Texas Leads in Pesticide Right-to-Know

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, p. 7

One of Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower’s pet projects has come to fruition, and he is calling it “the beginning of a new age of enlightenment in the agricultural workplace.”

On January 1, Texas became the first state to require farm operators to provide workers with specific information about chemicals they may be exposed to in agricultural jobs. Known as the Farm worker Right-to-Know Law, it applies to employers with a gross annual payroll of $50,000 or more for permanent workers or $15,000 or more for seasonal workers.

“That would apply to almost all vegetable and citrus growers, or they shouldn’t be in business,” says program coordinator Beltran Chavez. In fact, the law is not meant to apply to small operators.

Chavez estimates at least 10,000 employers are covered by the new law and must maintain a list–by crop–of every chemical used or stored on the farm in excess of fifty-five gallons or five hundred pounds. The employer must keep the records for thirty years, or send them to the Texas Department of Agriculture for storage and retrieval.

The Texas Department of Agriculture and the Texas A&M Extension Service are jointly responsible for training agricultural employees about the proper use of agricultural pesticides. This mandate differs from similar laws for other industries, which put the training burden on the employer.

The TDA and Extension Service are developing bilingual crop information sheets about the chemicals most widely used, their health effects, emergency procedures, employers’ responsibilities and workers’ rights. These sheets will be provided to employers for distribution to farm workers. Video training materials are also available.

The TDA has hired three staff persons for the project and five Right-to-Know specialists to work in the field. Despite recent hard economic times in Texas, the legislature authorized about $400,000 per year for the new program.

“Agriculture is the last major recognized industry to come on board with right-to-know,” says Chavez, who previously administered farm worker health programs at migrant clinics in both Texas and California. “That’s probably because of the strength of the agricultural and chemical lobbies.”

Surprisingly perhaps, there have been few harsh responses from employers. “We have had forty or fifty requests from producers for information,” says Chavez. “They seem to have realized that some law was eventually going to affect them, so there was some measure of acceptance.”

Chavez says that he expects other states to have right-to-know laws for agriculture soon, probably not through legislation as in Texas but through regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and other U.S. government agencies which will be extended to cover agriculture.

Commissioner Hightower has made the Right-to-Know program a priority because he thinks agriculture should stop and take a look at chemicals. “They are a habit and an expense,” says Hightower. “We should see if chemicals are warranted in terms of the long-run ecological effect.”

Freelance reporter Elaine Davenport divides her time between Austin, Texas, and London, England.

Hispanics Struggle for Parity in Texas

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 11-13

By the year 2010, Hispanics will be a majority of the population in Texas and will be more numerous than any other ethnic group, whites included, in California.

In sheer numbers and in buying power, Hispanics have growing clout. In America as a whole, the Hispanic market is now estimated at nineteen million and is expected to reach fifty-five million within thirty years. And in politics, both Democrats and Republicans count Hispanics as a potential “swing” vote in Texas, California, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois in the November elections.

Yet Hispanics still suffer from discrimination in education, jobs and housing, and are currently launching widespread struggles for equality, much as blacks did in the 1950s and 1960s.

The struggle is especially evident in south Texas, where Hispanics are seeking a federal court order to make more state money available for higher education. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund claims deliberate neglect exists when just 3 per cent of the state’s higher education budget serves 9 per cent of the population.

Texas’s important universities are all located north of an east-west line running through San Antonio. South of that line are just two little-known four-year universities-where faculty salaries start at about $16,000 a year-and a long list of NO’s: No accredited medical schools, no accredited law schools, no accredited health science schools, and no doctoral program except in bilingual education. By contrast, cities such as Dallas and Houston are overrun with degree programs.

Equally grim statistics exist in other social categories in south Texas: Jobs-for the past two decades, counties in south Texas have led the nation in unemployment. Poverty-federal statistics put residents of south Texas among

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the poorest of the poor in the U.S., worse off than residents of Appalachia. Housing-researchers say more than 30 percent of the region’s housing is substandard, citing the so-called “colonias,” the make-shift slums that have sprouted along the Mexican-American border.

For now, higher education is where Hispanics are demanding equality. Dr. Juliet Garcia, president of Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, says the formula for dividing the annual $4.5 billion state expense for higher education has shortchanged south Texas.

