Asuntos Latinos: El Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles en Estados Unidos: La Comisión de Mississippi Soberanía es un estado policía secreta que opera desde 1956 a 1977 para reprimir el movimiento de derechos civiles y
mantener la segregación.
La comisión hostigados y muchas de marca como a través de agentes infiltrados comunistas que fueron retirados del FBI,
la CIA y la inteligencia militar.
¿Por qué Mississippi recopilar registros de JFK, RFK y otros involucrados en su asesinato?
Los Kennedys eran vistos como peligrosos integracionistas ... al igual que tantos otros.
Mississippi Sovereignty Commission .. Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was a secret state police force operating from 1956 to 1977 to suppress the civil rights movement and maintain segregation. The commission harassed and branded many as communist infiltrators via agents who were retired FBI, CIA and military intelligence. Why did Mississippi collect records on JFK, RFK and others involved in their assassinations? The Kennedys were seen as dangerous integrationists... as were so many others.
Linda Royster Beito will appear for an author book signing and talk on the life of Mound Bayou's Dr. T.R.M. Howard: Mentor of Medgar Ever and Fannie Lou Hamer. David Beito is the book's co-author.
Time and Location: Friday, July 10, 6:00 p.m., Kemetic Institute, Mound Bayou, Historic Hwy 61, Across from the John F. Kennedy Memorial High School. For more information, call 205-292-2902.
Mississippi Senator Belongs to Uptown Klan (White Citizens Councils, Now Called Council of Conservative Citizens -- Same Folks, Same Message)
Last weekend, Sen. Lydia Chassaniol (R-Winona) was the keynote speaker at the annual convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that has been classified as a white separatist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and described as having “a thinly-veiled white supremacist agenda” by The New York Times. On the CCC web site, you can buy a “white pride” T-shirt; their platform praises America’s “European” heritage and condemns “mixture of the races”; a previous incarnation of their web site described African Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity”; and so forth. The organization’s agenda is fairly transparent.
Sen. Chassaniol has refused to disavow the organization, praising it as a group of “lone wolves crying in the wilderness” during her keynote and stating that its presence “gives [her] hope.” When she was later asked about her membership in the group, she replied that “a person’s membership in any organization is a private matter.”
Daughters of the late civil rights attorney, William Kunstler, Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, have recently completed a documentary about their father entitled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe which will have its world premiere screening as part of the Documentary Competition of the upcoming 2009 Sundance Film Festival in January.
Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission had great interest in Kunstler, who fought for civil righs with Dr. King., and judging by the hundreds of files still available to peruse, the civil rights lawyer loved stirring it up Mississippi. Here are several:
Mississippi was one of the most potentially deadly spots for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to appear during the civil rights years, yet he often did so – and not without tremendous personal risk.
Tougaloo College sociology professor, Hunter Bear, (Hunter Gray/Dr. John R Salter, Jr.) left his teaching job, was accused of being a Communist, and almost his life in the mid 1960s for his civil rights activities; he confirms the pressure put on King whenver he came into Mississippi.
Hunter Bear remembers telephoning King and asking him to come to Jackson in June of 1963 shortly after Medgar Evers was killed in front of his home. The state’s well-known NAACP leader’s wife and children were waiting for him to leave his car and come inside the house, after a late night planning meeting at his church.
---------- Some MLK links in Sovereignty Commission files
“The rapidly growing protest demonstrations were being bloodily suppressed and I asked him to come to Jackson for Medgar's funeral on June 15. He readily agreed to do so. We picked him up and several key staff of his – Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker and others – at the police-drenched Jackson airport.
“It was already very hot and the temperature was to go, that day, to 102 super-humid degrees. Martin King and Dr Abernathy rode in my car – along with Bill Kunstler – and the others were brought by Ed King (a Mississippi civil rights activist and Tougaloo chaplain, not related to Martin Luther King).
The retired sociologist remembers King’s calmness in the face of “..a very grudging police escort from the city's all-White police department. The Jackson setting could not have been more lethally dangerous for all of us – but Dr. King visited easily and casually with me, and I with him, as we traveled the very dangerous several miles to the Negro Masonic Temple on Lynch Street.” ------------ Salter"s", Evers and Threats
Evers’ funeral was huge – “several thousand people, inside and out” – and afterwards, “…six thousand of us marched the two miles or so from the Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on Farish Street. It was the first "legal" civil rights demonstration in Mississippi's hate-filled, sanguinary history.”
King came into Mississippi early on and was there during some of the state's most critical times. In 1966, a state chapter of the Deacons of Defense, a black group concerned with protection of the lives of African Americans, worried for King’s safety and provided him with armed security during events in Jackson and McComb, and for the James Meredith March held that summer.
