Murders Around Mississippi

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What Others Say About Susan Klopfer

"This [Who Killed Emmett Till?] is a well-written and fascinating book about a vicious lynching of an African-American teenager from Chicago while visiting Mississippi. His mother insisted on an open coffin for the services so that people could see what was done to her son. The author explains the history, demands justice, talks with some of those still alive who, as she says, "still had the story fresh in their hearts and minds." After you read this book, the events will live in your heart and mind too, because she makes it come alive. This is highly recommended." Bernard Farber

"Susan Klopfer, the leading authority on the history of the Mississippi civil rights movement ... Thank God for enterprising historians like Susan Klopfer who have the courage to state the obvious."

"The Iowa historian’s master work, Where Rebel’s Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, demonstrates how opposition to the Massive Resistance movement in Mississippi during the 1950s and 60s led inevitably to harassment and, in most cases, financial ruin." Alan Bean, Ph.D., Friends of Justice

"An amazing achievement. By far the most comprehensive guide to Mississippi's unsolved civil rights murders." Tom Head, Mississippi activist and About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

" ... an absorbing and substantial work that speaks in many provocative ways ..." Lois Brown, director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College

"Susan Klopfer is determined to tell the truth about Mississippi and about America ... Klopfer follows the money, showing how the lines of culpability lead into the offices of New York industrialist Wycliffe Draper, whose Pioneer Fund fueled Mississippi's fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and provided millions of dollars for the private academies, established to keep white children out of integrated schools after Brown v. Board of Ed. (More recently, the Pioneer Fund financed the research for the controversial book, The Bell Curve, a best selling, racist tract published in 1994.)" Ben Greenberg, poet, essayist and activist and author of the blog Hungry Blues

"You won't be ready to stop reading until you finish and then I read it several more times. It's a part of history that I lived through and the story just hasn't been told like this before. Her interviews and descriptions made me feel like I was there both during and after. I have a feeling I'm still not ready to put this book down." Elizabeth L. Smith, Newbet's Choice

"Susan Klopfer has conducted in-depth personal research for her civil rights writings. She has walked the land where these atrocities occurred and still occur. Susan has experienced the pain and secrecy felt in these stories as she conducted first hand interviews with relatives of victims. All well worth reading, Susan Klopfer tells it like it is, and like it was." Pat Fua, librarian, White Pine High School

"It was gripping, frightening and sad...Thank you for educating this community." Gayle Tiede, Mount Pleasant Public Library."

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Labels: black history, civil rights movement, Emmett Till, Mississippi cold cases, Mississippi Delta

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?

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

Authors suggest White Knights of Ku Klux Klan may have played role in civil-rights leader's 1968 slaying

Jerry Mitchell • jmitchell@clarionle dger.com • December 30, 2007

Could the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi have played a role in the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Nobody wanted King dead more than the White Knights, which referred to the civil rights leader in their literature as "Martin Lucifer Coon."

"King was the ultimate prize," said Philip Dray, co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.

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Labels: civil rights movement, Cleve McDowelll, KKK, Martin Luther King, Mississippi cold cases, White Knights