Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Revisited

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For you to enjoy -- pictures of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from over the year. Susan

'Missing Pages' .. Pioneering Black Journalists of Modern America

NONFICTION
Pioneering black journalists tell of early days in history
Missing Pages Edited by Wallace Terry, Carroll and Graf, 375 pp., $16.95

Not so long ago, the American media carried the battle for a racially integrated South onto the front page and into America's living rooms.

Still, newspapers, television and radio in the North and South often were no more open to blacks in the 1950s than a whites-only Southern diner, according to "Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America, An Oral History."

With few exceptions, newsrooms and broadcast studios were resolutely white and male, and determined to stay that way. Max Robinson's television boss in Virginia refused to show his face while he read the news in 1959. He later became the first black anchorman at ABC.

Story Continued--

Striggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Dittmer, et. al.

Archives 1996
From the 1996 Archives of
Black Issues In Higher Education

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
- book reviews

by Julian Bond

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1994. $29.95 hard, $14.95 paper

These three excellent books represent a developing and welcome trend in civil rights historiography.

Previous histories have described the modern-day 20th-century civil rights movement from the top down -- as a story whose main characters are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most have also described the development of the movement within a restricted time line -- from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that introduced King and his espousal of nonviolent resistance to the passage of important civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

Under that time-bound restriction, the movement began suddenly out of nowhere in the middle 1950s; by the middle 1960s it had triumphed. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the active cooperation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, segregation had been vanquished. The battle had been won.

More ..

Blogging across Mississippi; Birdia Keglar Highway Dedicated

Birdia Keglar Highway Dedication
June 1, 2007
Charleston, Miss.

Photos from the highway dedication that took place June 1 are posted. You can view (and download) from here.

Blog Across the Mississippi Delta Civil Rights History Tour

AS FREEDOM VOLUNTEERS packed up and left Mississippi in 1964, brutality and murder kept going on. Some stories made it into the news and into later history books, but in smaller Delta towns several hundred miles north of Jackson, many incidents remain only as whispers among those who once picked the cotton ...


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Bloggers Set to Revisit Mississippi Delta Civil Rights People and Places

Mount. Pleasant, Iowa (USA), May 29, 2007--Two friends from Cleveland, Mississippi and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are spending ten days roaming and blogging the Mississippi Delta while visiting civil rights people and places. Their pictures and stories will be placed daily at http://mississippimurders.com on the Internet. (Photo at left, courthouse in Belzoni, home of the Rev. George Lee who was murdered in 1955.)

Margaret Block, an early civil rights advocate, and Susan Klopfer, author of Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, plan to roam the Mississippi Delta starting June 1, visiting people and places of the modern civil rights movement. “We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for ten days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history,” Klopfer said.

“We plan to visit the towns of Money, Drew, Glendora, Greenwood and other spots connected to the murders of Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and Cleve McDowell, among others who were killed for their civil rights activities or just for being black.”

Block, an early SNCC volunteer, spent her first years out of high school in the small town of Charleston where they will kick off their blogging venture by attending a program June 1 honoring Keglar. The NAACP leader was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 on her way home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Keglar once saved Block’s life by moving her out of Charleston in a hearse from the funeral home that Keglar managed.

“We have very few scheduled stops, but we will also leave the Delta to attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother in Meridian,” Block said. The two also plan to visit with Unita Blackwell, Mississippi’s first black woman mayor, and will take pictures as they roam the historical Brooks Farm, Parchman penitentiary, and Clarksdale, home of Aaron Henry, an early civil rights leader who Block also knew.

The two women met when Klopfer was researching a book on the civil rights movement, “Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.” Klopfer was living on the grounds of Parchman at the time, where her husband was the chief psychologist.

...Contact:
Susan Klopfer
775-340-3585 (cell) sklopfer@gmail.com
http://mississippimurders.blogspot.com
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

# # #

David Halberstam, journalist, dies

David Halberstam


Several news outlets, including The Associated Press, are reporting that journalist, author and historian David Halberstam has been killed in a car crash. Halberstam celebrated his 73rd birthday two weeks ago.

A Harvard journalism grad, Halberstam first made his mark at The Tennessean in Nashville during the Civic Rights era and was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Halberstam was my journalistic hero. He was a wonderful observer who wrote early-on about the Civil Rights Movement. Halberstam, for instance,was one of few journalists who stayed in the Delta after the Milam-Bryant trial to report on the murder of Clinton Melton.

When researching Rebels Roost;Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, I ran into his account of the Elmer Kimball trial and was blown away by his humorous style -- not quite what I'd expected in 1956.

(Here's a link to the chapter in Rebel's Roost that quotes Halberstam.)

Cleve McDowell tried to find all of Emmett Till's murderers

Slain sttorney Cleve McDowell and Rev. Jesse Jackson campaign in the Mississippi Delta (as the cotton dust flies through the air). McDowell was murdered in 1997 and questions remain.

With February’s announcement of a second attempt by the U.S. Congress to open civil rights cold case files, questions re-surface over the more recent murder of a Mississippi Delta lawyer and civil rights warrior. Cleve McDowell was killed just ten years ago – an act too recent to be investigated under the pretext of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, named after the 14-year-old African American from Chicago who was killed in 1955. Investigation and court records of McDowell’s death remain sealed.
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Ten years ago on March 17 friends and family of a Mississippi attorney and civil rights veteran discovered his dead body slumped against the bathroom wall.
Cleve McDowell had been shot to death in his own home.

