The Help's Viola Davis Says She Based Her Character 'Very Loosely' on Fannie Lou Hamer; Not!

Hollywood movies try to turn real events during the civil rights movment into 'feel-good' films.

In The Help, a much publicized film that focuses on the modern civil rights movement, Viola Davis, a Juilliard-trained actor best known for her Oscar-nominated role opposite Meryl Streep in "Doubt" (and for her stage work, for which she has won two Tony Awards), plays Aibileen, a maid in early-'60s Jacksonville, Miss.

Fannie Lou Hamer, revered civil rights activist from Mississippi. (Image may be subject to copyright.)

The maid quietly endures her employer's racist remarks and casual cruelty — only to go home and write down her thoughts in a journal.

Davis, who apparently knows little about modern civil rights history, is saying she based the character, "very, very loosely," on civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. "She was born the same year as Aibileen, in Mississippi."

Slow down, Hollywood. This statement is simply insulting.

Being born in the same year is all that Davis has going for her, when making this comparison to one of the world's most admired civil rights heroes and social activists Mississippi ever produced.

Fannie Lou Hamer was no one's quiet maid who spent the evening writing down her thoughts in a journal. She had thoughts, all right, and shared them with anyone she chose, including the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson.

To understand and appreciate Hamer, one has to know from whence she came –

Born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, she was the granddaughter of a slave and the youngest of 20 children. Her parents were sharecroppers in this region of the Mississippi Delta, participants in a system of farming that allowed workers to live on a plantation in return for working the land. When the crop is harvested, they split the profits in half with the plantation owner, giving the system another name -- halving. Sometimes the owner paid for the seed and fertilizer, but usually the sharecropper paid those expenses out of his half. It is a hard way to make a living and sharecroppers generally were born poor, lived and died poor.

In my book, Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, I wrote this about Hamer:

A wise civil rights leader, singer and storyteller, Hamer often told how her family stayed alive during the hardest years.

In winter months, Hamer and her siblings followed their mother from plantation to plantation asking landowners for leftover cotton, the "scrappin' cotton. When the family gathered enough cotton for a bale, these bits of scrap were sold to buy food. On those treks "[Mother] always tied our feet up with rags because the ground would be froze real hard," Hamer in 1967 wrote in her short autobiography, To Praise Our Bridges.

Music was tied to survival during these treks and Hamer became well known years later for comforting others with her gospel singing - especially during some of the most difficult moments in the Movement when people were beaten and jailed.

When young civil rights workers later moved into Sunflower County many quickly discovered that Hamer had a "unique ability to define the problems that affected African Americans in the Delta in their own vernacular," wrote J. Moye in Let the People Decide.

Hamer was "a leader waiting for a movement [who] believed deeply in the promise of the Bible and in the promise of the United States of America."

In the early 1960s, as the modern civil rights movement progressed, there were predictions of wholesale starvation in the Delta as government commodities were being withheld from sharecroppers during winter or non-working months. Mothers about to give birth were particularly concerned about the consequences.

It was Hamer who pointed out the labor and sweat of blacks that had "made them white folks creamy rich," concluding, "There's so much hate. Only God has kept the Negro sane."

On June 11, 1963, a message came into the Greenwood Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) office that a group of eight freedom workers - Hamer, along with June Johnson, Annelle Ponder, Euvester Simpson, Rosemary Freeman, Lawrence Guyot, James Wes, and Ruth Day - had been arrested and beaten by Winona jailers in Montgomery County for integrating the white waiting room of the bus station in Winona upon returning from a training session in South Carolina on June 9, 1963.

SNCC leader Bob Moses led a group of volunteers that night to Winona. Though she could hardly talk, Annelle Ponder whispered, "Freedom," when she saw her friends, wrote Cat Holland who observed that June Johnson's face was "so smashed and bloody I didn't recognize her."

Then Holland recognized Hamer, who "took her hand and ran it over her lumpy, bruised flesh," while telling her what happened. Holland wrote of her conversation with a police officer:

"Why y'all beat 'em like this?" I asked the policeman, who stood by leering.
"We kin give you some of the same thing," he said.
"Don't say nothing, Ida," Miss Hamer said. "You go back an' tell the others."

Hamer, Others Protest in Chicago

Mississippi's conservative "blue dog Democrats" in 1964 threatened to support Republican Barry Goldwater. The state party's leaders predictably kept out all black participation in primaries or conventions.

