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Emmett Till


John Dolva

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Hi John

I also think this is an important thread and I thank you for initiating it.

Your timeline on Emmett Till's murder and aftermath plus other civil rights crimes seems to miss the fact that two and a half months after the refusal by the grand jury to indict Till's accused murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, on November 9, 1955, Look magazine published an article giving the accused's version of events in which Milam was quoted as admitting to the murder. The article, published in the issue of January 24, 1956, is a colorful exposé written by Alabama journalist William Bradford Huie, entitled "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi." In the article, Huie says he offered Bryant and Milam $4,000 to tell how they killed Emmett Till. Milam speaks for the record on how the gruesome crime was carried out and he admitted being the trigger man who shot Till on the bridge over the Tallahatchie River. They described how they brutally beat Till in a barn, took him to the bridge, shot him in the head, then tied his neck to a large metal fan used for ginning cotton with barbed wire, and pushed the body into the river.

The Look magazine article shows how at the time racists such as Milam and Bryant used the system, knowing that "a jury of their peers", that is, as then, made up of southern whites like themselves, would not find them guilty.

As it says at the end of the article--

"The majority -- by no means all, but the majority -- of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam's action or else 2) they don't disapprove enough to risk giving their 'enemies' the satisfaction of a conviction."

A good timeline of the Emmett Till case and a link to the Look magazine article by William Bradford Huie can be found on a National Public Radio web page, "Timeline: The Murder of Emmett Till," written to accompany the "American Experience" documentary on the case.

Incidentally, as an aside, the murder of Anthony Walker in Huyton, Liverpool, a black teenager with a white girlfriend by a gang of whites, including, apparently, the brother of Manchester City footballer Joey Barton, has in some ways the same racial overtones as the Till case. Walker suffered a mortal wound when an axe was buried in his head. As a Liverpudlian who came to the United States in 1955, the same year as the Emmett Till murder, it grieves me to see, fifty years after that event, racial hatred being stirred up in England like the hatred that blighted the United States back then.

All my best

Chris George

Edited by Christopher T. George
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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.

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.

A review of the desegragation of the public schools in New Orlean will demonstrate that this was not a peaceful event.

However, having been occupied once by Federal Forces, those who actually controlled the wealth and power in New Orleans knew that it could and would happen again.

They, not unlike Hurricane Katrina, did not want "FEDERALIZED" troops in command of their city.

LHO could be considered as a "footsoldier".

Now, if one could only determine exactly who the "Highest echelon" was.

Tom

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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.

Time has now eliminated much of the "Power Structure" which kept this aspect of american life in New Orleans, LA under wraps.

Katrina has done much of the work to expose the inequities of life in New Orleans in the year 2005.

Despite what many think, there are honorable persons, North & South, who would be more than willing to expose those of the South who were responsible for the assassination of JFK.

All of us are not immoral lawyers who's descendents have risen in wealth and position on the backs of average working class americans.

All of my forefathers fought for the South. And, rest assured I despise those who abuse their wealth; position; and power, irrelevant of race; creed; color; religion; or national origin. (Yankee or Southerner)

This is not what we as the human species were destined to do.

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Time has now eliminated much of the "Power Structure" which kept this aspect of american life in New Orleans, LA under wraps.

Katrina has done much of the work to expose the inequities of life in New Orleans in the year 2005.

Despite what many think, there are honorable persons, North & South, who would be more than willing to expose those of the South who were responsible for the assassination of JFK.

All of us are not immoral lawyers who's descendents have risen in wealth and position on the backs of average working class americans.

All of my forefathers fought for the South.  And, rest assured I despise those who abuse their wealth; position; and power, irrelevant of race; creed; color; religion; or national origin. (Yankee or Southerner)

This is not what we as the human species were destined to do.

Tom, I believe you. Perhaps a promise of redemption holds more chance of laying this matter to rest than a threat of execution? What would Kennedy want?

Sure, persuing his killers is one way of honoring his memory. Implementing the world he was looking for is another. He responded with principled strength where needed, but he also was on the lookout for peace.

Chris, thank you. Here is the article (after some introduction) edited by me in an attempt to shorten and to remove some of the 'colorful' nature of it that to my mind, and apparently to that of a leader of the NAACP who responded at the time with a letter to the editor, serves to mildly justify. Perhaps I'm over reacting but while expository, the article still was pitched at an audience and therefore restrained in a way that didn't entirely reveal the truth. The link to the unedited article is there.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/e_lynch.html

John David Smith:

"Lynching existed along the frontier in all societies and whites employed the device to control "outsiders" throughout the course of southern history. After emancipation, however, lynching and other forms of racial violence provided whites a practical means to control blacks by keeping blacks fearful and perpetually marginalized in southern society. The threat of white violence, in addition to economic and social controls, maintained the controls of slavery in the post-emancipation age."

