JUDGEMENT

CHAPTER EIGHT
JUDGEMENT

Study history, study history. In history lies all
the secrets of statecraft.
Winston Churchill

The Judge was warned by a Klansman that people go missing
in the swamps of Mississippi if they talk too much. The
once courageous lawyer fought the law over twenty years
ago and the law eventually won. However, his recent silence
cost him a career life sentence after his manditory eighteen
months behind bars. I could not even fathom that as a possiblity
until I phoned the press manager in the Kentucky jail
where Bobby Delaughter was supposedly staying, and she
had her employees hang up on me four times. Southerners
are notorious for taking your personal information, promising
to return the phone call and then you never hear from
them.

Why would a judge sentenced to less than two years be
held in a medium security prison like a hostage unable to
admit he is there, unless there is something more going on
that the public needs to know? I wanted to speak to this man
whose diligence inspired a movie about Medgar Evers and
his wife’s fight for justice on his behalf. I wanted to drive
down to Kentucky and discover why a man who victoriously
battled the KKK was now on the other side of the law.

The only reason I was hesitant was because my mother had
a dream about me disappearing in the Smokey Hills of
Southern Kentucky. With tears rolling down her cheek she
described the interstate she had never driven on. Her fear
was enough to leave me guarded.
“I dreamt that they found your vehicle on the highway
by the trees in the mountains,” she whispered while laying
against the pillow. “Because I was attached to the license
plate, they were able to contact me when they found your
car, but not you.”

“Yikes,” I retorted. “Are you sure that dream was real?”
My mother was not a dreamer, occasionally she has
woken up in the middle of the night to pray for my brother
while he was galavanting around Europe. When he was
stranded in Northern Africa, he did not know my mother
was on the floor praying for his protection the very minute
he was desperately seeking a solution for his frightening
plight. When I was caught in a blizzard and the interstate
was sheet ice, my mother had also dropped everything to
pray for my protection. The prayer of the righteous is powerful.
This is the very reason it is challenged by the dark
forces looming over public institutions. The very forces that
drive evil can be thwarted by a mother on her hands and
knees by her bedside.

My mother had never ever been to the Smokey Mountains,
only to Virginia to visit me while I attended college.
She had never seen the soft purple leaves of the magnolias
waiting to entrap a visitor as they paused. The purple magnolias
captivated my mind as I travelled to the Deep South.
They were beautiful but fragile, representing perserverance,
power and love. They could blossom with youth and inno-
cence in the cleft of a rock, yet their splendid beauty was
untouchable for the tourist.

My mother did not know the intrinsic nuances of the
south or have the rolling hills memorized. Nor did she realize
how easily a car could vanish in northern Tennesssee or
stall in the Delta. Southerners, who promised to return my
phone calls, did understand. So, when I contacted members
of the NAACP in Washington, they hung up like frightened
jack rabbits sensing an intruder. Anyone asking questions
out loud about the South is considered intrusive.
After being shunned by people working for the system
in Washington, I decided to rent the movie made about
Bobby Delaughter. Popcorn, and a Canadian ginger ale were
the perfect accoutrements for a movie night. The movie,
Ghosts of Mississippi, recounts the assassination of civil
rights activist Medgar Evers. A family became fatherless in
minutes and seeks justice for over thirty years. Hoping that
one day justice would confront Southern Tradition, Mrs.
Evers held on to court transcripts for almost as long as my
entire life. Hoping for a break in the case, she approached
Mr. Delaughter who was a prosecuter in Mississippi. Even
though very little evidence remained, he knew that it is
never to late to do what is right.

I choked on my popcorn during the scene where the
judges kept trial evidence as souvenirs. At this point, I questioned
the validity of the whole process in Mississippi. According
to legal definitions discussed in college classrooms,
justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Justice is to
be defined by the concepts of moral rightness based on equity,
fairness, ethics and rationality. With the move towards
humanism, rationality has taken the place of concepts that
were deeply entrenched in society. Yet a man can reason
away most of his behaviour if he so chooses. To base the
law solely on reason is as dangerous as basing religion
purely on one man’s tradition.