A Sunflower County judge slapped a gag order on the ensuing investigation and a decade later the same order remains on all public records of McDowell’s slaying – even though McDowell’s murderer was caught and convicted before the year was over.

McDowell was the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi law school. And once a lawyer, he never gave up investigating Emmett Till’s racially motivated murder that took place only several miles away from McDowell’s childhood home – plus the murders of countless others caught up in Mississippi’s civil rights battles of the 1950s and beyond.

The Drew, Mississippi native’s body was surrounded by dozens of guns – powerful handguns and rifles – all purchased over the years by McDowell for self-protection.

Initial news reports of McDowell’s murder from the Associated Press indicated

McDowell, 56, was found dead in an upstairs bathroom early that morning after relatives called police to say the door to his apartment was open and his car missing. Police continued to look for McDowell's Cadillac for two days before discovering it in a small, nearby town.

McDowell had been 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.

During the 1980s, McDowell was the executive field director of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Yet no journalists’ stories have ever revealed that McDowell was killed one week before the first public release of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files, secret government records kept on private citizens officially spied on by state officials from 1954 until 1972.
* * *

After losing a 21-year battle with the American Civil Liberties Union, Mississippi was forced into turning over thousands of Commission records that would eventually aid in solving the murders of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and others who’d worked for social justice during those turbulent years, including Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

Many of the Sovereignty Commission’s most secret records are believed to be missing, however, and McDowell’s private collection of his own investigations might have helped to fill in some of the blanks. McDowell had looked into a number of murders and other crimes over the past thirty years and stored these personal records in his Drew office.

Six months after McDowell’s death, those papers disappeared at the time of an office fire in downtown Drew.

McDowell’s former office manager states that files on the Emmett Till case were undoubtedly included in her boss’s collection of stacked boxes and in his locked office safe.

“He never let me go through any of those papers. So I don’t really know what he had. But he often spoke to Emmett’s mother and promised he would find out what happened to her son and who was involved in his murder. I know Cleve talked to her just a month before he was killed,” Nettie Davis said.
-----

Here are some old McDowell links. Of course, there are more for you to discover. sk

Link 1/photo

Link 2/news story of entry to U of Miss.

****

(From "Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited")

Revision date announced: May 2007

Susan Orr Klopfer, a former news reporter, is a writer and lived 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.

History Again ...

"During the American Civil War and the years immediately following, thousands of Confederate sympathizers and former soldiers left the southern United States to seek exile in other lands. Evidence suggests that more Confederate soldiers went to British Honduras, presently known as Belize, than any other single site. This work is an in-depth look at the settlements established by former Confederates-what lured the Confederates there, what the trip from New Orleans was like, what life was like for immigrants in Belize City, the settlements at Toledo, New Richmond, northern British Honduras, Manattee, and other settlements, and what Belize City was like at the height of the immigrant influx. Also included are lists of arrivals at the hotels and passenger lists from the ships; both were important in identifying prominent Confederates who sought refuge in British Honduras."

About the Author
Dr. Donald C. Simmons, Jr., is currently assistant director of the Mississippi Humanities Council. He resides in Jackson.

Mississippi Delta: Under the Microscope

The old community store at the Brooks Farm outside of Drew in Sunflower County, Mississippi.




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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
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Chapter 8 Under the Microscope

By the mid 1930s, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker and social psychologist John Dollard, both white Yale colleagues at the Institute of Human Relations, traveled into the Delta to study Indianola and nearby Sunflower, making the Sunflower County seat historically significant as the site of the first anthropological studies on non-Native people in the United States.

Their classic ethnographies, Powdermaker's “After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South” and Dollard's “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” contributed to a “master narrative” of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race.

Powdermaker’s field observations during her study of the town she wrote of as Cottonville were stunning. In her first few weeks, blacks told her of an incident when the black janitor of a white school was lynched after reporting some of the pupils to the school's principal for throwing stones at school windows.
Powdermaker noted how moods shifted within the white community regarding the possibility of a lynching. One day after a lynching attempt, the researcher journaled her impressions:

[A] group of shabby men, their eyes burning, tramped up and down the road and through the woods, mingling their oaths with the barking of their dogs. The middle-class white men sitting in their offices or homes remarked that of course they did not approve of lynching, but that undoubtedly these Negroes would be lynched, and "what can you do when you have to deal with the primitive African type, the killer?" The Negroes in the neighborhood sat at home all day, afraid to go out. Those in a town thirty miles distant said that things must be getting better because a few years ago, if the mob had not found the men they wanted by this time, they would have lynched someone else.

Powdermaker theorized that lynching encouraged blacks to commit violent acts against other blacks, “… because the black person can hope for no justice and no defense from our legal institutions" and therefore must settle his own difficulties, "and often he knows only one way." Dollard’s separate work led to development of a theory of “frustration aggression” through life histories he collected from nine middle-class African Americans. In their respective studies, both scientists stressed the importance of voting and of the deep injustice of the forced caste division they observed.

