Civil Rights Stories .. historias secretas de derechos civiles

2013-11-12T13:17:00.004-06:00

A different take on the JFK assassination - The Plan: a Novel.

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2013-11-08T09:06:00.000-06:00

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Film Maker Still Asking Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King; Story Remains Filled With Intrigue

2013-04-02T22:58:00.001-05:00

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The affair of Jules Rocco Kimble illustrates how government pressure has induced potential witnesses to slip from Garrison's grasp. A self-avowed member of the Ku Klux Klan who got in trouble over bombings in Baton Rouge, Kimble approached the DA's men in the apparent hope of gaining mitigation. He said that on the day after David Ferrie died, he drove a top KKK official, Jack Helm, to Ferrie's apartment. Helm came out with a satchel crammed with papers, which he placed in a bank safe deposit box. Kimble also divulged that in 1962, he had flown to Montreal with Ferrie on what was purported to be Minutemen business. He promised the DA's investigators that he would gather further information and report back.

He didn't come through. Shortly afterward, he phoned his wife from Atlanta, saying he had met a CIA contact. "They'll never get me back to New Orleans," he vowed. A few days after that, he called from Montreal. For reasons unknown, Kimble backtracked to Tampa Florida, where he was arrested by local police. Interviewed by Garrison's men, he said that he had once worked special assigments for the CIA, and in verification named his Agency contacts and the
box number of the Lafayette Street station they assigned him. He averred that he had contacted the CIA after Walter Sheridan, a close friend of the Kennedy family, had counseled him to say nothing to the DA and go to Canada..sk)

The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

by John Edginton and John Sergeant

{Editors' Note: In April 1988, John Edginton, a British

independent film maker, began an inquiry into the circumstances

surrounding the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Edginton had

just completed a film about King's life ("Promised Land") and was

intrigued by comments by King's friend, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy,

that King was murdered by government forces. By January 1989,

Edginton had gathered enough evidence disputing the official

verdict that BBC Television agreed to fund a documentary: "Who

Killed Martin Luther King?" John Sergeant joined the team as

associate producer. The film aired in England in September 1989

and on cable television in this country in March 1990. The

following article is derived from information gathered in their

investigation and raises questions about government complicity in

the assassination of the civil rights leader.}

Introduction

Equivocation, uncertainty, and doubt have never been fully

dispelled with respect to the untimely death of Martin Luther

King Jr. in 1968. This could be put down in part to the intensity

of public suspicion over the killing of President John F.

Kennedy. But suspicions linger primarily because of the

inherently unconvincing nature of the official version of the

events.

In an apparently {bona fide} effort to lay these ghosts to rest,

the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations

(HSCA) concluded an investigation in 1979 which reaffirmed the

guilt of convicted assassin James Earl Ray but conceded the

probable existence of a conspiracy behind him - headed by a group

of St. Louis businessmen with ties to organized crime. It

referred its leads to the Justice Department which quietly closed

the case in 1983.

However, new revelations clearly demand official answers. The

case should now be reopened and the whole 22-year-saga of James

Earl Ray's conviction and imprisonment should now be rigorously

reviewed.

The first important new revelation involves Jules Ron Kimble, a

convicted murderer serving time in a federal prison in Oklahoma.

In a recent interview, Kimble admitted being intimately involved

in a widespread conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of

King. He said that this conspiracy involved agents of the FBI and

the CIA, elements of the "mob," as well as Ray. In the late

1970s, investigators of the HSCA interviewed Kimble but,

according to their report, he denied any knowledge of the murder.

Now, for the first time, Kimble publicly admits participating in

the assassination. [1. Kimble made this admission while being

interviewed for the film documentary {Who Killed Martin Luther

King?} The interview took place at the El Reno Federal

Penitentiary, El Reno, Oklahoma, in June 1989.]

Kimble, a shadowy figure with ties to the U.S. intelligence

community and organized crime, corroborates much of Ray's self-

serving story. He alleges that Ray, though involved in the plot,

did not shoot King and was in fact set up to take the fall for

the assassination. [2. {Ibid}.]

Jules Kimble, in implicating the mob and CIA in the

assassination, claims to have introduced Ray to a CIA identities

specialist in Montreal, Canada, from whom Ray gained four

principal aliases. In August 1989, a former CIA agent serving in

Canada around the time of the King assassination, confirmed that

the CIA did indeed have such a false identities specialist

operating out of Montreal in the late 1960s. [3. Telephone

interview with ex-CIA agent who requests anonymity, August 1989;

in-person interview in December 1989.]

An investigation by Dr. Philip Melanson revealed that the

identities that Ray adopted during the period of the

assassination were far more elaborate than previously realized.

Melanson concluded that in at least one instance, Ray's alias

could only reasonably have derived from a top secret security

file accessible only to military and intelligence agencies. [4.

See Philip Melanson, {The Murkin Conspiracy} (New York: Praeger,

1989).]

Finally, Ray who has been protesting his innocence for over 20

years, has always claimed that he was set up for the

assassination by a mysterious "handler" called Raoul whom he had

first encountered in Montreal nine months before. The former CIA

agent who served in Canada named the agency's Montreal identities

specialist at the time as Raoul Maora. [5. {Op. cit.}, n. 3.]

Jules Ron Kimble cannot be dismissed out-of-hand. For a start he

has a long record of mob activity and violence, often with

political overtones. He is currently serving a double life

sentence in El Reno, Oklahoma, for two murders he admits were

political. He has proven links to the Louisiana mob empire of

Carlos Marcello (frequently accused of involvement in political

assassination) and admits to having done mob-related work in New

Orleans, Montreal, and Memphis during the late sixties - three

key cities in Ray's odyssey. [6. A July 1989 phone interview with

a Baton Rouge police detective confirmed Kimble's close ties to

organized crime. State investigator Joe Oster also investigated

Kimble because of allegations of Kimble's involvement in the

murder of union leader Victor Busie. In this investigation, Oster

found that Kimble had ties to the Ku Klux Klan and organized

crime.]

Investigative records from the period confirm Kimble to have been

involved with the underworld and the KKK, to have been in

Montreal in the summer of 1967, and to have been called in for

questioning in connection with the Kennedy assassination by then-

New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison. During this

questioning, Kimble admitted being linked to the local FBI and

CIA and Garrison accepted this admission as true. [7. Statement

taken from Jules Kimble by New Orleans District Attorney Jim

Garrison on October 10, 1967.]

Like his contemporary, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jules Kimble had been

living in Crescent City, California during the early 1960s and

was associating with gangsters, segregationists, the FBI and, he

forcefully asserts, the CIA. He is known to have been in contact

with David Ferrie, the dead CIA flier who has been repeatedly

implicated in the assassination of John Kennedy. [8. {Ibid}.]

Most astonishingly, Jules Ron Kimble is not dismissed out-of-hand

by James Earl Ray. When Ray was recently confronted with the

alleged connection, he said that Kimble may have been one of two

mysterious figures he saw on the afternoon of the assassination

but he wasn't sure. Ray then asked if Kimble was in prison (which

he was) but rejected Kimble's allegations about their connection

as some sort of "government disinformation." [9. Interview with

James Earl Ray, June 1989, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary,

Tennessee.]

Although James Earl Ray, now 60, stands convicted of shooting

Martin Luther King, most observers agree the truth of what really

happened has never been established. New evidence from Kimble,

compounded with other recent revelations, establish that the

issue is not whether government operatives were involved in the

King assassination but rather how high up the chain of command

the conspiracy ran.

The Lone Gunman

In late March 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to

Memphis to support the city's striking sanitation workers who

were predominantly black. He led a march of 6000 protesters which

disintegrated into violence between police and demonstrators,

giving conservative forces the opportunity to scorn King's

doctrine of nonviolent political struggle. Determined to prove

the sanitation workers' protest could be peaceful, King returned

to Memphis on April 3rd to lead a second march.

On April 4, a few minutes before 6 p.m., Dr. King walked out on

the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel.

He was scheduled to attend a dinner at the local Reverend Billy

Kyles's house and was bantering with his chauffeur down in the

parking lot below. At 6:01 p.m. there was a shot. A high-velocity

dum-dum bullet hit Dr. King in the neck, severing his spinal

column and leaving a massive exit hole. One hour later, in St.

Joseph's Hospital in Memphis, King died.

Public suspicions over the investigation of Dr. King's death

surfaced almost immediately. In 1968 there was already a growing

body of opinion at odds with the official explanation that Lee

Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy. In

Memphis, King too had been shot with a high-velocity rifle,

ostensibly from a window. Moreover, like Dallas, the

assassination had taken place under the noses of the authorities

in broad daylight.

Soon after his murder, questions surrounding the assassination of

King began to emerge. How had so many police arrived so quickly

on the scene - within moments of the shot being fired - yet

failed to spot the assassin either arriving or departing? Who, in

an apparent attempt to distract police radio control, had

broadcast a hoax car chase involving a Mustang on citizens band

radio less than half an hour after the police radio announced the

suspect car to be a white Mustang? If, as the police claimed, the

shot had come from the bathroom window, why did at least three

people claim to have seen a gunman in the bushes across the

street?

The official scenario of how Ray shot King is as follows: Ray was

supposed to have checked into a rooming house on Main Street, the

back of which faces the Lorraine Motel; established a sniper's

post in the bathroom; shot Martin Luther King; panicked and

dropped his belongings on the sidewalk as he fled the rooming

house, leaving the rifle to be discovered with his fingerprints

on it; and then raced out of Memphis in a white Mustang.

Suspicions of conspiracy in the murder of King did not diminish

with the capture of Ray, though officials continued to maintain

he was a lone assassin. On the contrary, expectations of major

revelations at Ray's forthcoming trial were very high. But these

expectations were never gratified. The public was kept ignorant

of many anomalies and peculiarities in the case, some of which

were even ignored by investigators.

The most prominent of these inconsistencies in the state's case

was the self-contradictory and inconsistent testimony of its

chief witness, Charlie Stephens. Stephens, who the state claims

saw Ray emerging from the bathroom, did not recognize Ray in a

photo he was shown shortly after the assassination. The state

also failed to mention that Stephens was an alcoholic and was

drunk the afternoon of the King murder.

Why Did Ray Plead Guilty?

It has never been established where the idea of Ray's guilty plea

originated but certain facts stand out. Ray's lawyers in the

original trial were Hugh Stanton Sr., the Shelby County Public

Defender and Percy Foreman. It is interesting to note that

earlier Stanton had acted as lawyer to Charlie Stephens - the

prosecution's chief witness. No one in the judicial system,

however, saw his acting as Ray's attorney as a conflict of

interest.

In December 1967, Foreman proposed to prosecutor Phil Canale that

Ray could be convinced to plead guilty in exchange for a slightly

reduced sentence and no death penalty. Canale was favorable to

the idea and consulted with the King family lawyer, Harry Wachtel

(former Governor of Tennessee), officials at the Justice

Department, and finally the Attorney General. Everyone agreed

that the guilty plea was a splendid idea. It was Foreman's job to

convince Ray. [10. Interview with Phil Canale, Memphis,

Tennessee, June 1989; interview with Dr. William Pepper, Memphis,

Tennessee, June 1989.]

