Hungry Blues

Not long ago I noted that, contrary to the post-trial statements of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan, there is proof James Chaney was tortured, and there is evidence he was shot by more than one person. At the time of the original state autopsies, the families of James Chaney and Michael Schwerner requested additional, independent autopsies, which were conducted by Dr. David Spain of Scarsdale, NY:

"We made the request because the state had been so hostile to us and was engaged in a campaign of denying the murders," said Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender of Seattle. "That we were right is exemplified by the fact that the state of Mississippi issued a death certificate for Michael Schwerner, which was sent to me some weeks after the Featherstone autopsies, which stated that Mickey's cause of death was 'unknown.' "

After Spain concluded that James Chaney's body was "totally decimated" by those who tortured him, William Featherstone, the medical examiner who conducted the original state autopsies, teamed up with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission to bring ethics charges against Spain to the College of American Pathologists.

When Spain was quoted in the media about his conclusions, Featherstone angrily contacted the commission, saying Spain never contacted him and that a second autopsy can't be performed without permission from the pathologist who made the original examination.

Another reason for that anger was that Spain's statements "conflict sharply with the official autopsy," commission documents show.

Featherstone obtained the commission's help in filing an ethics complaint against Spain with the College of American Pathologists. "The complaint has also been filed with the executive director of the college," commission documents show. "The matter is scheduled for hearing at the annual meeting of the College of American Pathologists at Miami, Florida, October 16, 1964."

During their post-conviction question and answer period Duncan and Hood "said that they knew much more about the case, including who actually killed the three, than they were allowed to tell jurors in court."

Duncan said Wayne Roberts and James Jordan, both of Meridian, were actually responsible for shooting the young men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Roberts shot Goodman and Schwerner, he said, and Jordan shot Chaney, they said.

The autopsy photograph and signed autopsy reports, obtained by the Clarion Ledger in 2000, prove that James Chaney was tortured. Sovereignty Commission files say that James Chaney

was shot at several times by several different people but was struck by only three bullets, each of which was alleged to have been fired from a different firearm."

James Hood and Mark Duncan do not state that James Chaney was beaten. The Attorney General and the District Attorney claim there were only two gunmen, one who shot Schwerner and Goodman and one who shot Chaney.

In his closing arguments for the prosecution of Edgar Ray Killen, Jim Hood bragged:

I wanted to be here myself, I didn't want to have any regrets. That I did my duty to the victims and their families.

Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?

Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?

---

Read Dr. David Spain's account of his Mississippi Autopsy.

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Where Rebels Roost

Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

Publisher: M. Susan Orr Klopfer, MBA

Publication Date: July 1, 2005

No. Pages: 668

Order/Review sites

http://themiddleoftheinternet.com/bookorder.html

http://www.lulu.com/content/135246

http://minorjive.typepad.com/hungryblues/2005/07/foreword_for_su.html

$29.17 Book

$11.25 Download

Special Inclusions

Nine-page Selected Bibliography/Citations: 73 Books; 3 Dissertations; 47 Articles; 32 Collections, Interviews, Oral Histories.

Twenty-pages/ Lists of Dead/References 900+ names and information of African Americans lynched and murdered in Mississippi from 1870 to 1970 (references Southern Law & Poverty Center, NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, individual family and friends, personal research).

Sixteen-page/160+ Names of Emmett Till Principles/Names and biographies of people close to this case, from lawyers, witnesses, judges and jurors to police, politicians, friends and families.

Over one hundred specific Sovereignty Commission Documents, references given.

Authors:

M. Susan Orr Klopfer, MBA

With Fred J. Klopfer, PhD and

Barry C. Klopfer, Esq.

Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg

Editors:

Margaret Block

Jan Hilligas

Geoffrey F.X. O’Connell

Karrie Schoppe

Dedicated to the memory of Birdia Keglar, James “Sonny Boy” Keglar, Adeline Hamlet, Grafton Gray, Cleve McDowell and Sam Block.

Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited is nonfiction. Descriptions and dialogue are based on interviews conducted with eyewitnesses and participants in the events described. In addition, newspapers, books, journal and magazine accounts were used. Other resources were documents, letters, diaries, and oral histories from various libraries, archives and private collections. Two other primary sources used were government materials provided under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act and material from the archives of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, available online. The project was initiated in August of 2003 and completed June 30, 2005.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg vii

