JFK Lancer Dinner

JFKConference

Ongoing Blog ... Notes from Lancer JFK Conference in Dallas.

"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin.."
Nicholas Katzenbach

"There has to be more to it."
Ted Kennedy

"We really blew it on the Kennedy assassination."
Dan Rather

"Hoover lied his eyes out."
Hale Boggs

"He looked far ahead and he wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy."
Mikhail Gorbechev

Why Did Hoover Own Stock in DalTex Business? Author Shares Strange Story

Larry Hancock,leading JFK researcher, is presenting on the Mystery of the DalTex building. Photos taken show police officers looking at this building when shots were first fired. In his research, Hancock found a business, Dallas Uranium and Oil, with no assets, business or employees. It was a shell. One of Jack Ruby's employees also worked in the same building at the time.

Today the business has turned into -- another shell business.

"You can lose lots of sleep at night over this stuff."

The DalTex is a building where a shot could have been fired from, Hancock believes. Especially since in his research he found one stockholder listed for the Dallas Uranium and Oil Company--J. Edgar Hoover owned one share.

Author of New Book "To Kill a President": 21-Year FBI Veteran

Wes Swearingen is speaking quietly. The author of FBI Secrets said he knew JFK was going to be killed before it happened and tried to get his superiors to so something about it but got nowhere.

A Cuban exile said the CIA was going to do it. "At first I thought he was crazy."


But he had received credible information before from Ramon about the CIA and the Bay of Pigs.

A handful of rogue CIA agents did it, Swearingen said. Decided to tell what he knows after the death of E. Howard Hunt.

JFK Conference: Crime Scene Expert Reconstructs Crime Scene

Sherry Fiester, a certified crime scene investgator is explaining the science of ballistics. Must look at angular orientation to wounds in relation to car. Showing all possible trajectories. "Evidence supports shot from grassy knoll."

Who Found Gun? JFK Conference Speaker -- Brit Detective -- Shares Findings

Who found the rifle?
I am at the annual JFK conference sponsored by Lancer Publications.
Current speaker, British crime researcher Ian Griggs, has studied this crime for 35 years.
P. K. Wilkins, the officer who assisted with the search, was introduced by Griggs as the correct officer. There has been dispute over this for years and Griggs has gone through an analysis of all candidates to make his case.
Why am I posting here? There are many Mississippi links and ties that I will be sharing. Start with John D. Sullivan. See what you can find!

More later,

Susan

SCLC Mississippi Volunteer; 'Cannon Fodder in the Cold War'

When college student Jo Freemen volunteered to go into Mississippi as a field worker for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), little did she know that she would be spied upon.

"Not until 1997 did I discover that the actual source of the editorial and photos was the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an official state agency of which I was completely unaware in 1966. And only after extensive research did I realize that I and others like me were not just foot soldiers in the civil rights movement, but cannon fodder in the Cold War," Freeman wrote for a history journal.

Her article, a detailed history of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, is fascinating. At least 28 files appear with her name --

Hre's a handwritten letter to the Sovereignty Commission about Freeman

http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd04/029461.png&otherstuff=3|30|1|96|1|1|1|28934|A

To find more links, visit the archives at http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/

Fannie Lou Hamer: Frequent Target of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony [Democratic National Convention, 1964] wasn't the whole truth. A recent biography of Hamer, "For Freedom's Sake," by University of Georgia professor Chana Kai Lee, reveals that she omitted a key fact: She had also been sexually abused by the law enforcement officers.

Lee implies that Hamer did not tell the Credentials Committee that she was sexually abused because she was a "modest and dignified" woman, but I think it also must have been in her mind that if she testified on national television that the Mississippi police had also sexually abused her that day, she probably would have been murdered when she returned from the convention.

Continued --


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There are a host of links to Mrs. Hamer in Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files. Name spellings vary, i.e., Fanie, Fannie L, Fannie Lou, Fanny, Mrs. Hamer, etc.

Here is one

Hamer linked to Communism

Sen. John McCain: Mississippi Roots

I ran into a fascinating article about Sen. John McCain --

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article and accompanying video about the McCain families in Carroll County, Mississippi: the descendants of John McCain's ancestors who still remain in the area where those ancestors owned a cotton plantation (Teoc), and the descendants of the slaves who worked that plantation and took their owners' surname. The McCains have a biannual reunion where family members of both groups of descendants meet.

