Secret Files to Shed Light on State-Sanctioned Racism

JACKSON, Miss. — Rita Schwerner and her husband, Michael, knew they were being spied upon. How could they not know? In the dead of night, on country roads, cops or klansmen--who could tell the difference?--would simply appear. In places they shouldn’t be. Knowing things they shouldn’t know.

For civil rights workers like the Schwerners in the 1960s, Mississippi was a fearful place. “My husband was picked up by the Meridian police on a number of occasions where [the police] seemed to have information they could not have unless someone gave it to them,” she said.

The last time they picked him up was in June 1964, the start of Freedom Summer. Forty-four days later, the bodies of Michael Schwerner and his two companions were found buried in an earthen dam in Neshoba County.

It was a nightmare lived daily by activists who risked their lives in Mississippi fighting racial segregation and discrimination.

Now that still-contentious history is being revisited as the state prepares to release the secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state agency charged with defending white supremacy from 1956 to 1973, when its funding was cut.

In the next few days, 400 men and women who either by conscience or happenstance were brought into close proximity with the civil rights movement will begin to learn how they were targeted by the commission.

In all, 85,000 people are named in 120,000 pages of documents compiled by the commission. A large portion of the files has been public since 1989, when they were discovered in the papers a former governor donated to the University of Southern Mississippi. They showed how the commission pried into people’s lives, helped defend Ku Klux Klan members accused of murder, planted stories in the press and otherwise worked to drive out or shut down people and institutions deemed subversive.

The imminent release of the files is causing great consternation to some civil rights activists who fear that many of the spying victims don’t even know they are named in the files, or that they may be linked to unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing. By releasing the unexpurgated documents, they contend, these people could be victimized twice.

A federal judge ordered the files opened in 1989, but a subsequent court battle over the privacy issue held up the order until now. The privacy issue also has torn apart old allies in the movement, fueled suspicions about the hidden pasts of former comrades and led to wild speculation about prominent Mississippians who may or may not be named in the files.

Rev. Edwin King, an early white supporter of integration who is frequently praised as a hero of the civil rights movement, says his motives are now being questioned because he supported the privacy effort.

“I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘We know that you collaborated with the white racists, and even when the files are opened it won’t be proved because that part of your file has been destroyed,’ ” King said.

It isn’t fair, he said. “I guess I’ve come under suspicion because I survived.”

But others, including Rita Schwerner--whose last name is now Bender--very much want the files opened so that history can be reviewed and, perhaps, justice pursued.

A Pattern of Covert Activity

Beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing school segregation, all of the Southern states mobilized a campaign of massive resistance to change. None fought harder than Mississippi. For almost 20 years--as the South was riven with rioting, church burnings, lynchings and assassinations--the Sovereignty Commission was the state’s official face of resistance to what was widely seen here as a federal assault on the Southern way of life.

The commission’s existence was not a secret. But until the Jackson Clarion-Ledger got access to a large portion of the files in 1989, no one knew the lengths to which the agency had gone.

In 1964, during Byron De La Beckwith’s second trial on charges of murdering NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the commission helped his defense screen prospective jurors to weed out Jews and civil rights sympathizers. Like the first trial, the jury could not reach a verdict.

The commission also spied on Michael Schwerner and fellow activist Andrew Goodman before they were killed, sharing information about them with a local sheriff’s department that had been infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan.

The commission employed private detectives and kept a stable of paid and unpaid informants. It used the information it compiled to get integrationists fired and to frame civil rights supporters as Communists, homosexuals, adulterers and thieves.

Some of the commission’s activities now seem ludicrous. According to documents reported on by the Jackson newspaper in 1989, the commission tried to get the television series “Bonanza” dropped from local programming because three stars of the show refused to make a public appearance in Jackson in 1964 before a segregated audience.

In 1965, when a frantic white woman wrote to the governor complaining that her daughter was dating a boy she suspected of having mixed blood, the Sovereignty Commission leaped into action. An investigator determined that the boy may in fact have been part black, and the state looked into getting him drafted.

Historian James W. Silver, in a respected 1963 book on the state’s response to the civil rights movement, says that what took place within Mississippi’s borders “comes as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America.”

At its peak, the commission commanded so much power that it could bully bills through the Legislature. Anyone who opposed them was branded an integrationist.

The commission shifted its focus to campus radicalism in the early 1970s, before its funding was finally cut in 1973.

Part of the commission’s activities included sending speakers to other parts of the country to extol the Southern way of life. Silver writes in “Mississippi: The Closed Society” about a state judge who, while speaking in Connecticut, was asked whether the men who had committed a particular long-ago lynching would ever be apprehended. Inadvertently, the judge revealed that when klan members went unpunished, it wasn’t necessarily because their identities were unknown to authorities.

The guilty parties would never be captured, he opined. “Besides,” he added, “three of them are already dead.”

Parallels to Apartheid Seen

In a way, what is happening here now with the release of the files is the state’s own version of the process underway in South Africa, where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been airing the extent of government wrongdoing during apartheid.

“There are many parallels between the old Mississippi system and that of the American South in general, with the system prevailing until recently in South Africa,” said John Hunter Gray, an American Indian who was known as John Salter in the 1960s when he taught sociology at all-black Tougaloo College in Jackson. The major difference, he said, is that in Mississippi, there is no evidence officials carried out the kinds of atrocities that were prevalent in that country.

But some of the people who were spied upon--including Rita Bender--believe that the commission’s activities may have extended beyond spying to include complicity with murder.

She acknowledges that her suspicions may never be confirmed. Even if incriminating evidence ever existed, it probably would have been wiped out long ago. An untold number of documents were destroyed in 1965 to prevent federal prosecution of state officials for interfering with voter registration. A federal judge has noted other gaps in the records.