Prologue xv

Book One History to Learn From

Chapter 1 From the Delta 3

Chapter 2 On Becoming Mississippi 0

Chapter 3 Hands that Picked the Cotton 27

Chapter 4 War of Aggression 36

Chapter 5 Freedom’s Taste 57

Chapter 6 Power of Terrorism 91

Chapter 7 Integration ‘Impossible’ 107

Chapter 8 Under the Microscope 129

Book Two Still Time To Learn

Chapter 9 Mississippi Stories 150

Chapter 10 Veterans Challenge the System 158

Chapter 11 War Rumors Hang Around 167

Chapter 12 Post War Civil Rights 178

Chapter 13 Brown & White Citizens Councils 188

Chapter 14 Bloody Belzoni 211

Chapter 15 Emmett Till 220

Chapter 16 The Meltons of Glendora 251

Chapter 17 Surviving Mississippi 266

Chapter 18 Registering Voters 277

Chapter 19 Mission Implausible 308

Chapter 20 Pushing the System 321

Chapter 21 Cleve McDowell 353

Chapter 22 Medgar Evers 366

Chapter 23 De’ Lay 371

Chapter 24 Follow the Money 391

Chapter 25 Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner 405

Chapter 26 Let the Summer Begin 430

Chapter 27 Klandestine 438

Chapter 28 Freedom Democrats 452

Chapter 29 Not Afraid 465

Chapter 30 Birdia Keglar 479

Chapter 31 Self Preservation 492

Chapter 32 Advocacy Building 510

Chapter 33 More Violence to Reconcile 529

Chapter 34 A Place in Time 559

Epilogue 577

Appendix

Lists of the Dead 579

The People of Emmett Till 600

WeBlog: Mack Charles Parker: 617

Selected Bibliography 618

About the Authors 627

Index 628

Where Rebels Roost... Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

by Susan Klopfer, MBA

With Fred Klopfer, Ph.D. and Barry Klopfer, Esq.

Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg

Printed: $29.17 Download: $11.25 (order)

June 27, 2005

Following this week’s conviction of Edgar Ray Killen on three charges of manslaughter for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi, it has been typical to hear triumphant declarations such as this one by Jim Prince III, editor of The Neshoba Democrat: “We pronounce a new dawn in Mississippi, one in which the chains of cynicism and racism have been broken and we are free, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!”

It is at best delusional and at worst a deception to view Killen’s conviction as meaningful expiation for Mississippi’s notorious racist crimes. To begin with, there are nine other living suspects whom the prosecution did not pursue. More to the point, however, are the lines of culpability that extend well beyond Killen and well beyond the Neshoba County klavern of the White Knights. We must look instead to the racist state government of Mississippi of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and to federal complicity in the state’s crimes. We will not read much about this in the news reports about the Killen trial, but we can learn a great deal of what we need to know in Where Rebels Roost. Susan Klopfer is determined to tell the truth about Mississippi and about America and she does a great deal of that truth telling in the pages of this book.

Klopfer’s book is one of the first to look closely at the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state spy agency whose anti-civil rights activities included providing intelligence and money to the Klan. Klopfer also examines the roles of powerful people like Senator James O. Eastland, who received regular reports from the Sovereignty Commission. We cannot begin to fathom the nature of racial repression in Mississippi without knowing what Klopfer reveals in her book. It is no exaggeration to say that Mississippi of the 1950s and 1960s was a totalitarian police state.

Klopfer also follows the money, showing how the lines of culpability lead into the offices of New York industrialist Wycliffe Draper, whose Pioneer Fund fueled Mississippi’s fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and provided millions of dollars for the private “academies,” established to keep white children out of integrated schools after Brown v. Board of Ed. (More recently, the Pioneer Fund financed the research for the controversial book, The Bell Curve, a best selling, racist tract published in 1994.)

America’s greatness rests on the countless brave souls, like Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, who have stood up for justice on its soil, in the name of this nation's own democratic principles. The nobility of these American citizens is not always understandable without some measure of the evils that they have faced. Klopfer's truth telling brings careful scrutiny to the long and ongoing history of racial repression in Mississippi and the resistances to it.

Where Rebels Roost tells a story that begins with the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans and continues through the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the white supremacist backlash against it that continues into the present, along with current, anti-racist community activists. Klopfer's story of Mississippi and America casts new light on events that will be familiar to many readers, and it tells important stories that have never been told before.

***

The focus of this book is the Mississippi Delta—the northwest portion of Mississippi, wedged between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, with some of the most fertile soil on the planet. The Delta has brought great wealth to white planters and industrialists who built their Southern society on the exploitation and impoverishment of African Americans. The Delta is also the home of a rich Blues tradition, running from Charlie Patton on through Pops Staples, which Klopfer artfully places in its proper context, amid the many currents of history that she describes. Klopfer dispels the dual myths that there was little Klan activity and little native civil rights work in the Delta. There has been much of both, and her drive to describe and understand them is another of Klopfer’s major accomplishments in this book.

By writing the history of civil rights in a particular region, rather than a study of an organization, particular activists or an individual political campaign, Klopfer demonstrates the real diversity of civil rights activity in the state and in the nation. In these pages, there is much to be learned about SNCC, SCLC, COFO, NAACP, Black Panthers and MFDP—and about the Colored Farmers Alliance (nineteenth century), Delta Ministry, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, Republic of New Afrika and Black farm cooperatives, like Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative.

In these pages, you will read about crusaders for freedom and equality with familiar names, like Medgar Evars, James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ella Baker. You will also read about Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Birdia Keglar, Mae Bertha Carter, Cleve McDowell, Margaret Block and Sam Block—and many other local Delta people who fought for civil rights before there was outside interest in the early and mid 60s and after SNCC, CORE. COFO and SCLC organizers had largely left the scene.