Charles McCain, grandson of a slave at Teoc, the white McCain plantation, was active in the Civil Rights Movement:

Charles McCain was a central figure in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. When civil-rights workers swarmed Mississippi in 1964, the black McCains housed white activists and received bomb threats and harassing calls.

Continued --
-----

Link to Charles McCain record in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Link to Charlie McCain

To find all McCain Links -- Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Roy Moore: FBI agent who pursued Ku Klux Klan killers

Nothing in Moore’s career could have prepared him for the challenge of protecting civil rights workers in the South. Born in Oregon in 1914, his early life was spent about as far from the Deep South as was possible for an American child. As a young man he served in the Marine Corps, before joining the FBI in 1938 as a clerk. In 1940 he became an agent, progressing quickly through the ranks.

By 1960, Moore had been promoted to the “number one man” in charge of training and inspection at FBI headquarters. From there he was dispatched to the hottest spots in the Southern civil rights movement, ending up in Birmingham and then Mississippi. Here, Moore became determined to break the Ku Klux Klan. He offered one informant 25000, which led to the discovery of the corpses. His team found that 25 people had been involved in the plot, including two Neshoba County officers.

But local law enforcement agencies refused to co-operate. In 1966, Martin Luther King spoke at a rally in Neshoba County and complained that “the murderers of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner are no doubt within the range of my voice”. A voice from a group of white men replied: “Ya damn right. We’re right here behind you.”

In 1967, governor Paul Johnson jnr — who opposed the Klan — agreed with Moore that the FBI agents should give their evidence to the federal government rather than to the Neshoba County authorities. The federal government tried 19 men for violation of civil rights. An all-white jury found seven men guilty. The suspected mastermind, Edgar Killen, was found not guilty.
Continued --

I found SOV COMM files that pull up under Roy Moore and Roy K. Moore.

Link to search Name Files

45 Years Ago JFK Assassinated; Were There Mississippi Roots?

Few structures remain in Doddsville, Miss., plantation home of Sen. James O. Eastland.

On Friday November 22, 1963, news bulletins hit the airwaves as rifle shots interrupted President John F. Kennedy's Dallas motorcade. The resulting three-day news marathon concluded only after the young president was buried.

Reporters moved on to the investigative phase of JFK's assassination but finally left the topic for fresh news. Yet conspiracy theorists and others have kept the debate alive over what happened forty-two years ago, who was involved, and why.

Interestingly, there are numerous asides to Mississippi's civil rights story but perhaps none quite so compelling (and less known) as this: Seven years before JFK was assassinated, the magnolia state's Sen. James O. Eastland met for the first time with Guy Banister, a controversial CIA operative and retired FBI agent in charge of the Chicago bureau.

Banister -- remember him as the man who "pistol-whipped" David Ferrie in Oliver Stone's film "JFK" -- was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald and Mississippi's senator through Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or SISS (sometimes called "SISSY").

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 23, 1956, reported that Robert Morrison, a former chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee or HUAC, and Banister traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to confer personally with Senator Eastland for more than three hours. Describing the conference as "completely satisfactory," Morrison told the reporter that "Mr. Banister has complete liaison with the committee's staff which was the main object of our trip."

Apparently cozying up to Eastland and "SISSY" was Banister's goal. And it worked.

Known as a notorious political extremist who was later described as the impetus for James Garrison’s 1967-1970 Kennedy assassination probe, Banister earlier became a brief focus of Mississippi's secret spy agency, the Sovereignty Commission, when it was suggested Banister should be hired to set up an "even tighter" domestic spying system throughout the state.

A second Eastland operative, private investigator John D. Sullivan of Vicksburg, made this suggestion to the commission just months after the JFK assasination, according to released Sovereignty Commission records.

Former FBI agent Sullivan had worked under Banister (both inside the FBI and privately) and as a private self-employed investigator who often did work for hire for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission; the private white Citizens Councils, of which he was an active member; and for SISS, as had Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald.

