Murders Around Mississippi

The nightmare began on Christmas Eve in 1993 when Rasco's two daughters, Jamie and Gladys Scott, left a mini-mart near their home in Scott County, Mississippi. Their car broke down, and they hitched a ride from two young men, one of whom they knew. But later that evening, the men were robbed at gunpoint by three teenagers in another car. The robbers got away with an estimated $11 and no one was hurt, but police accused the Scott sisters of setting the victims up.

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Labels: African Americans, black victims, civil rights, Mississippi murders, Parchman, prisons, Scott County, Scott sisters

New Book Announcement: Who Killed Emmett Till?
by Susan Klopfer

What others are saying about Susan Klopfer’s civil rights books

"Susan Klopfer, the leading authority on the historiy of the Mississippi civil rights movement ... Thank God for enterprising historians like Susan Klopfer who have the courage to state the obvious." Alan Bean, Ph.D., Friends of Justice

"An amazing ... 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.” Ben Greenberg, poet, essayist and activist and author of the blog Hungry Blues

Other books by Susan Klopfer
Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited
The Emmett Till Book How Branson Got Started
301 Ways to Get Ahead (with Fred Klopfer)
At Ease With FoxPro
Abort! Retry! Fail!
The DOS Answer Book
Internet Success with Fred (with Fred Klopfer)
Who Killed Emmett Till? (Blog Book)

Learn more about Susan Klopfer at smashwords.com/profile/view/sklopfer

Labels: Black History books, Black History Month, civil rights books, civil rights murders, Emmett Till, lynching, Mississippi history, Mississippi murders

Tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer,civil rights activist, who often told the story of Joe Pullen

If we must die, let it not be like hogs: hunted and penned in an accursed spot! If we must die; oh let us nobly die…fighting back. – Claude McKay (1889-1948).

Historians now define the period from 1954 (the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision) to 1965 as the Modern Civil Rights Movement. The African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights began long before Brown, however, and is a central part of U.S. history.

IN THE SMALL COTTON TOWN OF DREW, Mississippi the heart of the Mississippi Delta and birthplace of Archie Manning, some black elders still talk about a story passed down by their parents and relatives focusing on a 1923 gunfight raging into the early morning hours of December 15 between Joe Pullen, a tenant farmer and WWI veteran, and plantation manager W.T. Saunders.

The fight would turn out to be a watershed event in U.S. history.

Pullen shot and killed Saunders during an argument over money and then Pullen’s own life ended in a ditch at the edge of Drew when he was shot after an all-night gun battle.

The small town had buzzed with rumors that several dozen posse members were killed and possibly hundreds wounded before Pullen was taken down by machine gunners brought in from Clarksdale; some older Drew residents maintain that for years after the gunfight, a good number of people were using canes and displaying other signs of injuries received during the gun battle.

There are several versions of the Joe Pullen story, both written and spoken. In one account, nearly one thousand white men searched the swamps around Drew to find Pullen. The tenant farmer is said to have killed 4, 17 or 19 whites and wounded 8, 38 or 40 before he was machine gunned down. He either died immediately or was dragged through the streets and then killed.

Local news accounts of this event were few. The weekly Indianola newspaper carried one small paragraph on December 20, 1923 reporting that: “J. L. Doggett of Clarksdale and Kenneth Blackwood of Drew, posse men wounded Friday by negro, Joe Pullen, are reported as improving rapidly as could be expected.”

Associated Press reports offered more

Four men lost their lives in a spectacular gun battle which raged until 1 o’clock this morning between Joe Pullen, Negro tenant farmer, and a posse of several hundred men in the swamps of the Mississippi delta near Drew. Nine other wounded three probably fatally. Pullen was finally captured when four members of the posse stormed the drainage ditch in which he was entrenched. The Negro died an hour later from bullet wounds. The trouble started when Pullen’s employer came to his house to collect a debt.