Outside help was crucial to civil rights activity in Mississippi, but the local activists shaped the Movement in ways that are often forgotten. For example, Klopfer reminds us that when SNCC’s Bob Moses arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960 he was thinking in terms of the sit-in movement that had galvanized him to leave his New York teaching job and become an activist. Ella Baker’s friend, Amzie Moore, of Cleveland, Mississippi first conceived of the voter registration campaign that became the centerpiece of Freedom Summer. Unlike other local NAACP leaders, Moore welcomed outside help, but he was a guiding force from the start.

***

Susan Klopfer’s long view of the history of civil rights in the Mississippi Delta brings us on a march through two centuries of race riots, individual racial murders and genocidal policies against African Americans. There are the widely rehearsed murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evars and Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman and Fannie Lou Hamer’s riveting testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention of how she was cruelly beaten for registering to vote. But Klopfer’s march for truth and justice also takes us through less well-known territory: nineteenth century race riots in Minter City, where as many as one hundred African Americans were murdered and many more beaten and injured; the possible massacre of as many as 1200 African American soldiers at Camp Van Dorn by the US Army in 1943, with involvement from US Senators Eastland and Bilbo; the untold numbers of adults and children who starved to death in Leflore County, when, from 1962 to 1966, the Klan and the White Citizens Council pressured county officials to cut off distribution of federal food subsidies, in retaliation for Black voter registration activities; the murders of Birdia Keglar and Adeline Hamlet in 1966, James Keglar, son of Birdia (three months after his mother), Daisy Savage and her grandson in 1973, Cleve McDowell in 1997—and many others. In her work on these last six individuals, Klopfer describes cases that beg to be investigated. Included among Klopfer’s appendices is a list of over fifty civil rights slayings in Mississippi and a table of the state’s lynching statistics.

After you read this book, the conviction of one eighty year old man for the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman can seem like nothing but a farce. If we want to break “the chains of cynicism and racism,” Where Rebels Roost shows us where to begin. And it is, indeed, only a beginning. In an email, Klopfer told me that many old people in the Delta keep their own lists of people who were killed. As she put it in another email to me, “Even the countries of Germany and Chile have done a better job accounting for the evil done in those countries and making amends. Apologies are due many families.”

With wry irony, Susan Klopfer notes, “Senator Eastland was born nine months after the lynching [of Luther Holbert and his wife (name unknown) in 1904], which was led by Eastland’s father, a pharmacist and planter. Since lynching was often accompanied by celebrations and parties for the white persons attending, perhaps Senator Eastland was conceived on this occasion.” This may just seem like some well deserved spit in the eye for a vicious racist, but Klopfer’s comment also speaks to the tremendous benefits many whites have reaped from a system that devalues African American lives. Where Rebels Roost raises important and troubling questions about an all too wide array of systemic racial inequalities in the Mississippi Delta.

Why were African American children suffering from clinical malnutrition and why were prenatal care and dental care unheard of for Blacks, while white Mississippi planters received farm subsidies many times larger than those given out in other states? A1968 study, which Klopfer cites, found that “In 1966, there were more payments of $50,000 in each of eight Mississippi counties than in the states of Iowa and Illinois combined.... In the seven states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, 165 producers received checks of $25,000 or more, as compared with the 194 in Mississippi alone who received payments of $50,000 or more.” The disbursement of these monies should have been contingent on proper implementation of the flagship Head Start programs that were begun in Mississippi and effectively shut down by 1967, through, “investigations, surveillance, firings, audits, press attacks, closures and threats.”

Why were there heavily African American Delta towns like Tunica, with no water or sewer connections—in 1985? Why were Delta Pride catfish processing plants allowed to earn nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in annual sales while African Americans labored in their unsanitary sweatshops with no holidays or benefits in the 1990s?

Why in 2005 is Mississippi’s infant mortality rate the highest in the US with 10.5 deaths per one thousand infants under one year old across the state and up to 18 infant deaths per thousand in parts of the Delta? The national infant mortality rate is 6.8 (which is nothing for the richest nation in the world to be proud of).

***

In a post-9/11 America, Susan Klopfer’s revelations about Sovereignty Commission surveillance should serve as a dire warning about the dangers of allowing government to revoke our civil liberties and spy on its citizens with increasing impunity and diminishing oversight. Consider this summary of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 from Kim Zetter:

Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause.

Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Intelligence agencies and the Treasury Department, however, could obtain some financial data from banks, credit unions and other financial institutions without a court order or grand jury subpoena if they had the approval of a senior government official.

The new law (see Section 374 of the act), however, lets the FBI acquire these records through an administrative procedure whereby an FBI field agent simply drafts a so-called national security letter stating the information is relevant to a national security investigation.

And the law broadens the definition of "financial institution" to include such businesses as insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service and even jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships.

