Hungry Blues

Did you hear this yesterday on All Things Considered?

It's a short radio essay by Andrei Codrescu [realplayer] about his recent visit to Israel for a poetry conference. I said essay, but really it's an amazing prose poem that speaks volumes about the historical importance, the beauty and the wonder of the Jewish homeland and the tragic brutality of its occupation of the Palestinian homeland—all in 3 minutes and 28 seconds.

If you're like me, a loving supporter of Israel's existence and deeply opposed to the occupation, you know that there is precious little public space alloted for the sort of understanding that Codrescu packs into his marvelous images.

I was just kidding.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Runaway US bride faces jail term

May 24, 2005
Killen bid to toss case denied
By Jerry Mitchell
The Clarion Ledger
jmitchell@clarionledger.com

PHILADELPHIA — The judge presiding over reputed Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen's upcoming murder trial in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers rejected a defense request Monday to dismiss the charges.

Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon said the defense had failed to show Killen was being "selectively prosecuted."

He said Killen's June 13 trial will take place as scheduled. Killen, an 80-year-old sawmill operator and part-time preacher, has insisted he had nothing to do with the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. . . .

In an unusual occurrence, a defense attorney and a prosecutor testified in the hearing Monday.

James McIntyre of Jackson, who represented the sheriff in the 1967 trial and is on Killen's defense team, testified there were other suspects in this case besides his client who are still alive.

District Attorney Mark Duncan acknowledged eight suspects are still alive and said Neshoba County grand jurors could have indicted all eight or others whose names arose in the investigation.

After being presented all the information from the state's investigation, he said, "they chose to indict Mr. Killen and only Mr. Killen."

(Whole thing.)

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (Commission) was created by an act of the Mississippi legislature on March 29, 1956. The agency was established in the White Millsaps students marching in protest of death of JSU student Ben Brownwake of the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Like other states below the Mason-Dixon Line, Mississippi responded to Brown with legislation to shore up the walls of racial separation. The act creating the Commission provided the agency with broad powers. The Commission's objective was to "do and perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states . . ." from perceived "encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof." To exercise this loosely define objective, the Commission was granted extensive investigative powers. The governor was appointed ex-officio chairman of the Commission. Other ex-officio members were the president of the Senate, who was vice-chairman of the Commission; the attorney general; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In addition, the Commission comprised the following members; two members from the Senate, appointed by the president of the Senate; and three members from the House of Representatives, appointed by the Speaker. The governor, attorney general and legislators served on the Commission during their tenures in office. The three members appointed by the governor served for the duration of his term. The agency itself was small consisting of a director, public relations director, clerical staff and a handful of investigators.

The Commission's activities were shaped by the preference of the governor and skills of its staff. J.P. Coleman favored a low-key approach, and the Commission handled matters "quietly and effectively" during his term. The Commission compared itself to the FBI and the armed services intelligence agencies, "during times of war seeking out intelligence information about the enemy and what the enemy proposes to do." Coleman used the Commission to "dampen as far as possible racial conflict and violence . . . ." He countered criticism that the agency was inactive, asserting, people "would be amazed if they knew the work the commission has in fact done." He continued, "if the things we have done and our quiet methods of doing it ever get into the newspapers, then our enemies will be fully ALERTED [emphasis his] and the usefulness of the Sovereignty Commission will likewise be at an end." In contrast, Ross Barnett had no patience for the muted methods of the Commission. He envisioned an overt and expanded role for the agency, and under his direction, the Commission initiated a Speakers Bureau to travel the nation presenting the Mississippi perspective. The Commission also sponsored a film entitled "Message from Mississippi," which portrayed segregation in glowing terms. Following the integration debacle at the University of Mississippi, the Commission also assisted with the printing and distribution of the Mississippi General Legislative Investigating Committee's report on the incident, as well as sponsoring and distributing a movie on the subject entitled "Oxford USA."