Sidebar: Equal Opportunity Discrimination

“Everyone who lives in south Texas is being discriminated against without regard to ethnicity, or economic status, because we simply don’t have the diversity of programs available in other parts of the state,” says Garcia.

Students know there is bias: “A lot of people are forced into going to a vocational school because they don’t have the money to go somewhere else. They just settle for that and the cycle continues,” says Martha Luna, a senior at Pan American University in Edinburg. Ms. Luna will put off going north to medical school because neither she nor her family can afford both school fees and away-from-home living expenses.

Anyone with a high school diploma or the equivalent can apply to Pan American, and many rely on the university’s Learning Assistance Center for remedial help in reading, math and composition. Half of last year’s nearly 10,000 students used the Center. Of those, 34 per cent were from homes with less than $9,000 annual income; 82 per cent were first-generation college students, whose parents had attended an average of 8.1 years of school; and 46 per cent said English was their second language.

“That tells you our job is a tremendous one,” says Dr. Sylvia Lujan, director of the Center.

The lawsuit filed last December is part of a two-pronged attack on the decades-old problem. During its last session, the Texas State Senate passed a resolution asking the state’s two most prominent universities-the University of Texas and Texas AM University-to investigate ways of improving education for their poorer cousins to the south. Discussions between officials from north and south have ranged from bringing Texas AI University in Kingsville and Pan American into the state-wide systems of UT and Texas AM, and collaboration on improved programs for the south Texas colleges, including Laredo State University and Corpus Christi State University.

None of this sounds very promising to some Hispanic leaders, who have heard most of it before and now are trying to get something concrete done. In May, a joint legislative committee set up because of the Senate resolution heard testimony from Kenneth Ashworth, State Commissioner of Higher Education. He said that he would take steps to get the next state legislature to appropriate money for new programs at south Texas colleges.

State Senator Carlos Truan, who co-chairs the committee, made a blistering plea for action now: “In my 20th year in the legislature, I’m serving notice that we’re not going to take it any more and we want specific answers to the problems of south Texas. So far we get less than half the per capita funding for higher education in south Texas. We don’t have any professional schools. We have only one doctoral program and that being fourteen years ago, and we are demanding equity from you, the Commissioner of Higher Education, and the board you represent. We want to be fairly and equitably treated in the distribution of money, facilities and programs.”

It is no coincidence that the squeeze is on at a time when national politics is close to the top of everyone’s agenda. The Democratic presidential candidates held one of their debates in south Texas, in what is considered an important Democratic voter stronghold. And in June Democratic frontrunner Michael Dukakis stopped in San Antonio for the funeral of Willie Velasquez, 44, the man credited with igniting an explosion of Hispanic political power over the last fifteen years.

Velasquez, who died of cancer, was head of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, based in San Antonio. Much as Martin Luther King Jr. strove to put blacks on the political map in the 1960s, Velasquez began in

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the early 1970s, through sheer hustle and organizational abilities, to get Hispanics registered to vote. Over the past decade, the number of Hispanic voters in Texas has more than doubled, and Velasquez’s work in California has borne similar fruit.

Sidebar: A Critical Core of Lawmakers

Slowly, more Hispanics have been elected to office. The twenty-five Hispanics now in the Texas House and Senate make up about 15 percent of the 181 total members, whereas twenty years ago there was a bare handful. And of Texas’s twenty-seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four are Hispanic.

“Hispanic members of the Legislature now form a critical core of lawmakers who are forcing the state’s two premier universities to include south Texas in their plans for the future,” writes Jesse Trevino, a columnist for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. “The votes Velasquez has harnessed have been the key to the turnaround in the academic and economic fortunes of this area of Texas.”

Nationally, more than four million voters are considered Hispanic, a generic category for persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latin origin. That is still less than 5 per cent of all American voters, but their potential influence is great because they are concentrated in six states.

Sheer numbers are making Hispanics more visible and powerful, but there is also growing fear and suspicion of them. “Anglos are more scared of Hispanics now than they were of blacks in the fifties and sixties,” says columnist Trevino. “We’ve got a different culture, religion, and we’re slow to assimilate-to become American,” says Trevino. “There’s never been so large a population that’s bilingual and has a bond with a potential enemy-Mexico.”

