Emmett Till

[Thomas H. Purvis]

The evil that irrational hatreds can produce is astounding.

Hopefully year after year things get better.  Things are, of course, much better in the South than they were in the sixties.  Even some of the most bitter racist leaders changed their attitudes. 

And of course in the 1960 election there was great opposition to JFK because of his religion.  (Although on balance he probably gained as many votes as he lost.)  Now I think few Protestants would object to a Catholic president solely based on his or her faith.

Which is not to say that all racial and religious prejudice has been eliminated.

The biggest problem our world now seems to face is Muslim fundamentalism and the belief of Muslim extremists that Allah condones murder and terrorism.  Hopefully this will over time be worked out just as the bitter Catholic/Protestant dispute is now better.  Our challenge is to attempt to minimize the personal injuries and death caused as it is worked out.  As we all know, there have been deadly battles between Muslims and Christians for hundreds of years so the problem will not be solved "overnight".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The "sociological order" of the deep south is little different from that of those cultures which give us the "Muslim fundamentalism"; the Native American culture

which demonstrated little interest in joining the "Capitalistic" mainstream society; or even those poor of New Orleans who have for whatever reason see no advantage to further education and betterment of themselves for the sake of their children, even though our system has made this opportunity available.

One can not change a sociological order in a short period of time (less than 100 years), or for that matter almost 150 years since the Civil War.

England & Ireland, to this day have not come to fully peaceful resolutions, and these are in fact persons of a common heritage and language.

When not fighting outside "influence" and change, the Muslim fundamentalist, not unlike many other cultures, resort to the slaughter of each other over who's interpretation of the KORAN is correct.

And, although long ago by comparison to a single human life, in the long term of time, exactly how long ago was it that the Catholic Church felt bound by God to dispose of all "Heretic's".

Not to mention the uncared for slaughter of many from the South American Indian tribes as well as those of North America.

Then, the Church decided that these natives actually had "souls" and could therefore no longer be killed like a wild animal.

Unless of course they could not be converted to accept the Catholic Church's philosophy of God & relegion.

The Russian/Soviet Government became quite tired of having to hold guns to the heads of it's "citizens" in order to keep them from attempted genocide of each other. In addition to draining the wealth of the Soviet Economy in having to pay for an army to control one's own people, it further created animosity amoung those citizens who became a part of the military and were forced into this role.

Therefore, the Soviet solution was to tell them that they were free, allow them to go directly back to the slaughter of each other, and then inform the free world that they needed to police these uncontrollable socological orders.

And, to a large degree, our own security forces are being drained off in an attempt to track; trace; and apprehend our own version of "Home Grown" squirrels such as the Oklahoma City Federal Bldg. bombing group.

When society/the socialogical order of the human species changes, then the Government which must control this populance can change accordingly.

However, that same government must fully recognize and prepare for the fact that the sociological order change of other societies and forms of government are far behind in achieving the same sociological order.

Until then, even in recognition of it's flaws, I personally still prefer our system over any other which has been observed.

The first principal of government being "Control of the Populance".

It is somewhat difficult to achieve a peaceful sociological change for the betterment of all, when one is having to hold guns to the heads of, and shoot those for whom one is attempting to make the changes.

The "blueprint" for betterment of the entire human race is quite clear and quite simple.

The only trouble with it is the fact that it must also deal with the human species.

Tom

[John Dolva]

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@

July 25, 1941 – Emmett Louis Till is born in Chicago.

May 17, 1954

– In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court

rules unanimously that school segregation is unconstitutional. The decision

provokes intense hostility among many in the South, creating a poisonous

racial atmosphere.

August 1955

– Emmett Till, 14, travels from Chicago to Money,

Mississippi, to spend the summer with his cousins.

August 24, 1955

– While visiting Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in

Money, Emmett Till allegedly insults Carolyn Bryant, a white woman.

August 28, 1955

– Till is abducted by two white men and murdered.

August 31, 1955

– Till's mutilated body is found in the Tallahatchie River.

September 19, 1955

– The trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam begins in

Sumner, Mississippi.

September 23, 1955

– Bryant and Milam are acquitted.

December 1955

– African Americans begin a boycott of the segregated

city bus system in Montgomery, Alabama.

May 1956

– A rally is held in New York City's Madison Square Garden by

a newly founded group called In Friendship. The group is founded largely

in response to the Till murder and raises money to support the victims of

racial violence.

August 1957

– Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which

includes a provision for federal investigations of civil rights violations, a

provision that many observers credit to the impact of the Emmett Till case.

On the same day, Martin Luther King, Jr., decides on the name of the new

organization he and other ministers had founded – the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC).

May 28, 1963

– The NAACP begins to hold sit-ins at Woolworth lunch

counters. That night, a Molotov cocktail is thrown at Medgar Evers's

house.

June 7, 1963

– At an NAACP meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, Evers says,

“I love my children and I love my wife. And I would die, and die gladly, if

that would make a better life for them.”

June 12, 1963

– President John F. Kennedy gives a stirring civil rights

speech on television. As Medgar Evers returns home after hearing it, he is

killed by a rifle shot.

June 19, 1963

– Shortly after Byron de la Beckwith is arrested, Evers is

buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. For two

days previously, his body had been carried across the land by a funeral

train.

June 22, 1963

– Kennedy meets at the White House first with Roy Wilkins

of the NAACP and then with Martin Luther King, Jr.

August 28, 1963

– During the civil rights march on Washington, Martin

Luther King, Jr. delivers his “I have a dream” speech.

................Kennedy murdered

February 7, 1964

– The Beckwith trial ends in a mistrial. A second trial

also failed to convict.

July 2, 1964 – The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is signed by President Lyndon

Johnson, John Kennedy's successor. It abolishes discrimination in public

accommodations and employment.

July 1965

– President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, which ensure

voting rights to African Americans, thus fulfilling one of Medgar Evers's

missions.

............

1989 – The Byron de la Beckwith case is reopened.

1991 – July 25, On Emmett Till's 50th birthday, Mayor Richard M. Daley

proclaims “Emmett Till Day” in Chicago. Part of 71st Street is honorarily

named “Emmett Till Road.”

1994 – Beckwith is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

.............

Emmett Till*

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Alvin Sykes came late to the saga of Emmett Till, but the Kansas City human rights activist has as much as anyone to do with the reopening of the investigation into the 1955 murder.

Without Sykes' persistence and network of connections, it's unlikely that the case would have gotten the renewed attention of federal and Mississippi authorities, say those who have worked closely with him during a quarter-century-long quest to resolve unpunished civil rights crimes.

"He is tenacious as a bulldog, and he doesn't know the meaning of 'no,'" said Don Burger, a retired racial conflict mediator for the U.S. Justice Department.