When Sullivan reportedly committed suicide following the assassination, Sovereignty Commission investigators tried to acquire his library and files, but most of his confidential files were either reportedly burned by his widow or they had been lent out, and she "could not remember" who had them, Sovereignty Commission files disclose.

Then some twenty-nine years later, in testimony before the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board during a Dallas hearing on November 18, 1994, the late Senator Eastland was directly implicated in the president’s assassination by one of the author/theorists invited to testify.

“Lee Harvey Oswald was quite possibly an agent of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and he was doing the bidding of [Sen. Thomas J.] Dodd and Eastland and Morrison,” author John McLaughlin swore.

Documentation that could support or even discredit such assertions could perhaps be present in the Eastland archives at the University of Mississippi, but no objective scholar has been allowed to search these archives since the day they arrived on campus. Instead, Eastland's records were managed for years by a former associate and devoté who followed the papers from Washington, D.C. to Oxford.

Finally in 2005, after an unsuccessful Freedom of Information Act or FOIA request by this author, a historian was hired to organize the archives based in the James O. Eastland School of Law at Ole Miss. But there would still be a waiting period before any of the files could be viewed, according to the school's dean.

The plan was to release first all press releases, according to the historian who also confirmed that"many important files" were probably missing -- that the files looked “cleaned out.”

(The Dean of the law school, when presented a FOIA for access to Eastland archives, asked while laughing if he could “just show the rejection letter written to the last person who asked for this information." Later it came back to this author that “people at Ole Miss were really angry” over the FOIA request.)

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Notes

[1] “Banister, FBI Chief Since February, to Leave Post Nov. 30,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 19, 1954, Part 2, Page 12.

[2] Citation for this newspaper article (“NOTP, March 23, 1956, p. 1”) comes from the online Jerry P. Shinley Archive “Re: Jim Garrison and the SCEF Raids.”

[3] William Davy, “Let Justice Be Done,” (Jordan Publication, May 12, 1999), 1. On the weekend of the assassination, Banister pistol-whipped his employee Jack Martin, after Martin accused him of killing Kennedy. Martin eventually spoke to authorities.

[4] Sovereignty Commission documents SCR ID # 7-0-8-89-1-1-1 and SCR ID # 2-56-1-20-1-1-1.

[5] Sovereignty Commission documents SCR ID # 99-36-0-2-1-1-1 SCR ID # 1-16-1-21-1-1-1, SCR ID # 1-26-0-5-2-1-1, SCR ID # 2-2-0-19-1-1-1, SCR ID # 1-24-0-11-1-1-1

[6] After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, A. J. Weberman, a “Dylanologist,” “garbologist” and Kennedy conspiracist wrote that he received this communication from Sullivan's grandson, Jeremy Sullivan: "I was told that he commited suicide but my dad didn't think so. He told me there was an investigation and the FBI was involved. They deemed it suicide. The story I heard had changed depending on who told it, I believe that they had been out fishing all day and John Daniel had been drinking. After they got home, he was alone in his room and there was a gunshot and he was found dead." Also, Weberman stated that Jim Garrison had an undisclosed case against Sullivan in 1961. Per a “Memo for the Director” by Betsy Palmer on April 19, 1978, regarding the “HSCA.” From A.J. ajweberman and Michael Canfield, “Coup D'Etat in America, The CIA and the Assassination of John Kennedy,” (New York City, The Third Press, 1975) Nodule II.

[7] Online minutes of testimony before the Assassination Records Review Board, November 18, 1994. Dallas, Texas. Testimony of John McLaughlin aka John Bevilaqua, Harvard University graduate and systems analyst, also a Kennedy assassination theorist. McLaughlin was testifying why he needed to see documents from HUAC and SISS. He had also requested military records of Wycliff P. Draper, head of the Draper Committees and Pioneer Fund. Mississippi had been the benefactor of Draper money in its fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and in funding of private white academies per Sovereignty Commission reports.

[8] Eastland’s name has also been associated with the murder of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, U. S. Senator Robert Kennedy and with the mass murder at a U. S. Army base located in Mississippi of potentially 1,000 black soldiers during World War II.

[9] The former Eastland aid has since retired.

