Hungry Blues

Over at Cure This my Twitter friend los anjalis blogged this video of Phoenix, Arizona police officer Paul Dobson talking about his opposition to SB 1070. "This law is - pure and simple - a racist law," Dobson says.

Thanks to los anjalis for also transcribing important portions of Officer Dobson's statement:

So under SB1070 I know that people will not call officers in the case of a real emergency. I could see this type of scenario: a woman is being beaten by her husband or her significant other. And, if I show up, and I develop reasonable suspicion, or LESS, even, that the person that is a perpetrator in this case, is in this country extralegally, i'm going to start heading in the direction of asking the victim of the case, are you here illegally? I will have to arrest both of them---I'll be required to---and both will be deported. It violates our calling to serve and protect. It violates, under our Constitution, the requirement to serve and protect.

That the racist law will deter women from seeking needed protections against domestic violence and could result in victims of abuse being deported with their abuser is an important point. My Physicians for Human Rights colleagues Kathleen Sullivan and Erin Hustings have made a similar point about how the law will affect asylum seekers who have fled abuse and torture in their home countries.

In 2009, J-H- was an asylum seeker living in Phoenix, Arizona. J-H- is a survivor of female genital cutting (FGC) in her African homeland. As a victim of and activist against FGC, J-H- was targeted and violently attacked in her country, and her home was burned to the ground. Fearing for her life and safety, J-H- fled to the US without good immigration documents, and with almost no material possessions.

In Arizona, J-H- was fortunate to find a volunteer lawyer who helped her apply to the federal government for asylum. Physicians for Human Rights was able to find a physician from our Asylum Network who was willing to evaluate J-H- in support of her claim to legal protection in the US.

Based on their experiences as advocates for immigrants, Kathleen and Erin elaborate on the type of concern expressed by Officer Dobson:

Past experience with campaigns of immigration raids has shown that legally present immigrants and US family members are more reluctant to take part in civic activities, visit family members, or seek medical help for which they are legally entitled if doing so exposes them to potential questioning and arrest. If SB 1070 had been in force last year, fear of accessing community services may have prevented J-H- from seeking the legal help she needed to obtain asylum in the US. A life of fear and insecurity could have added to the physical and mental suffering she endured due to FGM.

SB 1070 is scheduled to be enacted on July 29. Earlier in July, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona to invalidate SB 1070. This past week, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a separate lawsuit to block enforcement of SB 1070 while its constitutionality is assessed in the DOJ lawsuit.

Further Reading

• DETENTION AND DEPORTATION CONSEQUENCES OF ARIZONA IMMIGRATION LAW (SB 1070) (Detention Watch).

Picked up the new Laurie Anderson record yesterday. Most of the record is too beautiful for me to talk about in any way that would be interesting. This is work at a level where moods, emotions, ideas are conveyed with individual word choices and the sounds around them. So to share my enthusiasm a little more directly, I offer this Laurie Anderson performance at Lincoln Center of the song "Only an Expert," which appears on the record. It is searingly funny and quite direct in what it talks about. Enjoy.

Hot new video from Francis and the Lights. It's best if you watch it full screen.

(Photo: Thomas Hawk)

I have been trying to wrap my mind around BART police officer Johannes Mehserle's defense in the shooting death of 22-year-old black man Oscar Grant.

Mehserle's supposed weapon confusion is at the heart of why he was not convicted of voluntary manslaughter, let alone of second degree murder. The underlying logic of the defense seems to be that drawing the gun was an illegitimate, death dealing mistake but tasing Oscar Grant would have been a legitimate course of action.

A photo of Mehserle and surveillance video of his fellow officer Tony Pirone show each of them brandishing their tasers during the events prior to the shooting on the BART platform.

We are to suppose, then, that when police arrive on a scene where fighting that they have not observed has reportedly occurred it is acceptable to brandish weapons to gain compliance from black men. We are to suppose it is proper procedure to threaten any young black man with weapons if he is suspected of having been fighting prior to the arrival of the police.

We are also to suppose that tasers are not themselves lethal weapons. Electronic Village has compiled a list 84 documented taser death incidents since the beginning of 2009. In addition to a growing body of evidence that tasers are unpredictably lethal, there is evidence that they are over-used by law enforcement and that law enforcement officers tase blacks disproportionately.