Burger, of Waukee, Iowa, joined with Sykes in founding the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, which successfully lobbied the Justice Department to put the FBI back on the hunt in 2004.

Until a few years ago, however, Sykes knew only the basic details of the black 14-year-old's brutal death, which is credited with helping to catalyze the civil rights movement.

Sykes felt the case first tug at him in 1981, after he had persuaded the Justice Department to investigate and successfully prosecute a hate crime for which the perpetrator had been acquitted in a Missouri state court.

The victim was Steven Harvey, a 27-year-old black jazz saxophonist, who was beaten to death in 1980 with a baseball bat by a white ex-Marine. Harvey's widow, Rhea, told Sykes it was the second hate crime in her family. The first was Emmett Till, to whom Rhea Harvey was distantly related.

Till's name, however, didn't attract Sykes' full attention until December 2002, when an article in a black-oriented Kansas City weekly newspaper detailed the books and films being done about the case. He read about Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett's mother, who had been trying since 1956 to get the case reopened. That was also the year Sykes was born.

"Like it was, wow, this woman has spent the equivalent of my lifetime pursuing this one thing," said Sykes.

Sykes contacted Mobley and talked her into chairing the Emmett Till Justice Campaign. Mobley died two days after giving the effort her blessing.

Sykes has made the cause his passion ever since, with help from Burger and others, such as filmmaker Keith Beauchamp. Beauchamp's documentary, "The Untold Story of Emmett Till," contends that there were other people, some still living, who were involved in Till's murder other than the two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, who were acquitted by an all-white Tallahatchie County jury.

As with the Steven Harvey murder, Sykes had to persuade the Justice Department that it had jurisdiction to look into the case, even if they would have to rely on state officials to prosecute it. His research turned up two precedents - a federal investigation during the 1970s into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the Clinton administration's re-examination in the late 1990s of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King.

"If it was good enough for Kennedy, and it was good enough for King, it was good enough for Emmett Till," Sykes said.

Sykes is one of the more unlikely characters in the latest chapter of the Till murder and its aftermath.

Sykes was taken at the age of 8 days from his 14-year-old biological mother and placed with a 48-year-old unmarried domestic worker. At 12, he got his first taste of the civil rights movement, snitching on vandals who were setting fires around his Kansas City neighborhood in the aftermath of the King assassination. Fearing in part for his safety, his adoptive mother shipped Sykes off to Boys Town, a home for troubled and neglected children in Nebraska.

At 16, back in Kansas City, Sykes dropped out of school and starting teaching and training himself on the intricacies of the law. Raised Catholic, he became a Buddhist at 18.

He developed a passion for helping crime victims, having himself experienced that sense of helplessness at a young age. When he was 11, Sykes said, he was sexually assaulted twice by a man and woman who lived across the street. They were never charged.

"I did not know there were people you could go to for help," Sykes said.

His grasp of the nuances of civil rights laws is unparalleled, according to Burger, the retired Justice Department mediator.

"He can stand on his own with the most gifted lawyers from Yale and Harvard," Burger said.

Sykes does his work without a vehicle (a visual impairment in one eye keeps him from driving) or much income.

Technically, as president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, he is supposed to receive a salary of $27,500 a year, but the organization hasn't had the money to pay it.

Sykes believes his biggest contribution to the Till investigation was getting federal and state prosecutors to talk. A pivotal meeting occurred in Oxford in February 2004, where Joyce Chiles, the district attorney for Leflore, Sunflower and Washington counties, agreed to request the Justice Department's help in the investigation. That allowed the FBI not only to get involved but to add the possibility of prosecution to its digging.

"Joyce Chiles made this a real investigation with real consequences," Sykes said.

Sykes' powers of persuasion extends beyond the Till case.

He planted the seed in the mind of Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., to create an office within the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute unsolved murders from the civil rights era.

That legislation has 22 bipartisan co-sponsors, including both of Mississippi's Republican senators, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is one of the lead sponsors in a companion measure that is expected to be introduced in the House next month.

Sykes also came up with the legislation's nickname - the "Till bill."

Sykes said he has no preconceived notions about whether anyone still living collaborated in the murder of Till.

"You will never get from me names of people who were allegedly involved. We want a complete and fair investigation," he said.

He said the evidence could just as likely exonerate aged suspects as it could show reason to prosecute.

"There may be people out there who have been falsely accused."

To those in Mississippi who question the wisdom of resurrecting the racially sensitive case, Sykes cites the example of the June conviction by a Neshoba County jury of Edgar Ray Killen for his involvement in the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers. That successful state prosecution of the former Klansman has removed, according to Sykes, the stigma that had clung for 41 years to Philadelphia, Miss., site of the infamous crime.

"Already around the world, Philadelphia means something different than it did a month ago," Sykes said during a July interview. "You see it as a beacon of hope for truth and justice."

He said the only way that Mississippi can move out of the long shadow of Emmett Till's death is by bringing to light the full truth of what happened 50 years ago.

"There are more people in Mississippi in the end who will feel better about this coming to a conclusion one way or another rather than to just hang there and fester."

*  http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=...id=104621&rfi=6

#  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Rights_Movement

@  https://www.choicesvideo.net/guidebooks/WAV/Heroes1.pdf

POLITICAL ASSASSINATION

@ : "Jim Crow” laws created a legally inferior status in the South for African Americans, who were denied equal justice and social services. In addition, African Americans suffered sporadic and vicious outbreaks of “lynch law” — people would seize suspected criminals (many of them innocent) and murder them, often after terrible tortures. Sometimes the “crime” for which a black person was murdered hardly qualified for that term. Such was the case of Emmett Till. Because he had allegedly insulted a white woman on a summer day in 1955, two white men assumed they had license to kill him. If they thought they would get away with it, they were correct, because they were never convicted. But if they thought Emmett Till would be forgotten, they couldn't have been more wrong.

Medgar Evers, as field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was at the forefront of the movement to get blacks to register to vote. This made him a prime target for segregationists. His murder in 1963 was the first racial killing to garner national attention since the killing of Till eight years before. After his death, an interesting shift in vocabulary signaled an important change in perception. His murder was not referred to as a “lynching,” but a “political assassination,” a recognition that violence against blacks had become something that had to be taken much more seriously and that it had deep political implications. Had Emmett Till and Medgar Evers met their deaths 50 years earlier, their names would probably have been forgotten. But times were changing in America, and their murders ignited a spirit of protest that would not die."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::

Comment;  Could Sykes be the man to help relaunch an investigation?

"Sykes' powers of persuasion extends beyond the Till case.

He planted the seed in the mind of Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., to create an office within the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute unsolved murders from the civil rights era."

