and racism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Olen Burrage

As Philadelphia, Mississippi prepares for the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, scheduled to begin on June 13, those who are committed to justice should continue to ask, why only this one prosecution?

The following excerpts concern another one of the suspects in the triple murder case, Olen Burrage, on whose property the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were buried by the perpetrators.

Olen Burrage is still alive and still a resident of Philadelphia, Mississippi. --BG

excerpts from

We Are Not Afraid: The Mississippi Murder of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney by Seth Cagin and Phillip Dray

Compiled by the Arkansas Delta Peace And Justice Center

---

The owner of a local trucking company, Olen Burrage, was having a cattle pond dug on his property, five miles southwest of town on Highway 21. Burrage had hired Herman Tucker, one of his part-time drivers and the owner/operator of two Caterpillar dozers, to build the pond and the large dam that would restrain it. The Neshoba Klansman arranged for Billy Wayne Posey to arrive at midnight on the lane of the Burrage property with the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Once the bodies were placed in the center of the dam, fifteen or twenty feet down, Tucker would reseal it with one of bulldozers. When the pond filled with rainwater, the place where the bodies were stashed would simply become an innocuous part of the Neshoba landscape--a Klansman version of a Choctaw burial mound.

"So you wanted to come to Mississippi?" one of the murderers is reputed to have told the victims later that night. "Well, now we're gonna let you stay here. We're not even gonna run you out. We're gonna let you stay here with us." p. 55

---

Killen, as organizer of the Neshoba and Lauderdale County klaverns of the White Knights of Mississippi and point man for the conspiracy, was eager to return to Philadelphia as soon as he had collected enough men for the operation. There were "arrangements" to be made, he explained to the men at Akin's. Quickly he sketched for them the plan he had devised in collusion with Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price and Billy Wayne Posey, and possibly--to infer from the events that would transpire--Hop Barnett and Olen Burrage. Deputy Price would release Goatee [i.e. Schwerner] and the other two civil rights workers as soon as it got dark. Once the civil rights workers were turned loose and were alone out on the highway, they would be stopped by the a Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol car and turned over to the Klan. p. 336

---

Billy Wayne Posey was among those who attempted the Bonanza alibi, but in fact Posey had been far too busy that day to watch television. His role in the conspiracy was to arrange for the disposal of the victims' bodies, a grisly task easily as complex as setting them up to be done away with in the first place. After Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were arrested late on the afternoon of June 21, Posey met with Olen Burrage, who owned a trucking firm and several pieces of farm property west of Philadelphia, and Herman Tucker, a bulldozer operator who occasionally worked for Burrage. This meeting took place either at Burrage's garage, southwest of Philadelphia, or at the Phillips 66 station...

Posey's arrangement with Burrage to use a dam being built on Burrage's property as a burial site for the three civil rights workers' was probably not the result of brainstorm thinking by the conspirators. In all likelihood, Burrage's dam site had been previously scouted out by the Neshoba klavern for its potential as a secret grave, perhaps as early as mid-May, when Mickey Schwerner's incursions into Longdale were becoming known to the Klansmen. Mississippi FBI agent John Proctor claims to have learned from an informant that Burrage once told a roomful of Neshoba Klansmen discussing the impending invasion of civil rights workers, "Hell, I've got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them." Although the Meridian Klansmen had been instructed to leave Mickey Schwerner alone, the leaders of the Neshoba klavern had apparently been given Sam Bowers's approval to "eliminate" him if they caught him in Neshoba County. They may well have expected to have further opportunities to nab Schwerner on one of his visits to Longdale, and it is possible many elements of the conspiracy--the release from jail, the highway chase, and the secret burial--were loosely in place before June 21.

The previous summer, Burrage had consulted an agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service about joining a program under which landowners could obtain government funding for pond dams that met certain conservation requirements. Burrage's proposed dam met the program's specifications, but the approval of the funding was contingent upon periodic inspections of the construction site by agents from the Department of Agriculture. In May 1964, when Burrage finalized arrangements with Herman Tucker and authorized him to begin work on the dam, Burrage chose--for reason he never explained--to do so without participating in the government program. pp 340-342

---

With the civil rights workers' bodies in the hole, Posey signaled Tucker to start moving. The tractor ran fifteen minutes as Tucker bladed off the top of the dam so it would look as though it had not been disturbed...

