MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI, THE KU KLUX KLAN AND BAPTIST PREACHERS

A History with Personal Memories

by Charles Felder Sudduth Jr.

The State of Mississippi is a murdering and a malevolent state, for the past 198 years in a condition of near secession, if not outright rebellion, from the Union and for which it stands, still flying the despicable flag of the Confederacy as its official emblem.

Its officers, its agents and its operatives are clearly defined as a "criminal syndicate" by its own statutes, (Sovereignty Commission Act). The State of Mississippi is not ruled by the precedent of law or by the enactment of statutes but by a criminal syndicate and its laws mock no one more plainly than itself.

The State of Mississippi is an "habitual criminal" within the terms of its own law untold thousands of times over. I speak from experience for I have seen its malignant criminality with mine own eyes.

Among my earliest memories of life in Mississippi is the winter storm of 1951. There was a snow storm and nearly a foot of the cold white blanket descended upon our town...a rarity as snow falls there only once every four or five years. We lived about a hundred yards from the pretty little stream called Deer Creek in Washington County. Deer Creek is about 200 feet in width at its widest and is about 30 feet deep in the middle but the actual water level varies from summer to fall to winter to spring. In late fall Deer Creek would turn into a little trickle about ten feet wide and maybe five feet deep. During that winter the creek froze a half inch thick and the gar fish were trapped in the ice.

Gar fish are a long slender fish that resemble an alligator with a long snout and a mouthful of razor sharp teeth. They breath through two nostrils at the end of their snout and at night rest at the surface of the water to continue their breathing uninterrupted but when the water freezes, they become trapped in the ice making them easy prey to the poor black families who lived on the other side of the creek on the plantation of Kelly Drew Alexander. The men would walk out onto the ice, causing it to break in and then grab the garfish with their bare hands and fling them to the bank. They taste terrible no matter how they are cooked but to those folks they must have been a godsend as they lived on the brink of starvation. One of the fishermen flung a gar beside me, slashing his hand on the gar's teeth. He stretched out his black hand for my examination and said, "See...my blood is red just like yours." It was strange because I could not see the color of red on his black hand. I was six years old.

A year or so later the plantation owner Mr. Alexander bought two Caterpillar bulldozers and cleared out the creek to construct a dam so that he would for ever after have a ready source of water to irrigate his cotton fields in case a drought struck. They were the old cable-blade dozers; the blade was raised and lowered by a winch at the rear that ran a cable thru a series of pipes and pulleys to the front. Cable-blades were made instantly obsolete when Caterpillar invented hydraulic blades about 10 years later. The cable blades had no downward pressure except the weight of the blade itself whereas the hydraulic blade dozers had the entire weight of the front end of the dozer plus the blade itself. But their winches were powerful; only an idiot would place his hand on the winch line when it was running. Working in tandem, they could pull out stumps ten feet in diameter. I often walked over to watch the two dozers tear down the cypress trees and construct the dam. The dozers were operated by the brothers Houston and Larry Tyler who along with their other brothers,  were all members of the Ku Klux Klan and the First Baptist Church. Thereafter Deer Creek never again ran dry in any season. Click to see responses from one of the Tylers.

Our next-door-neighbor was Mr. Bill Phillips, an expert carpenter who did all sorts of wood-working projects for the people in our town. Mr. Phillips built the spillway for Mr. Alexander's dam after the dozermen had finished their work. The dam was only a big pile of dirt but to the people of Hollandale, it was an engineering marvel. On many days I would walk over to help Mr. Phillips by fetching his string line, nails, level or hand saw. Sometimes Mr. Phillips would lie on the ground and  cry silently to himself. He had been a United States soldier attached to General Omar Bradley's divisions and was one of the first American G.I.s to have entered and liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald in 1945. It was many years before I understood what he was crying about. A few years later Mr. Phillips abandoned his wife and daughter, isolated himself in a dilapidated hut alongside the Mississippi River, turned to skin and bones and drank himself to death.

The dam became an ideal play ground for us boys: a place to dive, swim, fish, camp out, paddle our crude  boats and shoot our BB guns.

COON-ON-A-LOG

When I was about 10 years old, advertising flyers appeared in our town. They were of different colors: red, blue and yellow. Notices also appeared in the local paper and on the radio as well. It was announced that there was to be a Coon-on-a-Log contest at the dam on Kelly Drew Alexander's plantation on such and such a day. Black people were also referred to as "coons" by the Klansmen. As it was no more than a few yards from our house, I walked over there with my dog on his leash on that day. The contest was a great festival for the Ku Klux Klansmen who brought their coonhounds to participate in the contest. Some of them I knew, but most were strangers to me. They were the filthiest people I had ever seen; they were so dirty that it scared me. They appeared to have been mutant ghouls dredged up from a fetid swamp, or pulled from some muddy cave. 

A huge boar raccoon was chained by its neck to a log that was floated in the water above Mr. Alexander's dam. One by one the Klansmen turned their hounds loose on the raccoon to see whose dog could pull him off the log. Raccoons are not aggressive; they will usually run and hide from an attacker. The only way to make them fight is to chain so that they have no choice but to stand and fight. A raccoon is extremely dexterous and can at times drown a coonhound but there was always a Klansman standing nearby chest-deep in the water ready to pull the 'coon off the dog before that happened.

At the end of the contest it was announced that there would be a second contest held for the winners of the first contest. Such contests were the favorite sport of the Klansmen and were carried out in many places in Mississippi. The women and children were then instructed to leave the area and the Klansmen were invited to gather on the other side of the dam for the second contest. A hallmark characteristic of the Klansmen was their cruelty to animals; they thought nothing of killing pets, livestock or wildlife and encouraged their children to do the same.  A favorite terror tactic was to kill the dog or cat of a civil rights worker to leave it on his doorstep or hang it on his gate.  But their cruelty to black people was almost beyond description.

The next morning I walked back to the dam and there I observed a pile of intestines floating on top of the water but some time elapsed before I learned what happened at the second contest. At that contest a black man was chained to another log and it was floated in the creek, then one by one the Klansmen turned their coonhounds on him until they ripped open his chest and tore out the entrails and organs then left the body to float down the creek. For as vicious and evil a man as was Adolph Hitler, I am not aware that Hitler ever did anything quite so vile, malignant or criminal as that carried out in the State of Mississippi on that day.

Anyone doubtful that such murders ever occurred, consider the following law from the Code of Alabama, where legislators made an oblique yet brave attempt to discourage such crimes.  Mississippi legislators made no such effort.

Section 9-11-248

Permits for holding of "coon on the log" contests.

Any association desiring to hold a demonstration as provided for in Section 9-11-247, which is commonly called a "coon on the log" show or contest, shall first obtain a permit from the Commissioner of Conservation and Natural Resources before engaging in such activity. Said permit shall be sold by the Commissioner of Conservation and Natural Resources at a cost of $1.50, which money shall be covered into the State Treasury to the credit of the Game and Fish Fund by the Commissioner of Conservation and Natural Resources. Application for such permit shall contain the name of the association requesting same, the number of raccoons which it has in captivity, the date of the proposed show or contest and the time and place where said show or contest is to be held. Said application for a permit shall be accompanied by a remittance of $1.50 to cover the cost of said permit. Said permit shall be valid only for the date on which the show or contest is to be held, which date shall appear in the permit to be issued.

(Acts 1951, No. 779, p. 1374, §2.)

45 years elapsed before I witnessed another event like the Coon-on-the-Log contest.

Click to see the victim of a Coon-on-a-Log contest.

LYNCHING IN ARCOLA

When I was about 11-years-old (1957) there was a triple lynching in Washington County. I remember traveling the narrow concrete highway 61 until we came to the little village of Arcola, Mississippi, about 7 miles from our home. The highway ran parallel to our own little river, Deer Creek. When we came to the middle of the town there was a crossroad (state highway 438) that intersected the main road and also spanned the creek. I remember that there were buildings on both sides of the road and there was a cotton gin on the other side of the creek. There were two or three pickup trucks parked on the side of the road. There were several men leaning against the trucks.