A 2008 Amnesty International study found that 90% of those struck by tasers since 2001 were unarmed. Overall, among the 2009-2010 victims on the Electronic Village list, 38% were black, though blacks are only 13% of the total US population. Furthermore, tasers seem to be especially problematic in California. According to the Amnesty study, California and Florida have the highest taser death rates in the country. Among the taser deaths recorded by Electronic Village, twenty-one—or 25%—occurred in California.

The logic that legitimates using tasers, despite data such as above, is the logic of fear. Adam Serwer recently put it this way:

To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle's fear of Grant and his friends was 'unreasonable.' It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle's fear? That was reasonable.

Serwer provides broad historical context for America's fear of black men, from Toussaint L'Overture to Oscar Grant. In the spirit of collaboration, I'd like to add some information to Adam's history.

In Franklin County, Mississippi, May 1964, two black 19-year-old men, named Henry Dee and Charles Moore, were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a band of Klansmen. The abductions and torture of Dee and Moore were preceded by a spate of similar kidnappings and beatings, at least 16 according to one set of government documents, all in the same small, southwest corner of Mississippi.

During that four month period, bands of Klansmen ambushed black men coming home from work at night or lured them out to deserted roads on false pretenses, brought them out into the woods or oil fields and whipped them and interrogated them. Were their victims—or other blacks the victims knew—members of the NAACP, the Klan wanted to know?

It appears that until May 2, 1964, all of the victims of these abductions got away alive; some have lived with effects of severe injuries the rest of their lives. What brought the Dee-Moore abductions to a deathly end?

There is no evidence that the instigator of the Dee-Moore kidnapping and beatings was involved in the other incidents from early 1964. But when he targeted Henry Dee, he was not worrying about the the NAACP. When Klansmen threw Henry Dee and Charles Moore on the ground, tied them up and beat them with bean poles, the torturers asked the 19-year-olds about a black insurrection instead of about the NAACP.

Henry Dee had recently been to Chicago to visit relatives there. He came back to Mississippi wearing a do-rag and exhibiting other trappings of northern city life. This, with rumors that had started circulating that black Muslims from Chicago were bringing guns into Mississippi to arm local blacks, made Dee an embodiment of much that the Klan feared and had mobilized to suppress. The Klansmen were so intent on getting Dee that when his friend Moore joined him on the street and the two started hitchhiking together from Meadeville to Natchez, the Klansmen took Moore along for the ride and killed them both.

The Dee-Moore case is rare. Unlike scores of other cold cases from the Civil Rights Era, after 43 years, it was finally brought to court. One of the Klansmen involved went to prison in 2007 on federal kidnapping charges for his role in the murders, and, more recently, Franklin County settled a landmark civil suit with the families. Yet, even here, with significant closure for the victims' families and government being held to account for collusion with the Klan, no perpetrator has been charged with murder and no government official has admitted to any wrongdoing.

In this history of fear, self-possessed black men, who advocate for their rights and are willing to defend themselves when attacked (or are suspected of these things), are met with pathological, frenzied violence. We have not faced this history or held past perpetrators accountable. Until we do, we will continue to have Oscar Grants and we will continue to lack the will for adequate justice.

(A note of thanks to David Ridgen, who made factual corrections and shared his original research for the passages on Henry Dee and Charles Moore.)

Kimya Dawson's song about the BP oil spill.

Got this happy news in my inbox today, from the Prison Policy Initiative, about an important victory in the movement to end prison-based gerry mandering:

On June 30, the Delaware Senate passed a bill ensuring that incarcerated persons will be counted as residents of their home addresses when new state and local legislative districts are drawn in Delaware. The bill previously passed in the House, and is now awaiting Governor Jack Markell’s signature.

The U.S. Census currently counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison location. When states use Census counts to draw legislative districts, they unintentionally enhance the weight of a vote cast in districts that contain prisons at the expense of all other districts in the state. Delaware is the second state to correct this problem and adjust Census data to count incarcerated persons at their home address, joining Maryland which enacted a bill in April. Similar legislation is pending in New York.

“Delaware’s legislation recognizes that prison-based gerrymandering is a problem of fairness in redistricting. All districts — some far more than others — send people to prison, but only some districts have large prisons. Counting incarcerated people as residents of the prison distorts the principle of one person, one vote, and we applaud the Delaware General Assembly for enacting this common-sense solution,” said Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative.