Ray would have none of it. And it took more than two months for

him to cave in, despite all manner of tactics employed to

pressure him and his family into agreeing. Foreman even assured

Ray in a letter that there was a 100% chance he would be found

guilty and a 99% chance of the electric chair (even though the

state's case was very weak and no one had gone to the chair in

Tennessee in more than a decade). Ray also discovered he could

not change his lawyer again and that Foreman was doing nothing to

develop a defense. Finally Ray somehow believed that if he

pleaded guilty he could dismiss Foreman, demand a new lawyer, and

receive a new trial. [11. {Ibid}.]

The so-called trial took place suddenly on March 10, 1968 and

following a lengthy list of charges the state would have tried to

prove, Ray pleaded guilty as arranged and was sentenced to 99

years. He immediately petitioned for a new trial, which was

denied, and has been petitioning on every conceivable ground ever

since, also to no avail.

In 1974, however, Ray succeeded in prying from the state an

evidentiary hearing. The hearing was to determine whether Ray had

enough grounds for a new trial based on his being negligently

represented by attorney Percy Foreman. Harold Weisberg, a veteran

of the John Kennedy case and a writer, was taken on as an

investigator on Ray's legal team.

Major Inconsistencies in the State's Evidence

Weisberg's investigation was a searching and vigorous one.

Although he differs with many experts in his conclusions - he

believes Ray to be totally innocent, a fall guy or "patsy" - many

of his arguments about the weakness of the official case and the

existence of a conspiracy remain persuasive to this day. Through

his relentless pursuit of FBI documentation under the Freedom of

Information Act, Weisberg found many documents which revealed

numerous irregularities in the Bureau's investigation. Among

other inconsistencies, the state's examination of the alleged

murder weapon is very revealing.

An internal FBI report on the bullet which killed King said that

it was too mangled to compare against the rifle that allegedly

fired it. The report states that "... its deformation and absence

of clear cut marks precluded a positive determination." Yet the

evidence presented at Ray's "trial" gave the impression that the

"death slug" was proven to have been fired from the rifle. [12.

Internal FBI ballistics report, released under the Freedom of

Information Act, dated April 17, 1968.]

Weisberg consulted with a ballistics expert who examined the

bullet and concluded that there were indeed sufficient markings

on it to make test-fire comparisons. The ballistics expert is

adamant about the fact the FBI could and should have carried out

such tests. [13. Herbert McDonnell, the ballistics expert who

made this claim, is regarded as a leading authority. He presented

these views in an interview conducted June 1989, Memphis,

Tennessee.]

One of Weisberg's most powerful arguments concerns the crime

scene itself. How, he wonders, did the assassin, who would have

had to stand in a bathtub to fire at King, manage to take a

single shot, run from the bathroom into the bedroom, bundle up

the rifle and a bizarre collection of personal belongings into a

blanket (ensuring that the belongings but not the bathroom or the

bedroom had his fingerprints on them), run the length of the

rooming house, down a flight of stairs, dump the bundle in the

street, walk calmly to his waiting Mustang and drive away within

the one to two minutes it took uniformed officers to reach the

same location?

Official records as to precisely what took place on the street

outside the rooming house - Main Street, one block west of the

motel - in those critical minutes, are astonishingly chaotic.

At Ray's trial in 1969, testimony was given by Inspector N.E.

Zachary of the Memphis Police Department that he found the rifle

and the bundle first. By the time of the 1974 evidentiary

hearings (after various books had researched the question), the

state conceded that another officer, Sheriff's Deputy Bud

Ghormley was first to discover the bundle.

Yet Ghormley, in turn, has been contradicted by Sheriff's Deputy

Vernon Dollahite. Dollahite, now chief of detectives, insisted

that he was the first onto Main Street and first to see the

bundle. Dollahite has been consistent in his story from the

beginning. After one of his early FBI interviews, they calculated

that the time he took from the shot being fired to his arrival on

Main Street was 1 minute 57 seconds.

The extraordinary factor in Dollahite's testimony is that though

alert for anything unusual as he raced around the corner onto

Main Street, he not only missed the Mustang pulling away, he did

not even see the bundle with the rifle in it. Only after he had

entered Jim's Grill beneath the rooming house, told everyone to

stay put, and come out again, did he spot it lying in a doorway a

few yards away. He and the FBI agreed that whomever was about to

dump the bundle had probably seen him coming, hidden behind the

staircase door until he had gone into the grill, then run onto

the street throwing down the bundle while Deputy Dollahite was

inside.

There is an obvious problem with this scenario. How could Ray run

out of the doorway, throw down the incriminating bundle, and then

manage to climb into a white Mustang and drive off unnoticed

within the seconds it took Dollahite to emerge from Jim's Grill

just feet away?

The judge at the evidentiary hearing took more than a year to

conclude that Ray had no grounds for a retrial. The defendant's

guilt or innocence was immaterial to the issue at hand, he said.

Spying on King

By 1977, with the revelations by the Church Committee of major

abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, public opinion about the

political assassinations of the 1960s had reached such heights

that Congress was forced into forming the House Select Committee

on Assassinations to investigate the murders of John F. Kennedy

and Martin Luther King Jr.

Beset with political problems and threats to its funding, the

HSCA nonetheless did manage to address, if inconclusively and

frequently inadequately, the majority of the issues and points

raised by critics of the official story in the King case. Its

final report dated March 29, 1979 concluded that James Earl Ray

was indeed guilty of killing Martin Luther King Jr. but there had

been co-conspirators after all. An informant's report in the

FBI's St. Louis office, previously overlooked, led to the

discovery that a $50,000 bounty for the death of Martin Luther

King Jr. had been offered in that city in 1967. [14. Final Report

of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on

Assassination (hereafter referred to as the {HSCA Report}) (New

York: Bantam, 1979).]

However, blaming the King assassination on a conspiracy of St.

Louis organized crime figures, with Ray acting as the killer,

leaves many disturbing questions unanswered. One of these

questions is, how could Ray simply walk into a predominantly

black section of Memphis teeming with police, informants, and

undercover agents, shoot King and then leave unmolested? The

extent of the police surveillance on King was remarkable and the

notion that Ray shot King and escaped undetected is even more

remarkable. Recently, the true nature and extraordinary extent of

the official presence in Memphis in April 1968 became clear.

Retired Memphis police officer Sam Evans confirmed that King's

chauffeur and the manager of the Lorraine Motel were paid police

informants. It is also known that Marrell McCoullough, one of the

first to reach King's fallen body, although ostensibly a member

of the radical black group, the Invaders, was in fact an

undercover agent of the Memphis Police Department. [15. This was

not revealed by investigators in 1968 but was acknowledged by the

HSCA after writers like Mark Lane and Dick Gregory had drawn

attention to it. See Mark Lane and Dick Gregory, {Codename Zorro:

The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.} (New York: Pocketbooks,

1977).

The so-called Intelligence Unit of the Memphis Police Department

(MPD) had been planting bugs and agents at all the strategy

meetings of the sanitation workers and the Invaders.

Nevertheless, they continue to deny having had any source, human

or electronic, at the heart of the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC) (the group King headed) that day. A senior

police officer claimed that military intelligence and the U.S.

Secret Service had also deployed agents throughout Memphis. [16.

Interview with investigative journalist Wayne Chastin in June

1989.]

It is now known that a member of the SCLC and leaders of the

local NAACP were in the pay of the FBI. And another figure close

to the SCLC - Jay Richard Kennedy - had been reporting his fears

of communist control over King to the CIA. [17. This information

was revealed in documents released under the Freedom of

Information Act and published by David Garrow in {The FBI and

Martin Luther King, Jr.} (New York: Penguin, 1983). It was also

discussed by Kennedy for the first time on camera in an interview

conducted in June 1989.]

Despite the presence of numerous people engaged in the

surveillance of King, apparently not one of them spotted the

assassin arriving, shooting Dr. King, or escaping the scene.

Given that the Memphis Police Department had in the past provided

extensive security for Dr. King on previous visits and was aware

of the vulnerability of the Lorraine Motel, it seems incredible

that a contingent of police bodyguards assigned to King on his

arrival should have been removed the day of the shooting,

apparently without the knowledge of the police chief, Frank

Holloman.

Just two hours before the assassination the MPD's patrolling "TAC

Units," each comprising three cars, were pulled back five blocks

from the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Police chief Holloman

claimed that he did not know of that decision until afterwards.

Inspector Sam Evans, who was in charge of the units, denied that

they were pulled back, even though it is now an acknowledged

matter of public record. [18. This point of fact was established

in the HSCA investigation. However, when interviewed in June

1989, Sam Evans continued to deny it.]

Furthermore, immediately after the shooting, no "All Points

Bulletin" was issued which might have ensured that the major

escape routes out of Memphis were sealed. No satisfactory

explanation has ever been provided for that failure.

In another bizarre incident, on the day of the assassination, an

erroneous message was delivered by a Secret Service agent to the

Memphis Police headquarters stating that there had been a death

threat against a black police detective. The detective, Ed

Redditt, was stationed at a surveillance post next to the

Lorraine Motel. Shortly after the first message, a corrected

message arrived saying that the threat was a hoax but the police

intelligence officer who received it nevertheless, went to where

Detective Redditt was stationed and ordered him to go home. This

was two hours before the assassination. Why did the intelligence

officer send Redditt home even though he knew the threat to be

false? When we approached the officer, who has now left the

police force, he refused to be interviewed. [19. See G. Frank,

{An American Death} (New York: Doubleday, 1972).]

Some of these circumstances are explained by the police as a

series of coincidences, errors, and oversights. Some are not

explained at all. While the HSCA's final report fell short of

accusing the police of complicity in the assassination, it

lambasted the Memphis Police Department for incompetence and

latent racism.

Perhaps the HSCA's final conclusion would have been different if

it had obtained undoctored intelligence reports from the Memphis

Police Department. While doing research for his book "The Murkin

Conspiracy," Philip Melanson, obtained an MPD intelligence report

regarding the King assassination. When he compared it to the same

report published by the HSCA, he found that all the footnotes and

most of the references to undercover police agents in Memphis had

been deleted from the HSCA version. Numerous paragraphs were

missing and certain sentences were rewritten to play up the

violent nature of Memphis civil rights activists and strikers.

[20. {Op. cit.}, n. 4, p. 80.] Why didn't the HSCA get the

originals? When confronted with this discrepancy, Representative

Louis Stokes (Dem.-Ohio), the former Chair of the HSCA, admitted

that he did not know that the Memphis Police Department had

provided the Committee with altered documents. [21. Interview

with Representative Louis Stokes, Washington, D.C., June 1989.]

The Role of the FBI

It is also enlightening to look at FBI actions both prior to and

after the King assassination. Former Atlanta FBI agent Arthur

Murtagh has given some indication of the prevailing mood at the

Bureau in King's home city.

Murtagh related in an interview that "Me and a colleague were

checking out for the day when the news came over the radio that

Dr. King had been shot. My colleague leapt up, clapped his hands

and said `Goddamn, we got him! We finally got him.'" When asked

if he was sure of this statement Murtagh was adamant that his

colleague said "we," not "they." [22. Interview with Arthur

Murtagh, June 1989.]

For years, through its COINTELPRO operations, the FBI had been

spying on, bugging, falsifying letters, and sowing discontent

among the leadership of the SCLC in an attempt to discredit and

"neutralize" Dr. King. [23. See Garrow, {op. cit.}, n. 17; also

see HSCA report.]

