Murders Around Mississippi

Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian writes:

This is a Mississippi story. On January 11 1966, a gold-toned Plymouth Fury carrying a group of voting-rights activists crashed on a stretch of road near the small town of Sidon in the west of the state. Two African-American women, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, were killed on that day. That much is certain. But in their deaths is buried a painful question that has gnawed at three generations of their families. Was this an ordinary car wreck, or were the two women, who had previously been threatened, shot at and burned in effigy because of their efforts to register black voters, targetted on that road? Engineered car crashes were a known tactic by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. Violent crimes against African-Americans were rarely investigated or punished. And even if the women were murdered by white supremacists, was it better, as some members of Keglar's own family believed, to leave such suspicions left unspoken?

Continued --

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, cold cases, FBI cold cases, Mississippi cold cases

At left, relatives of early Tallahatchie County civil rights activist, Birdia Keglar, take part in a road-naming ceremony for the woman who was killed in January of 1966.


I've been asked why I started and maintain this blog. An answer is deserved, and here it is.

After living in the Mississippi Delta for several years, and using the time to write a book about the Delta's civil rights history, I wanted to keep up with related issues and so I started this Blog. Historically, Mississippi's civil rights history has been plagued with unsolved and questionably resolved murders.

Today, the FBI is finally investigating some of the civil rights cold cases from the 1960s and 1970s, including several in Mississippi. This really is not not good enough, because there are many more unanswered questions about people who were killed or who simply disappeared because of their race and/or their politics.

Who killed Adlena Hamlett and Birdia Keglar? The women were coming home from a Jackson, Miss. civil rights meeting on January 11, 1966 when their car reportedly swerved and went off the road and they were killed. But no police reports were filed. There are no official records of what happened that night. One short newspaper account accompanies a host of stories that are told by friends and others. None of the stories seem to match. Keglar was the first black person to register and vote in Tallahatchie County since the days of Reconstruction ended. Hamlett was a long-time teacher and civil rights volunteer.

Some Mississippians still question who assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. Byron De La Beckwith, a fellow Mississippian, was arrested and eventually found guilty of this crime. But what about the men who used to talk brag about their own involvement in coffee shops in Greenwood, Miss., their laughter and whispered conversations overheard by waitresses? What is to be made of the stories still floating around the Delta by black people who knew and loved Medgar Evers? These questions are legitimate and deserve answers for the sake of history.

The murders of James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three young civil rights volunteers killed in Philadelphia, Miss. in the summer of 1964, have never been adequately resolved. At least a dozen men living in and around Philadelphia are said to have been involved yet many are still living and only one person has ever been convicted and sent to prison, 79-year-old self-acclaimed white supremacist, Edgar Ray Killen. But why won't the state of Mississippi's attorney general bring anyone else to trial?

Who really killed Drew, Miss. attorney Cleve McDowell in March of 1997? The attorney who was mentored by Medgar Evers and James Meredith (first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi) was shot and killed in his home but the police reports have never been released. Do they exist? What about the court records involving the trial of the man convicted of McDowell's murder? Why won't the Sunflower County Courts release these records? What is there to hide? Were others involved? McDowell's autopsy records suggest others were part of the murdering team. Try finding a copy of this record (I have one!). The young man convicted of the murder later recanted. What ever happened to him?

What prompted McDowell to tell his best friends that he would be "next in line" after hearing of Alabama attorney- friend Henry S. Mims' strange death three years earlier? What happened to McDowell's personal computer soon after he was killed? His firearms? His civil rights records kept on various cases including the killing of young Emmett Till? How did the fire get started in his office six months later-- the fire that "destroyed" all of McDowell's investigative records? Why don't McDowell's colleagues want to talk about their old friend?

And what about Sam Block? This early civil rights leader from Cleveland, Miss. died suddenly in his California home in 2000. His body was immediately removed from his home, says his sister Margaret Block, and was embalmed before it could be examined by the county's medical examiner. Block's computer disappeared shortly after his death.

Even the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has strange Mississippi ties. Was the state's infamous long-time senator James O. Eastland involved? Seven years before JFK was assassinated, the magnolia state's Eastland met for the first time with Guy Banister, a controversial CIA operative and retired FBI agent in charge of the Chicago bureau.

Banister -- remember him as the man who "pistol-whipped" David Ferrie in Oliver Stone's film "JFK" -- was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Eastland through the senator's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS (sometimes called "SISSY"). All SISS records, of course, are classified.

Questions surround the murder of a white, racist Mississippi detective who worked for Banister and was killed within the year after Kennedy's assassination. Private investigator John D. Sullivan of Vicksburg bled to death after he was "accidentally" shot in the groin. He was with a "friend" after they came home from hunting.