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

John, that's an interesting approach. Here is some more information from that time to 'flesh out' the picture. Of course, as you indicated with all the other posts and links there seems to be clear reasons to argue for a reopening of the Kennedy Murder Investigations. I hope someone might raise this issue with Sykes. I'd be interested to know what he would say.

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http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/f.../doaressay.html

Bending Toward Justice: John Doar and the Mississippi Burning Trial

By Douglas O. Linder

extracts

"Doar knew Mississippi well enough to be deeply worried. The three might be dead. Doar told King that he was concerned. He would do what he could. But, as Doar told Freedom Summer volunteers just a week earlier, there was no federal police force. He suggested that King call the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol. After hanging up the phone, Doar alerted the FBI of the disappearance of the civil rights workers.

Two weeks earlier, Doar and Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the growing tensions in Mississippi. Since the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi formed on February 15, Doar had been getting periodic reports from the FBI on the clandestine group’s activities. An April report to Doar told of sixty-one crosses simultaneously burning across the state. KKK membership in Mississippi was exploding in response to stepped-up voter registration drives. Over 10,000 white men made up the membership of twenty-nine “klaverns,” or chapters. Equally disturbing was the lack of any political will to counter the KKK with state power. What, Doar wondered, was to stop them?"

................................................

"William Harold Cox and John Michael Doar had met numerous times in the judge’s courtroom. It would be fair to describe them as being old adversaries. A 1963 letter from Cox to Doar, written in response to Doar’s request to give the voting rights case of United States v. Mississippi immediate attention, is revealing of their relationship:

Dear Mr. Doar,

I have a copy of your October 12 letter… thought I had made it clear to you…that I was not in the least impressed with your impudence in reciting the chronology of the case before me with which I am completely familiar. If you need to build such transcripts for your boss man, you had better do that by interoffice memoranda because I am not favorably impressed with you or your tactics in undertaking to push one of your cases before me. I spend most of my time in fooling with lousy cases brought before me by your department in the civil rights field, and I do not intend to turn my docket over to your department for your political advancement….You are completely stupid if you do not realize that each of the judges in this court understands the importance of this case to all the litigants. I do not intend to be harassed by you or any of your underlings in this or any court where I sit and the sooner you get that through your head the better you will get along with me, if that is of any interest to you….

In a recent interview, Doar called Cox “a piece of machinery,” and remembers that the judge “would really lambast me when I came into his court with a motion.” Doar once tried to have Cox censured by the Fifth Circuit for his lawless behavior on the bench.

Cox owed his position on the federal bench to his friend and Ole Miss Law School roommate, James Eastland, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Eastland had the power to block President Kennedy’s appointment of NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—an appointment Kennedy very much wanted to make. Eastland bargained for his old friend, saying to Robert Kennedy, “Tell your brother that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the n.”

Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall met with Cox prior to his nomination. Cox assured the Attorney General and the head of the Civil Rights division that he would enforce federal law as it had been interpreted by the Supreme Court. Satisfied with Cox’s assurance, President Kennedy nominated Cox for the federal district bench. As soon as his robe was on, however, Cox became a major obstacle to the Justice Department. In one voting rights suit brought by Doar, for example, Cox refused to let government lawyers inspect the public voting records of Clarke County. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that and many of Cox’s other decisions, but his manipulations caused considerable delay in the progress of civil rights in Mississippi."

[John Dolva]

Here are some more extracts to indicate the type of environment that President Kennedy was entering when heading south. It's from the above document dealing witn the June 64 murders of civil rights activists called the 'Mississippi Burning ' case.

"As the intense search for bodies continued, investigators found several corpses of civil rights workers in lonely Mississippi places—but not any of the three everyone was looking for. They pulled the corpse of a black boy of about fourteen out of the Big Black River. The boy, who was found wearing a CORE T-shirt, was never identified.

It finally became apparent that the bodies, if they were ever to be discovered, would be found not by a search but by an investigation. John Doar was later to tell a jury of twelve Mississippians that “rarely in the history of law and enforcement” was it “so difficult to obtain evidence” (??? well, lots of crimes by the sounds of it, just not that particular one) of a crime as it was to determine what took place in the four hours beginning at 9 P.M. on June 21, 1964 in and around Philadelphia. Doar said “a thousand eyes explored every corner of Neshoba County” but “Neshoba County remained silent.” He added that only “extraordinary methods” and “the maximum effort of the FBI” could bring the conspirators “to the bar of justice of law.”

The FBI recognized that solving the case would require infiltration of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, an organization protected both by its own insularity and the fear that it inspired in the community. Before it was over, the bureau’s “Mississippi burning,” or MIBURN, investigation would include interviews with nearly one thousand Mississippians. About half of the interview subjects were known or suspected members of the Klan. The final report was over 150,000 pages long. FBI Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan summarized the problem: “They owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan.” Sullivan said the usual bureau approach of convincing people that cooperation was in their own best interest did not work. “It didn’t pay to push Neshobans, because they weren’t afraid.” Locals delighted in sending agents off on wild goose chases or debating agents on issues such as communist influence in the civil rights movement. Sullivan bemoaned the countless hours spent “wheel-spinning” and engaging in “jolly talks with Klansmen.”

[John Dolva]

Greenwood, FOIAs, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, The Citizens Councils, The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Guy Bannister, Lee Harvey Oswald, Senator James Eastland, and the sniper who killed Medgar Evers.

"The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, formed in 1956 by the state legislature was actually one of two groups leading the state’s official resistance to civil rights. The second group – the white Citizens’ Councils – was a private organization founded two years earlier in response to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS.

Both aided in maintaining Mississippi’s “closed society” by interchanging information, laundering money, tipping off the Klan and FBI to activities of civil rights activists or doing anything to disrupt the plans and activities of those working on the side of civil rights.

Often working the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a part of Mississippi with a heritage of struggle too-often ignored in other accounts, government spies (some former FBI agents or other experienced law enforcement personnel and some veterans with multiple Purple Hearts from military days past, ) gathered whatever data they could to harm black citizens and others who “agitated” for voting and civil rights. These agents worked under the direction of the state Sovereignty Commission.

The commission was intended to prevent outsiders from changing Mississippi's Southern--segregationist--way of life. It was supposed to do this by publicizing how well segregation worked and by secretly keeping watch over those who wished to overturn the system. By the time it closed in 1973, thecommission's investigators had amassed confidential files on 87,000 people, making it the largest state-level spying effort in U.S. history.

Some journalists not so jokingly, referred to the Sovereignty Commission as the “Cotton” or “Magnolia” Gestapo, and for good reason: School superintendents, teachers, college administrators, ministers, doctors, bankers, journalist and any others with information to be used against civil rights advocates were vulnerable to the Commission’s pressures.