People & Events: Lynching in America

For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace. The popular image of an angry white mob stringing a black man up to a tree is only half the story. Lynching, an act of terror meant to spread fear among blacks, served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social and political spheres.

Author Richard Wright, who was born near Natchez in southwest Mississippi, knew of two men who were lynched -- his step-uncle and the brother of a neighborhood friend. In his book Black Boy,Author Richard Wright wrote: "The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."

Although the practice of lynching had existed since before slavery, it gained momentum during Reconstruction, when viable black towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic inroads by registering to vote, establishing businesses and running for public office. Many whites -- landowners and poor whites -- felt threatened by this rise in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was a fear of sex between the races. Some whites espoused the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration in order to be with white women.

Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant public display. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchings were often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of white families. They were a kind of vigilantism where Southern white men saw themselves as protectors of their way of life and their white women. By the early twentieth century, the writer Mark Twain had a name for it: the United States of Lyncherdom.

Lynchings were covered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out the horrific details. Photos of victims, with exultant white observers posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display.

Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from 1880 to 1930 were prompted by an accusation of rape. In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent." Though most victims were black men, women were by no means exempt."

(I'd say the vile excuse of sexuality is merely an opportunistic appeal to 'lumpen' mentality. For economic control, an excuse that would appeal to or trigger base emotions to justify brutality. This kind of manipulation through fear, greed, and craving is used repeatedly through history by people who wish to manipulate relatively unaware persons to do their bidding. Typified, for example, in the pogroms of Nazi Germany)

"Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from a fight. Headlines such as the following were not uncommon:

"Five White Men Take Negro Into Woods; Kill Him: Had Been Charged with Associating with White Women" went over The Associated Press wires about a lynching in Shreveport, Louisiana.

"Negro Is Slain By Texas Posse: Victim's Heart Removed After His Capture By Armed Men" was published in The New York World Telegram on December 8, 1933.

"Negro and White Scuffle; Negro Is Jailed, Lynched" was published in the Atlanta Constitution on July 6, 1933.

Newspapers even printed that prominent white citizens in local towns attended lynchings, and often published victory pictures -- smiling crowds, many with children in tow -- standing next to the corpse.

In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the 1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000.

According to black journalist and editor Ida B. Wells, who launched a fierce anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s, the lynching of successful black people was a means of subordinating potential black economic competitors. She also argued that consensual sex between black men and white women, while forbidden, was widespread. Thus lynching was also a means of imposing order on white women's sexuality.

With lynching as a violent backdrop in the South, Jim Crow as the law of the land, and the poverty of the sharecropper system, blacks had no recourse. This triage of repression ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope. Whites could accuse at will and rarely was a white punished for a crime committed against a black. Even for those whites who were opposed to lynching, there was not much they could do. If there was an investigation, white citizens closed ranks to protect their own and rarely were mob leaders identified.

Violence against blacks would taper off during the second World War and rise again after the passage of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that nullified the country's separate-but-equal doctrine. Armed with hope, blacks began to register and organize people to vote. Local NAACP chapters began sprouting up in small towns.

When Emmett Till was murdered, the head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, lambasted Mississippi and called Emmett's murder a lynching. "It would appear from this lynching that the State of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children."

The brutal slaying of a 14-year-old boy was shocking, and when the killers later confessed to the crime in an article published in Look magazine, African Americans and others who supported civil liberties realized they would have to organize en masse and risk their lives in order to bring change.

The Look article (edited)

Last September in Sumner, Miss., a petit jury found the youth's admitted abductors not guilty of murder. In November, in GREENWOOD, a grand jury declined to indict them for kidnapping.

Of the murder trial, the Memphis Commercial Appeal said: "Evidence necessary for convicting on a murder charge was lacking."

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

On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Roy was in Texas, on a brother's truck. He had carted shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio, proceeded to Brownsville. Carolyn was alone in the store. But back in the living quarters was her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, 27, with her two small sons and Carolyn's two. The store was kept open till 9 on week nights, 11 on Saturday.

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

About 7:30 pm, eight young Negroes -- seven boys and a girl -- in a '46 Ford had stopped outside. They included sons, grandsons and a nephew of Moses (Preacher) Wright, 64, a 'cropper. They were between 13 and 19 years old. Four were natives of the Delta and others, including the nephew, Emmett (Emmett) Till, were visiting from the Chicago area.