Suddenly, after the King assassination, the FBI began what was

called the greatest, most expensive inquiry in Bureau history -

the hunt for King's killer. All the technical and human resources

of Hoover's FBI focused on the bundle of evidence conveniently

left at the crime scene - a bundle which only pointed to one man

- Eric Galt, a.k.a. John Willard, a.k.a. Paul Bridgman, a.k.a.

George Sneyd, whose real name is James Earl Ray. At the same

time, white racist groups braced themselves for an FBI assault,

but to their astonishment no one asked them any questions. "It

was strange," recalled white supremacist J.B. Stoner, "[It was]

almost as if they knew they didn't have to look this way." [24.

Interview with J.B. Stoner, Atlanta Georgia, April 1989.]

The HSCA, like the Justice Department which had already conducted

an investigation into the FBI's handling of the King

assassination, found no evidence of a coverup. In the end, the

Committee did conclude that the Bureau had contributed to a moral

climate conducive to the murder of Dr. King, but it stopped short

of accusing the Bureau of actual involvement in the killing. [25.

{Op. cit.}, n. 14.]

Evidence nonetheless exists suggesting that elements within the

FBI may have played a significant role in the political

assassination. Consider, for instance, Myron Billett's story.

In early 1968, Myron Billett was the trusted chauffeur of Mafia

chief Sam Giancana. Giancana asked Billett to drive him, and

fellow mobster Carlos Gambino, to a meeting at a motel in upstate

New York. Other major Mafia figures from New York were there as

well as three men who were introduced as representatives from the

CIA and FBI. There were a number of subjects on the agenda,

including Castro's Cuba. [26. Interview with Myron Billett,

Columbus Ohio, June 1989.]

According to Billett, one of the government agents offered the

mobsters a million dollars for the assassination of Martin Luther

King Jr. Billett stated that Sam Giancana replied, "Hell no, not

after you screwed up the Kennedy deal like that." As far as

Billett knows, no one took up the offer.

Billett relayed this information in an interview conducted just

weeks before he died of emphysema. Given his condition, there

appears to be no particular reason for him to lie. While his

allegations are mentioned in the HSCA's final report, it makes no

judgement as to their validity - the HSCA report simply states

that is was unable to corroborate his story.

There is another instance in which FBI agents were heard

discussing bounties and the recruitment of professionals to kill

King. In September 1965, Clifton Baird, a Louisville, Kentucky

policeman was informed by fellow officer Arlie Blair of a

$500,000 offer to kill Dr. King. Louisville was the home of

King's brother, the Reverend A.D. King. Baird said he overheard

other police officers and several FBI officers discussing the

contract. The next day, Baird tape-recorded Blair referring to

the contract again. Later, the HSCA heard the tape and verified

its authenticity. [27. {Op. cit.}, n. 14.]

FBI agent William Duncan, liaison with the Louisville Police,

admitted that the discussion had taken place and named two other

agents who would confirm it. But he also claimed the offer was

initiated as a joke by police Sergeant William Baker. Both of the

other FBI agents denied any knowledge of the conversation and

Baker had died. The HSCA ran out of leads. [28. {Ibid.}]

There are also witnesses afraid to discuss what really happened

on the day of the assassination due to continuing harassment and

intimidation. For example, ever since a black Tennessee grocery

store owner named John McFerren first told his story, he has been

threatened, burgled, beaten up, and shot at. Now he is very

reluctant to tell it again.

On the afternoon of the assassination, McFerren was at a Memphis

produce store when he overheard the store's manager say on the

phone "Get him on the balcony, you can pick up the money from my

brother in New Orleans and don't call me here again." The man on

the phone was Frank Liberto. His brother, Sal, who lived in New

Orleans, was associated with Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello. As

incredible as it seems, the FBI did not pursue McFerren's

allegation after they initially questioned Liberto and he denied

it. [29. Interview with John McFerren, Memphis, Tennessee, June

1989. It should be noted that because McFerren is terrified of

retribution, he refuses to be interviewed on camera.]

These connections, and other evidence that members of the Mob

were involved in the assassination, were discovered by

investigative reporter Bill Sartor. While doing research for a

book, Sartor had gone undercover and infiltrated the peripheries

of both the Memphis and the New Orleans Mafia. Sartor died

mysteriously in Texas as he was completing his first draft and

two autopsies failed to reveal the cause of death.

There are other Memphis locals, particularly in the vicinity of

the Lorraine Motel and Jim's Grill, who are still afraid to talk

or who have suddenly changed their original stories. At least one

of them is still visited from time to time by a man reminding him

to stay silent. There is also the allegation that someone posing

as an advance security person appeared at the Lorraine Motel two

days before the assassination and ordered Dr. King's room changed

from the ground floor to the first. Finally there was the known

presence in Memphis on the day of the assassination as well as a

week after, of a notorious anti-Castro mercenary and CIA contract

employee. Years later, when questioned about why he was in

Memphis on the day of the assassination, he admitted "it was my

business to be there."

The CIA and False Identities

It is not disputed that the CIA took a very active interest in

Martin Luther King Jr. Documents released under the Freedom of

Information Act reveal an extensive and ongoing CIA scrutiny of

the thoughts, actions, and associates of the civil rights leader

throughout the 1960s. One of those reporting back to the CIA was

Jay R. Kennedy, a writer and broadcaster prominent in the civil

rights movement. Kennedy fervently believed that King's

opposition to the war in Vietnam was orchestrated by Peking-line

communist agents.

There are other compelling questions about the complicity of the

CIA in the King assassination. For example, although James Earl

Ray never visited Toronto before April 1968, he used four

identities belonging to individuals living within a few miles of

each other in that city. Each of the four bears a rough physical

resemblance to Ray. Of these the most elaborate alias was that of

Eric Galt, a name Ray used extensively through the period before

the assassination. Only on April 4th, the day of the

assassination, did he abandon Galt's name and begin to use the

other three. [30. Interview with Ray, {op. cit.}, n. 9.]

The Galt alias was not merely the result of a fraudulently

obtained birth certificate - it was the wholesale usurping of the

real Eric Galt's history and physical identity. Evidence shows

that James Earl Ray had travelled in the same U.S. cities as the

Canadian Eric Galt, had access to Galt's signature, and even

inquired into emigrating to southern Africa - a place where Eric

Galt had relatives. [31. See William Bradford Huie, {He Slew the

Dragon} (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970).] Moreover Ray has

scars on his forehead and his hand, as does the real Eric Galt.

Two months before the assassination Ray had plastic surgery on

his nose. Galt revealed that he, too, had had plastic surgery on

his nose.

Eric Galt is, moreover, an expert marksman.

The question arises: How could Ray or his co-conspirators acquire

such a detailed profile of this alter ego? According to Eric

Galt, there is only one place where all the pertinent information

is collected together - his highly classified security clearance

file in the Union Carbide factory in Toronto, where, in the mid-

1960s, he was working on a top secret U.S. defense project. [32.

Interview with Eric Galt, Toronto Canada, June 1989.]

Fletcher Prouty, a former Pentagon colonel and author of "The

Secret Team," was responsible for providing military support for

CIA covert operations in the early 1960s. Prouty finds these

revelations highly significant: [33. Interview with Fletcher

Prouty, Alexandria, Va, June 1989.] "The Royal Canadian Mounted

Police (RCMP) [which at that time included the Canadian

equivalent of the CIA] would have compiled this file and besides

them and Union Carbide, the only people with access to it would

have been U.S. intelligence."

The question of how Ray came to acquire these identities provided

the original link to Jules Ron Kimble, the man who has confessed

to us that he aided Ray in the assassination.

Who is Raoul?

Ray claims that the mysterious "Raoul" hired him to carry out

assignments in Montreal in late July 1967. This sparked an

interest in {Toronto Star} reporter Andre Salwyn, who sought

corroboration to this claim after Ray's arrest. Salwyn conducted

an exhaustive search of the neighborhood in which Ray had

allegedly been seen drinking with an American stranger. He found

that there had indeed been a man with similar characteristics to

Ray's description of Raoul living there at different times during

the previous year. He was known as Jules "Ricco" Kimble and was

said by his girlfriend to have had a car with rifles in the trunk

and a radio tuned into the police band. Salwyn checked phone

records and discovered that Kimble regularly contacted numbers in

New Orleans. [34. Salwyn testified before the House Select

Committee on Assassinations; see also, Melanson, {op. cit.}, n.

4, p. 44.]

But the phone numbers disappeared, and Salwyn was never allowed

to pursue the story. The HSCA did manage to come across Kimble

ten years later and they investigated. They found an FBI file on

him; and a CIA file; and an RCMP file.

Joe Oster, a Louisiana state investigator, conducted extensive

surveillance of Kimble in 1967, and claims that there is a week

in July 1967 when nobody can account for Kimble's whereabouts.

[35. {Op. cit.}, n. 6.] This is the period in which Ray claims to

have met "Raoul" in Montreal.

When interviewed in 1967, Kimble claimed to have been a low-level

CIA courier and pilot. [36. Statement to Garrison, {op. cit.}, n.

7.] When we talked to him from prison, Kimble confirmed that he

had worked for the CIA as well as organized crime and also made

the following allegations: [37. {Op. cit.}, n. 1.]

+ He claims that the HSCA did know all about his role in the

assassination (more even than he could remember), producing

documents, photographs, and files which proved his association

with James Earl Ray, an association he then admitted. However,

all files relating to the HSCA investigation have been sealed for

50 years.

+ Kimble also stated that on the orders of a Louisiana FBI agent,

he flew James Earl Ray from Atlanta to Montreal in July 1967

where Ray was provided with an identities package by a CIA

specialist in Mont Royal, Montreal. An ex-CIA agent with

knowledge of Agency operations in Canada in the 1960s recently

confirmed in an off-the-record interview that there was an Agency

"asset" specializing in "identities" in Montreal in 1967. His

name was Raoul Maora.

+ Kimble said that he then accompanied Ray to a CIA training camp

in Three Rivers, Canada where Ray was taught to shoot. It was

there that the two men were seen together by Kimble's former

girlfriend.

+ At the same time, an assassination team was assembled to kill

King. Kimble claims that he flew two snipers into Memphis using a

West Memphis airfield belonging to a CIA front company. He said

that the only involvement that Ray had in the assassination was

to serve as a decoy.

+ Finally, Jules Kimble stated that elements of the Memphis

Police Department did cooperate in the assassination but that the

actual operation was coordinated by a high-ranking intelligence

official based in Atlanta.

What is the validity of Kimble's assertions? The evidence

presented here, and the many questions it raises, suggests one

thing: Those responsible for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

have yet to be caught and convicted of this political

assassination. There is strong evidence that shows agents within

the U.S. intelligence apparatus could have played a major role in

King's murder. If that is the case, then the U.S. government

could be guilty of not only covering up details of the

assassination, but of the murder itself. The only way to answer

these questions is through a complete and thorough investigation.

The documents from the HSCA should be unsealed and a new probe

begun. It is long past time for that to happen.

----End of article-----------------------------------------------

Don

-* Don Allen *- InterNet: dona@bilver.UUCP // Amiga..for the best of us.

