Murders Around Mississippi

Sovereignty Commission Online

"When a man bites a dog, that's news." Samuel Clemmons

In 1959, a black tenant farmer in Bolivar County was accused to shooting his white landlord to death. Much detail was given to this murder - so different from when the opposite occurred ...

The Sovereignty Commission kept up with the ensuing events:

Jackson Free Press | I Want Justice, Too: "The Jackson Free Press teamed with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to follow an Army vet and Mississippi native on his journey back home, looking for justice for his little brother who was killed by the Klan in 1964. This is his story.

by Donna Ladd
Photos by Kate Medley
Additional reporting by Natalie Irby and Thabi Moyo
July 20, 2004

Charles Moore hitchhiked often. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s in rural Southwest Mississippi, near the lethargic town of Meadville, the young black man had not enjoyed the amenities that many white teenagers had. His mama, Mazie, had never owned a car. They did not have running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, gas, a TV; they lived in a three-room shotgun house out in Franklin County, about 32 miles east of Natchez, where he shared a room with his brother, Thomas, one year older. You could see the daylight through the wooden slats."

This great story continues....

(Thanks to excellent reporting, another Mississippi murder will be resolved. This is the stuff of reconcilliation. sk)

Lynching site in Lambert, Mississippi. Older citizens of this community remember how this grain tower was used in earlier years. 

Home - Black Mississippi: "ACLU sues provider over health care of Mississippi inmates
By Shelia Byrd
The Associated Press

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the St. Louis-based health care provider for inmates at the State Penitentiary at Parchman, alleging prisoners have been misdiagnosed and received inadequate treatment.
The federal lawsuit against Correctional Medical Services, Inc., one of the nation's largest for-profit medical providers for prisoners, was filed today on behalf of 1,000 inmates at Parchman's Unit 32.

Other defendants are Chris Epps, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, deputy commissioner Emmitt Sparkman and other agency officials. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Greenville.

'We're hoping that the lawsuit is going to make a big difference in conditions in Unit 32, which we really do think are so grossly inhumane as to amount to torture,' said Margaret Winter, associate director of the National Prison Project of the ACLU.

Ken Fields, a spokesman for CMS, said the company, which holds contracts in 24 states, is still reviewing the complaint.

'A review of the facts will show that the quality of care provided to inmate patients in Mississippi prisons is excellent. The care inmates receive meets the standards of care in society,' Fields said today.

Leonard Vincent, an attorney with MDOC, said the agency was expecting the lawsuit and would fight it. 'We feel like they're absolutely incorrect in what they say,' Vincent said.

Since 2003, CMS has provided medical, dental and mental health care to prisoners at the Mississippi Delta prison. The lawsuit, which gives only one side of the legal argument, alleges CMS employees routinely ignore inmates' health complaints."

July 14, 2005



# Investigation to begin at end of Miss. justice's bribery trial

By Jerry Mitchell
jmitchell@clarionledger.com


Federal authorities will examine three unsolved killings from the civil rights era, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said Wednesday.

"We just owe it to them," he said.

FBI documents show on May 2, 1964, Klansmen beat and killed 19-year-olds Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in Franklin County, dumping their bodies in the Mississippi River. On Feb. 27, 1967, 37-year-old Wharlest Jackson was driving home, having been recently promoted to a "whites-only" job in Natchez, when a bomb planted under his truck exploded.

(Story continues ...)

Murder/Lynch List In Progress (Susan Klopfer)

Betty Butler, “killed a few steps north of the overhead bridge,” McComb, “by a sixteen-year-old white boy because she resisted his sex advances.” No date given. Reported by Rev. Hollis N. Turner, McComb, letter dated Ausut 23, 1957. MSCR SCR ID # 99-9-0-72-4-1-1

Kidnap/murder of a 16-year-old white girl residing in Walthall County by four white men. The girl was taken from her bedroom, carried into a swamp and raped. One man confessed, acquitted by an all-white jury in a trial in Magnolia. No date given. Reported by Rev. Turner. C MSCR ID # 2-61-2-4-2-1-1

Woodrow Wilson Daniels, Water Valley, beaten to death by Yalobush County Sheriff, J. G. Traelor, June of 1958. SCR ID # 5-2-0-4-1-1-1

Sam O’Quinn of Centreville, killed August 1959. Was NAACP leader ambushed and killed. Source: program for 41st annual memorial service for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Source: program for 41st annual memorial service for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

Wayne Yancy, killed August 1, 1964 in Holly Springs. Civil Rights worker died after being denied admission to hospital.