Emmett Till was 14 years old: born on July 25, 1941. He was stocky, muscular, weighing about 160, five feet four or five. Preacher later testified: "He looked like a man."

(??? photos of Till shows a well built young boy, certainly not a man)

Till bought some lollies. And flirted....

THE WOLF-WHISTLE MURDER: A NEGRO "CHILD" OR "BOY" WHISTLED AT HER AND THEY KILLED HIM.

The Negroes drove away.

By Thursday afternoon, Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 a.m. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas. Since he had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams' while Carolyn returned to the store.

During Friday afternoon, Roy reached the store, and shortly thereafter a Negro told him what "the talk" was, and told him that the "Chicago boy" was "visitin' Preacher." Carolyn then told Roy what had happened.

On Friday night, he couldn't do anything. He and Carolyn were alone, and he had no car. Saturday was collection day, their busy day in the store. About 10:30 Saturday night, J. W. Milam drove by. Roy took him aside.

"I want you to come over early in the morning," he said. "I need a little transportation."

J. W. drove to another brother's store at Minter City, where he was working. He closed that store about 12:30 a.m., drove home to Glendora. He pumped the pickup -- a half-ton '55 Chevrolet -- full of gas and headed for Money.

J. W. Milam is 36: six feet two, 235 pounds.

He is slavery's plantation overseer. Today, he rents Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers to plantation owners. Those who know him say that he can handle Negroes better than anybody in the country.

With a ninth-grade education, he was commissioned in battle by the 75th Division. He was an expert platoon leader, expert street fighter, expert in night patrol, expert with the "grease gun," with every device for close range killing.

Two hours after Milam got the word -- the instant minute he could close the store -- he was looking for the Chicago Negro.

Milam reached Money 2 a.m., Sunday, August 28. The Bryants were asleep; the store was dark but for the all-night light. He rapped at the back door, and when Roy came, he said: "Let's go. Let's make that trip now."

Roy dressed, brought a gun: this one was a .45 Colt.

They drove to Preacher's house: 2.8 miles east of Money.

Roy Bryant pounded on the door.Preacher: "Who's that?". Bryant: "Mr. Bryant from Money, Preacher." Preacher: "All right, sir. Just a minute." Bryant: "Preacher, you got a boy from Chicago here?" Preacher: "Yes sir." Bryant: "I want to talk to him." Preacher: "Yes sir. I'll get him."

Preacher led them to a back bedroom where four youths were sleeping in two beds. In one was Emmett Till and Simeon Wright, Preacher's youngest son. Bryant had told Preacher to turn on the lights; Preacher had said they were out of order. So only the flashlight was used.

The visit was not a complete surprise. Preacher testified that he had heard of the "trouble," that he "sho' had" talked to his nephew about it. Emmett himself had been afraid; he had wanted to go home the day after the incident. The Negro girl in the party urged that he leave. "They'll kill him," she had warned. But Preacher's wife, Elizabeth Wright, had decided that the danger was being magnified; she had urged Emmett to stay. "I thought they might say something to him, but I didn't think they'd kill a boy," Preacher said. Milam shined the light in Emmett's face, said: "You the n who did the talking?" "Yeah," Emmett replied. Milam: "Don't say, 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on." Emmett had been sleeping in his shorts. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then reached for his socks. "Just the shoes," Milam hurried him. "I don't wear shoes without socks," Emmett said: and he kept the gun-bearers waiting while he put on his socks, then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles. Preacher and his wife tried two arguments in the boy's behalf. "He didn't know any better" Preacher begged. "He didn't know what he was doing. Don't take him." "I'll pay you gentlemen for the damages," Elizabeth Wright said.

"You niggers go back to sleep," Milam replied.

They marched him into the yard, forced him to get in the back of the pickup and lie down. They drove toward Money.

Elizabeth Wright rushed to the home of a white neighbor, who got up, looked around, but decided he could do nothing. Then, she and Preacher drove to the home of her brother, Crosby Smith, at Sumner; and Crosby Smith, on Sunday morning, went to the sheriff's office at GREENWOOD.

The other young Negroes stayed at Preacher's house until daylight, when Wheeler Parker telephoned his mother in Chicago, who in turn notified Emmett's mother.

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

Milam and Bryant crossed the Tallahatchie River and drove west.