The problem is national as well. One state assembly district in New York includes 7% prisoners; a state house district in Texas includes 12% prisoners; and 15% of one Montana state house district consists of prisoners imported from other parts of the state. Prison-based gerrymandering was not a serious problem when the prison population was tiny, but the 2010 Census will find five times as many people in prison as it did just three decades ago.

“The Delaware legislature has taken a much-needed step to reflect incarcerated populations in a more accurate way. Delaware’s action should help pave the way for other states to end the distortions caused by counting incarcerated persons in the wrong place,” said Brenda Wright, Director of the Democracy Program at Demos.

The legislation, passed as HB384, applies only to redistricting and would not affect federal or state funding distributions.

What is prison-based gerrymandering, you ask? Here's a little video to help elucidate the subject. That's Prison Policy Initiative's executive director, Peter Wagner, doing the Bob Dylan thing with the cue cards.

Henry Dee

Settlement Reached in Civil Suit Charging Franklin County, MS Role in 1964 KKK Murders

On Monday, June 21, Franklin County, Mississippi agreed to a settlement in an historic civil suit with the families of Charles Moore and  Henry Dee, two 19-year-old Black men who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan on May 2, 1964.

"This is the first time, to my knowledge, that any civil lawsuit against public officials for collaborating with the KKK has reached the point of settlement," said Margaret Burnham, lead attorney for the family members who brought the suit against Franklin County. Klansman James Ford Seale went to prison in 2007 for his role in the murders; this landmark civil suit addressed the roles of Mississippi government officials in the double murder and subsequent cover-up of what had occurred.

"It's a bit of a stretch to say they were 'held accountable,'" Burnham added, "because they did not admit to the facts we presented."

"I'm convinced there's nothing else that I can do to get any more truth," said Thomas Moore, brother of victim Charles. Moore said further that African Americans in his home county "are joyful that somebody brought Franklin County officials to reality and to the way they treated other people."

Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, sister of victim Henry Dee, filed the civil suit against Franklin County, MS in August, 2008. The suit focused on the respective roles and actions from 1964 to 1967 of Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto and Franklin County Deputy Sheriff Kirby Shell, both now deceased. "In the aftermath of the killings," according to the complaint by Moore and Collins,

Sheriff Hutto misled the Plaintiffs when they inquired of the Sheriff about their loved ones. Further, Sheriff Hutto deceived the Plaintiffs into thinking he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Moore and Dee when in fact he did.

Throughout 1964, Hutto and Shell misled investigative agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the murders, concealing their participation in the events of May 2, 1964, the day the two young men were killed.

Hutto and Shell covered up their role in these crimes, deceiving law enforcement officials as well as the Plaintiffs.  Plaintiffs did not become aware of the participation of Hutto and Shell as co-conspirators until the federal indictment was returned on January 24, 2007. Nor could Plaintiffs have discovered Hutto and Shell’s culpability before the indictment. The U.S. Justice Department immunized Charles Edwards, one of the coconspirators and, on November 3, 2006, obtained from Edwards a full statement of the crimes revealing for the first time ever the involvement of Franklin County on the day the men were slain.

Thomas Moore holds photo of his brother, Charles. (Postcard for Mississippi Cold Case, created by David Ridgen.)

"The settlement didn't need to happen," noted documentary filmmaker David Ridgen, "if Franklin County officials would have simply apologized to the Moore and Dee families for the actions and inactions of their officials in colluding with and in some cases participating in the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror during the civil rights era."

Ridgen's film Mississippi Cold Case documented Thomas Moore's quest to learn the truth about what happened to his brother Charles and to Henry Dee. In their work together on the film Ridgen and Moore uncovered evidence that led to the indictment, trial and conviction of Klansman James Ford Seale.

"I am proud of Thomas Moore for being the juggernaut that pushed this civil suit forward with his lawyers," Ridgen said, "and I am hopeful that it will lead to civil trials in the near future that will hold Mississippi and elsewhere, state and county, accountable."

"This is a case about unconscionable crimes and unconscionable deception," Moore and Collins charged in their complaint.

It is also a case about the systematic denial by Franklin County of law enforcement protection to African-Americans and to whites suspected of opposing the Klan’s campaign of racist terror.

It is a case about the collusive and unlawful relationship between the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Franklin County.

Franklin County officials stated in their resolution that they do not condone "the horrific deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Dee. "The county desires not to imply the deaths were anything but abhorrent."

