If you’ve sighted a Barnes & Noble encap like the one Ash-Lee described in her post, leave a comment on this post and tell us where you saw it. If you’ve talked with Barnes & Noble about it, we’d also like to know whom you spoke to and what they said.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 26, 2007 at 9:03 am
A friend of mine that is currently an employee at Barnes and Noble read this blog (specifically where I write about the store management being ok with taking the endcap down if they could) and remembered something that occurred at our store very recently. Two wealthy white women came into the store, and happened to run into our “Love and Sex” bay (a bay being a large section of bookshelves), that has karma sutra books and stuff like that. When the two women complained, the bay was immediately shifted to books that dealt with those subjects that didn’t have “offensive” cover art.
Question: If they can change a bay that was and is mandatory and given to them by the corporate office, why can’t they take down or modify an endcap??
(It seems some of the words in the original post were tripping the spam/security settings on my webhost’s servers, making it difficult for people to post comments. Comments should work better on this post.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 23, 2007 at 11:34 pm
I became aware of Naomi Klein’s work in the first month after Hurricane Katrina, when she had made a remarkable discovery about New Orleans: in neighborhoods that had been declared habitable by Mayor Nagin there were 23, 267 uninhabited apartments that could be rented to evacuees. I said then:
If each unit houses three people, that’s 70,000 out of the estimated 200,000 left permanently homeless in the aftermath of Katrina. That’s over one third. Bringing them home is only a matter of political will.
Klein argued that there was indeed political will, but it was hell bent on a far different outcome.
“Reconstruction,” whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct “cost plus” government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.
This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: “Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas”; “Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).” All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.
In one of his most influential essays, [Milton] Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.
Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy – tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.
It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a “Chicago School” revolution, as so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic “shock treatment”. In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy”, has been the method of choice….
Torture, or in CIA parlance, “coercive interrogation”, is a set of techniques developed by scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.
Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break “resistant sources”: create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this “softening-up” stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.
The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster – the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown – puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.
These connections between Friedmanite “shock doctrine” and US torture policy are made quite vivid in this short film, based on Klein’s book.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 9, 2007 at 1:06 am
Because of Rosa Parks and many of the unknown Montgomery residents that were involved in the bus boycott and a lot more, Montgomery is a better place but we need to be better.
The Rosa Parks bus, the real one, is in Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum. It used to be here in Montgomery, but not anymore.
The owners wanted the bus scrapped after it quit running because it was THE bus. They lived in Chicago and owned most of the bus stations in the south in the 1950s.
Roy Hubert Summerford (my father-in-law) was a friend with the station manager and the dispatcher; they told him the Rosa Parks bus was about to forever be gone.
At the bus station, after 3 times being turned down to buy the bus, the owner finally agreed to sell the bus to Hubert. They said the bus would not ever run again without a new motor, but Hubert was very good with cars and trucks and I guess with buses too. After he paid for the bus he worked on it for about 30 minutes and cranked it up and droved it to his 10 acres of land outside the city limits of Montgomery. The bus went dead 3 times on the way to Hubert’s land but it cranked back up and kept going. It was in the winter and Vivian and I were waiting on him to bring the bus to the land. We couldn’t wait to see The Rosa Parks Bus; we couldn’t believe they let that bus go.
Hubert said that the time for America to know about the bus was far from now (1970). The KKK was still very much active in Montgomery. He took on the job of taking care of the bus. He concealed the bus and kept its identity quiet. He feared that they would bomb it. Notice the Cleveland Ave. at the top of the bus. That is the name of the street route that the bus took everyday. As this driver got to a certain place he could roll a bar inside the bus over his head and change the street marker. In 1971 Hubert took it out of the bus and wrapped it in a blanket, then placed it in the closet to keep it safe. We only took it out when we took pictures of the bus. He also said that we would know when the time was right to tell about the bus.
Right away without telling anyone what was on his mind Hubert knew that bus was as important as the Liberty Bell. Hubert knew its proper place was in a museum.
The owner [of the bus station] was still upset with Rosa Parks and did not want that bus in a museum in Montgomery or anywhere. In 1970 the owner was still mad about the bus boycott of 1955 and 56. The boycott had cost the company $3,000 a day.
In 1985 Hubert passed away leaving the bus to his only child, my wife, Vivian Summerford Williams. I began to take care of the bus.
In the 1990s the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper found out about the bus and called me to do a story on the bus, but the time was not right and I said no. They sent a reporter out to the land; I don’t know how they found out where the bus was, but they did. The reporter went to the bus without my permission and took pictures of the bus and put it on the front page of the paper and told America what the bus was and where it was. After that I had to check the bus everyday and had to run people away from it a lot. The KKK tried to catch it afire and shot holes in it. After that I had to rent a warehouse and store it inside under lock and key. This time they couldn’t find it.
In 2000, the decision was made to sell the bus, so that the world could enjoy it. However selling was difficult because of proper identification. Everyone in Montgomery knew it was “The Bus.” At the time Hubert purchased “The Bus,” the employees informally passed on the information about the bus.
Robert Lifson, President of Mastronet, Inc., an Internet auction house, decided he wanted to auction the bus for Vivian and me. He began a search for documents authenticating the bus. And he found them.
Mr. Lifson contacted retired employees of the bus company, including Mrs. Margaret Cummings, widow of the former bus station manager, Charles Homer Cummings. Mrs. Cummings provided a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that her husband had kept during and after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.
National City Lines (which was the parent company of the Montgomery City Bus Lines) had employed a clipping service to clip and save any newspaper articles about the company’s bus service. Charles Cummings had kept the scrapbook of newspaper articles from the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. Next to articles describing the arrest of Rosa Parks, he wrote “#2857″ and “Blake/#2857.” James Blake was the bus driver who had Rosa Parks arrested. Mr. Cummings’ relatives confirm that he jotted down the bus number because he felt the events were so important.
In September 2001, an article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the Rosa Parks bus would be available in an Internet auction in October.
Museum staff began researching this opportunity. They spoke to people involved in the original 1955 events, to those who planned other museum exhibits, and to historians. A forensic document examiner was hired to see if the scrapbook was authentic. A museum conservator went to Montgomery to personally examine the bus. Convinced that this was the Rosa Parks bus, the Museum’s leadership decided to bid on the bus in the Internet auction.