All of them were looking at the bridge that spanned the creek so I too looked at the bridge and saw what appeared to be three bundles of dirty tattered rags suspended above the water in the creek. The creek was high and the water was blue. At that time cotton was baled in thick brown burlap and that is what appeared to be hanging from the bridge. It occurred to me that someone was trying to wash out cotton sacks by hanging them in the flow of the water.

Staring upon the scene, I realized that the third bundle was not wearing a shirt: there were three dead black men hanging from the bridge. It was astounding to see that any persons could appear to be so restful and relaxed. Too little to realize what I was seeing at the time, a few years later the memory came back to haunt me in a recurring nightmare that afflicted me for over 20 years and still occasionally returns. In the dream it is myself who is dangling from the bridge and I am powerless to stop it.  Psychologists term it post traumatic stress disorder;  philosophers might term it Nazified Klan terrorism.

KLAN MEETINGS

Our neighbor down the street, Mr. J.C. Patterson, carried me to meetings of the Ku Klux Klan when I was about 12 or 13 years old. The Pattersons had a son, Jimmy, my own age and we often played together after school and on weekends. One evening Mr. Patterson came outside and told us both to jump in his car, that we were going to a meeting. Those were meetings of the Ku Klux Klan. My father would have whipped me had he known that Mr. Patterson took me to those meetings. Their meetings were organized like a Sunday sermon in a church, with Mr. Alexander preaching at his congregation from a lectern, dressed in his Klan robes with the hood pulled back upon his shoulders.  His congregation was arranged in rows of metal chairs.  I remember the persons and officials who were there. I remember the rites and rituals that they performed. They sang Rock of Ages, The Old Rugged Cross and other Baptist hymns. I remember the topics that they discussed. I remember their Klubhouse, the buildings, the pool table, the manicured lawns, the tennis courts and the swimming pool.

They showed me their secret handshake and taught me their secret codewords. When the collection plate was passed Mr. Patterson gave Jimmy 15 cents to put in it but he only gave me a nickel. I remember their robes and their hoods and the symbols on them. I remember the Confederate cigarette lighters handed out by their Exalted Cyclops, Kelly Drew Alexander (deacon in the Baptist church, Colonel on the staff of Governor Ross Barnett, lawyer in the Mississippi Bar Association and head of the Washington County draft board local #82) that had the battle flag of the Confederacy on one side and the portrait of an aged and decrepit Confederate soldier wielding a sabre on the other side with a caption underneath that read "FORGET HELL" and it played the tune Dixie when the lid was flipped.

Mr. Patterson was the accountant for the Torrey Woods Plantation at Murphy where black people were lynched by the Klansmen. Torrey Woods Senior and Torrey Woods Junior together were the wealthiest planters in the town. All the Pattersons and Woodses were members of the Ku Klux Klan/Baptist church.

The Klansmen perceived themselves as Confederate soldiers, operating as guerillas behind enemy lines sworn to use guile, terrorism, infiltration and dissimulation to drive out the Federal government and destroy Federal institutions, and they wore Confederate uniforms in our local pageants and parades. Like all Klansmen, Mr. Alexander hated the federal government with a passion that was venomous.  It is part of their philosophy.  The topic of one of his sermons was the Klansmen's relationship to the Federal government.  Mr. Alexander said that Klansmen were entitled to do anything...lie, steal, cheat, rob, commit murder...do absolutely anything to get the Federal government out of Mississippi.  He said that Klansmen were blessed by God and were incapable of doing any wrong to the Federal government.

When the meeting was over Mrs. Alexander invited myself and Jimmy to her kitchen where she served us cookies and milk. Ruthie Alexander then asked Jimmy where God lived and Jimmy said that God was an old man with a long white beard who sat upon a throne up in the sky and then Mrs. Alexander asked me where God lived and that I replied that of course that He lived in Heaven and then Mrs. Alexander said that we were both wrong: she said that God lived in our minds and that he who plied himself with liquor defiled the House of the Lord and that he would go to Hell when he died. (If that is true then the fires of Hell are stoked with the souls of Klansmen.) Mrs. Alexander thereupon gave me a book that is still in my possession. Its title is The Klansman.

THE KLEAGLE

Our next-door-neighbor, Mr. Lloyd Kilpatrick was their Kleagle and he prowled the Klan meetings with a long carved stick with which to maintain order among the Klansmen. The stick had a knob on one end and a tickler on the other. If a Klansman was talking out loud during the sermon, the Kleagle was supposed to knock him on the head with the knob end to make him be quiet and if he went to sleep, the Kleagle was supposed to tickle him on the back of his neck with the tickler end to wake him up. People said of Mr. Kilpatrick that he was one of the 'bad' Klansmen by which they meant he participated in tortures, burnings and lynchings. He owned a service station on Highway 61 where he also held a contract to supply gasoline for county school buses. After the buses began to run erratically, state investigators learned that he was mixing water with the gasoline at the ratio of 10% water to 90% gas. He was convicted of defrauding the state and lost his business but being a Klansman; he only received a fine but drew no time. More follows about the Kilpatricks below.

The black families who lived on Mr. Alexander's plantation dwelt in a poverty, misery, neglect and squalor that was painful to visualize, while he himself had every luxury that could be had, including the only swimming pool in town. Winter was terribly hard on his sharecroppers and many black people, especially the old and weak, in Mississippi starved to death even during our mild winters, (cf., Davis and Gardner, Deep South). Once a Delta planter related to me how he had dismissed a black worker who had been assigned to tend his hunting dogs. The man was stealing dog food pellets to feed his children when there was nothing else to eat. His dogs ate a more nutritious diet than his black employees had. Other things I remember are so degraded that children ought not to see them.

MURDERER ACE MATTHEWS

The Arcola Chief-of-Police also attended the Klan meetings. Ace Matthews was an honored person in Washington County for it was he who murdered those three poor people and dangled their carcasses from the bridge in the middle of the dirty little Town of Arcola, Mississippi. No rational man could talk to Ace Matthews for he was an incoherent, psychopathic barbarian. He would shout and rant and rave and point his pistol in any direction just like the dangerous hoodlum that he was. He mimicked the voice and demeanour of tough guy actor Broderick Crawford so often and so well that people nicknamed Ace as 'Broderick Crawford'. He was the perfect  embodiment of that great study, Jurisprudence, as it exists in the State of Mississippi, that is to say the embodiment of criminality and savagery. Chief Matthews ran away from Arcola after completing his crime shortly before dawn, later claiming that he was out of town "on business" in Jackson on that day but instructed the townsfolk by telephone to leave the corpses hang until he could return and examine them himself. A cursory investigation was conducted by the Mississippi Highway Patrol who took pictures of the three lynched men but nothing came of it except that Ace Matthews was advised not to do any more of his killings in public. For all the historians who have chronicled lynchings in Mississippi, none was an eye-witness to a lynching. The above is what historians term 'primary source material', as I was an eye-witness.

The Klan left those three mutilated corpses to hang from the Arcola bridge all that day. The three dead men were not even accused of having done any wrong but were selected at random and murdered for the one and only reason of terrorizing other black people. Their bodies were taken down that night and demolished in a place unknown to me. Surely, hundreds if not thousands of Mississippians journeyed to the Town of Arcola to gawk at and mock and glorify in that spectacular crime against humanity. Triple lynchings were of special significance to the Klansmen/Baptists as, in their degenerate psychology, it was their way of demonstrating to black people, that black people were held responsible for the lynching of Jesus Christ and the two thieves 2000 years previously. Everyone is aware of the unmitigated hatred that Baptists held for Catholics, Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses but few are aware that they hated black religions even more, despite the fact that many black people called themselves Baptists, and Klansmen loved nothing more than burning down a black church except tearing down a school built by the Federal government.. (cf., Whitfield, A Death in the Delta) Click to see what you can do to help stop black church burnings.  These attitudes still prevail unto the 1990s as is evident in the prescription of Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education, William Bennett, who has persistently called for the abolition of the Federal Department of Education.

