A-Infos (en) Mississippi Unseals Files of Agency that Fought Desegration

[Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>]

 ________________________________________________
      A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
            http://www.ainfos.ca/
 ________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________
 
  MISSISSIPPI UNSEALS FILES OF AGENCY THAT FOUGHT DESEGREGATION
_________________________________________________________________
 
     The New York Times
     March 18, 1998
     http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/      
     By KEVIN SACK
 
     JACKSON, Miss. -- After a 21-year court fight, the state of
Mississippi on Tuesday unsealed more than 124,000 pages of
previously secret files from a state agency that used spy
tactics, intimidation, false imprisonment, jury tampering and
other illegal methods to thwart the activities of civil rights
workers during the 1950s, '60s and early '70s.
     
     Like an eerie journey into a shadowy past, the files of the
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission provide a profoundly
unsettling reminder of the state's determination to maintain a
segregated society.
     
     The commission's investigators made note of the
pigmentation, associations, religious beliefs and sexual
proclivities of the civil rights workers they tracked. They
jotted down the license plate numbers of cars parked at civil
rights meetings and peeked into bank accounts. Informants, many
of them black Mississippians, reported to the commission about
plans for marches and boycotts.
     
     In some cases, the potential for using violence against
civil rights workers is discussed in commission memorandums.
Although none of the documents reviewed Tuesday show a direct
state hand in the numerous deaths of activists in Mississippi
during those years, they clearly reflect the mindset of the day.
     
     In one 1959 memorandum, for example, commission investigator
Zack VanLandingham tells of a conversation he had with a
Hattiesburg lawyer, Dudley Connor, about Clyde Kennard, a
Mississippi man who attempted to desegregate Mississippi Southern
College in Hattiesburg in the late 1950s.
     
     "If the Sovereignty Commission wanted that Negro out of the
community and out of the state they would take care of the
situation," VanLandingham quoted Connor as saying. "And when
asked what he meant by that, Connor stated that Kennard's car
could be hit by a train or he could have some accident on the
highway and nobody would ever know the difference."
     
     In another memo, written by VanLandingham to Gov. J.P.
Coleman in 1959, the investigator relates a conversation he had
with John Reiter, a campus police officer.
     
     "Reiter had several weeks ago told me that when Kennard was
attempting to enter Mississippi Southern College in December 1958
that he had been approached by individuals with possible plans to
prevent Kennard's going through with his attempt," he wrote. "One
of the plans was to put dynamite to the starter of Kennard's
Mercury. Another plan was to have some liquor planted in
Kennard's car and then he would be arrested."
     
     In fact, Kennard was arrested on Sept. 15, 1959, on charges
of illegal possession of whiskey after police officers claimed to
have found five half-pints of whiskey and other liquor under the
front seat of his car.
     
     The release of the Sovereignty Commission files here comes
at a time when the South is making fresh efforts to disinter the
history of some of its most tortured times.
     
     After years of silence, the family of Martin Luther King Jr.
is encouraging efforts to discover whether James Earl Ray really
was responsible for the 1968 assassination of the civil rights
leader. Federal investigators in Birmingham have reopened the
case of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Avenue Baptist Church, which
killed four girls.
     
     Last week in Little Rock, former members of the Women's
Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools held a news conference to
publicly release its membership roster for the first time.
Because members feared for their physical and economic
well-being, the group worked largely underground between 1958 to
1963 to reopen schools that had been closed by Gov. Orval Faubus
to deter court-ordered desegregation.
     
     In Mississippi, several civil rights activists who were the
subjects of Sovereignty Commission investigations said Tuesday
that they may use their newly-released records to file lawsuits
against the state. Prosecutors said that it also is possible that
information found in the files could be used to press criminal
charges against alleged perpetrators, if they are still alive.
     
     "Certainly, if there's evidence that comes to light
regarding any crime that occurred in our jurisdiction, then we'll
certainly investigate that, take a look at it to see whether it's
prosecutable, just like we did in the Beckwith case," said Bobby
DeLaughter, a Hinds County assistant district attorney in
Jackson.
     
     In 1994, DeLaughter won a conviction of Byron De La Beckwith
for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers after
learning that the Sovereignty Commission had aided Beckwith's
defense in previous trials.
     
     Beckwith had escaped conviction in two trials in the 1960s
after juries deadlocked. In 1989, reporter Jerry Mitchell of the
Clarion-Ledger, Jackson's daily newspaper, used information
leaked from Sovereignty Commission files to write that the
commission had secretly aided in the defense of Beckwith in his
trial for assassinating NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963.
     
     After prosecutors learned that the commission had helped
screen potential jurors to weed out Jews and civil rights
sympathizers, a new trial was ordered and Beckwith was convicted.
     
     The unsealing of the Sovereignty Commission files Tuesday
concluded a two-decade legal battle that began in 1977, the year
the state Legislature voted the commission out of existence and
sealed its records for 50 years. The American Civil Liberties
Union and several individual plaintiffs filed suit to keep the
records open, and in 1989 U.S. District Court Judge William
Barbour ordered that they be released.
     
     It took nine more years to satisfy appeals and to establish
a process for allowing subjects of the commission's
investigations to exert their rights to keep their own files
private. Approximately 7,700 pages out of a total of 132,000
pages of files remain secret because 42 people claimed those
privacy rights, according to Katie Blount, a spokeswoman for the
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which has
maintained and indexed the files.
     