IN 1933, FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt was elected and began implementing New Deal relief policies that in the end worked better for whites than most black – not surprising since federal agricultural policies favored the richer agriculturalists. Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover, who did not have a good record for helping Delta blacks. This new president appeared to favor the poor, but only in his words.
A group called African Americans in Mississippi hired a secret investigator who studied Roosevelt’s relief administration around the state, finding that black people were rarely hired by Works Progress Administration (WPA) or the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and those who were hired, received lower pay than whites.
No CWA building projects, such as libraries, were awarded to black communities, and most CWA teaching positions were handed out to whites. Planters and their relatives administered relief programs, always to their personal benefit; blacks were often removed from relief rolls by the planter-run social programs and forced to pick cotton at low wages.

Walter White of the NAACP confirmed the investigator’s findings that Delta blacks were losing their federal relief for refusing to pick cotton at low wages, creating a condition that “savors of peonage.”

In Tunica, White discovered a planter’s wife supervised the WPA program and thousands of the twenty thousand black residents of the county were dropped from the WPA relief rolls for refusing to pick cotton. Mrs. Mary Jane Harris, 85, suffered from high blood pressure. After picking cotton for one month, because of health reasons and the need to care for her daughters, she left the fields and lost her monthly WPA relief check.



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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
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New Deal agricultural programs helped large-scale planters the most, allowing them to withdraw up to 30 percent of the acreage of their cotton crops from production. This parity program, requested by planters in the early 1920s, raised farm prices.
In her Delta study, Woodruff found that a U. S. Senate committee in 1936 revealed Oscar Johnston’s Delta and Pine Land Company received over $318,000 in parity payments between 1933 and 1935. This would be equivalent to $4.1 million ($4,112,647.81 AFI) in 2002. These payments harmed smaller family farmers and offered very little for farm workers. Delta planters, who benefited, “welcomed the program as it gave them opportunity to move faster toward mechanization by boosting their profits.”

Planters obtained a windfall with passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (AAA) that provided a rental payment from the government on retired lands and a second "parity" check. Tenants and sharecroppers were supposed to receive a share of these payments, but in most cases, they did not, with their portion either stolen by the planter or taken as they were fooled into signing away their shares.
The AAA eventually led planters to retire croplands; planters could then use the full subsidy payments to hire back sharecroppers as wageworkers at lower costs. The planters’ strategy was to support a great number of tenants to place in the relief programs. Thus, the lower their own expenditures would be for “furnish” or what they provided in advance for food and supplies.

Unions, and cooperative farms

The Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union (STFU), founded in 1934, was a socialist organization that attracted support from a variety of Southern white liberals. This included ministers from a radical movement who followed a social gospel “drawing from the New Testament and Karl Marx.”

Noted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, deeply committed to fighting Jim Crow and an investigator for the NAACP, was an STFU member, and spent many months in the Delta often as an investigator for the NAACP.

The STFU called for the end of evictions, appointment of farm labor representation on agricultural boards, and enforcement of AAA contracts regarding parity payments to sharecroppers. In 1934, the STFU collected evidence for a pamphlet funded by the Socialist Party, “The Plight of the Sharecropper,” which “shocked even members of the AAA.”

Angered landowners asked for their own AAA investigation that when completed indicated no problems, since planters controlled this second study. But union officials demanded still another government investigation, and those results were “so damaging, that the head…agribusiness man, Chester Davis, destroyed it.”
In 1935, the Delta’s major planters reduced cotton-picking wages from 60 cents to 40 cents per hundred pounds picked. Most pickers brought in about 200 pounds per day, so this represented an average daily loss of $2.50. The STFU called a strike in Arkansas that met with success. Planters were caught off guard and with this victory union memberships grew. Nevertheless, landowners began evicting union members and blacklisting throughout the Delta, and soon thousands of families were thrown off plantations and out of their homes.

Within four years, the STFU could count eighteen locals and five hundred members in Mississippi, most from the Delta. STFU activities were far greater in Arkansas and received the majority of press coverage. Strikes did occur in the Delta and some were just as bloody.

Some negotiations were successful. In 1946, as part of the National Farm Labor Union, the STFU demanded cotton workers be paid 50 cents an hour or $5.00 a day for ten hours of work. Planters had lowered wages the year before, from $3.00 per 100 pounds of cotton to $2.10 and met secretly, this time, with the USDA Wage Stabilization Board in Greenville to strategize on keeping wages down.
H. L. Mitchell, STFU co-founder, filed a complaint and the Wage Board refused to support the proposed wage reductions, fearing violence and evictions if wages went down.

For the STFU, success was almost always short-lived. Stories of evictions, blacklisting, violence, terror, marches, shootings, convictions, beatings and murder kept building, particularly on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River where during a cotton choppers strike in the spring of 1936, workers at one plantation put down their hoes and joined a march along the cotton fields. Marchers, including women and children, faced men who rode alongside with guns and ball bats.
While the STFU moved into other parts of the South and California, some members returned to Mississippi in the 1960s to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement. But there were no further successful attempts to organize tenants until Fannie Lou Hamer in Sunflower County formed the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union in 1965.

What was the threat of the STFU? Why did planters employ such extremes to combat it? What did planters fear?

