Over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend some attention turned to US Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) renewed effort to open the FBI records of Dr. King. Civil Rights Cold Case reporter Jerry Mitchell reported:
U.S. Sen. John Kerry plans to introduce legislation next week that would pave the way for the release of thousands of FBI documents on the life and death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kerry, D-Mass., said the bill, which failed in 2006, can pass this year in honor of King. “I want the world to know what he stood for,” Kerry said. “And I want his personal history preserved and examined by releasing all of his records.”
The bill calls for creating a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives that would include all government records related to King. The bill also would create a five-member independent review board that would identify and make public all documents from agencies including the FBI — just as a review board in 1992 made public documents related to the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination.
Mitchell spoke with Kerry and other prominent supporters of the legislation, including US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and pulitzer prize winning King biographer Taylor Branch. MItchell also spoke with others from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, who believe Kerry should expand the focus of his important initiative.
Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Cold Case Truth and Justice Project, believe[s] Kerry’s idea should be expanded to include the release of documents involving not only King’s assassination, but also other racial slayings from the civil rights era….
Klibanoff met last summer with Attorney General Eric Holder and suggested creating an independent review board to make public “all files, documents and other historic materials related to the racial terror and hate crimes that occurred in the South during the modern civil rights era.”
In an Oct. 27 letter, Holder responded that the Justice Department was discussing the best ways to make “the most responsible public disclosure possible.”…
Ben Greenberg of Boston, whose father served as a special assistant to King in 1962 and 1963, praised Kerry’s legislation. “The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was a trauma that our country will not recover from unless we can clear the air about what really happened,” he said.
Greenberg, who has spent recent years investigating a number of unsolved killings from the era, including the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker near Woodville, said documents on many other racial slayings from the 1950s and 1960s should be made public, too.
“The effects of these murders linger throughout the South,” he said.
Some FBI documents continue to conceal the name of suspects in these killings, he said. “The people named in the documents, the family members and the perpetrators are dying every day. It is time for the truth to be told and for justice to be done. We need the information while there is still time to use it.”…
Recently the FBI asked for the public’s help in solving 33 killings from the civil rights era — a third of them in Mississippi.
Journalist John Fleming, whose work for The Anniston Star led to an arrest in the 1965 killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, Ala., questioned how the FBI can ask for the public’s help in solving killings but fail to make public the names of crucial witnesses who could shed light on these cases.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 22, 2010 at 8:20 am
In October, I was in Mississippi again, following leads in my investigation of the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, MS.
Driving home from the swing shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS, Walker was ambushed by Klansmen, who stopped his car on a deserted road and blew his face off with shotguns in the dark of night. He never made it home to his wife and five children. He was 37 years old.
The Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol and the FBI investigated for nine months and identified numerous suspects—including two who were recommended for arrest—but no one was ever charged.
This post works around the edges of the story to convey a little of what it’s like to conduct a real-time investigation of decades-old events. I’ll be publishing an in-depth article about the case soon.
The Tip
“One of my cousins, who still lives in Woodville, told me Emma’s in Centreville,” came the excited voice over the phone. “She just opened up a club there.”
There are two towns in Wilkinson County, MS—Woodville, which is the county seat, and Centreville, which is 15 miles east of there.
The caller was one of Clifton Walker’s nephews. I had just met and interviewed him for the first time the day before in Louisiana. In 1964 he and his family lived on the same 87 acre family plot of land as Walker and his family.
This was big. 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents said Emma, a black cook at the truck stop where Walker’s murder was allegedly planned, had knowledge crucial to solving the case. I had found subjects in the documents and confirmed others dead, but I had nothing on Emma, past or present.
“Did your cousin say the name of the club or where it is?” I asked Walker’s nephew.
“No,” he replied, “she didn’t mention that.”
Centreville is a small town of 1500 people. Finding a club that just opened up there didn’t seem daunting. The town is 45 miles from the hotel where I was staying in Natchez. I got into my rental car and drove there.