The files are scheduled to be opened to the public Oct. 15. But on Friday, the state sent out packets of material to spying victims whose names appear in the documents--at least the victims who went through a long and, critics say, needlessly complicated application process. They will get an advance peek at the allegations made against them.

Of the 974 people who initially responded to newspaper ads announcing the release, 700 completed the detailed four-page applications. Of those, 400 were found to be named in the documents.

They will have 30 days to request that the documents that mention them be kept secret or that their names be stricken. They also may choose to attach addenda addressing the allegations about them. If the American Civil Liberties Union believes that their requests for privacy are unwarranted, the organization will have 30 days to challenge them before the documents are opened to the public. The ACLU was an original plaintiff in the lawsuit to get the files released.

David Ingebretsen, the ACLU’S state executive director, said most of the startling revelations from the files--that the state harassed innocent people and turned a blind eye to racists who committed heinous crimes, including murder--are already generally known. But the Sovereignty Commission’s files also reveal the names of people who collaborated with the government, including prominent blacks and other activists who received money or favors for informing on compatriots.

One of them, according to commission records that has already been made public, was B.L. Bell, a now-dead principal of a Delta region school who volunteered his services in 1958. A commission report calls him “a white man’s Negro,” and documents show he was paid $100 a month for three months “for the purpose of setting up a secret underground organization of Negroes to assist in maintaining segregation in Mississippi.” Among his activities: attending meetings of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and reporting back to the commission on who was present and what was said.

Other alleged spies included two deceased leaders of the black Southern Baptist Convention.

But how many of the still-unreleased files contain unsubstantiated allegations gathered with the intent of harming the reputations or livelihoods of the people named?

King says his fight to protect privacy was based on the belief that these people spied upon by the commission should not be victimized a second time.

Gray was part of King’s fight but eventually dropped out. It still bothers him that people assume he and King have something to hide. “Neither I nor anyone else involved in this case had any intent of protecting informers or state agents,” he said. To prove he has no skeletons in his closet, he vows not to attempt to censor files pertaining to him.

King says it’s unfair to ask anyone to make that vow. He fought to the end to get the names of victims marked out, taking his case to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and losing.

“I think there will be some elected officials whose activities back then will come to light for the first time,” said Ingebretsen, who has seen much of the still-sealed files. “Whether these revelations will be politically damaging, I don’t know.”

Already, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has felt a need to publicly deny involvement with the commission during the early years of his political career, telling reporters in January, “I don’t have the foggiest idea” if he is mentioned in the files. “I’ve never heard such a thing and never was involved in any way.”

Evidence of a Racist Past

Today’s Mississippi is a radically different place from the frightful, almost surreal landscape that existed in the 1960s. Jackson, the largest city and capital, elected its first black mayor earlier this year. Mississippi has more African American elected officials than any other state.

Still, Bender, now an attorney living in Seattle, said she finds it unsettling to return to the state where her husband died. Much of downtown Jackson seems physically frozen in the 1960s because of the economic stagnation that set in when whites and businesses fled. Reminders of the old days abound. In 1994, during the third trial of Beckwith for killing Medgar Evers--the trial in which he finally was convicted--court convened every day on a floor of the county courthouse that still had restrooms marked “white” and “colored.” The designations had been painted over, but the words were plainly visible.

Today, metal plates hide the old racial classifications. There are people here who would tell you that those doors say all that needs be said about the state of race relations in much of Mississippi: The problems have been covered over, but things have not really changed.

Many crimes from the period of the civil rights struggles remain unsolved, either because authorities never pursued them or because, given the tenor of the times, no all-white jury would convict. Some of the cases are being reopened. In Alabama, federal agents and the Birmingham police are reinvestigating the 1963 bombing of a church that killed four black girls.

Eighteen men were tried on federal charges of violating the civil rights of Schwerner and his companions, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney; seven of them, including a sheriff’s deputy, were convicted and served brief sentences. But the state refused to file murder charges.

As Bender noted with the kind of hopeless laugh that accompanies many of her observations about the South and the ‘60s, justice was never served. “Sam Boyers [the klan leader who ordered this murder and others, according to court testimony] is still walking around in Laurel,” she said.

When Bender receives all of the files that deal with her and her husband from the days when they headed the Meridian office of the Congress of Racial Equality, she plans to peruse them for harder proof of state involvement in the deaths.

The files that she has already seen, and which have been reported on in Jackson, make clear that the agency spied on her and her husband three months before the murders. A description of their car and the tag number was circulated by the commission, and information was shared with local law enforcement agencies. Bender said that was tantamount to passing on information to the klan.

“The sheriff’s department and the klan were the same people,” she said. “The very institutions that was supposed to be protecting us were the ones to commit murder.”

Only a month before Bender’s husband was slain, King said he too almost became a victim, picked apparently because the klan wanted to commit a murder to discourage white Northern college students from flooding into the state that summer to register voters.

Returning from a speaking engagement in Canton, Miss., with several civil rights associates, King said klansmen ran him off the road and beat the driver of the car. King was able to talk the men into letting them go because the driver was from Pakistan; he told them it would cause an international incident and bring the FBI down on them if he were killed.

When the three civil rights workers were reported missing in Neshoba County the following month, King said he instinctively knew what had happened.

Bender said that perhaps because of the swirl of activities at the time, she never heard of King’s close call with the klan until he told her about it many years later. But she disputes some of King’s other contentions, such as his assertion that he and Michael Schwerner were friends and that her husband had stayed at King’s house when he visited Jackson.

“I knew him,” she said of King, “but I wouldn’t say we were friends.”

Unlike others in the civil rights movement who attack King for holding up release of the files for so long with his endless court battles, she said she does not question his motivations. “It’s unfair for people to attribute motives to him. But I strongly and vehemently disagree with him.”