Booker T. Mixon of Itta Bena, dragged behind a car near Marks (Quitman County) in 1959. This "auto accident" was not investigated and no autopsy was done even though Mr. Mixon's totally nude body showed "abrasions, cuts and contusions." He remained in a coma in the Clarksdale hospital from Oct. 12 until Oct. 23 when he died "without uttering a word." MSCR SCR ID # 10-70-0-2-1-1-1.

Sovereignty Commission Online

The Death of 15-year-old Jimmy Clemmons of Neshoba County happened when he allegedly stole gas from a mom & pop station...

Continued

The Honorable Erik R. Fleming:

"A Voice from the Capitol
By The Honorable Erik R. Fleming
Member, Mississippi House of Representatives, District 72

'If thou desire the love of God and man, be humble, for the proud heart, as it loves none but itself, is beloved of none but itself. Humility enforces where neither virtue, nor strength, nor reason can prevail.'
~ Francis Quarles (1592-1644) English poet

What has happened over the last month is the result of a lot of arrogance. Let us start with the big story over the last two weeks, the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen. Regardless of what you may feel about the verdict, it is no doubt that arrogance played a major role in this case starting some 41 years ago."

Continued ...

"Creative Loafing Atlanta"

John F. Sugg written an interesting piece on "Racial Healing In Mississippi, A tale of two men who reveal the best and worst of the South."

I question the dichotomy since I've been researching many of Mississippi's murders - Killen is by no means the "worst." And Molpus is not the "best" - I'm sure that even he would admit to this, as nice of a guy that he is.

One of the grimmest stories I've run into is about two ladies from Charleston, Birdia Keglar and Adelina Hamlet, both NAACP members, who were run off the road coming home from Jackson in 1966, the same day that Vernon Dahmer's home was bombed and the same day the Klan hearings were going on in Washington, D. C. The car was never given back to the owner, Birdia was decapitated, Adelena had both arms "cleanly severed" from her body. The other men in the car went crazy afterwards and would rarely talk ever again. They died early deaths.

There was no investigation. Except that Birdia's son, Sonny Boy, spent three months trying to learn what happened to his mother. He was arrested, turned loose, and died in a house fire; he couldn't get out of the house because he'd been hit on the head.

When are all of these murders going to be investigated? If they are, will ALL off those involved be pulled in? I'm beginning to understand the complicities of Mississippi's murdering soul(s).

I'm posting new murders every day on
Murders Around Mississippi.

Susan Klopfer


...from Sugg's cover story (maybe he should visit Mississippi long enough to do some research on the lynchings and murders here before pronouncing Killen the worst.)

'So they began to work them over, the three,
But most the dark one,
Bones smashed like sugarcane
In a molasses of blood,
Reduced them, young man by young man,
To a sobbing retching mass, partly conscious,
Till the three hearts shuddered and stopped
To the five bullets they shared, unevenly.'

- Elizabeth Sewell, 'This Land Was Theirs Before They Were the Land's,' 1964

PHILADELPHIA, MISS. It was a rhetorical question, but one freighted with implication for this town and the surrounding Neshoba County. For Mississippi and the South, as well.It was a question that should inspire those throughout the South who long for justice and reconciliation.

And it was a question that should haunt diseased souls, especially those of Mississippi's two U.S. senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who still play the race card and see little need to heal the South's wounds left from decades of terror, beatings, shootings, church bombings, cross burnings - and almost 4,800 lynchings between 1882 and 1964."

Continues ...

In the LATimes online edition of July 6 appears an article written by Warren Paprocki, an engineer in Philadelphia, Mississippi and a member of the Killen trial jury.

Paprocki gives a reasonable explanation of why the manslaughter conviction was handed out to Edgar Ray Killen for the deaths of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, rather than a murder sentence.