In a recent column, Trevino wrote about the problem of Anglo backlash. A press release from Baylor, the large Baptist university in Waco, announced that Texas could be facing a situation similar to what South Africa is going through if projected population estimates hold.

“There are rising tensions among Hispanics, many of who believe they have not been treated fairly and will continue to be treated unfairly,” the press release continued. “Much of the state’s new population in the next ten to twenty years will not speak English but Spanish….The day is quickly coming when the Anglo Texan, the native Texan, will himself be a minority.”

Sidebar: A Fear of Two Texases

Alarmed, Trevino called the professor who had been quoted, and learned that the statements had been mangled by an energetic writer from the university’s information office. “I stopped worrying about it,” wrote Trevino. “But driving home that day, it occurred to me that someone did write it, and that someone believes that kind of future awaits Texas….The fear, of course, is that the state is on its way to becoming two separate Texases.”

“The old ethnic bugaboo refused to die,” says Trevino. “The fear is that now we have the numbers, something could set us off end we’d do un-American things.”

The numbers, as it happens, are elusive whether non-citizens as well as citizens are included. “This is a new distinction,” says Trevino, “and reflects what people fear most about us-our sheer growth in number. If you count non-citizens, Texas will gain representation in the U.S. Congress and get more federal money. Yet there is a reluctance to recognize reality.”

Other evidence of fear and loathing among the Anglo population includes a negative reaction to funding for bilingual education and an overwhelming vote in favor of a non-binding measure on the Republican primary ballot in March to declare English as the state’s official language.

Just at a time when Hispanics could use strong direction, one of the most important leaders, Willie Velasquez, has died prematurely. And Henry Cisneros, the mayor of San Antonio and widely considered the most important and visible Hispanic in the country, has put his political prospects on hold due to personal reasons which include the birth of a son with a congenital heart defect.

Cisneros was considered a strong contender for the 1990 governor’s race until he ruled himself out. And with that exit went much of the visibility of the Hispanic plight. Cisneros was a constant reminder that there is a tide of Hispanics who are good for the country and who spend money but who also need a good education, jobs and decent housing. Cisneros’s Harvard education and matinee-idol good looks made him and thus fellow Hispanics more acceptable and less of a threat to Anglos than they might otherwise have been.

“The Hispanic issue is still largely invisible,” says Trevino. “That just sets us up for a misunderstanding on where we should go as a state. With half our kids dropping out of school, what will the state have to look forward to when we’re in the majority? There’s going to be, and already is, a lot of anger on all sides.”

That same thought is uppermost in the mind of Reynaldo Garcia, who became the first Hispanic to serve as a federal judge when appointed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. “Education is the only thing to get the people out of the cycle of poverty, but if it isn’t close to home, they won’t have it,” he says. “If we’re going to be in the majority, you’d better educate us.”

Elaine Davenport is a reporter and producer who divides her time between Austin, Texas, and London, England

Hightower Chooses a Populist Agenda

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 4-5

Jim Hightower has a way forward for the Democrat. Party. In order to pursue his strategy, Hightower has decided to run for re-election as Texas Agriculture Commissioner rather than challenging Republican Phil Gramm for a U.S. Senate seat in 1990, as was expected.

“While a run against Gramm might put me in the Senate, and while it would be good fun for me, campaigns are necessarily egocentric, leaving little behind in the way of a cohesive base that could elect not just me but others, ultimately to form a populist majority and produce populist politics,” Hightower wrote in The Nation, February 6, 1989. “And while I might be able to gather as much as $10 million, I would have to spend more time in the living rooms of the wealthy raising money than I could out in the communities raising issues, raising hopes and raising hell.”

Hightower wants to form a party within a party–a populist alliance that begins in Texas and spreads to the rest of the country. He wants nothing less than to “change the way politics is conducted,” starting with the Texas Democratic Party, and let that serve as a national model.

