One of the themes of this blog is the pressing need to look not only at who pulled the trigger in decades old Civil Rights Era murders but also to look more broadly at how institutions, people in positions of power and others in the broader society enabled or encouraged the countless crimes against African Americans and their allies.

Jerry Mitchell’s journalism does both.

In the video above, Jerry discusses with Stephen Colbert some of the murderers his reporting has helped to put away. In their discussion, Jerry also touches on the corruption that he exposed in the handling of the two 1964 Byron De La Beckwith trials that ended in mistrials. Jerry  exposed that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was aiding Beckwith’s defense while the state was prosecuting him. The Sovereignty Commission was the spy agency established by the Mississippi State Legislature in 1956 to monitor and oppose civil rights activity. The Commission’s files were declassified in 1998 and are available online.

This week Jerry has published a remarkable article adding substantial new evidence that former US Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS) had strong ties with the Ku Klux Klan and played a significant role in helping Klansmen escape convictions for their alleged roles in the Neshoba County murders of the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

Informants told the FBI that Eastland met with Klan leaders and courted the Klan’s vote in his 1966 re-election race. The senator also talked with suspects in the Neshoba County case, including then-Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and defense lawyers, getting updates on the case.

In 1965, U.S. District Judge Harold Cox of Jackson – whose appointment to the bench Eastland engineered – threw out the indictments of all the suspects, except Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price.

An FBI memo said Eastland, who was a college buddy of Cox, “has been taking credit for the federal government dropping charges against those indicted in the Neshoba County slayings.”

According to the FBI, Rainey penned a letter saying, “I know for a fact that James O. Eastland helped prevent the trial of 16 other men.”

On March 28, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the indictments.

A “prominent local Klansman” in Meridian told the FBI that Eastland had appeared at a rally in Forest and invited Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers to speak with him: “Eastland stated that he would help the 17 defendants in the Neshoba County case and that he has been ‘pulling strings for them.’”

Jerry’s article also discusses soon to be published writings and statements by Killen, as well as other evidence, elaborating on the Klansman’s alleged ties to his US Senator.

Eastland grew up in Hillsboro and was buried in Eastern Cemetery in Forest.

Killen, who grew up in neighboring south Neshoba County, said he developed a relationship with Eastland after becoming friends with Leander Perez, an arch-segregationist in Louisiana.

Documents from the Eastland papers at the University of Mississippi show Eastland and Perez shared information on purported communists.

Ellis told the FBI that Killen said his work for Eastland was “to stop the communist Jews or their soldiers.”

(Read the rest.)

The Speech from Document Films on Vimeo.

On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.

Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.

Aunt Esther at age 96

Last winter I drove to Providence, RI full of trepidation and sadness. My incredible Aunt Esther, my maternal grandfather’s sister, had pneumonia. I was going to see her to make sure I had the chance to say goodbye.

To everyone’s, including her own, surprise, she pulled through. “I saw the pearly gates—and they shut!” she said to us bemusedly. Thus we were able to have the pleasure of gathering together in Providence this summer to celebrate her 99th birthday and the start of her 100th year.

And thus WRNI had the opportunity to take an audio snapshot of my sage, spunky and inspirational great aunt. You can listen to it right here.

www.markmulcahy.com

I’m a huge fan of Mark Mulcahy’s music, and I’d like to help make sure that he can keep producing it. Now you can get a great collection of Mark Mulcahy covers by an incredible range of artists and support the continuation of his musical projects while he also raises his twin toddlers solo, following the unexpected death of his wife.

Connecticut has produced musicians more famous than Mark Mulcahy, but few who have been more influential.

Just how influential is evident on “Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy” (Shout Factory), a CD and digital collection of songs by the singer, songwriter and one-time leader of the New Haven band Miracle Legion. After Miracle Legion, he fronted Polaris, which wrote the theme for the Nickelodeon show “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

The 41-song collection (21 on a CD, an additional 20 available online only) features covers of Mulcahy and Miracle Legion songs performed by artists that include R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the Pixies’ Frank Black, Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood, Dinosaur Jr. and the National.

It’s a loving tribute, to be sure, but not to Mulcahy. Rather, “Ciao My Shining Star” is a remembrance of his wife, Melissa Rich, who died unexpectedly a year ago, leaving Mulcahy to raise their 2-year-old twin daughters.”

