What has Mississippi gone and done now?

    The railroad station in 2008. I took this photograph
     on a return visit to Canton, Mississippi. The
     "colored" waiting room where I sat in 1964 was no
     longer there.

Mississippi ain’t one of my favorite states. I’ll tell you that! Mississippi and I don’t get along. There are a number of people, who live in Mississippi, who I just love like crazy. I could tell you about them, man, but that is not the purpose of this blog.
by Charlie Leck

“This is not politics! This is human rights!” Ellen DeGeneres

I’m writing today in support of the Governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, who has just banned any non-essential travel to Mississippi by Minnesota government employees on government business matters (except when it is absolutely essential). Governor Dayton, like I and a lot of other people, is very upset about what Mississippi has now gone and done.

Mississippi has passed, and the governor of that state has signed, a stupid bill (Religious Liberty Bill) that allows people with religious objections to deny LGBT people marriage, adoption and foster care services. And that ain’t all (as a Mississippian might easily say)! Residents may also refuse to sell such person any property or services.

This utterly stupid bill will allow churches, religious charities and any private businesses to decline services to people if doing so violates their religious beliefs on marriage and gender.

It’s time to write-off any future travel to Mississippi! It’s time for businesses to rise up and tell Mississippi that this law may cost millions and millions of dollars and many, many jobs for its residents. Mississipians don’t get it: Many corporations are dependent on their good relationships with the gay and lesbian communities.

Mississippi and I have never gotten along. I arrived there for the first time in my life on a Monday morning in 1964 – actually on June 22 – at about 8 o’clock in the morning! The famous old train, The City of New Orleans, dropped me and a few traveling partners off at the railroad station in the city of Canton. As we traveled through the dark night on that train, a number of KKK fellows stopped three young men on a back road between Philadelphia (MS) and Meridian. Those young men (only slightly more than boys) were murdered by the KKK and their bodies were secretly buried where the ungodly organization thought they’d never be found.

But you know this old story of Mississippi Burning! Don’t you?

I spent some awful days down there in that unwelcoming, inhospitable and damned horrible state! (But I’ve written about all of this here before and I needn’t repeat that! If you want to read my Mississippi Blogs, written in 2007, you can begin at…  http://chasblogs.blogspot.com/2007/12/remembering-sixties.html 

I’ve been back to Mississippi a couple of times since that 1964 visit and I don’t like the state a bit more than I did on my first visit.

It’s just that I’m not surprised that Mississippi would pass such a law. It’s the damned strangest state in the nation anyhow, so why wouldn’t it do something like this?

Let’s hope sensible corporations will put the pressure on Mississippi to repeal this law and get rid of it for good.

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Jubilee in the Rear View Mirror

The above is the title of a play by a quite unknown playwright. He wrote to me this past week and he got my attention. I’m intrigued by the work and want to know more about it.
by Charlie Leck

Garrett Mathews is a retired newspaper reporter. In retirement, he polished a two act play he had been working on. It, Jubilee in the Rear View Mirror, ran last year in Evansville. Well, that Indiana city would not be called one of the great centers of live theater, but it’s worth learning a bit about Mathews and his play anyway – especially, I think, it you have lingering curiosities about the southern civil rights movement in 60s.

I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about the play. For starters here’s what a local paper in Evansville wrote about it before its opening

“The drama is set in the fictional town of Jubilee, Miss., during Freedom Summer when hundreds of activists headed South to register African-American voters and to desegregate schools, bus stations and businesses. Beatings and arrests were common. The Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center lists more than 40 murders during the 1950s and ‘60s, including several at the hands of local law enforcement.

“‘In the play, a young black civil rights worker from the North finds himself in a cell with a white racist who is behind bars for beating his wife,’ Mathews says. ‘The background comes from dozens of interviews I conducted with men and women of both races who risked their lives to challenge the deeply-rooted segregationist social and political structure in the South in the 1960s.