F. Raymond Daniell, a New York Times reporter, visited the Delta in 1935, and gave his interpretation of planters’ fears: “The average planter and public official is firmly convinced that unless he takes drastic steps, white supremacy, Christianity, the American flag and the sanctity of home and family ties will be overthrown by agents of the Soviet Union.”

Regardless, evangelist Sherman Eddy of Memphis decided it was time to try something new to help Delta sharecroppers and in 1936 and 1937 started two cooperative farms, in Bolivar and then Holmes counties. Both farms were projects of a philanthropically supported corporation, headed by Eddy, with a goal to help southern agricultural laborers out of their economic plight. The evangelist was a well-known YMCA official who also investigated crimes against union members.

While the STFU goal was not to build cooperative farms, there were still ties between the cooperative farms and the union through William Ruthrauff Amberson, professor at the University of Tennessee Medical School at Memphis, who advised the union group and also served as a trustee of the Delta and Providence Cooperative Farms.



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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
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Eddy’s first cooperative farm was successful in its early months as 19 black families and 12 white families lived and worked together. Vegetation was abundant and a clinic was built to provide the families with medical attention. The Delta farm was sold in 1942 and all farming activities were transferred to the Providence farm.

Like most cooperatives, the farms simply could not provide enough relief for those who were steadily becoming landless. Family farms were declining around the entire nation and small Delta farms, even with federal help, could not compete with large-scale corporate plantations.

A similar farming project was initiated outside of Drew in 1920 that lasted well into the 1970s. Brooks Farm on Freedom Road evolved from a plantation into a community of black landowners through the efforts of Palmer Herbert Brooks and community residents. The black planter’s goal was to help farmers achieve their dream of “having a place where colored folk could have a chance to make a decent living without having somebody always taking ‘way your crops and wages and looking over your shoulder.”

Brooks came to Drew in the early 1900s from Virginia after earning money in the lumber business in Ohio and West Virginia. Finding the soil, climate and labor supply good for farming, he purchased 7,000 acres in Sunflower, Leflore, and Bolivar counties. The collective plantation occupied 2,000 acres in Leflore and Sunflower counties.

Most important to Brooks was that farmers living in the community not remain dependent. “He wanted these black men to become the boss of their own land and men of their own decision,” wrote Valerie Grim in a dissertation at Iowa State University in 1990. Grim analyzed interviews given by some of the Brooks Farm members, learning that when it became clear Brooks wanted to help blacks, “everybody tried to move out here, but at times there wasn’t enough room, so people wait ‘til a house was built or came open.”

Brooks Farm workers appreciated the fair treatment offered in the community: “You was gone be treat well and fair, and if you work hard, you was gone get ahead, ‘cause that was what Mr. Brooks want for us too.” Many believed Brooks was “god-sent.” Steve Hearon, a former plantation manager for Brooks, told interviewers that “God sent Mr. Brooks to help us poor color people, ‘cause he knowed some of us wasn’t being treated right.”

Brooks Farm was in place for over fifty years mostly because of Brooks’ instincts and the black people’s determination to rise above peonage. Further, Brooks saw to it that farmers acquired knowledge and skills that were not only useful in agriculture, but which also gave residents the choice to make a home for themselves in Brooks Farm. Several of the women, Sarah Walters and Carrie Gordon, became licensed midwives and as community members, they often were called to deliver babies.

The community school emphasized a practical education that focused on manual skills, owing to the rural character of the community and the limits that segregation posed to black occupational advancement.

In the 1920s, most farm laborers worked for twenty cents a day. Returns were not much better in the Brooks community since cotton prices were low and debts weighed heavily against profits, Grimes observed. Through the 1930s, most of the money residents earned was used for household expenses, but institutional development in the community continued on, with additional churches and schools built along the way.

WHAT THE DELTA REALLY needed was a “courageous, incorruptible, intelligently edited newspaper” published by a newsman like Hodding Carter. This was the opinion of David Cohn, a Mississippi writer who asked Carter to consider leaving Louisiana and bring his journalistic talents across the river to Greenville, a unique cotton and river town on the Mississippi.

Carter listened. With degrees from Bowdoin College and Columbia University, he first worked for the wire services and the New Orleans States-Item before starting his own newspaper in Hammond, Louisiana, his hometown. Only in his twenties, Carter was already nationally recognized for taking on the flamboyant and corrupt Louisiana politician, Senator Huey Long.

Asked to write a political analysis on Long for the New Republic, in “Kingfish to Crawdad,” Carter showed how using laughter and ridicule was more effective against Long than libel proceedings and investigations. After Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge in 1935, Carter’s mother-in-law and two aunts from London called the newsman’s wife to ask where he was when Long was killed. Carter could account for his whereabouts, they were happy to learn.

Shortly after Huey Long’s death, the Carters lost a key contract for printing the parish delinquent tax list. Facing certain failure, they sold out in the spring and took up on Cohn’s suggestion. After investigating Greenville’s current newspaper, the Democrat-Times, the Carters met with a group of financial backers to arrange a plan.