The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions. (Wired News, Jan. 6, 2004)

There is no telling what the FBI is doing with such invasive powers, granted with the full authority of the law. The Sovereignty Commission, whose surveillance powers were acquired largely by fiat, was able to have similar access to citizens’ financial records. Cleve McDowell, who was murdered in 1997, earlier attracted the Commission’s attention when he was the first African American to enter law school at the University of Mississippi in 1963. Klopfer writes:

The [Sovereignty Commission] investigator [Tom Scarbrough] was sent back to Drew on June 4 and 5 to find more dirt on young McDowell. From R. D. Cartledge, “cashier of the Bank of Drew,” Scarbrough learned that “a Negro female school teacher gave Cleve McDowell a check for $10 payable to McDowell on May 27…. McDowell endorsed the check to Medgar W. Evers [who] in turn cashed the check at a service station in Jackson.” This fact was duly reported back to the Sovereignty Commission.

Scarbrough was not able to learn why “Jessie Singleton Gresham” gave McDowell the $10 check. He tried to talk once again to McDowell’s father and when he “could get no one to respond to my knock of their front door” he “journeyed over to Oxford … to observe his admittance to the University School of Law on June 5, 1963.”

Kim Zetter noted that “Bush signed the [intelligence] bill on Dec. 13, a Saturday, which was the same day the U.S. military captured Saddam Hussein.” It is important to note the parallels between the present war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, which was one of the backdrops for the Civil Rights Movement. In his essay “Highways to Nowhere,” Wallace Roberts, who was a Freedom School coordinator in Cleveland and Shaw, Mississippi, recalled that at “the first memorial service for the three civil rights workers, held just a few days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that marked the beginning of the Vietnam War, Bob Moses, the head of the summer project, said simply, ‘The same kind of racism that killed these three young men is going to kill thousands of Vietnamese.’”

Roberts also recalled last year’s fortieth annual memorial for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, at the rebuilt Mt. Zion Church, which had been bombed by the Klan on June 16, 1964, setting in motion the events that led to the murders of those three brave, young men:

Dave Dennis, one of the leaders of Freedom Summer, said that it doesn't really matter now what happens to a bunch of old men even in the name of justice. What matters now is the injustice still being done to the black children of Mississippi: Governor Barbour recently asked for a cut of more than $200 million in state funds for public education. This in a state that already ranks at the bottom nationally in per pupil spending.

I was able to shave a couple of hours off my driving time thanks to the lavish investment in slick new roads by Barbour and his predecessors, but that savings comes at the cost of the continuing intellectual enslavement of the state's black children.

Drive on, Mississippi, you're on a highway to nowhere.

(Click here to order Where Rebels Roost.)

Scott B. Smith looks out at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of Bloody Sunday and early point on the Selma to

Montgomery March (photo by Benjamin T. Greenberg).

For more about Scott B., see:

• Cleophus Hobbs Day
• Sitting across from a black panther, watching him eat octopus

But Susan Klopfer sees all the ripples in the water. From the comments (also cross posted in slightly different form on her Emmett Till blog):

Yes. The words in the the Five Point Action Program are unbelievable ... but it has not been that many years ago that Mississippi was under seige and these were the words of its leaders - people like John Satterfield of Yazoo City (twice head of the American Bar Association).

Satterfield used his powerful position in Mississippi's fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, using his title when signing off on racist literature (how embarrassing for the ABA) and helping to match up Mississippi with an old Nazi to fund the fight (Wycliffe Draper, The Pioneer Fund).

Frightening? Today Mississippi's U. S. senators, governor, numerous state legislators continue to meet with "the folks who brought us" the White Citizens Councils, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and the CCC - Council of Conservative Citizens - a clone of the earlier councils, now including open lines to Neo-Nazi's, Indentity Movement, New Confederacy Movement and every other hate group that Morris Dees tries to warn us about:

Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Reports, From Fall 2004, Issue 114... "five years later, Southern lawmakers are still meeting with the CCC ... no fewer than 38 federal, state and local elected officials who are still in office today have attended CCC events since 2000, most of them giving speeches to local chapters ..."

So think about this ... the CC Plan comes from the Citizens Councils days. If they sound scary, take a look at what the morphed CC (the CCC) is about these days ...and then realize that the man who started the CC, and then the CCC is still alive (Robert "Tut" Patterson) and still writing for his newest group.(He lives about 30 miles from my house!)

These folks are still around and they are making sure their organizations will live on. Afterall, they are the sons of their fathers. sk

(Not many Mississippians have looked at - or even know about - Sovereignty Commission files since Mississippi's media has dismissed the files, calling them "the works of keystone cops." Simply not true. These records are a critical piece of U. S. history and need to be read and written about)...

"Understand Mississippi, and you understand all of Democracy." Anonymous.

I forgot to mention that Susan Klopfer caught me in action at the Longdale Community Center site in Mississippi.

More recently, Jeff blogged about taking me and Scott B Smith out to lunch last Wednesday, when I was in Montgomery, AL. Jeff has his own blog and is also one of the cool people over at Preemptive Karma. Jeff turned up an old list-serve post by ScottB, which is a good introduction to his involvement in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and the story behind the black cat (later the Black Panther) symbol in African American political organizations.