Storing trial evidence as souvenirs in the South reminded
me of the Nazis keeping articles belonging to Jews
that had been mutilated during the Holocaust. I remember
watching documentaries about products that were made
from the gold tooth fillings of victims. Lamps were made
of human skin. Eye glasses were taken from concentration
camps and resold in the markets. The German Militia simply
considered these personal items spoils of war. In North
America, the educated elite are convinced that their democratic
society is more civilized than the Nazis’. We like to
think that anti-Semitism is deserved because of all the fighting
that happens in the Middle East. In reality, the silent majority
is no more civilized than the managers of the German
concentration camps. It sickened me to my stomach to know
that souvenirs were kept to remember the suffering of a
human being.

Near the end of the movie, the former Governor Ross
Barnett walked into the court room unannounced to shake
hands with the defendent Byron De La Beckwith, a man
who admitted publicy that he attended Klu Klux Klan meetings
with pride. Governor Barnett interrupted the proceedings
while Mrs. Evers was testifying. How could a governor
be allowed to walk in a court room and shake hands with
defending lawyers in front of Mrs. Evers while she was testifying?
A reporter comments on the noticeable hand shake
with horror, and a local boy leans close to his ear and welcomes
him to Mississippi.

How,in any court anywhere but Mississippi, would that
be possible or considered responsible government? The act
of a hand shake in court may have appeared to be protecting
the state. Instead, it was a precursor to the federal government
assuming the role of prosecuter in murder cases. Now
the federal government has taken the responsibilities of the
state into their own sphere led by the few. The state began
a shakey journey to centralized government simply because
they refused to uphold justice at the expense of man-made
traditions.

Perhaps this is why blogs are so popular in the south. A
blog and social networking is an opportunity to actually say
what is on one’s mind, within the confines of social acceptablity.
I was told here in Canada by a seasoned manager
working for Social Services that if something is not written
down it never happened. Paper trails are important for legal
purposes, which is why history needs to be studied. Winston
Churchill knew the value of a paper trail. For every one
comment on paper with a signature, there were probably a
dozen events that occured without a signature. For every
word admitted out loud within Southern walls, there are so
many more left unspoken. Southern silence is a subtlety lost
on the international community.

***
Junghans says:
January 5, 2010 at 3:31 pm
DeLaughter’s conviction can only be described as
true poetic justice. He will now get to enjoy Negro
‘equality’ to its fullest.

***
S.Davidson says:
January 5, 2010 at 2:52 am
I didn’t know about that Bevel guy. I did know that
Martin Luther King, Jr. had extramarital affairs. The
whole lot of the “civil rights” movement heroes were
really frauds and crooks. Someone should write a
book on the movement’s dark side.
***
P. Owens says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:47 pm
My child was stolen from me through Kangaroo
courts in Meridian Ms. I begged Graves Thomas a
popular lawyer in my home state Louisiana to help
me..HE turned a deaf ear..because I was’nt rich. He
got struck by lightening. I begged another well
known lawyer to help me fight those Mississippi
crooks..Stacey Freeman..he lied to me and led me
on ..He was killed by his law office in Bossier by a
drunk driver..In 2006..I begged Bobby DeLaughter to
help me..
***

When the state protects the system, the citizens of the
state are burdened by the natural consequences. Constitutions
are not written with bureaucracy and interest groups
in mind, constitutions are created for the rights of the people
who support good government. If the governor really did
walk into a court room unannounced and was not deemed
out of line, well, golly, that is proof in the pudding that governors
are indeed involved in court cases. Perhaps they just
spend much of their press releases denying it.
“If you give a man the correct information for seven
years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first
day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point
of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the
credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and
persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his
enemy.” (A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations
Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, 1958
Then I remembered that in the Brittany Willis case
based in North Carolina, James Johnson remained in jail
without a trial for three years until Governor Butterfield
wrote a letter publicly before Christmas calling for a speedy
trial. Although he was a governor from another jurisdiction,
Butterfield asked the courts and the police involved to proceed
with a higher standard. Governors can encourage or
discourage a trial from proceeding in the south.
However,in Mississippi, many trials have been speedy
and very few are allowed to be questioned. The very night
that Medgar Evers was assassinated, John F. Kennedy was
making his famous speech about equality before the law and
man. Kennedy did not know at that time, that his days were
numbered just as the political rights activists were. Watching
Kennedy on the television must have been a proud moment
for Mrs. Evers as she and her children huddled on their
bed waiting for her husband to return home. The speech was
historical calling for change that would last...