But the county denied any responsibility for the deaths of the two 19-year-old Black men. The officials resolved that the county had not "caused or contributed to the deaths of these two young men. These deaths are believed to have resulted solely from the criminal actions of the Ku Klux Klan."

In their resolution, the Franklin County officials questioned the evidence in the civil complaint, drawn substantially from the evidence presented in the criminal trial of James Ford Seale that led to his conviction.

George Colllins, President of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors, who signed the resolution accepting the terms of settlement with Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, had no comment when he was reached on the phone on Tuesday night.

"What we sought to prove was common knowledge at the time," Margaret Burnham said, "that these crimes could not have persisted without the support of local officials....There is no statute of limitations on murder, no expiration date on moral obligation, and there should be no impunity for human rights violators.”

"I am satisfied with the verdict of the criminal trial, and I'm satisfied with the settlement," concluded Thomas Moore. "I ran the race and I fought a good fight. I am finished with this case."

"I am at peace for the first time in 46 years," Moore said.

(Cross-posted at Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

Podcast

Thomas Moore, phone interview by Ben Greenberg, June 22, 2010 [ 7:11 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Documents

• Franklin County Board of Supervisors Resolution (PDF)
• Statement, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice, Northeastern University School of Law (PDF)
• Moore v. Franklin County Complaint (PDF)

Additional Coverage

• Michele Norris, "Miss. Officials Agree To Settlement In '64 Slayings" (NPR)
• Jerry Mitchell, "Lawsuit over '64 deaths settled" (Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
• Jonathan Saltzman, "Justice follows decades of silence" (Boston Globe)

[I'm honored to have collaborated with Jerry Mitchell on this article appearing on page 1 of today's Jackson Clarion-Ledger. —BG]

Killen claims God is on his side

Lawsuit filed last week alleges civil rights violations

Jerry Mitchell and Ben Greenberg
The Clarion-Ledger
March 1, 2010

Convicted Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen says there wasn’t enough legal evidence to imprison him for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers and that God is going to get whoever helped put him away.

Those written remarks are among the most recent public stirrings from Killen, who also filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI, alleging his civil rights were violated.

“Almighty God … is listening and is recording your acts, thoughts and deeds. One by one you will give account to him,” Killen wrote in a six-page letter obtained by The Clarion-Ledger from a Klansman. His lawyer confirmed the letter is indeed Killen’s.

District Attorney Mark Duncan, who along with Attorney General Jim Hood prosecuted Killen, responded, “I don’t have any trouble standing before God with my role in it.”

In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen, now 85, on three counts of manslaughter for his role in the Klan’s June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, commonly known as the Mississippi Burning case.

The FBI is now reexamining the killings. Four suspects are still alive in the case.

In his letter, Killen lambasted prosecutors and Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, who sentenced Killen to the maximum 60 years in prison. Killen, a former Union sawmill operator and part-time preacher, is serving his time in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County.

Killen blamed the press and the people of Neshoba County. “You had all the news media that helped indict me for murder on three counts, which you had no legal evidence,” he wrote. “All your grand jury heard was slick tongue talk from a couple of politicians.”

Sally Beam, one of those grand jurors, said that’s not correct.

All the evidence led back to Killen, she said. “We were not out to get him, but he was the one every order went out from. The fact he’s still trying to blame somebody else just tells me his heart is still not in the right place.

“He’s still trying to cover up what needs to be exposed. If I were Edgar Ray Killen, I’d be thinking about my maker and where I’m going to be when I die. He’s a preacher. He knows about heaven and hell.”

Killen says mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr., pistol whipped “testimony” from from Clayton Lewis, a defense attorney in the 1967 federal conspiracy trial of suspects in the civil rights workers’ slayings..

The nearly 40,000 pages of FBI files in the Mississippi Burning case obtained by The Clarion-Ledger do not appear to mention Scarpa or list his informant number. Some other FBI records refer to Scarpa being brought in to help crack the Klan’s 1966 killing of Vernon Dahmer.

Killen said the FBI paid Scarpa $30,000 in reward money — an allegation FBI agents have disputed.

Retired FBI agent Jay Cochran said the reward money was delivered to Mississippi Highway Patrolman Maynard King, who told the FBI where the bodies were buried. Cochran said King was passing the $30,000 on to the person who informed King.

Philip Dray, co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, said he’s not surprised Killen invoked God’s name since the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi often did that.