The Henry Ford museum entered the auction of October 25, 2001, and was the high bidder at $427,919. The other final bidders for the bus, both of whom were convinced of its authenticity, were the Smithsonian Institution and the city of Denver, Colorado.
At the same time, the Museum successfully bid on the Montgomery City Bus Lines scrapbook of newspaper articles with the Rosa Parks bus identified in two places. With additional grants the Henry Ford Museum has completely restored “The Bus.”
My mother, Louise Williams had to ride the buses to and from work in the 1950s and knew other women who rode the bus and witnessed how the Blacks were treated and she chose to boycott the buses during the boycott also. She walked or rode a cab, but mostly walked.
I can’t explain the feeling that I got everytime I got on that bus. It made me feel great; sometimes I even cried. Now everyone who gets to see and touch the bus at the museum can get to feel that too.
I wrote about the bus and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The book is The Thunder of Angels. I did this for the people who were involved in the boycott and never got their story told. I believe God put this on me to do because of the bus and my mother’s bad experiences on the buses in the 50s. I got to meet a lot of the boycott soldiers who became my friends and they told their stories to me to tell.
Photos All photos courtesy of Donnie Williams, except the final photo of the restored bus. Photo of restored bus by Erica Chappuis. Click on the two newspaper clippings to enlarge.
~ [Editor's note: It is an honor to publish this article by Donnie Williams for the 50th anniversary of the day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This article grew out of the correspondence between Mr. Williams and Marsha Joyner, after he found her latest piece on HungryBlues early in November. In that piece, Marsha was pictured in front of what she and many others had been led to believe was the original bus where Rosa Parks performed her momentous act of civil disobedience on Dec. 1, 1955. Fortunately, Mr. Williams has set the record straight with this teaser for his new book.
Marsha Joyner has posted an MS Word version of this article on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coalition-Hawaii website. --BG]
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 1, 2005 at 1:24 am
September 17, 2005 — Sixties voting rights advocate Birdia Keglar was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen on her way home to Charleston, Mississippi after meeting with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson.
Keglar’s January 11, 1966 death and the murders of her best friend and then her youngest son have never been resolved or even investigated by law enforcement agencies – local, state or federal.
Susan Orr-Klopfer, author of a new book on civil rights in the Mississippi Delta, believes these three “cold case” murders should get the immediate attention of a new Unsolved Crimes Section of the Justice Department.
Under a measure approved Thursday by the U.S. Senate, the new office would target such pre-1970 racially motivated homicides that remain unsolved because of lax state and federal prosecution at the time they occurred.
The bill was inspired by recent efforts to reopen the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American youngster who was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in the Delta.
“Young Till’s crime was whistling at a white woman while inside a small grocery store. For this, he was lynched and the men who admitted committing the crime went free.
“Birdia Keglar’s crime, 11 years later, was to advocate for voting rights. She and her friend Adlena Hamlett were driving home from Jackson after meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy to talk over civil rights issues. But their car was stopped in a small Delta town where they were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Klansmen.
“Very likely, the Klansmen who killed Keglar and Hamlett were also highway patrolmen. Both women’s bodies were mutilated – both were decapitated and Hamlett’s arms were cleanly severed from her body,” Klopfer said.
“Their deaths were attributed to a car wreck by officials. But the car disappeared along with Keglar’s briefcase and witnesses were threatened with murder if they did not remain quiet.”
Three months later, after Keglar’s youngest son went to Washington D.C. trying to learn what happened to his mother, he was murdered.
“James Keglar was knocked unconscious and burned alive in his house. This happened hours after he was released from a Clarksdale, Mississippi jail on a bogus charge. He was expecting help from the FBI but it never came, according to his brother.”
Klopfer’s book, “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited,” details these Mississippi Delta murders and dozens of others, including the lynching of young Till.
The book contains newly discovered information on several other Mississippi civil rights murders including “strong evidence that civil rights leader Medgar Evers was not murdered by Byron de la Beckwith who was finally convicted for the crime, but by a friend of Beckwith’s, another member of the Klan who was Beckwith’s superior,” Klopfer said.
Klopfer lived in the Mississippi Delta in employee housing on the prison grounds of Parchman Penitentiary for two years while she researched and wrote her 680-page book that contains over 1,400 footnotes as well as names and information regarding nearly 1,000 black people who were lynched in the state – “a small representation of the racial murders and lynching that have taken place in Mississippi,” Klopfer said.
Senator Jim Talent, R-Mo., sponsored Thursday’s legislation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. The Senate voted by unanimous consent to add the measure to an appropriations bill that is expected to pass the Senate this week, according to Associated Press reports. The bill was introduced by Talent and Dodd in July after a Mississippi court sentenced former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in jail for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.
“There are 13 Klansmen mentioned in the book who are known to the FBI and still living in Mississippi who helped murder Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Robert Goodman. Yet no one has been prosecuted except for Preacher Killen who was not at the murder scene. Maybe some progress will finally come about because of this Senate bill,” Klopfer said.
Klopfer said she feels closest to the Keglar and Hamlett murders, however. “These were two older, established Mississippi black women – Adlena Hamlett was 77-years-old and was a well-respected teacher for many years.
“Birdia Keglar was a business woman who was trying to start a local chapter of the NAACP. She was the first black person in her county to vote since Reconstruction following the Civil War. She was earlier represented in federal court by John Doar of the U.S. Department of Justice and was Doar’s first voting rights test case when he came into Mississippi after the election of President John F. Kennedy.”
One of Adlena Hamlett’s granddaughters in August told Klopfer about going with Hamlett to the courthouse square as a child to request a ballot.
“Nina Zachery said the clerk tore up the ballot and ordered their departure. But Zachery’s grandmother said not to worry because she – Nina – would be able to vote one day, and that was all that mattered. Hamlett and Keglar were later hanged in effigy at the Tallahatchie Courthuse and were strongly warned by Klansmen to stop their voting rights activities.”