A former FBI agent, Sullivan had worked for Banister both inside the FBI and privately; he was a private self-employed investigator who often did work for hire for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (Mississippi's mini CIA); the private white Citizens Councils (the state's uptown Klan made up of bankers, physicians, ministers, etc.) of which he was an active member; and he often worked for Eastland's SISS, as had Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald.

So much to figure out and so little time! I am trying to capture as much history as possible about Mississippi civil rights murders before available information disappears. Also, the blog's purpose is to keep up with any current activity on the part of law enforcement to resolve these cases.

Labels: Birdia Keglar, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, cold cases, Delta Blues, FBI, JFK assassination, Medgar Evers. Byran De La Beckwith, Mississippi

Adlena Hamlett, a retired Mississippi school teacher, was murdered with Birdia Keglar in 1965

THE NAMES ON THE SIGNS — Lamar Smith, Benjamin Brown, Wharlest Jackson, Adlena Hamlett ? were reminders of some of Mississippi's darkest days during the civil rights movement.

About 60 people rallied on the steps of the Capitol with signs in hand Monday, demanding that the state become more aggressive in investigating the deaths while there's time to bring culprits to justice.

John Gibson, a rally organizer, said the group has identified 55 Mississippians killed during the movement, which started in the 1950s.

"In the vast majority of these cases, there has been no justice," he said. "We are here to demand a full measure of justice for all of Mississippi's civil rights martyrs."

Continued --

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, Clinton Melton, cold cases, Emmett Till, Henry Dee, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Herbert Lee, James Chaney, Medgar Evers, Mississippi

# Activists, others to demand state officials investigate old cases

By Chris Joyner
chris.joyner@ jackson.gannett. com


SCHEDULE

Monday

# 11 a.m.: Rally participants will gather at Mississippi Coliseum in
downtown Jackson

# 11:30 a.m.: March to state Capitol begins.

# Noon to 2 p.m.: Rally at Capitol and speakers

Civil rights veterans and supporters will gather Monday on the Capitol
lawn to press state officials to aggressively investigate decades-old
deaths of martyrs to the movement.

Richard Coleman, president of the Meridian chapter of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said organizers
plan to call out the names of prominent suspects in the crimes and
demand government officials make complete investigations into the deaths.

"We want to target anyone that can influence justice in this state and
in this country," he said. "If it's the governor, if it's the attorney
general, if it's the president, we want justice for all in this country."

Dubbed a "justice rally," the event will include speakers from the
civil rights movement and family members of victims. Prominent among
them will be the son and grandson of Louis Allen, a Amite County man
who was shot to death in front of his home in 1964.

Continued --

Labels: Birdia Keglar, Charles Moore, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, cold cases, Emmett Till

Reward offered in 1964 slaying; efforts to find Louis Allen's killer increase after solving other cold cases

Family members of Louis Allen, a Liberty resident shot to death 43 years ago in what the FBI is investigating as a civil rights-era slaying, are offering $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of his killers.

Allen's namesake grandson, Louis Allen Jr., said family members suspect the killer is alive and that other people were involved.

The Allen case is one of more than 100 civil rights-era slaying under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Louis Allen Jr. said he hopes the reward offered by the Mississippi Religious Leadership Conference will spark more interest in finding justice for his grandfather.

Efforts to solve the case have gained steam, following prosecutions in other civil rights-era cold cases, including two life sentences handed down this summer to James Ford Seale of Roxie in the May 2, 1964, kidnapping of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The teens were beaten and drowned.

Story Continued --

Labels: Birdia Keglar, Charles Eddie Moore, Clinton Melton, cold cases, David Halberstam, Emmett Till, Herbert Lee, James Ford Seale, Louis Allen, Mississippi murders

Mississippi civil rights activist Margaret Block watches her computer screen closely as young Florida college student Andrew Meyer is tasered by campus police.

"How could anyone say he was resisting? He was holding a book under his arm and he never let go of it, as far as I can tell."

Block turns her attention back to the YouTube video as Meyer is arrested after campus police zap him with a stun gun because he won't stand up.

Posted on perhaps thousands of Web sites Tuesday, the video shows campus police officers pulling Meyer away from a microphone after he loudly asks U.S. Senator John Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush both belonged to the secret society Skull and Bones when they were students at Yale University.

Kerry asks police to let the student present his questions, but they pull Meyer away, instead. The video ends and Block is quiet; the young man's screams awaken memories she'd rather forget.