"The jury was initially split between those who felt he was guilty and wanted to convict him of murder and those who felt he was guilty and were frustrated because the state did not present sufficient evidence to convict him under the jury instructions.

"Still, we followed the law and the court's instructions. We did not enter into some exercise of "jury nullification" — in which jurors vote according to their convictions rather than by the law as prescribed — either for or against Killen. As it was put to me by a fellow juror: "If your brother was on trial here, wouldn't you want him tried according to the law?"

"In order to convict Killen on murder charges, according to our jury instructions, it had to be proved that he had pulled the trigger or that others had been acting under his specific direction to kill the three men. What we heard in court was that Killen told some people in Meridian that three civil rights workers "needed their asses tore up" and then showed these people where to sit and wait for the three in Philadelphia. But it was not established that he gave them any instructions to perform a specific act.

"We focused on what was presented in the courtroom, not what we'd heard over the last 41 years, and not what we either assumed or wished to be true. Had we convicted that man of murder in the absence of proper evidence, knowing even at the very least that he was certainly guilty in any reasonable moral sense, we would have been acting in the same spirit as the Ku Klux Klan. We would have been setting the law aside and subverting the process to suit our own purposes. Killen received a fair verdict, based on the evidence."

The rest of the article is interesting as well ...

On May 23, 1971, army veteran Eddie McClinton was killed by a white “night marshal” in Sumner in a fight at a pop machine. Sovereignty Commission investigator Mohead learned from county deputy sheriff Downs, doubling as the town marshal, that Aaron Henry sent a telegram to President Richard Nixon over the incident, asserting that McClinton was shot three times and killed by a white outside of Sumner.

McClinton was observed by Sumner Night Marshal Tom Trannam “kicking and beating on a change machine” at a self-service gas station. When Trannam intervened, McClinton threatened to kill him, Downs told Mohead.

“McClinton started for Trannam, in a threatening manner, Trannam fired one shot to the right of McClinton attempting to stop him. McClinton continued to advance and told Trannam, ‘If you don’t kill me, you white S.O.B., I’m going to kill you.’ At this time, Trannam shot McClinton once in the arm and once in the chest with a 45 cal. pistol,” Mohead’s report stated.

No hearing or coroner’s inquest was held, and Downs said he would get back to Mohead after he conferred with Trannam “and the two negro witnesses.”

During the week of November 1-6, 1971, Sovereignty Commission investigator Fulton Tutor reported from Pontotoc where the grand jury reported out, “without returning an indictment against Jake Denton, W/M, who shot ‘the Negro’ [Edger Higginbottom] a few months ago in Ecru. There is a possibility of some reaction from the black community over this.”

Tutor did not name the victim in his report. Also during the week, Tutor “did some checking on white voters to see if all were out to vote.” In Holly Springs, Tutor learned from Mayor Coopwood that “for the first time the whites all worked together in this election and this really paid off, as the blacks only won the Justice of the Peace post.”

Where Rebels Roost is Now Available.. 

Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited
is now available in book and/or a download PDF file.

You can use this link
to order directly from the publisher

OR choose this link to read the foreword (and then order). Cards and PayPal are accepted. If this doesn't work for you, send me e-mail.

After 23 months of research and writing, Where Rebels Roost features

--A Nine-page Selected Bibliography/Citations: 73 Books; 3 Dissertations; 47 Articles; 32 Collections, Interviews, Oral Histories

--Twenty-pages/ Lists of Dead/References 900+ names and information of African Americans lynched and murdered in Mississippi from 1870 to 1970 (references Southern Law & Poverty Center, NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, individual family and friends, personal research)

--Sixteen-page/160+ Names of Emmett Till Principles/Names and biographies of people close to this case, from lawyers, witnesses, judges and jurors to police, politicians, friends and families.

--And over one hundred specific Sovereignty Commission Documents, cited with references given (plus over 1,000 footnotes!),

But more important are the stories of some very unique, persevering and brave people – stories that deserve to be told. I hope you enjoy this read as much as I've enjoyed writing it.

Email me if you have any questions.

Susan