“‘Before pressure was brought to bear, black children in department stores were not allowed to try on new shoes,’ Mathews goes on. ‘Salesmen traced the edges of their old shoes onto butcher paper and fetched an approximate fit from inventory. Many African-Americans who attempted to vote were fired from their jobs by white employers. Some had their homes fire-bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.’”

Mathews has read several of my blogs about my own experiences in Mississippi in 1964. He thought I might be interested in his work

One thing he said grabbed my attention…
In the theatre, the audience was divided into white and colored sections in order to set a mood for the play itself. Wow! That would have grabbed my attention had I been there.

Here’s something else Matthews told me in his letter; and I think you might be interested…

“For our educational pre-show, we videotaped African-Americans in Evansville and Greenwood, Miss., who talk about living under segregation until the movement took root. The two 28-minute DVDs are on YouTube at http://bit.ly/10ptx9Z. I hope you'll want to spread the word about them (The Greenwood piece includes a reading of a deposition filed by June Johnson after she was brutally beaten in Winona, Miss.) The idea was to immerse the play's audience in the time period. We showed the DVDs before the performance, at intermission and at the end after the cast fielded questions.”

I’m posting the two videos here so you may watch them if you like. The information is pretty basic for most of us who went through the era, but I can see how it would be surprising material for young people. Mathews said in his note to me that “…few young people have more than a second grade knowledge of the civil rights movement.” That’s sad, but quite true.

It appears that the play is going to be staged in Indianapolis in 2014. I’ve asked Mathews to keep me posted about this possibility. I’d like to go down there to see it.

Mathews is a graduate of Virginia Tech. He’s written a number of books. He, like most of us who worked on civil rights in the 60s, is a grandparent now. As a newspaper man he wrote more than 6500 columns. His work makes me curious. I may try to learn more about him.

_________________________

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Appomattox on Opening Night

A huge, powerful play by Christopher Hampton opened at the Guthrie Theatre last night and I approached the moment with as much excitement as I’ve ever felt in my life. Perhaps I was too excited and expecting too much.
by Charlie Leck

Disclaimer: I am not, by any means, a theatre critic. Loving stage plays as I do is not enough credential to review them with any expertise. So, this review must be seen and read more as the meandering first impressions of mere member of a very complex and varied audience of interested spectators – a quiet, unimportant voice in a big crowd.

A group of us who attended the opening of Appomattox at the Guthrie Theatre this weekend, were struggling to find the right words as we left the theater and drove home. We knew we had seen something very powerful. The playwright, Christopher Hampton, had done a masterful job in providing extraordinary dialogue for the stage actors, telling two astonishing, historic stories separated in time by 100 years. And, the play included a powerful ending that seemed to provide an annoying and potent comment that wasn’t quite blatant enough to catch.

All in all, I think it was a great and important moment in American theater; yet, something was wrong and out of synch with it all.

And, it bothered me. The wrong things were minute, but they added up as the play went along. The direction seemed awkward. Transitions between scenes were stiff and the openings of some scenes were awkward. Dialogue was occasionally muffled and actors stuttered where stuttering was not called for.

I don’t usually attend opening night performances. Is this what they are like? Is it natural to see and hear such miscues and bobbles? Will first-aid be performed and patches used here and there?

Or, was the story too bold, too encompassing and too powerful for any acting company? Is this work, perhaps, more suited to the screen, where scenes can be reworked and sharpened and dialogue corrected in take after take?

General Robert E. Lee (Philip Kerr) was done perfectly and drew me into believability and into the historic moment. General Ulysses S. Grant (Mark Benninghofen), though, was missing something and he steered me away from believability at the very same moments and in the very scenes where General Lee grasped me. Abraham Lincoln (Harry Groener) disappointed me and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Harry Groener) captured and convinced me. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Shawn Hamilton) brought me to tears and Viola Liuzzo (Angela Pierce) drew me back to the level of high school drama productions. Lady Bird Johnson (Sally Wingert) was Lady Bird alive in front of me. Corretta Scott King (Greta Oglesby) was awkwardly out of place. J. Edgar Hoover (Brian Reddy) caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand up and sizzle and that felt terrible but as it should have been.

