Ben Chaney, younger brother of slain civil rights worker James Chaney, was one of my interview subjects for my recent article in The American Prospect, "Belated Justice for Civil Rights Era Crimes." I spoke with Ben over the phone on June 4, 2007, two days after his mother Fannie Lee Chaney was buried next to her eldest son in Meridian, MS. Fannie Lee Chaney passed away on May 22, 2007. Unfortunately the quotes from our conversation were cut as the editor at The American Prospect helped me narrow the focus of the article. I am therefore posting this podcast of the full ten minute interview. In the interview, Ben Chaney discusses the importance of belated prosecutions of suspects in Civil Rights era crimes, the limitations of such prosecutions, how to hold government accountable for its role in crimes against Blacks and their allies and his mother's disappointment over the incomplete justice for her murdered son.
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 the parade of witnesses take the stand -- his former daughter-in-law, his pastor, a fellow Klansman, FBI agents, a retired Navy diver, an elderly church deacon, a small town newspaper publisher -- to testify about his involvement in the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two 19-year-old black men from southwest Mississippi.
The horrific deaths of the two young men, and their families' years of suffering without remediation, illustrate why it is so important for perpetrators to be brought to justice, even decades after the crime was committed. "I've had nightmares every night for 43 years," Charles Moore's older brother Thomas told me in April. The Dee-Moore murders also raise questions about government complicity in Civil Rights era crimes -- and whether case-by-case prosecutions are an adequate response.
Read the rest at TAP.
In doing this article, I had the great honor of interviewing Diane Nash, Ben Chaney, John Steele, John Dorsey Due, Jr., Alvin Sykes, Kenneth O'Reilly and Congressman Kendrick Meek. Stay tuned for some of the outtakes, audio and text. There was some great stuff that was beyond the scope of the article or had to be cut because of space considerations.
UPDATE (via David Ridgen):
James Ford Seale was found GUILTY on all three counts of kidnapping at 6:30 pm (Central Time) this evening. The jury deliberated for under three hours. Sentencing in August. Each count carries a life sentence.
More in the news.
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 Commission was the spy agency established by the Mississippi State Legislature in 1956, to monitor and oppose civil rights activity. The Commission's files were declassified in 1998 and are available online. The report suggests that what happened to Henry Dee and Charles Moore was part of a pattern of systematic abductions and brutal interrogations to gain intelligence about Black people who were involved in organizations, such as the NAACP, supporting the right to register and vote and---as the Dee-Moore case has brought out---organizing armed self-defense against their white attackers.
From February 18-20, 1964, Sovereignty Commission Investigator A.L. Hopkins investigated three abductions and beatings of Black men, reported by the Natchez Sheriff's Department: Alfred Whitley on February 7, James C. Winston on February 15 and Archie Curtis and Willie Jackson together on February 16. Deputy Sheriff Mario Hernandez told Hopkins that while these men had come forward, they were just four of 16 Black men who had been similarly brutalized.
Mitchell uses Alfred Whitley's story to illustrate the nature of the abductions, "eerily similar ... to what happened three months later when Klansmen reportedly abducted two African-American teenagers, beat them, tied them up and drowned them." According to the original Sheriff's case file, Whitley was stopped by men wearing white masks while on his way home from work at Armstrong Tire & Rubber Co., at midnight.
He was taken from his car, put face down in [their] car on the floor. After about 30 minutes to 1 hour the cars stopped, about 10 men took him out of the car, cut his clothes off and beat him with 2 bull whips and cat tail, made him drink a bottle of Castor Oil and run shooting over his head.... All the time the whipping lasted, approximately 1 or 2 hours, they questioned him about the NAACP and Masonic organizations.
Whitley's back was a mass of marks and cuts.
According to Whitley's niece, Janie, whom Mitchell interviewed, her uncle "came out missing one eye, a lung ... His ribs were broken. He was never the same afterward." Whitley's niece emphasizes that her uncle Alfred was not a member of the NAACP. Nonetheless, he---and other victims---were targeted because they were suspected of being members or having knowledge of others who were members.
