Category: Civil Rights (Page 2 of 4)

Author Q & A with Jane Hearn (A Past That Won’t Rest)

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 24)

Jane Hearn shares the remarkable legacy of photographer Jim Lucas, who began shooting scenes of 1960s civil rights activism while a college student at Millsaps, in A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.

The University Press of Mississippi publication features more than 100 never-before-seen photographs taken by Lucas from 1964 to 1968 that focus on four Mississippi historic events, with a fifth chapter putting recent national episodes of activist violence into historical perspective. These chapters are bolstered with narratives contributed by Dr. Howard Ball, Peter Edelman, Aram Goudsouzian, Robert E. Luckett Jr., Ellen B. Meacham, and Stanley Nelson, with a foreword by Charles L. Overby.

Tragically, Lucas was killed in a car accident in 1980, while still in his mid-30s. His striking black-and-white images have been edited and restored by Hearn, who was married to Lucas at the time.

Could you share some of your background that is relevant to your relationship with photographer Jim Lucas, to put A Past That Won’t Rest into context?

Jane Hearn

I grew up in the Fondren neighborhood where my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had a service station until 1960 on the corner of North State Street and Fondren Place. That’s back when Duling was our elementary school and all the kids in that neighborhood went to Bailey and Murrah. Our family all grew up in St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, so I am still quite attached to that area and love the resurgence that is happening there.

When my husband, Terry Stone, retired from state government about 10 years ago, we moved to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and have made that our new home. I had earlier retired from my interior design and furniture business, but continued my interest in arts advocacy and worked on projects at Tougaloo College where I served as a trustee. I was most proud of the Tougaloo Art Colony which I founded and ran for many years.

Jim Lucas and I me in 1973 when he returned to Jackson from his tour in the Army and I had just returned to Jackson after having worked a few years in New York City after college at Delta State. At the time, Jim was intent on pursuing a career as a film cameraman, which he had done during his deployment in Southeast Asia. AS a freelance film photographer, he shot advertising, football films, and news and documentary assignments for NBC and UPI. Eventually, he was able to break into his real love, feature films, and was becoming known for his exceptional technical skills as a camera operator and director of photography. He was on location for the 20th Century Fox film Barbarosa, starring Willie Nelson, when he was killed in an automobile accident.

You were married to Jim Lucas at the time of his death in 1980. Why did you decide to put this collection of his photographs, along with pertinent narratives, together to create A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi at this time?

This project began over five years ago with the original intent of finding a home for Jim’s extensive collection of negatives, prints, and ephemera before we moved out of state. I had kept the collection as he had stored it for over 30 years, but I felt the need to look at the images myself before I let them go. Many of the images are of high school and college life, sports, and friends, but peppered in were also newsworthy local events and images depicting historic civil rights events. Jim had always told me that there was history in his collection. I realized just how exceptional these images were and decided that it was fitting that Jim’s work should be shown to a wider audience.

I began the project with an exhibit of 35 images which previewed in June 2014 at the 50th Mississippi Freedom Summer Anniversary Conference at Tougaloo College. With support from the Mississippi Humanities Council, I was able to tour the exhibit through Mississippi for another 18 months. The book was an outgrowth of that exhibit.

Please tell me about the task that you and photojournalist Red Morgan shared in restoring these photos. Where had these photos been kept through the years, and what shape were they in? How long did this process take?

I would not have been able to do this project without Red Morgan. Red and I had only been acquaintances in high school. A mutual friend suggested I call him for help. A photojournalist and freelance photographer in Florida, Red reviewed some of Jim’s images and was excited by them. We worked together to scan, sort, edit, and produce digitalized images from over 5,000 vintage negatives. These negatives had been meticulously packaged, labeled, and documented by Jim. Our partnership in this project, along with Craig Gill and book designer Peter Halverson at the University Press of Misssissippi, has resulted in a book of 108 never-before- published photographs For all of us, this book has been a joy to produce.

Explain the process of putting this book together. How did you decide to organize it around the five narratives included? How did you choose the contributing writers? How did you narrow the selection of photographs?

As we continued to mine the collection for more photographs, we developed a website and doubled the touring exhibit. Suddenly, there were enough images for a book. The University Press of Mississippi saw the images and agreed.

The book is organized like the exhibit into four main events: the search for (civil rights workers) Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney (who were murdered in Mississippi) during Freedom Summer, 1964; the Meredith March Against Fear in 1966; the funeral of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez in 1967; and the U.S. Hearings on Poverty in Mississippi and Robert Kennedy’s subsequent trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1967.

In researching the history of these events, I was fortunate to find writers who had authored books on each. Once these scholars saw Jim’s amazing photos, they each agreed to lend their expertise with an introductory essay. Their variety of writing styles and intricate knowledge of the subject give the chapters context and lend a verbal narrative to Jim’s visual one.

The preface was written by Charles Overby, who in the mid-1960s was reporting from The Jackson Daily News while has in high school at Provine. Like Jim, Charles’ early passion and talent set him on a course for an outstanding career in journalism.

Please tell me about the touring exhibition and the website.

The early exhibit toured Mississippi in 13 venues across the state. The expanded exhibit showed last summer at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and recently at the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas.

In February, it will show at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. The book will now be a companion catalog for the exhibit which is also called “A Past That Won’t Rest.”

An interesting thing that struck me about the book was the point that Aram Goudsouzian made about Jim capturing photos of not only the leaders, the famous people, and the drama, but also the ordinary people and events–the ones who would perform everyday tasks that would ultimately contribute to changing history, as has always been the case. Why do you think this was important to Jim?

Jim had a talent for capturing the story playing in front of his camera. He had an artistic sensibility, first to recognize the “moment,” to choose his subject, then to frame it with a discernment for good composition. His images rarely needed cropping. He shot black and white with multiple cameras (lenses), used wide angle photography and lighting with technical precision. His images reveal the emotion of the moment and the dignity and humanity of his subjects.

That day (in Yazoo County) in June 1966 on the Meredith March was hot and dusty. It was tough to walk that highway, yet through Jim’s lens we see the determination and cooperation that unified marchers of all different backgrounds who came to make sure  that Meredith’s march did not fail.

Could you put the historical significance of these photos into context, especially for young people? 

All of these photos and the accompanying essays depict iconic stories of Mississippians and those came to Mississippi to help in the long and arduous struggle to end violence and discrimination of black citizens.

Howard Ball’s essay on the murder of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney tells not only this terrible tale of Klan brutality, but explains the origination of the Freedom Summer project. From 1964 through 1968, Jim’s lens allows us to see the palpable tension in the square in Philadelphia, the encouragement and pride of the marchers who rallied to assure that James Meredith’s march would meet its goal of registering people to vote, and the heartbreak and ultimate provocation of the black citizens in Natchez for the murder of a father of five whose truck was bombed for taking a job promotion that paid an additional 16 cents per hour. Peter Edelman and Ellen Meacham explain the fight over funding for the War on Poverty, a fight that continues today, and Robert Luckett draws a parallel to the grassroots organization against institutionalized violence of the 60s and that of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jim Lucas

It’s rare that someone discovers his or her passion and future career at such a young age, but Jim was freelancing for The Jackson Daily News at age 14! Tell me about Jim–his talent, his drive, his personality.

Jim was a very humble person, almost shy, but never shy behind the camera or talking subjects photographic. The camera gave him entrance to all kinds of happenings and he had a curiosity and sensitivity for people and for animals. He was studied, measured, and loved the technical. Friends thought him the true camera nerd–in a good way! He had resolve from an early age to excel and make a mark. His work can now be included among other courageous and dedicated photojournalists of that era.

Signed copies of  A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi are available from Lemuria.