Killen said God knows what he did and that he is at peace with God, but Dray noted Killen never actually said he was innocent. “Convicted Klansmen have a special problem with justice,” he said. “Their ‘crimes’ were, in their minds, righteous. They were aimed at specific targets — meddlesome Yankees.”

In Killen’s mind, he said, “It will always be 1865.”

In the letter, Killen says he read many hidden Justice Department files. “I only read those of interest, as I was not hired and I was not a pimp, but I had security clearance, so I read and obtained straight evidence,” he says. “I am not putting some names in this letter as some are still living and believe it or not I am not a betrayer of anyone, especially my friends.”

Exactly who he refuses to betray he didn’t say.

Larry Ellis, a former inmate who has been interviewed by the FBI, said some of what the letter says mirrors much of what Killen told him behind bars.

Ellis told the FBI that Killen said he had access to these files because of his relationship with then-U.S. Sen. Jim Eastland and “did jobs” for Eastland around the country.

Killen said in his letter he had traveled to “most major cities in America.”

On those trips, he said he bragged about his hometown, his home county and his home state. Now, he said, he wants to retrace those steps and apologize.

The Clarion-Ledger obtained the letter from Cole Thornton, Imperial Wizard of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who attended Killen’s 2005 trial. Thornton said Killen authorized him to release the letter and shared a note that expert Thomas Vastrick of Memphis identified as Killen’s handwriting.

Thornton, whose real name is Charles Denton, said he wants to see “the scoundrels who railroaded this fine man pay up for their deceit.”

In his lawsuit in which he seeks millions of dollars, Killen is demanding all of the federal files in the case.

Hood responded that his office has given Killen’s lawyer “every document we have in our files. The federal prosecutors assured me that they gave us all of the documents in the possession of the federal government.”

Killen remains filled with venom, Hood said. “Hate will eat up a person’s soul. As with all criminals I have had to prosecute, I still hold out hope that their souls will be redeemed.”

Killen has repeatedly referred to the three victims as communists — something the victims’ families say isn’t true.

Ben Chaney, whose brother James was among the victims, said after reading Killen’s letter, “I sort of feel bad for Mr. Killen because he’s losing. The fact is he refuses to look at reality.”

Killen needs to come clean, he said. “God knows what he did, and he knows he did something contrary to what God wants. The truth will set him free.”

Documents

Download the letter we obtained from Edgar Ray Killen (PDF)

By Marsha Joyner

Isn’t technology wonderful! You can see our TV 6,000 miles away.  And Facebook brings everyone within a keystroke.

Just before the late evening news in Hawaii, my husband Kenneth said, “a tremendous 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile.”

“That’s awful,” I responded and went to bed thinking no more of it.

Until 5:20am my cell phone rang and rang and rang---“Oh damn, nobody calls this time of morning unless it is bad news.” By the time I was fully aware the landline rang. “Yes Scott, no Scott---thank you Scott” Kenneth said and promptly turned on the TV. We have a Tsunami warning because of the earthquake in Chile.”

“Oh dear, I must get Kaspar’s (the cat) carrying case . . . do we have enough fresh water. . .I hate canned foods. . . etc,” I began the emergency check list in my head. Knowing full well that we have everything. Living next to the water demands a level of preparedness that most people do not have to deal with.

HoneyGirl (the dog) was breathing heavy next to the bed and Kaspar (the cat) was standing on my chest daring me to open my eyes. What a way to awake from a dream. Or am I still dreaming? No, this is real!

The TV news was showing lines at the gas stations and it was still dark. Local residents were scrambling to stock up on water, gas and food as sirens pierced the early morning quiet across the islands ahead of the tsunami. Some stations had enough gas, but other stations reportedly ran out. At supermarkets, residents stocked up on essentials like rice, water and toilet paper in anticipation of the high waters. The TV repeatedly ran the picture of a sign at a store limiting families to two cases of Spam. A must in every local menu.

My first of many calls was to Marilyn, my daughter, to warn her... “Damn!” The sleepy voice on the other end of the phone said. “Mom what a wake up call. Thanks Mom, I’ll get my young’ens together. Aaron is at the airport leaving for a class trip to America and Ashley has to go to class today.” They live at the top of a step hill in Maile, a very safe place to ride out a Tsunami. The home has an unobstructed view of the ocean. It’s about 50 miles from me as the crow flies. But then we have no crows. And I really don’t know how crows fly.