Those who did “inform” were both white and black. Some were paid for their tips. Some were not. In turn the Commission was typically protective of white informations but not for blacks.

The information received was passed on where ever it was needed – to town constables, police officers and highway patrol officers (some who belonged to the Klan ) or to bankers and businessmen, school board members, loan officers – Citizens Councils members who could use information to financially punish errant Mississippians and others.

The information kept flowing as the Sovereignty Commission used secrets gained in a variety of ways to harm the enemy – supporters of integration and voting rights for blacks.

There were journalists who took advantage of a preferred relationship with the Sovereignty Commission and Councils members, and were paid for publishing slanted news and editorials at the Commission or Councils’ request, a technique borrowed from the FBI. Only a handful were brave enough to report the whole truth rather than succumb to Commission or Council pressures.

A number of good people lost their jobs along the way – their credibility, their businesses, bank loans, their insurance, their reputations or their self-respect; many were injured and even killed because of what they knew or what they wanted to do or had done, all of which contributed to Mississippi’s structural attack against the state’s best and brightest in their resistance to racism and segregation.

State government, at first using public funds, fed the Citizens Councils via the Sovereignty Commission, which frequently served as a pass-through of both public and private money to the Councils and their off-shoots.

Some money came through private individual donations, and then from small town and city banks, the state’s real estate board, the state bar association, private medical groups, chambers of commerce and others.

Yet, most of the funding for Citizens Councils projects – and later for setting up segregated white academies – came from one resource outside of Mississippi, from the accounts and foundation of one white Northeastern millionaire with direct Nazi ties, a financier who was following his own white supremacist agenda.

To even acknowledge Mississippi’s state-sanctioned racism would likely result in professional character assassination. A white history professor at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), Dr. James Silver, wrote about Mississippi’s closed society and eventually went publicly on record as a fierce opponent of racism and its forces in the Magnolia State.

From his arrival on campus in 1936, Silver began making speeches outside of the university. One speech at the Clarksdale courthouse on wage and hour issues almost caused him unanticipated trouble – as would many of his future activities: "I am sure I was extremely cautious in my remarks about federally imposed minimum wages, not popular in the Delta even though they didn’t apply to agricultural labor. At the time, I was unaware that laborers in the…lumber mills were being paid as little as ten cents an hour, and that often in company scrip.

"In any case, the next morning’s Clarksdale paper vigorously condemned my talk as a communist. A couple of days later I opened a letter from Tom Gibson, a gloomy columnist for the local press, who announced quite simply that I would be fired at the end of the year. In fact, he affirmed to several members of the Board of Trustees his belief that I was a Red.”

As the Sovereignty Commission and Citizens Councils grew in strength, Silver was finally forced to leave the state in 1964 and teach elsewhere.

There were so many others who were punished for trying to fix the system, trying to lift the siege: Dr. Horace Germany wrote of returning to his Northern Mississippi home in 1956. For five years, the white minister worked at starting a small Bible college, where black students would also learn to run a dairy and grow their own foods. After graduation, they would help other African Americans throughout the South. Nevertheless, as his operation grew strong, Germany was approached one day by members of the white Citizens Council of Senatobia and questioned for two hours.

“Was he financed by the NAACP?” Germany was asked. “I told them we had neither asked for nor received a cent from the NAACP. Then Tillman [head of Council] asked me about a check from a woman in California, and if that check hadn’t come from an ‘NAACP source.’” It was clear that Citizens Councils members had pried into Germany’s savings and checking accounts. Several days later, Germany was ambushed and beaten severely by Tillman and several Klansmen; one witness timed the beating for 45 minutes but did nothing to stop it.

Germany’s physician arranged for his hospitalization at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Meridian, far away from his home, where the Sisters hid him until it was safe to go home: “[My doctor] knew the Klan would finish me off if they knew I was still alive.” Germany finally moved his school to Texas, where it grew into a successful small college, surpassing all goals he had set for the Mississippi campus.

Ironically, for an espionage organization focused on secrecy, the Sovereignty Commission left massive footprints. Thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and others, including activist Ken Lawrence most of the Commission’s secret reports are now open to the public after a twenty-five year battle.

(The privacy stance of Dr. John Salter and Rev. Edwin King delayed the opening a long time, believing that some people would be killed if their names were revealed to the public.)

Some Sovereignty Commission representatives hid or threw away certain reports, memoranda and communications, rather than turn over the now incriminating documents; it is probable that boxes of documents are still stowed away in private homes and garages, as well as government and FBI offices. Copies of many files should be a part of the late U. S. Senator James Eastland’s archived (but so far inaccessible) papers, since Eastland was frequently updated by Commission directors at his own request.

There are some who believe the Commission’s secret work continues through the state’s secretive Bureau of Investigations; many early Sovereignty Commission records show an alliance between investigators from both organizations and the Mississippi Highway Patrol as they formally shared information. FBI files received through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) indicate this relationship was built very early on, back in the 1940s.

Where Rebels Roost emphasizes many such events occurring in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the remote Northwest quarter of the state, a portion of the larger Mississippi Delta. There is particular value to understanding the Delta culture because of its major role in agricultural production, resulting in a way of life that reveals the daily terror and violence experienced by blacks that often has been “insultingly romanticized as paternalism.”

As unsolved Delta crimes and murders against black Delta residents were examined, it was obvious that too many facts had “disappeared” over time – if they were ever collected in the first place, making investigation difficult at the least.

Even when “official” records were available, they were often suspect because of the bias that has traditionally kept Mississippi so enclaved.

This Resistance to openness too often continues. When Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIAs) were handed to police chiefs, sheriffs, university officials, FBI and court officials by this author and a lawyer, only the FBI seemed to take these requests seriously. An exception was the District Attorney of Leflore County.

Most FOIA recipients would not bother to search at all for requested records. The Dean of the University of Mississippi’s law school asked if he could just show his “rejection letter written to the last person who asked for this kind of information,” and then laughed. Later, it came back that “people at the University of Mississippi were really angry” over the FOIA request.

Bettie Dahmer’s father, Vernon Dahmer, was murdered outside of the Delta (1966 in Hattiesburg); she asserts the importance of tracking down records from past civil rights events.

"Some things have a way of getting lost if there's no permanent record," Dahmer told Nikki Davis Moute of The Hattiesburg American. "There are people who would like to forget what we went through. Some of them are alive today. They want to forget they held those views. It would have been so easy for people in power to stop the Klan then."

Dahmer was only 10 years old when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed her family’s Forrest County home, but said she remembers it as if it happened yesterday. Her story was among 4,000 firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement that in 2005 were recorded and contributed to the Voices of Civil Rights, for the U. S. Library of Congress.

"I told my story because I want people to know and remember what black people actually went through in the South because it is not addressed in the history books," said Dahmer, "If there is not a record of what happened, then it will be forgotten."