Whitley and other victims of these roving Klan torture and interrogation units may well have been targeted because of what Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner, has called "the dangerous attention of the Commission."
Speaking at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference held in Boston in April, Bender said:
The violence was not the isolated acts of a few crazed individuals acting as a mob. Rather these crimes are heavily tainted with governmental misconduct. The Sovereignty Commission funded the White Citizens Council, which used this money for a campaign which spread a virulent racist ideology which served intentionally to encourage violence.
Archie Curtis, one of the other victims, and George West, about whom Curtis was interrogated, were identified as possible members of the NAACP in a 1959 Sovereignty Commission investigation into the "racial situation in Natchez and Adams County." On June 24, 1960, Natchez Chief of Police S.C. Craft reported to Sovereignty Commission investigator Andy Hopkins that Archie Curtis and George West were two of four leaders in the Natchez Business and Service League, which law enforcement officials believed was a front for the NAACP.
After its initial findings, the Sovereignty Commission decided to investigate Curtis and West more fully---which also served to spread the word in the community that Curtis and West were suspected of being involved in the NAACP. On June 13 and 14, 1961, the Sovereignty Commission Director Albert Jones sent letters inquiring about Archie Curtis to five county officials: William T. Ferrell, Sheriff and Tax Collector; Robert E. Burns, Chancery Clerk; A.V. Davis, Jr., Circuit Clerk; Mrs. R. Brent Forman, Tax Assessor; and Claude Pintard, Jr., County Attorney. Each letter asked for general information about Curtis and sometimes requested information specific to the official's office, such as asking Sheriff Ferrell for Curtis' poll tax payment history and for his criminal record, if any. In addition, every letter but one asks the county official whether he or she has "information" regarding Curtis' "activity with the NAACP" or with "other subversive organizations." On June 30, 1964, Albert Jones sent five very similarly worded letters, requesting information about Geroge West, to the same five Adams County officials. All of the letters inquiring about West include requests for information about his involvement in the NAACP. (Letters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
It is also possible that the Sovereignty Commission inquiries concerning Curtis and West served as direct tip-offs to the Klan. When Paul Hendrickson, author of Sons of Mississippi, asked Ty Ferrell whether his grandfather, former Adams County Sheriff William T. Ferrell, was a Klansman, Ty Ferrell replied, "An elected official in a little Mississippi community? I can almost not imagine him being in the Klan." Hendrickson also found that many, researchers and local people alike, have thought that Ferrell was a member of the Klan or, at very least, closely associated with Klan members. While not at all conclusive, Sheriff Ferrell's likely ties to the Klan are suggestive of how the 1961 Sovereignty Commission investigation of Archie Curtis and George West may have been what led the Klan to target Curtis and other Black men for abduction and interrogation.
"The Sovereignty Commission hired staff investigators," Bender continued, in her talk in April.
It employed informants. The investigators spied on people. The reports were transmitted to the governor and disseminated with the deliberate intent to cause damage to persons who were perceived as enemies of the status quo ... resulting in beatings, fire bombings and murders.
Curtis, a funeral home director and ambulance driver, was indeed a member of the NAACP and was not afraid to speak about his experience. He reported what happened to him not only to the Sheriff's Department but also to civil rights workers in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and later to an investigator from the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council and in May 1964 hearings of the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR). COFO's initial March 18, 1964 report to the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the USCCR includes Curtis' story, as told to the COFO workers.
Archie Curtis of Natchez received a phone call at 12:45 A.M. He was told to go to Palestine Road and go "two miles past the black top" where "a man with a lantern will be waiting to show you the way to Henry Goodman's house." (He was told that Mrs. Goodman had had a heart attack and needed an ambulance.)