Their intention was to "just whip him... and scare some sense into him." And for this chore, Milam knew "the scariest place in the Delta." He had come upon it last year hunting wild geese. Over close to Rosedale, the Big River bends around under a bluff. "Brother, she's a 100-foot sheer drop, and she's a 100 feet deep after you hit."

Big Milam's idea was to stand him up there on that bluff, "whip" him with the .45, and then shine the light on down there toward that water and make him think you're gonna knock him in.

"Brother, if that won't scare the Chicago -------, hell won't."

Searching for this bluff, they drove close to 75 miles. Through Shellmound, Schlater, Doddsville, Ruleville, Cleveland to the intersection south of Rosedale. There they turned south on Mississippi No. 1, toward the entrance to Beulah Lake. They tried several dirt and gravel roads, drove along the levee. Finally, they gave up: in the darkness, Big Milam couldn't find his bluff.

They drove back to Milam's house at Glendora, and by now it was 5 a.m.. They had been driving nearly three hours, with Milam and Bryant in the cab and Emmett lying in the back.

At some point when the truck slowed down, why hadn't Emmett jumped and run? He wasn't tied; nobody was holding him. A partial answer is that those Chevrolet pickups have a wraparound rear window the size of a windshield. Bryant could watch him. But the real answer is the remarkable part of the story. Emmett wouldn't be intimidated as they thought he should be.

Milam: "We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless."

Back of Milam's home is a tool house, with two rooms each about 12 feet square. They took him in there and began "whipping" him, first Milam then Bryant smashing him across the head with those .45's. Pistol-whipping: a court-martial offense in the Army... but MP's have been known to do it.... And Milam got information out of German prisoners this way.

Milam: "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a n in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a n gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that n throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'"

They ordered him back in the truck and headed west again. They passed through Doddsville, went into the Progressive Ginning Company. This gin is 3.4 miles east of Boyle: Boyle is two miles south of Cleveland.

Milam: "When we got to that gin, it was daylight, and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan." ( ahh, a well developed sense of propriety...

Bryant and Big Milam forced Emmett to load the fan. Weight: 74 pounds.

They drove back to Glendora, then north toward Swan Lake and crossed the "new bridge" over the Tallahatchie. At the east end of this bridge, they turned right, along a dirt road which parallels the river. After about two miles, they crossed the property of L.W. Boyce, passing near his house.

About 1.5 miles southeast of the Boyce home is a lonely spot where Big Milam has hunted squirrels. The river bank is steep. The truck stopped 30 yards from the water.

Big Milam ordered Emmett to pick up the fan.

He staggered under its weight... carried it to the river bank.

Milam: "Take off your clothes."

Slowly, Emmett pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts.

He stood there naked.

It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.

They shot him.

They barb-wired the gin fan to his neck, rolled him into 20 feet of water.

For three hours that morning, there was a fire in Big Milam's back yard: Emmett's crepe soled shoes were hard to burn.

Seventy-two hours later -- eight miles downstream -- boys were fishing. They saw feet sticking out of the water. Emmett.

The majority -- by no means all, but the majority -- of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam's action or else 2) they don't disapprove enough to risk giving their "enemies" the satisfaction of a conviction.

The State of Mississippi delayed filing criminal murder charges against any of the Klansmen involved until January 7, 2005 when they hauled in one old man – a Baptist “preacher” – who had avoided conviction for federal conspiracy charges in 1967. In that trial, a holdout juror said she “could never convict a preacher.”

Some letters to the editor of Look...

...To publish this story, of which no one is proud, but which was certainly justified, smacks loudy of circulation hunting. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam did what had to be done, and their courage in taking the course they did is to be commended. To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic, cowardly and not in the best interest of their family or country.

Richard Lauchli

Collinsville, Illinois

...Look's story of the Till murder in Mississippi carries the material covering the alleged remarks and acts of the dead boy as "facts"...Who stands behind these "facts"?*

Roy Wilkins,

Executive Secretary

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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While I'm not old enough to specifically remember the Emmett Till incident, as a child I was aghast hearing my elders, upon hearing news of the recovery of the bloated body of a murdered black person from a creek, river, or lake, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, laughingly say: "Ain't that just like a n, to steal more chain than he could swim with?"

When I was a kid, folks with this sort of mindset were, by all appearances, in the majority in both North and South. Now that my generation is "the Establishment," whites have moved a long way from that mindset.

