I was honored to be interviewed by Jerry Mitchell for this article that came out in today’s Clarion Ledger.
A day after the FBI asked for the public’s assistance in solving 43 unpunished killings in Mississippi during the civil rights era, researchers say they know of at least 18 more slayings that haven’t been included.
“There definitely needs to be a bigger list,” said Margaret Burnham, professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.
On Thursday, the FBI highlighted 43 killings between 1955 and 1967 in Mississippi.
Burnham said research has uncovered 11 additional cases. She said one name the FBI released is misspelled – it should be the Rev. J.E. Evasingston, who was killed in 1955 in Tallahatchie.
Ben Greenberg of Boston, a journalist and blogger investigating the Feb. 28, 1964, killing of Clifton Walker, north of Woodville, said he’s run across seven names in his research that don’t appear on the FBI list and weren’t cited by Burnham’s research. “And there might be more,” he said.
Three of those – Lula Mae Anderson, Eli Jackson and Dennis Jones – were found dead in a car in December 1963, not far from Poor House Road, where Walker is believed to have been killed by Klansmen….
Surprisingly, all seven additional names that Greenberg found were either mentioned or referenced in the FBI file itself.
He has obtained a copy of the file of the Walker case, but some of the most important information has been redacted, such as the names of the two suspects recommended for arrest by the FBI, he said.
If the FBI is truly interested in solving these cases, the entire files should be released to the families and the public, he said.
He recalled sharing some of the FBI files with the Walker family – files the family had never seen.
“A full approach to justice involves more than just procedures in the courtroom,” he said. “It also involves as full accounting as possible of the truth in the community where the murders occurred.”
Related Reading
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 15, 2009 at 10:57 am
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has approved MS Governor Haley Barbour’s plan to divert $600 of Federal Community Development Block Grant funds from low-income housing recovery to a Port Expansion Plan in Gulfport.
In his letter to Gov. Haley Barbour, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said that although he’s concerned about using the housing money for the port project, congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds “allows me little discretion.”
“I’m sure that you share my concern that there may still be significant unmet needs for affordable housing, and I strongly encourage you to prioritize Gulf Coast housing as you move forward,” Jackson wrote….
The plan has drawn harsh criticism from several groups working on recovery efforts in the region who say housing is too scarce not to devote all possible resources to it.
Kimberly Miller, a policy analyst for Oxfam America, said the state’s long-term recovery committees that work with displaced families have 15,000 cases on their waiting lists, and a similar number of people are in temporary housing.
The state’s plan “doesn’t make any financial sense when you look at the number of people who haven’t gotten back into homes,” Miller said.
FEMA, in the meantime, is reneging on its payments to municipalities for emergency response and rebuilding costs.
Two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast, less than a fourth of the 10,833 public rebuilding projects are completed.
Many haven’t even broken ground.
And local officials are finding it harder to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie spent much of Tuesday in a meeting with FEMA accountants arguing over whether the federal government will help pay overtime costs incurred by his fire and police departments in the days and weeks after the storm.
“They are wanting to deobligate about half of that,” he said.
In regular language, Skellie explained FEMA is hedging on paying the city’s costs of more than $350,000 because the agency’s contract accountants are not satisfied with the time sheets kept by first responders immediately after Katrina hit.
“We were just trying to survive. I mean, my God,” Skellie said. “It’s these people who worked around the clock pulling bodies out. … They don’t want to pay for any of that because a person’s name doesn’t appear on a time sheet.”…
Since the storm, about $1.3 billion has been paid out to cover the costs of rebuilding to local governments, school systems and eligible nonprofits.
But as Mississippi approaches its third hurricane season since Katrina, many of the projects have not made it out of the planning stages. In all, 22 percent of Mississippi’s 10,833 public projects have been completed.
Together, Haley Barbour, HUD and FEMA are making sure that thousands of Mississippi hurricane survivors remain homeless, many of whom have no option but to live in poisonous, carcinogenic FEMA trailers.
House Democrats accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday of covering up the long-term health hazards – possibly including cancer – linked to formaldehyde in hurricane trailers.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a committee hearing Tuesday it is “unacceptable” FEMA did not begin testing formaldehyde levels in travel trailers and mobile homes until last month.
“Even more troubling is the recent discovery that FEMA directed the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to not investigate, or communicate, the health effects associated with prolonged exposure to formaldehyde,” said Thompson, of Mississippi’s 2nd District.
More than 43,000 trailers and mobile homes still are on the Gulf Coast housing victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some have been occupied for more than two years.