To do so, he proposes to rally progressive, populist forces already in place, expanding the concept that he and his staff have practiced within the Texas Department of Agriculture for the past six years. That has been to work “shoulder to shoulder with local communities to protect the environment and health of people associated with agriculture,” says Hightower. “We are challenging ourselves and the

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state’s farmers to build a diversified, consumer-oriented, sustainable agriculture. We have tapped the aspirations of everyday people, removing barriers to their economic endeavors and freeing their enterprise for the benefit of Texas. With the support of the legislature and the help of other agricultural institutions, we have offered the simple tools of self-help to build food processing facilities, to sell everything from grain sorghum to honey in the international market, to open up the $3 billion dollar-a-year organic foods market to Texas producers, to assure safer pesticide practices, to protect communities from toxic waste contamination–in general, to give people the means to get hold of their own destiny.”

Something akin to the old Farmer-Labor Party with an infusion of modern technology, the new alliance would encompass speakers’ bureaus, small-donor solicitation programs, policy development centers, campaign training, a network of progressive and populist elected officials in all areas, and a candidate recruitment program. Hightower is already talking with the state AFL-CIO, the association of trial lawyers and community organizations throughout the state, and seeking advice from organizations outside Texas such as the Legislative Electoral Action Project in Connecticut and Citizen Action in Chicago.

While running against Phil Gramm in 1990 would have been “more fun than eating ice cream naked,” Hightower has decided to eschew high-dollar, high-profile politics and “put my political capital into the more fundamental task of plowing the ground, scattering the seeds and nurturing the growth of a broad-based, grass-roots populist politics out of which a progressive government can arise.”

The question, says Hightower, is not whether the Democratic Party should go to the left or to the right, but whether it will go again to people themselves.

Elaine Davenport is a freelance reporter and audio producer who divides her time between Austin, Texas, and London, England.

Bear Poaching in North Carolina

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 11, No. 4, 1989, p. 21

Hundreds of black bears are being poached in the southern Appalachian Mountains for their heads, hides, teeth, claws, feet, pads and gall bladders. “When we caught him this one guy was carrying 29 gall bladders–some no bigger than a coin, so they were probably from summertime cub bears,” said Ben Wade, who polices crimes against wildlife for the state of North Carolina.

Today’s poachers are armed with CB radios, four-wheel drive vehicles, and $5,000 hunting dogs wearing radio-tracking collars. Black bear gall bladders, which sell for up to $1,000 an ounce in many large cities, are used for medicine, especially by Asians, for ailments such as heart conditions and high blood pressure, jaundice and digestive disorders.

Bear claws are made into earrings and necklaces and bear heads and hides are displayed as trophies and used for decoration.

Black bears are not endanged [sic] and with the proper licenses and permits can be legally hunted in the Great Smokies for seven weeks a year. However, scientists worry about a rapidly dwindling black bear population since there are about as many illegal as legal kills being made. To combat poaching, state and federal agencies pooled $160,000 for a sting called Operation Smoky. More than 50 arrests resulted but Wade is not optimistic.

Bears have less than 10 percent of their original habitat left in the southern Appalachians, and the habitat that remains is confined to protected areas. “The concern has been that the protected areas are like islands, not connected corridors, and the wildlife have few alternatives but to survive in those enclaves,” says Wade.

Mergers in South Texas Colleges

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 11, No. 4, 1989, p. 24

The largely Hispanic population of south Texas now has a better opportunity to get the same quality of higher education as Texans living in other parts of the state, thanks to several bills signed in May that will merge five south Texas colleges with the state’s two most prestigious university systems–the University of Texas and Texas A&M [Southern Changes, July/Aug 1988].

Texas A&I in Kingsville, Corpus Christi State and Laredo State will combine with the A&M system and Pan American University’s campuses at Edinburg and Brownsville will join the UT system, giving the schools access to the funds and management systems of UT and A&M and an ability to grow into full-fledged four-year schools with graduate programs.

The arrangement will expand the number of advanced degrees available in South Texas, where currently there are no accredited medical schools, law school, or health science schools and no doctoral programs except in bilingual education.

“You’re going to finally see an addressing of the problem of South Texas–unemployment, a high crime rate. The more educated the masses are the more productive citizens they’ll become,” said Eddie Cavazos, state representative from Corpus Christi.

But another south Texas legislator, state senator Hector Uribe, says that it’s much too little too late and confirmed that a pending lawsuit on the matter will go ahead.

This suit, filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was scheduled for trial in Brownsville in September. It seeks a federal court order to make more state money available for higher education in south Texas.