Fannie Lou Hamer, well-known civil rights activist from Ruleville, often talked about the shoot-out that occurred when she was a child. Hamer said that Pullen’s body was dragged into town and that people cut off body parts to keep as souvenirs. “Mississippi was a quiet place for a long time [afterwards].”

While local press claimed that four white men had died “in defense of law and order,” Mrs. Hamer was told that Pullen had killed thirteen white men and wounded twenty-six others before dying.

L. C. Dorsey, a Ph.D. sociologist, remembered how as a young child living on a Sunflower
County plantation between Ruleville and Drew she heard from her father and relatives the story of Pullen. Dorsey said that her own father often did not receive the money due him as a sharecropper, and Dorsey believed the Pullen incident had much to do with his fear of questioning “the man” over money he was owed.

Pullen’s family protested to the President [Calvin Coolidge] who sent an investigative team “because the man had been in the service, and that was what his family talked about, that this man had served his country and this is how he was treated. He had done nothing wrong and had been killed for trying to defend himself against the crew,” Dorsey said.

Alabama historian, Nan Woodruff, author of American Congo, adds to the story that Sanders may have offered Pullen $150 to recruit families to work on the plantation, and when Pullen kept the money without providing the service, the fight began.

Woodruff terms Pullen’s gunfight another “watershed event” “much like the Elaine Massacre [Arkansas, 1919] as blacks challenged the structure of white supremacy throughout the 1920s.

“Black people with guns had always threatened planter authority, particularly when disputes
arose over crop contracts or merchant bills. Despite the threat of terror, black sharecroppers and laborers fought back when their lives were on the line, even if such actions resulted in their deaths.”

Woodruff and other black history researchers write that many Southern black people had always carried guns for hunting and self-protection, but the frequency of armed confrontations between planters and croppers, based on the frequency of reporting, may have increased in the decade following World War I.

THE RULING WHITE Delta families would keep their immense social, economic and political power; the planters’ bloc maintaining its supremacy or hegemony through an efficient capitalist economy rooted in black labor manipulation. Schooling and marriage built strong family alliances, and these white coalitions, much like Mafioso, expanded into local economies, from ownership and operation of cotton gins, to real estate, and banking.

Mississippi white planters simply ran all of Mississippi.

Labels: cold cases, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Joe Pullen, Mississippi murders, Mississipppi Delta

A three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has vacated the conviction of former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member James Ford Seale for his involvement in the 1964 deaths of two 19-year-old black teens.

The 71-year-old Seale has been in federal prison since his 2007 conviction.

AP has more.

Labels: Barack Obama, cold cases, Emmett Till, FBI, James Ford Seale, Mississippi murders

from the Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center


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Philadelphia, MS Civil Rights Murders:

Neshoba county again fails to indict others

3 years and 6 months after Killen indictment

Another month has passed and Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi have again failed to indict others in the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
On January 6, 2005, a state grand jury in Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi returned the first-ever state indictment in the Neshoba murders case. Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen was indicted.
The grand jury heard testimony for less than one full day despite the fact that there were ten living suspects at that time. There was a massive amount of evidence against several of these suspects, including the 3,000 page transcript from the 1967 federal trial for conspiracy to deny civil rights.
That 1967 trial resulted in four of the suspects who were still living in 2005 being convicted. Why could not Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi at least indict them in 2005 on state charges?
And others should have been convicted in the 1967 federal trial.
Two of those suspects who were convicted on federal charges in 1967 are still alive now. Why cannot Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi indict them now? There was enough evidence to convict them on federal charges in 1967.

Why only Killen?

Why no more state indictments 3 years and 6 months after the indictment of Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen?

Labels: Chaney, cold cases, Goodman, Mississippi murders, Schwerner

MARY SANCHEZ COMMENTARY


Civil-rights era injustices still haunt us
By MARY SANCHEZ


Anyone who has ever uttered an apology knows the power of these three words: “I am sorry.”

Apologies are the precursors to forgiveness, to healing. They’re necessary to put bitterness behind us and let us move on with our lives. This came to mind when I heard the news that more evidence had been uncovered in three of the most infamous unsolved civil rights murders.