Jane Hearn will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the Mississippi Civil Rights panel panel at 12:00 p.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

‘Deep South Dispatch’ is a behind-the-scenes look at 1960s civil rights movement

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

John N. Herbers might not be a familiar name today, but during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, his byline blazed in The New York Times.
Herbers died last year as his book Deep South Dispatch was being edited (and ably finished by his daughter, journalist Anne Farris Rosen). But many people—especially journalists and leaders of the movement—remember him for his lucid accounts of that turbulent period when he was on the front lines and often at great danger himself.

deep south dispatchSubtitled “Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist,” Dispatch is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the arc of his reporting, from covering the Emmett Till trial, to the Birmingham church bombing, to marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to the Kennedy assassination. But it’s not merely a rehashing of old events.

Rather, Dispatch offers insights from a modern perspective, as well as conclusions Herbers made based on is reporting.

As Dispatch details, Herbers was not an “outside agitator,” as Mississippi politicians were wont to describe journalists back then. He was a son of the South, reared in various small towns mostly in the Memphis area, educated at Emory in Atlanta, with strong ties to Mississippi.

He began his journalism career after World War II first in Meridian, and then at the Jackson Daily News under fire-breathing publisher Fred Sullens. From there, he became bureau chief of the United Press (later United Press International) office in Jackson before going to the Times for the bulk of his writing. He was based in Atlanta, but traveled throughout the South and frequently visited his mother who lived in Crystal Springs.

Though from the South, he was at odds with the hate-filled tenor of the times. He believed his objectivity and penchant for journalism was a part of his peripatetic small-town upbringing, where “misfits” could not “escape into anonymity as they could in a city.”

Journalists, he wrote, are by nature and profession “the outlier who is always asking why.”

His love for Mississippi shines through, though, even as he was in anguish over its behavior in matters of race. Were it not for a few courageous voices against bigotry, such as Hodding Carter Sr., publisher of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, he wrote, “I think I would have fled Mississippi.”

Dispatch is full of names and places Mississippians remember both for good and ill. His writing is crisp and his life was Forrest Gump-like in his uncanny ability to be at signal moments. It’s encapsulated in such tales as his writing a story under a pecan tree with a manual typewriter on the top of his car at Fannie Lou Hamer’s house before going to interview powerful U.S. Sen. John O. Eastland at his plantation a few miles away.

He notes the ground-breaking reporting of Clarion Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell that resulted in cold-case convictions of civil rights outlaws and one (of many) photographs includes him standing next to the late journalist Bill Minor of Jackson, himself worthy of note.

Dispatch is an informative, insightful, personal and telling memoir that pricks the conscience still. As he quoted Dr. King in talking about our own personal stances and how they reverberate into our culture, the greatest impediment to true justice in the world is not those oppose it, but those who are silent when they see it breached.

That’s what journalism and journalists are about, too.

Jim Ewing’s journalistic expertise as a writer and editor spans more than four decades, including The Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Daily News, and USA TODAY. A three-time winner of the J. Oliver Emmerich Award (the Mississippi Press Association’s highest honor for commentary), he has also won numerous national Best of Gannett and regional Associated Press Media Editors honors. He is the author of seven books, including his latest, Redefining Manhood.

Author Q & A with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)

Nationally known reporter/blogger Radley Balko and the University of Mississippi School of Law’s Tucker Carrington, who is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project, have devoted their careers to investigating and helping to overturn wrongful convictions for inmates who have been unjustly imprisoned in this country.

cadaver kingTheir new book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, exposes their findings of how “institutional racism and junk forensic science” and the actions of Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and dentist Michael West of Hattiesburg teamed up to bring many false convictions against Mississippi defendants for nearly two decades. They highlight the cases of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, who spent a combined 30 years in jail for murders they didn’t commit, before being exonerated in 2008.

The book makes the case that Mississippi’s criminal justice system deserves serious scrutiny and investigation itself if it is to fairly and accurately dispense justice and spare innocent lives.

Radley Balko

Radley Balko

Balko, a longtime opinion journalist (now for the Washington Post) and an investigative reporter, writes and edits The Watch, an opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Carrington is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project and Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Its mission is to identify, investigate, and litigate actual claims of innocence by Mississippi prisoners, as well as advocate for systemic criminal justice reform.

Tucker Carrington

Tucker Carrington

Prior to coming to Ole Miss, Carrington was an E. Barrett Prettyman fellow at Georgetown Law Center, a trial and supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and a visiting clinical professor at Georgetown.

He writes frequently about criminal justice issues, including wrongful convictions and legal ethics. His work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social ChangeThe Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Mississippi Journal of Law.

How and why did you two come to collaborate on writing this book?

Balko: One of us called the other–we can’t remember which way that went–shortly after I had an op-ed on Haybe published in the Wall Street Journal. Tucker had just started work at the Mississippi Innocence Project in Oxford and was a little overwhelmed at what he had already seen. Over the years, we discussed these cases often as he litigated some of them and I wrote about some of them. As two of only a handful of people at the time who knew the full extent of what was going on, I think we commiserated a bit. Eventually we realized that a book was really the only way to tell this story with the thoroughness and attention to detail it deserved. By that time, we had both immersed in this stuff for nearly 10 years, so it just sort of made sense to write it together.

Carrington: We met shortly after I moved to Mississippi in 2007. It just so happened that Radley was working on the Corey Maye story (involving the 2001 shooting of Maye, a Prentiss police officer) and called me at my new office at the law school. I think he just wanted to reach out and make contact. From there our paths crossed in one way or another–in the main because he got interested in forensic science issue in the courts–and my practice began to feature exactly those types of cases. We each had ideas about recounting this decades-long episode–and we each slugged away at it separately: Radley in multiple pieces over the years, me through some law review pieces and litigating cases. Ultimately, we decided to join forces for a book.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the stories of how Brooksville, Mississippi, residents Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were falsely accused of murders and served a combined 30 years in prison until their release was navigated with the help of the Innocence Project. Their convictions had come largely due to policies that allowed Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, to become wealthy through a corrupt legal system. Please explain how their “partnership” developed and came to make such scenarios like this possible for so many years.

Carrington: Their partnership developed because the infrastructure and incentives were in place for it to develop. They–and others–just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had they not, someone else would’ve filled the vacuum–maybe not in precisely the same way, but similarly, as has occurred in other jurisdictions.

Instead of a independent, salaried, fully funded medical examiner office, Mississippi mostly went without one for two decades. That was combined with an anachronistic coroner system, an effort on state and federal levels to crack down on a perceived increase in violent crime and an embrace of the death penalty, as well as a spate of new and novel forensic disciplines that gained acceptance without significant scientific inquiry and rigor.

Finally, reviewing courts found themselves constrained by cynical legislative “fixes” to the “endless” appellate process, especially for those sentenced to death. The ultimate result was a recipe and perfect storm for what came to pass in Mississippi that we recount in the book.

What are the national implications for this book? While it makes the case that “poverty and structural racism” accounted for much of Mississippi’s abuse of a system that relied on autopsies and local coroners’ reports to get away with racial injustice, Mississippi has not stood alone in such discrimination.

Balko: The problems of dubious forensics, structural racism, and the coroner system of death investigation are definitely not unique to Mississippi. And even Hayne and West occasionally testified in other states, particularly Louisiana.

I think the main difference is one of scale. For example, we note in the book that in the 1990s, Texas medical examiner Ralph Erdmann was doing an annual number of autopsies in rural counties across the state that legal experts at the time called astonishing. It became a national scandal, and Erdmann became a poster case for forensics gone amok. Erdmann was doing about 400 autopsies per year. For most of his career, Hayne did at least 1,200. Some years he topped 1,500. He admitted that at least one year, he did more than 2,000. He had a hand in 70 to 80 percent of the homicide cases in the state for nearly 20 years.