Klopfer is the first journalist to write about Keglar and Hamlett. “I learned about this story from a nurse at Parchman whose wife was a relative of Mrs. Keglar. Very little was known about them and it took the entire two years to piece this story together – it was very complicated with numerous entanglements that reached from the Delta to Washington, D.C.”
Klopfer also asserts it was significant that Sen. Edward Kennedy led off the questioning of Chief Justice nominee John Roberts on his Senate confirmation hearing this past week.
“Sen. Kennedy reminded Roberts that people died for the right to vote. Sen. Kennedy is concerned about reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and opposition to equal voting rights and other civil rights supplied the motives for all of the murders listed in this book.”
Klopfer left Mississippi at the end of August and said she added newly discovered information to the book even as she was packing to leave.
# # #
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 20, 2005 at 11:05 am
No, damn it. Albert Einstein was a political radical and anti-racist.
When it came to how to handle Einstein’s ashes or his house on Mercer Street, everyone involved meticulously adhered to his wishes. But when it involved his ideas, and especially his concerns about what he called America’s “worst disease,” the fact that Einstein wanted his views made as public as possible seems to have slipped past his historians.
I’ve been going through a bunch of the documents from when my father was Executive Director of the Greater New York Council For A Sane Nuclear Policy and getting back into the history of the Left and the peace movement in the early 60s.
Albert Einstein was always one of my father’s heroes. Maybe Dad knew the anti-racist part, but all I remember hearing is the bumbling genius pacifist in a wrinkled suit version.
More than one hundred biographies and monographs of Einstein have been published, yet not one of them mentions the name Paul Robeson, let alone Einstein’s friendship with him, or the name W. E. B. Du Bois, let alone Einstein’s support for him. Nor does one find in any of these works any reference to the Civil Rights Congress whose campaigns Einstein actively supported. Finally, nowhere in all the ocean of published Einsteinia – anthologies, bibliographies, biographies, summaries, articles, videotapes, calendars, posters and postcards – will one find even an islet of information about Einstein’s visits and ties to the people in Princeton’s African American community around the street called Witherspoon.
Oh this makes me mad…
Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.
Twenty-pages/ Lists of Dead/References 900+ names and information of African Americans lynched and murdered in Mississippi from 1870 to 1970 (references Southern Law & Poverty Center, NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, individual family and friends, personal research).
Sixteen-page/160+ Names of Emmett Till Principles/Names and biographies of people close to this case, from lawyers, witnesses, judges and jurors to police, politicians, friends and families.
Over one hundred specific Sovereignty Commission Documents, references given.
Authors:
M. Susan Orr Klopfer, MBA
With Fred J. Klopfer, PhD and
Barry C. Klopfer, Esq.
Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg
Editors:
Margaret Block
Jan Hilligas
Geoffrey F.X. O’Connell
Karrie Schoppe
Dedicated to the memory of Birdia Keglar, James “Sonny Boy” Keglar, Adeline Hamlet, Grafton Gray, Cleve McDowell and Sam Block.
Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited is nonfiction. Descriptions and dialogue are based on interviews conducted with eyewitnesses and participants in the events described. In addition, newspapers, books, journal and magazine accounts were used. Other resources were documents, letters, diaries, and oral histories from various libraries, archives and private collections. Two other primary sources used were government materials provided under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act and material from the archives of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, available online. The project was initiated in August of 2003 and completed June 30, 2005.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg vii
Prologue xv
Book One History to Learn From
Chapter 1 From the Delta 3
Chapter 2 On Becoming Mississippi 0
Chapter 3 Hands that Picked the Cotton 27
Chapter 4 War of Aggression 36
Chapter 5 Freedom’s Taste 57
Chapter 6 Power of Terrorism 91
Chapter 7 Integration ‘Impossible’ 107
Chapter 8 Under the Microscope 129
Book Two Still Time To Learn
Chapter 9 Mississippi Stories 150
Chapter 10 Veterans Challenge the System 158
Chapter 11 War Rumors Hang Around 167
Chapter 12 Post War Civil Rights 178
Chapter 13 Brown & White Citizens Councils 188
Chapter 14 Bloody Belzoni 211
Chapter 15 Emmett Till 220
Chapter 16 The Meltons of Glendora 251
Chapter 17 Surviving Mississippi 266
Chapter 18 Registering Voters 277
Chapter 19 Mission Implausible 308
Chapter 20 Pushing the System 321
Chapter 21 Cleve McDowell 353
Chapter 22 Medgar Evers 366
Chapter 23 De’ Lay 371
Chapter 24 Follow the Money 391
Chapter 25 Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner 405
Chapter 26 Let the Summer Begin 430
Chapter 27 Klandestine 438
Chapter 28 Freedom Democrats 452
Chapter 29 Not Afraid 465
Chapter 30 Birdia Keglar 479
Chapter 31 Self Preservation 492
Chapter 32 Advocacy Building 510
Chapter 33 More Violence to Reconcile 529
Chapter 34 A Place in Time 559
Epilogue 577
Appendix
Lists of the Dead 579
The People of Emmett Till 600
WeBlog: Mack Charles Parker: 617
Selected Bibliography 618
About the Authors 627
Index 628
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 2, 2005 at 2:19 am
Following this week’s conviction of Edgar Ray Killen on three charges of manslaughter for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi, it has been typical to hear triumphant declarations such as this one by Jim Prince III, editor of The Neshoba Democrat: “We pronounce a new dawn in Mississippi, one in which the chains of cynicism and racism have been broken and we are free, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!”
It is at best delusional and at worst a deception to view Killen’s conviction as meaningful expiation for Mississippi’s notorious racist crimes. To begin with, there are nine other living suspects whom the prosecution did not pursue. More to the point, however, are the lines of culpability that extend well beyond Killen and well beyond the Neshoba County klavern of the White Knights. We must look instead to the racist state government of Mississippi of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and to federal complicity in the state’s crimes. We will not read much about this in the news reports about the Killen trial, but we can learn a great deal of what we need to know in Where Rebels Roost. Susan Klopfer is determined to tell the truth about Mississippi and about America and she does a great deal of that truth telling in the pages of this book.