Under Barnett the investigation team was also expanded. The Commission investigated individuals and organizations that challenged the racial status quo. Commission investigators toured the state and compiled reports on civil rights activities in the counties. They also responded to specific requests from local state officials and members of the public. In addition to staff investigators, the Commission also relied heavily upon informants, a practice begun under Coleman that continued throughout the agency's existence. Payment to informants varied from a few dollars to cover expenses to regular monthly sums of $500. In addition, the Commission employed private detectives, who often acted as intermediaries with informants.

Barnett's expanded role for the Commission also included funding for the Citizens' Councils. In 1960 the Commission voted a grant for $20,000 to the "Council Forum." From this point until December 1964, the Commission documented monthly grants to the Citizens' Council amounting to a total of $193,500. The Commission also participated in the national campaign to prevent the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, establishing and providing funds for the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms. In addition, the agency donated small amounts to African-American individuals and organizations sympathetic to segregation. In 1965, the Commission developed and promoted the Mississippi Negro Citizenship Association. Through this organization the Commission "launched a quiet campaign to encourage qualified Negroes to make applications to vote," hoping to outmaneuver the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) by attracting those they termed the "thinking Negroes of Mississippi."

The courtship of African-American conservatives was consistent with Governor Paul B. Johnson's approach to the integration issue. Mississippi had to appear to be law abiding and in compliance with federal regulations. Image was vital to this scheme, and Erle Johnston and the Commission worked with other state agencies to create Mississippi's new identity. Johnston also took measures to clean up the Commission, instructing removal of all "incriminating" reports, especially those that indicated the Commission helped county registrars stop African-Americans from registering to vote. Johnston now described the investigative work of the Commission as "preventative medicine" to avoid "bad situations," and he asserted that the Commission was "not a super snooping agency trying to crack down on any Negro who raises his hand." Investigators continued to track individuals and groups who challenged racial segregation, although the subjects of investigations were referred to now by the more generic anticommunist term "subversives" rather than the earlier brand "race agitators." The Commission also continued its advisory function, primarily advising how to circumvent civil rights legislation.

(MDAH Archives And Library, Sovereignty Commission Online Agency History)

In anticipation of the Edgar Ray Killen trial, Susan has started a Mississippi Sovereignty Commission blog, on which she is posting links to documents of interest from the Commission's papers that are available online in digital form, through the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). There is an amazing amount of material in the Commission files, so it is a great opportunity to get pointed towards significant documents by a a writer who has been working extensively with the contents of the archives. In brief, the Sovereignty Commission was a Mississippi state spy agency, founded to monitor and oppose the Civil Rights Movement. There is one good summary of the Commission's history here. Next up will be an excerpt from the Sovereignty Commission history that is posted on the MDAH website.

(Page 1 of 2)

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records
SCR ID # 2-141-0-19-1-1-1
Mississippi Department of Archives & History
http://www.mdah.state.ms.us

Up from the comments, Susan Klopfer writes about a little known, late 19th century pogrom against African Americans in Mississippi. I believe most Americans are ignorant of or in denial about the prevalence in our history of this kind of organized, mass racial violence. One reason for our country's present impotence in dealing with racial inequalities and violence against people of color is our inability to face the truth about our own past.

The wonderful part about living in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is hearing the "whispers" of what went on years ago. Mississippi's history, oral but not always written, includes routine reports of brutality and murder.

Early Delta planters were always fearing a race war and in September of 1889, the Governor sent three regiments to Minter City (in Leflore County but close to Money in Tallahatchie County where Emmett Till was kidnapped) to ensure that CFA members were unarmed. Completing their assignment, the state regiments withdrew and allowed a massacre of CFA [Colored Farmers Alliance] members and families to proceed.