USnail: 1818G Landing Dr, Sanford Fl 32771 \X/ Why use anything else? :-)

UUCP: ..uunet!tarpit!bilver!vicstoy!dona KING George Bush?? Just say NO!

UFO's in commercials....is the GOVT getting us ready for OCTOBER of 1992?

2010-10-20T19:28:00.002-05:00

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/@sklopfer

Mississippi Man Tells Life Story; Online Historical Fiction Novella

2010-03-22T15:02:00.008-05:00

In the early morning hours of last Sunday, I was google-ing around to learn more about Mississippi Mafia connections. And then I ran into an online novella written by Mississippian Jerry Lowerys ...

It's hot in Mississippi in July. Sweat was popping up on Clinton Moody's face as he climbed into his government issued blue Chevrolet. As he drove out into the hot murky morning he rolled his window down and turned the vent fan on high. There were not too many government issued vehicles equipped with air conditioners in the sixties. It was only eight o'clock but the temperature was already in the eighties.

As Clinton drove out of his drive way and into the street, he pondered the telephone conversation he had received last evening. It was from Betty Taylor,the secretary of the regional FBI office. Joesph Robertson the director wanted to see him at ten o'clock the following morningy. Clinton didn't really think too much of the call as he normally got weekly summons to discuss ongoing investigations. Little did he know what was in store for him this morning.

In 1962 Clinton was a two year veteran with the FBI. He had attended Jones County Junior College in Ellisville on a football scholarship. He then graduated from the University Of Southern Mississippi, where he also played football. He majored in Chemistry and graduated in 1960 with a 3.9 grade point average. Although recruited by several industries in Mississippi, he chose instead to accept a position with the FBI. Chemistry along with physics and mathematics majors are heavenly recruited by the FBI. They are consider as great analysist which is required in FBI work.

* * *

Now who could put this down? I surely could not and kept reading this neat little online novel. When I finished, I had to learn more and emailed the author with some questions.

Jerry Lowerys emailed me back quickly and said he had "...almost forgotten about having an email address dedicated to the Mississippi Mafia story."

He wrote it, Lowerys said, about 5 years ago, basing it "loosely on my growing up in South East Mississippi."

Most of the characters in the story are associated with characters that he knew or knew of...

"...The rolling store owner was a person who became one of the richest men in the county. The saw mill worker was a man who worked at my Grandfathers sawmill. The people at the honkey-tonk were real. The song, were songs that I use to hear sang by Blacks, who worked for my Grandfather. I believe that they were early blues songs. The Inn was a real place. The character you referred to was indeed based on Emmett Teal [sp]. The...sheriff was a man I grew up with."

Lowerys adds that "...a lot of the story was based on incidents that took place while I was growing up in Mississippi. The story of the hangings of the two black youths was a horrible true story. This story was also told in a book by Gale Graham whom you might have heard of. The story of the man in the Cadillac doling out soft drinks to the road workers was true."

Lowerys didn't choose to go down the same life path as many of his story's characters do, but instead aligned himself with the Civil Rights Movement, a brave thing for him to do, especially back then.

Close family member, he writes, "...often attended KKK meetings. My mother was on the jury that convicted the men who were involved in the “Mississippi Burning” incident. I grew up believing that Whites were superior to Blacks."

You can read Lowery's "The Mississippi Mafia" by going to his website at http://mimafia.home.mchsi.com/. It's a free read and simply fascinating when you consider the author and his own life story.
* * *

Early CORE Volunteer's Daughter Asks 'Where Are We Going?'

2010-03-17T16:09:00.004-05:00

Linda Keita has a story to tell. It's an important account of her mother's life and helps us to understand where we have been with respect to civil rights, and where we are going.

"My Mother Susie Mae Young Thomas was born in Tulsa Oklahoma 1930 during her school years she had grown tired of being treated different. around 1962 she join C.O.R.E in San Bernardino Ca. 1963 she help lead a boycott against the San Bernardino School District because they had opened a new all White High School in which they decied to take the buses from the areas that serve Black Student to make them available for the student in the all white district for the new high school.

"She was also a Commenter for a local Black newspaper named the Precint Reporter in which she expressed her views on racism. She was a Blues Jazz singer as well as an Actress . During the time she was involved with C.O.R.E my 1st grade year I attended Freedom School I remember the Freedom Marches, however I could not discern what discrimination was or what this was all about myself I was only 6 years old .

"The children did participate in these events as well. I grew up going to predominatly white schools living in mixed nieghborhoods and althought there where some issues in race it never affected me at a personal level. I played with white children we were diverse in every aspect and were taught to look beyond skin color.

"What I remember mostly was all the white people that partcipated in those marches, so I'v gone through my life looking at race through a rose lens not seeing race. My life has not been perfect educationally, but I struggled by trying to peice it together to make the most of it.

"I became a Nurse about 10 years ago shortly afterwards my mother passed away. About 5 years ago Susan I moved into Oregon and began working as a Nurse (LPN) I was met with discriminatory actions from co-workers and had lost 5 jobs in 4 years something that had not happend to me in the past it was hard for me to think I was being discriminated against.

"Finally I realized that is what had been going on. 2007 I was hired for a job fulltime and after starting work I was not placed full time the employer in turn hired several white nurses after me and placed them full time. I complained verbally about my schedules and they did nothing , so I wrote them a letter explaining I felt it was due to my race that I was not placed fulltime, within a week of the letter I was being written up alleging I had attendance problems.

"I recieved a negative performance evaluation when I complained to the Corporation about my treatment at work no one ever fix the problem so I filed a complaint with EEOC who dismissed and gave me a right to sue letter. I could not find an Attorney so I had to go file the case on my own shortly after Attorneys started to pay attention to me, my case is now being followed by a Attorney.

"This issue has turned me into a civil rights activist . At this time I am unemployed my last employer found out about my discrimination law suit and fired me, it has been 6 months without employment now, and it has been very hard for me to find job.

"If not for the civil rights movement I would have not had any law to apply to this matter. I am using Title 7 as amended 1964 to pursue this case thank God for my Mother and the work she had done or I would have not had knowledge to fight them back."
* * *

Remember When Rockfordians Marched For Civil Rights in 1965?

2010-03-14T23:57:00.004-05:00

Rev. James Reeb, Unitarian Minister Killed in Selma March

The Selma-to-Montgomery, Ala., voting rights march sparked demonstrations in many cities, including Rockford. About 350 people in Rockford marched March 13, 1965, from St. James Catholic Church to Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church to memorialize the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston who died after being beaten in the Selma march.

Story continued --
* * *

“Remembering a Unitarian Universalist Hero: The James Reeb Story”[1]
by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
January 21, 2007

On Monday, this nation acknowledged Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was a day to acknowledge, remember, and celebrate the life of one of the 20th century’s great moral leaders and the values and vision for which he stood.

There could have been no better time for us to do this. As this country’s president inanely called for an escalation of the war in Iraq only days earlier, a war in which so many have already unnecessarily suffered and tragically died, there could have been no better time for us to remember a man who changed the world through his commitment to non-violence.

This morning, however, I want to talk about the life of a man who may be less familiar to you than King, and that is a man named James Reeb.

I don’t think King would mind, for Reeb was a man that King held in high esteem, and their lives were also deeply interconnected.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the story of Jim Reeb’s life, and let me begin at the beginning.

He was born on January 1, 1927 - - 80 years ago this month - - outside Wichita, Kansas. His parents were both religiously devout, and his mother’s first pregnancy had ended in a still birth, so before the birth, his mother prayed, “O Lord, if thou wilt heal me and give me another child, I will give him to thee. Whatever you may wish to use him for, that he shall do. Where you need him, there he shall go.”

Jim was born healthy, and became the center of his parents’ life, which was not an easy one. The Great Depression began when he was still and small child, and work was not easy to come by for his father. The family was poor. To make matters worse, Jim was a sickly child, once suffering from rheumatic fever, and as a result, was often schooled by his mother at home. He was also cross-eyed. Too young to have an operation, he started wearing glasses when he was less than two.

During his second year of high school, his family moved to Casper, Wyoming. His teachers remember him as being very serious, neat, courteous, and considerate, and while not unpopular among his classmates, he wasn’t popular either.

Mississippi's Scott Sisters: Just Another 'Mississippi Goddam'

2010-03-11T21:06:00.006-06:00

Jamie and Gladys Scott could be freed by a pardon from Gov.Haley Barbour.

You might have recently read about two sisters who are being help in a Mississippi prison after receiving life sentences for a robbery involving $11. How could this be, one might ask?

Facebook Civil Rights Cold Cases group member Damond Wilson shares this story:

"The two Scott sisters are each doing two life sentences for a crime that say they didn't commit. It allegedly involved a robbery in which two individuals were robbed of $11 in which no one was hurt.

"It all started when these two sister's car broke down about 15 yrs. ago, causing them to accept a ride from two white males. Subsequently, these men wanted sexual favors from these females. However, they refused. Some time later, they were robbed by another couple of males. Prosecutors insisted that the two sisters were involved but they maintain they were never present during the robbery. Witnesses including the real perpetrators later recanted, stating they lied at the trial due to pressure from law enforcement.

"The actual robbers only did a couple of years for the crime and are now free. One of the sisters is now dying from kidney failure. The other sister offered to give her one of her kidneys but the Corrections Dept. has refused them from doing this. This is extremely troubling. I plan to write a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder concerning this matter."

Thank you, Damond. You can read more about the Scott Sisters at this site: http://bit.ly/d6PjDu.

This won’t be the first time Mississippi has conducted itself in this manner, when it comes to black prisoners. Clyde Kennard of Hattiesburg was arrested September 15, 1959 for illegal possession of liquor and speeding. This happened shortly after Kennard was rejected the second time for admission to Mississippi Southern College, now the University of Southern Mississippi.

While Mississippi Sovereignty Commission records show authorities once considered placing dynamite in his car (and a Hattiesburg lawyer offering to run him out of the country), the state finally succeeded in its quest to punish the poultry farmer and U. S. Army veteran when thirteen months later, on November 21, 1960 Kennard was convicted on charges of stealing chicken feed. He was sentenced to Parchman Penitentiary for the maximum penalty of seven years.

NAACP leader Medgar Evers heard of the verdict and told a reporter Kennard’s conviction was “a mockery of justice” for which Evers was arrested, charged with contempt and sentenced to thirty days in jail. The Supreme Court later overturned the conviction. But Kennard was literally beaten and worked to death at Parchman and after becoming seriously ill, he was diagnosed with cancer by the University of Mississippi Hospital.

Returned to Parchman, Kennard was dragged out to work in the fields each day despite his growing weakness. Prison authorities canceled his appointment for a medical checkup and he was not allowed to see his lawyer, Jess Brown. The Jackson attorney asked to receive Kennard’s medical reports but never got them. Tougaloo students mobilized to try and free Kennard, a friend of one of their instructors.

The story was picked up nationally as Dick Gregory and Dr. Martin Luther King demanded Kennard’s release. Finally, in 1963, Governor Barnett ordered Kennard’s release, concerned over potential bad publicity for the state if Kennard died at Parchman. Kennard underwent surgery in Chicago and soon died at Billings Hospital, shortly after he was paroled.

Was it an administrative oversight? Or was it deliberate negligence because of his connection with school integration? These questions, asked by Kennard’s attorney, were never answered. “No one can say for sure. You have to draw your own conclusions,” Jess Brown said.