Klopfer’s book is one of the first to look closely at the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state spy agency whose anti-civil rights activities included providing intelligence and money to the Klan. Klopfer also examines the roles of powerful people like Senator James O. Eastland, who received regular reports from the Sovereignty Commission. We cannot begin to fathom the nature of racial repression in Mississippi without knowing what Klopfer reveals in her book. It is no exaggeration to say that Mississippi of the 1950s and 1960s was a totalitarian police state.
Klopfer also follows the money, showing how the lines of culpability lead into the offices of New York industrialist Wycliffe Draper, whose Pioneer Fund fueled Mississippi’s fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and provided millions of dollars for the private “academies,” established to keep white children out of integrated schools after Brown v. Board of Ed. (More recently, the Pioneer Fund financed the research for the controversial book, The Bell Curve, a best selling, racist tract published in 1994.)
America’s greatness rests on the countless brave souls, like Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, who have stood up for justice on its soil, in the name of this nation’s own democratic principles. The nobility of these American citizens is not always understandable without some measure of the evils that they have faced. Klopfer’s truth telling brings careful scrutiny to the long and ongoing history of racial repression in Mississippi and the resistances to it.
Where Rebels Roost tells a story that begins with the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans and continues through the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the white supremacist backlash against it that continues into the present, along with current, anti-racist community activists. Klopfer’s story of Mississippi and America casts new light on events that will be familiar to many readers, and it tells important stories that have never been told before.
***
The focus of this book is the Mississippi Delta—the northwest portion of Mississippi, wedged between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, with some of the most fertile soil on the planet. The Delta has brought great wealth to white planters and industrialists who built their Southern society on the exploitation and impoverishment of African Americans. The Delta is also the home of a rich Blues tradition, running from Charlie Patton on through Pops Staples, which Klopfer artfully places in its proper context, amid the many currents of history that she describes. Klopfer dispels the dual myths that there was little Klan activity and little native civil rights work in the Delta. There has been much of both, and her drive to describe and understand them is another of Klopfer’s major accomplishments in this book.
By writing the history of civil rights in a particular region, rather than a study of an organization, particular activists or an individual political campaign, Klopfer demonstrates the real diversity of civil rights activity in the state and in the nation. In these pages, there is much to be learned about SNCC, SCLC, COFO, NAACP, Black Panthers and MFDP—and about the Colored Farmers Alliance (nineteenth century), Delta Ministry, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, Republic of New Afrika and Black farm cooperatives, like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative.
In these pages, you will read about crusaders for freedom and equality with familiar names, like Medgar Evars, James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ella Baker. You will also read about Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Birdia Keglar, Mae Bertha Carter, Cleve McDowell, Margaret Block and Sam Block—and many other local Delta people who fought for civil rights before there was outside interest in the early and mid 60s and after SNCC, CORE. COFO and SCLC organizers had largely left the scene.
Outside help was crucial to civil rights activity in Mississippi, but the local activists shaped the Movement in ways that are often forgotten. For example, Klopfer reminds us that when SNCC’s Bob Moses arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960 he was thinking in terms of the sit-in movement that had galvanized him to leave his New York teaching job and become an activist. Ella Baker’s friend, Amzie Moore, of Cleveland, Mississippi first conceived of the voter registration campaign that became the centerpiece of Freedom Summer. Unlike other local NAACP leaders, Moore welcomed outside help, but he was a guiding force from the start.
***
Susan Klopfer’s long view of the history of civil rights in the Mississippi Delta brings us on a march through two centuries of race riots, individual racial murders and genocidal policies against African Americans. There are the widely rehearsed murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evars and Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman and Fannie Lou Hamer’s riveting testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention of how she was cruelly beaten for registering to vote. But Klopfer’s march for truth and justice also takes us through less well-known territory: nineteenth century race riots in Minter City, where as many as one hundred African Americans were murdered and many more beaten and injured; the possible massacre of as many as 1200 African American soldiers at Camp Van Dorn by the US Army in 1943, with involvement from US Senators Eastland and Bilbo; the untold numbers of adults and children who starved to death in Leflore County, when, from 1962 to 1966, the Klan and the White Citizens Council pressured county officials to cut off distribution of federal food subsidies, in retaliation for Black voter registration activities; the murders of Birdia Keglar and Adeline Hamlet in 1966, James Keglar, son of Birdia (three months after his mother), Daisy Savage and her grandson in 1973, Cleve McDowell in 1997—and many others. In her work on these last six individuals, Klopfer describes cases that beg to be investigated. Included among Klopfer’s appendices is a list of over fifty civil rights slayings in Mississippi and a table of the state’s lynching statistics.
After you read this book, the conviction of one eighty year old man for the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman can seem like nothing but a farce. If we want to break “the chains of cynicism and racism,” Where Rebels Roost shows us where to begin. And it is, indeed, only a beginning. In an email, Klopfer told me that many old people in the Delta keep their own lists of people who were killed. As she put it in another email to me, “Even the countries of Germany and Chile have done a better job accounting for the evil done in those countries and making amends. Apologies are due many families.”
With wry irony, Susan Klopfer notes, “Senator Eastland was born nine months after the lynching [of Luther Holbert and his wife (name unknown) in 1904], which was led by Eastland’s father, a pharmacist and planter. Since lynching was often accompanied by celebrations and parties for the white persons attending, perhaps Senator Eastland was conceived on this occasion.” This may just seem like some well deserved spit in the eye for a vicious racist, but Klopfer’s comment also speaks to the tremendous benefits many whites have reaped from a system that devalues African American lives. Where Rebels Roost raises important and troubling questions about an all too wide array of systemic racial inequalities in the Mississippi Delta.
Why were African American children suffering from clinical malnutrition and why were prenatal care and dental care unheard of for Blacks, while white Mississippi planters received farm subsidies many times larger than those given out in other states? A1968 study, which Klopfer cites, found that “In 1966, there were more payments of $50,000 in each of eight Mississippi counties than in the states of Iowa and Illinois combined…. In the seven states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, 165 producers received checks of $25,000 or more, as compared with the 194 in Mississippi alone who received payments of $50,000 or more.” The disbursement of these monies should have been contingent on proper implementation of the flagship Head Start programs that were begun in Mississippi and effectively shut down by 1967, through, “investigations, surveillance, firings, audits, press attacks, closures and threats.”