The eight Klansmen got into Barnette's car and the civil rights workers' station wagon for the short ride down highway 21 to Burrage's trucking garage. There the men replaced the license plates on Barnette's car, which had been removed earlier in Meridian, and Jordan was given all the gloves the men had worn and told to dispose of them. Tucker took a glass gallon jug and filled it with gasoline from one of Burrage's pumps, to use in setting fire to the station wagon. p 361

Sunset in the Delta 

New Book Announcement

WHERE REBELS ROOST
MISSISSIPPI CIVIL RIGHTS REVISITED

by M. Susan Orr Klopfer
with Fred J. Klopfer and Barry C. Klopfer


Vanatech Press
Publication date: June 2005
Civil Rights Books

Chapter 1
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

In the summer of 2003, a new magazine was launched in Cleveland, Mississippi, a small and comfortable college town representing the heart of Mississippi Delta culture. The September issue of Delta Magazine featured a guest editorial penned by Wyatt Emmerich, a Greenwood, Mississippi native, and owner of Jackson-based Emmerich Newspapers. Reframing the social climate, which made possible the Mississippi Delta blues, Emmerich wrote:

[T]he Delta attracted adventurous souls who would risk their very lives to make it rich. The risk was real. Yellow fever and malaria were rampant. But for those who survived, the money flowed like wine…. Stuck out in a cash-rich swamp, surrounded by death, Deltans took to making hay while the sun shined. They threw huge parties that lasted for days. The money was good and life was for the living…. Another critical factor, also molded by the soil, was race. African Americans were needed to pick cotton. The whites, from the very start, were a minority in the Delta. This led to a cultural mingling between whites and blacks on a scale never really experienced by the rest of the country…. The ultimate manifestation of this cultural cauldron was the blues.... Somehow, there is something in the Delta that seeped out and spread through music, until it altered the very notes the entire world expects to hear in their songs. That’s pretty amazing.[i]

Early times in the Delta were amazing but the better Delta stories are not of moneyed “risk-taking” white planters and their lavish lives, but are accounts of courageous blacks who often fought the system, both winning and losing their dreams and ambitions – and too often, losing their families or their lives. From a cadre of these talented African Americans came the blues.[ii]

Whites simply contributed their own special horror in shaping the release of this soulful music.
When cotton was King, the Delta’s enslaved Africans, who were kidnapped and torn from their far-away homes because they were “needed to pick the cotton,” often rebelled instead of working – by tearing down fences, hanging animal stock upside down and hiding or stealing the “master’s” tools. Disgusted over the systemic abuse of their families and themselves, some of the kidnapped Africans faked sickness, practiced work slowdowns and sabotage, and sadly, self-mutilation.

Inside the planters’ homes, a white family member might fear death from poisoning or becoming the subject of African hoodoo. Other enslaved Africans reacted more fiercely to their frequent whippings and torture by setting fires or stealing the “ole massah’s” gun to use on the “ole miss.” And there are countless stories of horribly stressed Delta slaves exacting revenge by forcing openings in critical levies when floodwaters were high.

The kidnapped and enslaved Africans were excellent agrarians, a critical resource to their owners. The worst plantation owners would pay a price for their brutal mistreatment and forced labor – at best, missing a lavish party or two due to slaves’ payback for frequent abuse. At worse, the planter and his family could lose their lives.

“From the Delta”

Most Mississippians know when people say they are “from the Delta,” they’re referring to Mississippi’s region of flat farming lands, reaching from the Chickasaw Bluffs below Memphis to the Walnut Hills above Vicksburg a region of great wealth and even greater poverty. Few could describe the Delta more eloquently than David Cohn, a popular writer coming from a region producing an array of talented writers and artists. Cohn in 1935 offered his creative portrayal of the Mississippi Delta – “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”[iii]

His description was so good that nineteen years later, William Faulkner offered the same quote as his own, with a twist: “Mississippi begins in the Lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.”[iv]

Cohn painted the Delta as a land of excess: “The hot sun, the torrential rains, the savage caprices of the unpredictable river. The fecund earth, the startling rapid growth of vegetation, the illimitable flat plains, and the vast dome of heaven arching over them: all these environmental influences almost seemed to breed in the people a tendency toward the excessive.”[v]

Even with a century of clearing, cultivating, draining and land leveling, the Delta’s earthy beauty stands out at sunset when the sun’s burnt orange rays press into murky waters of swamps, bayous, and oxbow lakes.

As in Cohn observed, this region still retains much of its rural and agricultural past – with an economy that remains close to the land.

Fall’s cotton fields blanket the Delta like soft snow. Wheat, rice and sorghum crops are separated by large and very shallow catfish farm ponds, often outlined by flocks of dinner-seeking and protected snow-white egrets. The handsome birds were once imported to the Delta for their perfect hat feathers, but now irritate pond owners with their “pound-a-day” fish-eating habits. Nonetheless, Mississippi is now the largest catfish producing state.

Geographically, the entire Mississippi delta is massive. Stretching North into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, east to New York and west to New Mexico, the total delta of the great Mississippi River covers 41 percent of the continental United States.

