US Representative Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican from Georgia, made a very bald appeal to racists to unite against Obama. This wasn’t a private statement caught on a mic he didn’t realize was on. This was a statement for the record, to reporters, in the halls of the United States Congress. Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential [...]
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The Legacy of a Murder (full text)
I’ve uploaded to scribd.com the complete PDF version my article in the March/April issue of ColorLines Magazine, “The Legacy of a Murder,” about the 1959 murder of Samuel O’Quinn in Centreville, MS. You can read it in the handy viewer, embedded in this post, or you can go to the article’s page on Scribd and [...]
Cold Case Justice Initiative
In doing my work on racial violence in Southwest Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, it is exciting to get to know some of the other people doing similar work. Syracuse University College of Law Professors Janice McDonald and Paula C. Johnson direct the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which has been playing a role in [...]
New Article: The Legacy of a Murder
My latest article, about the 1959 racial murder of Samuel O’Quinn in Centreville , MS, was published today in Colorlines Magazine. The article is not yet available online, so here’s a teaser for you until I have a link to the whole thing. The Legacy of a Murder Racial killings from the civil rights era [...]
White Supremacist Fabrications
I want to thank pdxWoman for exposing the falsehoods of Blair, who commented on my recent post on Megan Williams as well as on one of pdxWoman’s. pdxWoman was writing about underreporting of the Megan Williams case and of other cases of violence against and abductions of Black women; I was writing about the history [...]
White Lawbreaking
P6 highlighted an important article in Slate, probing “why and when we will tolerate lawbreaking.” Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure-the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties. That’s why the [...]
Diane Nash: Mississippi Scheming
Diane Nash’s statement for my American Prospect article was longer than I could include in the published piece. Her statement is worth reading in full: The State of Mississippi is trying to change its image to appear to be a state that is no longer racist. If Mississippi would focus on truly eliminating and/or decreasing [...]
Belated Justice for Civil Rights Era Crimes
My latest is now out in The American Prospect online (free registration required), in many ways a companion piece to my previous blog post. For the last eight days in Jackson, Mississippi, reputed Ku Klux Klan member James Ford Seale has sat, mostly silent, in the James O. Eastland U.S. Courthouse. Seale has been watching [...]
Mississippi’s Dangerous Attention
In today’s Clarion Ledger, Jerry Mitchell published information about the abduction, torture and interrogation in southwest Mississippi of 16 other Black men—in addition to Henry Dee and Charles Moore—during the first months of 1964. Mitchell’s article is based on a Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission report [pdf] which has long intrigued and disturbed me. The Sovereignty [...]
Economy of Souls
“I have hoped and prayed for over 40 years for justice including full disclosure and the complete prosecution of all those involved in the murder of my son James, and his companions, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.” (Fannie L. Chaney, August 1, 2006) Last night, Fannie Lee Chaney’s soul left her body. She was the [...]
The Face of Henry Hezekiah Dee
For 43 years, Henry Hezekiah Dee’s family and friends had only their memories of the 19-year-old, who, along with is friend Charles Eddie Moore, was abducted and murdered by Klansmen in southwest Mississippi in 1964. Filmmaker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, brother of Charles, have recently discovered a photo and given back to the world [...]
43 Years
[DSCN9388.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.] 43 years ago today, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were hitchhiking from Meadville, MS and were picked up by James Ford Seale. Seale and others took the two 19-year-old Black men into the Homochitto National Forest, which surrounds the highway, tortured and interrogated them. Later the same day, [...]
Crimes of the Civil Rights Era
Today’s the day of the conference. Margaret Burnham, who is one of the conveners, has a great op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. A quiet campaign against the old shibboleth that justice delayed is justice denied is being waged in communities across the country, particularly in the South. An arrest in January of a 71-year-old man [...]
Apology to David Ridgen
David Ridgen is a documentary film maker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve mentioned him before in passing because he has been making a documentary film about the Henry Dee and Charles Moore murders case, called Mississippi Cold Case. David Ridgen also sometimes contributes to written CBC news articles. David Ridgen wrote to me recently [...]
Boy Am I Behind
I always feel guilty when I don’t blog for more than a week or two, and now I’ve just learned that one of my favorite state legislators has put Hungry Blues on a list of blogs that her staffers are supposed to follow. What an honor, but now I feel even a little more guilty… [...]
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