Main Street in Centreville is about eight blocks long. I parked my car near the western end, got out and started walking east. After a few blocks, I passed a small group of young black men near the corner of West Park Street and noticed a little place down that road that looked like a bar. A number of people were standing around outside. Was that Emma’s “club”?
After another block, I came to the Camp Van Dorn World War II Museum—the tall, box shaped, single-story brick building might have once been a bank or post office; the brown paint looked newer than the paint on any of the other buildings. Camp Van Dorn was an army base that operated in Centreville from 1942-1947.
It wouldn’t take long in such a small town for rumors about my work to spread widely. Maybe inside the museum I could get into a conversation that would reveal what I needed to know without asking direct questions about Emma.
The door was locked. The museum closed at 4:00 pm, and it was already after 5:00. I turned around and started walking back in the direction of my car and tried to come up with Plan B. One of the guys from the street corner was now standing across the street from me.
He called out: “What’re you looking for?”
His name was Robert. I had my camera over my shoulder. I said I was from Boston.
“Boston, Massachusetts?” he asked, “where they have whales and shit?”
Robert suggested beers; I assented, thinking we might go to the place on West Park, but he took me down the block to McKey’s Grocery.
“What kind of beer you drink?” he asked. “I drink Bud Light.”
“That’s fine. Hey, it’s on me,” I said, giving him a 20, “just give me the change.”
He came back a few minutes later with two 24 oz Bud Light cans.
“Seventeen dollars and three cents. Let me hold some of that for you,” Robert offered. “I’ll take you out to Camp Van Dorn and show you underground bomb bunkers, old torpedos and shit like that. You might take a few pictures of me standing in a cave.“
“Thanks,” I answered. “Maybe if I make it back here, but I need to get back to Natchez soon.”
We walked another block, crossed the street and walked a few feet down West Park and sat down on a stoop in front of an old pair of forest green double-doors.
His friends started coming by.
“This guy is a photographer from Boston,” Robert said.
Robert grabbed one of his buddies and started posing and flashing gang signs.
“Snap me. Don’t forget to snap me.”
One guy pulled off his shirt to show off his tattoos from prison.
“You make sure you take this shit back to Boston, Massachusetts.”
“What kind of white girls you got up there in Boston? They freaky?”
I gestured towards the bar down the block. “How long has this place been around?”
“A long time. Years.”
I snapped more photos of Robert’s friends.
Robert leaned over to me, saying, “They see you sitting here with me, so you’re cool. Why don’t you let me hold that 10 for you?”
It was getting dusky and it was time to go.
At the street corner one of the guys started asking me for $5 for a pack of t-shirts.
I thought about where else I could ask around about Emma’s club, but it was definitely time to go.
I heard them calling out as I walked back to the car. I didn’t turn around. I got into the car and drove down a side street to weave my way back to Highway 24.
I called Walker’s nephew from the car and told him I didn’t find Emma’s place.
The Source
In the morning, I drove to the Natchez Coffee House, got some breakfast, used the wifi and sorted through some of my photographs. At around 11:00 am, I went out to my car to call the Woodville cousin who was the source of the information that Emma had a club. Her mother, now deceased, was another of Clifton Walker’s sisters. All of Walker’s 10 siblings are dead.
“Why did he go and run his mouth off like that without knowing the facts?”
She was exasperated.
“Emma opened a new club there. But it was twenty-five years ago,” she said. “I was a little girl when I heard it. I went to Centreville with my mother. Emma walked past us in the store we were shopping in. Mama said, ‘if it wasn’t for that woman, my brother would still be alive.’”
“Is Emma still there? Is she alive?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
It was a 25-year-old tip.
Return to Centreville
I decided to visit the office of Centreville Chief of Police Jimmy Ray Reese.
“It was over him either using the white restrooms or drinking out of the white water fountain” at International Paper, Chief Reese told me.
Reese said he knew all about the Walker case. He said a number of things I hadn’t heard others say before.