Purchase and support the work of Mark Mulcahy:

• iTunes
• Amazon

Listen to tracks and learn more:

• MySpace
• Sterogum
• Pitchfork
• Icon vs. Icon

Past Hungry Blues blog post on Mark Mulcahy (mini concert review):

• Don’t Talk Crazy

Many thanks to Pam Spaulding for capturing John Lewis’ speech at Equality Alabama’s gala a couple of weekends ago. John Lewis is an American hero and a powerful speaker; it is fantastic to hear him speaking so strongly on this issue and declaring himself an ally to the GLBT community.

John Lewis took batons to the head, was beaten to unconsciousness multiple times for equality — courage and moral conviction that [Bishop Harry] Jackson and his fellow charlatans of bigotry are bereft of.

Rep. Lewis spoke eloquently about the simplicity of the government staying out of the lives of gay and lesbian couples — there is no need to “save” marriage from two people who simply want to love one another and be legally affirmed in the same way that heterosexual couples are when they marry.

But perhaps the most powerful message was to those in the LGBT community who are waiting for equality to come to them — Lewis charged us to seize the moment, do not accept being told to wait your turn, to demand your rights through your representative, and most of all take personal responsibility — the message we all heard was loud and clear.

(Read the rest of Pam’s post on Lewis’ appearance at the Equality Alabama gala.)

Jerry Mitchell at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, Northeastern University Law School, April 28, 2007

A papermaker dedicated to preserving traditional Western and Japanese techniques; a scientist developing theories of global climate change; and a journalist who helps uncover details of unsolved murders from the civil rights era are among the 24 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards,” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation….

Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., who focuses on cold-case murders from the civil rights era, said he would use the money to help write a book on the subject. “I never in all my life expected this,” Mr. Mitchell, 50, said of his award.

I have been following Jerry’s work almost as long as I’ve had this blog and more recently have had the honor and pleasure of getting to know him professionally. Here’s a bit more about him for those unfamiliar:

He has been called “a loose cannon,” “a pain in the ass” and “a white traitor.” Whatever he’s been called, Jerry Mitchell has never given up in his quest to bring unpunished killers to justice, prompting one colleague to call him “the South’s Simon Wiesenthal.”

Since 1989, the 47-year-old investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses, and quietly pursued evidence in the nation’s notorious killings from the civil rights era.

His work so far has helped put four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and, most recently, Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

So far in 2006, Mitchell has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, the winner of the Vernon Jarrett Award for Investigative Reporting and the Tom Renner Award for Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors. Last November, Mitchell became youngest recipient ever of Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for his 17 years of pursuing justice.

David Halberstam said in helping bestow the Chancellor award, “Mitchell pursued these stories after most people believed they belonged to history, and not to journalism. But they did belong to journalism, because the truth had never been told and justice had never been done.”

In 1989, Mitchell was a court reporter for The Clarion-Ledger when the film Mississippi Burning inspired him to look into old civil rights cases that many thought had long since turned cold. Through dogged reporting, which cut across the grain of his paper and many of its readers, he investigated leads long ignored or overlooked.

For example, Mitchell’s diligent attention to detail unraveled the alibi of Cherry, who claimed he was watching wrestling on television when the bomb was planted inside the Birmingham church. Mitchell had the newspaper’s librarian check the TV schedule in the old issues of the Birmingham News. There was no wrestling program on at the time.

His work inspired others. Since 1989, authorities in Mississippi and six other states have reexamined 29 killings from the civil rights era and made 27 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

“It is fair to say that without Mitchell’s dogged and often courageous reporting … many murders from the civil rights era would have remained unvindicated, locked forever in the vaults of regional amnesia,” wrote Tribune syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker.

(Read more.)

You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.

• NY Times Obit
• Bio of Mary Travis from peterpaulandmary.com
• Statements from Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey

Have you called Congress to say you support health care reform that includes a public option?

Even if you have, call again.

202-224-3121

Grand Casino, Biloxi, MS, five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi.

On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were completely destroyed, leaving few structures within which to identify still-water marks.” The center’s researchers estimate that the hurricane produced a storm surge as high as 27 feet in some locations.

It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino….