Cohn and several others represented Greenville’s landed gentry: William Alexander Percy, “lawyer, banker, cotton planter, published poet, and acknowledged cultural tsar of Greenville” headed the backing group. William T. “Billy” Wynn, lawyer, planter and a Delta Council co-founder, joined with several other business owners in bringing the journalist and his family to the Delta. With a young child in tow, Hodding and Betty Carter moved across the Mississippi River to improve Greenville’s newspaper, as part owners of the new Delta Star.

Greenville’s population was around 15,000, the Carters discovered – all of Washington County had 54,300 people of which 40,000 were black. Greenville’s towboat industry attracted a more diverse population than other Delta towns: a large Syrian group inhabited the city and an even larger population of Chinese.

A ferry, lighted at night, ran across the river, adding to the town’s charm. Most country clubs around the Delta did not admit Jews, while Greenville’s club had a Jewish president (but no black members). The river town’s white residents liked to believe they were more tolerant and more sophisticated than most other Delta towns.
Greenville depended on the twenty-seven-foot-high, 300-foot-wide levee at the foot of Main Street to keep the river in check, just as the town’s whites depended on a rigid caste system to keep segregation in line. Most of Greenville’s “higher-ups” were either Presbyterians or Episcopalians and a few were Jewish. All of them had black servants.

With Carter’s talent, the Star quickly eliminated its only competition and merged with a second community paper to become the powerful Delta Democrat-Times A shrewd and energetic businessman, Carter, whose friends and family lovingly called “Big,” initially finagled an agreement making it possible to buy out his financial supporters, which he soon did, and to their surprise.

Carter often left Greenville for months and longer, once to serve in the National Guard during World War Two until injuring his eye, and then to become a Niemann Fellow at Harvard; a year later to work as press editor for the PM newspaper in New York and to write articles for national magazines and books.

He needed these sabbaticals from the Delta, missing city life, the beauty of his second home in Maine and seeking relief from the growing race battles he faced in Mississippi – encounters that required maintaining his journalistic ethics and his temper while being pounded by other newspaper publishers around Mississippi, his advertisers, and many of his Delta readers, who regularly disagreed with his more liberal (but really moderate) stance.

The journalist, who’d grown up as an unquestioning segregationist, evolved to become a civil rights moderate, risking his life and his livelihood because of his personal integrity. Once an editorial so angered a reader that he called Carter at home on a Sunday morning and said he was coming over to kill him. Carter sat on his front porch with a shotgun and pistol while friends phoned and passed by to offer support. The man never showed up.

Carter often wrote about race and bigotry, giving him an essential role in the later Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and early 1960s. He did not believe in integration but did believe in the essential dignity and political rights of all citizens and he provided needed balance in news coverage to offset the daily extremes presented by nearly all other Mississippi media. His son, Hodding Carter III, watched and learned from his father and in 1966, as a supporter of integration, he became the newspaper’s publisher and took his family’s publication further.
Very little was good for Delta blacks in Carter’s time, even as Greenville’s white leaders appeared on the surface more civil than others in most Delta towns. Lynching was slowing down in the South, except for Mississippi, where most incidents were never reported. When a lynching occurred, usually nothing was done and records were lost.

Black people often disappeared. Sometimes it turned out they were murdered or lynched. Others escaped the Delta and never looked back.

The lynch mob was white supremacy’s firmest hold on blacks as their work went “unpunished, sanctioned, and sometimes headed by the community’s leaders.”
Lynching was the system’s ultimate guarantor, wrote historian Adam Nossiter. Journalists and academics knew that most every black person understood lynching was an accepted custom: “Many a white deplores lynching yet feels it may serve a beneficent purpose,” anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker wrote. “There are good and kind Christians who will explain that lynchings are terrible, but must happen once in a while in order to keep the Negro in his place.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, not surprisingly, Mississippi’s congressional representatives bitterly and successfully fought proposed federal anti-lynching laws.



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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
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In the days moving into World War Two, as always before, profit in the hands of wealthy Delta planters and their family’s social status remained top priority – no matter the extreme poverty of those who worked the cotton fields.


Malnutrition and poor health were widespread problems for most black families, and education for the poor – whether black or white – was deplorable, when it was even available. Klan violence went unchecked.

FANNIE LOU HAMER, a wise civil rights leader, singer, and storyteller, grew up North of Greenville in Sunflower County, and 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 said. Undoubtedly music was tied to survival during these treks since Hamer became well known years later for comforting others with soul-filled gospel singing – especially during some of the most difficult moments in the Movement.

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

Mississippi’s leadership did not question the brutal mistreatment of blacks. The survival of laborers like Hamer as individuals, let alone their comfort, simply did not matter to those in control, as long as enough people were available during cotton harvest months to labor and keep the money coming in. This attitude of careless regard had carried through generations of planters who have controlled the state since it left territorial status.

“Part and parcel of this control is that the Delta returns the same old evil men again and again to the legislature and therefore gets seniority and influence out of the proportion to the rest of the state,” George McLean of the Tupelo Daily Journal asserted editorially.

McLean’s editorial was hard to counter, since rarely were any fairness or true kindness shown to black tenants and sharecroppers. Instead, white planters, who reasoned that blacks would only squander money given to them, more often cheated them of earnings.