White people in Washington County were so proud of Ace Matthews that they let him ride their children around town in his police car and run black people off the road. Black people were so terrified of Ace Matthews that not one could come forward to complain of these heinous crimes for he himself would have been in danger of being shortly murdered. With his pistol Ace Matthews shot and killed several other black people in Arcola excusing himself with "in the line of duty". Black people also suspected Ace Matthews in the disappearance of several other of their friends and relatives. The lynching of Emmet Till near Money two years previously received nation-wide attention although that incident was more like a murder than a lynching but there is no account of the lynching at the Arcola bridge. This account is the only public record of it anywhere. It helps to be a state official in the case of a lynching as the whole incident can be effectively closed. The Till case only became a lynching after so many lawyers, judges and officials rushed forward to offer their free services to the murderers. (However, a recent investigator has learned that many persons attended the murder of Till and that would indicate it was a lynching.) Click to see denial by Alice Mathews.

MISSISSIPPI MENTORING PROGRAM

The Alexanders were the pillar of the community: the wealthiest in it (except for the combined Woodses) and the most respected. Every year Mr. Alexander and his wife Ruthie would address the assembled student body in the auditorium of our school to relate their histories of lynching black people and to exhort the school children to follow in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan/Baptist church. Their lecture was attended with great ceremony. First, it was announced over the Public Address system that all students from the 9th to the 12th grade were to proceed to the auditorium. Boys and girls alike slowly filed in to take their seats in that large hall. When we had quieted down, the lights were dimmed and slowly the purple curtains were drawn open to reveal Mr. and Mrs. Alexander on the stage. Mrs. Alexander would take the podium first to relate how they captured a black man, allegedly having stolen a necklace from a store in town. She also said that it was quickly determined (without the benefit of trial or arraignment of course) that the man's wife had taken part in the crime by distracting the store keeper's attention. Mrs. Alexander said that a cage was constructed on the outskirts of town into which the man and his wife were placed. She said that white people came by for three days to torture the couple, burning them with faggots and jabbing them with sticks. She said that at the end of the third day, the cage was doused with coal oil then ignited and the couple was burned alive.  I shall never forget the satisfied smile on that woman's face as she related how the couple cried, shrieked and pleaded for mercy when the flames reached their flesh. With the mention of each atrocity, Mr. Alexander who was sitting on a stool beside her, would swell up his chest a little more or raise his head a little higher. He was saying, not in words, but in body language that he took part in those murders.

The Klansmen were infected with the dualism that was first established in their favorite text: the Gospel according to John the Baptist. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God..." Mr. Alexander did not express himself in using his tongue or larnyx or lips to brag how he had murdered those two persons, believing that by not using such means he could not be held accountable for his crimes. Whether one admits to a crime either by the use of speech or by use of a writing or by nodded assents, or by a sly smirk, he has still admitted his guilt in committing said crime. There is no deus ex machina. Mr. Alexander apparently believed that so long as he did not mouth the words, "I am the one who burned those people alive" he could not be held accountable for his actions. A few years later Byron Dela Beckwith used the same tactic in bragging all over the state of having murdered Medgar Evers; he boasted endlessly how he shot Medgar in the back but was always careful or not so careful not to put his admission in direct words. In 1965 my roommate at Delta State College at Cleveland, Mississippi went to a rally for Beckwith and returned as white as a sheet. When asked what happened the Ohioan gasped out, "My God! He publicly admitted killing Medgar Evers! What kind of people are you?" The rationale behind this excuse is that human speech as perceived by John the Baptist is postulated as the human soul itself and any other attempt to interpret meanings must be invalid.

Mr. Alexander himself would then take the podium to relate how other black people were murdered at what was called "Free Nigger Bridge". In Washington County there is a bridge across Deer Creek that leads to the hamlet of Murphy, via the Murphy Road where black people were lynched. There were many roads, bridges and bayous similarly prefixed and they can be found on official state and county maps printed in the 1950s and 1960s. Mr. Alexander said that the one to be executed had a rope tied around his neck and the other end tied to the bridge railing. He said that their victim was then thrown over the railing. He said that a number of the town’s white citizens, armed with rifles, lined the creek banks and would then shoot the victim. The purpose of this ritual was to involve so many people in the killing that it would be impossible to prosecute anyone for who could say whether he died by the gun or the rope or which bullet killed him? The last time that lecture was delivered to us was in my fourteenth year. For whatever reason, the difference between right and wrong suddenly became crystal clear. The Alexanders appeared as criminals...not good citizens and their entire lives appeared as despicable. At the end of that lecture I ran out of that room, tore off my favorite shirt and hid it in the bushes. What if they had inflicted their atrocities on myself? How would I have felt? The Alexanders gave me the nastiest feeling that I had ever experienced. It was like being dipped into a sewage lagoon. With such hoodlums as the Alexanders being held up to us by the Mississippi Department of Education as the highest role models to emulate, it is a wonder that any of us are sane.

The Klan had the policy of delivering that same message to white school children all over the state, but they divided it up into messages designed for separate segments of children. In later years it was the White Citizen's Councils who controlled that 'mentoring' program but the focus was slightly different. Only the most astute expert could discern any difference between the Ku Klux Klan and the state-supported White Citizens Councils as in most cases there was no difference at all. In today's schools it is the same old Baptist preachers who are running the mentoring programs in white schools.

What is even more outrageous than the Baptist mentoring of murder and an absolute disregard for black people to the children of the white schools, was their control of the black schools.  While the white school was at least physically designed to be able to impart the semblance of an education, the black school, in contrast, appeared to be some sort of a warehouse.  It had no playground equipment, no shade trees, no room for activities or  sports, no gymnasium.  It looked like a medium security prison set in a cotton field and surrounded with barbed wire; the only visible plumbing was a ditch along the front.  This was all justified under the program of "separate but equal".

Most appalling of all is that Baptists took it upon themselves to indoctrinate a few select black children with the same perverted theology. Click to read the account of Dr. Delmar Sanders who was subjected to the white Baptist/KKK program.

It is not religion that schools need to teach: there is no future in having a fine religious education.  It will not make anyone a better person.  Schools need to teach physics, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, literature, art,  and computers in order to create children who can find good jobs, build character, be an asset to everyone and enjoy the good life.

IDIOT

Houston Tyler, Mr. Alexander's dozer operator, was one of the townsmen who participated in the murders of black people at Free Nigger Bridge. Houston later tried to untangle a winch line on Tom Bueker's Caterpillar D8 bulldozer while the engine was running and the winch was still in gear. A steel sliver from the wire rope snagged his hand and pulled it around the spool. When he tried to grab one hand with the other, the winch pulled both hands around the spool and cut off 9 fingers. I helped pick up his fingers and we put them in a jar of formaldehyde and gave them to him after his release from the hospital. Thereafter Houston was known as "Nub" Tyler. Idiot.

CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS

The Congress of Racial Equality sent two white civil rights workers to our town in June of 1964. One was a Charles Carpenter from Wyoming. They were such friendly and well-educated boys only a couple years older than myself, and it was an honor to help them in their activities of leafleting, talking to people and in their demonstrations. In truth, it was black people who fought and gained their civil rights...there was very little that white civil rights workers could do. About the only thing we could do was to be polite, friendly, respectful and try to persuade white people not to kill them. The two civil rights workers were provided with lodging by a black lady in her own home, and for white people to live in a black home was regarded as one of the greatest of all imaginable crimes. The Mayor of Hollandale, J. W. Fore, approached the two boys and advised them that "you cannot live in the Negro section of town and register voters". (Source: Len Holt, The Summer That Didn't End: The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of 1964)

MRS. DAISY SAVAGE

The two civil rights workers served out their 3 month stint, then escaped Mississippi but the the black lady who befriended them had no such luck. In May of 1973 Mayor Fore and 4 other men caught Mrs. Daisy Savage and her 11 year old grandson fishing near Steele Bayou at the Yazoo Wildlife Refuge, a few miles outside of town. They stoned both of them to death with the rip rap limestone chunks that lined the banks, stuffed their bodies back into their car then pushed it into the bayou. No one was ever charged with these murders. This is the only public record that exists of it. Daisy was the finest and bravest woman in the entire town. She makes everyone else look like worms squirming in slime. Her murder at the hands of those nauseating criminals is a permanent blot on the character of every white person in Mississippi (including myself, which I resent) and especially all white officials. Her relations still live there, in a state of sorrow, bereavement, fear, and confusion desperately seeking some kind of closure to that miserable chapter in their lives. Some of the murderers who killed her are still walking the streets in blithe ecstasy. There seems little hope that anyone will ever do anything to apologize for or rectify what those sub-humans did to her.