The other big differences is that in most other states, once the malfeasance was discovered, there was some effort to assess the damage done and review the cases that may have been affected. Some of those efforts were more thorough than others. But in Mississippi, state officials have refused to conduct any such review of Hayne and West cases.

Tell me about the important role that the “junk science” of bad forensics has played in the outcomes of so many jury decisions in America. It seems that this problem has, to some degree, been a constant in our country’s criminal justice process. Why is that?

Balko: It really comes down to the fundamental differences between law and science. We want to use science in the courtroom, because at times it can help us discover the truth. But science is an ongoing process. Theories can and are tweaked, revised, or even shown to be wrong. The law–and by extension our courts system–values certainty and precedent. We still haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile these differences. So, for example, we’ve delegated the important job of keeping bad or fake science out of the courtroom to judges. But judges of course are trained in legal reasoning, not in scientific analysis. So, they haven’t been very good at it.

This tension between law and science for a long time alienated much of the scientific community from the criminal justice system, creating space for fields like bite mark matching, hair fiber analysis, tool mark analysis, and others to assist police and prosecutors in solving crimes and winning convictions. These fields have the veneer of science, but were never subjected to the rigorous testing and review of the scientific method.

It wasn’t until the rise of DNA testing–which was developed in scientific labs–that we began to see that these fields weren’t nearly as accurate and foolproof as their practitioners claimed. Over the last decade or so, the scientific community has shown more interest in criminal justice and has begun subjecting some of these fields to real scientific testing. They’re finding that many of these disciplines have little to no grounding in science at all. But because our courts tend to put a premium on finality and precedent, it has been really difficult to get them to apply the lessons we’ve learned from DNA testing–that these fields aren’t scientifically reliable–to a much larger pool of cases where DNA isn’t a factor.

In his foreword to your book, author John Grisham, who serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York, laments that actual wrong conviction estimates range from 2 percen to 10 percent of the millions of cases tried each year–amounting to staggering numbers that can never be accurately determined. He said getting these people out of prison is “virtually impossible.” What do you say?

Carrington: He’s correct. In the vast majority of these types of cases, evidence that could lead to an exoneration never existed–because, for example, DNA was not collected  and/or present to begin with–the cases are old, witnesses have disappeared, forgotten their accounts, died, and so on. Also, most cases in the criminal justice system plea. And as a result, there can be very little in the way of a record, including an investigative record that would lead to new evidence of innocence.

What do you hope this book will accomplish?

Balko: Mississippi needs to conduct a thorough review of every case in which Hayne or West testified. They need to look not only for cases in which one of them gave scientifically dubious testimony, but any case in which their testimony may have nudged a jury one way or the other. Because forensic pathology can be subjective, even testimony that was within the realm of acceptable science could contribute to a wrongful conviction. Preferably, the review should be conducted by an outside entity, and should include input from forensic pathologists and scientists, not just judges and lawyers.

I’d also hope the book can serve as a warning to be skeptical of claims from forensic disciplines untested by science, particularly emerging disciplines. The courts have been far too quick to embrace new fields of “expertise,” and far too slow to correct the damage done when science later shows those fields to be fraudulent.

Carrington: I’d simply add that we also hope the books ets out what can happen when the wrong incentives are offered up in the criminal justice system. We can learn from this going forward. Or we can continue to ignore and risk finding ourselves in this predicament again at some point in the future.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington will be at Lemuria on Thursday, March 1, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A (Telling Our Stories)

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 11)

The recent opening of two of Mississippi’s premier museums, coinciding with the state’s Bicentennial celebration in December 2017, was a landmark event in the Magnolia State’s recognition of and salute to its history.

Like all states, Mississippi’s past includes not only its memories and accomplishments but its challenges and struggles, as well–along with a bright hope for its future. And, fortunately for those who want to actually bring home an insightful reminder of their experiences while visiting the new Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Right Museum in downtown Jackson–there’s a book for that!

telling our storiesThe University Press of Mississippi, working with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, have published Telling Our Stories, a comprehensive “companion book” that highlights the people, places and dates of events (the good and the bad) that are emphasized in the museums and have shaped our culture today

Three MDAH staff members who are serving in vital roles in the museums and have been instrumental in the publication of Telling Our Stories share their thoughts below on the role that the museums and this book will play in Mississippi’s journey to a vibrant future.

AMANDA LYONS

Amanda Lyons is assistant to the MDAH director and served as managing editor of Telling Our Stories. Originally from Louisiana, she graduated from Belhaven College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and now lives in Jackson.

How did the Telling Our Stories book project come about, and why? What is the overall purpose of this book?

We approached University Press of Mississippi about publishing a companion book to the museums a few years ago. They loved the concept! Telling Our Stories celebrates the opening of the museums on the occasion of our state’s bicentennial. It’s also a beautiful souvenir for our visitors and is available in the Mississippi Museum Store.

In the introduction to the book, civil rights leader Myrlie Evers and former Mississippi Gov. William F. Winter remind us that “No state has more stories to tell than we do.” How does this book, and the museums, reflect that sentiment?

Mississippi is full of storytellers. The book and the museums draw on this rich tradition with quotes, oral histories, and primary sources. As much as possible, we wanted each person to tell their own story, in their own words. We also encourage visitors to record their own story before they leave.

The writers of the book’s foreword, former Gov. Haley Barbour and former attorney and judge Reuben V. Anderson, describe the museums as “the largest classrooms in the state,” and they reflect positively on the statewide impact they will have in Mississippi and beyond. What do you expect that impact to be?    

School buses filled with children pull up at the museums every day! We want every child in Mississippi to visit the museums at least once during their K–12 years, and we are raising funds for an endowment for school visits. People of all ages will learn more about where they come from–and where they are going–at the museums. One man was amazed to see his grandfather, a civil rights activist, featured in the exhibits. Here, we can discover new facets about ourselves and how our stories fit into the complex tapestry that is Mississippi.

Museum of Mississippi History

Museum of Mississippi History

PAMELA JUNIOR

Pamela Junior is director of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. A resident of Jackson, she is a graduate of Jackson State University with a degree in education.

Mississippi’s civil rights story has been long and complicated. While it may have a way to go, much progress has been made. How does the museum reflect that story, and what do you think (or hope) remains to be accomplished in Mississippi on the civil rights front?

The stories of the Civil Rights Era are complex, but Mississippi has done something that people thought couldn’t be done. Mississippi has reconciled its differences by making sure that all content in this museum is truthful!

What I know will happen is conversation–conversation about race relations. What I hope for is that people will be honest enough to share their inner thoughts, to tell the truth and face the problems regarding race so that we can get to the next level of making Mississippi the best it can be. Right now, we have done the spectacular, and that is building the civil rights museum in Mississippi–ground zero during the Movement.

Could you share an overview of the contents of the museum (its layout, major exhibits, etc.)? What have been some of the most popular displays?

The Museum is laid out chronologically and forms a circle that can be approached from either side.

There are eight galleries in total. The first, “Mississippi’s Freedom Struggle,” gives the history of Africans coming here through slavery and includes the Civil War. Gallery two covers Reconstruction and explores the flowering of African American communities and the passage of Jim Crow Laws. This gallery also contains the first of the monoliths that appear throughout the museum and lists the names of all the people known to have been lynched in Mississippi.

“This Little Light of Mine” is a large central space to stop, reflect on what you’ve seen, and to rest as the music of the Civil Rights Movement plays. An interactive sculpture hangs from the ceiling surrounded by pictures of the heroic women and men of the Movement.