Clyde Kennard died at the age of thirty-six on July 4, 1963.

Footnote: In one 1959 memorandum found in Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files, commission investigator Zack VanLandingham tells of a conversation he had with a Hattiesburg lawyer, Dudley Connor, about Kennard in the late 1950s.

"If the Sovereignty Commission wanted that Negro out of the community and out of the state they would take care of the situation," VanLandingham quoted Connor as saying. "And when asked what he meant by that, Connor stated that Kennard's carcould be hit by a train or he could have some accident on the highway and nobody would ever know the difference."

In another memo, written by VanLandingham to Gov. J.P. Coleman in 1959, the investigator relates a conversation he had with John Reiter, a campus police officer. "Reiter had several weeks ago told me that when Kennard was attempting to enter Mississippi Southern College in December 1958 that he had been approached by individuals with possible plans to prevent Kennard's going through with his attempt," he wrote.

"One of the plans was to put dynamite to the starter of Kennard's Mercury. Another plan was to have some liquor planted in Kennard's car and then he would be arrested."

So for the Scott Sisters, it appears to be just one more chapter of Mississippi Goddam.

Listen to a show on the Scott Sisters that includes "Mississippi Goddam."

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe/2009/09/17/Tha-Artivist-PresentsWE-ALL-BE-News-Radio

Civil Rights; 'A Nice Way to Learn About Life'

2010-02-25T07:38:00.000-06:00

Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, visited Seattle's Washington Middle School on Wednesday to watch students participate in an anti-bullying program.

Perez asked one class what it had learned and a boy said, be nice to people, which prompted Perez's definition of the field he has worked in for most of his career.

His current job is to enforce the country's civil-rights laws, and he is traveling to let people know "the civil-rights division is open for business again" after several low-profile years.

More --

Roslyn Brock named NAACP chairman, marking generation change

2010-02-21T12:55:00.000-06:00

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 20, 2010; 4:36 PM

The NAACP has selected health-care administrator Roslyn M. Brock as its chairman, marking the culmination of a generational shift for the historic civil rights organization. For the first time in NAACP's history, both its president and chair are too young to have personally experienced legalized segregation.

Brock, 44, takes the helm from civil rights pioneer Julian Bond. She will guide the association along with Benjamin Jealous, who at 37 is the youngest president in NAACP's history.

Continue --

Greensboro, N.C. Museum Honors 1960 Lunch Counter Protest

2010-02-20T06:40:00.000-06:00

As he walked through the door of the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C., one fateful day a half-century ago, college freshman Franklin McCain finally realized the gravity of what he was about to do.

"I thought, 'Well, this is the beginning of the end of my days as a college student,' " McCain said in a recent interview. "They'd be over because one of two things would happen: If I were lucky, I'd go to jail for a long time. Or if I wasn't that lucky, I'd get my head busted open and have a nice tombstone somewhere."

Story Continues --

Civil Rights Stories; Interview with Stuart Tanner on the Mississippi Delta

2010-02-15T22:09:00.005-06:00

http://www.kruufm.com/tanner-moore

This Thursday, Feb. 18, at 7 p.m. I’ll be talking with BBC Filmmaker Stuart Tanner about the ghosts of the Mississippi Delta. You’re invited to listen in!

Tanner’s work with the BBC and the U.K. Channel Four News spans 15 years of award-winning documentaries. Among many other topics, his productions cover ethnic conflict in China and persecution of the Falun Gong by the Chinese government. Stuart currently works with the David Lynch Foundation overseeing documentary film production.

I can't tell you how exciting this is for me to be interviewed by Tanner and have the chance to talk about the Delta and its stories that I've been working on over the years. You really can't prepare for an interview like this -- just wish me luck and hope that I capture his interest in this remarkable place and its people.

Susan

FBI Running Out of Excuses For Refusing Granddaughters’s Pleas; ‘Find Out What Happened to Adlena Hamlett and Birdia Keglar’

2010-02-10T14:36:00.004-06:00

Adlena Hamlett, civil rights advocate, 44th Year Anniversary of Death

By Susan Klopfer

Two granddaughters of a killed civil rights activist want to see the FBI take a second look at what really happened to their grandmother back in 1966.

As soon as the agency agrees to take a first look.

To date, the U.S. Justice Dept. has refused to revisit the deaths of Adlena Hamlett and her friend, Birdia Keglar, as part of the FBI’s cold case initiative. A young, white “eye-witness” who admits he was asleep when the accident took place, still told officials the two women were killed on impact.

Recently, a Northeastern University law student investigating the cold case potential for the murder of both women agreed with the witness and concluded the car wreck was an accident and informed members of both families as such. She based her decision on the eye-witness statement.

“We disagree,” says Zachery-Black, Hamlett’s granddaughter who is a teacher in Minneapolis.

“So, I guess it is up to us to just keep trying to find out what happened to our grandmother -- even if the FBI doesn’t care.”

Zachary-Black said she recently received a message from the FBI office she contacted in Minneapolis, Minn., to request the deaths be given cold case status. “I was told the families should have called the police when it happened.”

Zachery-Black said she was not going to respond to a comment so ludicrous.

“That’s just simply ridiculous. I thought the FBI was going to work hard on these cold cases. That’s a lame excuse for doing nothing.”
* * *

Burnett Hollis Patton, 77, still recalls the day of her grandmother’s funeral back in January of 1966. Patton and her family made the drive to Charleston, Miss. from Indianapolis. While her parents, Henry and Mabel Hollis, were frightened to return to the Delta, they also believed in showing respect for the relative who taught them the importance of voting.

“My grandmother, Adlena, was very close to my father. She would write to him and remind him to be sure and vote before every election. She was a very bright woman and believed in the power of voting.” Patton says.

Patton was born in Scobey but with her family moved to Arkansas when she was a baby. That didn’t mean family ties were broken, even after the family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in the 1950s.

There were still family visits and once Patton lived with her grandmother for the school year, attending the one-room country school house for grades 1-8 where her grandmother was the sole teacher.

“She was kind and generous and everyone loved her. She was very well known around Mississippi, from Jackson to Charleston. She was always willing to help someone else.”

When the family heard of Adlena Hamlett’s death, they were hesitant to return to Mississippi, but did so out of love for Hamlett. The grandmother Patton describes as “medium sized” “...and loved to cook” was well-known for her civil rights activities and by the time the word of her death reached Indianapolis, “we all knew something bad happened.”

When the family arrived in Charleston for the services, “...the woman at the funeral home tried to make us think this wasn’t a murder. We knew she was lying. But we were so afraid our father would get out of control because of his anger, we were quiet and didn’t question anything.”

“My dad was a sharecropper. He loved his mother and was very close to her.”

Adlena Hamlett’s first husband, Henry Hollis, had left Mississippi when his children were babies. “My dad never knew him. But he was close to my grandmother’s husband, Berry Hamlett.”

“We were always afraid for my grandmother. She had worked on civil rights issues for many years. My parents told her they feared for her life but she continued to work on what she was trying to achieve and that’s what led to her death.”

Patton describes the funeral as very sad. “I remember it was open casket. They tried to make it seem like it was an accident. But we knew better.”

“At the time it happened, everyone down there in Mississippi was scared. They didn’t want to talk openly about it because they knew they would be beaten up and harassed. Everyone was scared to death and we were scared and nervous on our way down there and all the time we were in Mississippi.

“We knew if my dad found out who was involved, he would have created a big scene. No one would talk to us. They were afraid that he might cause problems and get everyone killed.”

But people who knew Adlena Hamlett did talk to relatives privately. “They talked to my daddy. I don’t know what they said -- it was too long ago. But I know they told him it was not an accident.”

Back in those days and times, everything was hush-hush, Patton said.

“If you asked for help from the police, they would have tried to kill you. You didn’t have any rights. If they though we were trying to investigate, we would have paid with our lives.”

If anyone tried to scare her grandmother into passivity, she would like them back in the eye and say, “... if so, so be it.”

“That’s the way she was and it’s why we loved her so much.”
* * *

Forty-four years ago, Adlena Hamlett and Birdia Keglar were killed in the early evening hours of Jan. 12, 1966, outside of Greenwood, Miss. in a suspicious car wreck. Birdia Beatrice Clark Keglar, 58, a voting rights activist, was involved with forming a local NAACP chapter in Tallahatchie County. Keglar was the first black person to vote in Tallahatchie County since the end of Reconstruction. Several months earlier, Hamlett, a long-time voting rights advocate, was earlier hanged in effigy for her activities.

Their car was reportedly forced off the road in Sidon, a small town near Greenwood in Leflore County, as they returned from a civil rights meeting in Jackson, said Robert Keglar, who was first told about his mother's death by a close friend who claimed to have witnessed the accident.

This was not the first time they had been chased, one of the driver's relatives said. A friend of Robert Keglar confirmed earlier car chases, too. And so did the wife of Grafton Gray, the driver.

Keglar said the local district attorney visited his Charleston home that night to tell him of the accident. The prosecutor said a drunk driver had hit their car, forcing it from the road and killing both women. The prosecutor also warned Keglar to stay home and not go to the accident scene. But, despite this warning, Keglar immediately went to the site, a small town known quite well for Klan activities.

Keglar said he was interviewed several times in 2009 by the FBI. He said agents told him they would not open his mother's death as a cold case because she died from injuries received in an auto accident. They had no answers to offer regarding the death of his brother, James "Sonny Boy" Keglar, who died three months later.

Keglar said he is not satisfied with what he was told and believes that is mother and brother were victims of a crime.

Three months after his mother died in the wreck, Birdia Keglar's youngest son, James or "Sonny Boy" died in a mysterious fire when his home burned down. Reportedly, he was three months into a personal investigation of his mother's death and, according to Robert Keglar, FBI representatives still claim there are no files on James Keglar.

Relatives of both Keglar and Hamlett believe there was definite evidence of foul play. Both women had been subjected to bullying and harassment because of their civil rights activities.

Nina Zachary-Black asserts the murder of her grandmother, Adlena Hamlett, could have been prompted by her own father's well-known hatred of the late U.S. Senator James O. Eastland and her father's political activism, as well.

"When he [James Black, a school principal] heard about Adlena's murder, my father wept and said that Eastland had finally gotten to him by murdering Adlena. My father often collided with the senator, who was a noted racist."

Zachery-Black said her father tried hard to get someone to go to the site but by the time her grandfather, Barry Hamlett, got to the scene, everything was cleaned up. Officers used hoses, her grandfather said, adding there was nothing left to see.
* * *

Who Killed Emmett Till; Black History Month Celebrates Till & Others

2010-02-09T10:38:00.004-06:00

Emmett Louis 'Bobo' Till

Who Killed Emmett Till?

Emmett Till’s story has its roots in Mississippi’s early history, when kidnapped and enslaved Africans were brought into the Delta, forced to clear swamps, and plant and harvest cotton under the vilest conditions.

In 1975 Professor James Loewen tried to help his Tougaloo College students go to these roots for understanding the Till story, and other history, when he co-wrote the first revisionist state-history textbook in America, winning the Lillian Smith Award for “best nonfiction about the South.”

But Loewen had to sue the state to make Mississippi: Conflict and Change even available to public schools. We can hope that today’s Mississippi historical gatekeepers won’t let this happen again.