Curtis went out to Palestine Road as requested accompanied by Willie Jackson. After going two miles past the black top, they did not see anyone with a light. Curtis blew his horn. A car pulled up behind the ambulance. Two white men got out of the left side and two white men got out of the right side. All four had white hoods over their heads. One had a gun in his hand. Curtis and Jackson were told to get out of the ambulance. Curtis told them to go away because he had no time for foolishness. Curtis told them he was looking for a Mr. Goodman. One of the four white men said, "I'm Henry Goodman. I am the one who called you for an ambulance-and damn it, I want you to get out." Another of the four men walked over the driver's side of the vehicle and asked Curtis while pointing a gun at him. "Didn't you hear him say get out?" Curtis turned to get out-they caught his hand and hit his hand pit. Curtis got out of the ambulance, he was told to take off his glasses. Curtis was slow getting them off; one of the men grabbed them and threw them away. Next Curtis and Jackson were blindfolded and carried to the white men's car, pushed in the car. Both Curtis and Jackson were put in the front of the car and driven down to a field called Duck Pond. They were told to get out of the car in Duck Pond, which they did; they were told to remove their clothes. They refused. After being hit "two or three times," they dropped their pants. Curtis was told to hand over his NAACP card. Curtis replied saying he didn't have a NAACP card. He was told "yes, you have and that damn West has a NAACP card too." Curtis said "I don't think West has one." Curtis and Jackson were told to lie on their stomachs and then they were beaten. One of the four men suggested killing them-but another said no "lets [sic] just leave them out here." Curtis and Jackson went to a friends' house and got a ride into town.
In his February 20, 1964 Sovereignty Commission report concerning the "whippings and armed robberies of Negro men in Adams County by hooded or masked men," Hopkins named ten suspects in the beatings, including James Seale and his brother Jack Seale, who were both later implicated in the murders of Dee and Moore. Hopkins also named Tiny Lewis, "a Colonel on Governor Johnson's staff."
As far as anyone knows, Dee and Moore were of no interest to the Sovereignty Commission until after their dismembered bodies were found in a Mississippi River backwater on July 12 and 13, 1964. But the Mississippi state spy agency cultivated the climate of suspicion and intimidation which nurtured units of Klansmen who believed they could abduct, torture and murder with impunity any Blacks suspected of organizing for civil rights, self-determination or self-defense.
It is worth asking why Dee and Moore were murdered while other torture victims were left to nurse their wounds. It is also worth asking whether other unnamed victims were murdered by these Klan interrogation units. The courtroom will not tell, but history---and justice---demand an answer.
RELATED
Belated Justice for Civil Rights Era Crimes (The American Prospect)
The James Ford Seale trial has been underway since Monday. I've been following it closely but have not had the time to give it coverage on my blog. In any case my second hand coverage would not compare to what is available elsewhere. Matt Saldaña is doing great, detailed coverage at the Jackson Free Press, where he is blogging daily.
While I am mentioning the trial, I'd like to direct you to a couple of related items.
1.
Last week, during the jury selection process, John Flemming published an interesting piece about James Ford Seale, Jr., the son of the defendant. Most of the article is about how Seale Jr. tried to protect his father from prosecution by telling people that he was dead. But check this out:
After The Los Angeles Times and the Clarion-Ledger reported that James Ford Seale was dead, Canadian film maker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, the brother of Charles Moore, found him in July, 2005, near the little Mississippi town of Roxie. They had been alerted by Ronnie Harper, the local prosecutor in Natchez, that Seale was alive. They were skeptical until they actually saw him.
What's wrong with this picture?
The Dee-Moore case was re-opened in 2000 but closed in 2003 and then reopened again in 2005 when it was learned that Seale was not dead. But who informed Thomas Moore and David Ridgen that reports of Seale's death have been greatly exaggerated? Ronnie Harper, the local prosecutor in Natchez. Why didn't the local prosecutor inform the US Attorney that Seale is still alive? I might add that Natchez is in Adams County, the next county west of Franklin County, where Seale and his alleged victims are from. Seems like Seale's wellbeing and whereabouts were not such a big secret.
2.
One person attending the Seale trial is Alvin Sykes, President of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign. I heard Sykes speak at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, and he was very impressive. The Atlanta Journal Constitution caught up with Sykes while he was in Jackson, at the James O. Eastland Courthouse.