If a black cropper did not come to work, performed poorly or violated Jim Crow, he or she might be forced to work at gunpoint, beaten or even lynched – even years after the modern Civil Rights Movement formally ended. All the while, as McLean observed, the “same old evil men” kept making the laws that kept Mississippi at a distance from its needed change.

Dr. L. C. Dorsey’s parents, like many others who worked the Delta’s cotton, typically fell asleep soon after leaving the fields: “I remember asking questions … and not understanding [it was] just chronic fatigue…. I’m sure some of them were also depressed,” she said.

Dorsey’s father, like many other black men, took only so much punishment or threat before reacting to preserve himself and his family. In Leflore County in the mid 1940s, when she was not quite ten, Dorsey’s father left his family picking cotton at on the Lake Henry plantation to find better paying work for himself, a few miles away.

Hearing about Dorsey from other black workers, the plantation manager hauled Dorsey back to Lake Henry and at first tried to force Dorsey into a barn filled with farm equipment, where he could beat him up.

Cultivator blades called sweeps were stored in the barn and L. C. Dorsey somehow knew that her father would throw them at the plantation manager until he, Dorsey, was killed for his actions. “He understood very clearly when he got back in that truck that he may be going to his death,” she said.

The manager, also sensing the depth of her father’s anger, turned his truck around and drove Dorsey back into the field, dumping him out on the ground near his family. L. C. Dorsey’s family spent the rest of the year working for “Mr. Gess” and then moved over to the Ferguson plantation in Sunflower County.



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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
---------------



African Americans survived through their own resilience and because they employed whatever resources they could, their strategies often included gun ownership. Like many Delta blacks, including Hamer and her husband “Pap” Hamer, L. C. Dorsey’s parents kept loaded guns in their home. “Most houses had guns, and [my parents] had guns for the very simple reason – It was dangerous in the Delta and your life meant little if you had no protection.”

Most any sharecropper could name an individual or entire family who “disappeared” when trying to leave a plantation or if they were too outspoken or politically active. L. C. Dorsey remembered when Odell Gray, a handsome young man with “hazel” eyes, suddenly disappeared. “White folks didn’t like Odell and [some] said Odell was confronted on the bridge over the river that ran through Tribbett … and forced to jump.” His body was never found and children were not told about such incidents because “they could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut.”

Robert Keglar of Charleston, a retired teacher and NAACP member, keeps a list of over 20 friends who disappeared from Tallahatchie County: “I don’t know what happened to any of them, but I’m very sure some were killed and others left their plantations.”

A young Delta State University student remembered a story told by her mother, Sadie Wilson Fuller, whose family lived at Cotton Quarters outside of Drew. When she was ten (sometime in the 1920s), Fuller and two friends were walking home from school. They heard a man scream and ran into the bushes to hide, but could see the plantation boss being tortured by white men who put a noose around his neck. The girls ran home, because they knew what was about to happen. The man was lynched, her mother was later told, because he was too nice to the black field workers.

John Burl Smith got sick and tired of seeing people getting killed or disappearing, and so he sneaked his family out of Quitman County in the middle of the night: “In 1948, under the cover of night, my family, like thousands of others, escaped. That was the year Strom Thurmond ran for president and helped incite a climate of fear, madness and murder by spewing the fiery segregationist rhetoric of white supremacy.”
Even twenty-five years later, as late as the 1970s, some laborers found it difficult to walk off a plantation. The “Box Project,” a small group of advocates, helped sharecroppers with problems of daily living, and if necessary, escape from plantations. A project director spoke with the NAACP’s Aaron Henry about the plight of a Grenada family she was trying to help:

The foreman on the plantation pays the men in cash and refuses to give written statements of wages and with-holdings. He with-holds $4 each week regardless of wages … the foreman has the men work 12-14 hours a day but refuses to pay over-time and pays only for an 8 hour day. They are charged $36 for getting their gas tanks filled but the price is always this whether the tanks are empty or half full. They never know what the deductions from wages actually are for. The foreman sold one family on this plantation a second hand wringer washer for $165. They sell in Jackson, Miss. for $24 to $40. The Box Project field worker in Jackson visited the Pritchetts several times and kept in close touch with a local Grenada woman who acts as field worker there…. Mabel took the Pritchetts to the food stamp office [and] they were told to come back next week and bring a statement from the plantation owner stating exactly how much he deducts for Soc. Security, gas and medical bills. Mr. P has received a summary of account from SS Admin. And it shows that his employer did not report any wages for him during 1969. Mr. P. says he will file a complaint. According to Pinkie, the foreman showed them a report which he said was the copy of the one he sent in and that they had nothing to worry about.

The Box Project representative told Henry how another laborer’s moving plan was progressing:

He has been moving their belongings one piece at a time to his mother’s place. However, the plantation hand 2 shacks down from him reported this to the foreman. So when Pinkie and More went to the foreman at the request of the Food Stamp office, he threatened the whole Pritchett family if they tried to leave, or if they pursued the efforts to get food stamps, welfare or get the Soc. Sec. straightened out. He has this plantation hand watching and reporting to him. And this is why Pinkie didn’t want Mabel to come out anymore because she fears for their lives.... She is afraid to write anything for fear Jones (the snitcher) or the foreman will learn their plans. She said the mailman never puts the mail in the box, just throws it on the ground from the window of his car and she never knows who sees the mail before she gets it or even if she gets all of it…. Her husband is permitted to leave the place only on Sundays.... Mabel is afraid to go out to the place because she has a local license plate on her car and the plantation folks can easily follow her home or find out where she lives.