Mayor Fore was also an accomplished arsonist. He owned the only ice plant in Hollandale and ice was a new-found and valuable commodity in the hot Mississippi Delta. He burned that ice plant down, collected on the insurance and then started an ice-plant in nearby Glen Allen which he also burned down for the insurance. He then opened a third ice-plant which he also burned down and collected more insurance. After that, Mayor Fore could buy no more ice-plant insurance.

Mayor Fore was always detectable by sound, if not by sight, as his voice rang out above all others when they sang Bringing in the Sheaves in the choir at the First Baptist Church.

A LYNCH MOB

The two civil rights workers left our town in August of 1964, having completed their three month stint in Mississippi as did most of the others who came here to help us. After they were gone, black people announced that they would integrate all theatres in the state on such and such a day. Prior to that time, movie theatres were rigidly segregated: black people were required to sit in a balcony, entirely apart from whites. On that day black people announced all over the state that theatres would be integrated. Of course no white people attended that movie. The least I could do was to go with them also...otherwise the theatre would not really have been integrated. The hope was that the Klansmen would not attack those children if I were there to witness against them.  About 10 or 12 black kids showed up. The street was blocked by Mr. Alexander and his Klansmen...carrying ropes, shotguns, swords, whips, chains, pistols, knives, axe handles and so forth .It was a lynch mob, as ugly a thing as can be witnessed. Those black kids were the bravest people I have ever seen too, defiant: they walked right through the middle of those hoodlums to demand their seats in the theatre. If a single one of those kids had made the slightest misstep or stumble, the Klansmen would have torn them apart with all the ferocity with a pack of wild hogs. To this day I cannot remember what the movie was about. When the movie was over, the owner apologetically offered to refund my 35 cents for having had to sit with Negoes in the theater but I told him it was a great movie and well worth the 35 cents. There is no depth to the ignorance which white men can embrace.

The next morning about 5:00 AM noises awoke me and outside the bedroom window my dog was nuzzling thru some garbage. I ran outside to find 3 sacks of garbage on our front lawn and a small wooden cross about two feet tall, still smoldering and smelling of lighter fluid. After searching thru all the garbage I found a light bill with a name on it. Two of our local Klansmen, Wayne Upchurch and his cousin Scott Bowlin, had dumped their garbage there as a warning to me. I took their cross, split it into several pieces and made a foot scraper out of it. I knew who they were and later told them that my dog ate their garbage and that it made him sick and asked them not to do that again and that I made a foot scraper out of their cross and that I used it to wipe the dung off my shoes. Scott Bowlin's father, Jack Bowlin, was one of the Klansmen who helped Arcola Chief-of-Police Ace Matthews kidnap and lynch the three black people at the Arcola bridge. All the Upchurches and Bowlins were in the Ku Klux Klan/Baptist church.

It was almost impossible for any civil rights worker to drive a vehicle in Mississippi: to do so put him at the mercy of every hoodlum with a tin star and a .38 caliber pistol. We were pulled over and jailed on the slightest excuse, real or not. In the case of civil rights workers, such as in the case of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were murdered only Schwerner was driving the vehicle but all three were arrested for speeding. In the fall of 1968 I became field co-ordinator of the Head Start program in Washington County. At the end of that first day of work, I was stopped by two Greenville police officers who searched me, searched my car, looked under the hood and in the trunk, examined my driver's license, car insurance and ownership papers. They could find nothing wrong and eventually crawled under the car to continue their search. One officer finally emerged, claiming that there was a pin hole in the muffler and advised me that it was against the law to drive a vehicle with a pin hole in the muffler. They then arrested, hand-cuffed, jailed me over-night and brought me to court the next day to fine me $110 for the alleged pin hole in the muffler. There was no such pin hole. A few days later my insurance company canceled my insurance. Courts in Mississippi had but small relationship to the principles of law and anyone who tries to defend himself will only find a vendetta laid against himself. Most jurisprudential scholars regard the system of American law as an adversarial system but in Mississippi anyone who attempts to be an adversary in court is likely to have another charge being suggested against himself: that of being adversarial. It was equally dangerous to expose oneself after dark (and still is). About a week after that incident, I walked from my home to the Coke machine at King's Daughter's Hospital (where I was born) two blocks away. Again Greenville police arrested me and charged me with vagrancy as it was after dark and I only had pocket change with me. Such injustices occurred by the millions and it makes little if any sense to even mention them in consideration of the infinitely far graver crimes carried out by the State of Mississippi. Many times judges did not even report such trials or fines but only put the money in their own pockets then forgot about it.

JURISPRUDENCE

In the State of Mississippi civil rights workers were the last ones entitled to civil rights. A few cases made their way to the Federal District courts after several millions of dollars were expended but the average person could expect no fairness from State courts at all. Judges and courts act more as prosecutors rather than as neutral arbitrators between the state and its citizens, (cf., McMillen: Dark Journey). Contrary to the American tradition of a separation between the executive branch, the judicial branch and the legislative branch, all three branches in Mississippi operate as a single unified entity.

On another occasion Eddie Keith, a Constable in Washington County drove by me and called for me to come over. When I did he pulled out his pistol, aimed it directly into my chest and shot me six times. He roared with laughter, "Haw, haw haw! I'll bet that scared you didn't it!" It was only a .22 caliber pistol loaded with blanks. I had known Eddie since we were in grade school together. His uncle, Bennie Keith, was also a Klansman and Deputy Sheriff who attended the Klan meetings at the Alexander home. Eddie's father, Edwin Keith, was also a Klansman and the foreman of Mr. Alexander's plantation. He went home one night in a drunken rage and made the fatal mistake of deciding to beat his wife, Janey Keith, one more time. Mrs. Keith picked up his own 12 gauge pump shotgun and bi-sected him at the midriff. Mrs. Keith was not even arrested, much less charged, as everyone knew it was justifiable homicide. Edwin Keith also participated in the lynchings of black people at Free Nigger Bridge. All the Keiths were in the Baptist church and the Ku Klux Klan.

THE BAPTIST CHURCH

The hierarchy of the Ku Klux Klan was drawn exclusively from the hierarchy of the white Southern Baptist church. There were no Catholics, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses in the Klan. There were a few Methodists in their ranks but their Kleagles, Exalted Cyclopses, Grand Wizards, etc., were all deacons, Sunday school teachers, ministers and preachers of that violent religion. The Klan was the enforcement wing of that white Southern Baptist church. Click to view a Klansman/Baptist killer.  (After the above was written, an article appeared in the local newspapers in which the actual Klan/Baptist organizer of the murders was named.  Click to read more about the preacher who carried out that murder.) 

They were hardly distinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists and their enforcement wing Al Qaeda. Persons suspected of atheism were regarded as double-criminals. Nearly every lawyer, judge and bailiff in the state was a contributor to or member of the Ku Klux Klan as the Klansmen regarded jurisprudence as their exclusive domain. Law degrees and judgeships were handed out like candy to the most vicious and ignorant louts that could be found, which is how Mr. Alexander came to obtain his law degree as law for the Klansmen was only a case study of how to evade Federal law.

I know the Klansmen. I know their habits, their attitudes, their personality traits, their ideology and their speech. I know the spectre of a Klansman. I know the screech of a Klansman. I know the stench of a Klansman. Many people think of racism whenever they hear the word Klansman but they were far more than just racists: their hatred of women was almost as great as their hatred of black people. If you ever see a woman in Mississippi who has a black eye or bruises on her arms or scratches on her face or missing teeth or unexplained absences at work or hear her husband yell at her in public...you can mark it down that woman is married to a Klansman. They beat the hell out of their wives. Where ever you find a strong Ku Klux Klan, you will also find a house of prostitution just around the corner. Although they have no respect for women whatsoever they will quickly raise a lynch party for any outsider even slightly suspected of looking at one of their white women.