The national media have covered the near-total destruction of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Driving along Beach Boulevard in the two towns, I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….

In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.

Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.

But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.

Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.

“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”

When I wrote this for Dollars & Sense Magazine in 2006, I focused on the housing crisis faced by Katrina survivors in Mississippi. Today, at the fourth anniversary of the storm, the housing crisis rages on, thanks to government inaction and skewed priorites.

Small rental and workforce housing progress has fallen dramatically short of State predictions, and so Mississippi has asked HUD for additional funds to temporarily subsidize lower-income residents in market rate rentals….

• Mississippi has allocated just over half its funds on housing, and has lowered its commitment to housing by over $800 million in the past 2 years. Louisiana has allocated over 85 percent to housing programs and increased its commitment over the same period.
• Mississippi has spent just under half its funds, while Louisiana has spent almost 68 percent of its funds, widening its lead over Mississippi.
• Mississippi diverted $600 million from its housing program to a port expansion, while Louisiana intends to reinvest $600 million in unused Road Home funds for housing assistance for low-income residents.
• Mississippi took longer to spend less later for low-income residents than for wealthier residents.

But the housing crisis was just one part of the ongoing disaster. Katrina has also been a cultural and ecological disaster of epic proportions.

A family photo rests on the foundation slab of a home obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

I emphasize Mississippi in this blog post because I know that nearly all of the fourth anniversary coverage of the ongoing Katrina aftermath, will focus myopically on New Orleans. The situation in New Orleans is still dire. The housing crisis is dire. But there will not be an adequate recovery until the interconnectedness of regions and issues becomes a fundamental insight that drives policy.

While poor and minority survivors and activists will agree (if anyone asks them) that they face multiple, interconnected disasters in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, this basic local insight goes largely unrecognized. Government failure is certainly most responsible for a “recovery” that has been arbitrary, resource-driven, and slow rather than holistic, need-driven, or effective. But no one, progressives as a group included, has adequately depicted, let alone offset, that failure. Narrowly focused aid has often segregated otherwise related issues, making one or another worse and masking the lack of an overall plan. Residents of the region feel tremendous gratitude to the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of volunteers whose countless hours of labor, along with their financial contributions, are primarily responsible for what rebuilding has occurred. However, this individual good will is no substitute for the kind of comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained response that is needed from government at all levels.

Unfortunately, no thoughtful and coordinated response will occur without a compelling grassroots push for community visibility, multi-issue awareness, and broad social justice for Gulf Coast survivors. Our region today remains in a cultural, environmental, economic, and human rights crisis no less severe than its more frequently discussed housing crunch and extending far beyond the parishes of its famed city, New Orleans. The media, policymakers, academicians, and private funding groups repeatedly fail to recognize regional connectivity or to challenge the basic invisibility of the Gulf Coast’s multiply wounded communities and ecosystems—together, its very soul. [P]iecemeal analyses and responses … are moving social justice and equitable recovery nowhere fast.

The Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, still needing co-sponsors in the House, is a step in the right direction:

a hybrid model to partner directly with communities in planning, overseeing and administering recovery projects to assist the survivors of these disasters, provide communities with tools to build resilience against the impact of future disasters and revitalize the region economically.  The bill would create a minimum of 100,000 prevailing wage jobs and training opportunities for local and displaced workers on projects reinvesting in infrastructure and restoring the coastal environment utilizing emerging green building techniques and technologies.  This program would empower residents to realize their right to return with dignity and create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities.

Ask your Representative to co-sponsor this important legislation.

Carland Baker, Sr. on the site of his former townhouse, Longwood Apartments, 2012 2nd St, Long Beach, MS.

More reading and resources

• Marian Wright Edelman, Katrina’s Children—Still Struggling
• Jeffrey Buchanan, Four Years Later, Let’s End the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille
• The STEPS Coalition, Hurricane Katrina: Has Mississippi Fallen Further Behind?
• Institute for Southern Studies, SPECIAL REPORT: How is Obama doing on Gulf Coast recovery?
• Institute for Southern Studies, Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement
• Children’s Defense Fund, What It Takes to Rebuild a Village after a Disaster
• The KatrinaRitaVille Express
• Advocates for Environmental Human Rights
  
• Mississippi Center for Justice
• The Gulf Coast Fund