So the black-led Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) decided to become active in the state's official Democratic Party and to steer the party to support Johnson for President.

While the regular Democrats were sending a "hand-picked delegation to Chicago with only two token Negro delegates, although Negroes constituted 40 percent of 240,000 of the registered voters in Mississippi," MFDP members decided they, alone, should represent the state at the upcoming party convention, and Hamer was part of this group.

Aaron Henry, a Delta leader from Clarksdale and friend of Hamer's, appealed for $30,000 to support the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, a bi-racial coalition made up of the MFDP, NAACP of Mississippi, the state Teacher's Association, the Mississippi AFL-CIO and the Young Democrats.

The coalition's purpose would be to appear before the Credential Committee of the Democratic National convention on August 26 to prove discrimination by the regular Democratic Party of Mississippi.

The secretary of state, however, refused permission to register MFDP because "there was already a Democratic political party in the state," even though Mississippi Democrats failed to support the national party's presidential candidate in the previous 1960 elections.

Whites did not take the MFDP very seriously and it was sometimes the target of editorial "humor." The state's spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission, meanwhile, had collected nearly 1000 files on the political organization including newsletters, membership lists, meeting announcements and notes, as well as commentaries from the Commission's investigators.

Then on August 12, an injunction was issued ordering all MFDP officials not to leave the state and go to Atlantic City for the convention. Also prohibited was engagement by the leader in any further MFDP activity. MFDP filed suit in federal court asking that more than a dozen of Mississippi's segregation laws be invalidated, taking advantage of the new Civil Rights Act legislation and causing a cloud of last-minute confusion as the group made haste for New Jersey.

Once they arrived, national Democratic Party leaders fell through in support of this unique group from Mississippi and were not prepared to greet MFDP's 64 delegates with open arms.

President Lyndon Johnson did not want bitter debates initiated, even if the regular Mississippi Democrats were supporting Goldwater instead of him.

Johnson and party liberals had campaigned on the basis of their civil rights "successes" and even though the Southern state party structures completely excluded African Americans, Democrats did not want this practice disrupted, fearing they would lose the support of Southern states.

But Fannie Lou Hamer added heat to the convention when she spoke before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention, telling the horrifying story of her attempts to register to vote in Sunflower County, including the beating she received in Winona.

Lyndon Johnson, concerned over the attention paid to MFDP and the fight for credentials, gave notice that he wanted to deliver a special televised speech on an unrelated topic, as Hamer was speaking.

News networks recognized the public's interest in Hamer and played her entire speech on the evening news, giving even more airtime than she would have received:
Hamer's unforgettable August 22, 1964 testimony would go down in civil rights history:

"In June the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop, was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailways bus. When we got to Winona ... four people that had gone in to use the restaurant was ordered out. During this time I was on the bus. But when I looked through the window and saw they had rushed out I got off of the bus to see what had happened, and one of the ladies said, "It was a State Highway Patrolman and a Chief of Police ordered us out."

"...I was carried to the county jail, and put in the booking room. They left some of the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells. I was placed in a cell with a young woman called Miss [Euvester] Simpson. After I was placed in the cell I began to hear the sounds of kicks and screams. I could hear somebody say, "Can you say, yes, sir, nigger? Can you say yes, sir?"

" ... They beat her, I don't know how long, and after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people. And it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he ... said, "You are from Ruleville all right," and he used a curse word, and he said, "We are going to make you wish you was dead."

" ... The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman for me, to lay down on a bunk bed on my face, and I laid on my face. The first Negro began to beat ... until he was exhausted, and I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.

"The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to set on my feet to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush ... I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered."

Historians would later write that Johnson told Hubert Humphrey to "crush the rebellion" and get the MFDP off the front pages, or Humphrey could give up on the idea of ever becoming vice-president. Humphrey instructed fellow Minnesotan and future Vice President Walter Mondale to "suppress the MFDP by any means necessary" and this was accomplished through secret meetings, and false statements, and by using information on the MFDP's strategy gathered from FBI informants.

Johnson, Humphrey, and Mondale finally offered MFDP to seat two at-large delegates to be selected by Johnson (to ensure Humphrey that Hamer would not be selected). MFDP delegates refused the compromise. Humphrey reportedly pleaded with Hamer (whom he reportedly found "distasteful" because she was poor and uneducated) to accept the compromise so he could become vice president and push civil rights.

Mississippian Rev. Ed King, also a delegate, years later told how Hamer expressed no sympathy for Humphrey's dilemma:

"Senator Humphrey. I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs for trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County. Now if you lose this job of vice president because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take it this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about."