The House Committee on Science and Technology this week released e-mails from Christopher DeRosa, a CDC scientist analyzing test results on unoccupied trailers in 2006. The e-mails said FEMA repeatedly requested “we specify safe levels of exposure.”
“We should be very cautious about the use of the word ’safe’ in reference to formaldehyde,” De Rosa wrote. “Since it is a carcinogen, it is a matter of science policy that there is no ’safe’ level of exposure.”
In case you want some further reading:
By the way, do you know Clarence? This post is partly for him. Check out his podcast, The Truth and Poplitics.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 31, 2008 at 1:57 am
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that among hundreds of recently declassified intelligence documents from the 1950s was a 1950 proposal by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty….
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
The revelation was noted briefly by a couple of major blogs and discussed at some length by smintheus at DailyKos. All have been quick to note the parallels between Hoover’s attempt to suspend Habeas Corpus and the current travails of our fair and essential writ. Both the NY Times and smintheus emphasize that there is no evidence Hoover’s plan was approved.
Smintheus argues that horrible though it was that Truman created loyalty boards, it was to preempt
something even more abusive of civil liberties. Truman also feared that something truly evil might be stirred up by Hoover, whom he loathed. Truman told Clark Clifford on May 2, 1947 that he “wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo’”. Truman believed, rightly I think, that Hoover had assembled enough dirt on members of Congress that they would give in to almost any of Hoover’s demands. In fact within hours of taking the oath of office in 1945, the President had his eye on the manipulative Hoover (Hoover had sent over to the White House a young FBI agent from Truman’s home town, to chat the new President up).
So the background to this notorious decision from 1947 illustrates that Truman, far from indifferent to the Bill of Rights, instead believed that he was fighting as best he could on its behalf. His profound skepticism of the FBI Director was both a personal as well as a politically savvy judgment. For all his faults (including cronyism, occasional ineptitude, stubbornness), Truman was at least a very sharp, self-reflective, and principled man. Such a person has the potential to rise above his times.
The impression one gets from reading the Times and smintheus is that though those were dark times, we averted something potentially much worse, in no small part because of Truman’s leadership.
Smintheus may be correct about Truman’s motive and strategy, but I don’t think halting mass detentions actually ameliorates the dangerousness of Hoover’s activities. Then and now, the news that the mass detentions did not occur is something of a red herring.
Actually, Hoover’s proposed suspension of Habeas Corpus and mass detentions is not news. The document reported on in the NY Times is new, but the plans have been known since The Church Committee’s famous 1976 Congressional report on “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
Mass detentions—as well as illegal surveillance practices by the NSA—should be vigorously opposed, of course. But the fundamental problem is data mining as an approach to intelligence. Data mining is the basis for mass detentions and the emphasis on data mining as a method leads to illegal surveillance activities.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2007 at 2:00 am
Exciting developments in the notorious case of the 1964 murders of the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Jerry Mitchell reports in the Clarion Ledger:
Authorities should reopen the Klan’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers because of newly discovered evidence, family members say.
“Without a doubt,” said Ben Chaney of New York City, a Meridian native whose brother was among those slain. “There is enough to warrant the state attorney general to reopen the case and begin to pursue other people who committed this crime.”
Six people are still alive who have been accused of playing a part in the June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, which led to a massive FBI investigation code-named Mississippi Burning. The probe later was depicted in the 1988 fictional film of the same name.
The Clarion-Ledger has found three potential new witnesses in the case, including a former FBI agent who said reputed Klansman Billy Wayne Posey admitted he was a guard for the Klan’s killing party.
Upon hearing about the possible testimony, Ben Chaney said he believed this was enough evidence to put the case in front of a grand jury again, particularly since the 2005 Neshoba County grand jury came within one vote of indicting Posey.
He encouraged Attorney General Jim Hood to ask for the FBI’s help in investigating the case. “By doing so, I think he can get indictments against the people who are still alive,” he said.
Authorities say they’re interested in what the newspaper has found.
“Any new evidence we will certainly follow it up,” said Hood, whose office investigated the case, leading to the 2005 conviction of Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, now serving 60 years in prison for manslaughter.
The Clarion Ledger has also published several related article today:
The Ledger has also released some of realated documents:
I am on deadline for an article on another Civil Rights Era murder case in Mississippi and do not have time to comment on this development just yet. See my past coverage of the Neshoba Murders case (aka Mississippi Burning) for more background.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 2, 2007 at 12:02 pm
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