“Back in those days they had the signs, you know. He’d been told don’t do one or the other. And apparently he did and he was found shot with buckshot. Something like 250 holes were found in his car. I think a tree might have been cut across the road and he might have gotten out to check on the tree and they shot him.”
I told him about Emma.
“Yeah I know her,” he said.
“She still around?” I asked.
“Yup,” he replied, “I talked to Emma last week. She was involved?”
It was no longer dated hearsay. Emma was alive.
“She’s mentioned in the documents as having knowledge,” I explained, trying to not speak too excitedly.
“I’ve been in law enforcement in this town 33 years, 34 years in January. She’s been here ever since then,” Reese said. “She ran a big night club. I know her quite well, and we always got along good.”
“When she ran that juke, I was the deputy and we had a lot dealings,” Reese continued. “A lot of them at these jukes don’t like to tell you who was fighting, but she’d always point em out to me and have em arrested and try to stop things. She tried to run a pretty good place. She had a lot of pull back in them days.”
I finally met Emma the next morning. She was 81 years old, tall, even as she bent to use her cane. She had small, braided pigtails pinned tightly behind her ears. She was getting over the flu and was wearing a white, terrycloth robe. Her recollections comported with details in the 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents.
“They come down there and they questioned me,” she said. “They knocked on the door, I answered the door and they just pushed the door on over.”
After the murder she was living in Louisiana.
“They brought me big pictures. He was laying there with blood, he was full of blood and I didn’t look at them cause it was horrible.”
She clearly had not forgotten it.
Did she have information crucial to my investigation? She sure didn’t think so, but that remains to be seen.
(Cross-posted on The Civil Rights Cold Case Project blog.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 16, 2009 at 12:25 am
If you are like me, and you struggle to find full throated enthusiasm for any of the Democratic candidates, I want to encourage you vote and to vote for Barack Obama.
In my most cynical moments I fear that there is little difference between Obama and Clinton and that neither will be a progressive President.
I’ve been saying to people that I like Obama best during his speaches, which have inspired and moved me. I often distrust my positive emotional responses to political candidates, but the presidency is, in fact, a symbolic position. In my book, Obama is the candidate who most clearly stands for meaningful political change and national cohesion based democratic and progressive values. We need the President to stand for these things. The devil will most certainly be in the details. Once Obama is in office, it will be up to us to hold him accountable for what he says he stands for and to make sure those details are not forgotten in excitement over the first Black president or in the resumption of business as usual in Washington.
If you are on the fence about Obama or about voting at all, read this email from Fred Berman to the Progressive Democrats of Somerville email list. It helped me.
Maybe Obama isn’t Kucinich, but then Kucinich couldn’t be elected.
Obama is willing to meet the challenge of building the tax base by increasing the amount of Social Security taxes paid by higher income earners; Clinton isn’t.
Obama was unwilling to support the Congressional resolution labeling Iran a threat; Clinton did.
Neither Obama or Clinton are proposing single payer, but Obama’s proposal will move us to single payer more directly, because instead of providing coverage through the commercial insurers (as Clinton proposes to do), Obama proposes the creation of a public insurance alternative.
If you think the soapbox isn’t important, look what George Bush has accomplished at the bully pulpit.
If you think that people around the world will see no difference between Goerge Bush and Barack Obama at the helm, will think that a change in leadership is just four years of more of the same…. you’re wrong. Electing Obama will be the clearest message that the American voting public can send to the world that we’ve woken up and we’re ready to change course.
If you were fooled by Ralph Nader into believing that Gore and Bush were just two sides of the same Demopublican coin, you must by now have seen the error of that thinking, or you are wearing blinders.
If you think that Gore would have invaded Iraq, would have opened Guantanamo, would have supported extraordinary rendition, would have pushed drilling in Anwar, would have fought stronger fuel economy standards, would have sliced funding for housing subsidies, would have cut back funding for substance abuse treatment, would have linked commitment to abstinence to foreign aid and AIDS treatment, would have supported the intrusion of religion in the public arena….. you’re wrong.