Definitely check out Jeff's post to read the passage by ScottB. But I also want to make sure you catch the last part, where Jeff announces his project on Tallassee:

I'd been thinking for a long time that the history of Tallassee needed updating. A History of Tallassee was published by the about-to-close Mt. Vernon Mills in 1949, but I'm not aware of any similar historical attempts at archiving since.

I'd been thinking for a long time that the Writers' Bloc site needed doing, for longer things than blog entries.

There's so much to cover since the 1940s, and so many stories that aren't what the Chamber of Commerce would appreciate, but they need to be told; like this one Ben and I have talked about a lot. So it's on. In a serious way. I'm expecting it'll be a forum or portal-style website, collecting and telling the oral history, and that I'll be organizing it in anticipation of a printed version.

Yet another reason being a blogger has been so worthwhile: I keep meeting people and learning things I'd never have had access to otherwise.

Thanks for lunch, Jeff.

This voice from the past is a reminder of why voting technology activists need to keep on the front burner the racial politics they embraced widely up through January 6, 2005.

Nations were made by men, not by paper Constitutions and paper ballots. We're not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings were free men . . . if you can make men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hands of a tyrannical judge or a vicious attorney general, to transform by its magic 18 million blacks into 18 million kings....

This is a white man's government, conceived by white man and maintained by white men through every year of its history. And by God of our fathers, it shall be ruled by the white man until the archangels shall call at the end of time!

(A FIVE POINT ACTION PROGRAM: AN ADDRESS BY LOUIS W. HOLLIS, Executive Director, CitIzens' Councils of America to THE REORGANIZATION RALLY SAVANNAH CITIZENS' COUNCIL SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, July 22, 1963, p. 17)

'

It's one thing to not have the evidence they would have had if they'd asked for assistance from the Department of Justice. But what about the evidence that is available to anyone with an internet connection?

Let's go back to that post conviction question and answer period held by Attorney General Jim Hood and District Attorney Mark Duncan.

The two said that they knew much more about the case, including who actually killed the three, than they were allowed to tell jurors in court.

They faced several problems, they said. For one, some witnesses, including several of those who were convicted in a 1967 federal civil rights violation trial, refused to testify or sign written statements. Others, Hood said, were dead. Three of the most significant witnesses in the case against Killen died, he said.

Duncan said Wayne Roberts and James Jordan, both of Meridian, were actually responsible for shooting the young men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Roberts shot Goodman and Schwerner, he said, and Jordan shot Chaney, they said (emphasis added).

Now let's go back a little further to an article by Jerry Mitchell in the year 2000 (via Susan Klopfer).

Like the photograph of Emmett Till two generations ago, the picture of James Chaney horrifies and outrages.

It is that autopsy picture, along with a signed autopsy report obtained by The Clarion-Ledger, that experts say proves Klansmen on June 21, 1964, didn't just kill the black civil rights activist, they tortured him before he died.

That report says Chaney had a left arm broken in one place, a right arm broken in two places and "a marked disruption" of the left elbow joint. That picture suggests he may have suffered other trauma to the groin area that white activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, did not....

For 36 years, countless books and movies have portrayed the killings of all three as quick executions, but experts now agree with what a second opinion then suggested — the damage Chaney suffered suggests he was treated differently than the other two.

"If he had broken one arm, you might could rationalize it," said Dr. Joe Burton, chief medical examiner for metropolitan Atlanta, who examined the trio's autopsy photos under intense magnification. "To break both of them would be more like torture. He was not only shot, he was tortured for some reason."

(Emphasis added.)

The question again: why only Killen?

What happened the night Chaney and the others were killed is detailed in confessions from two participants — James Jordan and Horace Doyle Barnette.

Those confessions identify Edgar Ray Killen of Union, otherwise known as "Preacher" Killen, as directing Klansmen where to go and what to do that night. (Killen insists he is innocent.)

After Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price released Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney from jail at about 10 p.m., Klansmen chased down the trio in their station wagon. Price struck Chaney with a blackjack before Klansmen loaded the trio into Price's car to take them where they would be killed.

When Price stopped his deputy's car on a nearby gravel road, Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts pulled Schwerner out, put his hand on Schwerner's shoulder and shot him dead.

Roberts then removed Goodman from the car and shot him.

According to Barnette's confession, Jordan jerked Chaney out of the car. As he and others shot Chaney, Jordan said, "You didn't leave me anything but a n-----, but at least I killed me a n-----."

Killen received a mistrial. Barnette, Jordan, Roberts and Price were each convicted of federal charges of conspiring to deprive the trio of their civil rights. Of the five, Killen and Price are still alive.

Philip Dray, co-author of the 1988 book about the killings, We Are Not Afraid, said what dumbfounds him about the suggestion Chaney was beaten is Klansmen were angrier with Schwerner: "He was the one they really, really hated."