SCHOOL HOUSE MURDERS

The 1990s saw a plague of school house killings all over the country. One was at Pearl, Mississippi a town adjacent to the state capital at Jackson. The killing spree began when one white teenager killed his own mother by slitting her throat with a butcher knife as she lay sleeping in bed. He and another boy went on to kill several girls at the local high school. No ordinary man could kill his own mother with the possible exception of a Klansmen. The teenagers operated under a white gang which they called the "Kroth". Newspapers speculated endlessly about the meaning of the term but not a single one of had the courage to publish the truth. The term "Kroth" is only an old-time Klan word, meaning "Wroth of the Klan". Somewhere in those boys' back ground lies either a Klansman or a Baptist preacher acting as a personal mentor to them. Once again, the Ku Klux Klan escaped all public censure for infecting children with their nauseating philosophy of hate and violence.

In Oregon another high school student started out his day by killing both his parents before attacking school children. The boy's parents had given him the name Kipland K. Kinkel; no one would name his own son so that he might sign his name with the initials KKK, except a Klansman. The parents likewise named their son's sister with the same initials: KKK: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." Persons who investigate such matters should bear these facts in mind when looking at such cases. Educators who wish to prevent such atrocities should bear these facts in mind also. It may be possible to locate these individuals and get them counseling before they erupt into such sprees of deadly violence.

The Klansmen were also the world's biggest deadbeats. All of them fed at the government trough whenever they could squeeze in,  all the while cursing the government loudly between mouthfuls. They always had their hand out for something free and those who did not give it them were targeted for retaliation. Every year the Klan would make the rounds of all the business owners in our town asking for a 'donation'. Those who did not pay would soon find themselves out of business. When they came to the local TV/radio man asking for their annual contribution he refused to give them anything. Chuck Sudduth had been a Master Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, attended their radio school at Quantico, Virginia and become an electronics wizard...the only one in town. Any other person would have been run out of town but they could hardly afford to run off the only one who could repair their TVs and electronics. Or maybe they were afraid to tangle with a US Marine. The White Citizen Councils that were established in the 1960s also had the same policy of demanding an annual 'donation' from business owners but Chuck refused to give them anything either. Their so-called 'donations' were nothing less than out-and-out extortion demands.  Trying to extort anything from a US Marine is a waste of time. Chuck Sudduth was my father.

Mr. Dill Pickles was flown to New York City to appear on the TV show I've Got A Secret in 1963 and his secret was that his real name was Dill Pickles and that he owned Pickles Grocery Store in our town as well as a restaurant next door. Mr. Pickles was so pickled that he could hardly sit in his chair and answer questions from the panel. Our townspeople had a great laugh as we all knew what the problem was. Black people were allowed to spend their money in his grocery but were not allowed entrance to his restaurant. Our two civil rights workers targeted his store, handing out leaflets to black customers suggesting that they shop else where unless Mr. Pickles let them into his restaurant also. (Mr. Pickles was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan/Baptist church.) My first act as a civil rights worker was to help them in that project by handing out leaflets. A delegation of Klan ladies appeared at our home that same afternoon to bawl and demand of my mother that she dissuade me from those activities.

My mother never gave me but one licking: after I used some derogatory words in reference to black people she broke off a switch from a weeping willow tree and made me weeping too.  Kathy Sudduth was also a member of the United States Marine Corps in WWII, attended their radio school; one of the very few women to have served in that branch of service. She told the Klan women that I was her son and that she would always back me up no matter what.

MURDERS IN FLOWOOD

In the 1990s I lived in the Town of Flowood, Mississippi, a suburb of Jackson, totally dominated by the Ku Klux Klan and the Flowood First Baptist Church. Flowood was the epicenter of that phenomenon known as the "white flight" from the City of Jackson. No black person had ever been elected to office in Flowood (the current home of Attorney General Mike Moore.) All elected officials in Flowood ran on the platform of being a member of such and such a Baptist church. At the time I owned a construction business and had several dump trucks, bulldozer, backhoe etc.

Myself and my partner (who just happened to be black) started the business 5 years previously.  In addition to all its other stellar qualities of racism, sexism, illiteracy, gratuitous violence, extortion and murder the Klansmen were also notoriously anti-business.  In 5 years time we had 4 dump trucks, the only 60 foot bucket truck in town, a knuckle boom log loader truck, stump grinder, brush chipper, little bulldozer, backhoe, John Deere tractor, 2 A-frame winch trucks and scads of other equipment and machinery.  Much of our equipment was built by ourselves, using nothing more than a cracker-box welder, cutting torch and drill press.  We were at the verge of building a 60 foot truck mounted hydraulic crane that could be operated by remote control, for use in dangerous conditions.  We had more equipment than all our competitors combined.  We offered better pay and more benefits than anyone else.  The Klan works over-time to keep black people from having good, steady jobs with a livable income. The Ku Klux Klan demolished that enterprise after they saw a black man was so brilliant as to have been a partner to those efforts.

But what incensed the Flowood Klansmen the most was that my partner began dating a white woman. Dr. Susan Marie Weill, a long-term anti-racist, anti-sexist social activist in Mississippi established a close relationship with Ben Jackson.  The Klansmen were enraged, and threatened both of them with the same lurid predictions of their own death that they had already presented to myself.  Ben took off for Chicago and Ms. Weill headed for California, leaving me to fight the Flowood Klan all by myself, a move that was not appreciated.  Click to view Professor Weill's own web log.

If Henry Ford, Bill Gates or the Wright brothers had tried to start their respective businesses in Mississippi, we would all still be riding mules, writing letters and flapping our arms in a fantasia of flight.

The Klansmen thought nothing of asking "Kin we borry your dozer for an hour or two?" A 100 horse power machine in the hands of an unsupervised idiot is a disaster about to happen: (HELL NO! Go ask the US Army if they will loan you an Abrams tank for an hour or two!) but if you did not give it them, they would only come back later and take it when no one was around. Later they demanded my presence at a meeting at Two for Dinner Dating Service (their own personal brothel) and demanded the use of the dozer for one day in exchange for a membership to their hunting club. Same old deadbeats still with their hand out-stretched, asking for their annual donation.

Klansmen in Flowood congregated at the Big Woods Hunting Club where they pursued what Klansmen always do: run rabbits, spot light deer, litter the woods with empty beer cans and rusted out stolen cars, trail their coon hounds at night, shoot their machine guns, gig frogs, exterminate snakes, birds and turtles, distill whiskey and dynamite fish. They also carried out lynchings of black people whom they had captured. As two Flowood Klansmen related to me, after killing their victims, they then dismembered the bodies and hid the parts in the swamps and stuffed them in alligator holes. In the early 1990s they captured a black man and lynched him in the backwoods of their Klub. Their hunting club was 'whites only' and no black person in his right mind would ever have ventured onto the Big Woods Hunting Klub Kamp. Their Klan leader, "Red" Miller turned the corpse over to Flowood Chief of Police Gary Rhoads, claiming that he "found" the body and secure in the knowledge that nothing would ever be done about the murder. No self-respecting Klansman would ever have had the decency to turn in the body of a black man to any legitimate law enforcement officer. More likely he would only have used it for target practice. Chief Rhoads made no investigation of Miller at all even though every criminology text ever written would have pointed directly to Miller as the primary suspect. According to statistics compiled by the FBI, of the persons who claim to have 'found' a corpse, 52% took part in making it a corpse.  Where does a swamp rat  such as Miller acquire such worship, power, prestige and admiration that he can kill anyone he pleases and walk away with it scot-free?   There can be only one reason why Chief Rhoads made no investigation of Miller: he already knew who carried it out. Some of the Flowood Klansmen were members of the Flowood First Baptist Church as were Mayor Flynnt and his son-in-law Chief Rhoads. Church, State and Klan were indissolubly welded together in the Town of Flowood as they are in many other Mississippi cities.