And if, after listening to the campaign rhetoric, you think that McCain/Huck/Romney would be no worse than Clinton/Obama then you haven’t been paying attention…
Voting DOES make a difference, even if the election doesn’t bring corporate power to a grinding halt.
It’s NOT worth sitting out the election if you can’t get everything you want in a candidate. Life isn’t about perfection or nothing. It’s about playing the hand you’ve been dealt, and moving on from there.
The future of war and peace, climate change, health coverage, the right to choose, water and air quality, affordable housing, worker health and safety, an unfettered Internet, human rights, public education, and the Supreme Court are all at stake.
Chances are you’re not doing anything so important that you can’t spare 15 minutes to go to the poles, even if Buddha isn’t on the ballot.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 5, 2008 at 2:06 am
Desegregation, A Story of Quiescence and Violence
By Mario Marcel Salas
Violence against integration efforts would not end after the Brown v. Board decision, and patterns of hatred and segregation would be revealed in graphic media images in the North. In 1965, a decade after the desegregation of southern schools, school segregation in the North became national news. As a outcome of extreme segregated neighborhoods in the North, racist savagery erupted in Boston. The NAACP in seeking to end educational segregation supported black parents by confronting the Boston School Committee, and racist leader Louise Day Hicks, who stood fast in her claims that Boston’s black public schools were not inferior. Black parents took the Boston school committee to court, and a federal district court judge ruled that the school committee had intently maintained two divided school systems. The outcome that was imposed was that students were to be bused citywide to eradicate segregation. White racists never accepted it and just moved away causing the schools to stay segregated.
To a certain degree African American political power itself, in many southern states, was a continuation of the orchestration and control of the white elite in which “partial” freedom was granted to them as the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and later the Civil Rights movement. There were civil rights victories, but the colonial white elite controlled its extent. These racist white systems of control were not plantation based, but was based upon a state colonial matrix that helped them to recapture control of a newly freed African American population. This colonial system has never been destroyed but has morphed with time. It retailored itself to the legal victories and desegregation efforts by controlling the scope of change, while protecting white elitist positions of power. This is why many political scientists maintain that racism is permanent.
Many public schools across the United States were never truly integrated and San Antonio perhaps best describes the process by which many schools were desegregated. When Brown vs. Board became law, in 1954 and 1955, the white racist power elite, along with their economic and political allies, sought ways to appease desegregation efforts in many areas of the South. The legal, political, and social struggle by anti-integration activists blunted the Brown decision in a number of ways. Racist southern school boards, supported by their allies in state governments, brought suits challenging the Brown judgment, thereby creating escape routes to get around the intent of the decision. In many areas around the country social trickery, intimidation, and violence were used to uphold segregation or blunt the intent of the Brown decision.
Topeka, Kansas became the legal battleground on which school segregation was fought. The 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board declared that racist segregation of public schools was unequal and thereupon unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board brought much gravity to the racial model and the structure of U.S. society. Though the Brown decision did not begin the historic African American civil rights movement it provided the political fire and legal impetus for social action. While The Brown decision did not end segregation, it provided a legal foundation by which social action could be launched. However, the court decision raised questions as to how much authority it had over entrenched institutional and traditional racism that was embedded into the social fabric of society in a racial matrix that appears to have permanence in U.S. society.
The paternal system of white dominance, as codified in law, was overturned as the constitutional policies established by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that validated the doctrine of “separate but equal” were ruled illegal. Interestingly, the racist “one drop rule” was also codified in the Plessy decision, as Homer Plessy was said to be only “one-eighth black.” Jim Crow laws reinforced this pyramidal structure of white racism throughout the South and established separate facilities for Blacks and Whites in every area of social life. Though the South had lost the war segregationist forces were able to “redeem” southern values through segregation and the perpetuation of the myth of “black racial inferiority.” The Plessy decision was a achievement for the “Redeemers movement,” and those who wanted to “save the South” from Reconstruction and the perceived threat of black rule.