The FBI has uncovered 51 more killings, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has a list of 127 race-related killings between 1954 and 1968.
It's in this atmosphere that Sykes has brokered meetings with people as various as U.S. senators, district attorneys and victims' relatives to seek long-delayed justice.
His behind-the-scenes maneuvering was key to the FBI's reinvestigation of the infamous 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teen brutally killed after he allegedly whistled at a white woman in Money, Miss. (Earlier this year, a Mississippi grand jury did not return an indictment in the case.)
Sykes also generated the idea for legislation now before Congress that grew out of the reopening of that now-52-year-old slaying. Commonly known as the Till Bill, and sponsored in the House of Representatives by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), it would fund a separate unit in the Justice Department devoted to investigating civil rights-era crimes....
Sykes was born to a 14-year-old at a home for unwed mothers, then taken in by a single 48-year-old friend of the family in Kansas City, Mo. He was sickly, in and out of hospitals with epilepsy, and says around age 11 he was sexually abused by a couple that lived across the street.
His formal education was spotty -- he spent three years at Boys Town, the facility for at-risk kids in Omaha -- then left school for good at 16.
He lived briefly with his biological mother -- he thought for years she was a cousin -- but says she was an alcoholic and rarely employed. He ran into her years later when he was homeless. She lived at the same shelter.
But Sykes calls leaving school the start of his education. Working nights managing a band, he spent his days holed up in a library. "Education was important to me -- that's the reason I left school," he said. "The administration was more concerned with students getting a piece of paper than an education. So I started teaching myself."
He also sat in on trials, watching legal strategies, researching what he didn't understand. He became involved in a federal desegregation case with the Kansas City public schools and befriended a Justice Department official. "I learned about cases and the system and started applying it to real matters," he said.
Sykes' work as a victims' advocate became locally renowned after a string of Kansas City musicians were murdered in the late '70s and early '80s. When a white defendant was acquitted of beating a prominent black musician to death, Sykes went back to the library with the victim's wife. "It was like in the movies," he recalled. "We just kept opening books. Then 10 minutes before closing time, I found it."
Sykes unearthed an obscure federal statute that allowed the defendant to be prosecuted on a civil rights violation. He sent everything he found to Justice Department lawyer Richard Roberts, now a federal judge in Washington, who got an indictment. The defendant was convicted and received a life sentence.
"His seriousness of purpose was impressive," Roberts said. "It made answering his phone calls much more attractive."
(Read the rest.)
RELATED POSTS
John Flemming from the Anniston Star has discovered important documents from the FBI's 1965 investigation of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
An FBI file about a 1965 shooting that provided a catalyst for the Selma-to-Montgomery March contains eyewitness accounts as well as a statement from the victim, who later died.
The file, obtained by The Anniston Star from an archive at Washington University in St. Louis, contains some 160 pages, including interviews with local police and affidavits of people caught up in a riot and its aftermath in Marion that led to the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper.
The trooper, James Bonard Fowler, was indicted for murder by a Perry County grand jury on May 9. He has admitted shooting Jackson, but has maintained to this newspaper that it was done in self-defense. Fowler remains free on $250,000 bond. Circuit Judge Thomas Jones of Selma will set a tentative trial date and Fowler will be allowed to enter a plea on July 10.
Neither the prosecution nor the defense in the case had seen the file until they were provided a copy by The Star this week. Parts of the file could be important to both sides because some statements bolster one side while others seem to bolster the other side, say those familiar with the case....
The names of many witnesses, as well as the names of the FBI agents conducting the interviews, are redacted, along with other parts of the statements. One statement that is mostly intact, however, is Jackson's.
FBI agents interviewing him at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital on Feb. 23, 1965 - five days after the shooting and five days before he died - wrote that Jackson said he was in a Marion restaurant, Mack's Café, when troopers came inside and started beating him.