Uribe says the state must spend an additional $500 million to resolve the lawsuit.

Angela Davis: ‘Rekindle the Flame’

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 10-11

Angela Davis, one of America’s best known activists of the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged an overflow crowd in Austin, Texas, on Martin Luther King Day to renew a commitment to activism in the 1990s–to “rekindle the flame.”

In 1972 Davis was acquitted of charges of murder and conspiracy stemming from a shootout involving Black Panther prisoners at a courthouse in San Rafael California. She emerged as a symbol of the American left and became a popular speaker at rallies and a lobbyist for change. “I’m asked what it was like then,” said Davis. “I tell them we worked hard, that it didn’t just happen. It’s called organization and continuity from one event to the next.” She said that today’s goals can be achieved only through an activist struggle: “Our activist efforts must unfold on all fronts …We must be aware of how the issues interconnect. You must join and be on call to be seen and heard.”

• “We must fight for free, universally available, quality child care for all,” Davis told her Austin audience. Women can’t afford to work when they earn 510,000 a year and the cost of child care is 53,000 a year per child.
• “Violence against women in the home and against children has to stop.” The portrayal of women in today’s rap music–“this idea that women are to be trampled upon and treated as sexual objects”–has to change, she said, suggesting that people write to their local radio stations.
• Blacks must tackle problems in their own communities, she said, including AIDS. “We have not done whet we ought to have done to help those with AIDS.” Since blacks make up the overwhelming majority of AIDS victims, why is it that black churches in East Oakland can’t find buddies to spend time with black people who have AIDS? “This upsets me more than almost any other issue that we currently face.”
• “The reproductive rights movement is still too white.” The federal government will pay for sterilization, but is rolling back the right to abortions. “It’s this simple: it is a woman’s right to determine what happens to her body.”
• A higher minimum wage is possible by saying “no to the corporate system that gives us no economic hope.” We may have rights, she said, but if we’re too poor to exercise those rights, we might as well not have the rights.
• “We must begin to fight for mandatory courses on African- American history and Latino history on U.S. campuses,” she said. This brought a large number of people to their feet, based perhaps on the longstanding conflict at the University of Texas over upgrading the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center into a bonafide department.

The crowd of more than 3,000 overflowed the Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas. The PAC is often filled with with [sic] mostly white audiences attending the symphony, ballet or opera. But the atmosphere on this occasion resembled that of a community gathering, as the racially mixed audience heard songs by the Webb Elementary School Choir, a welcome by the president of the University of Texas, who was heckled because of the university’s South African policy, and a dramatic interpretation by Miss Black Austin. The group also participated in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Davis, a polished orator, spoke slowly and rhythmically, often repeating her last few words or last phrase as members of the audience began to shorthand clap.

Her list of crises facing blacks and other Americans was long:

• “Drugs, prison and violence are a murderous cycle for our young black people,” she said. “We’re talking about a genocidal situation in this country.” With homicide the leading cause of death for black men and women ages fifteen to thirty-four, blacks making up 44 percent of the murder victims in the country, with the majority of those
  

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  with AIDS black, and with large numbers of black men permanently unemployed, “is it hard to understand why they drift to drugs?”

• “The U.S. government is solidly on the side of apartheid,” she said. If the United States had asked for total economic sanctions against South Africa ten years ago, apartheid would no longer exist.

Davis reminded the audience that by circulating petitions, marching and writing to elected representatives, they had achieved a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. “This national holiday is a living example of the possibility of our activism. We are living in history. Yesterday informs today.” Martin Luther King was not ‘the’ movement. He emerged from the movement and others will emerge from the movement, too, she said. She reminded the crowd that it was a group of women in Montgomery, including Jo Ann Robinson, who provided the organizational structure to successfully mount the Montgomery bus boycott. “What the sisters did in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, we can do in 1990. The issue then was desegregation, but Martin Luther King soon realized it had economic roots. In 1990, the interconnectedness of all the issues is much more pronounced than before. It is no longer possible to separate all the struggles. We’re all in this together.”

One tactic she suggested was to occupy Washington, D.C. “Prepare to stay there and force the government to negotiate with us.” There is a revolutionary spirit all around the world, she said. “If they can rise up in Eastern Europe, then so can we.”