What purpose was served by segregation and its meanness? Especially since farm laborers and their families were still needed by the planters. Social psychologist John Dollard, who lived in the Delta while studying the region, placed “defensive beliefs and anxiety” at the heart of the segregated system, “reinforced by the idea that blacks were not fully human beings – that they were children, or brutes; that they demanded constant vigilance, or paternal benevolence; that they were shiftless, immoral, and smelly, and were really quite happy in their lowly stations, if only the meddling Northerner would leave them be.”

Among the tales Dollard collected, one came from a white planter who believed that the black sharecroppers working for him “liked to be cheated, and even expected it at settle-up time.” Dollard characterized such beliefs as “simply useful excuses for [mis]treatment of blacks.”

White planters and their families were outnumbered and surrounded by blacks that they depended upon and yet horribly mistreated. Many planters were actually frightened over possible insurrection and used Ku Klux Klan terrorists to keep “safe” from blacks while also keeping their feudal system intact.

Hard times for bluesmen, too

Trouble in mind, I’m blue,
But I won’t be always
For the sun goin’ shine in my back door some-day.

I’m goin’ down to the river
’Take along my rocking chair,
And if the blues don’t leave me,
I’ll rock on away from there.
- Anonymous

Like those around them, blues musicians often suffered and saw the suffering of others around them. Bessie Smith, a blues singer and composer on a comeback tour in 1937, was driving through Mississippi when her car was rear-ended by a slow moving truck. Smith’s left arm and ribs were crushed. John Hammond wrote in Downbeat magazine that Smith was turned away by several white hospitals where she was first taken and by the time she reached a hospital in Clarksdale, she bled to death.
Harmonica-player Sonny Boy Williamson of Glendora was robbed and murdered in 1947. The robber stuck an ice pick through Williamson’s skull and stole his weekly takings. Robert Johnson, the songwriter and guitarist, known as "King of the Delta Blues,” was poisoned August of 1938 when he and Honeyboy Edwards were playing at a house party in Three Forks, Mississippi. One version says Johnson was "stabbed to death by a jealous husband." Another story is that he was "stabbed by a woman or poisoned by parties unknown." Whatever the case, Johnson died three days later at the age of twenty-seven.

Prison blues were sung from bitter experience. Some blues artists were imprisoned in state and county jails and farms. Arthur Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly , Robert Pete Williams, Champion Jack Dupree, Roosevelt Sykes and Bukka White were part of the inhumane chain-gangs and other forms of forced labor that were profitable for the state and sometimes lethal to prisoners at the Parchman Farm in Sunflower County. From the prison wood lot, musicologist Alan Lomax recorded music of Parchman men at work:

Rise um up higher, let um drop on down,
You won’t know the diffrunce when the sun goes down.

“These men in striped clothes smiled at the good lines. They drove at the work, muscles rippling in the sun, axes biting big chips out of the logs, chips that occasionally rang against the microphone.”

Axes walkin, chipses talking,
All day long,
All day long.

War, revolt, and opening of the Cotton Curtain
As the years moved closer to World War II, little changed in the Delta at first glance, but revolution once again was in the air. White planters kept up the terror, arresting strikers and sending them to penal farms to work out their fines; landowners held tenants against their will, broke into their homes, murdered union organizers and brutalized the workers on their plantations.

Sometimes these stories got out; usually they did not. Smaller incidents, like the Delta Council allegedly spying on STFU meetings, were only shared by insiders, and almost seemed insignificant.

Yet, slowly more national attention was being paid to the Delta’s worst accounts of violence and terror, stories that were finally emerging as STFU and NAACP representatives and others spoke with journalists, invited in photographers, and testified before Congress.

At last the Cotton Curtain was slowly rising, allowing the world more than just a glimpse into this place called the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.

Why is it important to know this background before moving into the history of World War II and beyond? As James W. Loewen points out; the past is prologue to the present and future. In referring to some history textbook authors, he commented:

The authors make no connection between the failure of the United State to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later…. Between 1890 and 1907 every Southern and border state “legally” disenfranchised the vast majority of its African American voters. Lynching rose to an all time high…. No textbook explains the rationale of segregation, which is crucial to understanding its devastating effects on white and black psyches…. Textbooks need to offer the sociological definition of segregation: as a system of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for white employers…. “Unclean!” was the caste message of every “colored” water fountain, waiting room, and courtroom Bible. “Inferior” was the implication of every school that excluded blacks…. The stigma is why separate could never mean equal, even when black facilities might be newer or physically superior…. During the nadir, segregation increased everywhere. Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major leagues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out. In 1911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they won fifteen of the first twenty-eight Derbies … in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting over a million members. The KKK … proudly inducted President Warren G. Harding as a member in a White House ceremony. During the Wilson and Harding administrations, perhaps one hundred race riots took place.

With this beginning as background, a number of Mississippians were ready to confront the past like never before. The Second World War would be fought abroad … and then again at home.