Frederick Douglas (Joe Nathan Thomas) seemed to have come back from history and death to stand before us.

Senator Richard Russell (Philip Kerr) enamored me as he chatted about serious matters in the Oval Office with President Johnson. Russell’s comments about Vietnam and our misguided policies there drew me again and deeply into one of the ugliest moments of United States history. To me, it was, perhaps, the evening’s most extraordinary moment – to be allowed into the private conversation between two such powerful men of American political history.

Edgar Ray Killen (Richard Ooms)? Well, I don’t know. Such an evil man! Such ignorance! Perhaps the scene had been played correctly. I just don’t know. It was awkward; yet it made me want to vomit and scream out. Tears filled my eyes and rage my heart as Killen, sitting in his wheelchair, confesses in a long soliloquy (because James Bonard Fowler seems not to listen)…

“Most everyone thinks well of me; I been a jackleg preacher all my life. I pastored churches all over Neshoba County for more than fifty years. But I’m like you, you know, I’m a good soldier. I follow orders. Anyways, back in the summer of nineteen hundred and sixty-four, which was a hot one, I get a call from the Imperial Wizard and he issues me with an order number four, you understand what I’m saying? He tells me there’s these three troublemakers come down from up North, a Commie and a Jewboy and a nigger, Civil Rights workers, scum of the earth; and he says he wants their rear ends tore up.

“So I call my guys, I just have to say two words: payday’s comin’. First thing, I had the deputies arrest them and throw them in Neshoba Conty jail, so I could buy me a little time, enough to figure out a plan. I had the big dozer moved over to the dam and working; and late in the evening we released them. They beat up on the nigger a little too heavy with them chains, which wasn’t too smart, because he was the driver, but turned out he was still able to drive. They cut them off out on Highway 19 and rode their asses down to Rock Cut Road. Wayne Roberts took the Jew out of the patrol car. You know what he said? Wayne asked him if he was a niggerlover and he said, ‘Sir, I know just how you feel.’ How do you like that? Wayne shot him, then he executed the Commie. Jimmy Jordan was pissed. He said: ‘You didn’t leave me nothing but a nigger.’ Then he shot him anyway and said, ‘Well, at least I killed me a nigger.’ They took the bodies over to the dam and dug ‘em in with the dozer, down where the sun don’t shine, in fifteen feet of Mississippi clay. They’d never have been found, ‘cept some greedy fuck squealed to the FBI for cash.

“A job well done, wouldn’t you say? We didn’t get no more trouble out of them.

“It was Father’s Day, as I recall. But that’s OK. The nigger was the only one with children.”

I’ve walked along Rock Cut Road a couple of times – right to the spot where they dragged those boys out of the car and shot ‘em.

“Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?”
                               [James Weldon Johnson, 1900]

I had arrived in Mississippi, the first time, as a civil rights volunteer, on the day after Father’s Day in ’64. There were reports that the three boys had gone missing. It was a hot summer in Mississippi.

I’ve gone back a couple of times since then to observe the anniversary of that Father’s Day in ’64, and we gather at Rock Cut Road and sing the sacred hymn of the movement: We Shall Overcome! I was back there again, standing beside the ditch on the scruffy, stony back road in Mississippi when the play came to an end. Tears filled my eyes and hatred for Edgar Ray Killen filled my heart.

And then it was over and I could only think that something that was supposed to soar and penetrate deeply into the mind and heart had missed – only by a mere fraction, but it had missed.

Actors – good, bold and talented actors – seemed to miss the mark by fractions. Timing seemed so close to true, but one could tell it was not settled, accurate and where it was supposed or meant to be.

Is this opening night? Does it commonly happen? Can it be fixed – cured? Or is it misdirection? Or is the dialogue too immense and powerful for any theater company? Does the truth hurt too much to see it before one’s eyes? Is it too, too painful to be reminded of it again and again?