Rev. George Lee: Sovereignty Commission Investigated the Slain Minister

The Rev. George Lee, voting rights advocate, murdered in Belzoni, Miss.

Some voters who stood in lines to elect this country's first black president, may have spent some of the long hours remembering stories people who gave their lives for this moment.

The story of Rev. George Washington Lee of Belzoni, Miss., would surely be one to remember.

Lee, the first black person to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot to death on a neighborhood street while driving his car on the night of May 7, 1955.

Those who knew Lee -- and there were many -- say the Baptist minister was brutalized and killed by white men angered over his voting rights advocacy.

BOTH LEE AND his friend Gus Courts ran small grocery businesses and were targets of Belzoni's White Citizen's Councils, formally organized Klan-influenced organizations initiated in the Delta in 1954 to scare black citizens away from the polls and keep integration from taking place.

Lee often used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to take action and vote. White officials once offered protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused.

Heading the town's new NAACP Chapter, Courts was ordered by his banker to turn over all NAACP books and when he refused, Courts was told to leave town. But he stayed. Courts once was handed a list of ninety-five blacks registered in Humphreys County by a Citizens Council member who warned that anyone not removing their name from the voting list would lose their job. He later testified about his experiences before a Congressional Committee.

Both men had tried for years to pay poll taxes in order to vote and were finally allowed to sign the register only after the county sheriff feared federal prosecution. Casting a ballot required a separate battle.

THE DAY OF REV. LEE'S murder, almost a year after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education and three months before the lynching of Emmett Till in nearby Sunflower County, he and Courts met and talked about the latest warning.

Lee had received an anonymous death threat demanding he remove his name from the voting list and told Courts that he had a strange feeling about this particular threat.

That night as Reverend Lee drove his car along Belzoni's Church Street, two gun blasts shattered the night stillness, and the minister's Buick sedan swerved over the curb and rammed into a frame house. With the lower left side of his face gone, Rev. Lee staggered from the wreckage but died as he was being driven to the Humphreys County Memorial Hospital. When NAACP leader Medgar Evers arrived from Jackson to investigate Lee's murder, he was told by Sheriff Ike Shelton that Lee lost control of his car and died from the crash; the lead pellets found in his jaw tissues were dental fillings.

An autopsy was not necessary for the "freak accident," Shelton said.

But at Mrs. Lee's insistence, two black physicians examined her husband's body and reported the tissues contained pellets "fired at close range from a high-powered gun." They also found powder burns. Over the next few days, Evers and two national NAACP representatives met with eyewitnesses and the full story emerged:

Lee had been followed by three men in another car. His right rear tire was punctured by a rifle shot and as he slowed, the second car "pulled parallel and a shotgun was fired point-blank into his face. There were also descriptions of the three men, with tentative identifications."

Evers always doubted that any FBI investigation took place, since there was never any public report "or even a solid rumor" as to what was in the report.

Rev. Lee's murder was a cold-blooded answer to demands for equal treatment coming from more Mississippi blacks and was backed by the lies of the sheriff and local police, Evers later reported; Evers was assassinated ten years later in his Jackson driveway by a Delta Klansman and member of the white Citizens Council. Questions remain over Evers' murder.

Aaron Henry,a popular civil rights leader (who lived long enough to die a natural death), asserted, "We felt we needed protection because the past had taught us that when one Negro is killed, stay out of town if your skin is black."

But surprisingly, no protection was needed at the public funeral that took place in Belzoni.

"There wasn't a white man on the streets the day of the service, except for the press. There was a great turnout of Negroes for the funeral. This large presence of Negroes and absence of whites marked a turning point," Henry reported. As Henry predicted, the murder of Rev. Lee became a critical turning point back in 1955; his untimely death would help prompt later passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) -- one of the most successful civil rights laws in American history, guaranteeing millions of minority voters the equal

VRA ended literacy tests, poll taxes and other methods of keeping blacks from voting that had long poisoned the roots of this country's democracy. In 1964, only 300 African Americans served in public office nationwide, including just three in Congress. But recently, more than 9,100 black elected officials were serving, including 43 members of Congress, the largest number ever, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. often simply called Inc.