...or have we? I'd like to think so, but maybe it's just wishful thinking. But to ignore the conditions that existed in the 1950's and early 1960's is, I think, to misunderstand the times and conditions that made the assassination of JFK possible. Until John Dolva started this thread, I'd suppressed a lot of these memories, memories that are just resurfacing, and when they do I can still feel the fears I felt as a child about nuclear war and racial tensions and...and yes, even divisions between Protestants and Catholics that were much more pronounced then than they are now. While the discussion may prove cathartic to those of us who lived those days, perhaps they can help younger folks understand what those days were like, and perhaps lead them to a better understanding that may someday solve this case.

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Mark, one thing that has struck me particularly is the quality contributions from the people who have contributed to this topic. In one way it is not controversial, it's stark, bleak truth. I can continue (and will for some time) to cut and paste the writings from other authors in my posts. You and the other fine folk that actually live there can do the same:: or even more valuably, tell your OWN story. I got so much from those few words of yours.

That you and the other contributors have said as much affirms to me that it's not in vain.

Just how much a factor it was jumps out at me by a sentence of yours : "...my elders, upon hearing news of the recovery of the bloated body of a murdered black person from a creek, river, or lake, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, laughingly say: "Ain't that just like a n, to steal more chain than he could swim with?".

If it had been just one body that would have been bad enough, but bodies in creeks, rivers and lakes... Enough bodies for an average person to become blunted in the way we are today when we see horror on the TV.

In an earler post of mine : "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." later in the same article : “it was so difficult to obtain evidence of a crime as it was to determine what took place" and "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.”

So, bodies all over the place, but no crimes, just jokes. I suspect that's how the average German got through the 30's and 40's.

And we forget so quickly? So human...

But as Tom says:

"Despite what many think, there are honorable persons, North & South, who would be more than willing to expose those of the South who were responsible for the assassination of JFK.

All of us are not immoral lawyers who's descendents have risen in wealth and position on the backs of average working class americans.

All of my forefathers fought for the South. And, rest assured I despise those who abuse their wealth; position; and power, irrelevant of race; creed; color; religion; or national origin. (Yankee or Southerner)

This is not what we as the human species were destined to do."

Edited by John Dolva
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A footnote

While trying to fully appreciate the conditions which the Kennedy Presidency I find that as a result of this research I had a somewhat rosy outlook. His assassination wasn't an end of an era. Much more his election was part of a process of change.

His election merely offered opportunities to accelerate that change. And as such he then became the target for the reaction to that change. As Tom's emphasis on Tulane reveals, the backers of segregation hava a strong intellectual historical basis. The maneuverings involved in desegregating Tulane University are quite intriguing. A see saw of rulings and counter claims, relying on specific appointments and consequent concessions. It seems reasonable to assume that the highest thinkers in the fight against desegregation and change in the south would also be found to contain elements desirous of removing Kennedy. As such the potential influence over the less educated elements of society who would turn out to be the 'foot soldiers' was undoubtedly there.

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Let them see what they have done

Jackie and Mamies response to losing their loved ones.

Edited by John Dolva
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A favourite way of disposing of unwanted civil rights activists was to sabotage their cars. While in Greenwood, Mississippi (home of Senator Eastland, relative of the KKK sniper who murdered Medgar Evers at a later date(this murderer also claimed a Greenwood alibi)) John R. Salter describes one event he went through with Medgar: ( http://www.hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm )

"I can recall one occasion that Medgar conceded fear -- at least as he recounted the experience to me. He had gotten a new Oldsmobile, but up in the northern part of the state it had broken down. The only place he could get it fixed was at the garage owned by the county president of the Citizens' Council -- so the car was towed there. Apparently, the garage was, in the purest sense of the term, a cracker nest. The owner and his men recognized Medgar's name immediately, but began to work on the car. He didn't want tostay in the garage for the day that it would take to fix it, but on the other hand he was afraid to leave for fear they'd somehow sabotage the car. He wound up staying the whole day, right by his car while the mechanics worked on it. Many people came by to look at him, but he stuck it out until the car was fixed; then left just before sundown.

But he was cool: I recall leaving Greenwood with him one night at midnight -- and we left at 90 mph -- with Medgar casually talking about a rumor he'd heard to the effect that a segregationist killer outfit in Leflore Co. had installed infra-red lights on the cars, which could allow them to see the highway, but which couldn't be spotted by whoever they were following. By the time he finished discussing this, we were going about 100 mph! But he was driving easily and well and his talk was calm in tone, if not in content."

Through Medgars care the drive this time was uneventful, but they knew to take care and to drive fast to throw off any pursuit.

Apart from other threats of violence by the KKK, the police liked to hit John Salters head with clubs.