In December 1964, MFDP tried to halt seating of Mississippi's white Congressmen who gained their seats in racially rigged elections by filing a notice of contest. MFDP claimed that Annie Devine, Victoria Gray and Fannie Lou Hamer, three MFDP Congressional candidates who ran in the freedom vote after being kept off the official ballot, were entitled to seats in their respective districts.

Congress would not budge. Civil rights groups including SNCC, CORE, SCLC and Americans for Democratic Action endorsed the challenge but ADA would not support the seating of the three women.

The national media also rejected seating of the three candidates; hence the Freedom Democratic Party backed down from supporting the three, but continued the seating challenge.

In January, 600 black Mississippians attending the opening ceremony of the 1965 session to lobby against seating of the Mississippi delegation, and more than one third of House members agreed, voting to bar the official Mississippian delegation.
Hamer had helped make their case.

Hamer Made Impact, Julian Bond Said

Long after the conflicts faded from national news coverage, Fannie Lou Hamer was acting on her dream of an ideal community and in 1970, formed the Freedom Farm Cooperative to help displaced farm workers become self-reliant.

At its zenith, the cooperative owned 680 acres of land devoted to cotton production, 200 units of low-income housing, day care center, and a small manufacturing plant.
When Hamer died in 1977, penniless, and ill from the beatings she had received, Georgia state legislator and SNCC representative Julian Bond spoke at her funeral, noting that Fannie Lou Hamer was "the articulator for the Southern movement to continue to fight long after SNCC's summer soldiers abandoned Ruleville and the rural South, shell shocked by too much of what was daily life for her."

Hamer's impact upon African Americans, the labor and women's movements, was impressive, Bond said.

"She and her co-workers taught a powerful lesson to those now facing the rapid dismantling of the formal structure of African American progress, the rise of widespread racist terrorism, and the intensification of economic exploitation."

Fannie Lou Hamer was not a person to journal her thoughts.

And Davis's character isn't close to this incredible woman from Mississippi.

Not close at all.
* * * * *

For many people, this is the only film they will ever see that has anything to do with the modern civil rights movement in Mississippi. They will leave with no idea of the utter violence and heroism that defines this period. I am concerned, for instance, when I hear the name of Fannie Lou Hamer being bantied about, as a model for the maid character. It is a shame, that when African Americans are offered an opportunity to work, it is for a film that doesn't represent the true pain and nobility of this movement that was so critical to our country.

We need some real history taught by films and books before moving into feel good movies about Mississippi's ghosts. Especially when in today's papers, we still read about white teens in Jackson killing an innocent black man -- for fun.

Will John Grisham Please Write EVEN MORE About Emmett Till, Cleve McDowell, James Eastland and Other Mississippi Madness?

Josh Lucas plays The Firm's Mitch McDeere.


I don't know if I can stand the wait! This Sunday is the two-hour premiere of John Grisham's new television series on NBC.

Sometime back, I wrote the following blog post -- begging Grisham to write a book about Emmett Till, a book that would be made into a movie. He hasn't done this yet, but at least we now have The Firm every Sunday on television to look forward to.

Here's what I have learned, so far, about this new series (Jan. 8, 9/8 central):

Based on the blockbuster feature film and best-selling novel by world-renowned author John Grisham ("The Pelican Brief," "The Client"), "The Firm" continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel. As a young associate, McDeere brought down the prestigious Memphis law firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which operated as a front for the Chicago mob -- and his life was never the same. After a difficult decade, which included a stay in the Federal Witness Protection program, Mitch and his family now emerge from isolation to reclaim their lives and their future -- only to find that past dangers are still lurking and new threats are everywhere. "The Firm" is produced by Entertainment One in association with Sony Pictures Television and Paramount Pictures. The executive producers are Grisham, Lukas Reiter ("Law & Order," "Boston Legal"), John Morayniss ("Haven," "Hung"), Michael Rosenberg ("Hung," "Skins") and Noreen Halpern ("Rookie Blue," "Hung").

Here's my original blog post:

This is a plea to my favorite author, John Grisham. Write a book about Emmett Till – the 14-year-old Chicago, Ill. pupil brutally murdered 56 years ago while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta. You could bring us up to date on the FBI, cold cases and what went on in Sunflower County when the prosecutor would not accept help from the FBI to make the case.