New investigations must be opened or reopended for possibly dozens of unresolved Mississippi civil rights murders including the murders of Birdia Keglar of Charleston in Tallahatchie County, a long-time voting rights advocate killed in 1966; and Cleve McDowell, a state NAACP leader and civil rights attorney who was murdered in 1997 in Drew of Sunflower County – both counties are in the Delta.

While new investigations of “more famous” crimes have been taking place throughout Mississippi, Delta civil rights murders such as these are rarely addressed.

THERE ARE MANY interesting asides to the Mississippi civil rights story but perhaps, none quite so compelling as this:

Seven years before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Sen. James O. Eastland had met Guy Bannister (“a controversial CIA operative” and retired FBI agent in charge of the Chicago bureau later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Eastland through the senator’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS.)

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956 reported that [Robert] Morrison [a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy] and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours. "Describing the conference as completely 'satisfactory,' Morrsion said, 'Mr. Banister has complete liason with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip.'"

Less than two years after Kennedy was assassinated, several high-ranking Sovereignty Commission officials considered hiring Bannister to set up an even tighter domestic spying system in Mississippi. Another Eastland operative, John Sullivan, made this suggestion in March of 1965 as shown in Sovereignty Commission records.

Sullivan, also a former FBI agent and private investigator, often did work for hire for the Sovereignty Commission, the white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member, and for Eastland’s SISS committee. When he died in the mid 1960s, the Sovereignty Commission later tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were reported as missing by his wife." - http://emmett-till.blogspot.com/2005_04_01...ll_archive.html

edit:: error on my part . Medgar Evers (NOT Emmett Till) was shot (sniper at 150 feet) by a relative of Eastland.

That's great Tim, I agree. Motive's not enough. I think that means and opportunity should'nt be hard to establish. Hard evidence is going to be the difficulty. However, I can point to some places where it might be (and will do so). I do have plenty of circumstantial stuff. Un fortunately these organisations have one defining characteristic : secrecy. Loyalty bound up with collective guilt or hatred or fear.

This is the scenario that fits the supposition that it was not any particular group, but rather members of groupings : FBI men, police men, ordinary folk, members of government. KKK, JBS, DCC, tCC, SISS. Sworn together by an old common cause. Well established procedures for concealment and obfuscation. (for example one of a few common 'codes' within white supremacy groupings is the code of silence : 5(words) This numeral represents "I have nothing to say."

FBI Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan summarized the problem: “They owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan.” Sullivan said the usual bureau approach of convincing people that cooperation was in their own best interest did not work. “It didn’t pay to push Neshobans, because they weren’t afraid.” Locals delighted in sending agents off on wild goose chases or debating agents on issues such as communist influence in the civil rights movement. Sullivan bemoaned the countless hours spent “wheel-spinning” and engaging in “jolly talks with Klansmen.”

Edited September 13, 2005 by John Dolva

[Tim Gratz]

John, I cannot disagree with a word you said.

Like I said, I can see intense anti-black, anti-integration feelings as a possible strong motive for the assassination, although motive in and of itself does not get us very far.

It is my understanding that when HSCA disbanded it expected the Dept of Justice to continue the investigation.

[Thomas H. Purvis]

Greenwood, FOIAs, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, The Citizens Councils, The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Guy Bannister, Lee Harvey Oswald, Senator James Eastland, and the sniper who killed Medgar Evers.

"The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, formed in 1956 by the state legislature was actually one of two groups leading the state’s official resistance to civil rights. The second group – the white Citizens’ Councils – was a private organization founded two years earlier in response to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS.

Both aided in maintaining Mississippi’s “closed society” by interchanging information, laundering money, tipping off the Klan and FBI to activities of civil rights activists or doing anything to disrupt the plans and activities of those working on the side of civil rights.

Often working the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a part of Mississippi with a heritage of struggle too-often ignored in other accounts, government spies (some former FBI agents or other experienced law enforcement personnel and some veterans with multiple Purple Hearts from military days past, ) gathered whatever data they could to harm black citizens and others who “agitated” for voting and civil rights. These agents worked under the direction of the state Sovereignty Commission.

The commission was intended to prevent outsiders from changing Mississippi's Southern--segregationist--way of life. It was supposed to do this by publicizing how well segregation worked and by secretly keeping watch over those who wished to overturn the system. By the time it closed in 1973, thecommission's investigators had amassed confidential files on 87,000 people, making it the largest state-level spying effort in U.S. history.

Some journalists not so jokingly, referred to the Sovereignty Commission as the “Cotton” or “Magnolia” Gestapo, and for good reason: School superintendents, teachers, college administrators, ministers, doctors, bankers, journalist and any others with information to be used against civil rights advocates were vulnerable to the Commission’s pressures.

Those who did “inform” were both white and black. Some were paid for their tips. Some were not. In turn the Commission was typically protective of white informations but not for blacks.

The information received was passed on where ever it was needed – to town constables, police officers and highway patrol officers (some who belonged to the Klan ) or to bankers and businessmen, school board members, loan officers – Citizens Councils members who could use information to financially punish errant Mississippians and others.

The information kept flowing as the Sovereignty Commission used secrets gained in a variety of ways to harm the enemy – supporters of integration and voting rights for blacks.

There were journalists who took advantage of a preferred relationship with the Sovereignty Commission and Councils members, and were paid for publishing slanted news and editorials at the Commission or Councils’ request, a technique borrowed from the FBI. Only a handful were brave enough to report the whole truth rather than succumb to Commission or Council pressures.

A number of good people lost their jobs along the way – their credibility, their businesses, bank loans, their insurance, their reputations or their self-respect; many were injured and even killed because of what they knew or what they wanted to do or had done, all of which contributed to Mississippi’s structural attack against the state’s best and brightest in their resistance to racism and segregation.

State government, at first using public funds, fed the Citizens Councils via the Sovereignty Commission, which frequently served as a pass-through of both public and private money to the Councils and their off-shoots.

Some money came through private individual donations, and then from small town and city banks, the state’s real estate board, the state bar association, private medical groups, chambers of commerce and others.

Yet, most of the funding for Citizens Councils projects – and later for setting up segregated white academies – came from one resource outside of Mississippi, from the accounts and foundation of one white Northeastern millionaire with direct Nazi ties, a financier who was following his own white supremacist agenda.

To even acknowledge Mississippi’s state-sanctioned racism would likely result in professional character assassination. A white history professor at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), Dr. James Silver, wrote about Mississippi’s closed society and eventually went publicly on record as a fierce opponent of racism and its forces in the Magnolia State.

