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with liberty and justice for all

Mississippi Delta Boy
1949

The purpose of this web site is to advocate and teach benevolence and good will for all humankind: to abolish capital punishment and stop Ku Klux Klan lynchings, Mississippi police killings (and in all other places) and so-called 'jail house suicides', to oust political demagogues from public office who threaten more prisons or crueler punishments or those who would paint their personal bigotries with the color of law and to dissolve away racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism as well as intolerant sexual mores and to liberate the human mind from the strictures and dictates of religion and ideology, to expose tyrants and frauds and to instill a disgust for abuse and oppression in all their myriad forms and to prosecute any person who attempts to frighten, intimidate, proselytize or indoctrinate school children under whatever banner and to remove the battle flag of the Confederacy from all places of public esteem,

And to bring peace, friendship, happiness, knowledge and security to all, to champion the United Nations and to establish the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution as law inviolate and to criminalize all violations of said law, to abolish war and to scrutinize preparations for war, to preserve and protect individual rights and beliefs and to establish unlimited access to education and medical attention and to respect the rights and needs of our pets and animals and to clean up our environment and to keep it clean and to decriminalize the acts of those who harm no one but themselves and to explore space and to establish an international research station on the moon,

And to celebrate Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Cordell Hull, Desiderus Erasmus, William of Occam, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, A.J. P. Taylor, A.J. Ayer, Johann Sebastian Bach, Giaccono Rossini, Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Georg Friederick Handel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarotti, Leonardo da Vinci, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Alicia de la Rocha, E. Power Biggs, Jascha Heifetz, David und Igor Oistrach, Maria Callas, Nicanor Zabaleta and all those other illustrious scientists, artists and philosophers.

If you like the New York Times daily crossword puzzle, then you know how they are formatted: starting on Monday, the puzzles are easy but get increasingly harder each day until Saturday when they become really tough. The Sunday puzzle can be a mind-bender. Working the puzzle first thing in the morning acts as a defragmentation program for the mind...just as the defragmentation program on your computer does the same thing: it cleans up the neurons and synapses and gets the electricity to flowing appropriately. Anyhow, here are 3 puzzles of my own construction. You cannot work them on your monitor screen but print them out. If they do not print correctly, then copy and paste into a word program or change your printer settings to print html.
PHILOSOPHY POLITICS WISE GUYS

I first met Kenneth Haxton around 1960 when he worked at Nelms and Blume department store in Greenville. He was the only Mississippian I ever knew who had read the entirety of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and could discuss it at length. Ken was a superb crossword puzzle creator and edited all of mine (view above). He upbraided me incessantly over the usage of terms, meanings and definitions. In later years, he taught himself to play an astonishing number of musical instruments and became the conductor of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. Ken was also a master woodcarver and created dozens of miniature woodcarvings of all sorts of animals: the royal Bengal tiger, snow leopard, jaguar, African elephant, Indian elephant, Indian rhinoceros, white rhino, black rhino, eohippus, dinosaurs, pets, farm animals and so forth.

When I returned to Mississippi from Canada in 1972, it was as incognito: wearing overalls, a fake beard, thick phony glasses and a wig for I was afraid that Klansmen would recognize me and report me to the FBI. One of my first stops was to see Ken at the Nelm's store but no sooner than I had entered than a well-known Klanslady entered just behind me. Ken sensed that that I was in mortal terror of being recognized and hid me in a back store room until the woman had left. Thanks Ken! He left us recently at the age of 81 and he will be sorely missed. His former wife Ellen Douglas was an early critic of segregation in Mississippi as seen in her excellent novel White Cloud, Black Cloud.

Try out the following site if you would like to read more about Mississippi writers. This site has been constructed by a group of brilliant high school students at Starkville High School.

http://www.shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/

Click below to read some of my own crummy fiction.

PREACH

The Southern Poverty Law Center began as a small civil rights law firm in 1971 by Morris Dees and Joe Levin with Julian Bond as its first president and who continues today as its President Emeritus. The SPLC is one of the most aggressive prosecutors and trackers of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and other militarist hate groups. The SPLC also takes great pride in sharing their information with the US Department of Justice. It is a real pleasure to watch Morris Dees interrogating a Klansman on the witness stand. www.splcenter.com

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is one of the bravest and most tenacious civil rights groups ever assembled. They have given not only their fortunes but their lives as well, over and over again and continue to do so today to attain benefits and blessings that we all can share. http://www.naacp.org/

The United States Commission on Civil Rights is a relative newcomer to the fight for American principles of jurisprudence although one can argue that they have really been around for many years in the form of former US official organizations. First funded by act of congress in 1954 and re-established in 196- the USCCR treads softly but carries a big stick. One of their most recent acts has been to establish hot lines and investigatory personnel into hate crimes against Arab-American people in the wake of the terror campaigns against the World Trade Center. Few other groups could have instituted these actions as fast or as seriously as the USCCR. They make me proud to be an American. http://www.usccr.gov/

The Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union fought the State of Mississippi to open the files of the State Sovereignty Commission for 25 years in federal district court. At long last, it won its case as the court ordered the state to open its records and give closure to the victims of the Sovereignty Commission. I am very much afraid that the State of Mississippi over the intervening 25 years has already destroyed its records in its determination to protect the criminals among us. Everyone thought that dozens of law suits were eminent for the crimes committed against civil rights workers and others. In fact, only one such suit has been filed...all the really incriminating files have been destroyed. No closure at all has been achieved...all issues are still on the table. Erle Johnson, ex-director of that commission swore for years in many articles, books, interviews and court testimony that he never destroyed a single page of its files but after his death it was revealed that he did in fact destroy thousands of pages. What a gutless slimeball! However, the remnants of his files are now available thru the Mississippi ACLU home site. It contains a list of 87,000 names of persons spied upon and targeted by the Commission for elimination, smear campaign or unemployment. If you were a civil rights worker during that time, click to see if your name is among them. http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/index.html

Amnesty International

Rick Abraham was one of the very few white Mississippians to have joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I first met Rick when he was working in the anti-war movement in Jackson around 1972. We worked together, cutting trees for several years (it was the only kind of work that we could find) as well as working on his various civil rights projects. At one time he learned of a lynching in Humphreys County carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and a group of white farmers. He then asked me to infiltrate that Klan to get more information on them...surely the craziest thing he ever asked me to do. The Klan was intertwined with the Mississippi state government: they would have known me instantly and lynched both of us the next day. Unable to find a job or to reside in peace and security, Rick finally moved to Texas and continued his civil rights work in a different vein. Click below to see a review of his recent book on his fight against pollution in Texas:

The Dirty Truth

James Dickerson is a veteran journalist who has written for numerous magazines and newspapers. He is also the author of eight books all of which you can find at Amazon books including Dixie's Dirty Secrets: The True Story of how the Government, the Media, and the Mob Conspired to Combat Integration and the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, Colonel Tom Parker ( a history of Elvis Presley's personal manager), Dixie Chicks: Down Home and Backstage as well as North to Canada pictured below. I grew up with James in the Mississippi Delta from grade school to high school and we spent many days roaming the woods and bayous of Washington County. Later we roomed together at Ole Miss when we had reading contests. As quick as one of us would read a good book, the other would then read it also. While James hardly mentions it in his book, he also fought the Ku Klux Klan but was eventually driven out of his home and family by those murdering hoodlums. I followed him about a year later. Click above to read the first page of chapter 3, which is about my personal fight with the Klan.