The much smaller Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (“the Delta”) is one of the region’s many smaller basins. Once called “the most Southern place on Earth,” by historian James C. Cobb, because of its cotton-rich history and defined culture, this flat triangle of fertile land, about two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, covers 7,110 square miles.

On a map, the Delta looks like half a football with its western edge following along the mighty Mississippi River’s path, but it was a mean spirited ballgame that was played on this field. With a reputation for harboring a sweltering summer heat, the Delta became an endless supplier of cheap black labor beginning in the 1800s, enabling thousands of white families to become rich and forcing generations of black families to work their entire lives for nothing, to live and die in poverty, illness and despair.

Traveling around the Delta seems one of the best ways to get in touch with the region’s rich history; the intensity of the Delta’s unforgiving past runs through miles of vine-covered railroad tracks and sweeps across the small country bridges spanning innumerable muddy rivers and streams, small lakes, cane breaks and mossy tree-silhouetted bayous.

Associated stories of evil curse through abandoned cotton gins rusting in the centers of near ghost towns where their tales are etched into crumbling red brick that once gave structure to active retail stores, cafes, movie houses, Masonic halls, Baptist churches, “colored” and white schools.

Today’s Delta countryside remains dotted with white one-room churches that served sharecroppers as schools and houses of worship, sometimes morphing later into freedom schools, NAACP meeting halls or unsafe quarters for “outside agitators.” Along most back roads near the small churches or along the edges of cotton fields are occasional, small run-down sharecropper houses, mostly abandoned but some still in use. Nearby are small cemeteries, some overgrown by kudzu vines but most carefully tended.

When seeking formal historical accounts, not surprisingly, the Delta has its dedicated gatekeepers. Some represent old-line aristocratic families trying to keep their spin on the past; others believe that hiding “embarrassing” Mississippi moments is their inherent responsibility, and good for the states economics.

Gate keeping takes place in so many ways. Sometimes it involves hiding notes, diaries, tapes, books, and papers of people who were closely involved in important activities. At one small Delta library, “someone lost all of the oral history tapes.” At another, “the librarian locked up the Emmett Till scrapbook in the safe,”[vi] and at still another reading spot are two shelves of dated “Old South” classics, but only one copy of Fannie Lou Hamer’s biography is “available.”

Many historical markers give travelers insight into the “white” Delta, but none describe the horrors of slavery, [vii] the cruelty shown to kidnapped African Americans and their children. Few markers[viii] display the Delta’s Jim Crow past or the continued march of African Americans into Mississippi’s civil rights era. Most Mississippi historical markers call attention to famous plantations, prosperous planters and white Confederate Civil War heroes, with a scattering of “blues” markers here and there. In Indianola, a significant black history event was finally celebrated in 2003 with placement of a marker near the post office honoring an early black postmistress who was pressured out of her job by a white politician – one of Mississippi’s most zealous racists.

Black history museums are rare. Exhibits in the “Cottonlandia” museum in Leflore County are remarkable for their lack of mention to African American contributions to the entire agricultural cycle and culture. Enslaved Africans not only planted, grew and harvested the crops, but also were also responsible for clearing land and for nearly all farming-related activity White settlers were their “overseers.” (In Tallahatchie County, retired civil rights activist Rev. Willie Blue complained his town once acquired cultural tourism funds and then used “thousands of dollars” to honor “a famous pig” raised there some time ago.)

Civil rights activists from the small Delta town of Marks in 1968 kicked off a Mule Train headed for Washington, D.C. as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Poor People’s Campaign. The unforgettable event drew thousands of poverty stricken people to Washington, D.C. from the four corners of the United States and captured the world’s attention. Yet in 2003, when a small group of blacks wanted to put up a sign greeting visitors to Marks and honoring the Mule Train story, white city council members objected.

History-blocking was found in fights over archived civil rights materials: At Tougaloo College in Jackson in 2003, the college president agreed to move all of the school’s archived civil rights collections to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, leaving some white and black researchers saying that Aaron Henry, one of the state’s most famous civil rights activists, would “roll over in his grave” if he knew that all of his important papers wound up in the state’s possession, since Henry was often an enemy of the state.

Instead of Tougaloo, others question why the papers of Medgar Evers were donated to the state archives and wonder if they will “all” be appropriately categorized, maintained and protected. One hundred percent availability of these documents is another concern in this state with a record of mishandling and “losing” critical historical records.

At the public University of Mississippi, none of the papers donated to the law school library by the family of the late, legendary racist Sen. James Eastland are available for viewing. One would further think the school’s most significant historical event, the entry of the first black student and resulting campus crisis, would merit a historical plaque, but only a line on one sign is dedicated to the singular 1961 event that could have brought on a second civil war.