Elaine Davenport is a Southern Changes contributing editor. She lives in Austin, Texas. Angela Davis currently teaches courses in philosophy, aesthetics and women’s studies at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Angela Davis: An Autobiography from Random House was a 1974 best-seller. SO has also written Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1982); her latest book is Women, Culture and Politics (Random House, 1989).

Guilty as Charged

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 8-11

In closing arguments at the January 27-February 5 trial of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, Hinds County, Mississippi Assistant District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter asked the jury, “Is it ever too late to do the right thing?” The jury’s answer was “Guilty as Charged.”

Like many events in this case, the unanimous verdict did not come quickly. It was read after five hours of 8-4 deadlock the first afternoon, an evening of sequestration at Jackson’s Edison Walthall Hotel, and more than an hour of deliberation the next morning—during which the jury foreman, the Rev. Elvage Fondren, 70, led a prayer session to help resolve the jury’s disagreement.

The pace of the Evers case has been both as slow and as sure as the pace of change in the South. More than thirty years have passed since Beckwith hid in a thicket of honeysuckle near the Evers home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, and shot the Mississippi State NAACP leader in the back as he got out of his car in his driveway. Evers led the struggle for better employment and housing for black residents, equal voting rights, and desegregation of schools, libraries, and other public facilities. Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 for the murder, and twice all-white, all-male juries deadlocked. Charges against him were dropped in 1969.

The next phase of the case came in the 1990s, when Mississippi had more elected black officials than any state. Beckwith and others had not changed their white supremacist views, but there had been a vast change in the law and the attitude of most of society since the 1960s. New evidence came to the attention of DeLaughter, assistant Hinds County prosecutor, who, at 35, was young enough to wonder why the case had never been solved.

A grand jury reindicted Beckwith for the Evers murder in December 1990. But Beckwith fought extradition from his home in Tennessee for ten months, then delayed the trial for more than two years with motions alleging violation of his constitutional rights of due process and a speedy trial. The old status quo seemed to be digging in its heels. Evers’ widow Myrlie said she began to despair that the trial would ever take place.

But it did, and the change in social attitudes that thirty years had brought was the biggest factor in the 1994 verdict. The jury this time was not all-male and all-white, but made up of seven women (five black) and five men (three black). Little new evidence was presented; in fact, crucial evidence including the bullet that killed Evers was missing this time. The prosecution had managed to round up the Enfield rifle, the telescopic sight with Beckwith’s fingerprint on it, and a transcript, all from the 1964 trials. Many of the same witnesses testified. And stand-ins read the words of witnesses who could not be found or who had died.

The scant new evidence there was added only circumstantial proof of the murder. Six witnesses testified that Beckwith had bragged to them about killing Evers (see New Witnesses, page 10). An enlargement of a picture that had been evidence in 1964 also was presented. The picture was of Beckwith’s white Plymouth Valiant. The area near the rearview mirror had been enhanced, using modern methods, to reveal a Masonic emblem hanging there, thus matching Beckwith’s car with one a witness had seen in a parking lot near the murder scene.

Mrs. Evers said she had been told “every reason why we could not pursue a third trial,” but kept pushing, nonetheless. She said at a press conference after the trial that whatever the verdict, the trial was a victory in itself. “Perhaps Medgar did more in death than he could have in life…. He lives through all of us.”

As the Evers case began to move through the courts, the idea became more firmly planted that other murder cases from the Civil Rights era might be brought to justice. A precedent had been set in 1977 with the successful reopening of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing case, in which four girls attending Sunday school had been killed. Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of first-degree murder in that case. But, despite an eyewitness account of four white men planting the bomb, no one else has ever been charged.

National NAACP leader William Gibson, who attended the Evers trial February 2 in Jackson, called on the Department of Justice to investigate unsolved civil rights atrocities in the same way its Office of Special Investigation looks for Nazi war criminals. The call to reopen or investigate cases has come from every quarter, even

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given that evidence may have disappeared and memories may have faded. “If you can ever solve a murder case, you should be able to prosecute it,” said Bill Baxley, the former Alabama attorney general who was responsible for reopening the Birmingham church bombing case.