In 1990 there were 185 members in the Big Woods Hunting Club: not all of them were Klansmen but the majority were.  Klansmen will sometimes admit non-Klansmen into their social functions, provided that they pay cash up front. They were armed with everything from muzzle loaders to M14s, M16s, AK47s, and SKSs with 30 round clips. Flowood at that time had about 285 residents and 41 full time police officers (40 white and 1 black).  The one black officer was a hero to the  white Flowoodians as he had killed his own father by shooting him 17 times with a .22 caliber automatic rifle, just the sort of  person that Mayor Flynnt and the Klansmen adored when they were forced to integrate. Police departments in Klan controlled cities are little more than Public Welfare for otherwise unskilled, unemployable Klansmen.

The Klansmen in Flowood also laid plans to kill my innocent self. Klansmen and Flowood police began to circle my house as though they were Indians attacking a wagon train.  That was the end of that business.  I sold my equipment for half its value, packed up my possessions and scrammed from that place.  My partner received the same treatment, packed up his possessions and fled to Chicago.  As the Klansmen wandered the woods all around my home, it was too dangerous to stay there any longer.   Rankin County courts do not allow civil rights advocates to submit complaints against government officials but the Internet does. Click to read more about the Klan in Flowood.

Once I had a Flowood Klansman as an employee who had no front teeth. When asked what happened to his teeth and he replied, "Daddy knocked 'um out wif' a stick of firewood." When asked why he replied, "His daddy knocked hisn out and he wanted me to know how it felt to have no front teef'."

(My telephone number is unlisted:   otherwise Klansmen amuse themselves all night long with sending me lurid threats of impending death.  But in Mississippi all police officials have instant,  unlimited access to all unlisted telephone numbers, numbers called out and all in-coming numbers.  After the above segment was added, a caller purporting to represent Mayor Rhoads, instructed me to delete the segment Murders in Flowood or Mayor Rhoads would proceed to file lawsuit and seize the tiny plot of land that I own in that city.  The caller further quoted from my previous lines: "Klansmen have many more ways of killing than by throwing someone off a country bridge."  He then ominously added, "They have ways of killing that you don't even know about." Apparently, the only persons in Mississippi who can make anonymous death threats to unlisted phone numbers are police officials.)

ORGANIZED CRIME

The Klansmen were all expert moonshiners and bootleggers...and produced more illicit whiskey than all the major distilleries put together. It was the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Baptist Church who in the 1920s disfigured the simple beauty of the US Constitution with their 18th amendment (Prohibition) the only amendment that ever had to be repealed by a second amendment. (Source: David Chalmers, HOODED AMERICANISM: A History of the Ku Klux Klan) They stayed drunk 6 days a week, went to their Baptist revivals on Sunday to roll on the floor, "get religion" and to swear off alcohol forever, then were right back at it again on Monday morning. Prohibition for the Klansmen was only a method of eliminating their competition from the commercial distilleries. Such organizations as MADD and SADD in Mississippi today are run neither by mothers nor students but by Baptist preachers scamming millions of dollars from government, industry and citizens by preying upon the grief and misfortunes of others. Click to view a Klan demonstration  Some authorities claim that the largest cash crop in Mississippi today is marijuana production and one can believe that these operations are carried out by Klansmen. They are the only ones with the land resources, agricultural and distribution expertise as well as the knowledge of who to bribe and who not to bribe. Mississippi police officials frequently intercept South Americans smuggling marijuana thru the state but they NEVER apprehend local growers of the state's largest cash crop. Terrorists, whether they live in Peru, Libya, Afghanistan or Mississippi, always derive a substantial part of their income from illicit activities Click for more on Klan drug dealers. Once a person decides to break such a law as a law against murder, then to that person all other crimes become insignificant.

Between the ages of 18 and 24 (1964 and 1969) I worked in the civil rights movement in Washington County: in Arcola, in Hollandale, in Greenville, in Tribett and in Leland. The Klansmen often discussed myself at their meetings and several times laid plans to kill myself. Among other things that they discussed at their meetings, there was one plan to kidnap, then tar and feather me and chain me naked to a light post in the middle of town on a Sunday morning.  (That would have been embarrassing).

They also planned on several occasions to shoot me from ambush with a .44-40 caliber, 1873 Winchester rifle. Davis Jones was the one who made that offer but it was hard to take seriously as the .44-40 has a trajectory like a lead balloon. I played with his kid brothers as a child but he had over 150 deer skins tacked onto the inside walls of his garage. His older brother Magruder Jones produced the finest moonshine whiskey that ever crossed the human palate. Unknown to the Klansmen, they had one traitor in their midst, a boyhood friend, who kept me informed of their intentions, and for that he has my eternal gratitude.

Davis Jones later seized one of the CORE civil rights workers at Hollandale and carried him to a deserted barn where Klansmen forced him to drink moonshine whiskey until he was in a stupor and then tried to have him arrested by the police. His younger brother, Vance Jones, ran over one of the civil rights workers as he was walking down highway 61. (Vance Jones stole his brother's .44-40 Winchester and sold it to me for $14.00 which I promptly sold to a gun collector for $20.00, thereby not only eliminating the threat, but earning a $6.00 profit.)  Their father, Merlin Jones, was one of the primary Klan enforcers in the town. Whenever the Klan had a black person they wished to punish without actually killing him, they would take him to Merlin Jones who would beat him nearly to death with a black leather bull whip.

PROHIBITION

Merlin Jones was also the chief bootlegger in town and openly supplied both moonshine and name brand whiskey to the town's thirsty citizens as well as to two black juke joints across the tracks. Prohibition was still the law in Mississippi but that made no difference whatsoever. Law in Mississippi is a joke, something like a two-headed chicken, only a thing with which to astonish the ignorant. Merlin had a whiskey store/tavern on Highway 61 and he kept several illegal one-armed bandit slot machines in a back room also. Directly across the road he owned a diner and a run down motel consisting of about six rooms where he supplied both black and white prostitutes to the Klansmen and traveling salesmen. Organized crime was totally controlled by members of the Ku Klux Klan. All of the Joneses were members of the Ku Klux Klan and the First Baptist church. The niche occupied by the Mafia dons in New York and Chicago was the same niche occupied by Klan leaders in Mississippi but with a greater degree of malevolence and intolerance.  The Mafia was primarily concerned with their own members; Baptists tried to control everything from the flow of liquor to the thought patterns of the entire society.

The Klansmen were notoriously intolerant to anyone who would flaunt their social mores yet they themselves had not the least qualm of breaking them. The greatest of all the Baptists' taboos, sexual contact between white and black, was smirked at when it came to their own members breaking them. Merlin Jones had in addition to his white wife and white children, a second, black, wife by whom he had more children and openly divided his time between the two wives. Click to see a comment from one of the Jones children.

As the two civil rights workers were effectively banned from use of the public roads, they had to walk nearly every where they went. They made a pathetic yet brave spectacle, straggling along the sidewalks, hanging onto each other.

When I became field co-ordinator of the Head Start program in Washington County in 1968, there were 17 Head Start centers there, two of which were located at Hollandale. Part of the program was free dental care for our children, all of whom were black children. The only dentist in town was Dr. Kelly Drew Alexander Jr. (Yes, the only son of the Ku Klux Klan leader: Exalted Cyclops Kelly Drew Alexander Sr.) All our children went to Dr. Alexander's dental clinic. Dr. Alexander required our children to enter by the back door under a sign that read COLORED whereas white people entered by the front door. I informed Dr. Alexander that he must remove the sign and let my children to enter by the front door as well as all other black people. Dr. Alexander refused and I arranged to have our children bussed to a dentist in Leland. He was not pleased. Many Alexanders and their cousins the Treadways as well as our county supervisor Virgil Sandifer were members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Baptist church. Read more about other Alexander relatives below.  Click to read a denial from Dr. Kelly Drew Alexander, Jr.

INTEGRATION

When integration finally did come to our town’s school in 1965, only one little black girl was allowed into the first grade. (She was as cute as buttons in her starched white dress and the pride of their parents.) The school at Hollandale was no one-room school house but was actually quite large, well-built and well-equipped. It had several hundred students as it served so many kids from out-lying rural families. The school consisted of about 20 classrooms, offices for teachers, the principal and superintendent, a library, science labs and a large auditorium for plays, lectures and concerts and a beautiful gymnasium for basketball games and social events and was equipped with modern kitchens and a cafeteria. It also had a music conservatory with practice rooms for piano and organ at the rear of the gym. It was set on 10 acres of land surrounded by huge oak, cottonwood and pecan trees and had lots of playground equipment as well as a football field. It also had a great workshop for kids to study mechanics and machine tools.