There were no reports of blacks being armed or of whites being shot; estimates of African Americans murdered reached as high as one hundred. From his research on the massacre, historian William F. Holmes observed that neither the National Guard, nor the governor and black residents of Leflore County were forthcoming with accounts of the incident. But he discovered several first-hand accounts by travelers who happened to be in the region, including the observations of J. C. Engle, an agent for a New York textile company, who was in and about Greenwood during the trouble:

When he arrived at New Orleans several days later, Engle told reporters that Negroes “were shot down like dogs.” Members of the posse not only killed people in the swamps, he said, but they even invaded homes and murdered “men women and children.” Engle recalled one act in which a sixteen year old white boy “beat out the brains of a little colored girl while a bigger brother with a gun kept the little one’s parents off.” Several sources reported that the posse singled out four well-known leaders of the Colored Farmers Alliance whom they shot to death: Adolph Horton, Scott Morris, Jack Dial and J.M. Dial. “A black undercover reporter sent to the region stated that the truth may never be known because terrified blacks dare not speak of the matter, even to each other.”

The lack of coverage of this massacre by the Mississippi press, and the failure of state and federal officials to lead investigations, left researcher Holmes wondering how many other instances of violence of a “greater and lesser magnitude” happened in Mississippi during this era. (There were many.)

Recently, one young African American who grew up in Minter City in the late 1970s and early 1980s told me he had never heard of the massacre but did report of folk lore from his youth about "dead bodies" in the “Singing River,” who could sometimes be heard at night.

Back in December there were serious allegations by Hocking County, Ohio Board of Elections Deputy Director, Sherole Eaton that an employee of Triad, the company that services all of Ohio's punch card machines, tampered with the tabulator computer, which records the results from the individual machines around the county. There is now evidence that Eaton has been asked to resign or be fired, for her whistleblowing. Even more damning, however, is a recently leaked letter to all Ohio elections officials, from J. Kenneth Blackwell, threatening dismissal of any officials who do not follow his directives.

Though comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, the Hocking County Board now pressuring Eaton continues to act under direct threat from Secretary of State Blackwell. Blackwell administered the 2004 election in Ohio while serving as the state's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign. He has been widely criticized in Congress, in the media and throughout Ohio for heavy-handed partisan manipulations that resulted in Bush carrying Ohio and the presidency.

In a letter dated October 5, 2004 to Republican Chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Robert Bennett, Blackwell specifically threatened removal of any board member who refused to follow his direct orders. The threat undermines Republican arguments that the election was fair because both Democrats and Republicans serve on election boards. "Be advised that your actions are not in compliance with Ohio law and further failure to comply with my lawful directives will result in official action, which may include removal of the Board and its Director," Blackwell wrote Bennett.

Under Ohio law, all election board members serve at Secretary of State Blackwell's pleasure. Cuyahoga Election Board member James Vu mentioned the letter at a Congressional hearing staged at the Ohio statehouse by Republican Congressman Bob Ney. Ney brought the hearing to Columbus in part because Blackwell refused to testify in Washington. The hearing was highlighted by angry, bitter exchanges between Blackwell and US Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who co-introduced (with Senator Barbara Boxer of California) the historic Congressional resolution challenging the seating of the Ohio Electoral College delegation for Bush.

In his October letter Blackwell made it clear that any Election Board official, Republican or Democrat, who challenged Blackwell's decrees would be summarily removed. Election Board positions are well paid, and Blackwell's threat erased widespread claims the presence of Democrats on Election Boards guaranteed that the election was administered in a neutral, bi-partisan manner.

In fact, with the club of a loss of substantial salaries, this leaked letter makes it clear Blackwell was running the election with an iron partisan hand, and that claims of true bi-partisanship were strictly for show. (Emphasis added)

(Read the whole thing!)

• After I blogged my friend Dana's memoir piece on her 1999 trip to Auchwitz, she commented to send me over to the website of Peter Cunningham, the photographer whose photo of Dana appears in her article.

Peter has spent years photographing musicians and there is a nice link on his site to those pictures. Open it up and you see many pictures you've seen replicated in many places -- he's the guy who took them!

You can truly get lost browsing through Peter Cunningham's photos. You can also read his own documentary essay with photos of an earlier trip he went on to Auchwitz, before the one Dana wrote about.

• Elisa Salasin posted some interesting comments regarding the article on expulsion rates for children in preschool. She also left a link for her Open Letter To Jenna Bush, published on Common Dreams.