It would make a wonderfully intriguing Mississippi murder mystery, since no one has ever really determined exactly what happened in those early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955 and who all was involved.

While an updated Till's story alone would make a great, new Grisham novel, what keeps me going is the murder of a Mississippi lawyer, Cleve McDowell, shot to death in his home some 42 years later – a man who was born in the same year as Till and who became a civil rights lawyer because of Emmett Till’s murder.

On the morning of March 17, 1997 the naked, lifeless body of Cleve McDowell was discovered by his youngest sister, propped up against an upstairs bathroom wall.

Throughout his Mississippi Delta home, dozens of powerful handguns and rifles –"always one within his reach" his secretary told me – had been strategically placed by McDowell for self-protection.

So why didn't McDowell use one of his guns to save his own life?

What happened to bullets taken from McDowell's body during the state's autopsy? What happened to McDowell's guns?

Why do county officials still maintain a gag order on all investigation records of this murder? How is this even possible when the man is dead?

McDowell served as a public defender in Sunflower County for three decades. He was part of a group of black leaders organizing to pressure district attorneys and revive interest in many never-prosecuted cases in which Blacks were killed for doing civil rights work, as well as the murder of Emmett Till.

For over forty years, McDowell studied hate crimes and murders taking place during the modern civil rights movement. Where is all of the information he collected about the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and so many others?

Had this Mississippi lawyer and his friend been working to solved Dr. Martin Luther King’s murder? McDowell once worked for King. He was an SCLC man and worshiped this civil rights leader.

Did his partner really commit suicide, over in Montgomery Alabama? What about the signs of torture, McDowell discovered and reported about his friend, to others?

Why did McDowell tell his closest friends that he would be next?

Why is McDowell’s name being erased from Mississippi history? Why do some Mississippi officials and reporters get so uptight when I mention his name? And why aren’t they writing about McDowell?

So many questions wait to be answered. Would John Grisham see the story emerge? I have faith that he would.

Doing research in Mississippi on people like Till or McDowell, is a challenge. I’ve had my own fights when trying to pull up records in the Magnolia state, and I will share a few...

Back in November of 2005, writing about Who killed JFK, I kept running into intriguing facts and questions involving a Vicksburg, Miss. private detective who once worked for the state’s double secret spy organization, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency formed soon after the murder of Emmett Till, partly to stave off questions from the Feds.

This detective had gone on to work for the rather famous detective agency in New Orleans that later would be linked to Kennedy’s assassination. He returned home to Vicksburg, told his son that he had learned something about the assassination that scared the hell out of him, and then… the detective “accidentally” shot himself in the groin with his rifle and died.

Sullivan's death was reported as a hunting accident, since it happened while he was cleaning his rifle after a duck hunt, the report states. Sullivan's daughter once told me she and her brother absolutely believe their father was murdered because he knew too much. “He knew enough about guns to not have an accident like that,” the daughter said.

Now THAT would be a great book for Grisham's fans. It would put this story to rest for Sullivan’s family. While JFK conspiracy theorists keep the debate alive, few mention Mississippi's links to the president’s murder. I know Grisham could make it come alive in his own unique way.

My intrigue with the Mississippi connection to JFK's assassination began while discovering information that linked a true Delta icon, U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland, to several others often associated with the tragic Dallas event, including this Vicksburg detective.

Seven years before John F. Kennedy's murder, the magnolia state's infamous senator (a Delta planter whose paths crossed with McDowell’s more than once) met for the first time with Guy Banister, a controversial CIA operative and retired FBI agent in charge of the agency’s Chicago bureau. Banister was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Eastland through involvement with Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS (sometimes called "SISSY”).

Okay, this is a little weak, but some conspiracy theorists have no trouble at all, making this connection.

Here is what I know:

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956 reported that Robert Morrison, a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi in the heart of the Delta, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours.

Describing the conference as "completely satisfactory," Morrison told the New Orleans reporter "Mr. Banister has complete liaison with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip."

Don’t you think this alone would fire up John Grisham? I sure do.

Known as a notorious political extremist who was later described as the impetus for James Garrison’s 1967-1970 Kennedy assassination probe, Banister earlier became a brief focus of Mississippi's secret spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission, when it was suggested Banister should be hired to set up an "even tighter" domestic spying system throughout the state. This report was hidden away in the state's Sovereignty Commission records.

If Mr. Grisham wants to discover more about these records, I have put up the link online at http://mississippisovereigntycommission.com and yes – I own this domain and I know, for fact, it pisses off the state library, which houses the commission’s records (at least the records that were not stolen by former state officials or the FBI).