It was a good call by the Deacons, since Meredith was shot June 6 near Hernando, a day before the primary election, while walking from Memphis to Jackson to encourage black people to register and vote.
Meredith, four years earlier the first black student to enroll and attend the University of Mississippi, undertook his 220-mile March Against Fear to challenge white supremacy and inspire black Mississippians to vote. This was an unusual move for Meredith, who was home from his first year at Columbia University’s law school; he rarely involved himself publicly in civil rights demonstrations.
After Meredith was wounded, and taken to a Memphis hospital, King and other civil rights leaders continued the protest. The march moved on southward through the Delta to Belzoni, where Rev. George Lee had been violently killed by a shotgun blast to his face eleven years earlier, and on through several other small cotton towns.
Then King split off and left for Philadelphia to hold a service on the anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; King and others were attacked with clubs while police and Justice Department observers and FBI agents looked on, reported civil rights marchers who were also beaten. ----------- Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner
Meanwhile in Canton, a small town north of Jackson, officials refused to allow marchers to pitch tents on the town's black school ground. The crowd numbered about 3,500 people and was faced off by sixty-one state troopers lined up in full battle gear, carrying a mass of weapons. The troopers fired tear gas into the crowd and then waded in with guns and nightsticks.
One journalist on the scene observed, "They came stomping in behind the gas, gun-butting and kicking the men, women, and children."
"This is the very state patrol that President Johnson said today would protect us. Anyone who will use gas bombs on women and children can't and won't protect anybody," Rev. King told reporters.
The riot in Canton would equal in violence and bloodshed the assault on Selma, Alabama marchers one year earlier. After Selma President Lyndon Johnson had federalized the National Guard to protect the demonstrators marching to Montgomery, but his administration's response to Canton was different. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained to reporters he “regretted” the use of tear gas against the marchers, for “it always makes the situation more difficult.”
But Katzenbach refused to condemn the police action and asserted the whole matter was under investigation.
Meredith’s March ended quietly as Dr. King rejoined marchers and led a group to Tougaloo College, where 9,000 supporters attended a mass rally. On Sunday, June 26, the march came to close at the capital grounds in Jackson as nearly 15,000 people drew together to hear the civil rights leader declare the march and rally to go down in history "as the greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the state of Mississippi."
Just four days after the Meredith incident, Klansmen had tried to lure King back into Mississippi by kidnapping and murdering a black farmer. Members of an Adams CountyWhite Knights cell known as the Cottonmouth Moccasin gang murdered Ben Chester White, described by Mississippi journalist Jerry Mitchell as "a quiet man with a shiny gold tooth, a humble man who could hardly read but could still quote long passages from the Bible."
White was neither a civil rights worker nor was he registered to vote.
Believing they could lure Rev. King to Natchez, the cell members on June 10 shot White who had worked most of his life as a caretaker on a Natchez plantation and had no involvement in civil rights work. (FBI agents arrested Ernest Fuller, Ernest Avants and James Jones four days later. FBI documents indicated that O'Dell Adams, the Adams Sheriff who led the local investigation of the White murder, was also a Klansmen.)
Mississippi could not let go of its hate and harassment of the civil rights leader. And its unique State Sovereignty Commission, opened in 1956 in reaction to federal enforcement of the US Supreme Court ruling on integrating schools, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the murder of Emmett Till (1955), often used former FBI agents to spy on and harass Dr. King.
After the Sovereignty Commission was shut down, state lawmakers ordered the files sealed until 2027 (50 years later). In 1989, a federal judge ordered the records opened, with some exceptions for still-living people but legal challenges delayed the records' availability to the public until March 1998.
Still more records were released in 2002. It would turn out that over twenty years the agency amassed files on 87,000 people making it the largest state-level spying effort in the nation's history, though some other states had lesser efforts of the same sort.
Hundreds of files on King alone confirm the state’s dedication to spying on and harassing him. Perhaps the most damaging Sovereignty Commission files will never see the light of day; records that were either destroyed, hidden, moved to other state offices or simply never released. But here is one small example of Sovereignty Commission confirming the early-on targeting of King:
Back on September 18, 1959, former FBI agent Zack J. Van Landingham, a Sovereignty Commission investigator, officially reported that A. J. Simmons, a white Citizens Councils administrator, had contacted him about an upcoming Southern Christian Ministers Conference of Mississippi that included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with other speakers from around the country.
Simmons wanted "these speakers coming here from out of the state ... harassed as much as possible” and specifically wanted Dr. King "arrested by the police, taken down, fingerprinted and photographed ... [and] had already conferred with Chief of Detectives Pierce about such procedures."
