One of the themes of this blog is the pressing need to look not only at who pulled the trigger in decades old Civil Rights Era murders but also to look more broadly at how institutions, people in positions of power and others in the broader society enabled or encouraged the countless crimes against African Americans and their allies.
Jerry Mitchell’s journalism does both.
In the video above, Jerry discusses with Stephen Colbert some of the murderers his reporting has helped to put away. In their discussion, Jerry also touches on the corruption that he exposed in the handling of the two 1964 Byron De La Beckwith trials that ended in mistrials. Jerry exposed that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was aiding Beckwith’s defense while the state was prosecuting him. The Sovereignty Commission was the spy agency established by the Mississippi State Legislature in 1956 to monitor and oppose civil rights activity. The Commission’s files were declassified in 1998 and are available online.
Informants told the FBI that Eastland met with Klan leaders and courted the Klan’s vote in his 1966 re-election race. The senator also talked with suspects in the Neshoba County case, including then-Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and defense lawyers, getting updates on the case.
In 1965, U.S. District Judge Harold Cox of Jackson – whose appointment to the bench Eastland engineered – threw out the indictments of all the suspects, except Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price.
An FBI memo said Eastland, who was a college buddy of Cox, “has been taking credit for the federal government dropping charges against those indicted in the Neshoba County slayings.”
According to the FBI, Rainey penned a letter saying, “I know for a fact that James O. Eastland helped prevent the trial of 16 other men.”
On March 28, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the indictments.
A “prominent local Klansman” in Meridian told the FBI that Eastland had appeared at a rally in Forest and invited Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers to speak with him: “Eastland stated that he would help the 17 defendants in the Neshoba County case and that he has been ‘pulling strings for them.’”
Jerry’s article also discusses soon to be published writings and statements by Killen, as well as other evidence, elaborating on the Klansman’s alleged ties to his US Senator.
Eastland grew up in Hillsboro and was buried in Eastern Cemetery in Forest.
Killen, who grew up in neighboring south Neshoba County, said he developed a relationship with Eastland after becoming friends with Leander Perez, an arch-segregationist in Louisiana.
Documents from the Eastland papers at the University of Mississippi show Eastland and Perez shared information on purported communists.
Ellis told the FBI that Killen said his work for Eastland was “to stop the communist Jews or their soldiers.”
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 majorblogs 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.
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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