The secret of why Chaney may have been treated differently can be found in the long-sealed records of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a segregationist spy agency headed by the governor from 1956 to 1973.

"James Chaney, the colored member of this group, is alleged to have broke (sic) away from the group of men that were holding them captive," commission investigator Andy Hopkins wrote in his Jan. 26, 1965, report for the Sovereignty Commission's files. "Shortly after he made the break, he was shot at several times by several different people but was struck by only three bullets, each of which was alleged to have been fired from a different firearm."

That coincides with Jordan's statement Chaney died perhaps 40 feet away from where Schwerner and Goodman were killed.

The autopsy report offers other possible evidence Chaney broke free. He was shot in the back, an indication he may have been hit while trying to evade his killers.

John Dittmer, author of the 1994 book on the Mississippi civil rights movement, Local People, said Klansmen may have beaten Chaney before finishing him off.

"There are books on lynching and mob psychology," Dittmer said. "To kill a person isn't enough. People go berserk. If this happened, it was because Chaney decided to run away."

Jordan's statement appears to support a gap of time between the first round of shots fired and the last ones fired: "A volley of shots, approximately six or seven in number, were heard, followed by two separate shots."

The two last shots that Jordan described could have been the shots that killed Chaney, one that struck him in the abdomen and the final bullet that fractured his skull.

Former FBI agent Jim Ingram, who headed the civil rights desk for the FBI in Mississippi in the 1960s, said he believes the Klansmen's motive was clear: "It seems to me they would have gotten their licks on Chaney since he was a Mississippi black associating with these whites from up North."

(Emphasis added.)

James Chaney was tortured and there is evidence that he was shot by more than one person.

Mississippi in 2005 is protecting white, racist murderers.

Further reading:

Mississippi Autposy, by Dr. David Spain

Cleophus Hobbs Day

Saturday, June 10, 2006

David Hall Campsite 1 on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail

Sponsored by the White Hall Village Educational Association

Here's the story:

After my trip to Mississippi for the 41st Annual Chaney Goodman Schwerner Memorial, I spent some time in Montgomery, Alabama with Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnad, both from SNCC. ScottB was a SNCC worker in Alabama, with Stokely Carmichael, Bob Mants and Jimmy Rogers. They helped organize the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which was the local political organization. The symbol of the organization was the black panther, which was its origin as a symbol for Black militant groups. Lowndes County is the county situated between Montgomery County and Dallas County (which includes Selma).

ScottB was known as the Bone Man because he wore a bone around his neck to urge everyone to get together like Ezekiel's dry bones, to register to vote at the Lowndes County jail house. Whites placed voter registration at the jail house as a means to intimidate African American voters out of registering. The jail house was a place where African American men went in, frequently "disappearing," never to be heard from again. When family members came to inquire after their incarcerated loved one, they were told that the prisoner had been released and law enforcement officials did not know where the prisoner had gone.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, ScottB took me around Lowndes, Montgomery, and Dallas Counties to familiarize me with the work that he did with local communities and with some of the current conditions of African American life in those same communities today.

On Tuesday one of our stops was at the home of Johnny and Betty Hall, members of the family of Mr. David Hall, who owned the property that was the first campsite on the Selma to Montgomery March. David Hall was an African American landowner on Highway 67, off Route 80, which runs east-west through Alabama, making the major route between Montgomery and Selma (and further west to Perry County, which was where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered by police, leading to the Selma to Montgomery March). David Hall had not been particularly involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but when he observed the beatings of marchers on Bloody Sunday, he drove his truck the eight miles into Selma, to the Brown Chapel AME Church to offer his land as a campsite for the civil rights marchers. Johnny and Betty Hall presently live on the land David Hall offered for the marchers' use.

When we arrived at the Halls' home, we were met by some of Mr. and Mrs. Hall's grandchildren, who explained that their grandfather was on his way home from the hospital, where he had recently had heart surgery. They called him on his cell phone, and when he heard it was ScottB, Mr. Hall asked that we wait for them to get home. There were chairs set up in front of the garage, so we sat down and watched two of the grandchildren, an adorably pudgy twenty-two month old boy with cornrows and a pretty, slender girl of seven or eight, play out in the driveway, he on his big wheel and she on her bicycle with training wheels.

While we sat there, ScottB started to tell me about Cleophus Hobbs, who lives just down the road in Sunshine Village. Mr. Hobbs was a SNCC worker who was well respected in Lowndes and Dallas Counties. He wore a cowboy hat and carried a gun. He was shot at a number of times by whites and shot back in self-defense. The non-violent philosophy was not dominant in rural areas of Alabama, like Lowndes County, where Klan violence was such that fighting back was often a necessity. Cleophus Hobbs was an organizer in Selma before the famous march: he worked on demonstrations around education and voter registration. Children's education continued to be a concern of Mr. Hobbs throughout the years.