Dear Ms. Bush,

I’ve read recently that you will soon be teaching in an urban, Washington, D.C. elementary school. As you begin your career there are a few things that I would like you to consider.

I’m sure that you are entering the profession with the highest of expectations for the children who will be under your care in the coming years, that you are not someone who might fall prey to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” If possible, though, please take a few moments to think about just what it means to have high or low expectations for your students.

I ask you to do so because I believe that much of the so-called educational reform mandated in the name of “high” expectations truly reflects very low expectations of the intellectual capacities and learning potential of children – most specifically, poor children in urban schools who are usually not white and who often don't speak English as their first language.

This conclusion might seem counter-intuitive. After all, your father claims that No Child Left Behind is closing the achievement gap. He claims that test scores are rising, that more kids are reading at a higher level. I see that achievement gap differently – when teaching and textbooks mirror the tests, scores indeed will rise. In the eyes of some people, high expectations for students are being met. I see the high expectations of the testing/publishing industrial complex being met as their profits soar, and the high expectations of pundits being met as their pockets fatten. Let’s say that I’m wrong, though, and children are indeed learning more in this brave new world of education. We still cannot say that high expectations are being met without taking into account some of the other effects of NCLB on classrooms. A few examples include: students reading fewer actual books in school, far less time being spent on social studies, science, arts education, or any other activity that does not fall within the realm of concepts-to-be-tested.

Read the rest and also check out Elisa's blog, two feet in.

• On the second of my two posts about Olen Burrage, Susan Klopfer posted an excerpt from her forthcoming book Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, due out on June 15. Susan prefaces her excerpt, saying, "Look away from Neshoba County and the "regular" klansmen. So many others were involved ..." I have actually linked to a similar excerpt (scroll down to "Further Reading"), which Susan had posted previously on her website, in order to make precisely her point, that others—including Senator James O. Eastland and Representative Prentiss Walker—are on the chain of responsibility for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Here's part of what Susan posted:

.... Ninety miles away from Neshoba County in Jackson, Sovereignty Commission director Johnston was looking at a possible direct link between Andrew Goodman and "communists." The name "Goodman" had attracted Senator Eastland’s interest, since Goodman had family ties to Pacifica Broadcasting, a progressive, alternative-broadcasting network founded in 1949 by pacifists.

Goodman’s father, Robert, was President of the Pacifica Foundation. One year prior to Andrew Goodman’s death, The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Senator Eastland, completed a three-year investigation of Pacifica’s programming, looking for "subversion."

In 1962, Pacifica station WBAI was the first station to publicly broadcast former FBI agent Jack Levine's exposé of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The program was followed by threats of arrests and bombings, as well as pressure from the FBI, the Justice Department, and the FCC. Also that year, Pacifica trained volunteers to travel into the South for coverage of the awakening Civil Rights Movement. The station also took a strong anti-Vietnam war stance, helping to prompt the investigations.

Sovereignty Commission documents in fact show that Eastland knew the names and backgrounds of all volunteer workers in advance of their arrival, including Goodman. Records show the senator requested this information from the Sovereignty Commission well before the opening of Freedom Summer.

On February 26, 1965, Director Johnston wrote a letter to newly elected Congressman Prentiss Walker, requesting that he "ask the HUAC for any information about the Pacifica Foundation of New York…. We have reason to believe this foundation also is subversive."

A good source on the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner is Susan's chapter on that story (scroll down past the web form), currently posted on her website.

Susan is now also keeping two new blogs: Civil Rights Books and Emmett Till. Civil Rights Books is intended as "a forum to share civil rights history in Mississippi." There is already quite a bit of interesting posted there. Susan's Emmett Till Blog promises to soon be a place to go to follow the developments in the new FBI investigation of Emmett Till's murder.

Photo by Peter Cunningham

The other day, I posted excerpts from Jonathan Tilove's article, by the above title. The article is an important piece of journalism, which reports that there are 2 million more Black women than Black men in the US, pointing to a major crisis in Black men's health. Over at Cynthia's Interests, I came across information about Black women's health that one would not expect after reading Tilove's article.