[click to continue…]

Last weekend, on February 6, Catherine Walker and I were emailing back and forth about our plans to interview people familiar with the unsolved civil rights murder of her father Clifton Walker 46 years ago. Around mid-afternoon we had a breakthrough; Catherine wrote to tell me about her conversation with the son of a possible eyewitness to the planning of the murder:

I explained to him how important today is: “DADDY’S birthday” How I need his Dad’s # to speak with him to move forward with the Justice quest. He understood.

For months, Catherine Walker and I have wanted to speak with a black man who reportedly witnessed the planning of the murder at Nettles Truck Stop, about 6 miles north of Woodville, MS. The FBI documents say the man

left the vicinity of Woodville, Mississippi, immediately after the murder of Walker ... he [said he] knew what would happen if he continued to hang around.

Some Woodville residents who know the possible eyewitness have told me they saw him about four years ago and that he told them he was at the truck stop on the night of the murder, February 28, 1964, and the planning of the murder was what he saw there.

I was pretty sure I’d located the possible eyewitness, and I was in Louisiana, so Catherine and I were making plans to go see him ourselves. Over the last year, both Catherine and I have been in touch with our subject's son, who lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The son told us that his family is actually kin to the Walkers and that he knows some of Catherine’s cousins well. He has information about the murder that he's heard from extended family currently living in Louisiana who were in Woodville in 1964. The son has been eager to help. He’s shared the information with us, but he hasn't felt comfortable arranging a meeting with his father. We originally thought he was trying to protect his father, but he eventually revealed to Catherine that he and his father do not get along.

We wanted the son to tell us his father’s general location or phone number so I could verify that my information was correct. Finally, on Clifton Walker’s 83rd birthday, the son came through, and his information matched mine.

The man we were looking for was at church when we got to his place. His wife and a slew of grandkids were all hanging out in a shotgun shack in a working class black neighborhood outside of New Orleans.

We sat in Catherine’s car outside the house and waited.

A few weeks after his 37th birthday, on February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed on the deserted, unpaved Poor House Road, outside Woodville, MS. He was on his way home from the 3-11 pm shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS. Gunmen shot up his car, blew out all the windows, and shot Clifton Walker at close range, multiple times in the head. No arrests were ever made. Walker’s wife Ruby died in 1992 not knowing what really happened. Clifton and Ruby’s five children are still in the dark about the murder.

For the two years I’ve known Catherine, we’ve been gaining on the case, but the progress is slow. We have a collection of federal and state documents, but we haven’t obtained any new documents for over a year. Many of the people mentioned in the documents are dead. Few of them who are still living have been willing to talk. People with knowledge of the case are dying off.

But on Sunday we were feeling hopeful. Catherine made a good connection with the wife of the possible eyewitness when we went up to the house and found out he was at church. Afterwards, while we sat in the car waiting the man to return, Catherine said:

I’m glad he’s in church. That means he’s gonna come back with the spirit in him and he’s gonna be really nice to us. That’s what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna talk to us.

Even if he doesn’t, if he was afraid, he can just tell us what he heard, what he knows that made everyone else think he knew too much. That would help.

Our man came back from church in the late afternoon and we talked with him at length. Though he admitted knowing the people in Woodville that I talked to, he denied having any first hand knowledge of the murder.

But he had some other information we did not expect him to have. He recalled an encounter with the FBI in 1964.

The FBIs came up to my house. They had his picture and all that where he got shot. They had him naked, laying out on the table.

According to him, the photo showed that Walker was shot on his right side---twice in the shoulder, twice in thigh and twice in the lower leg. He also said that the right side of Walker’s face was shot off “on an angle,” as if he was leaning over to the right when he was taking it in the face.

The information our interviewee recalled from the FBI's photo comports with first- and second-hand accounts of numerous bullet holes in at least one side of Walker's car. It also potentially corroborates what Catherine's mother Ruby told her---that she, Ruby, was told by FBI agents in 1964 that they found empty shotgun shells all along the banks of the road where Walker was shot. Our new information about the wounds on just the right side of Walker's body could also help to establish with more certainty the sequence of events that occurred out on Poor House Road.