I wouldn’t have missed Appomattox for anything in the world – not anything – but, I swear, something was missing – wrong – off target last evening and I cringed occasionally when the strident note hung there too long, screaming at me

I wrote five or six weeks ago on this blog about the first reading of the play by the proposed actors. I was honored to be in attendance for that reading and I was deeply moved by it. If you wish, you can read that blog, History Alive, here.

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'64 in Mississippi Never Seems to Go Away

Not many of the central figures remain, but the story never seems to go away!
by Charlie Leck

Many of you followed my series of Mississippi writings in 2008 with something approaching intense interest. I received lots of communications about those essays. Well, the story of the ’64 killings of the three civil rights workers (Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner) never seems to go away.

The following report appeared in the Clarion Ledger, Neshoba County Mississippi in November of this year.

Ex-inmate: Killen boasted in prison

Says former Klan member bragged land never searched

Jerry Mitchell • jmitchell@clarionledger.com • November 23, 2009

The FBI has been told that Edgar Ray Killen bragged that his property was never searched, despite having evidence against those involved in the Ku Klux Klan's killings of three civil rights workers in 1964.

Larry Ellis, who had a prison cell next to Killen in 2007, told agents recently that Killen talked of possessing evidence that could incriminate others in the June 21, 1964, killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Ellis, 57, who now lives in south Mississippi, also told the FBI that Killen talked about a murder weapon used in the killings being buried on his property.

FBI officials wouldn't comment on their ongoing investigation into the four still-living suspects in the slayings, but Chaney's brother, Ben, said agents should search Killen's home and property for possible evidence.

Killen, an 84-year-old Union sawmill operator and part-time preacher now serving 60 years in prison, is appealing his 2005 manslaughter conviction. His lawyer, Rob Ratliff of Mobile, said his client denies telling Ellis any of this, calling the former inmate "a con man with a history of violence."

Ellis spent two decades behind bars in Mississippi and Florida for a string of crimes that included burglary, assault, forging prescriptions, altering money orders and writing hot checks. All the crimes were related to his addiction to painkillers, Ellis said, adding that he's been sober the past four years.

Ellis, who has written a yet-to-be-published book on Killen titled Getting the Last Word In, showed The Clarion-Ledger dozens of handwritten pages discussing the trio's killings and other subjects. An expert analyzing those pages concluded they were written by Killen.

Before his 2003 death, former state investigator George Metz told The Clarion-Ledger that Killen had told him about cleaning up the murder scene immediately after the trio's slayings.

Former Meridian police officer Mike Hatcher testified at Killen's trial that Killen approached him a day after the killings and gave him a revolver to destroy. Ballistics showed at least two guns were used in the killings, but no murder weapon has ever been recovered.

Ellis told the FBI that Killen said one of the murder weapons used in the killings was never destroyed and remained on his property, along with other possible evidence. He said Killen talked of holding on to some of the evidence against the killers in case they tried to testify against him, saying, "The evidence proves them guilty, and I mean proves it."

In addition to those killings, Ellis told the FBI that Killen spoke of having a photograph of those who took part in the lynching of an unnamed black man near the Mississippi Gulf Coast - "five of them on that limb, trying not to look."

Ellis said Killen explained the photograph had come from one of the lynch mob members.

This was one of 11 killings of African Americans that Killen mentioned, Ellis told agents.

He said when he pressed Killen for more details, Killen replied, "Son, I told you what's private, so don't you dare tell that or I'm a cooked goose. But for your book, you can say that the boys said my place was the safest to hide anything because it was never searched even once."

He said Killen also remarked, "Do you know that not once was my home, property, records or anything searched? Amazing for someone so wanted and hunted."

Ellis told FBI agents that Killen talked of keeping names of Klan members tucked among official lists of church members he knew from decades of preaching.

The reason he said Killen cited his relationship with then-U.S. Sen. Jim Eastland as the reason his property was never searched.

He said when he asked Killen again about the subject, Killen replied, "Now that was our private talk when you were asking me about them never searching my home or property and me being the No. 1 suspect. Figure that one out, will you? While Big Jim was alive, you can bet your bottom dollar that none of them could get a search warrant to come on any of my property."