Hernando de Soto “discovered” the Mississippi River in 1540 and has more historical markers dedicated to him than the Native Americans who lived along the river long before de Soto visited the region. Along one of de Soto’s expedition routes lies the Delta community of Clarksdale, where Highway 49 intersects Highway 61 – the mythical (and historically inaccurate) site where blues man Robert Johnson “sold his soul to the devil” in exchange for learning to play a mean blues guitar.

I went down to the crossroad
Fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord “Have mercy now
Save poor Bob if you please.

- Robert Johnson,

A hand-painted sign on two weathered boards marks the imaginary “Crossroads” spots. But the real site of Robert Johnson’s “conversion” lies about 30 miles south on an old dirt road between the Dockery plantation and Parchman prison – two well-known Delta institutions that once capitalized on the blood, sweat and tears of black folks … the true Ground Zero for the Delta blues.

ENDNOTES

[i] Wyatt Emmerich, “Embrace the Uniqueness of the Delta,” Delta Magazine, September 2003, 96.
[ii] Alan Lomax, “The Land Where the Blues Began,” (New York: The New Press, 1993), 64.
[iii] James Cobb, editor, “The Mississippi Delta and the World; The Memoirs of David L. Cohn,” (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), xi.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] James Cobb, “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 311. Cobb cites David Cohn, “Where I was Born and Raised,” (Boston: University of Notre Dame Press, 1948), 320.
[vi] In March of 2005, a cherished scrapbook was donated to the Delta State University Archives, said Dr. Henry Outlaw of the school’s Delta Center. Once donated to the Charleston Library, the scrapbook was handed over to Outlaw, at the request of its original owner, Frank Chamblin of St. Louis. “When Chamblin was a young man living in Sumner, the Emmett Till trial was going on. He was a paper boy, and his mother suggested that he fill a scrapbook with news clippings, because she knew this would be a very important historical event some day in the future, and of course it is,” Lawless said.
[vii] Abolish Slavery International (online). More than 27 million people are enslaved today worldwide – more than at any time in history, according to this organization.
[viii] Indianola is one exception with four or five historical markers that honor African American achievement.

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Where Rebels Roost .. Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.
Vanatech Press
June 2005

THE 1960s were glorious years for the Northern college students who came to Mississippi to help the poor, southern crackers overcome their ignorant views and practices. They were truly doing God’s work.

Mississippi Blacks knew better. The 1960’s was just a chapter, perhaps a loud and widely distributed chapter, but still just one chapter of a long struggle for human dignity and opportunity based on individual merit and not on the color of one’s skin.

AFTER THE YANKEES left the Mississippi summers, just like when Federal troops left Mississippi at the end of the second reconstruction in 1874, white Mississippians worked like the devil to return to the status quo before the outsiders intervened; they did a pretty good job.

It wasn’t until the 1970’s and into the 1980’s that involuntary servitude really ended on some Mississippi plantations. And then only because Blacks were no longer “necessary to pick the cotton.”

EVEN TODAY, Mississippi has a poor two-tier education system with Black children in public schools and White children in segregated private academies, originally funded by a Northern industrial neo-Nazi, a friend of Mississippi’s two most famous U. S. Senators – James Eastland and Theodore “The Man” Bilbo.

Hundreds of racially motivated lynching incidents have occurred in Mississippi, more than in any other Southern state. Lynching was sometimes a social event for the observers. One of the post-lynching celebrations resulted in the conception of Senator Eastland, famous Dixiecrat and white supremacist plantation owner. Other times lynching was a keenly calculated means of social control over the black population.


OF COURSE MISSISSIPPI didn’t invent slavery, and Mississippians weren’t the first to use slaves on American soil. That distinction belongs to the Christian Pilgrims, persons escaping from the unfair control and authority of other persons over their lives.

HISTORICAL PRESSURES which facilitated slavery to Mississippi are reviewed in Where Rebels Roost as well as the politics of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s – How SNCC, CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, the SCEF and other groups fought for control and ownership of events, and why they did so. But most important, are the new stories about real bravery and true villains presented in Where Rebels Roost.

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Where Rebels Roost opens with stories of enslavement and moves into the Civil War, when thousands of African Americans fought for the Union, and then lost their gains after Reconstruction ended. It took decades of protest activity before the modern Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s arrived, and too many years afterwards to rid Mississippi of Jim Crow and to bring the vote to Delta blacks.

Published by Vanatech Press

Copyright M. Susan Orr Klopferf 2005

All rights, including electronic, reserved


Susan Orr Klopfer, MBA, is a writer and lives in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta with her husband, social and clinical psychologist, Fred J. Klopfer, Ph.D. Barry C. Klopfer, Esq., their son, is an assistant district attorney in New Mexico.

Vanatech Press
Gallup, New Mexico

www.civilrightsbooks.com