"We got this in the Civil Rights Movement, too. Police didn't use tasers to terrorize us but they would beat us down and put the dogs on us. And shoot water hoses at us. But can you believe he was tasered just for speaking out? In this day?"

Block still remembers the terror she often felt when working the Mississippi Delta as a voting rights activist two years out of high school in 1962. And she recounts the story of a 27-year-old student volunteer who was traumatized so badly she wonders if he ever recovered.

Her story begins when Block's late brother Sam was signing up voters and preaching civil rights in nearby Greenwood where he once rode a mule down the main street to draw attention to the cause.

Greenwood was home to Byron de la Beckwith, convicted years later for the murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers. Also living in the Delta cotton town was Gordon Lackey, a Klansman and Beckwith's mentor. Both Beckwith and Lackey are dead.

Margaret chose Charleston as her headquarters, a smaller town in the heart of Tallahatchie County, north of Greenwood, where she became a SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) volunteer after first working with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council).

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered and his body dumped into the infamous Tallahatchie River in 1955. Like Greenwood, Charleston also had a horrid reputation for violence.

"Not that Greenwood was much better. Charleston was just more isolated and there were even fewer black people living there unafraid enough to get involved in the Movement," Block says.

Her life was threatened several times in Charleston; once a Klansman tried to stab the young woman on the courthouse steps and his knife was quickly taken away by an FBI agent. "Agents weren't supposed to get involved but he did and I'll never forget it." Another time, Block was sneaked out of town in a hearse after rumors the Klan wanted to kill her.

In mid January of 1966, after Block moved away, two of her Charleston friends, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, both NAACP members, were murdered in Sidon, a small cotton ginning community just seven miles south of Greenwood. Block and others have continued searching for evidence, hoping their murders one day become a cold case for the U. S. Department of Justice to solve.

Officially, the two women died in a car accident. But Block and others know better.

"Birdia Keglar was trying to start a chapter of the NAACP in Tallahatchie County and was a wonderful person. She managed the local funeral home and was responsible for sending a driver to sneak me out of town in the back of a company hearse after hearing the Klan was out for me. Adlena Hamlett was a retired teacher and like her son had been involved in voter registration and civil rights efforts for years."

Nina Zachery Black, Hamlett's granddaughter, believes the murder could have been prompted by her uncle's well-known hatred of the late U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, also a Delta cotton farmer.

"When he heard about his mother's murder, my uncle wept and said that Eastland had finally gotten to him by murdering Adlena. My uncle had often collided with the senator who was a noted racist."

Both Keglar and Hamlett met with U. S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy earlier in February of 1965 when they testified before a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing, telling of the years of harassment they'd been through for their involvement in voting rights including the hanging in effigy of Hamlett on the Tallahatchie Courthouse lawn. At the time, the senator warned his audience that both women had better return home safely, said one of Keglar's great-granddaughters.

Keglar once angered the local sheriff and county officials when her voter registration experiences were used by the U.S. Justice Department to argue the first Mississippi voting rights case before a federal court in 1961. She was the first black person to vote in Tallahatchie County since Reconstruction.

Both women were killed in mid January of 1966 -- on January 12th say family members and according to a brief newspaper account. The story is told that both women were on their way home from a Jackson meeting where they likely met once again with Senator Kennedy.

But new and somewhat different information has surfaced about the Mississippi murders after a 95-year-old aunt of Keglar's led Margaret Block to an eyewitness, 85-year-old J. D. Williams who recently moved back home to Charleston from California.

Williams says he was in the car behind Keglar and Hamlett when they were run off the road and has details to share. And Williams says the murder took place in Sidon, one day before others have said it occurred.

"Williams has given us something new that could help find truth," Block says.

This much Williams remembers

"We were meeting in Sidon, in a small church. Dick Gregory and another volunteer, Michael Stoffer, had been to Sidon and gave us a load of clothes to distribute. I'd given them to a local white agency but they kept everything and we had no clothing to hand out.

"We were talking about this and about the NAACP meeting coming up when a black man came into the church and looked around. He didn't look familiar. He acted strange and one of my friends, Jessie Brewer, said he thought the man was trying to look out for us or that he must be upset about something and couldn't tell us."

When the meeting ended, Williams and the others went out to their cars. "Mrs. Keglar and Mrs. Hamlett were in the car in front of us. I remember that a car driven by a white man [officially identified as Brown Lee Bruce of Sidon, deceased came up on them really fast and hit them in the side, forcing them into a steep ditch with water.

"Then more cars and trucks came out from nowhere, full of white men, and lots of shooting happened. They really shot up their car. I didn't recognize any of them. It was the firemen who finally came and removed the bodies from the car. They also took away the young college man who was with them."