In prison, Killen received letters of support from white supremacists around the world, Ellis told the FBI.

He said Killen bragged: "They think it will all end with me, but my death will be a new beginning for all of the millions of good and pure-blooded Aryans around the nation and world who keep up with me."

If authorities have indeed never searched Killen's property, it's high time it happened, said Alvin Sykes, architect of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. "There should be no sparing of expense in searching it from top to bottom."

To comment on this story, call Jerry Mitchell at (601) 961-7064.

According to an earlier story by Mitchell, Ellis has claimed that Killen confessed to him that he had taken part in the killing, but had no guilt about it because he was "a soldier fighting against evil" and doing the will of God.

But the FBI has now been told the 84-year-old, convicted of the crimes in 2005, has admitted his involvement in the June 21, 1964, slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Former inmate Larry Ellis told agents Killen described their deaths as necessary casualties, saying, "This was God's war."

Killen's attorney, Rob Ratliff of Mobile, denies his client admitted taking part in the killings. "That's something he's never done, and he continues to maintain his lack of involvement," he said.

For decades, Killen has insisted he had an alibi for that night. In 1998, he told The Clarion-Ledger he went to the funeral home for the wake "of a family that lost a ... child. The father and mother were there. We stayed till the morning hours."

But the girl's mother, Carolyn Dearman, said Killen couldn't have seen them that night because they arrived in town too late to attend the visitation of her 5-year-old daughter, Leslie Carroll Barrett, who died suddenly, apparently of Reye's Syndrome.

She said she and her husband didn't arrive until shortly after 10 p.m. By then, McClain-Hays Funeral Home was pitch black, she said, with no sign of anyone anywhere.

According to a statement given the FBI, the late Horace Doyle Barnette said he and fellow Klansmen dropped Killen off at the funeral home about 9:30 p.m. after Killen told them they had a place to bury the trio "and a man to run the dozer to cover them up."

Ellis told the FBI that Killen admitted he took part in the killings but said he did nothing wrong because he was a soldier against evil.

Ellis quoted Killen as remarking, "Those three communist Jews chose which side they were on and were soldiers in action. When the n----s joined the communists, they became soldiers, also. Now, how that's wrong you tell me?"

For the 22 days he was in the cell next to the man known as "Preacher," Ellis said Killen answered dozens of questions. He said he collected what Killen wrote as well as notes he took for a book.

Ratliff said the book isn't being done with Killen's permission. Ellis has a document dated Oct. 31, 2007, that appears to be signed by Killen, saying he is providing information to Ellis "to the best of my knowledge and memory under penalty of perjury, if false. He may write my story."

Handwriting expert Thomas Vastrick of Memphis has concluded the documents match Killen's handwriting.

Ellis said Killen expressed no remorse about the killings, saying, "I feel no shame in the deaths of communists, of those with anti-Christ beliefs.

"Our Bible says God will wipe them off the earth and withhold eternity from them. You can check the record - three enemy soldiers died in Neshoba County on June 21, 1964, and they came bringing communism and an anti-Christ war against real Americans."

Ellis said Killen did say he was "sorry for the pain I caused," explaining, "I wanted only to serve my nation and of course firstly to my God and his only begotten son, Jesus Christ. I know my sins, and those are between me and my God."

He asked Killen if he had any proof against others involved in the killings.

Ellis told the FBI that Killen replied, "If there is evidence, it was kept as leverage to keep them turncoats from telling lies on me or anyone else. The evidence proves them guilty, and I mean proves it."

He said when he asked Killen if the murder weapon still exists, the Klan leader replied, "They say it is buried somewhere with seven sets of blood-stained sheets and clothing. There was some old blankets and the canvas-type material used as tent material that they say it was all wrapped in, is what someone said."

Absolutely amazing stories keep coming out of Mississippi about this traumatic moment in my life. On my own voyage into the civil rights world, I arrived in Mississippi on 21 June 1964.