After Tilove runs through the factors that contribute to such a low proportion of Black men to Black women—among young men, high homicide and AIDS rates and among older men, cardiovascular disease and cancer—he adds that another reason for the disparity in numbers is that Black women's health is improving:

In the March/April issue of Health Affairs, Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general under former President Bill Clinton and now the interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, exposes the core of the problem: Between 1960 and 2000, the disparity between mortality rates for black and white women narrowed while the disparity between the rates for black and white men grew wider.

But Cynthia picked up an article by Kendra Lee from Alternet (via Cyrus) that should cause serious alarm about Black women's health, too. Lee reports on a study that found that

from 1991 to 2000 they discovered that more than 800,000 African Americans died during that decade because they didn't receive the same health care as their white counterparts.

Based on the study, Lee observes that

Black women are in the vanguard of those receiving inferior health care, with greater incidence of and mortality from nearly every major disease, including diabetes, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, hypertension, and some forms of cancer:

* Diabetes rates have tripled among African Americans over the past three decades. Nearly 12 percent of black women over 20 and 25 percent of those over 55 have this condition.

* Forty percent of black women have high blood pressure.

* Black women are 69 percent more likely to have heart disease and heart attacks, and they have a 70 percent greater chance of dying of heart disease.

* Black women accounted for 69 percent of new HIV diagnoses from 2000 to 2003 and have a rate of HIV/AIDS infection that is 18 times higher than that of white women.

* Although cancer is the second-leading cause of death for all women, black women have the greatest number of deaths from cancer of the breast, colon, pancreas, and stomach.

I guess that if things really have gotten better in Black women's health, things are still bad enough that the data cited by former Surgeon General Satcher should not make us complacent. Either that or there is something funny going on with one or the other of these studies. Is there somebody more knowledgeable about public health in the house?

One last thing: In my original post about Tilove's article my title made the ironic suggestion that Black men need to watch their weight and I then referenced discussion at Alas, A Blog about the much trumpeted obesity public health "crisis." Because readers may not be familiar with the arguments against viewing obesity as a dire health problem, and because Cynthia amplifies Kendra Lee's assertions that obesity is a major factor in Black women's health issues, I would like make sure you have the link to Amp's posts in the fat, fat and more fat category. As a teaser and to make the basic point, I leave you with this excerpt from his most recent post along these lines:

That the CDC “fat crisis” studies don’t adjust for the effect of age on mortality is enough, by itself, to justify throwing them into the garbage. However, there are other reasons to doubt the CDC’s high obesity death counts.

The original 300,000 statistic wasn’t based on weight at all ; former Surgeon General C Everett Koop simply misrepresented a study of deaths associated with unhealthy eating and inactivity as being a study of deaths caused by obesity. (Outside the world of anti-fat hysteria, this is called “lying.”).

In the years since, studies have tried to match Dr. Koop’s lie, using what the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine describe as “weak or incomplete data.” In addition to the flaws described in the Scientific American article quoted above, the CDC’s high-fat-death studies failed to account for confounding factors like socio-economic status, discrimination, eating habits, history of yo-yo dieting, body shape, and activity levels - factors that haven’t been accounted for even in Flegal’s better-designed study. Accounting for these factors could easily lead to a massive reduction of the “obesity death count.”

I hope that makes the point well enough, though that isn't even the half of it. The whole long post is well worth your time.

Ms. Faulkner: Then there was the investigation by the FBI and the arrests. Were you surprised at who was arrested or who was not arrested?

Rev. Collier: I was surprised at who wasn't arrested, but I wasn't surprised at who they arrested.

Ms. Faulkner: You think some others should have been arrested.

Rev. Collier: Many more. Olen Burrage, they found that on his place, and I've been reminiscing over that a long time. Why in the world didn't they do something with that guy? Now, they ought to have had him to tell something. He knew something. That was - I don't see how come the family can't sue the hell out of him. He's a rich man.

Ms. Faulkner: And he's still living there in Philadelphia.

Rev. Collier: Still living there.

Ms. Faulkner: And still prospering.