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Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005-2006. Read the entire book online, free. Click HERE.
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Anne Braden, civil rights warrior, dies

Anne Braden (1924 - 2006)


Anne and Carl Braden, cofounders of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, Inc. (SCEF) of New Orleans, were often the focus of government interest. As two of the most active and determined white anti-racist crusaders of the 1950s and beyond, the Bradens spent much of their time in the Delta; easily, over a thousand reports regarding both Anne and Carl Braden, as individuals and as a couple, are contained in Sovereignty Commission files.

SCEF grew out of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (S”CHW), a New Deal organization formed in 1938 “based on a vision of a new democratic south that would be built jointly by black and white people.” Supporters included Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1948, SCEF was formed as its tax-exempt educational arm and later took over when SCHW closed down. SCEF raised funds for black activists, lobbied for Truman’s civil rights proposals and tried to educate southern whites on racism.

Frequently the Bradens were labeled as “Communists” by Mississippi’s segregationist leaders because of their ties to SCEF and to a liberal retreat center in Tennessee, The Highlander Center (also attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others in the civil rights movement). Julian Bond referred to them as “modern abolitionists.”


Their troubles began in 1954 when the couple purchased a house in a segregated area of Louisville, Kentucky for an African American family. Local racists targeted the house and burned a cross in the front yard. The house was finally destroyed in a bomb blast. The criminals were never brought to trial; instead, they and several other anti-racist activists were accused of conspiring in a Communist plot against the state.

Carl Braden received a fifteen-year prison sentence for sedition, a sentence that the U. S. Supreme Court overturned within months. “The unique thing about the Cold War in the South was that [fighting it] was inextricably tied to the battle against white supremacy,” Anne Braden told author Catherine Fosl. “That was the reason for all the hysteria against us in Louisville. It was anti-red and anti-black hysteria wrapped up and thrown at us.”

SCEF became a nurturing force behind the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), providing it with funding, mailing lists, and access to major Northern donors. The Bradens were active in the Delta and often linked to Amzie Moore, who once received a loan from SCEF with their assistance, to save his business and home while personally supporting civil rights activists.

Activists like the Bradens were frequently summoned to testify about their "disloyal" activities before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee or before SISS. As a result, some activists left the movement altogether while others continued to work for equality despite the false charges and terrorism they faced coming from their own government and fellow citizens.

(From "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited." This book is now available online. Click here to read all chapters.)

Anne Braden died today, March 7, 2006, from pneumonia. Tributes to this civil rights warrior are posted on the website of the Civil Rights Movement veterans.

Mount Holyoke Conference

For Immediate Release
March 2, 2006
Susan Orr-Klopfer
Fort Madison, IA 52627
319-372-8534
cell 775-340-3585
sklopfer@earthlink.net
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

Fort Madison Writer Speaks at Mount Holyoke Conference

(Fort Madison, Iowa) -- Fort Madison writer, Susan Orr-Klopfer, is set to appear Thursday, March 9, at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., on a civil rights panel sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts. Klopfer, the author of "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," will talk about her experiences living in the Mississippi Delta for two years while investigating and writing about four civil rights cold cases. She is to appear with Ben Chaney, the brother of slain activist James Chaney.

"The Civil Rights era in America stands out as a period of great national upheaval and of unprecedented moments of community solidarity. The era is synonymous with non-violent resistance, and also with barbarous acts of violence that ranged from murders of young civil rights workers to the assassinations of prominent public officials. Our speakers Ben Chaney and Susan Orr-Klopfer share powerful links to this explosive American past and are dedicated to seeking justice for those persecuted and killed during the Civil Rights era," said a spokesperson for the Weissman Center.

"In June 1964, three young civil rights workers named James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner who were part of Freedom Summer began their work in Meridian, Mississippi. They were captured, beaten, and then murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The three men were buried in an earthen dam and were not found for some forty-four days after the killings. In January 2005, the state of Mississippi finally filed its first charges against one of the Ku Klux Klan members involved in the murders. In June, the charged man was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to sixty years in prison.

"Ben Chaney is the younger brother of the slain activist James Chaney. A native of Meridian, Mississippi, he came of age during the Civil Rights Movement. Before his twelfth birthday, Ben Chaney already had been arrested on more than twenty occasions for his role in non-violent civil rights demonstrations. He is the founder and president of the James Earl Chaney Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 1998 and that is committed to civil rights, human rights, and to social justice.

"Susan Orr-Klopfer is an investigative journalist and the author of two powerful and illuminating books on the Civil Rights Movement. Her most recent work, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited is a riveting documentary history that sheds light on conspiracies, murders, civil rights activism, and community politics in Mississippi, the state in which James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were slain in 1964. Ms. Orr-Klopfer also is the author of The Emmett Till Book, a work that revisits the world in which 14-year old Emmett Till was kidnapped and lynched in August 1955."


Event Details
Date: Thursday, March 9

Time: 7:30 PM

Speaker: Ben Chaney and Susan Orr-Klopfer

Place: Gamble Auditorium, Mount Holyoke College

Admission: Free and open to the public.

Contact Information, Mount Holyoke:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/omc/acts/contact.html

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.”
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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.