     The Sovereignty Commission, which was created in 1956 with a
$250,000 budget "to protect the sovereignty of the state of
Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by
the federal government," formally existed until 1977, although
its funding was eliminated three years earlier. It was the model
for similar agencies that fought desegregation in other states
across the South, including Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas. In
many instances, the agencies shared intelligence information.
     
     The unsealing of the Sovereignty Commission files has
generated a vigorous debate here between those who believe that
the ugliness of the past should remain buried and those who
believe that only a full airing can bring healing.
     
     In addition, some civil rights activists have fought the
opening of the files because they believe their release could
victimize the subjects of Sovereignty Commission investigations
once again by releasing unsavory, and possibly untrue, details
about their personal lives.
     
     "It will probably bring forth some memories of a bad time in
the state, which we all acknowledge was a bad time now," said
former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, a member of the
President's Advisory Board on Race. "I hope it'll be the basis
for understanding that we can't ever lapse back into the kind of
intolerance we once had in this state."
     
     One of the few living members of the Sovereignty Commission,
Betty Long, 69, said Tuesday that she too was pleased that the
files had been opened. "I want facts to be known instead of
innuendo and rumors," she said, adding that she did not believe
that the commission had been involved in murder or other acts of
violence. "At the time, everyone in the state was gung-ho to keep
things segregated and that was tied in with the idea of the
communists taking over. It's something I wish had never
happened."
     
     For those who have waited for decades to see what
information the state had collected about them, their family
members and their friends, the day provided a long-awaited moment
of revelation and relief.
     
     "Twenty-one years is a long time to wait to see what is in
here," said Ellie J. Dahmer, clutching a packet containing the
file on her husband, Vernon Dahmer, who was killed when their
Hattiesburg house was firebombed in 1966.
     
     Mrs. Dahmer, who spoke outside the archives building in
front of a memorial to the Confederate dead, said she hopes that
her husband's file may help prosecutors retry Sam Bowers, an
Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who was
acquitted in 1968 of ordering the firebombing. That trial, for
arson, ended when the jury deadlocked 11-1. A second trial, for
murder, also ended with a deadlocked jury, this time 10-2.
     
     The Clarion-Ledger published a story by Mitchell last week
saying that notes taken from FBI files suggest that Klan members
had contacted jurors in the first case.
     
     "When it came up 11-to-1 one time and 10-to-2 the next time,
we thought something might be wrong, but we didn't have any way
of proving it," Mrs. Dahmer said. "It shows what kind of state we
lived in, what kind of environment there was, what they really
thought of black people."
     
     A review of Dahmer's file Tuesday revealed no evidence of
Sovereignty Commission involvement in Bowers' trials. A 1958
memorandum, however, did list Dahmer as one of three "potential
troublemakers."
     
     The commission files also show that the commission's
director Erle Johnston Jr. ordered one of its investigators, A.L.
Hopkins, to look into the facts surrounding the killings of three
civil rights workers -- Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and
James Chaney in 1964. In a series of reports back to the
commission over the next several months, Hopkins reported first
that some of the local law enforcement officers on the case had
assured him that they were working hard to solve it. But by his
last report he was noting that some of the officers had
themselves been arrested and charged in the deaths and were
headed for trial.
     
     Even though Hopkins apparently knew that the FBI suspected
local law enforcement officials in the murders, he criticized
federal investigators in an Aug. 25, 1964, memorandum for taking
control of the case.
     
     "The actions and methods of members of the Justice
Department, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
Philadelphia, Miss., in the course of their current investigation
into the disappearance and murder of the three civil rights
workers, in my opinion amounts to encroachment and usurpation of
the rights and powers reserved to this state," Hopkins wrote.
     
     No detail was too inconsequential for the commission's
spies, as is clear in Schwerner's file. "Rita Schwerner recently
purchased a Singer sewing machine in Meridian and had it
delivered to 2505 1/2 5th Street in Meridian," a 1964 memo
reports, referring to Schwerner's wife.
     
     The files also reveal an obsession by commission
investigators with bloodlines and pigmentation. In a 1958
memorandum, VanLandingham wrote that an Eatonville grocer had
reported that "the Negroes at Eatonville are very aggressive,
well educated and intelligent. Most of them look practically like
white people and apparently have considerable white blood in
them."
 
     Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
 
                              * * *
 
  ** NOTICE:  In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107,
     material appearing here is distributed without profit to
     those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this
     information for research and educational purposes. **
 
     +:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
     +:        A N T I F A   I N F O - B U L L E T I N        :+
     +:          NEWS * ANALYSIS * RESEARCH * ACTION          :+
     +:     RESISTING FASCISM    *  BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY!   :+
     +:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
 
        to subscribe e-mail Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.org>
 
          ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
   ++++ if you agree copy these 3 sentences in your own sig ++++
  ++++ see: http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm ++++


	***A-INFOS DISCLAIMER - IMPORTANT PLEASE NOTE***

A-Infos disclaims responsibility for the information in this message.


			********
		The A-Infos News Service
			********
		COMMANDS: majordomo@tao.ca
		REPLIES: a-infos-d@tao.ca
		HELP: a-infos-org@tao.ca
		WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/