Rev. Collier: Prospering. . . .

(Reverend Clinton Collier, interviewed by Leesha Faulkner for the Mississippi Oral History Program of The University of Southern Mississippi, June 25, 1994.)

Reverend Clinton Collier was born on August 24, 1910 in rural Neshoba County. After completing the eighth grade, which was as high as black schools taught at that time, he went to Tougaloo College. The depression interrupted Collier's education and his teaching career began. He taught in Mississippi until 1940, and then moved to Washington, D.C. where he worked until he was drafted into the Navy in 1942. After two years of service, Collier went back to Washington, D.C. and then on to Detroit until returning to Mississippi in 1956. He returned to public school teaching and entered the United Methodist ministry. During the late 1950's and the 1960's Collier was closely associated with leaders of the civil rights movement and was very active on the state and local level.

As Philadelphia, Mississippi prepares for the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, scheduled to begin on June 13, those who are committed to justice should continue to ask, why only this one prosecution?

The following excerpts concern another one of the suspects in the triple murder case, Olen Burrage, on whose property the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were buried by the perpetrators.

Olen Burrage is still alive and still a resident of Philadelphia, Mississippi. --BG

excerpts from
We Are Not Afraid: The Mississippi Murder of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney by Seth Cagin and Phillip Dray

Compiled by the Arkansas Delta Peace And Justice Center

~

The owner of a local trucking company, Olen Burrage, was having a cattle pond dug on his property, five miles southwest of town on Highway 21. Burrage had hired Herman Tucker, one of his part-time drivers and the owner/operator of two Caterpillar dozers, to build the pond and the large dam that would restrain it. The Neshoba Klansman arranged for Billy Wayne Posey to arrive at midnight on the lane of the Burrage property with the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Once the bodies were placed in the center of the dam, fifteen or twenty feet down, Tucker would reseal it with one of bulldozers. When the pond filled with rainwater, the place where the bodies were stashed would simply become an innocuous part of the Neshoba landscape--a Klansman version of a Choctaw burial mound.

"So you wanted to come to Mississippi?" one of the murderers is reputed to have told the victims later that night. "Well, now we're gonna let you stay here. We're not even gonna run you out. We're gonna let you stay here with us." p. 55

~

Killen, as organizer of the Neshoba and Lauderdale County klaverns of the White Knights of Mississippi and point man for the conspiracy, was eager to return to Philadelphia as soon as he had collected enough men for the operation. There were "arrangements" to be made, he explained to the men at Akin's. Quickly he sketched for them the plan he had devised in collusion with Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price and Billy Wayne Posey, and possibly--to infer from the events that would transpire--Hop Barnett and Olen Burrage. Deputy Price would release Goatee [i.e. Schwerner] and the other two civil rights workers as soon as it got dark. Once the civil rights workers were turned loose and were alone out on the highway, they would be stopped by the a Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol car and turned over to the Klan. p. 336

~

Billy Wayne Posey was among those who attempted the Bonanza alibi, but in fact Posey had been far too busy that day to watch television. His role in the conspiracy was to arrange for the disposal of the victims' bodies, a grisly task easily as complex as setting them up to be done away with in the first place. After Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were arrested late on the afternoon of June 21, Posey met with Olen Burrage, who owned a trucking firm and several pieces of farm property west of Philadelphia, and Herman Tucker, a bulldozer operator who occasionally worked for Burrage. This meeting took place either at Burrage's garage, southwest of Philadelphia, or at the Phillips 66 station...

Posey's arrangement with Burrage to use a dam being built on Burrage's property as a burial site for the three civil rights workers' was probably not the result of brainstorm thinking by the conspirators. In all likelihood, Burrage's dam site had been previously scouted out by the Neshoba klavern for its potential as a secret grave, perhaps as early as mid-May, when Mickey Schwerner's incursions into Longdale were becoming known to the Klansmen. Mississippi FBI agent John Proctor claims to have learned from an informant that Burrage once told a roomful of Neshoba Klansmen discussing the impending invasion of civil rights workers, "Hell, I've got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them." Although the Meridian Klansmen had been instructed to leave Mickey Schwerner alone, the leaders of the Neshoba klavern had apparently been given Sam Bowers's approval to "eliminate" him if they caught him in Neshoba County. They may well have expected to have further opportunities to nab Schwerner on one of his visits to Longdale, and it is possible many elements of the conspiracy--the release from jail, the highway chase, and the secret burial--were loosely in place before June 21.