From Loewen and others, there appear to be three major themes surrounding Mississippi’s civil rights history. First, few of Mississippi’s thousands of race-based murders can be seen as isolated events, including the slaying of Till. These atrocities fit into a larger pattern reflective of the region’s brutal society formed even before statehood.

Secondly, there were powerful forces outside of Mississippi contributing money and other resources to keep the evil flowing — from Northern people who had always profited from enslavement and discrimination in one way or another.

More than three fourths of the cotton consumed by British mills during antebellum years came from the American South via New England mills and New York businesses that marketed and shipped the cotton overseas.

Northern banking interests supported the slave trade. Slave ships built and outfitted in New England sailed to Africa right up to the Civil War. Twelve million Africans would be shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries; with an estimated 645,000 enslaved brought to what is now the United States.

Interestingly, Mississippi state records show most money collected and spent by Mississippians to fund and sustain the fight against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to develop Mississippi’s private, segregated academies or schools, came from outside of Mississippi. Money came from Northern business concerns and was moved through a Northern bank. Significant help came from a famous publisher, William "Bill" Loeb III, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire and from Morgan Guaranty Trust.

Thirdly, some of the people involved in bringing change to their state have simply been forgotten or still undiscovered by historians. Cleve McDowell, Jo Etha Collier, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, Lamar Smith, Rev. George Lee, Joe Pullen, and so many others unnamed, have earned their place in history.

Why does Mississippi’s history matter today?

Some believe the modern civil rights movement began with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Others mark this date as the murder of Emmett Till. But no mass movement starts all of a sudden. Before the Civil War began and well into the 1940s and early ’50s, many years before the modern civil rights movement made the pages of the white press and then television, there were brave souls trying to right wrongs. They worked in the North and they tried their best from inside “the belly of the beast”—Mississippi.

With today’s increased racism and discrimination, especially following the election of this country’s first black president, we would all be well served to watch closely as Mississippi attempts to transcend from a state denying some of the worst mental and physical atrocities against kidnapped Africans and African Americans in this nation, to a state accepting its history and seeking clues that explain the functions of racism and discrimination.

Mississippi’s newly announced History in the Classroom program is the outgrowth of a state law passed in 2006. Statewide implementation is planned for the 2010-2011 school year, following an unsuccessful legislative effort to eliminate the plan entirely in 2009.

It will be an interesting journey to follow as Mississippi moves along, and a process from which to learn.
* * *

Lunch Counter Sit-Ins Came Three Years Later to Jackson, Miss.

2010-02-01T17:23:00.002-06:00

Scene from a Jackson, Miss. lunch counter during integration attempts.

While the first lunch counter sit-ins occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960 and had spread to every state in the South except Mississippi, students at Tougaloo College and Jackson College eventually held sit-ins – facing the worst repercussions. Unlike Mississippi, other Southern states by the spring of 1963 had already allowed some public facilities like lunch counters to be desegregated.

But Mississippi would not budge until a group of black and white students from Tougaloo, led by Pearlena Lewis, Memphis Norman, Anne Moody and Joan Trumpauer, were joined by other Tougaloo students including Walter Williams, and Jackson State students through CORE (led by George Raymond) to take their turn at Woolworth’s – “in an act to defy white Mississippi and inspire black Mississippi.” … “They would sit together and break bread together, should they be served, at the segregated lunch counter,” wrote Dr. Ed King, Tougaloo’s chaplain.

The May 28, 1963 action was planned by the Jackson Movement Strategy Committee and its chairman, sociologist John R. Salter, under the overall leadership of the state’s NAACP coordinator, Medgar Evers. King was to observe but not participate that day.

King described what happened when the first group entered Woolworth’s on Capitol Street in downtown Jackson and walked over to the fifty-two-seat lunch counter. Police did not arrest the demonstrators but looked the other way as a mob of whites tormented and attacked the students for several hours of “sustained hatred and violence.”

What King saw, Salter later wrote, was “indicative of the soul of the Movement and the almost lack of soul and insensitivity bred by the racism and fascism of the whites of Mississippi.”

Black Tougaloo student Memphis Norman was knocked to the floor, stomped and beaten unconscious. Other black and white women were “knocked from the stools and dragged by the hair as the TV crews and police watched.” During the two hours of violence, there were some arrests of peaceful demonstrators including King’s wife, Jeanette King.

When Salter decided to join his students at the counter, he was “allowed” to pass through the mob and take a seat. But then “all fury broke loose” as angered segregationists seized the closest instruments at hand – plastic, ugly yellow jars of mustard and squirted this all over Salter and the students. Next was ketchup, then spray paint, then more lethal weapons of glass ash trays and sugar jars – and soon there was blood mixed in the mustard – and more blood.” The “demonstrator-victims” remained seated, according to King:

The whole event [the most violent of all sit-ins in the United States] was carried on national TV news. Finally the order came from the Woolworth’s management to close the store. The mob left “and Dr. Dan Beittel President of Tougaloo College, and I were able to remove the victims. The event shocked sensitive people in the nation but was shown to Mississippi TV audiences only in censored versions, and the local press mockingly wrote of Salter, one of the bloody, garbage-covered demonstrators, as ‘Mustard Man’.”

Jackson journalists reported the sit-in “as a joke” and in the next three months, as similar activities continued, over one thousand local persons and some visiting supporters were illegally imprisoned. By then, Medgar Evers had been assassinated and Jackson became infamous to the world.

Cold Cases; From the Folks Who Brought Us COINTELPRO

2010-01-03T14:35:00.003-06:00

Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s: COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971.

The FBI’s stated motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.” According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups suspected of being subversive, such as communist and socialist organizations; the women’s rights movement; militant black nationalist groups, and the non-violent civil rights movement, including individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, and other civil rights groups; a broad range of organizations labeled “New Left”, including Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Weathermen, almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, and even individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation; and nationalist groups such as those “seeking independence for Puerto Rico.”

The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to marginalize and subvert “white hate groups,” including the Ku Klux Klan and National States’ Rights Party. The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.

This is a documentary on COINTELPRO:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3729458480013375211

Katrina Victims Win Federal Court Ruling Against Army Corps of Engineers

2009-11-20T12:40:00.001-06:00

A federal judge on November 18 ruled in favor of Hurricane Katrina victims who claimed much of the worst flood damage was a result of negligence by the Army Corps of Engineers, an important victory for many of those impacted by the storm. The case was the first to find the government responsible for damages from the storm.

Read more --

Return trip to the Land of Emmett Till

2009-11-06T14:57:00.001-06:00

Photo from the trial of Emmett Till's murderers. Mrs. Till-Mobley, third from left, stands next to Dr. T.R.M. Howard, at her right.

SOME THIRTY YEARS after reporting on the Emmett Till case for Ebony magazine, Cloyte Murdock Larsson, a former Ebony staffer, returned to write an article on "The New Mississippi." (Cloyte Murdock Larsson, "Land of the Emmett Till Murder Revisited," Ebony, March 1986.) Larsson and young Till had shared the same birth date.
* * * * *

There are some stories that a journalist can never forget no matter how hard one tries. Like fading pictures in a photo album, certain impressions remain in the mind long after time has erased the details of the events. For one young black reporter, Cloyte Larsson, the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial was that kind of assignment.

When the trial of the young Chicagoan's murderers ended in acquittal, Larsson - the only female reporter to cover this historical Mississippi Delta trial - worked abroad for the next thirty years, returning only in 1986 to write the thirty-year anniversary story for Ebony.

In 1955 Larsson had joined the team of writers and photographers from Johnson Publishing Company who volunteered to cover the trial, and when the all-white jury returned an acquittal, she saw "a side of the American way of life that even I, a Southerner, found shocking. Prejudice was a phenomenon that I was prepared for …but not open, raw, vulgar menacing hate.”

One day before the trial began, Ebony and Jet photographer David Jackson and Larsson visited Rev. Moses Wright at his weathered gray tenant farmhouse in Money. Larsson later recalled, "While we sat talking on the porch, an open truck came rumbling down the road. It slowed as it approached the house, and in my mind’s eye I can still see the six white men standing in the back, armed with shotguns that glittered in the sun.

"How slowly the truck seemed to move…so slowly that I could see the eyes of the men regarding us with a cold and ageless hostility. The menace was obvious, the message clear. The spell was not broken until, abruptly, the truck picked up speed and raced on." Larsson met Sheriff Strider, "another unforgettable Mississippian," the following day at the courthouse in Sumner.

"Standing in the entrance to the courtroom, like the anointed defender of the unreconstructed South, he rested his right hand meaningfully on his gun as he saw the members of the Black press approach. "Malevolently aware that we could do nothing except accept his insult, swallow our rage and go on, [Strider] said with a poisonous smile, ‘Mawnin’, niggers!’"

Larsson got the message. "We were behind enemy lines now. We had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. Our press cards were no guarantee of safety. Not even a member of the U. S. Congress could expect a courteous welcome, not if he happened to be both Northern and Black." Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan discovered that quickly enough when he joined reporters to witness the proceedings.

"A nigger congressman!" scoffed a White deputy at the door. "It ain’t possible. It ain’t even legal!" Knowing that any encounters with white journalists would arouse suspicion, Larsson and the other black reporters on their team were careful to pretend they did not know the white photographer who had come with them to photograph "aspects of the trial and of Mississippi life which it would have been impossible for Black reporters to cover."

They would only meet secretly with Mike Shea to exchange information quickly at pre-arranged rendezvous points. Since telephones in the homes of Black activists were tapped, Larsson dared not use them to make contact, fearing she would draw unnecessary attention to her hosts, "militant Blacks of Mississippi who were already in trouble enough."

Dr. T. R. M. Howard, with whom some of the black journalists stayed in Mound Bayou, had received many death threats. "For his family’s protection and ours during the Till trial, he kept a small arsenal of shotguns behind the door." Most spectators at the Till trial were white Mississippians, some bringing their children and their box lunches.

"They bought soft drinks from vendors who curtly refused to sell their wares to Blacks, and peered admiringly at Carolyn Bryant, the ‘victim’ of the alleged wolf whistle," Larsson observed. When Sheriff Strider told the court that the body which he had pulled out of the water had deteriorated to such an extent that "he couldn’t be sure whether it was that of a Black person or a White," Larsson's temper flared.

And then she did something totally out of character. "During a pause in the trial, I pushed my way through the milling crowd of Whites and asked Judge Curtis Swango, whose impressively evenhanded conduct of the trial was like a breath of fresh air, why, if Sheriff Strider was unsure of the victims racial identity, he had asked a Black undertaker to take charge of the body!"

Heads turned. Eyes focused on Larsson, and.... "I felt like a marked woman." The White Citizen’s Councils were active in the area and Larsson had seen a letter on White Citizens’ Council stationery on Sheriff George Smith’s desk during an office visit.

"I knew that a White reporter from the North had been run out of town, and I knew that Sheriff Strider was perhaps the last man in Mississippi whose truthfulness I should publicly challenge."

As the trial proceeded, tension in the courtroom was so high that when somebody dropped a glass bottle – it shattered – the sound was like a shot. "In a single, reflex reaction, everybody, Blacks and Whites alike, ducked." After the acquittal of Milam and Bryant, Larsson remembered her dismay. It had seemed clear from evidence presented that a strong case had been made against the accused.