From his arrival on campus in 1936, Silver began making speeches outside of the university. One speech at the Clarksdale courthouse on wage and hour issues almost caused him unanticipated trouble – as would many of his future activities: "I am sure I was extremely cautious in my remarks about federally imposed minimum wages, not popular in the Delta even though they didn’t apply to agricultural labor. At the time, I was unaware that laborers in the…lumber mills were being paid as little as ten cents an hour, and that often in company scrip.

"In any case, the next morning’s Clarksdale paper vigorously condemned my talk as a communist. A couple of days later I opened a letter from Tom Gibson, a gloomy columnist for the local press, who announced quite simply that I would be fired at the end of the year. In fact, he affirmed to several members of the Board of Trustees his belief that I was a Red.”

As the Sovereignty Commission and Citizens Councils grew in strength, Silver was finally forced to leave the state in 1964 and teach elsewhere.

There were so many others who were punished for trying to fix the system, trying to lift the siege: Dr. Horace Germany wrote of returning to his Northern Mississippi home in 1956. For five years, the white minister worked at starting a small Bible college, where black students would also learn to run a dairy and grow their own foods. After graduation, they would help other African Americans throughout the South. Nevertheless, as his operation grew strong, Germany was approached one day by members of the white Citizens Council of Senatobia and questioned for two hours.

“Was he financed by the NAACP?” Germany was asked. “I told them we had neither asked for nor received a cent from the NAACP. Then Tillman [head of Council] asked me about a check from a woman in California, and if that check hadn’t come from an ‘NAACP source.’” It was clear that Citizens Councils members had pried into Germany’s savings and checking accounts. Several days later, Germany was ambushed and beaten severely by Tillman and several Klansmen; one witness timed the beating for 45 minutes but did nothing to stop it.

Germany’s physician arranged for his hospitalization at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Meridian, far away from his home, where the Sisters hid him until it was safe to go home: “[My doctor] knew the Klan would finish me off if they knew I was still alive.” Germany finally moved his school to Texas, where it grew into a successful small college, surpassing all goals he had set for the Mississippi campus.

Ironically, for an espionage organization focused on secrecy, the Sovereignty Commission left massive footprints. Thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and others, including activist Ken Lawrence most of the Commission’s secret reports are now open to the public after a twenty-five year battle.

(The privacy stance of Dr. John Salter and Rev. Edwin King delayed the opening a long time, believing that some people would be killed if their names were revealed to the public.)

Some Sovereignty Commission representatives hid or threw away certain reports, memoranda and communications, rather than turn over the now incriminating documents; it is probable that boxes of documents are still stowed away in private homes and garages, as well as government and FBI offices. Copies of many files should be a part of the late U. S. Senator James Eastland’s archived (but so far inaccessible) papers, since Eastland was frequently updated by Commission directors at his own request.

There are some who believe the Commission’s secret work continues through the state’s secretive Bureau of Investigations; many early Sovereignty Commission records show an alliance between investigators from both organizations and the Mississippi Highway Patrol as they formally shared information. FBI files received through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) indicate this relationship was built very early on, back in the 1940s.

Where Rebels Roost emphasizes many such events occurring in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the remote Northwest quarter of the state, a portion of the larger Mississippi Delta. There is particular value to understanding the Delta culture because of its major role in agricultural production, resulting in a way of life that reveals the daily terror and violence experienced by blacks that often has been “insultingly romanticized as paternalism.”

As unsolved Delta crimes and murders against black Delta residents were examined, it was obvious that too many facts had “disappeared” over time – if they were ever collected in the first place, making investigation difficult at the least.

Even when “official” records were available, they were often suspect because of the bias that has traditionally kept Mississippi so enclaved.

This Resistance to openness too often continues. When Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIAs) were handed to police chiefs, sheriffs, university officials, FBI and court officials by this author and a lawyer, only the FBI seemed to take these requests seriously. An exception was the District Attorney of Leflore County.

Most FOIA recipients would not bother to search at all for requested records. The Dean of the University of Mississippi’s law school asked if he could just show his “rejection letter written to the last person who asked for this kind of information,” and then laughed. Later, it came back that “people at the University of Mississippi were really angry” over the FOIA request.

Bettie Dahmer’s father, Vernon Dahmer, was murdered outside of the Delta (1966 in Hattiesburg); she asserts the importance of tracking down records from past civil rights events.

"Some things have a way of getting lost if there's no permanent record," Dahmer told Nikki Davis Moute of The Hattiesburg American. "There are people who would like to forget what we went through. Some of them are alive today. They want to forget they held those views. It would have been so easy for people in power to stop the Klan then."

Dahmer was only 10 years old when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed her family’s Forrest County home, but said she remembers it as if it happened yesterday. Her story was among 4,000 firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement that in 2005 were recorded and contributed to the Voices of Civil Rights, for the U. S. Library of Congress.

"I told my story because I want people to know and remember what black people actually went through in the South because it is not addressed in the history books," said Dahmer, "If there is not a record of what happened, then it will be forgotten."

New investigations must be opened or reopended for possibly dozens of unresolved Mississippi civil rights murders including the murders of Birdia Keglar of Charleston in Tallahatchie County, a long-time voting rights advocate killed in 1966; and Cleve McDowell, a state NAACP leader and civil rights attorney who was murdered in 1997 in Drew of Sunflower County – both counties are in the Delta.

While new investigations of “more famous” crimes have been taking place throughout Mississippi, Delta civil rights murders such as these are rarely addressed.

THERE ARE MANY interesting asides to the Mississippi civil rights story but perhaps, none quite so compelling as this:

Seven years before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated,  Sen. James O. Eastland had met Guy Bannister (“a controversial CIA operative” and retired FBI agent in charge of the Chicago bureau later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Eastland through the senator’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS.)

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956 reported that [Robert] Morrison [a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy] and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours. "Describing the conference as completely 'satisfactory,' Morrsion said, 'Mr. Banister has complete liason with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip.'"

Less than two years after Kennedy was assassinated, several high-ranking Sovereignty Commission officials considered hiring Bannister to set up an even tighter domestic spying system in Mississippi. Another Eastland operative, John Sullivan, made this suggestion in March of 1965 as shown in Sovereignty Commission records.

Sullivan, also a former FBI agent and private investigator, often did work for hire for the Sovereignty Commission, the white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member, and for Eastland’s SISS committee. When he died in the mid 1960s, the Sovereignty Commission later tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were reported as missing by his wife." - http://emmett-till.blogspot.com/2005_04_01...ll_archive.html

edit:: error on my part . Medgar Evers (NOT Emmett Till) was shot (sniper at 150 feet)  by a relative of Eastland.

That's great Tim, I agree. Motive's not enough. I think that means and opportunity should'nt be hard to establish. Hard evidence is going to be the difficulty. However, I can point to some places where it might be (and will do so). I do have plenty of circumstantial stuff. Un fortunately these organisations have one defining characteristic : secrecy. Loyalty bound up with collective guilt or hatred  or fear.

