Birdia Keglar's Mississippi Murder

An old Mississippi Delta crime is now drawing some attention ...

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New office would open cold cases from civil rights era
By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
September 29, 2005

WASHINGTON - In the Mississippi Delta during the tumultuous 1960s, voting rights advocate Birdia Keglar never made it home after meeting with then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Highway patrolmen said Keglar, a businesswoman and the first black person in her county to vote since Reconstruction, and her friend Adena Hamlett, an elderly former teacher, died in a car accident.

But when the bodies of the two black women were found they bore the signs of intentional mutilation and murder. The fact that both had been warned by the Ku Klux Klan to stop pushing for voting rights added to the suspicion they had been killed.

Nearly 40 years after their deaths on Jan. 11, 1966, the case has remained unsolved, and essentially uninvestigated until the publication this year of "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" by author Susan Klopfer, who also probed other still-open violent crimes from that era.

Now, a bipartisan push has begun in Congress to create a new Department of Justice office that would be dedicated solely to investigating such very cold civil rights cases.

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This story continues ...

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Here's a link to earlier "Birdia" files in the Sovereignty Commission files. She made the wrong people angry ... Look for "Keglar" and "Kegler."

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/index.html

Secrecy? "Understand Mississippi and ..."

There's a saying that goes ... "Understand Mississippi and you understand all of Democracy." Maybe this saying actually makes some sense when trying to understand FEMA:

"This article on FEMA by Harry V. Martin documents why it can't handle
hurricane relief: because its real function is as part of the NSC/Secret
Government and precious little of its funds actually go to disaster
relief. Most funds go to building underground bunkers for government
officials, planning and preparing for martial law, etc. It has existed
under different names since the outbreak of the Cold War, became FEMA
under Jimmy Carter, and failed the test sufficiently during Hurricane
Andrew that all the stuff documented in the article came out. It also
makes clear why it was so easy to transfer Director Brown back to DC and
turn the N.O. relief effort over to the Coast Guard. Nothing truly
new in it but extremely worthwhile and for those directly in N.O. or the
other Gulf disaster areas, immediately politically informative." (From the SNCC discussion group)

www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR402B.html