Before long, the Halls' car rolled in with Mr. and Mrs. Hall and a few more of their grandchildren. Though Mr. Hall was just out of the hospital, he sat down, out in front of the garage with us to talk for a few minutes before going inside to rest. One thing led to another in our conversation, and ScottB mentioned something about visiting Mr. Hobbs since he was just down the road. Mr. Hall then told us the news: Cleophus Hobbs had died the Friday before last, on June 10. He died peacefully, in his sleep. The funeral had already come and gone.

ScottB had known Cleophus Hobbs well and worked closely with him and was devastated not to have heard about his death in time to attend the funeral. In trying figure out something constructive he could do with his grief, ScottB came up with an idea:

Next year, June 10, 2006 will be the first celebration of Cleophus Hobbs Day.

Johnny and Betty Hall have offered Campsite 1, which is still on their family land, for the event. Campsite 1 is one of the stops on the National Park Service Historic Trail, following the route of the Selma to Montgomery March, and it is on the same road Mr. Hobbs lived on. The event will be sponsored by the White Hall Village Educational Association, which was founded by ScottB and Linda.

The event on June 10, 2006 will be a celebration of Cleophus Hobbs and it will be an opportunity for people in the area to talk about the things they are currently dealing with and to strategize and organize around their concerns. The first Cleophus Hobbs Day will also be a fundraiser for a commemorative plaque to be placed in Campsite 1, in memory of Mr. Hobbs. ScottB is encouraging other SNCC members to have celebrations for others who have passed and to use these occasions similarly for recognizing deceased civil rights workers' contributions and for addressing the problems people are facing now.

Let there be a James Forman Day, an Ella Baker Day, a Fannie Lou Hamer Day, an Emmett Till Day, and so on.

ScottB points out that these events could also be used as fundraisers to do things like giving money to families who could not afford the funeral costs for their loved ones.

For more information, contact ScottB, scottbsmithjr[at]yahoo[dot]com or Linda Dehnad, lindadehnad[at]hotmail[dot]com.

It was an apropos end to an exciting week when I received Gary May's email yesterday, announcing the publication of his new book, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. I haven't mentioned this yet, but in addition to traveling to Mississippi for the 41st annual Chaney Goodman Schwerner Memorial on the land of civil rights pioneers Cornelius and Mable Steele, I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama and spent time with former SNCC workers Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnat. ScottB took me all around Montgomery, Lowndes County and Selma, to teach me about his work with the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the 1960s. I will get into more of the details very soon, but it was just Tuesday that I stopped with ScottB at the memorial to Viola Liuzzo on Rt. 80, outside Selma, where she was murdered by Klansmen after she'd traveled from Detroit to march with all the others in the Selma to Montgomery March. (A good account of the story is here.)

Here's an excerpt from a recent review by Murray Polner:

The Informants is a model of painstaking historical research coupled with an exemplary writing style, vivid, dramatic, and suspenseful. Serious historical writing May proves need not be dull.

What is new and different about the book are May’s portraits of Klan members and primarily the FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, a violent, angry liar, who loved nothing better than hanging around cops, was planted inside the Klan, in Bessemer, Alabama, where many members and sympathizers worked in the steel mills, their activities often approved, subtly and otherwise, by Birmingham’s ruling elite. (Readers might also turn to Diane McWhorter’s fascinating Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution)....

The problem, as May points out, is that Rowe, a member of Eastview Klavern No. 13 in Bessemer, rose rapidly within Klan ranks. He joined in meting out savage beatings of blacks and white sympathizers. When the Klan beat Freedom Riders badly in the Birmingham bus terminal in 1961, none of the attackers, including Rowe, were deemed culpable, because local police were in on the plot. The FBI, which had advance knowledge about the assault, refused to intervene because they wanted Klan members to trust Rowe. May speculates that Rowe may well have been involved in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham where four small black girls died. “Hoover,” May goes on, “blocked persecution…in part to protect Rowe” and another FBI snitch, who was even more dangerous than Rowe.

He also suggests, but cannot prove, that while Rowe was present in the automobile shadowing Liuzzo’s car, he urged another Klan member to kill Liuzzo. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center once accurately portrayed Rowe as “a loud, bragging, know-it-all thug who had been made a hero for what would have sent most men to prison.”

But thanks to Gary May, we do know that the murder of Viola Liuzzo took a devastating toll on her family. Some misguided Americans wrote her family obscene and bigoted letters and castigating their husband and mother for going South to help other Americans.

For May, this business of using criminals as spies raises “the use of questionable, even illegal means to achieve a beneficial end,” a question he later suggests raises a new set of questions in today’s “war against terrorism.”

During the sixties, the FBI claimed to have 2,000 Rowe-like informers inside various Klan groups. Much about them is still secret. The FBI will not allow researchers access to their files, information how well or badly they did, and what crimes, if any, they committed while serving as informers. “It is unlikely that such records will become available to historians in the near future,” May explains, “because the Bureau fiercely guards informant identities and activities.”