For three years we’ve had a 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) report that described the wounds to Walker’s head but made no indication of wounds to other parts of the body. In the report, highway patrolmen recount photographing Walker's body at the funeral home at about 7:30 pm on February 29, before the pathologist had arrived to do the autopsy. The photo that the FBI reportedly showed our interview subject may have been one of the MHSP photos or it may have been from the autopsy which was performed later the same night. If this eyewitness report concerning the photo is correct, it raises questions about why such crucial details would have been left out of the MHSP report.

If there was a crowd of men firing on Walker's car from the banks of Poor House Road road, that substantially increases the likelihood that there are still living perpetrators. And for each person directly involved, there are possible others with knowledge of the perpetrator's actions.

If the FBI had the photo taken either by the MHSP or the coroner, then there were likely multiple copies and there is a better chance that the photo still exists somewhere. "I would like to even have those pictures," Catherine said.

(Cross-posted on Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

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.

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I first heard Mark Mulcahy's music three and a half years ago, at a live performance in Somerville, MA. I was blown away by the songs and by his performances of them and have been a huge fan ever since. A couple of months after the show I found an mp3 of one of the songs that I'd heard and I just had to blog it. I wrote:

A ways into the set Mulcahy took his hands off his guitar and he and the bass player and drummer applied their voices, just their voices, to this song. You could hear the sounds from the bar, separated from the lounge by a wall and a hallway. But the performance space was silent while the three men sang this. The sounds of the bar and pretty much everything else in Somerville dropped into the background.

A few days later Mark's management contacted me and asked me to take down the mp3, so I did.

The song is a dialog between two people who've been through something that far too many of this generation's young couples have been through. 

A very recent performance of the song is now on YouTube, so I'm posting it for you all again. Great to see Mark is back on stage; I hope he comes through Boston soon.

USA Today reports that the FBI Field Office in Jackson, Mississippi may soon be named after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman---the three civil rights workers murdered by Klansmen in Neshoba County, MS, June 21, 1964.

JACKSON, Miss. — This state, whose civil rights history is marred with negatives, wants to name its new Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters after slain civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

"Given our state and its history, it would do a lot to show that Mississippi has changed," said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat.

"I think it's an excellent idea and one that I would support," Thompson said.

The Jackson City Council will vote today on a resolution supporting the move. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed June 21, 1964, while participating in Freedom Summer, an intensive voter registration drive aimed at breaking Mississippi's resistance to civil rights for African Americans....

"It could send a signal to the rest of the nation that we at least understand some of the things that have happened in the past and realize that this is in tune of correcting some of the negatives back then," Smith said.

FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden said the agency will defer to Congress for a final decision on naming the building, which the federal government is leasing....

Angela Lewis, Chaney's daughter, said naming the building after the trio would be "a very nice gesture" that could contribute to a better understanding of the era.

I'm ambivalent about this possibility of a Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman FBI Field Office. In 1964, when the field office was established, attention to the three murdered civil rights workers precluded attention to most other of the numerous incidents that warranted investigation and response. In his book Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-72, historian Kenneth O'Reilly writes:

The reason for skepticism about the FBI presence was obvious. The violence had not abated. By COFO's estimate 450 incidents makred the three months beginning June 15. Segregationists three voter registration workers in Hattiesburg as Hoover made his speech [at the opening of the Jackson Field Office]. (171)

Despite enormous resources expended by the Bureau on solving the Neshoba murders, there was much skepticism about that as well. As Dick Gregory remarked at the time:

If these Mississippi white Klansmen, who do not know how to plan crimes, who are ignorant, illiterate bastards, can completely baffle our FBI, what are those brilliant Communist spies doing to us?

Though Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted in 2005 on manslaughter charges for his role in the murders, the case is far from resolved.

The FBI has been been trying to set a different tone in the present day, but questions remain about what the Bureau will accomplish.

It is meaningful that US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who is a Mississippi Civil Rights Movement veteran, as well as the Mississippi NAACP and James Chaney's daughter Angela, support the name change. It is worth noting, however, that journalist Chris Joyner has no quotes from Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney, Rita Schwerner-Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, or David Goodman, brother of Andrew Goodman. All three regularly make public statements regarding the Neshoba murders and are outspoken advocates for a broad approach to justice for their murdered family members—and for the countless other victims, many still nameless to the world at large.

Since I first posted about The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, we've added the trailer for the documentary mini-series that we are currently developing in partnership with WNET.org and Paperny Films. I'm on there with the Clifton Walker Case a few times, starting at around 00:45.