NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8430

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Subject: NEWS: 24 Lynchings Fear in Miss./ww
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Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


                24 LYNCHINGS FEARED IN MISSISSIPPI

                          By Andy Stapp

Over the past three years, 22 Black people have died while in the
custody of Mississippi law enforcement officers. The Mississippi
Coalition for Justice, a grass-roots alliance of progressive
individuals and organizations, together with the relatives of the
victims, is now demanding an independent investigation into each
of the deaths.

"In Mississippi the killing of African Americans has been a state
ritual, a major social event, the thing to do," declared a recent
statement from the coalition.

The organization cited the case of 18-year-old Andre  Lamond
Jones, the son of well-known political activists from Jackson who
was discovered lifeless in his jail cell last summer. The
authorities claimed he hanged himself. An autopsy requested by
the family turned up evidence of murder.

Another example the group listed is the Oct. 9, 1990, hanging of
David Scott Campbell after he was arrested for disorderly conduct
and locked up by Neshoba County cops.

During a mysterious power failure in the jail around midnight,
the 21-year-old Campbell supposedly hit himself on the back of
his head (a bruise was visible there) and then hung himself with
his clothes. His clothes have since disappeared. Someone in the
sheriff's department then snatched his body and had it embalmed
before an autopsy could be ordered.

A thorough investigative report by the Neshoba NAACP noted that
at the time he was picked up by the police, Scott Campbell was
dating Nicki Griffin, the daughter of a white deputy sheriff in
neighboring Union County.

COALITION FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE

The Mississippi Coalition for Justice seeks "an independent
counsel to prosecute law enforcement officers involved in these
lynchings." It recalls that when the search was underway for "the
three civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman during
the `Freedom Summer 1964,' the bodies of nine African-Americans
were found in one river. Not much has changed in Mississippi. The
signs of discrimination have been removed, but the deaths
continue."

Indeed, from the 1960s to the present, many dozens of murders of
Mississippi Black people and some whites sympathetic to the cause
of equal rights have remained unresolved. The federal government
has the power to re-examine the evidence and bring the guilty to
justice. In a number of instances, the culprit's own boastful
confessions have been disregarded by prosecutors and juries.
Police officers are taken at their word, often despite clear-cut
proof of their lethal malfeasance and criminal wrongdoing.

CATALOG OF RACIST LYNCHINGS

Tuskegee University keeps a stark catalog of cases of racist
lynching over the years. Of the 4,709 lynchings recorded in 43
states, very few were punished. Mississippi heads the body count
with 581.

There's Herbert Lee, shot to death by E.H. Hurst, the Amite
County state representative. A farmer, Lee was running the local
voter registration drive when Hurst gunned him down. An Amite
coroner's jury declined to press charges. Despite repeated
threats, Louis Allen, a logger with a wife and three children,
testified against Hurst about what he saw on that fatal
afternoon. Then one day he opened his front door and took three
shotgun blasts in the head. Louis Allen's executioners were never
found.

Mack Parker, falsely accused of rape, was dragged from his prison
cell by eight masked white men who shot him to death and threw
his body in a river. In "Blood Justice," a 1986 book exposing the
Parker atrocity, author Howard Smead used FBI documents and
interviews to identify the mob's ringleader: J.P Walker, elected
sheriff after the lynching; James Floren Lee, a Baptist preacher;
and Jewel Alford, the jailer. Although some of them confessed, a
grand jury of 18 white men refused to indict.

Ben Chester White, a 67-year-old plantation caretaker in Natchez
was kidnapped and riddled with bullets by night riders hunting
for a Black man to kill. A month later, James Jones, one of the
Klan terrorists who took part in this horror, admitted everything
and was put on trial. The jury failed to reach a verdict, and
Jones was not tried again.

The NAACP treasurer in Natchez, Warlest Jackson, was assassinated
when a bomb exploded in his truck. Jackson had just become a
chemical worker, a job formerly reserved for whites, at Armstrong
Rubber. It was an open secret that the KKK did it, but no
witnesses came forward.

Charles Moore and Henry Dee were abducted from a Meadville
roadside by Kluxers, driven into the Homochitto National Forest,
tied to trees and beaten unconscious. The rest is too gruesome to
relate. A couple of hooded sadists implicated in the slaying were
eventually indicted. One, Charles Edwards, signed a confession
and turned it over to the prosecution. A justice of the peace
dismissed all charges.

From Emmett Till, robbed of life at age 14, to the Rev. George
Lee, the Belzoni NAACP founder torn apart by a hail of rifle fire
from a passing car, to civil rights champion Medgar Evers whose
executioner was sprung by an all-while jury, it's always the same
story. Justice denied.

There is no statute of limitations on homicide. Many of the
killers from bygone years remain alive and these murders go on
still. But for the martyrs, their loved ones and the Black people
of Mississippi, the long delayed day of reckoning can't be put
off forever.


(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; "workers" on PeaceNet; on Internet:
"[e-mail]".)


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