WOULD BARACK OBAMA know the story of Rev. George Lee. "Oh, I'm very sure he know this story," said Margaret Block, the sister of civil rights advocate Sam Block and a civil rights veteran, herself.

"The story of Rev. George Lee is one that we simply do not forget. It is so important to this country's history. And I'm very certain that our new president knows of Rev. Lee and much more about the brave men and women, black and white, who fought so hard for this day to come."

Some interesting links ...

Letter to Atty. Gen. from NAACP

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd01/000984.png&otherstuff=2|5|2|36|1|1|1|966|

Other records

http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/result.php?image=/data/sov_commission/images/png/cd08/062948.png&otherstuff=10|5|0|52|1|1|1|62123|

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Susan Klopfer, journalist and author, writes on civil rights in Mississippi. Her newest books, "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" and "The Emmett Till Book" are now in print. "Where Rebels Roost" focuses on the Delta, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore and many other civil rights foot soldiers. Emphasis on unsolved murders of Delta blacks from mid 1950s on...

Socialist? Term Often Linked to Blacks

Part II: Shame on McCain, Palin for using an old code word for black

By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

The PBS documentary, “Soldiers Without Swords” shows heroic scenes of black World War I and World War II soldiers and touching moments of black people celebrating in the streets of America at the end of the Second World War. Until that film debuted in the 1990s, I and a lot of African Americans had never seen such moving, memorable footage. It had been excluded from the history we studied in school and from the mainstream media.

So it is no surprise to me that tens of thousands of white people spoke with one thunderous roar against my Oct. 21 Midwest Voices blog post, criticizing Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for dredging up the old “socialist” label to apply to their Democratic rival for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama.

I wrote that the word “socialist” had long ugly historical roots. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to label white and black leaders as “un-American” because they dared to fight for equality. The news media and eventually textbooks reported on white people who became enveloped in Hoover’s crusade against socialists and communists during the Red scare. But the stories of how the FBI damaged black leaders didn’t make the press just as the everyday and success stories of African Americans were excluded from mainstream coverage.

Continued --

Here's a Sovereignty Commission Link with a "report" on Socialists ...

Emmett Till TV Program Set Oct. 5

A note from civil rights film producer Keith Beauchamp --



Dear Friends,

Please remember to watch, "Murder in Black and White" hosted by Al Sharpton Oct. 5th - 8th on TV One 10pm EST (9pm CST).

Sincerely,

Keith A. Beauchamp
Executive Producer/ Director
"Murder in Black and White"
http://www.tvoneonline.com/

Emmett Till Crime Bill Passes Senate; 3 Years Delay

Sumner, Miss., site of the trial of Emmett Till's murderers. The Tallahatchie County Courthouse appears in the distance.Emmett Till,from Chicago,was visiting his uncle in the small cotton town of Money when he was murdered. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, named for him, passed the U.S. Senate unanimously, Sept. 24.

by Ronni Mott
October 1, 2008

If there is any doubt that the wheels of power grind slowly, the U.S. Senate proved the point this week, when, after more than three years of delays, it unanimously passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which will strengthen federal and local agencies’ abilities to investigate and prosecute unsolved civil rights era murders.


The act, which was first proposed in July 2005, after the Senate passed a resolution to apologize for lynching, passed in the House June 20, 2007, with nearly unanimous approval (422-2). Since then, it has languished for more than 15 months in the Senate due entirely to the “hold” put on the bill by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., which the Democratic Caucus’s Senate Journal Web site characterized as “petty procedural maneuvers.”

Continued in the Jackson Free Press

New Park Honors Emmett Till

The grocery store in Glendora, Miss., where Till whistled at the grocer's wife.

Emmett Till Park to open in Mississippi Delta town
By TIMOTHY R. BROWN | Associated Press Writer
1:53 PM CDT, September 16, 2008

JACKSON, Miss. - A 20-acre park and nature trail in memory of Emmett Till will open Friday in the tiny Mississippi Delta town of Glendora, almost 53 years to the day after an all-white jury acquitted two white men in the brutal murder of the black teenager.

The Emmett Till Memorial Park & Interpretive Nature Trail is an extension of a museum honoring the Chicago 14-year-old whose death helped bring national attention to the brutality of segregation. The park will include picnic pavilions, a baseball field and an outdoor stage.