The previous summer, Burrage had consulted an agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service about joining a program under which landowners could obtain government funding for pond dams that met certain conservation requirements. Burrage's proposed dam met the program's specifications, but the approval of the funding was contingent upon periodic inspections of the construction site by agents from the Department of Agriculture. In May 1964, when Burrage finalized arrangements with Herman Tucker and authorized him to begin work on the dam, Burrage chose--for reason he never explained--to do so without participating in the government program. pp 340-342

~

With the civil rights workers' bodies in the hole, Posey signaled Tucker to start moving. The tractor ran fifteen minutes as Tucker bladed off the top of the dam so it would look asthough it had not been disturbed...

The eight Klansmen got into Barnette's car and the civil rights workers' station wagon for the short ride down highway 21 to Burrage's trucking garage. There the men replaced the license plates on Barnette's car, which had been remove earlier in Meridian, and Jordan was given all the gloves the men had worn and told to dispose of them. Tucker took a glass gallon jug and filled it with gasoline from one of Burrage's pumps, to use in setting fire to the station wagon. p 361

Youngest Students Most Likely to Be Expelled
Preschoolers' Self-Esteem at Risk, Study Says

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 17, 2005; Page A02

Preschools are expelling youngsters at three times the rate of public schools, according to a nationwide study by Yale researchers, prompting concerns that children are being set up for educational failure at a very young age.

The first nationwide study of expulsion rates in state-supported preschools, scheduled for release today, found that boys are being thrown out of preschool 4 1/2 times as frequently as girls. African American preschoolers are twice as likely to be expelled as white or Latino children, and five times as likely as Asian Americans. Twice as many 5-year-olds face the ultimate sanction for bad behavior as 4-year-olds.

"These 3- and 4-year-olds are barely out of diapers," said Walter Gilliam, an assistant professor of child psychiatry and psychology at Yale University and author of the report "Prekindergarteners Left Behind." He said the lack of support for troubled youngsters could lead parents to "view their child as an educational failure well before kindergarten."

Los Angeles-based child development expert Karen Hill-Scott said the study provided scientific validation for the impression conveyed by the popular television show "Supernanny" "that there are a lot of out-of-control children out there." But she and other experts put much of the blame for the high expulsion rate on teachers and administrators rather than on children.

Child-care experts said that many expulsions could be avoided with better teacher training and greater support from psychologists and social workers. They noted that most states spend less than $5,000 a year per preschooler, compared with average per-pupil spending of more than $9,500 for other students.

(via Steve Gilliard.)

The New York Times has a better article (via Prometheus 6) than the one I linked to last night. The Times article goes through the interesting history of the last copy of the transcript that had been known before the new one was found:

Investigators verified the transcript's authenticity, Mr. Garrity said, by comparing it with what people who had seen the trial remembered, and with a book written by Steve Whitaker, a scholar who had a copy until his basement flooded in the 1980's. . . .

Until yesterday, the last person known to have had a trial transcript in the Till case was Mr. Whitaker, now a researcher for the Florida Department of Health. As a graduate student in 1962, he was assigned to revisit the trial for his master's thesis in political science. He says the jurors, who received him openly because he had grown up in the county, told him they did not doubt that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam had been responsible for the killing.

Mr. Whitaker says he obtained his copy of the transcript, a thick sheaf of onionskin with a binder clip, from the lead defense lawyer, J. J. Breland, after interviewing him for hours over a fifth of Jack Daniel's.

"He just gave it to me," Mr. Whitaker said in an interview yesterday. "They looked on it as assisting me with my research. They never asked for it back."