The “Closed Society” gallery highlights the return of African American soldiers from World War II, the “separate but equal” doctrine, and the murder of Emmett Till. “A Tremor in the Iceberg” tells of the young people joining the Movement and the assassination of Medgar Evers. The “I Question America” gallery focuses on the work of Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Aaron Henry, Ed King, and others, and contains an original film on the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner.

Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

“Black Empowerment” tells the story of the marches, sit-ins, and other protests that were continuing, changes in public education, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. The final gallery–“Where do We Go from Here?”–examines the election of African Americans to political office across the state and gives visitors a chance to reflect on the courage of the many people who died for a cause greater cause than themselves–and what they might do to make things better today.

Why is this museum and its message so important to Mississippi?

Our message is of hope and racial healing. Out state has some of the greatest people and the greatest minds. We must put our heads together and fight the demon of racism. We have more in common than we have differences.

RACHEL MYERS

Rachel Myers, director of the Museum of Mississippi History, has lived in Jackson for 10 years. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in religious studies from Brandeis University and her Master of Arts in museum studies from Johns Hopkins.

The opening of these museums came as Mississippi marked its bicentennial–a history that the Museum of Mississippi History and this book examine through, among other things, our state’s role in conflicts and wars, survival during the Great Depression, its economic swings, racial strife and progress, and its accomplishments in sports, music, storytelling, writing, crafts, and the arts. How does the Museum of Mississippi History play an important role, as historian Dennis Mitchell puts it, in “sharing our stories, clearing away myths, and inspiring and children and grandchildren’?

Our role is to inspire the exploration and appreciation of our state’s history by presenting an honest representation of Mississippi. Visitors will find stories that resonate with their experiences, but we hope they’ll also find new and surprising ways of looking at our state and its many stories.

This museum is a place that elicits stories. I’ve enjoyed watching families reflecting on the history of their communities and sharing stories passed down over generations. The experience of seeing an artifact or a film or standing in a recreated historic site can facilitate conversations that strengthen our identity and challenge perspectives.

Some students find it hard to engage with lessons about history. What would you say are some of the exhibits/displays at the museum that may win them over? Are there some things that patrons may be surprised to see?

With four original films, dozens of digital interactives and immersive scenes, and more than 1,600 artifacts, the museum is designed to capture the attention of a wide range of visitors.

Students have been excited to walk through time and peek into the different living spaces of Mississippians throughout history, investigate their artifacts, and hear their stories. Visitors are often surprised by the size and scale of this museum, the amount of history we are presenting, and the range of voices that are highlighted and uplifted in the exhibits.

The book tells us that Mississippi’s story has evolved as history has recorded the presence of its first native peoples, followed by Europeans, Africans, and later people from Germany, Russia, Poland, Slavonia, Italy, Lebanon, China, and others. How do we see the impact and the accomplishments of such diversity of our people reflected in our state today?

To me, the story of Mississippi is one of the most fascinating in our country. We see here on the local scale our national themes of people from different groups and places coming together to form something greater than themselves.

Our theme of One Mississippi, Many Stories celebrates all those who have shaped and defined our state–and continue to do so today.

The hours and admission for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum can be found here. The hours and admission for the Museum of Mississippi History can be found hereTelling Our Stories can be purchased at the museums’ store, or from Lemuria Books and its online store.

Author Q & A with Karen L. Cox

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 7)

Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press) uncovers the details of what came to be the highly sensationalized case of the 1932 murder of Jennie Merrill, a wealthy white Natchez woman who was killed during an attempted robbery of her antebellum home.

goat castleThe book, which documents the obvious racial injustice with which the case was handled by local officials, gained national attention because of the eccentric lifestyle of initial suspects Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery, who lived in a decaying antebellum home overrun with crumbling furnishings, pervasive filth–and a pen of goats, among many other animals.

Emily Burns, an African-American domestic worker and Natchez resident who unwillingly found herself at the scene of the crime, was unjustly tried and convicted of the murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Parchman Penitentiary.

It was award-winning author Karen L. Cox, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who came across the story when she was conducting research for another book at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.

Karen L. Cox

Karen L. Cox

A native of West Virginia, Cox said her ties to Mississippi go back to when she first arrived in Hattiesburg to pursue her doctorate degree at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1991.

“There’s hardly been a year that I haven’t been back to the state to work on a research project,” she said. “After writing Goat Castle, I fell in love with Natchez and made good friends there.”

Cox, who teaches courses in American history and culture, also authored Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, which won the Southern Association for Women Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruhill Prize; and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History.

As a distinguished historian widely recognized for her knowledge of the American South, Cox has written op-eds for The New York TimesThe Washington Post, CNN, and The Huffington Post, and she has been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other American newspapers, as well as papers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on numerous television news outlets around the country, as well as the BBC.

How did you learn about this case, and why did you decide to write  this book about it?

I learned about this case while working in the State Archives in Jackson. I was researching a previous book, which included the tourism generated by the Natchez Pilgrimage, when Clinton Bagley–a longtime historian/librarian at the Archives–told me that I should be looking at Goat Castle. As soon as I learned the barest of information on the story, I instinctively knew I’d write this book. It has so many layers to it and the “characters” are real. The truth is really stranger than fiction.

The investigation after the crime revealed that Dana and Dockery, white neighbors of Merrill’s, had plotted with George Pearls, an African-American, to rob Merrill’s home. But things wen terribly wrong, and Merrill was shot during the attempted robbery. After Pears was soon killed by an Arkansas policeman for an unrelated incident, an innocent black woman, Emily Burns, would ultimately be charged with the murder and imprisoned. The book states that the murder had become national news within less than 48 hours. Why was this?

Why it became national headlines so swiftly had to do with Jennie Merrill’s status as a descendant of planter aristocracy and being the daughter of Ayres Merrill, Jr., who was the former Belgian ambassador. Yet, within a week the story became less about her death and more about her eccentric neighbors, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. They, too, were from elite Southern families, but in 1932 lived in absolute squalor at their home Glenwood, which the press nicknamed “Goat Castle” since the pair kept a pen of goats inside the house.

The news coverage after the murder seems to have focused much more on the strange, eccentric lifestyle of Dockery and Dana than it did on the fact that a murder had been committed and Burns’ future was at stake. Please describe the public’s obsession with “Goat Woman” and “Wild Man,” and the press’s fascination with keeping the story focused on their “Old South” heritage–even as Burns remained in prison.

In addition to the squalor, the press nicknamed Dick Dana the “Wild Man” and, it seems, needed to give one to Octavia Dockery as well. She became the “Goat Woman.” The press was obsessed with what it saw as the decline of the Old South as seen in the lives of Dana and Dockery–the shocking contrast between the grandeur of the Old South and what appeared to be a Gothic novel come to life. This obsession resulted in a tourist trade to go to Natchez to see the house and the odd couple who lived there. It should be no surprise that little attention was paid to Emily Burns, a black domestic. Jim Crow justice meant that she was assumed to be guilty.

This book is well-documented, with 20 pages of notes. It seems that the research must have been painstaking, as you include a great deal of description about the city of Natchez, its crumbling antebellum homes at that time–and, just 70 years after the Civil War had ended, the mindset of the descendants of those who had fought in the Civil War and those who had been enslaved. How did you approach the research for this material, and how long did it take?

The timeline of the research looks like it took me five years (2012-2017), but it’s important to note that as a professor of history, I am also teaching classes, grading papers, going to meetings, etc. So, I’d have to plan research trips to Jackson, Natchez, and even Baton Rouge–a week here and a week there. Fortunately, I had a sabbatical that allowed me to write full time beginning in the fall of 2015. I wrote the book in about seven months. It went through a few months of editing and then was submitted in 2016. It takes about a year after submission for a book to come out.