Till was kidnapped Aug. 28, 1955, from his uncle's home in the rural community of Money after being accused of whistling at a white woman. Three days later, a fisherman spotted Till's mangled body in the Tallahatchie River.

The teen's body was unrecognizable, except for a ring. Till's mother insisted on a public viewing and funeral in Chicago. Pictures of the brutalized body shocked the world.

Story Continued --

Glendora is the same town where Clinton Melton was murdered, soon after the trial ended that found Till's murderers innocent.
* * *

Once the 1955 J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant trial ended in Sumner, Mississippi for the murder of Emmett Till, less than a month later in the nearby small cotton town of Glendora, a black service station attendant and father of four children was killed by a friend of Milam’s.

Elmer Kimball murdered Clinton Melton and then nineteen days later, Melton’s young wife was killed, only a week before Kimball’s murder trial opened.

Fourteen-year-old Till of Chicago was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta at the end of August when he was kidnapped, tortured and killed after he was accused of whistling at a white store clerk.

* * * * *
Check out the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files at http://mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/
where you will find numerous files under Emmett Till and Clinton Melton.

* * * * *

Then in December, Clinton Melton was murdered only four miles from where Emmett Till’s body was dumped into the Tallahatchie River six months earlier. Kimball, Milam's friend, had lived in Glendora for a short time, managing a local cotton gin, and had an account at the gas station where Melton worked.

On the day of the murder, Kimball, 35, was driving a car borrowed from his friend, J.W. Milam, one of the two men accused and acquitted of killing Till, when he drove to the gas station and asked for a fill-up. Melton’s daughter, Deloris Melton Gresham, was a toddler when her parents were killed, but she later was told what occurred at the service station:

"When Kimball drove up to the station, my father’s boss told my father to go out and fill up his car. But when he was done filling the car, Kimball went into a rage and said he only wanted a dollar’s worth of gas, and that he was going to go home and get his gun to shoot him. The gas station owner tried to talk him down, but couldn’t. He told him my father was a good negro and that he did not deserve to be hurt. He really pleaded with Kimball."

As soon as Kimball left, his boss told him that he had better leave, fast. But his car was out of gas and he had to fill it first. Kimball came right back and began shooting at my father. Another man was in his car with him, and yelled for him not to shoot. He jumped out of the car and ran into the station to hide. On arrest, Kimball claimed Melton shot at him first. McGarrh [the white owner of the gas station] denied this, adding that Melton did not have a gun at any time during the quarrel. A bullet hole was found in the windshield of Melton's parked car.

An angry Southern newspaper publisher, Hodding Carter, reacted to the murder of one of "Mississippi’s own," comparing it to the Till case in a Delta-Times editorial:

[Melton] was no out-of-state smart alec. He was home-grown and "highly respected.".... There was no question of an insult to Southern womanhood. There was only an argument about … gasoline. There was no pressure by the NAACP, "credited" with the outcome of the Till trial.... So another "not guilty" verdict was written at Sumner this week. And it served to cement the opinion of the world that no matter how strong the evidence, nor how flagrant is the apparent crime, a white man cannot be convicted in Mississippi for killing a negro.

LITTLE ATTENTION was given to the death of Gresham’s mother that occurred on or around December 21, 1955, approximately nineteen days after Clinton Melton was killed on December 3. Officially, her mother’s death was blamed on faulty driving. "Later, a relative told me that was not true, that everyone knew she was run off the road," Gresham said.

Gresham, a toddler at the time, recalled being trapped inside her mother’s car as it sank to the bottom of a murky bayou near Glendora. A relative driving by saved her life and that of her baby brother. But Beulah Melton drowned.

"My mother was a pretty woman, known for being bright and outspoken," Gresham said. "People who knew her have told me we are very much alike – both in looks and in personality."

Beulah Melton had been picking up information on her husband’s death and would have been a "problem" for Kimball at the trial, Gresham said.