"Till may or may not have wolf whistled. What did it matter? He had a right to life. I thought about his last moments, the terror...the blows...the bullet. How could anyone have done such a thing to a 14-year-old child?" On their return trip to Sunflower and Tallahatchie counties, Larsson and the news team tried to interview Roy Bryant at his present place of business, a country-style general store in Ruleville. Bryant granted them an interview, but was not in the mood to say much except that the case had hurt him, financially and that after the trial, his customers in Money found other places to shop.

"Forced to give up the business, he left Mississippi, and his wife Carolyn eventually left him. His half-brother, J. W. Milam, also moved out of state and, like Roy, split up with his wife," Larsson would learn. Larsson found that Milam had died from cancer. Sheriff Strider was dead and so was Moses Wright, whose house in Money had been leveled. "I remember [Wright] as a brave man whose finger never shook when, in that hostile courtroom, he pointed out Milam and Bryant."

What in the past would have been a quiet lynching had made news around the world and Larsson on her trip back to the Mississippi Delta found that many whites were still embarrassed.

She interviewed Aaron Henry in Clarksdale who by then was serving a second term in the state legislature. Henry had been one of the NAACP officials who had helped produce the "missing witness" that the FBI may never have found. Henry told Larsson that white men had been killing black boys in the Delta for years without ramifications.

But this time, perhaps "the hand of God" was involved, causing the Emmett Till case to become a cog in the wheel of change. "Perhaps we have television to thank for that," Henry told Larsson. Searching for Roy Bryant, Larsson and her team met up with Cleve McDowell in a courtroom in Clarksdale of Coahoma County. McDowell took them to see Bryant during a quick trip around the counties.

The black attorney who was the regional director of the NAACP in his state looked vaguely familiar to Larsson. "We had seen his picture in the newspapers. In 1963, he was the first Black student, after James Meredith, to be admitted to the University of Mississippi and the first ever to study law there.

After the murder of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, McDowell learned that he and James Meredith were next in line for assassination [a fact confirmed by a retired Parchman guard who said he was asked to perform this act by a Delta planter.]McDowell bought a gun.

"Most everybody else had one, he told Larsson, "but when mine was discovered, I was expelled." He completed his education, however, at the Thurgood Marshall School of law in Texas - a "better and safer" place to be, he told oral history interviewer Owen Brooks a number of years later. "They were teaching civil rights law and the University of Mississippi was far behind."

Larsson was surprised that Bryant's store was in a black Ruleville neighborhood where he was not hassled. But McDowell explained that Bryant wasn’t worried "because blacks forget" and that "even when they know what certain whites have done, they don’t do anything about it." But this was no reason to think the Klan had gone away, McDowell added. "They're not wearing sheets any longer. They’re wearing gray flannel suits! But some of them have just gone under cover. And some of them are doing it to us in a different way–the Northern way.

"If Northern whites had been in power down here, we’d still be in slavery!.... Now, we have situations like Black lawyers being harassed by the bar association, and we have economic freeze-outs whenever big money is involved.”

In McDowell's opinion, conditions in parts of Mississippi were worse in 1986 than in 1955: “You can see open sewers, a level of poverty as bad as in some deprived, developing countries, with insects crawling over everything. Down here, we’ve still got a massive job to do.”

McDowell introduced Larsson to Greenwood Councilman David Jordan and his wife, Christine, both science teachers in Greenwood’s integrated city schools. The Jordan couple had fought long and hard for civil rights and as president of the Greenwood Voters’ League for 20 years, David Jordan was instrumental in initiating lawsuits aimed at democratizing the political and educational systems.

The couple were at the movie theater when Emmett Till’s body was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River. Jordan remembered feeling shocked that someone in their midst could kill a 14-year-old child.

"After that happened, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to change the social conditions which had made this possible," he told Larsson. During the remainder of the Decade, the Emmett Till case remained the overriding force in black people’s minds. It was "evident that white people didn’t care," the Greenwood teacher told Larsson on her return trip to the Delta.

"I am intelligent enough to realize that the same kinds of things that happened once could happen again...We are still in the struggle, and even though we have made some gains, we are still skeptical," Larsson wrote. Were this journalist's words prophetic?

Eleven years later, in 1997, McDowell was murdered in his Drew home, about five miles from the plantation shed where Till was lynched. Questions remain about this civil rights attorney's murder; to this day, all police and court records surrounding this crime remain under a "gag order."

The struggle continues as thousands of southern African Americans look around the chaos contributed by storms Katrina and Rita; many asking if the emergency services provided to them would have been the same, had their color been white. Will the Land of Emmett Till every change? The question remains - even fifty years after a young woman changed history by reporting on one of this country's most famous trials.

Grisly hanging of Census worker: an antigovernment act? | csmonitor.com

2009-09-25T07:36:00.001-05:00

Grisly hanging of Census worker: an antigovernment act? | csmonitor.com

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Civil Rights History Found in Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission Files

2009-01-19T15:22:00.008-06:00

The story of Birdia Keglar, murdered in Mississippi, 1965

Some of the most fascinating stories can be found in the records of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency that was the state's official counter civil rights agency from 1956 to 1973.

Established by an act of the Mississippi legislature on March 29, 1956, the Sovereignty Commission arose in the wake 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.

But the act creating the Commission provided the agency with even 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."

Hiring former FBI and other government intelligence agents to do its work, 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.

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.

While the agency itself was small, consisting of a director, public relations director, clerical staff and a handful of investigators, its footprint was enormous.

Early on, the agency 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."

Mississippi Governor J.P. Coleman would later say he used the Commission to "dampen as far as possible racial conflict and violence," countering criticism that the agency was inactive, later asserting that people "would be amazed if they knew the work the commission has in fact done," according to an official agency history compiled by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH)that hosts the official digital collection of the Commission's files.

"... 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," Coleman said.

Civil Rights Stories: Cleve McDowell

2008-11-17T09:57:00.006-06:00

Civil Rights Lawyer Murdered 11 Years Ago; Questions Remain

Eleven long years have come and gone since the murder of black criminal lawyer Cleve McDowell, who was shot to death in his Mississippi Delta home.

On the morning of March 13, 1997, the naked, lifeless body of Cleve McDowell, 56, was discovered by his youngest sister propped up against a bathroom wall.

Throughout his home, dozens of powerful handguns and rifles -- "always one within his reach" -- had been strategically placed by McDowell for self-protection. So why didn't he use one to save his life?

On this quiet anniversary, questions still surround the death of this important but forgotten civil rights leader:

What happened to bullets taken from McDowell's body during the state's autopsy? Would such evidence show if more than one shooter was involved? What happened to McDowell's guns?

Why do county officials still maintain a gag order on all investigation records of this murder? And what happened to all of McDowell's investigative files?

For over forty years, McDowell studied hate crimes and murders taking place during the modern civil rights movement. Where is all of the information he collected about the murders of Emmet Till, Medgar Evers and countless others?

McDowell served as a public defender in Sunflower County for three decades and was part of a group of black leaders organizing to pressure district attorneys and revive interest in many never-prosecuted cases in which blacks were killed for doing civil rights work.

IN 1956, TWO YEARS AFTER Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and one year following the Delta murder of young Emmett Till, Mississippi legislators had installed a quiet and effective spy agency over their concerns of "forced integration" and related race issues. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission did not close its doors until 1977.

Only in 1998, after twenty-one years of legal wrangling, United States District Court Judge William H. Barbour, Jr. ordered all Commission records not involved in litigation to be opened to the public.

McDowell was killed exactly one year to the day before this first court-ordered release of secret records -- records that had been gathered on private citizens by former FBI, CIA and military intelligence agents performing their clandestine work during some of Mississippi's most tumultuous years of civil rights strife.

When these secret records were first handed over to the public, many of the Sovereignty Commission's files were considered missing by investigative journalists and other longtime civil rights observers.

Hence, McDowell's extensive private collection of his own criminal and civil rights investigations -- papers stored in high stacks of cardboard boxes and in his office safe -- could have filled in some of the gaps, had his files been available.

But McDowell's investigation records officially disappeared six months following his murder when fire engulfed his Drew, Miss. law office where all of his papers were stored. Family members later told reporters McDowell's records were stored there because they wanted to turn the office into a civil rights museum.

McDowell's records could have easily filled such a museum, say friends and colleagues who saw the mounds of boxes grow higher each successive year until McDowell's life was ended by gunshot wounds.

AS THE CIVIL Rights Movement years waned, McDowell never quit looking into numerous Mississippi's race-based murders and other hate crimes. His interest in Till's murder remained strong; coincidentally, he and Till were born two weeks apart in the summer of 1941 and young Till's murder influenced McDowell to study law and then investigate Till's and other hate crimes against blacks.

Till was kidnapped from a nearby Tallahatchie County relative's home in the small cotton town of Money back in 1955 and taken to a Sunflower County plantation outside of Drew where he was beaten, tortured and slain. Till's body was taken to a neighboring county and thrown into the Tallahatchie River from a bridge.

Ironically, McDowell would be killed in his Drew home forty-two years later, only a few miles from Till's murder site.

Stacked boxes of papers and files on these murder cases grew high in McDowell's office while other papers were stored in his locked office safe as well as at home, his former office manager said.

"Cleve never let me go through any of those papers. So I don't know exactly what he had. But Cleve often spoke to Emmett's mother and promised he would find out what happened to her son and who was involved in his murder," Nettie Davis said.

"I know Cleve talked to her on the phone just a month before he was killed." Davis was McDowell's office manager and had known him since high school days in Drew.

Kwasi McDowell, McDowell's godson, also knew about his uncle's investigations and said his uncle was always very quiet about what he was working on but "it was evident that his investigations were serious." McDowell's nephew said he once worked on a civil rights paper for school that required his uncle's help.

While he was busy writing down notes, McDowell "looked away and quietly said that people in this state would be surprised if they knew about all the politicians and their families who have murdered people."

"He didn't say anything else, but he looked upset," Kwasi McDowell recalled. "Cleve may have been working with two lawyers in Texas at one time to track down civil rights murderers.... I think both of those lawyers died in car wrecks, but I don't recall any specifics," McDowell's nephew said.

ONE OF CLEVE MCDOWELL'S CLIENTS was quickly arrested and charged with capital murder -- those charges were reduced to manslaughter in return for Juarez Webb's confession.

Webb later retracted his admission but was convicted of the lesser charges and remains locked up in a state maximum security prison.

Autopsy records indicate there may have been more than one shooter. The bullets from McDowell's body were not collected by the medical examiner.

Where Rebels Roost... Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited
Susan Klopfer, 2004; LuLu Press

Civil Rights Stories: Fannie Lou Hamer

2008-11-17T06:12:00.005-06:00

Fannie Lou Hamer: Her Story too Dangerous to Tell

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony [Democratic National Convention, 1964] wasn't the whole truth. A recent biography of Hamer, "For Freedom's Sake," by University of Georgia professor Chana Kai Lee, reveals that she omitted a key fact: She had also been sexually abused by the law enforcement officers.

Lee implies that Hamer did not tell the Credentials Committee that she was sexually abused because she was a "modest and dignified" woman, but I think it also must have been in her mind that if she testified on national television that the Mississippi police had also sexually abused her that day, she probably would have been murdered when she returned from the convention.