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a
people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot
be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot
be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in
the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and,
above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin
the blame on others, to say this a problem of one section of
the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A
great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to
make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive
for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as
well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing
right, as well as reality. JFK

His words left the nation breathless on the eve of June
11, 1963. Medgar Evers, a human rights activist, loving father
and husband was returning home from work just after
midnight. He had been working at the NAACP office and
was bringing home Jim Crow must GO shirts for their new
efforts to inspire change. Knowing the hearts of the men he
was confronting, Medgar often assured his wife that he
loved her. Just hours after the profound speech JFK had
made over the radio, Evers’ children had to watch their father
bleed all over the garage pavement. They were not prepared
to find their father shot in the back by a coward hiding
in the trees – or for the casualties of human rights. But in
the South there is always a casualty for doing right.
Twice Mrs. Evers took a gloating man to court who
bragged at a clan meeting that he shot him. Twice Mrs.
Evers watched an all white jury acquit him. Thirty years
later, a young lawyer with a desire for a challenge came
across the case as a result of an article in the newspaper that
alluded to a rigged jury. Both times it was a hung jury – because
a white jury was never going to convict that man.
With the help of the Jim Crow law, blacks were considered
equal but separate. Convicting a white man of killing a
black man in a state where men disappeared often would be
implying that blacks and whites were equal. Convicting a
white man in a state where white men were not prosecuted
for killing black men would set a precedent that the law was
not separate.

It bothered me to watch movies where people had to
lose their lives fighting for something proper. The well educated
Southern gentility did not always fight because they
supported the Confederate army, but because of loyalty for
their state. Without land in the South, a man was impoverished.
The civil war was not always fought because of a differing
opinion on slavery, nor was the war considered
proper. Billions of dollars were at stake and the destruction
of the Old South economy would have left the gentility spiritually
and emotionally impotent. Loosing the war at Gettysburg
was the day their civilization once was. A man’s
loyalty for his state and his land in the south defies reason.
Why would the son-in-law of one of the most racist
judges want to open the files of this case? While watching
the movie Ghosts of Mississippi, I remembered wondering
why retrying a Klan man could be so pivotal. Thirty years
later, things had changed, had they not? The fearlessness of
Delaughter portrayed during the trial reminded me of England
the Lion standing against Germany in the Second
World War. With the help of allies, the international community
united against the crowd of zombies who marched
with loyalty to their Fascist dictator.

Justice does not have a time limit and the voices from
the grave continue to cry until they are heard by the community.
Loyalty is a fierce force that is often the weakness
for a people clinging to a Utopian society. A civilization that
was is never perfect, just a fantasy for those escaping the
simplicity of doing what is proper. The desperation for an
elite society enlightened by higher reason is driven by the
voiceless. A man without a voice is a man without a
weapon. With our voices we must engage in upholding what
is proper.

The movie depicts Bobby Delaughter as a soft spoken
gentlemen who was moved by compassion as he stood outside
Medgar’s home. Like Medgar, he had three children
and could not understand that a coward would shoot him in
the back in front of his children. The evidence was lost, the
rifle and bullet kept as souvenirs. The transcripts were no
longer in the file – only police reports congratulating whoever
shot the nigger and did Mississippi a favour. Like
Medgar Evers, he would have to fight a hopeless cause.
Like Medgar, he was going to leave for heaven or hell from
Jackson. Little did he know that years later he would be
leaving for hell.

It is much more difficult to fight for justice in the same
town your friends and co-workers live. While visiting Tennessee
I received text messages about Rob Vincente, a local
boy who was missing. Our little town with dirt roads and a
dilapidated hockey arena where the police officer took his
son to play hockey was possibly impacted by gang crime?
I felt like I had never left the south. Even Margaret, the gas
attendant, was consumed at night by the thought of a local
boy going missing. Tires were slashed of the local youth
who “knew something but wouldn’t confess.” Did his
friends help look for Rob? Loosing a local boy had divided
the town.