From news accounts and the talk around Glendora, there was no provocation of her father’s killing. It was outright murder, according to white witnesses, including the white service station owner. The Melton family was well known in Glendora. Clinton Melton had lived there all his life and, "for once, white people spoke out against the killing of a negro. The local Lions Club adopted a resolution branding the murder ‘an outrage’ [and pledging to donate $400 to the family]," Myrlie Evers, the wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, later wrote.

Melton’s widow told Medgar Evers she feared justice would not be done if the NAACP interested itself in the case, and asked him not to become involved. "Her wishes were respected."

In a later investigation after her death, Medgar Evers discovered the club had given the widow only twenty-six dollars and that a local white minister had given her sixty dollars of his own.

Relatives took in Delores Melton Gresham and her siblings, and Gresham continued to live in Glendora with her grandmother. "My grandfather was so upset, he left Glendora and never came back."

Unlike some earlier Mississippi white on black murders, Kimball was charged for the murder and although not convicted, spent some time in jail:

Kimball Loses Bid for Freedom on Bond

Sumner, Miss. (AP) –December 28, 1955 – Elmer Kimball today lost his bid for freedom on bond while awaiting grand jury action on a charge of murdering a Negro man.

Three justices of the peace held a preliminary hearing for the white gin operator and refused bond. Officers returned Kimball to jail to await action of the grand jury which meets next March. The hearing was held in the little courthouse where the sensational Emmett Till trial was held. Bond usually is refused in cases where a person is accused of a crime which carries a possible death sentence upon conviction.

Kimball is charged with murder in the shotgun slaying of Clinton Melton, Negro service station attendant at nearby Glendora and father of four children. The accused man testified he fired in self-defense after someone shot at him three times. Kimball said he didn’t know who fired until he returned the fire and killed Melton.

Lee McGarrh, Melton’s employer, testified that Kimball fired without provocation, and Melton was unarmed. He said Kimball became angry at the Negro during an argument over gasoline for Kimball’s car. McGarrh said Kimball declared he was going home for his gun and [sic] kill Melton. ***

ONE WIRE SERVICE sent a staff member to cover the Kimball trial, and the only Mississippi newspaper that sent a staffer was Carter’s Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. Reporter David Halberstam remained in Mississippi after the Milam-Bryant trial and wrote as a freelancer.

This time cameras were barred, not only from the courtroom but also from the entire courthouse property, and no press table was set up. The sentiment [for conviction] was particularly strong in the Glendora community where Kimball shot Melton and where both the deceased and the defendant were well known, according to Halberstam: "Elsewhere in Talahatchie County, of course, it tended to become the usual matter of a white man and a black man."

Defining "Good" and "Bad"

Halberstam assessed the environment before the trial got started:

"A friend of mine divides the white population of Mississippi into two categories. The first and largest contains the good people of Mississippi, as they are affectionately called by editorial writers, politi­cians, and themselves. The other group is a smaller but in many ways more conspicuous faction called the peckerwoods.

"The good people will generally agree that the peckerwoods are troublemakers, and indeed several good people have told me they joined the Citizens Councils because otherwise the peckerwoods would take over the situation entirely. It is the good people who will tell you that their town has enjoyed racial harmony for many years, while it is the peckerwoods who may confide that they know how to keep the niggers in their place; it is the good people who say and mean, "We love our nigras," and it is the peckerwoods who say and mean, "If any big buck gets in my way it’ll be too damn bad."

"But while the good people would not act with the rashness of and are not governed by the hatred of the peckerwood, they are reluctant to apply society’s normal remedies to the peckerwood. Thus it is the peckerwoods who kill Negroes and the good people who acquit the peckerwoods..."

DESPITE HIS PLEAS of self-defense, Kimball was denied bond in two preliminary hearings. The biggest problem at the trial facing District Attorney Roy Johnson and County Attorney Hamilton Caldwell, according to Halberstam, was swearing in fair and impartial jurors [from] a group "sworn by birthright to pro­tecting the interest and life of the white."

The state had produced three witnesses.

First was McGarrh, "a stern little man who was a member of one of Glendora’s most respected families." McGarrh, Halberstam wrote, stuck to the same story he had told at the earlier hearings.

"He said he saw Kimball shoot the unarmed Melton. He went unshaken under cross examina­tion. The only weakness in his story is that although Kimball had given prior warning of his intention Mc­Garrh stayed inside the station with his shot gun.’