This is the scenario that fits the supposition that it was not any particular group, but rather members of groupings : FBI men, police men, ordinary folk, members of government. KKK, JBS, DCC, tCC, SISS. Sworn together by an old common cause. Well established procedures for concealment and obfuscation. (for example one of a few common 'codes' within white supremacy groupings is the code of silence : 5(words) This numeral represents "I have nothing to say."

FBI Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan summarized the problem: “They owned the place. In spirit, everyone belonged to the Klan.” Sullivan said the usual bureau approach of convincing people that cooperation was in their own best interest did not work. “It didn’t pay to push Neshobans, because they weren’t afraid.” Locals delighted in sending agents off on wild goose chases or debating agents on issues such as communist influence in the civil rights movement. Sullivan bemoaned the countless hours spent “wheel-spinning” and engaging in “jolly talks with Klansmen.”

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

John;

Since, on this subject matter you appear to have caught the correct boat, and are also rowing in the correct direction, it would be remiss of me to not wax you oars.

In event you follow the MS Soverignty Commission adequately, you will find ex-FBI Agent Zack Van Landingham highly involved in the Commission.

Although originally from TN, the Van Landingham's of Greenwood, MS , certainly supported the cause of the Confederacy.

They also left their "marks" on history and not unlike many good southerners, were quite proud of living and being buried in a place known as "Greenwood".

Tom

P.S. You are not likely to find too many answers looking for assassins in the bushes.

[John Dolva]

A long, long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile and I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance and maybe they'd be happy for a while but February made me shiver with every paper I delivered, bad news on the door step, I couldn't take one more step, I can't remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride but something touched me deep inside, the day, the music, died. So...

CHORUS

Bye, bye Miss American Pie drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry an them good ol' boys were drinkin whiskey and rye singin this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die.

Did you write the book of love and do you have faith in God above, if the bible tells you so, and do you believe in rock n' roll, can music save your mortal soul and can you teach me how to dance real slow? Well I know that you're in love with him cuz I saw you dancin in the gym you both kicked off your shoes and I dig those rhythm and blues. I was a lonely teenage bronkin buck with a pink carnation and a pick up truck but I knew I was out of luck, the day, the music, died. I started singin...

Chorus

Now for ten years we've been on our own and moss grows fat on a rollin stone but that's not how it used to be, when the jester sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean and a voice that came from you and me, oh and while the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown the courtroom was adjourned, no verdict was returned, and while Lenin read a book on Marx, the quartet practiced in the park and we sang dirges in the dark, the day, the music, died. We were singin...

Chorus

Helter Skelter in a summer swelter the birds flew off with a fallout shelter, eight miles high and fallin fast, its the land that falled on the grass the players tried for a forward pass with the jester on the sidelines in a cast, now the half-time air was sweet perfume while the sergeants played a marching tune we all got up to dance oh but we never got the chance oh as the players tried to take the field the marching band refused to yield do you recall what was revealed, the day, the music, died. We started singin...

Chorus

Oh and there we were all in one place, a generation lost in space with no time left to start again, so come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack Flash sat on a candle stick because fire is the devils only friend, oh and as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clinched in fists of rage, no angel born in hell could break that satan's spell and as the planes climbed high into the night to light the sacrificial right I saw satan laughing with delight, the day, the music, died. He was singin...

Chorus

I met a girl who sang the blues and I asked her for some happy news but she just smiled and turned away, I went down to the sacred store where I'd heard the music years before but the man there said the music wouldn't play and in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed but not a word was spoken, the church bells all were broken and the three men I admire most, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast, the day, the music, died, and they were singin...

Chorus

They were singin... Bye, bye Miss American Pie drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry an them good ol' boys were drinkin whiskey and rye singin this will be the day that I die.

[Mark Knight]

John, as an Aussie you've certainly given us a good historical background on the US civil rights movement, and how violence and killing weren't exactly disavowed.

Allow me to relate an incident from my teenage years.

I grew up in a fairly segregated community in Indiana, just north and west of Louisville, KY. I grew up in town, so I knew of "n Hill," the rocky ground where most, but certainly not all, of the black folks in town lived. Out in the county, there were some blacks who farmed and who were neighbors as well, but that was more of a convenience for themselves than any outward community racism. The pool hall in town had a black shoeshine "boy", but he was well beyond retirement age.

I started school in 1961 at the Grade School Annex, as it was called then. Due to an overflow of "Baby Boomers," the town's grade school couldn't handle the numbers of students, so two classrooms were established in a former one-room "colored" school about two blocks from the grade school. While the community was predominantly white, we shared classes with a few black students...and they were our friends, our playmates at recess, our fellow Boy Scouts who camped and hiked and swam together with us. But parents and grandparents weren't quite as liberal-minded as we were; after all we were just kids. And so the "N-word" was used in a lot of homes.

The incident I recall was sometime after I'd graduated, probably in 1973 or '74. A local black man in his early 20's worked for one of the local weekly newspapers, and the newspaper was bought out by a regional chain. Subsequently, he was transferred to another weekly newspaper in a neighboring county that had a reputation as being even less racially enlightened than our home county. Within two weeks this young black man was back at home, nursing a broken arm and numerous lacerations and contusions. At first, he claimed he'd had an especially bad bicycle wreck; then it finally came out that he'd been intentionally run over on his bicycle, and then beaten and told to "go back where you came from; we don't put up with your kind around here."

This was a young man who walked away from confrontations whenever he could. His employers understood, and transferred him back in order to keep him alive. While my generation was asking, "How could this happen?", my grand-dad's generation was saying," We knew that'd happen." So while attitudes here, "up north," were considered more enlightened than "down south," it wasn't a universal thing by any means.

Appropriate lyrics, too...and I know 'em by heart.

[Tim Gratz]

I agree with Mark that there certainly was racial prejudice in the North as well. As I recall the phrase, racial discrimination in the South was de jure (by operation of law) but in the North it was de facto (occured in fact, due in part to economic conditions). Fortunately, I was raised in a home and school environment which really was prejudice free. Certainly I never heard any racist renarks from either parent nor from any classmates. As I remarked before, the only black student in my high school was the most intelligent member of his class.

These irrational prejudices and hatreds are certainly a sad commentary on our society and indeed on mankind in general since prejudice and xenophobia is not confined to our country. Tom had a great post that it takes much time to change these attitudes--but they have been changing, thank God.

One of my closest friends is Jewish and has two sons about the age of my daughter. I have often wondered how a Jewish parent explains anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to his or her children. Which reminds me, I once saw a remarkable children's book about Martin Luther King's mother explaining racial prejudice to her children and little Martin decided then and there to do something about it. It was a great book for children.