Van Landingham reported he spoke with Sam Ivy, director of the Bureau of Identification and that "Arrangements were made whereby we could use the recording instrument of the Mississippi Highway Patrol.... I will take some steps to see what pressure can be brought to bear on any of [the speakers] and possibly get the meeting cancelled."
Mississippi government was not alone in their targeting of King who also was a major focus of the FBI’s COINTELPRO secret operation that also targeted the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, a group led by activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry that ultimately questioned the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
Ironically, most of the Sovereignty Commission’s agents had ties to the FBI as well as other intelligence agencies, and as records show, maintained those relationships when going to work for Mississippi. Clearly they were in good position to help out the federal government in its continued, vicious attack on Rev. Martin Luther King.
***** MLK "I Have a Dream"
*****
Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler have recently completed a documentary about their father entitled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe which will have its world premiere screening as part of the Documentary Competition of the upcoming 2009 Sundance Film Festival in January.
The Sovereignty Commission had great interest in Kunstler, who fought for civil righs with Dr. King., hundreds of files are still available to peruse. Here are several:
Cold weather is great for reading books. And I've been holed up for the past week doing just that while trying to learn more about John D. Sullivan, a Vicksburg, Miss. private detective and former FBI agent, who "committed suicide" Oct. 23, 1966, three years after the assassination of JFK.
------------------ El tiempo frío es grande para los libros de la lectura. Y para la última semana intenta aprender más sobre Juan D. Sullivan, un Vicksburg, Mississippi detective privado y agente anterior de FBI, que “suicidio confiado” Oct. 23, 1966, tres años después del asesinato de JFK.Por coincidencia, el Sr. Sullivan fue un empleado de Guy Banister de Nueva Orleans y Banister fue un empleado de FBI -------------------
Sullivan, who often performed contract work for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound following a hunting accident -- shooting himself in the groin with a rifle and then bleeding to death(no kidding).
By coincidence, Mr. Sullivan had been working under contract for Guy Banister of New Orleans.
For those who do not recall Banister, this former FBI agent in 1963 began working for Mafia criminal defense lawyer G. Wray Gill and Gill's client, Carlos Marcello.
Marcello was the New Orleans-based Godfather of the American Mafia Family whose operations were centered in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas.
Bannister's involvement with Marcello centered on attempts to block Marcello's deportation, ordered by Robert F. Kennedy.
"Upon being named Attorney General by his brother, RFK had his agents arrest Carlos Marcello and deport the Godfather to the country of his alleged birth, Guatemala. Literally dumped into the jungles of South America, Marcello somehow fought his way out of this dilemma, possibly with the help of pilot David Ferrie, and soon returned to the United States. Once back home in the swamps of Louisiana, the Godfather reportedly vowed Vengeance against the Kennedys, uttering the following Sicilian curse: "LIVARSI NA PIETRA DI LA SCARPA!" (rough translation: "Take the stone from my shoe!")."
Did Sullivan know too much? Some who were close to the Mississippian believe this is so.
Anyone out there with information on Sullivan? Pictures?
In his fascinating book on the JFK assassination, Michael Collins Piper writes in Final Judgment that Carlos Marcello "has become a favorite target for JFK assassination researchers who like to claim that 'The Mafia Killed JFK'."
But Piper asserts that Marcello was only "one cog" in the Meyer Lansky Syndicate. "[Marcello's] key placement in New Orleans -- scene of much of the pre-assassination planning -- makes him the perfect fall guy...There's a lot more to the Marcello story that meets the eye." ----- Here's an interesting Marcello link in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission Files.
Who killed President John F. Kennedy? In Mississippi, members of the Jackson Movement, an organization constantly spied on by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, put out a report after the death of JFK listing segregationists and "Communist Hate Team" as part of the "long list of murderers."
The Jackson Movement also wrote of the murder of Medgar Evers, Mississippi's first NAACP Field Secretary. Sovereignty Commission spies frequently spied on and harassed Evers.
In this Sovereignty Commission 1959 record, agent Zack Van Landingham informs his boss on the current activities of Evers and others.
Here is a link to the above picture/flyer written about President Kennedy the San Diego Patriotic Society (blaming communists and the ACLU for Kennedy's murder.) Or click directly on the picture to bring up the record.
"Where Rebels Roost... Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited on CD:" A new look at the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement from the time that enslaved Africans arrived in Mississippi through 2005 as criminal cases and trials continue…. Whether a Rebel represents someone supporting the Confederacy’s Lost Cause or someone opposing the caste system it represents, either way Mississippi has always been full of Rebels. Authors M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, Fred J. Klopfer, Barry C. Klopfer, Esq. Foreword by Benjamin T. Greenberg...
![hire Guy Bannister [sic]](http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd08/056980.png&otherstuff=7|0|8|89|1|1|1|56199|){kind=link}