"Bad beatings at Jackson: June 13, 1963 -- two days after Medgar Evers was shot and killed. It helps a lot to have, as I have since the hatch, a thick skull and a thick hide. When a horde of police charged, I stood my ground -- facing them. I was clubbed several times, into bloody unconsciousness; then taken to the Fairgrounds Stockade Concentration Camp; finally to a hospital; then to jail. [see the Mississippi section, listed on the inside Index.] We were in the hard-core South, deeply involved in the Movement, from 1961 well into 1967.

-- Hunter Gray [John R. Salter, Jr.]"

Edited by John Dolva
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While I'm not old enough to specifically remember the Emmett Till incident, as a child I was aghast hearing my elders, upon hearing news of the recovery of the bloated body of a murdered black person from a creek, river, or lake, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, laughingly say: "Ain't that just like a n, to steal more chain than he could swim with?"

When I was a kid, folks with this sort of mindset were, by all appearances, in the majority in both North and South.  Now that my generation is "the Establishment," whites have moved a long way from that mindset.

...or have we?  I'd like to think so, but maybe it's just wishful thinking.  But to ignore the conditions that existed in the 1950's and early 1960's is, I think, to misunderstand the times and conditions that made the assassination of JFK possible.  Until John Dolva started this thread, I'd suppressed a lot of these memories, memories that are just resurfacing, and when they do I can still feel the fears I felt as a child about nuclear war and racial tensions and...and yes, even divisions between Protestants and Catholics that were much more pronounced then than they are now. While the discussion may prove cathartic to those of us who lived those days, perhaps they can help younger folks understand what those days were like, and perhaps lead them to a better understanding that may someday solve this case.

Hi Mark et al.

My mother who had emigrated from England in 1955 and was a member of a transatlantic brides organization in Maryland in the late Sixties reported being shocked when one of the British born wives, married to an American, cheered when news of the Martin Luther King assassination broke during one of the group's meetings. But to persons who persuaded themselves that MLK was a "n agitator" and a Communist (as was alleged), perhaps such a reaction is understandable if never forgivable.

I saw a few nights ago on cable the 1997 John Singleton movie "Rosewood" with Ving Rhames and Jon Voigt, based on a true story about a Florida black rural community in 1923 that was burned and ransacked by local whites, with scores, perhaps as many as 150, black citizens killed and lynched. The incident occurred after a white woman alleged, without basis, that she was assaulted by a big black man when in fact her white lover had beaten her up and she concocted the tale to hide the truth from her husband. A compelling film with good performances by Ving Rhames as a rich, mysterious African American outsider who arrives in town in time for the incident, Don Cheadle as a bookish piano-playing man of principle, the veteran actress Esther Rolle as his mother, and Jon Voigt as the conflicted white local store owner.

Chris

Edited by Christopher T. George
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Tulsa, OK race riot of the 1920's

http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trre/freport.htm

Tulsa, OK.  The only city in the continential United States to ever be bombed from the air.

For whatever reason, the url is not working.

Enter keyword: "Race Riot", with the additional words: Tulsa, OK and one will hear about a little known event in American history.

Tom

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Tulsa, OK race riot of the 1920's

http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trre/freport.htm

Tulsa, OK.  The only city in the continential United States to ever be bombed from the air.

For whatever reason, the url is not working.

Enter keyword: "Race Riot", with the additional words: Tulsa, OK and one will hear about a little known event in American history.

Tom

"According to black journalist and editor Ida B. Wells, who launched a fierce anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s, the lynching of successful black people was a means of subordinating potential black economic competitors. She also argued that consensual sex between black men and white women, while forbidden, was widespread. Thus lynching was also a means of imposing order on white women's sexuality.

With lynching as a violent backdrop in the South, Jim Crow as the law of the land, and the poverty of the sharecropper system, blacks had no recourse. This triage of repression ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope. Whites could accuse at will and rarely was a white punished for a crime committed against a black. Even for those whites who were opposed to lynching, there was not much they could do. If there was an investigation, white citizens closed ranks to protect their own and rarely were mob leaders identified."

When a young boy and his mother were hung off a bridge in Oklahoma, they were dead.

However, photographs were taken with a large number of well dressed white citizens attending. These photographs were turned into postcards and these postcards were sent through the postal system.

The lynched were dead.

Their death was a statement dissemminated throughout, handled and delivered, viewed and passed around.

This is what happens to Negroes who step out of line.

The confidence of immunity to prosecution held by the murderers was quite astonishing. It persisted through the Civil Rights war of the 60's.