The next witness was John Henry Wilson, "a Negro in whom Kimball said he had a great deal of confidence. Wilson did not witness the shooting, but he dam­aged the self defense theory. He was standing outside the station when Kimball returned with a gun. He asked Kimball what he was going to do.

"I’m going to kill that nigger," Kimball said. "Please, sir, don’t shoot that boy. He ain’t done nothing to you," Wil­son said. "Get back or I’ll kill you too," said Kimball. Wilson ran to the back of the station."

The last witness for the state, George Woodson, testified that he was staning about ten feet away from the scene and saw Kimball walk around the side of the station with a gun, and that he did not see any gun in Melton’s hand.

"The defense lacked eye witnesses and thus tried to shake the testimony of the state’s witnesses. Its witnesses came up with only minor points," according to Halberstam.

"But more significant than their testimony were their positions—a sheriff, a deputy sheriff, and a chief of police."

Apparently Kimball did the most damage to himself when he got on the stand, as Halberstam told it:

"[He] got up there before those twelve Mississippians and told them a story about his relations with Melton that flatly contradicts all the Mississippi mores…. Kimball said he went inside and told McGarrh that Clinton was getting pretty nasty and asked him to total up his account and he’d be back and settle up; when he returned a few minutes later someone started firing at him, hit him, and he went back to his car and got his shot gun.

"Kimball’s story would be hard for any jury to believe, because they would know…. "[You] cannot provoke a Negro attendant to talk like that no matter how much you irritate him, particularly a trusted Negro such as Clinton Melton."

"The jury also knew that "no white peckerwood gin manager, the best friend of J. W. Milam, would let a Negro talk like that without doing a little whupping right there on the spot."

AFTER FOUR AND one-half hours, the jurors walked in and announced their decision to acquit:

Sumner, Miss. (AP) – Elmer Otis Kimball was acquitted of murder late yesterday in the shotgun slaying of a 33-year-old Negro. "I wasn’t sure justice would be done," said the 35-year-old white Glendora cotton gin operator, "but I should have known." A 12-man, all-white jury, made up mostly of farmers, deliberated more than four hours before freeing Kimball.

Two witnesses testified they saw Kimball blast Clinton Melton three times with a shotgun December 3 at a Glendora service station. Witnesses said the shooting was an aftermath of an argument between Kimball and Melton over gasoline to be put into Kimball’s car. Kimball testified that Melton cursed him during the argument. Defense Atty. J. W. Kellum said Kimball fired the fatal shots in self-defense. Kimball said three shots were fired at him before he opened fire, one wounding him in the shoulder. He showed a scar and brought in a doctor who verified the gunshot wound.

But neither Lee McGarrh, white owner of the service station, not George Woodson, Negro, who said he witnessed the slaying, said they saw or heard Melton fire. No weapon was found on Melton’s body or in his car. The trial took place in the same courtroom where half-brothers J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were found innocent six months ago of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Chicago Negro. Kellum was one of five defense attorneys in the Till case.

****

Times were now more dangerous for Mississippi’s African Americans. One white Glendora resident, asked by a reporter for his opinion of both the Till and Melton murders told him "There’s open season on the Negroes now. They’ve got no protection, and any peckerwood who wants can go out and shoot himself one."

Clinton and Beulah Melton’s daughter never moved from the Delta. She keeps a picture of her mother who looks like she could be her twin. While she has never owned a picture of her father, Gresham said she would have liked to know him better and continues to question what happened to her mother on that frightening day.

Yet her story had a happy note. In 2003, Keith Beauchamp, a New York filmmaker, discovered a copy of an old newsreel showing the story of Clinton Melton’s murder. Beauchamp incorporated the reel into a documentary on Emmett Till, and made sure that Gresham had a copy for her family.

The following year, Beauchamp's documentary was shown on a Chicago television station, resulting quite by chance in one of Gresham’s brothers discovering his sister. A family reunion took place that summer.

"It was joyous," Delores Gresham said. "We talk to each other on the phone several times a week, and I’m meeting other relatives through my brother."

(An excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by Susan Klopfer. Copyright 2005 Susan Klopfer.)