Story Continued --

For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Women in American History)

Civil Rights Stories: Charles McCain

2008-11-15T09:19:00.003-06:00

I ran into a fascinating article about Sen. John McCain --

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article and accompanying video about the McCain families in Carroll County, Mississippi: the descendants of John McCain's ancestors who still remain in the area where those ancestors owned a cotton plantation (Teoc), and the descendants of the slaves who worked that plantation and took their owners' surname. The McCains have a biannual reunion where family members of both groups of descendants meet.

Charles McCain, grandson of a slave at Teoc, the white McCain plantation, was active in the Civil Rights Movement:

Charles McCain was a central figure in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. When civil-rights workers swarmed Mississippi in 1964, the black McCains housed white activists and received bomb threats and harassing calls.

Continued --
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Link to Charles McCain record in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Link to Charlie McCain

To find all McCain Links -- Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Civil Rights Stories: Jo Etha Collier

2008-11-14T23:24:00.002-06:00

A small group of Boston-based law clinic students are trying to uncover new details about a Mississippi high school senior who was killed over thirty-seven years ago on her graduation night.

Jo Etha Collier was murdered at approximately 9:45 p.m. on May 25, 1971, shortly after the ceremony ended; she had been talking to friends in front of a small grocery store in Drew, Miss., and as a pickup truck passed by, Collier was hit in the head and killed by gunshots coming from the truck.

It would turn out that Collier was shot by Wesley Parks, 25, of Drew in a murder that "seemed to have no motive," according to a sheriff's deputy.

---
Note: I write about the murder of this young woman in my new book The Plan. You can find it at http://smaswords.com Do a search on The Plan by Susan Klopfer.
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But were others involved? And did Parks ever serve his full prison sentence?

A half-dozen dedicated law students at Northeastern University School of Law are investigating cold cases of the modern civil rights era, hoping to find answers to Collier's murder and those of others who were killed in earlier, violent times.

Through the school's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, they are seeking to learn more about past civil wrongs, including the Mississippi deaths of Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett, James Keglar, all were of Charleston; Rev. George Lee of Belzoni; and Cleve McDowell and Collier, who were both from Drew.

In April 2007, Northeastern’s clinic director, Professor Margaret Burnham, joined with colleague Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School's Houston Institute for Race and Justice in organizing a national conference, "Crimes of the Civil Rights Era."

More than 100 academics, activists, prosecutors and family members of those harmed or slain during the civil rights era came together at Northeastern and Harvard to assess the current movement to revisit and rectify these past injustices and consider the relation between this era and the racial inequities that continue to fester in the United States.

Burnham brings a wealth of national and international experience to lead this project. She began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating school desegregation cases, leads the students in their quest. In 1978, Burnham was appointed an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court, and in 1989returned to law practice as a founding partner of Boston¹s first law firm headed by African-American women.

From Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files, Burnham’s students have discovered that Parks, his brother and their nephew, Allen Wilkerson, 19, of Memphis were in the truck and all three were arrested in nearby Cleveland within three hours of the shooting. A 22-caliber pistol "with one bullet missing" was found in the car along with a 12-gauge Army issue riot gun and a 22-caliber automatic rifle.

But others disagreed, at the time, with the sheriff's assessment, including civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who said she was "convinced that Collier's death was connected with the current voter registration campaign." Hamer lived in nearby Ruleville.

Collier was not active with the voter registration campaign going on at the time, but visiting reporters were reminded that black political activity in the Delta - where blacks outnumber whites - had "long met with a proportionate increase in random, almost casual, white harassment."

Police Chief J. D. Fleming of Drew said the three men "were very much under the influence of alcohol." Fleming took Collier's two companions to Cleveland to identify the suspect. The three men offered no resistance when arrested in Cleveland, Fleming said.

It was Collier's first year at Drew High School. The well-liked student had earlier received the school's spirit award on awards day and was named the "Most Valuable Player in Track." The young woman was also awarded a basketball jacket.

About 45 minutes before the shooting, the men were seen sitting in their truck at a service station located less than a block away from the grocery store. When a black male asked for a light, "one of the occupants of the vehicle pointed a revolver at the negro male and told him 'I'll put all your G.D. lights out," the investigator stated.

Reportedly, Collier was killed by a single bullet, which hit her in the neck as she stood in front of a grocery store "in the negro section of town." At her funeral, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, eulogized Collier before an audience of 2,000.

"The foes of evil have robbed us of one of our most dear and talented sisters.... How long will black people be mistreated in Mississippi? How long will black people be shot down in the Delta?" the SCLC leader asked the crowd gathered in the auditorium of Drew High School.

Abernathy called for massive change that would come with black voter registrations to put blacks in office "... so that we can see that her living and dying was not in vain."

Drew Mayor W. 0. Williford, seated on the stage during the rites, reportedly expressed surprise to a reporter at the large turnout of blacks and spoke of recent gains by Delta blacks:

"If that many Negroes had gathered in one place when I first took office there surely would have been bloodshed."

But on this day, the atmosphere was peaceful enough that Williford quickly sent away the highway patrolmen who were there in case of an anticipated flare up. Days earlier, the mayor imposed an 8 p.m. until daylight curfew and called in the officers to help enforce it.

After the ceremony, the 18-year--old student, who was regarded highly by teachers and friends, was buried in the all-black section of the Drew cemetery.

Cleve McDowell, a black Jackson attorney and Drew native, returned to keep his hometown calm. Meeting with the mayor, McDowell was required to pledge that no outsiders - "especially Fannie Lou Hamer" (a well-known voting rights advocate who lived in nearby Ruleville) - would come into Drew and cause problems. Collier's family was extremely poor, and McDowell took care of the funeral arrangements.

The civil rights attorney requested and was granted a permit to hold peaceful daily marches in the downtown section of Drew. McDowell also praised the "swift police work" in apprehending the three men. "Now there must be vigorous prosecution. Responsible people are angry at this senseless murder."

Perhaps these Northeastern law students will bring final closure to the murder of Jo Etha Collier. It is too late for McDowell to continue his investigation since he, too, was murdered twenty-six years following the death of Collier– his murder also took place in Drew.

McDowell, as a civil rights lawyer and leader, had investigated dozens of murders of African Americans, including the murder of Emmett Till.

The Delta lawyer, who once headed Mississippi's NAACP chapter, held special interest in the Till case because he was born two weeks apart from Till and grew in the same town where Till was beaten.

But McDowell's investigative papers on the Till case and countless others disappeared six months after McDowell was murdered in March of 1997; purportedly all of his records were burned in a fire and like Collier's cold case, questions remain surrounding McDowell's untimely death.

McDowell was killed too recently to qualify formally as a civil rights "cold case." But Northeastern's law clinic students say they will take a second look, regardless.

Civil Rights Stories: Joe Pullen

2008-11-14T22:18:00.003-06:00

At left, memorial to civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, who often told the story of Joe Pullen.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs: hunted and penned in an accursed spot! If we must die; oh let us nobly die…fighting back. – Claude McKay (1889-1948).

Historians now define the period from 1954 (the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision) to 1965 as the Modern Civil Rights Movement. The African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights began long before Brown, however, and is a central part of U.S. history.

IN THE SMALL COTTON TOWN OF DREW, Mississippi the heart of the Mississippi Delta and where young Emmett Till was taken and beaten in 1955, some black elders still talk about a story passed down by their parents and relatives focusing on a 1923 gunfight raging into the early morning hours of December 15 between Joe Pullen, a tenant farmer and WWI veteran, and plantation manager W.T. Saunders.

The fight would turn out to be a watershed event in U.S. history.

Pullen shot and killed Saunders during an argument over money and then Pullen’s own life ended in a ditch at the edge of Drew when he was shot after an all-night gun battle.

The small town had buzzed with rumors that several dozen posse members were killed and possibly hundreds wounded before Pullen was taken down by machine gunners brought in from Clarksdale; some older Drew residents maintain that for years after the gunfight, a good number of people were using canes and displaying other signs of injuries received during the gun battle.

There are several versions of the Joe Pullen story, both written and spoken. In one account, nearly one thousand white men searched the swamps around Drew to find Pullen. The tenant farmer is said to have killed 4, 17 or 19 whites and wounded 8, 38 or 40 before he was machine gunned down. He either died immediately or was dragged through the streets and then killed.

Local news accounts of this event were few. The weekly Indianola newspaper carried one small paragraph on December 20, 1923 reporting that: “J. L. Doggett of Clarksdale and Kenneth Blackwood of Drew, posse men wounded Friday by negro, Joe Pullen, are reported as improving rapidly as could be expected.”

Associated Press reports offered more

Four men lost their lives in a spectacular gun battle which raged until 1 o’clock this morning between Joe Pullen, Negro tenant farmer, and a posse of several hundred men in the swamps of the Mississippi delta near Drew. Nine other wounded three probably fatally. Pullen was finally captured when four members of the posse stormed the drainage ditch in which he was entrenched. The Negro died an hour later from bullet wounds. The trouble started when Pullen’s employer came to his house to collect a debt.

Fannie Lou Hamer, well-known civil rights activist from Ruleville, often talked about the shoot-out that occurred when she was a child. Hamer said that Pullen’s body was dragged into town and that people cut off body parts to keep as souvenirs. “Mississippi was a quiet place for a long time [afterwards].”

While local press claimed that four white men had died “in defense of law and order,” Mrs. Hamer was told that Pullen had killed thirteen white men and wounded twenty-six others before dying.

L. C. Dorsey, a Ph.D. sociologist, remembered how as a young child living on a Sunflower
County plantation between Ruleville and Drew she heard from her father and relatives the story of Pullen. Dorsey said that her own father often did not receive the money due him as a sharecropper, and Dorsey believed the Pullen incident had much to do with his fear of questioning “the man” over money he was owed.

Pullen’s family protested to the President [Calvin Coolidge] who sent an investigative team “because the man had been in the service, and that was what his family talked about, that this man had served his country and this is how he was treated. He had done nothing wrong and had been killed for trying to defend himself against the crew,” Dorsey said.

Alabama historian, Nan Woodruff, author of American Congo, adds to the story that Sanders may have offered Pullen $150 to recruit families to work on the plantation, and when Pullen kept the money without providing the service, the fight began.

Woodruff terms Pullen’s gunfight another “watershed event” “much like the Elaine Massacre [Arkansas, 1919] as blacks challenged the structure of white supremacy throughout the 1920s.

“Black people with guns had always threatened planter authority, particularly when disputes
arose over crop contracts or merchant bills. Despite the threat of terror, black sharecroppers and laborers fought back when their lives were on the line, even if such actions resulted in their deaths.”

Woodruff and other black history researchers write that many Southern black people had always carried guns for hunting and self-protection, but the frequency of armed confrontations between planters and croppers, based on the frequency of reporting, may have increased in the decade following World War I.

THE RULING WHITE Delta families would keep their immense social, economic and political power; the planters’ bloc maintaining its supremacy or hegemony through an efficient capitalist economy rooted in black labor manipulation. Schooling and marriage built strong family alliances, and these white coalitions, much like Mafioso, expanded into local economies, from ownership and operation of cotton gins, to real estate, and banking.

Mississippi white planters simply ran all of Mississippi.