When it's understood that Governors could make public statements that amounted to 'the only good n is a dead n' and get re-elected one gets a feel for the circumstances that Kennedy was dealing with in 1963.

It wasn't just communists and castroists and mobsters who misbehaved. It was UnI and elected representatives.

In refusing to acknowledge this 'collective guilt' it is perpetuated. How many black people feel a need to ask themselves where they were?

Edited by John Dolva
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Twenty minutes past midnight 12th June, Evers opened the left-front door of his car and stepped out on the driveway, wearing a white shirt, carrying paperwork and sweatshirts that read JIM CROW MUST GO. Byron De La Beckwith found Evers in the telescopic sight on his rifle and got Evers right in his cross hairs. The lit carport gave him a perfect view. For a crack shot like Beckwith, it was easy pickings. Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, stood trial twice in Mississippi in the 1960's , in which both cases resulted in hung juries. Beckwith toured the South riding in parades waving to crowds holding signs saying, "We Love you De La" and spoke at Klan rallies, telling crowds, "Killing that n was the best thing I ever did in my life."

After Medgars 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.

The Speech by Kennedy the evening of the 11th

Good evening, my fellow citizens:

This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro.

That they were admitted peacefully on the campus is due in good measure to the conduct of the students of the University of Alabama, who met their responsibilities in a constructive way.

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Viet-Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.

It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety. Nor is this a partisan issue. In a time of domestic crisis men of good will and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics. This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level, but law alone cannot make men see right.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law. The Federal judiciary has upheld that proposition in a series of forthright cases. The executive branch has adopted that proposition in the conduct of its affairs, including the employment of Federal personnel, the use of Federal facilities, and the sale of federally financed housing.

But there are other necessary measures which only the Congress can provide, and they must be provided at this session. The old code of equity law under which we live commands for every wrong a remedy, but in too many communities, in too many parts of the country, wrongs are inflicted on Negro citizens and there are no remedies at law. Unless the Congress acts, their only remedy is in the street.

I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public - hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.

This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure, but many do.

I have recently met with scores of business leaders urging them to take voluntary action to end this discrimination and I have been encouraged by their response, and in the last 2 weeks over 75 cities have seen progress made in desegregating these kinds of facilities. But many are unwilling to act alone, and for this reason, nationwide legislation is needed if we are to move this problem from the streets to the courts.

I am also asking Congress to authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education. We have succeeded in persuading many districts to desegregate voluntarily. Dozens have admitted Negroes without violence. Today a Negro is attending a State-supported institution in every one of our 50 States, but the pace is very slow.

Too many Negro children entering segregated grade schools at the time of the Supreme Court's decision 9 years ago will enter segregated high schools this fall, having suffered a loss which can never be restored. The lack of an adequate education denies the Negro a chance to get a decent job.

The orderly implementation of the Supreme Court decision, therefore, cannot be left solely to those who may not have the economic resources to carry the legal action or who may be subject to harassment.

Other features will be also requested, including greater protection for the right to vote. But legislation, I repeat, cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country.

In this respect, I want to pay tribute to those citizens North and South who have been working in their communities to make life better for all. They are acting not out of a sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency.

Like our soldiers and sailors in all parts of the world they are meeting freedom's challenge on the firing line, and I salute them for their honor and their courage.

My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all - in every city of the North as well as the South. Today there are Negroes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to whites, inadequate in education, moving into the large cities, unable to find work, young people particularly out of work without hope, denied equal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or lunch counter or go to a movie theater, denied the right to a decent education, denied almost today the right to attend a State university even though qualified. It seems to me that these are matters which concern us all, not merely Presidents or Congressmen or Governors, but every citizen of the United States.

This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents.

We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can't have that right; that your children can't have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.

Therefore, I am asking for your help in making it easier for us to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves; to give a chance for every child to be educated to the limit of his talents.

As I have said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or an equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.

We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as justice Harlan said at the turn of the century.

This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens.

Thank you very much.

________________________________________________________________________________

___________________

Meanwhile, in Alabama, Police Commissioner Bull Connor was electioneering from the back of an armoured vehicle. Connor unleashed dogs and ordered the Birmingham Fire Dept. to turn high powered water hoses on the Black people who were marching for their Civil Rights.

" Break up this demonstration now! I'll demonstrate your Black asses all the way to the jailhouse! You Niggers get on home now and get off my streets before I make you sorry you ever came here!"

________________________________________________________________________________

___________________

The black people probably already were unhappy. Medgar said once that he wasn't interested in being loved by white people as much as wanting to get through the day without being hit.