For many years the Robert E. Lee model of separate educational institutions that focused on a curriculum of domestic skills instruction and manual labor was the societal norm of admittance into white society for freed slaves and their ancestors. This is why it took so long to bring black schools and colleges up to par academically. By choosing these pathways, racist paternalistic models of control could assign the boundaries by which the descendents of Africans could interact within a white racist society. Thus, the promises of emancipation and Reconstruction were sidestepped and structured to guarantee white racist rule in the United States. Booker T. Washington’s ideas became the affirmed model for white racist doctrines of paternalism. Consequently, African American movements for social equality fought within the boundaries set by racial models and codified by the Plessy decision. African Americans fought for equal pay for teachers, for equal school facilities, for equal libraries, and for equality on the same footing as whites beyond the racist vocational models prescribed for blacks. The Plessy decision legally defined the boundaries of these struggles, but did not completely control it as African Americans challenged the law and the legal boundaries in many cases.
~
Mario Marcel Salas was born in San Antonio, TX in 1949. He joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee soon after high school, and became a civil rights worker for over 30 years. He was the leader of the last SNCC-Black Panther chapter in the United States in 1976. Now a full time professor at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio teaching American and State government, Mr. Salas writes for three African American Newspapers in Texas and speaks across the country at various colleges and universities.
§ Posted by Mario Salas on November 12, 2007 at 11:55 am
J was out biking in Jamaica Plain, MA (part of Boston) on September 11:
I joined The Club. I took a header on South Street, the tire of my bicycle caught in the groove of the unused trolley track.
I tried to keep control of the bike, and managed to hang on to the handlebars until I had planted the bike sideways, skidding another good ten feet or so. I landed on my right side, bruising my right knee, right hip, and right elbow. I also have some hard to describe muscular pain under my right wing, so my shoulder is somehow involved as well. In addition, I have massive bruising in the knuckles of my left hand – I think that the handlebar came smashing down across my hand. I managed to ice it down pretty quickly, but it swelled a nasty amount nevertheless. There’s a bruise in my left instep – I think the pedal poked me there pretty hard.
Conditions were not good at the time: it was dusk, and it had rained earlier, so the pavement was slick. The rails were slicker than the pavement, of course, and I think it was my rear tire that got caught in the groove….
I knew I had to at least get between the right rail and the left rail in order to be in place to make the turn. There were no cars behind me or in front of me for about a block, so I decided I had the time to make an attempt. I recall seeing my front wheel skidding sideways left and right before I went into my slide – this is how I’ve deduced that it was my rear wheel that got caught.
I lost all traction, veeered from side to side, went over to my right and ended up sliding into the oncoming traffic lane, which would have been a very hazardous issue if there had been oncoming traffic. As it was, there was a car approaching about a block away when I went in to my slide, and the woman driving it stopped well before me and asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I got up off the pavement and quickly dragged my bike to the sidewalk, mentally checking my limbs and trying to determine if anything was broken. Two other passers-by were asking me if I was alright, and I asked for a moment to keep checking myself out. My left hand was beginning to swell, and felt pretty useless….
I’m thankful I’m alive.
Me, too, J. I’m thankful you are, too. I ride to work most days and can totally imagine it. And yeah, I’m with you. Say no to bringing back the trolley.
The tracks need to be paved over. End of story. They’re a danger to cyclists, they’re contributing to the deterioration of the pavement on South and Centre Streets, and the city has been promising to do something about it but sitting on their duffs for too long….
I was lucky. I hope nobody else gets seriously hurt.
This public service announcement was brought to you by Cyclists for Non-Lethal Roads.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 20, 2007 at 12:53 am
Jesse Edsell-Vetter of Somerville will run the 26-mile Dublin Marathon Monday, Oct. 29, and has pledged to raise $4,000 to support Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership’s efforts to end homelessness.
He is no stranger to marathons. He ran the Boston Marathon twice as part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team, and regularly participates in races of all lengths. The fact that he is able to run at all is something of a miracle.
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