The Klansmen were enraged at the entrance of the little black girl and Kelly Drew Alexander along with several prominent Baptist leaders bought the school from the state for a pittance, if anything at all and then closed it. Deacon Alexander caused dozens of teachers, administrators, secretaries, cooks, janitors and a host of suppliers to lose their jobs and effectively whacked off the educational process for all the town's children. They dismantled the school, brick by brick, dug up the foundations and plumbing, cut down the trees, ripped out the sidewalks and parking lots and turned the property back into a field which Mr. Alexander replanted in cotton: the ultimate insult to white people, black people, humanity, democracy, justice, freedom and goodwill.  The Baptists stole and divided between themselves all the pots and pans, food stocks, typewriters and business machines, toilets, machine shop equipment, athletic gear, the Public Address system that Chuck Sudduth installed for free, refrigerators, ovens, dishes, pictures, roofing tiles, furniture, lumber, bricks, pipes, machinery, books, piano, the Wurlitzer organ and all other musical instruments, plumbing, windows, doors, wiring, anything and everything of any possible value. There were also two homes for teachers across the street that the Klansmen/Baptists also looted and then dismantled. No Catholics,  Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses (and certainly not any black people) took part in the sacking of the school. The same thing happened all over Mississippi. Most of those schools, sorry as they were, had been built with Federal grants over the previous 30 years. White people were so abysmally ignorant that they would deny their own white children the fundamental rudiments of an education just to keep black children from getting any education at all. The school was never rebuilt. Education in the town remains as segregated in 2002 as it was in 1964. Click to view a Mississippi school.

State officials deemed the miniscule profit from 10 acres of cotton accruing to one greedy Baptist preacher as a greater value than the educational opportunity of 500 children.   Any person who would steal all educational opportunities for American children to grow into useful, productive assets for this nation and themselves; regarding them as worthy of nothing more than to hoe the weeds in his cotton fields, with the least possible expense to himself, deserves to be stood up before a brick wall facing a firing squad with no blind fold. 

Klansman David Holland attacked the girl's mother, Lavaree Jones, and attempted to kill her by ramming his truck into her car, pushing it nearly 50 yards. Mrs. Jones packed up her family and moved to Jackson, unable to stand the terrorism any longer. Mrs. Jones will never know how closely she came to sacrificing her life for the United States of America.  David Holland also had a stolen US Army .30 Browning machine gun that he used to terrorize other black people, aiming it at them and shooting around their homes at night.

With such blatant acts of thievery permitted by Mississippi government, it could be assumed that all acts of thievery which occur are only vagaries and none of them should be prosecuted.

INDOCTRINATION TODAY

Before the white Baptist churches attempt to dictate morality for the state's schoolchildren, they need to replace all the hundreds of public schools that they and the Klan looted and destroyed over the past 30 years and compensate all the thousands of teachers who lost their careers and jobs and then find some means to de-program the millions of school children that they indoctrinated with their philosophy of hate crime. 

In 1968 a dear friend showed me a letter written by Mr. Alexander. By mistake the letter had been missent and came to rest in another's mailbox. It is against the law to read another person's mail or to reveal the contents of it...but so what? Murder is also against the law and that never gave any hesitation to the Klansmen. In the letter to another Klansman in Greenville, Mr. Alexander related his annual drive for business contributions. It also contained information about the purchase of robes for his Klansmen. Some Klansmen bought their robes ready made from their headquarters but the poor ones only bought a pattern so their wives might stitch their robes at home. Mr. Alexander related that 635 persons had contributed to his Klavern, although a lesser number were actual members (400 plus). Those facts were cause for concern for I had no idea that there were so many of them. That fact meant that I was swimming in an ocean infested with Klansmen.

THE KLAN AND THE VIETNAM WAR

In his role as head of Washington County Draft Board local #82, Mr. Alexander was in a position to make life miserable for any one suspected of civil rights sympathies. Klansman Alexander never drafted any of the Klan/Baptist children; they all received permanent deferments from military service, despite their rabid support of the Vietnam War. The Klansmen were not even allowed into the US military as they were on the US Attorney General's subversives list. Being born into a Klan family was like being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth: they had all the advantages imaginable (provided they could keep their front teeth). No door was closed to the children of the Klan; no door was opened to those who opposed them. Mr. Alexander managed to usurp the power of the entire United States Department of Justice to the ends of the White Knights of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan and there was little that anyone could do about it. But he did conscript James Dickerson, David Sumrall, Bert Greer, Charles Johnson and myself with the firm intent of having us sent directly to the infantry to fight on the front lines of Vietnam and have us killed there. The worst of all possible military officers is one who selects his troops for a mission to deliberately have them killed. Such is the nature of the Ku Klux Klan. For the Klansmen, the Vietnam war was not a war against Communists but a war against civil rights sympathizers. Klansman Alexander also peddled military deferments for sexual favors. "One mother described how a board member (Mr. Alexander) had told her he could do something about her son's draft status if she went out on a date with him. She turned down his offer and her son was drafted." Source: James Dickerson; North to Canada, p.63.

The last time I saw attorney Kelly Drew Alexander was in 1968 when he summoned me to appear before himself at his office in the United States court house in Greenville to explain my opposition to the Vietnam War. By that time, I had known him since I was six years old, a period of 18 years. He was a short, pudgy man with a red face criss-crossed by blue veins running up his jowls and across his nose brought on by years of steadily nursing from a bottle of Old Crow whiskey. He often affected that ugly snarl with squinted eyes by which Klansmen caricature themselves in their papers and on their web sites. It was the strangest sensation to sit across from him at his desk, knowing full well that he was a serial killer, a mass murderer and that he would have thought nothing of ordering his henchmen to slip a rope around my own neck to throw me off some lonely country bridge. For every question he asked, I responded with a question about John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell or some other philosopher. Klansman Alexander appeared to be totally uneducated as he could answer none of my questions. There is nothing in this world that could have made me serve anyone or anything connected to the Ku Klux Klan.

All the persons who refused to be drafted into military service by Klansman Alexander were prosecuted by another Klansman. US Attorney Martin Andersen Kilpatrick, the only son of the Klan Kleagle Lloyd Kilpatrick, handled all the indictment proceedings for the US Department of Justice. Martin was the person who showed me the stick that his father wielded at the Klan meetings and explained its functions to me. Martin Kilpatrick has prospered and has his own lawyer’s business today but those whose lives he mangled live at or near poverty. Such persons who were members or associates of the Klan could easily be excused for their activities…but those of them who knew of, yet took no action whatsoever to reveal them, remain forever cowards and criminals. 

Mr. Alexander's nephew, Major Treadway and I often played together as adolescents and he also visited the Klan Klubhouse at the Alexander home. Klansman Alexander and Attorney Kilpatrick had already sentenced my courageous friend, Bert Greer to 5 years in prison for his heroic defiance of the Ku Klux Klan.  Facing the prospect of going to court against two Klansmen/Baptists at once (Alexander and Kilpatrick) as a criminal syndicate, there was little to do but get out of their way. It is hard to blame the US government as Klansmen were sworn to infiltrate and over-throw the government of these United States by any means to be found. Mr. Treadway will be able to verify everything that I have written about his uncle, Klan leader Alexander.  I wonder what sentiments those two Klansmen felt as they watched FBI agents wading up to their necks in Mississippi swamps searching for the bodies of Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman but finding only the half-rotted, indistinguishable corpses of black men murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.  Did they feel glee?  Remorse? A desire to join in the search or volunteer information?  Click to view Mr. Treadway's comments.

That was the year that I and millions of others nearly lost our faith in the United States of America; for me almost but not quite. My own education had been bestowed upon me by two naval officers at Jefferson Military College, Vice Admiral Aaron Stanton Merrill and Rear Admiral Marcy Matthias Dupre, both of whom were genuine, in-the-flesh military officers. They would have persecuted, prosecuted and imprisoned the Klansmen for life had they known what they was doing. My reflections on the policies of Jefferson Military College were the only things that kept hope alive in me.

