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.
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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.)