The statement says Jackson saw troopers beating his mother and recalls being shot by a state trooper in the stomach. The agents wrote that Jackson recalled then running from the café into the street, where the troopers continued to beat him. The agents added that Jackson could not offer a description of the trooper who shot him or of the ones who beat him or his mother.
Definitely read the rest.
John Flemming, who originally discovered that James Bonard Fowler is alive and could be prosecuted, has been doing excellent reporting on the Jimmie Lee Jackson Case. You can find the archive of all of his articles on the case, as well as related documents, in the sidebar to his original 2005 article on Fowler.
Recently Flemming reported on a surprising claim by one of the doctors who treated Jackson before he died at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. In a 1979 interview, Dr. William Dinkins claimed Jackson was actually killed by an anesthesia overdose and that the cause of death was covered up. The interview was conducted for the documentary, Eyes on the Prize, but was not used in the version that aired on TV.
Also in the Eyes on the Prize archive of interviews is an eyewitness account from civil rights leader Albert Turner, which corroborates Jackson's statement to the FBI.
[T]hey took Jimmy and pinned him against the walls of the building and uh, at close range they shot him in the side. Just took the pistol and put it in his side and shot him three times. . . . then they ran him out of the . . . front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers or some of the remaining troopers were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church . . . he had to run through a corridor of . . . policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell.
I originally blogged about Turner's statement in March 2005. I also wrote a letter to the editor about it, which the Anniston Star published that same month. This seems like a good time to get the Albert Turner interview back into the discussion of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
A recently declassified report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General confirms what many have long been deducing from the available evidence. Interrogation tactics seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere---such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions--- "were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists." Adam Zagorin reports today in Time Magazine:
Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.
This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse", which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere — techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings "deeply troubling," and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.
The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as "unlawful combatants" captured in the "war on terror." These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive "counter resistance" techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.
In response to fallout over the well-documented cases of prisoner abuse — which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation (visual and auditory), forced removal of clothing, exploiting prisoners phobias (notably fear of dogs), and threats against family members — the Pentagon began scaling back the use of SERE tactics in 2002 and eventually banned them altogether. The Army Field Manual, which serves as a primary guide for U.S. military interrogation, now specifically rules out the use of a variety of SERE-founded techniques including water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, as well as the use of dogs.
The Washington Post elaborates in a hard hitting editorial:
Techniques such as prolonged sleep deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes and death threats were taught to interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002 and to special Army teams in Iraq a year later by military trainers whose normal duty was to school U.S. soldiers on resisting torture in the event they were captured by a lawless regime. No studies were done to determine whether the methods were effective or whether other interrogation practices might get better results. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, according to the report, "replicate[s] harsh conditions that the [U.S.] Service member might encounter if they are held by forces that do not abide by the Geneva Conventions. . . . The SERE expertise lies in training personnel how to respond [to] and resist interrogations -- not in how to conduct interrogations." Yet many of the methods used on "high-value" detainees in both Guantanamo and Iraq came from SERE.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials argue that those methods got results from such al-Qaeda prisoners as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a claim that cannot be independently verified because the records of those interrogations have been kept secret. What administration officials don't mention is that at least two top prisoners, Mohamed Qatani and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, are now known to have provided false information to interrogators after being tortured -- in Mr. al-Libi's case, by Egyptian jailers. Moreover, an extensive report by the Intelligence Science Board, sponsored by the Pentagon, concluded that there is no scientific evidence to back up the administration's contention that the techniques it adopted are effective. In fact, the intelligence experts concluded that some painful and coercive treatment could prevent interrogators from getting good information.
Those Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, which Senator Carl Levin is promising, cannot come soon enough. US Torture was not the product of a few bad apples. It was planned. There was expert supervision. There was a chain of command.
You should also read Mark Benjamin's report on Salon.com.
Photo
Caption: A Guantanamo detainee peers out through the so-called "bean hole" which is used to allow food and other items into detainee cells.
Credit: Brennan Linsley / AP
Jared Story has left some wonderful recollections of Mrs. Chaney in the comments.