Williams states that he and Brewer were frightened and drove off the side of the road after Keglar's car was hit. "Someone got us out of our car and arrested us for trespassing. They took us to jail in Greenwood and then someone got us out the next day. It might have been the FBI."

His recollections don't entirely match several accounts told by some and yet give substance to others in trying to piece together what happened over forty years ago to Keglar and Hamlett. One more person who also was in Keglar's car could shed more light -- if he could ever be found.

Richard L. Simpson, a 27-year-old voting rights volunteer from Massachusetts, was held isolated in the Greenwood Hospital where he was treated for injuries received in the car wreck -- until he disappeared. But no one knows or will tell where the student was taken. Simpson worked in nearby Belzoni the summer before and then stayed on for an extra year.

Block and others say that Simpson was probably sneaked out of Mississippi and sent home as soon as possible, perhaps for his own safety.

"That would have been the only way to keep anyone safe in those days. But I've always hoped he would come forward and give us more information," said Robert Keglar, whose brother, James Eddie "Sonny Boy," died three months later while unconscious in a suspicious house fire after he tried to find out from the FBI who'd killed his mother.

"Sonny Boy was just trying to find out what happened to our mother, and he ended up dead, too."

Leflore County officials say no records exist regarding the deaths of Keglar and Hamlett. And several former student volunteer leaders who knew Richard Simpson say they have no idea whatever happened to him.

This summer, however, the state of Mississippi officially declared a 25 mile stretch of highway outside of Charleston dedicated to Birdia Keglar.



Adlena Hamlett, left



.. and Birdia Keglar



Keywords: civil rights movement, YouTube, Andrew Meyer, Mississippi, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett

Labels: Birdia Keglar, civil rights movement, cold cases, Emmett Till, FBI, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Medgar Evers, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi murders, Robert Kennedy

Once a SNCC volunteer protester, U. S. Rep. John Lewis is carried away by police




Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 02:23 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

U.S. Rep. John Lewis went before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, tying the disarray in the U.S. Justice Department to Georgia’s voter ID law.

Here’s the gist of his printed remarks:

“During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we knew that individuals in the Department of Justice were people who we could call any time of day or night….

“And we felt during those years that the civil rights division of the Department of Justice was more than a sympathetic referee, it was on the side of justice, on the side of fairness.

“During the movement, people looked to Washington for justice, for fairness, but today I’m not so sure that the great majority of individuals in the civil rights community can look to the division for that fairness…

Continued --

Labels: Birdia Keglar, Charles Eddie Moore, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, cold cases, Goodman, Gordon Lackey, Henry Dee, Henry Hezekiah Dee, James Ford Seale, John Lewis, KKK

For you to enjoy -- pictures of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from over the year. Susan

Labels: Aaron Henry, Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, civil rights, Cleve McDowell, cold cases, David Halberstam, Eastland, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gordon Lackey, Ku Klux Klan

Birdia Keglar Highway Dedication
June 1, 2007
Charleston, Miss.

Photos are now posted from the highway dedication that took place June 1. You can view (and download) from here.

Labels: 1965 voting rights act, Birdia Keglar, civil rights, civil rights movement James Alcorn, cold cases, Emmett Till, Hamlett, Keglar, Mississippi, Mississippi Delta

This news just in about the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice. Will cold cases be taken more seriously?

For some former career staff in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman's face-off with the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee this week couldn't have come soon enough.

"I'm glad to see it," says Toby Moore, a researcher who worked in the division's voting section from 2000 to 2005. "It's way overdue."

That's because Schlozman, who was a senior political official in the division from 2003 to 2006, including five months as its acting assistant attorney general, has emerged as the latest lightning rod for allegations that the Justice Department has become politicized during the Bush administration.

Here's more ..

Labels: Birdia Keglar, Chaney, Charles Eddie Moore, Charles Moore, civil rights, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, cold cases

It was a beautiful day in the Mississippi Delta as friends and family of the late Birdia Keglar were present to see a 25 mile stretch of highway dedicated to the voting rights advocate who was killed in 1966.

More to come ...

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, civil rights movement, cold cases, Emmett Till, Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi murders, voting rights

AS FREEDOM VOLUNTEERS packed up and left Mississippi in 1964, brutality and murder kept going on. Some stories made it into the news and into later history books, but in smaller Delta towns several hundred miles north of Jackson, many incidents remain only as whispers among those who once picked the cotton ...