Please describe the run and filth that Dockery and Dana lived in–along with ducks, geese, chickens, cats, dogs, and of course, the goats–and explain how they actually profited off of their eccentric lifestyle.

I’d rather that people read the book for those descriptions. They profited off of their notoriety by selling tickets to tour the grounds. There was a second charge to enter the house, where Dick Dana played piano. The pair also went on a tour of towns in Mississippi and Louisiana and appeared on stage as the “Wild Man” and “Goat Woman” of Goat Castle.

The city of Natchez was not fond of the publicity brought on by the trial at that time, but it was a boon for tourism.

How did the city deal with this circus of a crime story invading it on a national scale?

It’s not clear how the city of Natchez dealt with it. Certainly, local restaurants benefited. People would also tour other houses while in Natchez. On the one hand, there was profit to be made. On the other, it had become an embarrassment. So, the best way to deal with it was not to talk about it publicly.

What can we learn today from this story of criminal injustice 85 years ago–as a state and as a nation?

What is evident in this story is that the double standard of justice that sent an innocent black woman to prison still exists. Octavia Dockery’s fingerprints were found inside of Merrill’s home, not Burns’. Yet Dockery got to go home. Also, 85 years late, it’s still true that the majority of women sent to prison are women of color, especially African-American and Hispanic women.

Do you have other writing projects in mind that you can share with us?

I’m still trying to figure that out. Goat Castle only came out in October and I’ve still got book events coming up. I’ll be back in Natchez in February for the Literary and Cinema Celebration, which will be focused on Southern Gothic. I’m also going to be in New Orleans in march for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. My guess is that my next project will include Mississippi, as all of my books have done.

Author Q & A with Carter Dalton Lyon (Sanctuaries of Segregation)

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 26)

A strategic program that was begun to awaken Jackson’s segregated white churches to the idea of opening their doors to their African-American Christian counterparts in the 1960s will be commemorated with several public events next weekend that will honor that struggle.

More than 50 years later, that effort has been documented in Carter Dalton Lyon’s Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign, published by University Press of Mississippi.

sanctuaries of segregationWhat began for Lyon as a doctoral dissertation while he was a history student at Ole Miss more than a decade ago eventually resulted in his debut book, which unfolds in meticulous detail why activists and students at Tougaloo College acted on what they believed was a necessary element in advancing their goal of racial integration in the capital city.

A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Lyon now teaches and chairs the History Department at St. Mary’s Epsicopal School in Memphis. He and wife Sally Cassaday are the parents of two daughters.

Your new book, Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign closely examines a 10-month effort by Tougaloo College students and activists who set out to integrate what you called “the last sanctuaries for segregationists” in the city–white churches. Why was this an important goal of the civil rights movement in Jackson in the early 60s?

One thing that I found early in my research was that segregationists throughout the South had been worrying about the potential desegregation of their churches for many years and that organized groups of students had been testing the attendance policies of white churches as they were challenging other segregated spaces. They would, in effect, conduct a sit-in at lunch counters on Saturday and try to attend white churches on Sunday. This had been done in other cities in 1960, but not in Jackson until 1963.

The idea for these “kneel-ins” was to tug at the conscience of white Christians, especially those moderates who favored a more voluntary approach to desegregation or who didn’t really appreciate the immorality of segregation. Being barred from church would make visible the reality of racial discrimination in the house of God. Activists in Jackson in 1963 had a more specific reason as well: they had tried mass marches and sit-ins, but the local movement had fractured a bit, and there were those, like Rev. Ed King, who wanted to give the Jackson community another chance to shift course–and appealing to white Christians seemed like a logical approach.

Although the participants in this movement faced a great deal of resistance from congregants and church leaders, the effort slowly began to gain some ground with white ministers and members. What was the trigger that finally broke through the resistance?

For the churches that were “open” to black visitors during the campaign, it took a combination of ministerial and lay leadership to sustain that. Even if the minister had ordered the doors to be open or favored open doors, the extent to which they would in fact be open really had to do with logistics–who was at the door and who was organizing them. The minister really needed the backing of a majority of lay leaders to make this work.

For those who began to change or who opened the doors in the years after the campaign ended, it would be nice if I could say that i was because of a change of heart, but there’s really little evidence to that effect. The Jackson church visit campaign forced their regional or national denominational bodies to clarify the open-door policies of the denomination, and so these churches needed to consent to this, especially if they wanted to call a new pastor. Some church members didn’t and formed break-away churches and, in the case of the Methodists, formed a new denomination.

Ultimately, what did this movement accomplish?

The Jackson church visit campaign made the reality of racial discrimination visible in these sacred spaces and forced white church people to confront the essential question of these activists: was racial exclusion following the will of God? These visits sparked internal debates within congregations throughout the city and certainly led to turmoil and division in many churches. But I see the church visitors as exposing a fatal flaw in these churches. They had retreated into these sanctuaries of segregation, but their practices contradicted their faith and were in defiance of the stated beliefs and policies of their own denominations. As a result of this campaign, you see denominations moving to clarify their attendance policies and become more deliberate in examining segregation within their bodies.

You write that many ministers secretly agreed with the students and activists who attempted to join in worship services in their churches, but believed they could not share their feelings with their congregations for fear of losing their jobs and/or causing a split in the church. From your research, how did these ministers ultimately deal with their mixed feelings?

Each minister dealt with it differently and there really isn’t a general way of answering this, but I can say that all of the ministers who fit this description certainly battled with the feeling that they had been called by God to this particular church and they were determined to remain. Some had been at their churches for at least a decade and even when their lay boards voted to bar African-Americans, the real moment of truth came when black visitors were in fact blocked at the church doors. For those who held onto their positions as activists were being rejected outside, I see a real sense of exasperation on the part of these ministers, that their message, and the Gospel’s message of inclusion and brotherhood over the years, had not gotten through to their congregations.

As a Kentucky native, why did you decide to bring this topic to light about Jackson’s past now, and how is it relevant in today’s social, spiritual, and/or political climate?

Carter Dalton Lyon

Carter Dalton Lyon

This book has been germinating for a while, but when I began researching this, I frankly noticed a dearth of analysis on the white church response to the civil rights movement on a local level. In the last decade and a half, historians and theologians have been doing great work filling in that gap, and I hope my book adds to that body of scholarship. The great Mississippian Ida B. Wells once wrote that “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth on them,” and my hope is that this book helps in some of the truth-telling that is happening in Jackson.

Your research for this book is extensive–with 65 pages of notes and bibliography. How did you go about your research, and how long did it take to put this book together?

This book grew out of my thesis and dissertation work in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, so the bulk of the research was conducted during those six years, and I’ve spent the last six years of so refining and getting it into book form. I should say that it was very important to me to try to capture all sides of this struggle and to track down as many people who were a part of this effort as I could. I realized early on that there were folks who wanted to sweep this story under the rug or deny it outright, so I aimed to be as careful and extensive as I could in documenting this and getting the story right.

Although you mention several Catholic and Protestant houses of worship, much of the book is devoted to how the “closed door” policy was carried out by Methodists. Why was that?

In the early months of the campaign, the visitors cast a pretty wide net and attempted to attend churches from a variety of denominations: Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, Unitarian, Church of Christ, and Catholic. For those that routinely barred their entry, such as First Presbyterian and the Baptist churches, they reasoned that they would have little hope of cracking open those doors, so they began to focus more on the churches with regional or denominational bodies that they could use as a potential wedge against these churches.