My condolences go out to Ben and his sisters, Barbara, Julia, and Janice. I met Ms. Chaney at the Killen trial in 2005. I was struck by both her quiet strength and her humor. She told Sheryl, Ash-Lee, and myself that she was supposed to accompany us on the 2004 Freedom Ride for Justice, but that her son Ben had left her sitting on her front porch with her bags packed. She suggested we should take him outside and give him a good whoopin’ for forgetting to pick her up.
What inspired me the most about Ms. Chaney was that, during her testimony, she was determined not only to tell the story of her son and his companions, but to let the world know that nine other bodies of black men had been found during the search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. When asked by the prosecution how she learned that her son’s body had been found, she made a point to detail each of the several phone calls she received describing the features or clothing of a body or bodies that had been found. I wish I could find the exact transcript. Ms. Chaney deserved a standing ovation–I know I was not the only person in the courtroom both saddened at the reality of what she was saying, but beaming at her boldness. May she rest in peace. I know she is rejoicing with James at her side now.
I also recommend Jared's account of some troubling events that took place during the 2004 Freedom Ride for Justice.
I'll note here, as well, that it was an honor to receive this comment from Freedom Rider Edward Kale.
My apologies to the several of you who posted comments this afternoon. Gmail's spam filter does not seem to like the automated email notifications my blogging software sends me when I have new comments. Your comments are now all live on this site.
If you have never commented on Hungry Blues before, your comments are held in moderation for me to approve them. Once I approve your first comment, any new comments you post will publish to the blog immediately, without my intervention. This helps ward off comment spam.
(To the technically inclined WordPress users out there: have you been having similar problems with gmail and comments? The announcement for the new version of WordPress (2.2) note that the internal mail functions have been switched to phpMailer. Anyone have any ideas about whether phpMailer could be causing the problem and, if so, is there a suggested hack to make it play nice with gSpam?)
"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 mother of slain civil rights worker James Earl Chaney.
Today (5/24) the soul of Henry Dee drew a little more near. The one known image of him came to light, after having been lost for 43 years.
In life Henry Dee and Charles Moore from southwest Mississippi had nothing to do with James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Circumstances following their violent deaths at the hands of Klansmen brought them close together.
On July 12, 1964, at 8:00 PM, phone calls started coming across the Council of Federated Organizations' (COFO) WATS line. A body had been found in the Mississippi River earlier that day, mid-state on the Mississippi-Louisiana state line. It was only the lower half of a body. It had a belt with a "buckle and letter M . . . like one Mickey [Schwerner] is supposed to have had, also [a] gold watch." By about 8:55 PM they heard back from Mickey's widow, Rita. The information did not check. By 6:45 PM the next day, the word was out that there were two bodies and their names were Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were found almost a month later, on August 4, buried in an earthen dam, in Neshoba County, on the property of Olen Burrage. They had been missing since June 21.
In 2005, Mrs. Chaney saw a small measure of justice in her son's case, when Edgar Ray Killen was indicted on state murder charges and convicted for manslaughter.
[T]he 82-year-old mother of five returned [to Mississippi] from New Jersey to testify in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, sharing her last encounters with her son, whom she called J.E., at her Meridian home on the morning of June 21, 1964.
She fixed breakfast for J.E. and his friends, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, "but J.E. never come back," she said....
Before another year passed, Fannie Lee Chaney left Mississippi after a series of threats, including one to dynamite her house and another to put her "in a hole like James was."
In 1967, a U.S. District Court jury in Meridian convicted Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price and five others on federal conspiracy charges, but the other suspects walked free.
No one was ever charged for murder in the case until 2005 when Killen was charged. (Clarion Ledger)
Schwerner's widow, Rita Schwerner Bender of Seattle, said Wednesday that she and her late husband visited the Chaney home for meals and fellowship in the months before the killings. She said the 2005 trial was the last time she saw Fannie Lee Chaney.