There are many unresolved cases. Some of them cry out for justice because either the killer, like Beckwith, has bragged about the crime, or because the murder was witnessed but a case never brought. Carved into the black granite of the Civil Rights Memorial in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery are the names of forty persons who died in the civil rights struggle. Most of those deaths remain unsolved. The Civil Rights Research and Documentation Project, formerly at Ole Miss but now directed from Boston by Dr. Ronald Bailey, has found that between 1889 and 1940, “almost 3,100 Black people were lynched in the U.S., mostly in poor rural areas of the South.”

A highly visible stride has been made with the Evers case. And at least two other cases from the same decade now have been reopened. They are:

VERNON DAHMER A well-off businessman and local NAACP president, Dahmer died in January 1966 after Klansmen shot at and firebombed his home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He had offered to pay poll taxes for those who could not afford the fee to vote. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an FBI investigation and fourteen Klansmen were charged with arson and murder. Only three were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Sam Bowers, then the Imperial Wizard of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, known as the most violent Klan group in the South, was tried twice and twice the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. Glenn White, Forrest County District Attorney, has searched for transcripts of the Bowers trials, hired an investigator, and is considering reopening the case. “It’s never too late,” says Dahmer’s son Dennis, echoing the words of Assistant District Attorney DeLaughter in the Evers case.

ONEAL MOORE was shot in the head June 2, 1965, by nightriders in Varnado, Louisiana, and died instantly. He and his partner were the first black deputies in the sheriff’s department of Washington Parish, known to have one of the largest Klan memberships per capita in

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the country. Police arrested Ernest Ray McElveen, who belonged to several segregationist groups, but charges were dismissed and the murder never solved. The FBI has reopened the case, which was the subject of an episode of the television program “Unsolved Mysteries” several years ago.

Other cases, both well-known and obscure, beg for justice:

MICHAEL SCHWERNER, JAMES CHANEY, and ANDREW GOODMAN. These young civil rights workers were investigating a fire at the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were soon to conduct a Freedom School. On June 21, 1964, they were arrested and held in jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi, then released at 10 p.m. and intercepted by Klansmen. They were shot and their bodies buried in an earthen dam. Imperial Wizard Bowers (who figured in the Dahmer case), Neshoba County Chief Deputy Cecil Price, and six other Klansmen were convicted of a federal charge of conspiracy to deprive the three young volunteers of their civil rights. But the state has never brought murder charges.

EMMETT TILL. The murder of this black 14-year-old on August 28, 1955, was the subject of an article in Look magazine, in which J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant said they beat the youth, shot him in the head, wired a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his neck and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. A Chicago resident, Till was in Money, Mississippi for the summer and had dared to whistle at Bryant’s wife. Milam and Bryant were tried and found not guilty by an allmale, all-white jury who deliberated just

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over one hour. The case is considered pivotal because such an outrageous act against a young person made Till a symbol of the struggle for equality and galvanized the early civil rights movement. Evers, who had become the first NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi in 1954, investigated the murder and attended the trial. Milam is now dead. Bryant is still alive, but having been acquitted once of the murder, cannot be tried again for the same offense.

LAMAR SMITH. On August 13, 1955, Smith went to the Lincoln County courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, as part of his energetic campaign to organize black voters. He was shot as he stood on the courthouse lawn arguing with several white men. No one would testify as to what many had witnessed, and the three men arrested for murder went free. The grand jury’s report said that “although it was generally known or alleged to be known who the parties were in the shooting, yet people standing within twenty or thirty feet at the time claim to know nothing about it.”

Just as the end of the Nazi atrocities against Jews did not mean the end of anti-Semitism, one guilty verdict in an old civil rights murder case does not mean the end of bigotry.

But reopening the Evers case did bring some gains. District Attorney Ed Peters summed up the case: “A bragging murderer has been convicted.” Mrs. Evers saw the verdict as a way to “cleanse the state as it has our family.” And she reminded those who are still alive with a murder on their conscience to “always look over their shoulder because there may be someone like me and my family who will push to see that justice is done and never give up.”

Free-lance journalist and Southern Changes contributing editor Elaine Davenport is the associate producer of an upcoming HBO documentary on Medgar Evers.