And here is Gary May, himself, expanding on the issue of using informants, noted by Polner:

My research in FBI, Justice Department and the Liuzzo family attorney’s records convinced me that the Liuzzo Case was unique and offered important lessons for our current war against terrorism. Unlike the other well known Civil Rights murders, the crime was quickly solved because one of the four Klansmen who shot Liuzzo on an Alabama highway following the conclusion of the 1965 Voting Rights March, was an FBI informant. As soon as Gary Thomas Rowe could get away from his associates, he quickly reported the murder to his FBI handler and, within hours, the Klansmen were apprehended. President Lyndon Johnson announced their arrest over nation-wide television. In none of the other civil rights murders was an FBI informant so deeply involved and an examination of Rowe’s career led to disturbing conclusions about the role of informants then and now-- their activities can actually produce the very tragedies they are supposed to prevent....

Although the Klansmen would later charge that Rowe himself murdered Liuzzo, which led her family to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the FBI in the 1980s, a judge ruled against them and evidence I uncovered indicated that another Klansmen fired the fatal shots. The Klansmen responsible for Liuzzo’s murder are dead as is Rowe and the case is officially closed, but—in fact, it deserves to be examined and discussed for what it tells us about the dangers of recruiting informants and putting them into terrorist groups. To reassure their associates that they are truly committed to their cause, they too must commit brutal acts. And to hide their association with despicable characters, intelligence agencies become silent partners in the crimes their informants commit. I hope that as the U.S. seeks better “human intelligence” in the war on terrorism, The Informant will provide a cautionary tale about the role played by informants in that struggle. Along with the newly reopened case of Emmett Till and the start on June 13 of the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, accused of killing James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964, I recommend opening, intellectually if not legally, the case of Viola Liuzzo. It has too much to teach us to be closed forever.

Text of memorial reads:

IN MEMORY OF OUR SISTER

VIOLA LIUZZO

WHO GAVE HER LIFE IN THE

STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHT TO

VOTE..... MARCH 25, 1965

PRESENTED BY SCLC/WOMEN

EVELYN G. LOWERY, NATIONAL CONVENER

—1991—

THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

CONFERENCE

JOSEPH LOWERY, PRESIDENT

---

Photos:

Viola Liuzzo with her children, UPI Photo, hosted by Civil Rights Movement Veterans

Viola Liuzzo Memorial, Rt. 80, outside Selma, Alabama, by Benjamin T. Greenberg

Posted on June 22, 2005

NEWS RELEASE JUNE 22, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Brenda Wright, National Voting Rights Institute (617) 624-3900, ext. 13

Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative (413) 586-4985

http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-22-6-2005.shtml

Today, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is hearing arguments in two cases alleging that New York's felon disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution (Muntaqim v. Coombe and Hayden v. Pataki). The National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative have filed an amicus brief with the Court arguing that the Court should consider the redistricting implications of disenfranchisement as part of the "totality of circumstances" which must be examined under the Voting Rights Act. The brief highlights the New York State legislature's racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in upstate prisons.

New York State is majority White (62%), but its prison population is majority Black and Latino (82%), so disenfranchising prisoners and parolees results in a disproportionate bar to Black and Latino political participation. In their brief, the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative provide new information to the court showing how New York State's disenfranchisement practices combine with its redistricting practices to diminish the voting strength of non-incarcerated persons of color in the prisoners' home communities.

In drawing state legislative districts, New York uses Census Bureau data that counts the state's mostly urban and minority prisoners as residents of the mostly white and rural prison counties rather than as residents of the home communities where they resided prior to incarceration, where they are deemed legal residents for most other legal purposes. Several upstate legislative districts lack sufficient population to meet accepted one-person, one-vote standards without counting disenfranchised prisoners as part of their population base. At the same time, heavily minority districts in New York City would in all likelihood be entitled to additional representation if prisoners were counted as residents of their home communities for purposes of redistricting.

The brief argues that New York's practice has an historical parallel that the Court should be disinclined to follow. "The practice bears a striking resemblance to the original 'Three-Fifths' clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment," says Prison Policy Initiative Assistant Director Peter Wagner.

Brenda Wright, managing attorney of the National Voting Rights Institute and the author of the brief, says: "New York's decision to credit disenfranchised prisoners to largely white counties, rather than their home communities, is a critical example of racial discrimination the court should consider."

In the two cases, the Second Circuit has taken the unusual step of granting in banc review by all active judges on the Court. The lower courts initially ruled against the plaintiffs and held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not permit a challenge to prisoner disenfranchisement. The amicus brief of NVRI and the Prison Policy Institute, filed on January 28, 2005, is available on NVRI's website at: http://www.nvri.org/about/new_york_state_policies.shtml and in hypertext on the PPI site at http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/muntaqim.shtml.

The National Voting Rights Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan legal center. Through litigation and public education, NVRI seeks to make real the promise of American democracy that meaningful political participation and power should be accessible to all regardless of economic or social status. The Prison Policy Initiative conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy. Among its publications are a report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York , which documents how the transfer of a large, non-voting population to upstate prisons, where it is counted as part of the population base for redistricting, artificially enhances the representation afforded to predominantly white, upstate legislative districts.

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