"It sounds trite when you say it; she loved her children dearly. She was devastated by J.E.'s death." (AP)
A full measure of justice has yet to be rendered. There was sufficient evidence to arrest and/or indict on federal charges related to the murders eight men in the 1960s, who are still alive today, in addition to Edgar Ray Killen. The Neshoba County Grand Jury has met at least four times since the Killen trial, most recently on April 30, but has indicted no one else for the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
The trial of James Ford Seale begins next week. He has been charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy leading to the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.
~
Photo: Fannie L. Chaney testifying at the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, June 18, 2005. (AP)
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 the face of Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion Ledger reports:
Until recently, the only photograph of Henry Hezekiah Dee that family members knew of was in his wallet when he was killed in 1964 with Charles Eddie Moore after reportedly being abducted by Klansmen in Meadville. Authorities never gave the family the picture back.
The only images family and friends had of Dee were the ones they carried in their minds."There had always been a picture of Charles Moore, but it felt like Henry Dee, once he had been murdered, had simply vanished off the planet," said Canadian Broadcasting Co. documentary filmmaker David Ridgen....
Recently, someone they interviewed in 2005 discovered photographs in their home.
"Flipping through their collection, they saw one picture that reminded them of our questions and our quest," Ridgen said. "We got back in touch with this person, were given the photograph by them and then checked the photo with several people who knew Henry."All confirmed it was Dee.
The picture is now in the hands of federal prosecutors for next week's federal trial of Seale.
Sharing this photo means jurors will get a chance to glimpse pictures of both victims, as will Seale.
Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, said when she found out there was a photograph of her brother, "I was so happy till I cried because we've been looking for it for a long time."
The family had found no solace in visits to Dee's grave because no marker was there, nothing to indicate this 19-year-old had ever lived and breathed the air in Franklin County, nothing to show what his life might have been.
Dee's other sister, Mary Byrd, still feels the hurt - a hurt not only from losing a loved one, she said, but also from having nothing to remember him by.
When she learned Tuesday that a photograph had been found of her late brother, she exhaled and said, "It feels good. I'm so glad for that."
Upon seeing the picture of his old friend for the first time, Thomas Moore said, "I almost felt the earth move beneath me. It was overwhelming."
He saw in the photograph the Dee he remembered from his class in high school - tall, slim, white teeth, with a laid-back personality and the memorable hair he later treated to look like singer James Brown.
Thomas Moore is planning a service soon in Franklin County to remember the slain teenagers and to build a permanent memorial to honor them.
That memorial will now contain the photographs of Dee and Charles Eddie Moore together.
"They lived together, and they died together," Moore said. "Now they'll be together."
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The Beatles were my first musical obsession. When I became a fan of the Beatles in middle school, I collected every recording, poured over every liner note, read biographies, studied the lyrics, listened to the solo projects . . .
It was the first time I'd gotten into music like this. I think it was around my sophomore year in high school that I hit my saturation point with the Beatles. I never stopped liking them, but I moved on. In high school and college, I found Neil Young, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Greatful Dead, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Parliament/Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus---to name just some, at random . . .
After my dad passed away in 1997, I took it to a new level with Frankie Newton. I compensated for the fact that he only has about 50 recorded songs by collecting recordings by everyone he associated with. For several years, I immersed myself in Newton's musical milieu, high art, pre-Bop Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the earlier stuff from the 1920s, the foundations.
After a while, the Jazz obsession mellowed. Maybe around 2000, I started actively listening again to music from the second half of the 20th century and to current 21st century stuff.
But, as I've mentioned before, it's all come back around to the Beatles. With the help of YouTube, my 4-year-old has been doing with the Beatels what I did starting in around 5th grade. The favorite record for some time has been Let It Be. I am sure we have watched each song played on the rooftop of Apple Records at least 100 times. It's a good thing the Beatles are so damn good, cause otherwise I'd be going out of mind.
