Murders Around Mississippi

"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 ...