The Six New Witnesses

By Elaine Davenport

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 10-11

Highlights from the testimony of the six new witnesses in the Byron de la Beckwith trial, in the order in which they appeared before the court:

In September 1966, Mary Ann Adams, 51, of Mississippi, went with a co-worker to a restaurant between Tchula and Greenwood in the Delta, where she met Beckwith: “He came to our table and was introduced as Byron de la Beckwith, the man who killed Medgar Evers. I refused to shake his hand and he got angry. He said he had not killed a man, but a ‘damn chicken-stealing dog and you know what you have to do once they’ve tasted blood.’ She told her mother, but not “the law” because she thought Beckwith couldn’t be tried again. When she saw publicity about the case being reopened, she got in touch with Deputy District Attorney DeLaughter.

Dan Prince, 49, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, rented an apartment in Beckwith’s home from November 1986 until he was evicted in August 1987. On one occasion when they were both standing in Beckwith’s front yard, Beckwith told Prince that Beckwith had been tried twice in Mississippi “for killing that nigger. I had a job to do and I did it and I didn’t suffer any more for it than my wife would when she was going to have a baby.” The defense portrayed Prince as a drunk, and as someone who was trying to get back at Beckwith for evicting him.

Elluard Jenoal ‘Dick’ Davis, 60, of Orlando, Florida, a Klan member turned FBI informant. Davis met Beckwith October 21, 1969, in a restaurant in Winterhaven, Florida. Beckwith was selling boats. Beckwith discussed his arrest and trials and “‘selective killings’ and said he would never ask anyone to do anything he hadn’t already done himself.” Immediately, Davis typed up notes for an FBI report.

Peggy Morgan, 46, of Mobile, Alabama and her husband lived in Greenwood, Mississippi, and one Sunday, sometime between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s (she was unable to be more precise), the couple gave Beckwith a ride to the state penitentiary, some eighty miles from Greenwood. The Morgans visited her husband’s brother and Beckwith visited Cecil Sessums, one of four KKK members convicted of murder in the January 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer, former president of the Forrest County NAACP. All three rode in the front seat, with Peggy sitting between her husband and Beckwith, who was in the passenger seat. Beckwith was concerned that no one know of his visit. “He said he had killed Medgar

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Evers, a nigger, and if this ever got out [about the trip to the penitentiary], he wasn’t scared to kill again,” she testified. Morgan said Beckwith later told her again the trip “better not get out” which “put a fear in me.” The defense tried to discredit her by suggesting she had psychiatric problems and was on medication, that she had been subjected to abuse, and that her mother’s death from freezing had traumatized her.

Delmar Dennis, 53, of Sevierville, Tennessee, a Klansman turned FBI informant, recounted the Aug. 8, 1965, meeting of Klan leaders in Byram, Mississippi, at which Beckwith said “killing that nigger didn’t cause me any more physical harm than your wives did to have a baby for you.”

In late 1979 Mark Reiley, 36, of Chicago, Illnois, had been a guard at the Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Angola inmate Beckwith was staying. Beckwith called him “Young Blood” because of Reiley’s Scots-Irish coloring: “Beckwith knew I was lacking a father-type figure and he was willing to fill that role.” Reiley spent eight to ten hours a day over a period of weeks with Beckwith and they studied the Bible: “He explained to me from the Bible that black people were ‘beasts of the field’ and if they got out of line you should kill them and not feel guilty about it.”

At one point, Reiley said, Beckwith rang for a nurse and a black woman appeared. Beckwith asked for a white person, and the nurse and Beckwith began a screaming match. Reiley remembers Beckwith saying “If I could get rid of an uppity nigger like Medgar Evers, I would have no problem with a no-count nigger like you.” Reiley also said Beckwith tried to impress him with having run for Lt. Governor of Mississippi, saying if Beckwith didn’t have power and connections, “he’d be serving time in jail in Mississippi for getting rid of that nigger Medgar Evers.”

Reiley did not know who Medgar Evers was until the Friday of the trial when the weather in Chicago was so cold he did not have to go to work and he sat at home watching CNN on television. He saw a story about the Evers case and finally realized who Beckwith had been talking about. Over the years Reiley had told his wife and friends of his conversations with Beckwith. When he realized it was important, he called the prosecutor in Jackson. At the end of the trial, District Attorney Ed Peters called Reiley—a surprise witness with a detailed, coherent story—his “cleanup hitter.”