Why were there heavily African American Delta towns like Tunica, with no water or sewer connections—in 1985? Why were Delta Pride catfish processing plants allowed to earn nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in annual sales while African Americans labored in their unsanitary sweatshops with no holidays or benefits in the 1990s?
Why in 2005 is Mississippi’s infant mortality rate the highest in the US with 10.5 deaths per one thousand infants under one year old across the state and up to 18 infant deaths per thousand in parts of the Delta? The national infant mortality rate is 6.8 (which is nothing for the richest nation in the world to be proud of).
***
In a post-9/11 America, Susan Klopfer’s revelations about Sovereignty Commission surveillance should serve as a dire warning about the dangers of allowing government to revoke our civil liberties and spy on its citizens with increasing impunity and diminishing oversight. Consider this summary of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 from Kim Zetter:
Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause.
Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Intelligence agencies and the Treasury Department, however, could obtain some financial data from banks, credit unions and other financial institutions without a court order or grand jury subpoena if they had the approval of a senior government official.
The new law (see Section 374 of the act), however, lets the FBI acquire these records through an administrative procedure whereby an FBI field agent simply drafts a so-called national security letter stating the information is relevant to a national security investigation.
And the law broadens the definition of “financial institution” to include such businesses as insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service and even jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships.
The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions. (Wired News, Jan. 6, 2004)
There is no telling what the FBI is doing with such invasive powers, granted with the full authority of the law. The Sovereignty Commission, whose surveillance powers were acquired largely by fiat, was able to have similar access to citizens’ financial records. Cleve McDowell, who was murdered in 1997, earlier attracted the Commission’s attention when he was the first African American to enter law school at the University of Mississippi in 1963. Klopfer writes:
The [Sovereignty Commission] investigator [Tom Scarbrough] was sent back to Drew on June 4 and 5 to find more dirt on young McDowell. From R. D. Cartledge, “cashier of the Bank of Drew,” Scarbrough learned that “a Negro female school teacher gave Cleve McDowell a check for $10 payable to McDowell on May 27…. McDowell endorsed the check to Medgar W. Evers [who] in turn cashed the check at a service station in Jackson.” This fact was duly reported back to the Sovereignty Commission.
Scarbrough was not able to learn why “Jessie Singleton Gresham” gave McDowell the $10 check. He tried to talk once again to McDowell’s father and when he “could get no one to respond to my knock of their front door” he “journeyed over to Oxford … to observe his admittance to the University School of Law on June 5, 1963.”
Kim Zetter noted that “Bush signed the [intelligence] bill on Dec. 13, a Saturday, which was the same day the U.S. military captured Saddam Hussein.” It is important to note the parallels between the present war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, which was one of the backdrops for the Civil Rights Movement. In his essay “Highways to Nowhere,” Wallace Roberts, who was a Freedom School coordinator in Cleveland and Shaw, Mississippi, recalled that at “the first memorial service for the three civil rights workers, held just a few days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that marked the beginning of the Vietnam War, Bob Moses, the head of the summer project, said simply, ‘The same kind of racism that killed these three young men is going to kill thousands of Vietnamese.’”
Roberts also recalled last year’s fortieth annual memorial for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, at the rebuilt Mt. Zion Church, which had been bombed by the Klan on June 16, 1964, setting in motion the events that led to the murders of those three brave, young men:
Dave Dennis, one of the leaders of Freedom Summer, said that it doesn’t really matter now what happens to a bunch of old men even in the name of justice. What matters now is the injustice still being done to the black children of Mississippi: Governor Barbour recently asked for a cut of more than $200 million in state funds for public education. This in a state that already ranks at the bottom nationally in per pupil spending.
I was able to shave a couple of hours off my driving time thanks to the lavish investment in slick new roads by Barbour and his predecessors, but that savings comes at the cost of the continuing intellectual enslavement of the state’s black children.
Drive on, Mississippi, you’re on a highway to nowhere.
It was an apropos end to an exciting week when I received Gary May’s email yesterday, announcing the publication of his new book, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but in addition to traveling to Mississippi for the 41st annual Chaney Goodman Schwerner Memorial on the land of civil rights pioneers Cornelius and Mable Steele, I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama and spent time with former SNCC workers Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnat. ScottB took me all around Montgomery, Lowndes County and Selma, to teach me about his work with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the 1960s. I will get into more of the details very soon, but it was just Tuesday that I stopped with ScottB at the memorial to Viola Liuzzo on Rt. 80, outside Selma, where she was murdered by Klansmen after she’d traveled from Detroit to march with all the others in the Selma to Montgomery March. (A good account of the story is here.)
The Informants is a model of painstaking historical research coupled with an exemplary writing style, vivid, dramatic, and suspenseful. Serious historical writing May proves need not be dull.
What is new and different about the book are May’s portraits of Klan members and primarily the FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, a violent, angry liar, who loved nothing better than hanging around cops, was planted inside the Klan, in Bessemer, Alabama, where many members and sympathizers worked in the steel mills, their activities often approved, subtly and otherwise, by Birmingham’s ruling elite. (Readers might also turn to Diane McWhorter’s fascinating Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution)….
The problem, as May points out, is that Rowe, a member of Eastview Klavern No. 13 in Bessemer, rose rapidly within Klan ranks. He joined in meting out savage beatings of blacks and white sympathizers. When the Klan beat Freedom Riders badly in the Birmingham bus terminal in 1961, none of the attackers, including Rowe, were deemed culpable, because local police were in on the plot. The FBI, which had advance knowledge about the assault, refused to intervene because they wanted Klan members to trust Rowe. May speculates that Rowe may well have been involved in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham where four small black girls died. “Hoover,” May goes on, “blocked persecution…in part to protect Rowe” and another FBI snitch, who was even more dangerous than Rowe.
He also suggests, but cannot prove, that while Rowe was present in the automobile shadowing Liuzzo’s car, he urged another Klan member to kill Liuzzo. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center once accurately portrayed Rowe as “a loud, bragging, know-it-all thug who had been made a hero for what would have sent most men to prison.”