Anyway, I'm telling you all of this to try to explain what it was like to hear this John Lennon outtake from 1968. I love the rooftop performance of "I've Got a Feeling." And I've always thought that John makes the song with the song fragment he weaves into Paul's bluesy love song. What I didn't know until earlier tonight was that John had recorded "Everyone" separately. From what I could read online, there are a couple of versions out there. So far, I've just found this one. It's rough around the edges, the Julia-like guitar part doesn't seem totally worked out---and it is beautiful. John really gets me at the end. After the circular lyrics, delivered over repetitive guitar picking, he trails off with that "everybody got the wrong time, everybody got the wrong time . . ."
"They quickly fast-tracked legislation to allow the casinos to be rebuilt on land so that the casino companies and operators wouldn't abandon the Gulf Coast. An opportunity was missed to also require those folks, when they rebuild, to pay into an affordable housing trust fund, like the hotels do in Boston."
---Derek Evans, Executive Director, Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, January 2006
"The big push is to get over 3 billion (in 2007)," said Larry Gregory, executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission.
In 2004, gaming revenue peaked at $2.8 billion. Gregory said he expects Mississippi gaming revenue to hit $3.2 billion by the end of the year, which has eight months left and additional casinos scheduled to open in the coming months.
---"Casinos head for record year," Clarion Ledger, May 2007
"We now have 80 contiguous acres on the water . . . You look out over the beach and there's a tremendous footprint that's completely clear that you can put stuff on. That could include more hotels, a condo development, further retail or a theater."
---Gary Loveman, Chairman, President & CEO, Harrah's Entertainment Inc., May 2007
But what about other development?
Local governments say they are struggling to support infrastructure without more help.
The issue holding the Coast back is housing. Mississippi had 220,384 houses damaged by Katrina, 65,000 of them flattened.
Here, after nearly two years, some 80,000 people are still living in about 23,000 FEMA trailers.
---"Coast: Casinos OK, but what else?" Clarion Ledger, May 2007
I said a couple of things in my post about the James Bonard Fowler indictment that really deserve more nuance. Fortunately Kenneth Mullinax wrote an article last week that hits some of the notes that I missed.
I emphasized the importance of prosecution of the Fowler indictment for Jimmie Lee Jackson's family, but I overstated the case, to the exclusion of others. Quoting Margaret Burnham from my neck of the woods, in Boston, Mullinax reminds us that
the Fowler case has important implications for the nation.
"The Fowler case has much more significance than merely to the family of the victim," Burnham said from her Boston office.
She said the Perry County case represents a shared history from the days of legal segregation and repression of the constitutional rights of black Americans.
It represents our common burden as a nation, Burnham said.
She insists that the Jackson case isn't an Alabama or a regional story, but a major national story.
"These miscarriages of justice must be revisited. These are not efforts to bring pain to an old man, but an important effort to get history right," Burnham said.
In my earlier post, I let Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of another civil rights era murder victim, make the point about the need "to get history right," but there are also people in Jimmie Lee Jackson's own family making this point.
Jimmie Lee Jackson's cousin, Carlton Hogue, said many members of his family feel that Wallace and the state are as culpable as Fowler in Jackson's death.
"We are really angry more at the state of Alabama than the trooper," Hogue said.
He said that it was Wallace's troopers who drove from Montgomery at night to stop a riot in Marion that wasn't even happening.
"When you boil it down, Fowler was the vehicle for George Wallace's rage against black people," Hogue said.
Jones said he believes Wallace fostered a climate of hate that empowered whites with a sense that they could lash out at blacks and get away with murder.
"George Corley Wallace contributed to the climate of lawlessness in Alabama," Jones said.
"His words and his lack of action in not following through with Jackson's death showed the Ku Klux Klan and the killers there were no consequences to their actions," he said.
What I still don't hear in the reporting on the Jimmie Lee Jackson case are considerations of who else---in addition to James Bonard Fowler---may be directly responsible for Jackson's death. There may not be more people to prosecute, but this case is probably one of the best opportunities we'll have to "get history right."
Things may look funky for a bit, but we'll be back to normal soon.
UPDATE: Upgrade to WordPress 2.2 is now complete. Everything seems to have gone okay. If blog functions seem broken or things seem to be working strangely, please let me know.
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