Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, State Government Funded Racist Department

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 kept files, harassed and branded many as communist infiltrators via agents who were retired FBI, CIA and military intelligence. No one was safe in Mississsippi. A form of the Sovereignty Commission continues today in Mississippi. Ask Haley Barbour.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

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

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Mississippi Sovereignty Commission Links

On Wikipedia: ” The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state agency directed by the governor of Mississippi that existed from 1956 to 1977. The commission's stated objective was to "[...] protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states" from "federal encroachment." Initially, it was formed to coordinate activities to portray the state, and the legal racial segregation enforced by the state, in a more positive light.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_State_Sovereignty_Commission Facts About Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: Some facts about the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, whose files were opened to the public Tuesday. FOUNDED: Created by legislative act in 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education outlawed segregated schools. MISSION: The Legislature created the commission to "protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi and her sister states" from federal government interference. In practice, it worked to preserve a segregated society and to oppose school integration. In secret, the commission harassed and spied on activists, branding many of them racial agitators and communist infiltrators. http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/bh/badco/missSov.htm MDAH Digital Collection: Sovereignty Commission Online http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/ The Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission by Jo Freeman (2001): “On Thursday, August 18, 1966 I entered the Bellflower Church in Grenada, Mississippi, which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was using as its headquarters for a voter registration project. I had been a fieldworker for SCLC for over a year but in Mississippi only since June.” http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/sixtiesprotest/FSMMiss.htm