Edited September 10, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[John Dolva]

I agree with Mark that there certainly was racial prejudice in the North as well.  As I recall the phrase, racial discrimination in the South was de jure (by operation of law) but in the North it was de facto (occured in fact, due in part to economic conditions).  Fortunately, I was raised in a home and school environment which really was prejudice free. Certainly I never heard any racist renarks from either parent nor from any classmates.  As I remarked before, the only black student in my high school was the most intelligent member of his class.

These irrational prejudices and hatreds are certainly a sad commentary on our society and indeed on mankind in general since prejudice and xenophobia is not confined to our country.  Tom had a great post that it takes much time to change these attitudes--but they have been changing, thank God.

One of my closest friends is Jewish and has two sons about the age of my daughter.  I have often wondered how a Jewish parent explains anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to his or her children.  Which reminds me, I once saw a remarkable children's book about Martin Luther King's mother explaining racial prejudice to her children and little Martin decided then and there to do something about it.  It was a great book for children.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I agree absolutely with both of you, It's a global problem. And good people were either struggling against it in the south or were understandably afraid to do anything. As well, the history of for example the Mnemonites migrating south to Mississippi and quite quickly adopting these attitudes show it is very difficult to remain untainted. I don't 'blame' them.

A number of the active parrticipants in the anti-segregation movements are today expressing relief at the fact that the truth is coming out.

However, in this context, the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I think it needs to be recognised just how much it was a reality then. And therein lie some clues as to the identity of the perpetrators, right from the 'lumpen' foot soldiers up to the Highest echelon.

Edited September 10, 2005 by John Dolva

[Tom Marchand]

There are now coming into being avenues for reopening the Kennedy murder investigations. It would be negligent not to explore them.

Do you really think that another HSCA will solve any mysteries surrounding JFK's murder?

[John Dolva]

There are now coming into being avenues for reopening the Kennedy murder investigations. It would be negligent not to explore them.

Do you really think that another HSCA will solve any mysteries surrounding JFK's murder?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Tom, I certainly recognise your point. But, Yes I do. With a qualification. Just a voluble agitation for it hopefully leading to such will bring the general public up to speed on where the investigation is today.

Also it would provide a Forum where the current thinking and evidence can be aired. Also the slow implementation of the release of documents order may get on the agenda and speeded up. Money would be allocated.

And yes, another round of obfuscation no doubt initiated. But....

[Tom Marchand]

Tom, I certainly recognise your point. But, Yes I do. With a qualification. Just a voluble agitation for it hopefully leading to such will bring the general public up to speed on where the investigation is today.

John,

What investigation? What information should be presented to the public? There are many theories but I don't see a cohesive investigation. For me, the last investigation were the HSCA hearings.

I am not trying to start a war here. I am not a JFK researcher, I have no insider information and I am not pushing my own assination theory. My day job entails performing computer/electronic forensic investigations, so my interest in the assination is purely from the point of view as an investigator. In fact, I found this forum site by accident while using Google during an investigation.

After lurking around this site for 4 months, the main impression I've gotten is that after 40+ years of JFK investigations, we can't see the forest because of the trees. I encounter the same thing during some of my investigations.

I wonder if it would be beneficial for people to backup and take a more general view of the issues surrounding the assassination. It's been 40 years, time is one of my greatest investigation tools and the JFK assassination is one of the greatest cold cases in history.(IMO)

Having said all that. I feel there should be an investigation for persons who have made a statement that they were somehow involved in the assassination. They should be called into a legal setting and under rules of perjury be compelled to tell their story. Put up or shutup.

[Mark Knight]

I believe that John Dolva has performed a public service here by reminding us of the racial climate of the US in the early 1960's. My children were born in the 1980's, and even after graduating high school, they don't appear to have a good understanding of what the '60's were like, from a racial standpoint...and I'd venture to say that this is true of many of the younger members of the research community as well. After all, we are just 51 years beyond "separate-but-equal" as a legal argument, and just 41 and 40 years past civil rights and voting rights legislation which altered the history of white/nonwhite interaction in the US.

In 1963, around the time of King's "I Have A Dream" speech, I often heard a joke repeated which sought to equate Rev. Dr. King with the primary internal of a Maytag washer: a "black agitator." Truth is, America needed some shaking up then, someone to make ripples in the still waters that covered America's dirty laundry of racism. Detroit and Watts and Newark had yet to surface in the public consciousness, but first the confrontations in the de jure segregated South had to happen. Only after confronting the legally-condoned racism of the South could the de facto segregation of the North be addressed effectively.

America's children in the '60's had plenty of reasons for fear. The Cold war held a nuclear "Sword of Damocles" over us all, and the threat was reinforced every time a Civil Defense drill was held, every time our family drove past a building with a "fallout shelter" on the way to school, to church, or to the store. The civil rights movement was becoming increasingly violent, and then there was this bearded fellow 90 miles off our coast who had nuclear weapons in his country as well. Without building a time machine and actually returning to those days, it's awfully difficult to reconstruct them in the minds of readers without making it all appear as the plywood scenery in a high-school play. But it was real, and it was in the backs of all our minds almost daily.

[John Dolva]

Mark, and under the sword Democles lies the door to the solution, the Gordian knot.

Cleave the knot and set repression free and it will evaporate, allowing healing to take place.

I'm probably getting a bit esoteric here for those unfamiliar with the nomeculature. A boil is most painful and repulsive prior to bursting, naturally one tends to dread it and perhaps avoid it by ignoring or papering it over with various anaesthetising endeavours. However, in nature as in the affairs of man, allowing the boil to come to the surface and reveal its poison will if studied equanimously and left to its own natural course set the stage for the real healing. I believe that a human like a moth to the light cannot help but gravitate to truth. Painful though that truth may be. Truth, Reconciliation, Redemption

History forgotten runs the risk of being repeated.

Tom, I believe that a bipartisan approach as outlined by Sykes endeavours will create an atmosphere wherein the evidence and investigations will emerge as something credible. The number of theories and confessions around at the moment are quite amazing. I don't know if anyone has counted but there must have been shooters shoulder to shoulder all over the plaza vying for what really only was at the most two headshots.

There seems to be at the moment a set of theories that are zeroing in on the issue from apparently different angles. This is good. I can already see names and organisations being repeated in them.

Perhaps a unifying thought might be, from my perspective, a realisation that economics is at the core. The central group involved I think would have quite a sophisticated philosophy, devoid of any symbology, just cold hard facts : how to stay, get, maintain, in power. From there they can safely rely on base emotion of 'lumpen' elements to do 'the dirty work' as explained by Tom Purvis.