Then about midway through the campaign, the police arrested three students outside the Capitol Street Methodist Church, and made a total of 40 arrests on subsequent Sundays, and that suddenly brought national attention on the problem of segregation within the Methodist Church ahead of the 1964 General Conference. Methodist ministers and, later, two bishops from across the country began joining students on their weekly visits for their own reasons, but certainly to expose a problem that they hoped (the conference) would solve.

Carter Dalton Lyon will appear at Lemuria to sign and read from Sanctuaries of Segregation on Thursday, November 30, at 5:00 p.m.

Author Q & A with Gene Dattel

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 5)

reckoning with raceCultural and economic historian Gene Dattel, who grew up in the small Mississippi Delta town of Ruleville, tackles questions about what he calls “America’s most intractable problem–race”–up close and in depth in his newest book, Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure (Encounter Books).

The biggest and most necessary part of bridging the racial divide, he said, is “economics–which means jobs,” a goal he believes is possible with what he calls “the right kind of assimilation.” To Dattel, that means avoiding what he believes is a harmful separatism while at the same time allowing for full expression of one’s cultural heritage.

Dattel’s lifelong interest in racial history, and its ties to economic history and colonial nationalism, was launched in the early 60s when he was entering Yale University at the same time James Meredith was entering Ole Miss.

After his early years in Ruleville, located in what he calls “the heart of the majority-black cotton country of the Mississippi Delta,” he graduated from Yale, and then Vanderbilt University Law School. Of his 21-year career in finance as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, 15 were spent in London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He has done advisory work for the Pentagon, major financial institutions, and cultural organizations from the New York Historical Society to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

His previous books include Cotton and Race in the Making of America and The Sun That Never Rose.

What prepared you to write this book, (as in, I’m curious–what exactly is a “cultural historian,” and how did you become one?) and what do you hope your book will accomplish?

The small-town dynamic of my youth mean that I had to adjust to people–old/young, middle class/poor, black/white–regularly. Beginning at age 13, I worked in my family’s dry goods store on Saturday night when most of the customers were black. I entered Yale at the same time James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. This triggered my profound interest in racial history, economic history, and colonial nationalism.

A career in finance brought home the importance of economics in the lives of people. My 11-year stay in Japan was transformative; there, I observed the first major economic challenge to the United States by a non-white, non-Western nation. For eight years, I performed a “Parallel Lives” Program with black author (and businessman” Clifton Taulbert about my growing up Jewish and his growing up black in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s. My book Cotton and Race in the Making of America (2009), a description of the fateful intersection of the power of cotton and the African-American experience, was the stepping stone to Reckoning with Race.

My definition of a cultural historian: one who examines the impact of a broad range of topics–literature, art, movies, music, tradition, communication, values, rhetoric, humor, and fusion in a society. It is my sincere hope that this book contributes to a frank discussion about the hardest of all hard topics in America–race. I believe our goal should be to concentrate on access for the mass of blacks into the American economic mainstream.

In your book, you present a great deal of historical research that most of us never heard in our school history classes about the open hypocrisy of Northern and Midwestern states–dating back as far as the 1700s–of extreme racist attitudes toward blacks. Instead, the history that has captured the nation’s interest has, for the most part, emphasized the racial atrocities of the South. Why has this discrepancy largely remained a well-kept “secret”?

One has only to look at the quotes at the opening of the book’s chapters to recognize how white Northern racial attitudes have frequently been overlooked:

  • White abolitionists “best love the colored man at a distance.” – Samuel R. Ward, Black Abolitionist, 1840s
  • No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of this constitution shall come, reside, or be within this state. – Oregon State Constitution, 1857
  • The New York Times, Feb. 26, 1865, in the text: “The negro race…would exist side by side with the white for centuries being constantly elevated by it, individuals of it rising to an equality with the superior white race.”

The white North has almost no exposure to its true historical racial attitudes. White Northern racial hypocrisy and self-righteousness has resulted. Historians extol the abolitionists but neglect the anti-black attitudes that doomed Reconstruction, created a containment policy of keeping blacks in the South, and trapped them in combustible urban ghettos. The drama of the civil rights movement in the 1960s was particularly visual and suited for television; millennials have seen countless clips of Birmingham hoses and dogs, etc. I have found that “going local” is effective in creating awareness for Northern audiences. When in Connecticut, include Connecticut’s past.

You state that, despite decades of political advancement, economics gains and the passage of civil rights legislation, “the practical task facing America is the economic elevation of the black community–desperately for the underclass and significantly for the fragile (but growing) middle class.” To that end, you emphasize the importance of personal responsibility and assimilation into American society. Explain why you believe this idea is so important.

America’s unique strength, its ability to foster the “right kind” of assimilation, allows its people to retain their cultural heritage. We are the only grand experiment of a multiethnic country that does not resort to tribalism. At the same time, we have seen no successful large scale self-sufficient economic group within America, able to function outside the economic mainstream. The acceptance of common values–color-blind middle-class norms–is a prerequisite for mass entrance into the economic mainstream.

In a competitive global marketplace, individuals must aspire to resiliency, a byproduct of personal responsibility.

You cover many government programs that have been implemented through the years to help African-Americans raise their standards of living, often with little progress. Why do you think it’s been so difficult to find lasting solutions toward economic progress?

Gene Dattel

Gene Dattel

Large government programs are plagued by bureaucracy, inefficiency, and most importantly, lack of accountability. I would argue, if a program is not working, change it or reduce it; if a program is working, expand it. I describe several small programs that are successful but cannot be replicated on a mass scale.

We need to understand and speak about the currently taboo topics of black culture and structure. The only way to move forward economically is to develop viable structures for family, church, and community. Education, the portable credential for employment, largely depends on these influences. Education provides the skill set and thought process for success. Or, in the words of New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker: “My mom and dad were constant mentors, my first and greatest teachers….[From my father] I learned the connection between hard work, discipline, and reward.”

Part of America’s problem in finding racial unity, you say, has been a “hypersensitivity” to real or perceived “slights” that seem to be arising more frequently, especially on college campuses. Why is this, and how can these be dealt with constructively?

Today’s iteration of multiculturalism fosters and encourages differences, to the detriment of what Americans have in common. Our inability to discuss real or perceived sensitive topics further inhibits dialogue and promotes separatism. Greater contact and discussion in a responsible, objective way is the best way to achieve trust. College is supposed to be the proper venue for challenging and preparing students for life and exposing them to a diversity of ideas. The interaction with different opinions promotes resiliency and should be pursued on an individual basis.

Despite hopes that an Obama presidency would help heal some racial divides, you state that “racial divisiveness is more evident now than it was when Obama took office.” To what do you attribute this change?

The racial divide had already been set in motion before the Obama presidency. Powerful forces–multiculturalism, frustration at the ineffectiveness of many programs, social media, separatism as expressed in identity politics, economic recession with a weak recovery, and the lack of a frank racial discussion–were at work. President Obama’s leadership could not produce the necessary unity given these factors.

You speak of a racial mindset in this country that seems to be heading more toward separatism than the defining goal of integration in the ’60s. Explain what that ultimately means, and what your hopes are for our future.

As of the end of 2016, the overall numbers for black progress in education and economic well-being were disheartening. The poverty level of blacks has remained three times that of white for the last 45 years. Also, 32.9 percent of black children under the age of 18 live in poverty. Only 38.7 percent of black children under 18 live in a two-parent family. Black Americans’ college majors, according to a 2016 Georgetown University study, “tend to be low earning.”

As we move int a stage of self-imposed, heightened racial identity, the goals of integration and assimilation become loaded terms with negative connotations. This separatism is highly detrimental in accessing a proper education, combating poverty, and attaining economic parity.

As for the future, we must remember America’s strength. Where else could a man, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was a white American, become president?