But thanks to Gary May, we do know that the murder of Viola Liuzzo took a devastating toll on her family. Some misguided Americans wrote her family obscene and bigoted letters and castigating their husband and mother for going South to help other Americans.
For May, this business of using criminals as spies raises “the use of questionable, even illegal means to achieve a beneficial end,” a question he later suggests raises a new set of questions in today’s “war against terrorism.”
During the sixties, the FBI claimed to have 2,000 Rowe-like informers inside various Klan groups. Much about them is still secret. The FBI will not allow researchers access to their files, information how well or badly they did, and what crimes, if any, they committed while serving as informers. “It is unlikely that such records will become available to historians in the near future,” May explains, “because the Bureau fiercely guards informant identities and activities.”
My research in FBI, Justice Department and the Liuzzo family attorney’s records convinced me that the Liuzzo Case was unique and offered important lessons for our current war against terrorism. Unlike the other well known Civil Rights murders, the crime was quickly solved because one of the four Klansmen who shot Liuzzo on an Alabama highway following the conclusion of the 1965 Voting Rights March, was an FBI informant. As soon as Gary Thomas Rowe could get away from his associates, he quickly reported the murder to his FBI handler and, within hours, the Klansmen were apprehended. President Lyndon Johnson announced their arrest over nation-wide television. In none of the other civil rights murders was an FBI informant so deeply involved and an examination of Rowe’s career led to disturbing conclusions about the role of informants then and now– their activities can actually produce the very tragedies they are supposed to prevent….
Although the Klansmen would later charge that Rowe himself murdered Liuzzo, which led her family to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the FBI in the 1980s, a judge ruled against them and evidence I uncovered indicated that another Klansmen fired the fatal shots. The Klansmen responsible for Liuzzo’s murder are dead as is Rowe and the case is officially closed, but—in fact, it deserves to be examined and discussed for what it tells us about the dangers of recruiting informants and putting them into terrorist groups. To reassure their associates that they are truly committed to their cause, they too must commit brutal acts. And to hide their association with despicable characters, intelligence agencies become silent partners in the crimes their informants commit. I hope that as the U.S. seeks better “human intelligence” in the war on terrorism, The Informant will provide a cautionary tale about the role played by informants in that struggle. Along with the newly reopened case of Emmett Till and the start on June 13 of the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, accused of killing James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, I recommend opening, intellectually if not legally, the case of Viola Liuzzo. It has too much to teach us to be closed forever.
Now that Killen has been convicted and sentenced, Susan Klopfer has revamped her blog that focused on the trial to cover, instead, the history of racial murders in Mississippi. Spend fifteen minutes on Murders Around Mississippi and it should be abundantly clear what Rita Bender Schwerner meant when she said:
“If this verdict is a beginning, if the sentence is a beginning, helping to open up what happened in this state — that is important.”
Susan has already posted a lot (including some excerpts from Susan’s book, Where Rebels Roost), so I’ll mention a few things to check out:
[I am proud to say I wrote the forward to Susan Klopfer's new book, which becomes available next week. You will see a couple of quotations from the forward, below. Once Susan's book is available to the public, I'll post the forward here. Note, too, that Susan's small book on Emmett Till is available now.--BG]
New Nonfiction Book Examines Civil Rights in Mississippi
M. Susan Orr-Klopfer’s new book revisits Mississippi’s state government 50 years ago, which fostered a culture of racism and fueled the civil rights movement.
(PRWEB via PR Web Direct) June 22, 2005 — Edgar Ray Killen has been found guilty of manslaughter for slayings in Mississippi that spurred the civil rights movement 41 years ago. M. Susan Orr-Klopfer’s timely new book, “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited,” examines the circumstances of this case and suggests that a racist Mississippi government of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s allowed several other alleged confidants to escape charges.
Killen was accused of helping organize the posse that murdered civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964. Killen is the only person ever indicted on state murder charges in the case, but was tried, with several others, in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims’ civil rights. Killen was found innocent then, but seven others were convicted.
“We cannot begin to fathom the nature of racial repression in Mississippi without knowing what Klopfer reveals in her book,” states Benjamin T. Greenberg, in the book’s foreword. “It is no exaggeration to say that Mississippi of the 1950s and 1960s was a totalitarian police state.”
Little has been written about civil rights in the Delta, particularly about the struggle that began before Mississippi became a state, and the continuation of those struggles into the youth of Mississippi’s statehood.
Orr-Klopfer has spent the last two years traveling the Delta and writing the book’s 32 chapters and more than 700 pages of historical content. Descriptions and dialogue in “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited” are based on interviews conducted by eyewitnesses and participants in the events. In addition, Orr-Klopfer used newspapers, books, journals and magazines, documents, letters, diaries, and oral histories from various libraries, archives and private collections.
About the author:
M. Susan Orr-Klopfer holds an M.B.A. from Indiana Wesleyan University and a B.A. from Hanover College. She is a former acquisitions and development editor for Simon & Schuster, Inc., and is an award-winning journalist for her investigative reporting in Missouri. In addition to “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited,” available on Tuesday, June 28 at www.lulu.com and http://themiddleoftheinternet.com, she is the author of several other books, including “The Emmett Till Book,” which is being released today, June 22, and a computer book, “Abort! Retry! Fail!”
Last Sunday, I attended the 41st Annual Chaney Goodman Schwerner Memorial in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This year the memorial was held on the Steele family land, at the site of the former Longdale Community Center.
One of the speakers at this year’s memorial was John Steele, son of Cornelius and Mable, a civil rights pioneering couple. Cornelius Steele first started trying to register to vote on his own accord in 1951, without the support of civil rights workers. It was Cornelius Steele who first conceived of the memorial service forty-one years ago, as a way to honor these struck down American heroes, ensure they were not forgotten and provide a vehicle for bringing justice in their murders. John Steele was ten during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, and he knew James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. John says that they were truly close friends and playful with one another. John Steele has since then been one of the strongest and longest standing voices for truth and justice in the murder case.
Last week, during the trial, a reporter asked John Steele what he thinks about Killen being prosecuted for murder after all this time. Steele said, “I told the reporter he [Killen] needs some company.”