A second Eastland operative, private investigator John D. Sullivan, the detective from Vicksburg who was mysteriously killed after JFK’s assassination, made this suggestion (to hire Banister) to the Sovereignty Commission just months after the JFK assassination, also reported in released Sovereignty Commission records.

Sullivan once worked for Banister (both inside the FBI, as an agent, and then privately, in New Orleans) and also as a private self-employed investigator for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Sullivan got around -- he also worked for the private white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member; and for Eastland’s SISS, as had Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Citizens Councils (and Grisham writes about them) came together after Brown V. Topeka Board of Education. Everyone in Mississippi was madder than hell about the Court’s decision to open up schools to black children, and so the Councils formed to “let others know what a good job Mississippi is doing with its segregation” and of course, to fend off any attempts to integrate.

The Councils, in effect, were the uptown Klan, as one famous Mississippi journalist, Hodding Carter, Jr., would write. For a few years, Councils got their money from the Sovereignty Commission, which received and channeled money to them through a famous New York financier (per Sovereignty Commission records). Oh, it gets so sticky in Mississippi.

When Sullivan reportedly shot himself soon after the Kennedy assassination, Sovereignty Commission investigators went to his widow and tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were either reportedly burned by his widow or they had been lent out, and she “could not remember” who had them, Sovereignty Commission files once again disclose.

Some twenty-nine years later, in testimony before the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board during a Dallas hearing on November 18, 1994, the late Senator Eastland was directly implicated in the president’s assassination by one of the author/theorists invited to testify.

"Lee Harvey Oswald was quite possibly an agent of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and he was doing the bidding of [Sen. Thomas J. Dodd and Eastland and Morrison,” author John McLaughlin swore. Of course, McLaughlin has been vilified repeatedly since he made that statement. This guy would be a great character in a Grisham novel.

But back to Mississippi and the fight over McDowell and Eastland secret records.

Documentation that could support or even discredit such assertions as McLaughlin’s might have been found in the Eastland archives at the University of Mississippi, but for many years, no objective scholar was allowed to search these archives since the day they arrived on campus. I was told that the well-known Mississippi newspaper investigative reporter, Jerry Mitchell, was allowed to go through the Eastland papers at will, threatening to report some nasty stuff if he was not allowed to do this at his pleasure.

Once I tried to blow past the law school’s dean who was in charge of the records. However, it did not work. I do not have Mitchell’s chutzpah or, more important, his power base.

But that day my son, a just-out-of-law-school graduate who had left New York, and I tried to present the Ole Miss law school dean (used to be called the Eastland School of Law) with a FOIA to gain a peek at some of McDowell’s records, hoping we could slide into senator’s stuff, too. We walked into the dean's office, requesting that we see some records on McDowell, who was kicked out of the law school back in the early 60s.

McDowell was a friend of James Meredith (the Black student at Ole Miss who nearly caused a second Civil War because of his admission to that infamous university). When Meredith left school (the day after their close friend Medgar Evers was assassinated), McDowell (the first Black admitted to the law school) was left alone.

To make matter worse, Meredith’s security guards were released from duty when Meredith split. After numerous chases and threats by students welding guns, McDowell finally ordered a gun for his personal protection. Campus security reported this, and McDowell was booted out. He later proved that a number of students actually carried guns on campus, especially during the Meredith clash, and were not kicked out of school. But this did not matter, and McDowell lost his case.

Back then, the former law school dean wrote a glowing letter of support (used to get McDowell into another law school). I learned about this letter from another author and I wanted to see it, but the current dean refused access. He said it did not exist.

So Barry and I are sitting in the office, watching Dean So-and-So read the Freedom of Information Act request to himself. He looks at my son’s paper for one second and then wads it up and pitches it into his garbage pail.

“That’s why I told the last person who gave me one of these,” the dean says.

Barry looked stunned. It was a wonderful experience for him, I believe, but Barry quickly decided to leave Mississippi to study for the New Mexico bar. I really did not blame him, but as his mom, I was amused and believed it could be chalked up as a good lesson for later on.

What would John Grisham do?

Back to Eastland's records.

Once records were handed over to the University of Mississippi, they were “managed” for years by a former Eastland associate and devotee who followed the papers from Washington, D.C. to Oxford, I discovered.