In 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were working to register black voters in Mississippi when they were abducted by Klan members near the town of Philadelphia. All three were shot to death, then buried to hide the crimes. Chaney, the only black man in the group, was also severely beaten.

Now, a December series of newspaper articles in The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., has uncovered witnesses and evidence that could lead to new charges. Previously sealed FBI documents show that one vote kept a man from facing charges two years ago when a grand jury re-examined the case. One vote of innocence came from the man’s relative — clearly a violation of justice.

The last time new evidence in this case was uncovered, a then 80-year-old former Klansman was convicted. Stooped, on oxygen and confined to a wheelchair during much of the 2005 proceedings, Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to 60 years for manslaughter.

Continued --

Labels: Chaney, cold cases, Goodman, James Chaney, Meridian, Mississippi murders, Schwerner, voting rights

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

KNOWN TODAY more for his struggles for civil rights in Mississippi and his untimely death at the hands of an assassin than for his writings, Medgar Evers nevertheless left behind an impressive record of achievement.

Medgar Wiley Evers was born July 2, 1925, near Decatur, Mississippi, and attended school there until he was inducted into the army in 1943. After serving in Normandy, he attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), majoring in business administration.

While at Alcorn, he was a member of the debate team, the college choir, and the football and track teams. He also held several student offices and was editor of the campus newspaper for two years and the annual for one year.

In recognition of his accomplishments at Alcorn, he was listed in Who's Who in American Colleges.

At Alcorn he met Myrlie Beasley of Vicksburg and they married on December 24, 1951. He received his BA degree the following semester and they moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, during which time Evers began to establish local chapters of the NAACP throughout the delta and organising boycotts of gasoline stations that refused to allow Blacks to use their restrooms.

He worked in Mound Bayou as an insurance agent until 1954, the year a Supreme Court decision ruled school segregation unconstitutional.

Continued --

Labels: Aaron Henry, Byron De La Beckwith, civil rights movement, Clinton Melton, Emmett Till, FBI, Medgar Evers, Mississippi murders

The Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood

From the Associated Press

GREENWOOD — The half-century search for justice in the murder of Emmett Till petered out last February when a Leflore County grand jury declined to indict Carolyn Donham on criminal charges.

“There is nobody left to indict,” said Greg Watkins, one of 19 members from the grand jury. “It will be debated forever probably, but there is no one left living to send to jail.”

Donham, 73 and living in Greenville, was the centerpiece of the investigation conducted by federal and state authorities into the 1955 murder.

Members of the grand jury say that no one on the panel last February thought an indictment was in order.

“We all realized that this lady is 70 years old-plus, and no one really knows for sure how much she was involved,” said Gary Woody. “I think (Donham) knows, but there is so much that we just don’t know for sure.”

continued --

Labels: civil rights, Cleve McDowell, Cllinton Melton, Emmett Till, FBI, Gordon Lackey, Jerry Mitchell, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi murders

Tallahatchie River, near site where Emmett Till's body was found

October 2, 2007
BY SHELIA BYRD Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss.---- The county where Chicago teenager Emmett Till's body was found after he allegedly whistled at a white woman officially apologized Tuesday for the way the crime was handled, more than 50 years after the boy died.
Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff William Brewer Jr. signed the resolution that included an apology to Till's family. They also unveiled a marker commemorating the 14-year-old's death.

Continued --

Labels: Aaron Henry, Cllinton Melton, cold cases, Eastland, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Henry Dee, Mississippi Delta, 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

The Associated Press reports that attorneys for a reputed Ku Klux Klansman concluded their case Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. without his testimony on kidnapping and conspiracy charges in the 1964 deaths of two black Mississippi teenagers.

Witnesses called on behalf of James Ford Seale, 71, included his younger brother and an Alabama forensic pathologist who testified he studied autopsy reports on the two young men but could not draw any conclusions about how they died.

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* * *

Labels: Charles Eddie Moore, civil rights, cold cases, FBI, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Homochitto National Forest, James Ford Seale, KKK, Mississippi murders

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

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