In 1982 the community center burned down under mysterious circumstances. All that remains are portions of the brick walls and the concrete that was poured into the foundation. The land had not been used for years. The grass and brush were so overgrown that the remains of the Community Center were not visible to anyone passing by on the road. In the week before the memorial Steele family members and others in the local community cleared the grounds completely, to make an open space where they set up tents and tables and chairs and served all the guests wonderful food—traditional Southern items like ribs and fried chicken and baked beans, as well as nice vegetarian salads for people like me who are not meat eaters.
In the Longdale community in rural Neshoba County, Mickey had befriended Cornelius Steele, who “has been most eager and cooperative in the freedom registration and also has a great desire to help set up the Summer Project there.” Steele showed Mickey an abandoned Negro school that was for sale as a possible site for a freedom school and community center. He told Schwerner he thought people in Longdale would put up the money to buy the place. “As promising as things look,” Mickey noted, “one must keep in mind that Neshoba is a very ‘tough’ county, indicated by the fact that no Negro has been registered since 1955.”
Owing to Cornelius Steele’s encouragement, Longdale was a constant destination for Schwerner and Chaney. Between February and June 1964, as they prepared for the Summer Project, Schwerner and Chaney made some thirty trips there.
John Steele continued in his remarks last Sunday, saying, “we’ve called for justice for 41 years . . . there is too much blood crying from the ground from those veterans who have died so we could live better . . . If they wanted to kill them all, then let them all stand trial together.”
Photo: John Steele speaking, as Hollis Watkins looks on. The two men stand in front of the largest remaining wall of the Longdale Community Center. (Photo by Benjamin T. Greenberg)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 24, 2005 at 12:49 am
As anyone who sifts through the neshoba murders posts on this blog will know, the emphasis here at Hungry Blues is not so much Edgar Ray Killen but the big picture, of which Killen is only a small part. For excellent reading with good historical background and a broad understanding of the issues that are involved in this case, read Susan’s two part series, based on her forthcoming book, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited. (Available for order by next mid week; go here to sign up for email notification with book ordering information.)
Taped conversations released in 1997 show that on June 23 President Johnson, dealing with the disappearance of the young civil rights workers, was angry over receiving conflicting information on the telephone from Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Senator James Eastland.
Kennedy had advised Johnson to meet with the student workers’ parents. He also suggested Johnson make a statement expressing his ”personal concern for them and for their families.”
Less than an hour later, Eastland told Johnson he believed the whole incident was a hoax. ”I believe it’s a publicity stunt,” Eastland said. ”I don’t think there’s a damn thing to it. There’s not a Ku Klux Klan in that area…. There’s no organized white men in that area,” Eastland said. ”Who could possibly harm them?”
Johnson asked Eastland whether the senator thought he should expand on an earlier statement on the investigation, as advised by Kennedy, and Eastland answered “no.”
The name “Goodman” must have attracted the senator’s interest, since Goodman had family ties to Pacifica Broadcasting, a progressive, alternative broadcasting network founded in 1949 by pacifists. Goodman’s father, Robert, was President of the Pacifica Foundation. Only a year prior to Andrew Goodman’s death, The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Senator Eastland, completed a three-year investigation of Pacifica’s programming, looking for “subversion.”
In 1962, Pacifica station WBAI was the first station to publicly broadcast former FBI agent Jack Levine’s exposé of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The program was followed by threats of arrests and bombings, as well as pressure from the FBI, the Justice Department, and the FCC. Also that year, Pacifica trained volunteers to travel into the South for coverage of the awakening Civil Rights Movement. The station also took a strong anti-Vietnam war stance, helping to prompt the investigations.
Sovereignty Commission documents show that Eastland knew the names and backgrounds of all volunteer workers in advance of their arrival, including Goodman, since the senator requested this information from the Sovereignty Commission well before the opening of Freedom Summer.
Thirty-five shootings, thirty bombings, thirty-five church burnings, eighty beatings, and at least six racially motivated murders took place in Mississippi during the first eight months of 1964. Fourteen died in civil rights-related killings. This violence constituted a “deliberate pattern of Klan terror,” according to the FBI.
Aftermath
By the following spring, Sovereignty Commission director Johnston was definitely looking for a direct link between Andrew Goodman and “communists.” On February 26, 1965, he wrote a letter to newly elected Congressman Prentiss Walker, requesting that he “ask the HUAC for any information about the Pacifica Foundation of New York…. We have reason to believe this foundation also is subversive.”
Walker, whose district included Philadelphia, Mississippi wrote back to Johnston that he had been in contact with Congressman John Ashbrook, HUAC chair, who offered a “thorough search … to obtain any information on the people and organizations mentioned.”
Included on Walker’s list he sent to the Sovereignty Commission was Robert Goodman (the same name as Andrew’s father) but the HUAC committee’s director reported he could find no records of any testimony by Goodman.
Johnston also mailed to Eastland a list of COFO workers “in the Mississippi Summer Project as of August 1964,” explaining he had obtained this list through “one of our pipelines” and that it was possible “some of these names are in the files of the Senate Internal Security Committee or the House Un-American Activities Committee,” referring, of course, to Goodman.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 15, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Up from the comments, Susan Klopfer writes about a little known, late 19th century pogrom against African Americans in Mississippi. I believe most Americans are ignorant of or in denial about the prevalence in our history of this kind of organized, mass racial violence. One reason for our country’s present impotence in dealing with racial inequalities and violence against people of color is our inability to face the truth about our own past.
The wonderful part about living in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is hearing the “whispers” of what went on years ago. Mississippi’s history, oral but not always written, includes routine reports of brutality and murder.
Early Delta planters were always fearing a race war and in September of 1889, the Governor sent three regiments to Minter City (in Leflore County but close to Money in Tallahatchie County where Emmett Till was kidnapped) to ensure that CFA members were unarmed. Completing their assignment, the state regiments withdrew and allowed a massacre of CFA [Colored Farmers Alliance] members and families to proceed.