Mr. Whitaker said he believed that the transcript had been ordered by the defense team and had never been an official court document.

The Times article is also good because it touches on two aspects of the American racist power structure that obstructs justice in those Civil Rights era murder cases which have actually been brought to trial. First reason mentioned is that the evidence keeps disappearing.

Scholars and filmmakers have long sought a copy of the transcript. But other important pieces of evidence have long been lost as well. For instance, the cotton gin fan that was attached to Emmett's neck with barbed wire to weigh down his body in the river disappeared when the county courthouse was remodeled.

Leesha Faulkner, a reporter who covers courts and government for The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, said old documents were often hard to find in Mississippi.

"If something didn't suit somebody, they took it home and put it in their attic and never said anything about it," Ms. Faulkner said. In the 1980's, she said, she was at an auction in Greenwich Village when she found government photos, and a state official's detailed account, of the 1962 rioting by whites in response to the earliest desegregation at the University of Mississippi. (Emphasis added.)

The second reason mentioned is a social atmosphere that supports white supremacism. In their closing arguments in the 1955 murder trial, the defense lawyers told the jurors that

even in the face of national press coverage, "every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men," and warning that the jurors' "forefathers would turn over in their graves if these boys were convicted on such evidence as this."

What protected the two murderers in 1955 (who later confessed the crime in Look magazine) and the others since implicated, who may be prosecuted in a new trial, is not unique to the South and it is not only in the past. Remember the 1985 police bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia that I mentioned yesterday? Note this detail from Professor Kim's historical essay:

The MOVE members denied that they had fired on the police and there was little forensic evidence available at trial because the city had the house destroyed right after the gunfight -- notwithstanding that it was a crime scene that would normally have been secured (emphasis added).

The evidence wasn't just stashed in somebody's southern attic: it was destroyed outright by the city authorities. Moving further out of the South and into the immediate present, David Neiwert has made this important observation in connection to a rash of hate crimes in Davis, California.

"You have to recognize that most hate criminals see themselves as acting on the secret wishes of the community," he said. "If they get a slap on the wrist, they see that as tacit approval. Inevitably, that escalates.

Social approval of homegrown domestic terrorism against people of color, gays and lesbians, Jews and Muslims might not be stated quite so directly in courtroom arguments, but it is still a big part of the problem, along with the pervasive attitude that if we ignore them, the extremists will just go away. This is unfortunate, especially now, when white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, homophobic extremism is on the rise (via David Neiwert) and its exponents are increasingly embraced by the mainstream.

WTOK, Channel 11 of Meridian, Mississippi, ran a short profile of Judge Marcus Gordon, the judge for the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, which is slated to start June 13. The print version on the news story has a link that allows you to view the news segment on your Windows Media Player.

Meridian, Mississippi is the city where James Chaney was born and where Michael Schwerner had been doing civil rights work for four months before Klansmen murdered the two young men, along with Andrew Goodman. Killen is accused of having been the ringleader of the murder plot.

Apparently, reporter Wade Phillips did a quick google search to gauge the opinions of Judge Gordon from people "on the fringes of both sides." They mention me as the counterpoint to the Nationalist Movement (sorry, no link: you can google 'em if you're really curious). Here's the passage where HungryBlues makes its television debut:

"I've always been impressed with his fairness and unbiased conduct of trial," said Stanley Dearman, the former editor of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper.

But not everyone agrees with Dearman. A quick Google search of his name brings up more than a hundred references. People on the fringes of both sides have less than kind things to say about Gordon.

The white supremacist Nationalist organization has called him the self-proclaimed embodiment of communist agitators, and branded him the re-incarnation of Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers killed in 1964.

On the other side, the liberal website, Hungry Blues, questioned how badly Gordon wanted to try the case after he delayed it when Killen was hurt in a tree cutting accident. That kind of criticism doesn't seem to faze the judge.

"I have a job to do and I recognize the law, and in doing so I think sometimes people don't understand fairness," Gordon said.

This is the post they refer to, complete with a quick camera pan of a computer monitor while my post is on screen (screenshot above).