***
According to an email from my manager,
Hey, Paula, just thought I’d apologize for being short
with you when you phoned. I’ve been very upset
and worried about a boy who I have never even
met. In the early morning of October 10, 2010, Rob
Vicente disappeared from Davidson. He was last
seen at the Shell Station next door to the restaurant
where we work. I’ve been staying at work late looking
at security video footage from the night hoping
to find any new information that could be helpful.
Like everyone else in town, I want so badly to be able
to aid the Vicente family and find Rob. We do know
he was seen in the backseat of his car with three
other friends at the Shell station at 3:15am. It is known
that he tried to contact his cousin at about 5:30am
and again at about 6:00am, but he did not succeed.
found on a farm 29km.west of Davidson. From that
point on he’s been missing and no body has been
found. The police searched a local Davidson house
for evidence and have stated that they suspect foul
play. Girls who I work with everyday and sing karaoke
with are fighting and accusing one another of having
information or of telling falsehoods. Half of the staff
at our restaurant have been out on search parties,

looking for Rob, and the other half have had their
property or their relatives property searched The
burnt out car sounds like gang activity. But really, we
are suffering from our own version of “Northern Silence”,
someone knows something and isn’t talking
or is covering up the truth. Me personally, I dream of
Rob at night. I can’t stand the idea of his family not
having an answer. My brother disappeared April 3rd
in the afternoon of 2003. My brother was a lot like
Rob. Matthew had a bit of trouble because of a
brain injury but could function perfectly well and look
after his basic needs. My brother and Rob needed
help from their families even as adults but both families
had no reason to expect that these boys
wouldn’t live long and full lives.

***
Justice is more than compassion and generosity, it is a
virtue. Although there are variations of justice (retributive,
restorative and distributive according to Plato), justice is
proper. Without justice in a social institution, mere politicians
would simply give people what they want in order to
gain fleeting power, rather than help the community reach
their destination. Even the naturalists believe there are consequences for every action. Thus it is important for each community to question powerful or cunning leaders trying to oppress them with unlawful legislation.

Until there was justice in Mississippi, Medgar Evers felt
that he must continue confronting the system. As a re-
spectable scholar, he was the first black man to apply to the
segregated University of Mississippi. When rejected by the
law school in spring of 1954, even though he was listed on
the list of Who’s Who in American Colleges, he sued the
school in the famous Brown vs. the Board of Education in
the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled and segregation
was found unconstitutional. He had become the focus
of the NAACP fight for desegregation. Asked to be a field
agent due to his involvement, he became the first vocal
black man to address hidden facts regarding Emmett Till
and also gave support to Clyde Kennard. The white-collar
political watchers in Washington were forced to engage.
Clyde Kennard sought to enroll at Mississippi Southern
College on three separate occasions (1956, 1957 and 1959).
MSC was one of Mississippi’s premier educational institutions
whose student body was exclusively white.

Despite the offers from Mississippi governor for his tuition to be
paid anywhere else in the state where he could gain acceptance,
Kennard declined, stating that the school was closest
to his home, a major factor given his family situation. After
declaring himself a “segregationist by nature” but “integrationist
by choice,” he gave a reasoned explanation why he
saw segregation in education to be impractical and bound
to be replaced by one integrated system.

Clyde just wanted to attend college close to home. I remembered
when my grandmother was ill, I just needed to be
by her bedside. I transferred from Virginia to a prairie university
because I couldn’t bear the thought of being so far,
while she was so weak. University courses demanded concentration
and an inner resolve to endure. For Clyde to
achieve the excellence he was accustomed to, he would have
to remove obstacles sapping his valuable time. If he were to
achieve honours and watch over his father, he would be consumed
by the demands of manhood. Not all decisions are
based on logic or civil rights. The decision for Clyde to attend
the University of Mississippi was one made from the heart.
Files from the Sovereignty Commission that were
opened in 1998 showed that members considered a variety
of options to prevent Clyde from changing their way of life,
including forcing Kennard into an accident or bombing his
car. Those trying to protect a way of life at the Mississippi
Southern College, walked all over his heart. When Kennard
could not be dissuaded, the only option they had was to silence
him in prison. Without his weapon – his voice – he
would be easily buried in the grave like the other children
who went missing in the river.

