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.

Showing posts with label Parchman. Show all posts

Friday, June 21, 2013

U.S. Senator James Eastland Tried to Fake Out LBJ Over Lynching of Freedom Summer Volunteers Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney

Car belonging to Freedom Summer volunteers Mchael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- all killed in the summer of 1964 while helping register black voters in the state of Mississippi.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Land of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

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For you to enjoy -- pictures of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from over the year. Susan

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Blog Across the Mississippi Delta Civil Rights History Tour

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AS FREEDOM VOLUNTEERS packed up and left Mississippi in 1964, brutality and murder kept going on. Some stories made it into the news and into later history books, but in smaller Delta towns several hundred miles north of Jackson, many incidents remain only as whispers among those who once picked the cotton ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Bloggers Set to Revisit Mississippi Delta Civil Rights People and Places

Mount. Pleasant, Iowa (USA), May 29, 2007--Two friends from Cleveland, Mississippi and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are spending ten days roaming and blogging the Mississippi Delta while visiting civil rights people and places. Their pictures and stories will be placed daily at http://mississippimurders.com on the Internet. (Photo at left, courthouse in Belzoni, home of the Rev. George Lee who was murdered in 1955.)

Margaret Block, an early civil rights advocate, and Susan Klopfer, author of Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, plan to roam the Mississippi Delta starting June 1, visiting people and places of the modern civil rights movement. “We'll be traveling in and out of the Delta for ten days as we photograph important spots and talk about the region's history,” Klopfer said.

“We plan to visit the towns of Money, Drew, Glendora, Greenwood and other spots connected to the murders of Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett and Cleve McDowell, among others who were killed for their civil rights activities or just for being black.”

Block, an early SNCC volunteer, spent her first years out of high school in the small town of Charleston where they will kick off their blogging venture by attending a program June 1 honoring Keglar. The NAACP leader was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 on her way home from a Jackson meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Keglar once saved Block’s life by moving her out of Charleston in a hearse from the funeral home that Keglar managed.

“We have very few scheduled stops, but we will also leave the Delta to attend the funeral of Mrs. Chaney, James Chaney's mother in Meridian,” Block said. The two also plan to visit with Unita Blackwell, Mississippi’s first black woman mayor, and will take pictures as they roam the historical Brooks Farm, Parchman penitentiary, and Clarksdale, home of Aaron Henry, an early civil rights leader who Block also knew.

The two women met when Klopfer was researching a book on the civil rights movement, “Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited.” Klopfer was living on the grounds of Parchman at the time, where her husband was the chief psychologist.

...Contact:
Susan Klopfer
775-340-3585 (cell) sklopfer@gmail.com
http://mississippimurders.blogspot.com
http://themiddleoftheinternet.com

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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