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Bloggers Set to Revisit Mississippi Delta Civil Rights People and Places

Mount. Pleasant, Iowa (USA), May 29, 2007--Two friends from Cleveland, Mississippi and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are spending ten days roaming and blogging the Mississippi Delta while visiting civil rights people and places. Their pictures and stories will be placed daily at http://mississippimurders.com on the Internet. (Photo at left, courthouse in Belzoni, home of the Rev. George Lee who was murdered in 1955.)

Margaret Block, an early civil rights advocate, and Susan Klopfer, author of Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, plan to roam the Mississippi Delta starting June 1, visiting people and places of the modern civil rights movement. “We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for ten days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history,” Klopfer said.

“We plan to visit the towns of Money, Drew, Glendora, Greenwood and other spots connected to the murders of Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and Cleve McDowell, among others who were killed for their civil rights activities or just for being black.”

Block, an early SNCC volunteer, spent her first years out of high school in the small town of Charleston where they will kick off their blogging venture by attending a program June 1 honoring Keglar. The NAACP leader was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 on her way home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Keglar once saved Block’s life by moving her out of Charleston in a hearse from the funeral home that Keglar managed.

“We have very few scheduled stops, but we will also leave the Delta to attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother in Meridian,” Block said. The two also plan to visit with Unita Blackwell, Mississippi’s first black woman mayor, and will take pictures as they roam the historical Brooks Farm, Parchman penitentiary, and Clarksdale, home of Aaron Henry, an early civil rights leader who Block also knew.

The two women met when Klopfer was researching a book on the civil rights movement, “Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.” Klopfer was living on the grounds of Parchman at the time, where her husband was the chief psychologist.

...Contact:
Susan Klopfer
775-340-3585 (cell) sklopfer@gmail.com
http://mississippimurders.blogspot.com
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

# # #

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, Cleve McDowell, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Chaney, June Johnson, Mississippi, Mississippi Delta

From the Lancaster UAF

This is a Mississippi story. On January 11 1966, a gold-toned Plymouth Fury carrying a group of voting-rights activists crashed on a stretch of road near the small town of Sidon in the west of the state. Two African-American women, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, were killed on that day. That much is certain. But in their deaths is buried a painful question that has gnawed at three generations of their families. Was this an ordinary car wreck, or were the two women, who had previously been threatened, shot at and burned in effigy because of their efforts to register black voters, targetted on that road? Engineered car crashes were a known tactic by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. Violent crimes against African-Americans were rarely investigated or punished. And even if the women were murdered by white supremacists, was it better, as some members of Keglar's own family believed, to leave such suspicions left unspoken?

Now, 41 years after that crash, Keglar's cousin, Gwen Dailey, is campaigning for the FBI to open an investigation into her death. Despite the passage of time, the lack of recorded evidence, and the death of what few witnesses there may have been to that accident long ago, it is not an entirely unreasonable hope.

More ..

Labels: 1965 voting rights act, Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, civil rights, JFK, lynch, Medgar Evers, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi murders, Robert Kennedy, voting rights

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson urged members of the Mississippi Associated Press Broadcasters Association to remain vigilant in their efforts to uncover wrongdoing and preserve the public's right to know in an era of eroding rights.

Thompson, who lives in Bolton and represents the state's 2nd Congressional District, spoke for 20 minutes Saturday on several topics. He told a crowd of about 80 at the group's annual meeting that efforts to curtail the rights of the media must be vigorously fought.

"I firmly believe that a free press is important but also that the press and the public has a right to know," Thompson said. "It appears that some of our public officials have forgotten that. So I want to encourage you to keep pursuing that. That is a fundamental principle that this country was founded upon."

Continued
--------------

Rep. Thompson, himself, knows the power of the Sovereignty Commission. You will find quite a few entries regarding his brave history of civil rights activism. Here are a few ...

As an alderman, complains FBI not pursuring beating in his hometown of Bolton

Charges Selective Service System Black Conspiracy

Charges of Brutality, Intimidation and Harassment Toward Blacks by Police

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Bennie Thompson, Birdia Keglar, Chaney, civil rights movement, Emmett Till, Goodman, Medgar Evers, Mississippi, Schwerner

Some very interesting news from the Mississippi Legislature

- “Birdia Keglar Memorial Highway,” a portion of Highway 35 in Tallahatchie County. Keglar, a voting rights advocate, was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen on her way home to Charleston after meeting with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson in 1966.

More on this story from the Associated Press --

Here is a link to the story of Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett



It looks like Birdia's relatives are working very hard to see that her story is remembered. If anyone has the ability to help move this along, please do so. sk

Labels: Adlena Hamlett, Birdia Keglar, civil rights, cold cases, KKK, Mississippi