The commission conspired to have Kennard framed for
a crime. On September 15, 1959, Kennard was falsely arrested
by constables for reckless driving upon returning to
his car from a meeting with the college president. The meeting,
which seemed promising, was a trap. After he was
jailed, Lee and Daniels perjured themselves before Justice
of the Peace T. C. Hobby, claiming to have found five half
pints of whiskey, along with other liquor, under the seat of
his car. Mississippi was a “dry” state and possession of
liquor was illegal until 1966 when Mississippi became the
last state to repeal prohibition.

As I read about his case on the internet, I remembered a
vivid dream I had in 1991 when I was his age enrolling for
college. I had found myself walking along a path that was
crushed by the impact of bombs. To the right were flashes
of gold and red as though blasts were continuing into the
lake. To the left of the path was steaming rubble with liquid
metal running past the concrete like rushing rivers currents.
I remembered the path feeling like an escape route from a
city ravaged by war. There was fire and the sound of explosions
coming from behind me, burning my arms as I tried
to pass swiftly. I could hear a voice calling to me, telling
me that terrorists had hit the United States. Arguing that
terrorists have never attacked America on their own land, I
continued pressing towards the next city in the hopes of
finding normalcy.

Suddenly, I was up in Northern Ontario, where Canada
had also been by hit by terrorists. I continued down Memorial
Avenue trying to warn my friends and academics that I
recognized, yet they insisted that they were content with
their way of life. I tried to desperately explain that their way
of life was going to dig their grave in an era of international
war. With glossy eyes they drove away wanting to reach
their next activity.

I stumbled up the Red River Road hill with shock and
horror consuming me by their naivety. As I rested to regain
my senses, a close friend of mine rolled from a car heading
for the war zone. She had come from Northern Alberta,
where they had also been targeted by terrorists. As I
reached to protect her from the drivers of the vehicle, she
insisted that her way of life was too enjoyable and she
climbed into the back seat of another car speeding towards
the war zone south west of Thunder Bay.

My friend was angered by my warnings and turned me
over to the regime who had arrived by the air onto the
rolling hills of northern Alberta in unmarked black helicopters.
The terrorists were seeking to hold our nation captive
as retribution for our unwillingness to comply with the collectivists.
The men from the unknown military looked as
though they had spent years in the clefts of the rock waiting
for a portal of entry. Their uniforms bore markings similar
to the communist regimes seen in old war movies. I waited
in line while they beheaded anyone who challenged their
way of life.

Although it was merely a dream, I was soaked with
sweat when I awoke and felt my neck for a scar. I had never
experienced the moment where dream and reality collide.
It was so tangible, I can still feel the frustration of my voice
being silenced.

Yet for Clyde Kennard, his situation was not a dream.
His reality had become a nightmare when he was subsequently
cited for illegal liquor possession. He was convicted,
fined $600 for the offence, and soon became the
victim of an unofficial local boycott whereby his credit was
cut off. He was then arrested again with an alleged accomplice
on September 25, 1960 for the theft of $25 worth of
chicken feed from the Forrest County Cooperative warehouse.
At the trial, the alleged accomplice Johnny Lee
Roberts testified that Kennard paid him to steal the feed.
On November 21, 1960, an all-white jury deliberated only
10 minutes before finding Kennard guilty. He was sentenced
to seven years in prison to be served in Parchman
Penitentiary, a high-security facility.

Clyde was not in a war waged simply over the colour of
his skin. The war waged against his heart was over protecting
a way of life, no matter if there were casualties. Although
friends and common acquaintances perpetuate the
war with eyes glassed over by the importance of their sched-
ules, the root of this heartlessness is financial and social
profit at the expense of human being. Even though this way
of life terrorizes families and murders victims, it is protected
by those who seek to rule with force. Eventually though,
truth will expose their hearts and the voices of the dead will
forever haunt them. Eventually those who know where Rob
is will be exposed by voices that cry for justice. Truth cannot
be silenced.
(EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK SOUTHERN SILENCE)