There were no reports of blacks being armed or of whites being shot; estimates of African Americans murdered reached as high as one hundred. From his research on the massacre, historian William F. Holmes observed that neither the National Guard, nor the governor and black residents of Leflore County were forthcoming with accounts of the incident. But he discovered several first-hand accounts by travelers who happened to be in the region, including the observations of J. C. Engle, an agent for a New York textile company, who was in and about Greenwood during the trouble:
When he arrived at New Orleans several days later, Engle told reporters that Negroes “were shot down like dogs.” Members of the posse not only killed people in the swamps, he said, but they even invaded homes and murdered “men women and children.” Engle recalled one act in which a sixteen year old white boy “beat out the brains of a little colored girl while a bigger brother with a gun kept the little one’s parents off.” Several sources reported that the posse singled out four well-known leaders of the Colored Farmers Alliance whom they shot to death: Adolph Horton, Scott Morris, Jack Dial and J.M. Dial. “A black undercover reporter sent to the region stated that the truth may never be known because terrified blacks dare not speak of the matter, even to each other.”
The lack of coverage of this massacre by the Mississippi press, and the failure of state and federal officials to lead investigations, left researcher Holmes wondering how many other instances of violence of a “greater and lesser magnitude” happened in Mississippi during this era. (There were many.)
Recently, one young African American who grew up in Minter City in the late 1970s and early 1980s told me he had never heard of the massacre but did report of folk lore from his youth about “dead bodies” in the “Singing River,” who could sometimes be heard at night.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 24, 2005 at 2:02 am
• After I blogged my friend Dana’s memoir piece on her 1999 trip to Auchwitz, she commented to send me over to the website of Peter Cunningham, the photographer whose photo of Dana appears in her article.
Peter has spent years photographing musicians and there is a nice link on his site to those pictures. Open it up and you see many pictures you’ve seen replicated in many places — he’s the guy who took them!
You can truly get lost browsing through Peter Cunningham’s photos. You can also read his own documentary essay with photos of an earlier trip he went on to Auchwitz, before the one Dana wrote about.
I’ve read recently that you will soon be teaching in an urban, Washington, D.C. elementary school. As you begin your career there are a few things that I would like you to consider.
I’m sure that you are entering the profession with the highest of expectations for the children who will be under your care in the coming years, that you are not someone who might fall prey to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” If possible, though, please take a few moments to think about just what it means to have high or low expectations for your students.
I ask you to do so because I believe that much of the so-called educational reform mandated in the name of “high” expectations truly reflects very low expectations of the intellectual capacities and learning potential of children – most specifically, poor children in urban schools who are usually not white and who often don’t speak English as their first language.
This conclusion might seem counter-intuitive. After all, your father claims that No Child Left Behind is closing the achievement gap. He claims that test scores are rising, that more kids are reading at a higher level. I see that achievement gap differently – when teaching and textbooks mirror the tests, scores indeed will rise. In the eyes of some people, high expectations for students are being met. I see the high expectations of the testing/publishing industrial complex being met as their profits soar, and the high expectations of pundits being met as their pockets fatten. Let’s say that I’m wrong, though, and children are indeed learning more in this brave new world of education. We still cannot say that high expectations are being met without taking into account some of the other effects of NCLB on classrooms. A few examples include: students reading fewer actual books in school, far less time being spent on social studies, science, arts education, or any other activity that does not fall within the realm of concepts-to-be-tested.
• On the second of my twoposts about Olen Burrage, Susan Klopfer posted an excerpt from her forthcoming book Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, due out on June 15. Susan prefaces her excerpt, saying, “Look away from Neshoba County and the “regular” klansmen. So many others were involved …” I have actually linked to a similar excerpt (scroll down to “Further Reading”), which Susan had posted previously on her website, in order to make precisely her point, that others—including Senator James O. Eastland and Representative Prentiss Walker—are on the chain of responsibility for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Here’s part of what Susan posted:
…. Ninety miles away from Neshoba County in Jackson, Sovereignty Commission director Johnston was looking at a possible direct link between Andrew Goodman and “communists.” The name “Goodman” had attracted Senator Eastland’s interest, since Goodman had family ties to Pacifica Broadcasting, a progressive, alternative-broadcasting network founded in 1949 by pacifists.
Goodman’s father, Robert, was President of the Pacifica Foundation. One year prior to Andrew Goodman’s death, The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Senator Eastland, completed a three-year investigation of Pacifica’s programming, looking for “subversion.”
In 1962, Pacifica station WBAI was the first station to publicly broadcast former FBI agent Jack Levine’s exposé of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The program was followed by threats of arrests and bombings, as well as pressure from the FBI, the Justice Department, and the FCC. Also that year, Pacifica trained volunteers to travel into the South for coverage of the awakening Civil Rights Movement. The station also took a strong anti-Vietnam war stance, helping to prompt the investigations.
Sovereignty Commission documents in fact show that Eastland knew the names and backgrounds of all volunteer workers in advance of their arrival, including Goodman. Records show the senator requested this information from the Sovereignty Commission well before the opening of Freedom Summer.
On February 26, 1965, Director Johnston wrote a letter to newly elected Congressman Prentiss Walker, requesting that he “ask the HUAC for any information about the Pacifica Foundation of New York…. We have reason to believe this foundation also is subversive.”
A good source on the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner is Susan’s chapter on that story (scroll down past the web form), currently posted on her website.
Susan is now also keeping two new blogs: Civil Rights Books and Emmett Till. Civil Rights Books is intended as “a forum to share civil rights history in Mississippi.” There is already quite a bit of interesting posted there. Susan’s Emmett Till Blog promises to soon be a place to go to follow the developments in the new FBI investigation of Emmett Till’s murder.
Photo by Peter Cunningham
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 22, 2005 at 11:01 pm
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
It was an apropos end to an exciting week when I received Gary May’s email yesterday, announcing the publication of his new book, 
(PRWEB via PR Web Direct) June 22, 2005 — Edgar Ray Killen has been found guilty of manslaughter for slayings in Mississippi that spurred the civil rights movement 41 years ago. M. Susan Orr-Klopfer’s timely new book, “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited,” examines the circumstances of this case and suggests that a racist Mississippi government of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s allowed several other alleged confidants to escape charges.
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