There was so much I wanted to learn about Eastland, a planter from the cotton hamlet of Doddsville, in the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The old Senator was a talented racist who often blocked money from coming into the Delta to feed and employ the poorest of Mississippians. Yet he was quite good at collecting hundreds of thousands dollars of federal farming subsidies for himself. Shades of Michele Bachmann.

Eastland died in 1986 at 82 and even though he was once of the most powerful U.S. senators ever to work Washington, D.C. (at one time chaired multiple powerful committees) there has been very little written about Eastland; his family and friends seem to be protecting what information is allowed to the public.

Ole Miss sure did a bang up job of helping his family protect this man who best known for his strong support of states' rights and for his opposition to the civil rights movement.

Like most Southern Democrats, Eastland denounced Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, and even advised that no one had to obey this Supreme Court decision.

"On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court's decision. You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent sociological considerations,” he told voters in Senatobia, Mississippi.

When it came to races mingling or as they say in Mississippi, mixing, the older Senator did not mince words, testifying to the Senate 10 days after the Brown decision came down:

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth, which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination... Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.

When three brave young civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were kidnapped and killed in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, Eastland reportedly told President Lyndon Johnson that the incident was a hoax and there was no Ku Klux Klan in the state, conjecturing that they young men had gone to Chicago.

Later released records of President Lyndon Johnson show this conversation:

Johnson: Jim, we've got three kids missing down there. What can I do about it?

Eastland: Well, I don't know. I don't believe there's ... I don't believe there's three missing.

Johnson: We've got their parents down here.

Eastland: I believe it's a publicity stunt...

President Johnson once said that, "Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he'd say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.”

I remain fascinated by Sovereignty Commission records showing that Eastland asked for a list of students who would be coming into Mississippi for Freedom Summer. It also intrigues me that Paul Goodman was the son of the Pacifica Radio executive who was earlier hounded by Eastland in special Senate hearings.

Would Grisham be so intrigued?

Well, after our unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act or FOIA bid to the University of Mississippi's law school, an ethical historian finally was hired by Ole Miss to organize the archives based in the law school. The records, by the way, were moved over to the school’s library, thus getting rid of the law school's problem.

So we could finally see some records?

Not a chance.

One Ole Miss historian explained the current plan was to release first all of Eastland's press releases. (Old press releases are something I really want to dig through. I am kidding.) However, she was honest and admitted that many important files were “probably missing” – that the files looked pretty much “cleaned out."

There was something gained from our efforts, though. It did come back to me that “some people at Ole Miss were really angry” over the FOIA request. This was good news. Plus, I helped my son get over his angst before he left Mississippi by driving around together on campus blasting our CD version of Bob Dylan singing Dixie. If you have not heard the man sing it, do. He spent a Freedom Summer in the tiny cotton town of Drew, my friend Margaret Block told me, the same town where McDowell was killed years later. Very close to where young Till had been tortured in a planter’s shed only a few miles away from McDowell's home. Dylan got it, all right, and sings Dixie with a slight snarl.

I once spoke with historian Carol Polsgrove from Indiana University who wanted to see Eastland’s records. Polsgrove said she was interested in the white resistance to the civil rights movement, that it has not received the kind of attention from historians that the movement itself has—understandably, since there is nothing very heroic about this behavior.

She said she had thought about writing a biography of Eastland, terming him the political linchpin of the resistance, and going so far as to call the law school, asking to see his papers. Secretaries told her they were stowed in boxes in a basement—uncataloged and inaccessible. A library staffer whispered that Senator Eastland was not quite “politically correct”.

No kidding?

Polsgrove and I agreed we would really love to go through ALL of Eastland’s papers, someday. I felt a bond of sisterhood, at the time.

So, don’t you wonder what kind of a tax deduction his family got for donating these inaccessible and incomplete papers to this most southern university on Earth? Where students still dally in blackface, upon occasion?

Would John Grisham demand to see all of the Eastland papers? I would like to think so.

Damn, I wish my favorite author would go pay a visit to Oxford, Mississippi, maybe get some of Eastland’s good stuff and then pay a visit to Sunflower County to let his readers know just what happened to Cleve McDowell and to his lawyer-friend over in Alabama.

This would be truly an excellent reading adventure, a new John Grisham novel I could really get into. Something to download on my iPad for a good read on a rainy summer day.
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Susan Klopfer writes on civil rights history and current issues. She is the author of several civil rights books that related to the Mississippi Delta, including her newest book, "Who Killed Emmett Till," available in e-book, audio book and print.