Gene Dattel will sign copies of Reckoning with Race on Monday, November 13, at 5:00 p.m. at Lemuria.

Author Q & A with Stanley Nelson

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 23)

As the editor of his hometown’s weekly newspaper–the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La.–Stanley Nelson didn’t set out to become a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. He didn’t plan on his investigative journalism becoming the basis of a blockbuster fictional trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles. And he never dreamed his efforts would build a crusade for justice that would draw dozens of willing supporters from around the country.

devils walkingBut it was Nelson’s tough investigative reporting that led to his book, Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s (LSU Press), in which he describes not only the difficulties of pursuing decades-old cold cases of racial injustice, but the remarkable successes that he and his collaborators were able to achieve–even when the FBI could not.

As a testament to Nelson’s tenacity and courage to take on this topic, Iles dedicated Natchez Burning, the first installment of his fictional trilogy, to the Ferriday reporter who, with the help of a large team, stopped at nothing to find answers to so many questions that had lingered for 50 years. Inspired by Nelson’s work, Iles used pieces of the massive puzzle that was unraveled as a basis for some plot material for his trilogy that included The Bone Tree and Mississippi Blood. In fact, it was Iles who wrote the forward to Nelson’s book, offering high praise for the journalist’s accomplishments.

At the heart of Nelson’s book is the story of one man–Frank Morris of Ferriday–whose tragic fiery death at the hands of the notorious Klan cell known as the Silver Dollar Group in 1964 would eventually lead to further investigations, and, in one case, even a grand jury hearing.

From his first awareness of the Morris case in 2007, prompted by the FBI’s initiative to reopen Civil Rights-era cold cases, Nelson would write nearly 200 news stories about the murder, over a seven-year time period. In addition to the Sentinel in Ferriday, his award-winning investigative writing would appear in the New York TimesWashington PostLos Angeles Times, and on CNN and National Public Radio.

A discussion about the events in both Iles’ and Nelson’s books will be led by Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell at the Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 19.  The event will begin at 1:30 p.m. in the Galloway United Methodist Church sanctuary in Jackson.

ms book fest

Devils Walking, a detailed examination of Klan murders committed by the Silver Dollar Group in Mississippi and Louisiana during the 1960s, revolves around the story of the brutal killing of Frank Morris in Ferriday, La. in December 1964. As a reporter for Ferriday’s newspaper, the Concordia Sentinel, what sparked your interest in this case in 2007?

Frank Morris in front of his shoe shop (wearing visor, near center)

Frank Morris in front of his shoe shop (wearing visor, near center)

In late February 2007, the FBI and Justice Department announced they were taking a second look at approximately 100 unsolved civil rights-era murders. Frank Morris’ name was on the list. Morris died from burns he received when Klansmen torched his Ferriday shoe shop and deliberately incinerated him as well.

I initially wrote a couple of stories. Then I got a phone call from Frank Morris’ granddaughter, Rosa Williams. She thanked me for the coverage and said that she had learned more about her grandfather’s death in the first article than she had in the previous decades. Of all of the questions she had about the murder, the biggest was “Why?”

When I was young, I witnessed the aftermath of a horrible traffic accident in which a young family, including a 7-year-old girl, died in flames. Considering that and the murder of Frank Morris, I wondered how someone could purposely set a human being on fire? It was a question that would not go away. I talked to the Sentinel‘s publishers. They agreed that we should try to find out what happened.

Explain how and why this case grew into such a large investigation–with the help of, among others, 25 students at the Syracuse University School of Law–in such a short time.

Race is a polarizing topic. So, could I get readers to open their minds and hearts to the Morris story? I figured that if they got to know Frank Morris, they would care about him. Then justice would seem important. So, week after week we tried to bring Frank Morris back to life so that our readers would see him as a living, breathing human being–not a ghost from the past.

A lot of people lent me a hand–some included Syracuse University College of Law professors Janis McDonald and Paula Johnson; the Center for Investigative Reporting; the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication; Teach for America; and summer interns from universities in the South. Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen was a constant help. But nothing would have happened without the Sentinel’s publishers–Lesley Hanna Capdepon and Sam Hanna Jr.–who supported the work through thick and thin.

By 2007, as the FBI, the Department of Justice and a contingent of government investigators were becoming involved with this case, there was urgency to move the investigation forward. Why was this?

In the 1960s, dangerous Klansmen at the height of their power menaced anyone who questioned the terror they engendered. But by the 2000s, those men were dead or dying. The new enemy to justice became “time.” Witnesses were dying, too. So, urgency was mandated.

Explain the assistance that Jerry Mitchell, investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger, was able to lend to your own investigation of Klan murders in Mississippi.

Jerry is considered a legend in the world of cold case investigations. I often seek his advice and he always helps.

When did Louisiana State University get on board to join the investigation, and what contributions did they make?

Jay Shelledy of the LSU Manship School invited me to talk to his journalism students. Later, then dean of the Manship School Jack Hamilton asked, “How can we help you?” I answered that I needed FBI Klan files from the National Archives.

Since then, Jay and his students have amassed tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents, approaching 200,000 pages, all now on line on their website (http://lsucoldcaseproject.com/). Their amazing work continues with new students every year and the full support of Dean Jerry Ceppos. Former Interim Dean Ralph Izard was fully behind the project as well.

In the end, you have a theory of who was actually responsible for Frank Morris’s murder–but has it been proven, or can it be proven?

A Concordia Parish deputy, Frank DeLaughter, wanted Morris’ shop burned following a verbal confrontation with him. DeLaughter considered Morris an uppity black man and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

FBI agents in the field were convinced DeLaughter was the mastermind of the arson. A retired agent recently deceased–John Pfeifer–spent 10 years in Concordia Parish back then. Pfeifer said the one thing FBI agents couldn’t do in the 1960s was directly link DeLaughter to the arson. Fortunately, we were able to do that in 2010.

Relatives of admitted Klansman Arthur Leonard Spencer of Rayville, La., including his son, said Spencer had discussed his involvement in the Ferriday arson through the years. They also said a family friend–Coonie Poissot–told them he was involved as well.

Described by the FBI as a drifter, Klansman, thug, and speed addict, Poissot revealed to agents in 1967 that he was with DeLaughter the night before the arson and that as they passed the shoe shop in DeLaughter’s patrol car, the deputy said he planned to teach Morris a lesson. The following night, Morris watched his two attackers as they torched the building. He didn’t know them.

DeLaughter and Poissot died in the 1990s. Following our story on Spencer in January 2011, three separate Concordia Parish grand juries heard from witnesses in the case, but took no action and issued no reports. After Spencer died in 2013, the Justice Department said it didn’t believe Spencer had been involved. Yet the U.S. Attorney’s office in Louisiana considered him a prime suspect.

You have also investigated the cold case deaths of other African Americans at the hands of the Silver Dollar Group, described as the most secretive and dangerous in the nation at the time. What has driven you to pursue these injustices in such depth?  How many stories did you ultimately write?

I’ve written approximately 200 stories. Like Frank Morris, all of these cases are compelling. The victims are ordinary folks who have suffered extraordinary pain.

Additionally, discovering the inner workings of the Silver Dollar Group was a fascinating journey. These men, including Frank DeLaughter, were incredibly successful terrorists for two reasons. One, in small numbers, typically three or four men, they committed these crimes. Two, they kept their mouths shut.

The group’s leader–Red Glover–who may have acted alone in the 1967 bombing of NAACP Treasurer Wharlest Jackson in Natchez, was interviewed several times by FBI agents after Jackson’s murder. On one occasion, Glover told the agents he hoped they caught the murderer because, according to Glover, the killer obviously was “a maniac.”