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  • 1 month later...
My views on where to look for solutions are clear to members. I see this new bill as an avenue to reopen Kennedy's murder. To my mind the connection to civil rights and the murder of Kennedy should encourage Sykes and Talent to at least consider it.

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

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

http://dodd.senate.gov/press/Releases/05/0705_b.htm

July 5, 2005

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senators Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) today announced strong support for their Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (S. 1369) with 22 bipartisan cosponsors, including Dodd and Talent, already backing the legislation. The bill seeks to create an office within the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Civil Rights-era murders. Talent and Dodd formally introduced the bill last Friday and continue to gather support for the legislation.

The Talent-Dodd plan is co-sponsored by: U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D- N.Y.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Mel Martinez (R-Fla), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and John Sununu (R-N.H.).

“I think the reason we’ve seen this kind of support right away is due to the power of the idea,” said Sen. Talent. “When you talk to people about this legislation, they immediately understand the need to create an office to investigate and prosecute these unsolved murders. We need to aggressively investigate current Civil Rights cases, but we should also dedicate separate resources to investigate Civil Rights-era murders like the Emmett Till case which leaders like Alvin Sykes have been pushing for all these years. We need to unearth the truth and do justice because there can not be healing without the truth.”

This Bill is now passed. The civil rights angle has a potential tool here in accessing documents and questioning people.

A Civil Rights Icon

Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero (October 31, 2005)

Kenneth Dickerman for The New York Times

With the deaths this year of other major figures from a movement that once galvanized a mass following over issues like the right to vote, segregated lunch counters and a seat in the front of the bus, some say that not enough has been done to share that history with the young or to shape future leaders to carry on the cause. That movement has been replaced, in large part, by more dispersed struggles over issues like housing and employment, health care and incarceration.

"In the absence of dogs and hoses there is no immediate, obvious enemy before us, so it's harder to mobilize a sense of outrage," said Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is the only black member of the United States Senate. "Rosa Parks did not just sit down on her own initiative. She was part of a movement."

The reflection on the earlier civil rights movement and the next phase, if there is to be one, is occurring at an extraordinary time.

Hurricane Katrina exposed fault lines of race and class in America. The case of Emmett Till, the black teenager who was killed in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 supposedly for whistling at a white woman, has been reopened. Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klansman, was convicted in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss.

Just last weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice focused international attention on the civil rights struggle when she took Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, on a visit to the Birmingham, Ala., church where four black girls died in a bombing 42 years ago. Ms. Rice used the visit to link the civil rights struggle there to an international quest for democracy.

And last month, the Senate approved a measure that would create a Justice Department office to investigate and prosecute unsolved killings from the civil rights era.

"I do think there is a movement building," said Malika Sanders, 32, president of the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement with headquarters near Selma, Ala., which trains young people to be human rights workers.

"If you look from California to Wyoming and from Maine to the furthermost tip of Alabama, you find people working on human rights issues," Ms. Sanders said. "It's a major challenge to this generation to put forth a vision that makes connections between those issues."

The echoes of the past come as many of the figures and chroniclers of the early fight are dying, leaving behind a black population with a median age of 30 - many born after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 and after legal barriers to voting, public accommodations and education were toppled.

"We are at a crossroads," said Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who is a former associate of Dr. King's. "We can either go forward or stand still."

"It seems every other day we are losing somebody and we have not done enough to inform, to educate another cadre of leaders," said Mr. Lewis, who once led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. "I am thinking not only of the death of Rosa Parks but of Constance Baker Motley, Vivian Malone Jones, C. DeLores Tucker."

Ms. Motley was a politician and lawyer who defended civil rights workers, and became the first black female judge on the federal bench. Ms. Jones was the first black graduate of the University of Alabama, and Ms. Tucker marched with Dr. King and founded the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Since the beginning of the year, other prominent leaders in the civil rights movement have died, including John H. Johnson, the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Ossie Davis, the actor and activist who eulogized Malcolm X; and Arthur A. Fletcher, known as the father of affirmative action.

It was the recent death of Mrs. Parks, though, that reawakened the desire to reflect, say some leaders from her era and young leaders of grass-roots organizations across the country.

While many struggles continue, they do not approach the drama of the march on Washington in 1963 when Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech or of Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, when Mrs. Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, setting off the bus boycott that brought Dr. King to national prominence.

"A lot of people are gone," said Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "You lose that witness, that personal testimony."

Mr. Bond was once one of the Young Turks of the movement. "Civil rights today has to fight the false belief that all those problems were solved in the Martin Luther King era," he said.

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