There is no claim that these activities have ceased. On the contrary, they have continued throughout the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the new millenium. They have been taken over by other agencies and departments, slightly abated perhaps and definitely more discreet. The killings and lynchings continue, not in the old ways but in slightly newer, more sophisticated ways. Click to read how Klansmen carry out their lynchings in 2002. Klansmen and their sycophants in the Mississippi government have far many more ways of killing society's dissidents than lynching them from a bridge in the middle of a rustic town. But they are just as deadly and leave family members and society just as ruined, devastated, frightened and isolated.

Kelly Drew Alexander, Lloyd Kilpatrick, J. W. Fore, Eddie Keith, Merlin Jones, Ace Matthews and Jack Bowlin escaped justice. So did all the other Klan hoodlums who carried out their policies. Others have arisen to take their places. Most died at home of old age. I apologize to the government and to the people of the United States of America that these memories and knowledge are with me.  I was not able to bring these Nazified Klan terrorists to the halls of justice. The entire legal system was completely dominated by them (they were the legal system) and no one could touch them. I would have done anything in my power to have jailed them forever. They drove me out of Mississippi but that is no one's fault but my own. I was a coward. The Jehovah's Witness boy, Bert Greer, was not a coward. When Mr. Alexander conscripted him, he refused to appear, then refused to attend his own arraignment and trial and then stood up to a five year prison sentence handed down upon himself. His father committed suicide with a 12 gauge shotgun held under his chin and Bert stood up to that also. I should have stayed and fought them down to the last man standing. But I am not a coward anymore The hoodlums of the Ku Klux Klan/Southern Baptist Church/State of Mississippi will never run me out of anywhere again.

BAPTIST PREACHERS SCAMMING IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

At the same time that white Mississippi Baptists were using Attorney General Mike Moore to rake in billions of $$ for their mentoring programs they were also scamming on a second front.  Bernie Ebbers as Chief Executive Officer of World Com/MCI led a major US corporation into the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history.  Ebbers swindled over $12 billion from stockholders, clients, competing firms, employees, pensioners and even unsuspecting Internet passers-by.  The $12 billion dollar figure was only the tip of the iceberg, as that was only the amount that World Com/MCI could not repay.  Stockholders have no legal claim on the monies they lost as all stock is always bought as a gamble.  The loss to American stockholders is estimated to be between $180 and 200 billion.  Ebbers, a graduate of Mississippi Baptist College in Clinton, Mississippi channeled billions to his Baptist buddies, Baptist schools, Baptist preachers, Baptist lawyers, Baptist churches and Mississippi Baptist College.  No Catholics, Jews nor Jehovah's Witnesses received a penny from Ebbers.  It was Attorney General Mike Moore's duty to have prosecuted Ebbers and his Baptist cohorts, but it seems that task has been left to Federal prosecutors: in Mississippi Baptists are sacrosanct.  They believe themselves incapable of doing wrong.

Not a peep came from Moore.

As of this day, no Baptist preacher or church has volunteered to return any of the billions that they received from that corporate boondoggle.  The money was squandered on their magnificent churches, homes, exotic cars, Baptist lawyers, plush living and (believe it or not) even prostitutes supplied by Two for Dinner Dating Service from the Town of Flowood to the President of Mississippi Baptist College.  The rapacious greed of Ebbers and his Baptist cohorts became so obvious that even a prominent Baptist ethics review board saw fit to condemn them in the following article.  Click to see how Baptist preachers were scamming from American stock holders.  (And by the way, let's all thank the courageous, disciplined and far-sighted Baptist author of this article.  I'll kneel down in his church any time he asks me.)

After Ebbers was convicted but before he was sentenced, Baptists rushed to his defense.  Ebbers' wife, Kirstie Ebbers and head of the Mississippi Baptist Convention pleaded for leniency to the judge "Not because of the loss of power and prestige, but because of the feeling that he had failed a lot of people who had counted on him."

Jim Futral, executive director of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, wrote: "He has been generous and quietly helpful behind the scenes to make a difference in thousands of lives...The mission work, the child-care services and the Christian institutions of higher learning have all been recipients of his generosity with no request or thought of personal gain."  The Reverend Futral does not seem to be aware that the billions Bernie gave away was not his money to give; it was the stock holders' money.

Robert Self, Ebbers' pastor, also pleaded for leniency: "The gift was always very private and never used in any attempt to lift his position in the community."

Mississippi Baptist College (now called Mississippi College, to comply with federal regulations)  in the City of Clinton is the showcase of that city and city government leans over backwards to please the Baptists in any manner it can.  The City of Clinton even built a magnificent boulevard leading  to Ebber's World Com/MCI that the public could not use.   Black people who are caught driving thru the City of Clinton without their papers in order (shadows of Hitler's Germany) are casually fined hundreds of dollars and sentenced to work for weeks on road gangs, picking up garbage in front of the Clinton/Bernie Ebbers' Baptist church.  Baptists themselves are too lazy to pick up their own garbage or soil their hands with demeaning labor.  Virtual slavery provided courtesy of the State of Mississippi.

In 1950s Mississippi, Baptist churches and the Klan would often use local police to set up roadblocks in front of their churches to stop motorists and force them to attend a sermon then extort a contribution. Those who were Baptists were granted free passage but those who were not and who refused were often jailed on some pretext.  The practice has been outlawed by Federal courts but that makes little difference to the City of Clinton, as they still do it.

THE KLAN TODAY

With the elections of 1988, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, Mike Moore, promised that Mississippi would no longer be ruled by the Ku Klux Klan. Moore also promised to restore Prohibition to any county that desired it and to the entire state if possible.  He explained his policy by saying that the Repeal of Prohibition was not actually a repeal but only gave the states the ability to repeal it.  Otherwise the 18th Amendment was still a valid Amendment.  Moore was a ticking time-bomb that exploded upon being sworn into office: he turned the Ku Klux Klan loose on the people of the Mississippi. Killings, beatings and lynchings blossomed forth anew with all the ferocity that they entailed in the 1950s and '60s. The civil rights that so many brave people had given their lives and fortunes to establish dried up and blew out the window. Mississippi police officers will steal anything they can lay their hands on. Under Mike Moore as Attorney General, police were permitted and/or encouraged to steal, sabotage and destroy real estate, careers, family heirlooms, identities, businesses, cash monies, vehicles, jewelry, watches, firearms, equipment, tools, homes, electronics, buildings and ultimately, even human life: killing scores of innocent persons alongside the hysteria generated by his campaign to restore total Prohibition to the state. 

The infrastructure of the Ku Klux Klan was largely broken up by the FBI in the late 1970s and early 1980s (after the demise of J. Edgar Hoover) by their persistent prosecution of the murderers of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. The previous period that I had known so well is what historians now refer to as the "third" Klan existing from about 1955 to 1980. Click to read more about the "Second Klan, the era of its greatest power. What replaced that Klan is what is now called the "Fourth" Klan but during this transitional period some klaverns retain identities closer to the Third Klan than to the Fourth. Although the Klan does not now have the power that it once did, there are still many thousands of Klansmen and Klan sympathizers in the state. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists a total of 57 Klan Klaverns operating in the state and in fact there are far more than that. The Ku Klux Klan is no longer a unified, formal organization with a recognizable office or telephone number but it is still a powerful force. Klannery today is more like a bad attitude, and its members tend to congregate under the cloak of the hundreds of hunting clubs existent in the state, such as in the Town of Flowood. They no longer carry out their lynchings in public, but rest assured, they still carry them out.

CURRENT WEB SITES

Visit the site below for some terrific essays on racism in America.  The professors at this little school in Michigan have amassed a vast library on the history of racism in America.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University

Andrea Gibbs, a former deputy sheriff on the Mississippi gulf coast was one of the first persons to point out the violent trend of killings and beatings that began in the early 1990s.  Click the link below to read some of the crimes that she witnessed,

http://www.printz.usm.edu/features/3-21gibbs.html

For a photographic journal of lynching as it occurred throughout the United States click below.

http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/main.htm