Natchez author Greg Iles’ blockbuster trilogy of Natchez BurningThe Bone Tree, and Mississippi Blood was based on you and your work to solve these cold cases. Please comment on the significance of that honor.

Stanley Nelson

Stanley Nelson

In 2013 (Greg) handed me a galley of Natchez Burning. He signed the title page: “To Stanley Nelson: The Real Henry Sexton.” I’ll never forget it. Greg was born with a gift for writing, and he continues to become better at it. But, in my opinion, his genius is his research.

You were named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting in 2011, as a result of your investigation of these cases. How has that impacted you personally and professionally?

It was totally unexpected. I never thought the Sentinel would emerge at the top of the list against stories such as WikiLeaks and the BP Oil Spill. It also means that the stories of Frank Morris and the other victims may live on.

Is there anything else you’d like to include?       

The book covers the emergence of the Silver Dollar Group (SDG) from the three traditional Klans. The SDG’s goal was simple–go underground and fight integration with deadly force. Red Glover hand-picked the members and as a symbol of unity gave many a silver dollar minted in the year of the Klansman’s birth. Southwest Mississippi and Concordia Parish, Louisiana, (across the river from Natchez) had seen at least four SDG murders by July 1964, three occurring before the Neshoba murders and the fourth occurring just days afterward. Eight SDG murders are covered in the book as well as the killing of Johnny Queen in 1965 in Fayette.

Additionally, the book questions the FBI and Justice Department’s new probes into the murders. Since the initiative was announced in February 2007, only one re-opened case moved forward–the grand jury probe into the Frank Morris arson. For the most part, the government’s initiative was a failure and we discuss why.

‘Civil Rights, Culture Wars’ shows how textbook fight mirrors battle of Mississippi legacy

By Jere Nash. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 9).

civil rights culture warsNot until 1980 were Mississippi high schools allowed to use a textbook that accurately and dispassionately covered the entire history of the state, complete with the horrors of slavery, the motives behind the Civil War, the value of Reconstruction, and the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight Over a Mississippi Textbook (University of North Carolina Press) by University of Mississippi historian Charles Eagles explains how it happened.

Several years ago, the University of North Carolina Press published The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, the authoritative account by Eagles of the one event in the 1960s that defined Mississippi for the rest of the nation.

The disastrous response of whites in our state to the demand for civil and voting rights was prompted in part by 80 years of school textbooks that marginalized black men and women and distorted black history.

Eagles is unsparing in his descriptions of those earlier textbooks: one explained that “the life of a slave [was] pleasant,” while another textbook defended the role of the Ku Klux Klan, while yet another applauded the 1890 Constitutional Convention in seeking to “insure control of the state by the white man.” After eight decades of indoctrination of generations of white Mississippians with historical myths, it is not hard to see how that helped to fuel the fire of massive resistance.

MississippiConflictandChangeWhich brings us to James Loewen and Charles Sallis. In the 1970s, Loewen, a professor at Tougaloo College, and Sallis, a professor at Millsaps College, began to work together on a new kind of textbook, called Mississippi: Conflict and Change, that, as Eagles writes, “argued that conflict produces change, and [that] embraced controversial subjects related to race and class, examined unpleasant subjects such as economic depressions and violence, and included subjects neglected by other books–blacks, women, workers, and the arts.” Eagles takes us through how the book was researched, written and ultimately published in 1974.

Getting the book published, though, didn’t automatically mean it would show up in high schools. In Mississippi, then as now, a state board approves the textbooks for classroom use. And in November 1974, the board said no to Conflict and Change. With access to rich primary material, Eagles gives us a perceptive behind-the-scenes accounting of why that decision was made.

But the story doesn’t end there. Loewen, Sallis, and Eagles are just getting warmed up. The authors filed a historic lawsuit, asking a federal judge to force the state to accept their textbook, and Eagles delivers this development with backroom negotiations, trial testimony and lucid analysis. The litigation took six long years and was finally resolved on April 2, 1980, when Judge Orman Smith ordered the board to place Conflict and Change on the approved list.

Eagles captures the untenable position of the state in one short exchange between the judge and John Turnipseed, a teacher who rated the book unfavorably. After objecting to a photograph of a lynching because it would cause “harsh feelings in the classroom,” Turnipseed was asked by Judge Smith, “But this happened, didn’t it? Didn’t Mississippians have more lynchings than any other state?” Turnipseed testified, “Well, yes. But that all happened so long ago. Why dwell on it now?” To which the exasperated judge responded: “Well, it is a history book!”

As with his book on Meredith and Ole Miss, Eagles’ writing is marked by three qualities that I like. One, he builds the narrative around primary sources. He interviews people, he digs through old file boxes, and finds the records that tell the truth.

Two, he provides context. He not only sets the state for the story, he give us succinct biographical information on the players. The journey of Conflict and Change involved lawyers, historians, journalists, activists, including Ernst Borinski, Frank Parker, Mel Leventhal, Margaret Walker Alexander, Fred Banks, Clarice Campbell, Duncan Gray Jr., Jeanne Middleton, David Sansing, and John Bettersworth.

Third, Eagles doesn’t hesitate to give his opinion. I agreed with some, other I didn’t, but I like authors with opinions; it makes me stop and think.

I’ll close this review with an observation on the import of Conflict and Change by the incomparable Frank Parker, one of the lawyers for Loewen and Sallis: “Desegregation of the public schools in the South is now protected even more by a constitutional prohibition against maintaining racial segregation in the curriculum and in textbooks.”

Jere Nash is the co-author of Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008, Mississippi Fried Politics, Tall Tales from the Backroom, and America’s Great Storm: Leading Through Hurricane Katrina.

Civil Rights Superheroes: ‘March’ by John Lewis

The graphic novel is a strange beast. Though I’m not as well versed in them as our beloved Hunter is, I still enjoy reading them. Most of the graphic-format books I’ve read have been about superheroes:  Batman, the Green Lantern Corps, Daredevil. And, in a way, March fits that bill, too, though both the hero and enemies are too real.

March is the three-part memoir of civil rights icon Senator John Lewis, co-written with his communications aide Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell.  The narrative begins on the inauguration day of President Barack Obama, but quickly jumps back in time, beginning with Lewis’ childhood in rural Alabama, where he witnessed racial inequality but was ordered (by his parents, for his safety) to stay quiet about it.  march book twoWith the occasional jump back into the narrative present, March follows Lewis’ life using major civil rights events (the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Freedom Rides, and the event alluded to in the title, the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge).

I won’t bore you with a summary of Lewis’ life—it’s well known in general, and well-told in March. I will, however, encourage you to buy the all three volumes for several reasons. Primarily, the story is important. Having this narrative focus on one man’s experience in a movement that affected so many is brilliant, both rhetorically and craft-wise. It takes an idea that for so many of us is an abstract notion and turns it into a story. Lewis’ story is simultaneously his own and part of something much larger than himself, and March tells both sides of this well.

march book threeIt’s also compellingly told. Lewis’ tone is conversational: it balances seriousness and grief with levity and honesty. Anyone who’s heard Senator Lewis speak knows he does so with conviction but without false airs, and March is written the same way.

The quality of Lewis’ storytelling is augmented by Powell’s artwork. The black-and-white drawings are at times austere, others foreboding, but always evocative. When I tell people about the book, I often describe it as visually “gorgeous,” a term I seldom use but which is the only one that fits. Here.

march art

March is for anyone:  a reluctant reader, a fan of history, a consumer of comics, a member of the human race who wants to know more about heroism in the face of hatred. Some heroes fly; others march–over, and over, and over again.

March comes into two forms: a collected slipcase edition, and separately in volumes onetwo, and three.

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