![]() On May 31, 1961, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP (the same organization that sponsored Brown vs. But when you realize that Mississippi towns like Winona and Charleston entered the twenty-first century with segregated senior proms, or that State Senator Lydia Chassaniol can boast about her membership in the thoroughly racist Council of Conservative without raising a single eyebrow in the regional media you begin to understand the mindset Curtis Flowers of Winona, Mississippi is grappling with. The fact that only 11% of Mississippi’s white voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama might not seem all that significant by itself (nationally, Obama won the votes of 43% of white voters). The issues weren’t as emotional for the young folk but civil rights resentment appeared to be a staple of Mississippi life. But Hendrickson found little reason to believe that the children and grand children of the men in Moore’s picture felt much differently. That’s not so surprising, perhaps, considering the traumatic times these men lived through. In their minds, people like Medgar Evers of the Mississippi NAACP, Fannie Hamer, the unlettered organizer from Ruleville, Mississippi, and nationally prominent leaders like Martin Luther King were nothing but a bunch of self-promoting communist agitators. All these men were on guard during the period between 19 when the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens’ Councils were fighting a last ditch battle to preserve the Southern way of life. Hendrickson spent several years travelling between Washington and Mississippi interviewing the surviving sheriffs, their children and their grandchildren.Ī telling phrase echoes through the book: “that civil rights crap”. The mixture of malice and mirth raised obvious questions about the men and their mission. You can buy a used copy for one red penny.Ī reporter with the Washington Post, Hendrickson was mesmerized by the picture of the Mississippi lawmen. You can learn everything you would ever want to know about Charles Moore and the sheriffs in his famous picture by picking up a copy of Paul Hendrickson’s Sons of Mississippi, available from Amazon. The photographer was Charles Moore, the same man who captured the famous scene of Martin Luther King being arrested in Montgomery, Alabama in 1958. The picture originally appeared in Life magazine. The fellow brandishing clenched fists is Sheriff James Wesley Garrison of Oxford. The fat man with the malicious grin is Sheriff James Ira Grimsely of Pascagoula on the coast. The man with the arm band and his back to the camera is Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Greenwood, just down the road from Winona. The man holding the bat is Sheriff Billy Ferrell of Natchez, Mississippi. In reality, they were in Oxford to keep the federal government from integrating Ole Miss. The men in the picture are sheriffs from all over the state who were called to Oxford to keep the peace. The shot captures the scene a day before James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi after two years of legal and political maneuvering. The picture above was snapped in late September of 1962, thirty-four years before Curtis Flowers was apprehended by the State of Mississippi. (What follows is part of a series of posts concerning the tragedy that has divided a Mississippi town. But if it takes ten trials to convict Flowers, the state of Mississippi, represented by District Attorney Doug Evans, is determined to do it. So far as I can gather, no American accused of murder has ever faced trial on the same facts six times. If the defendant is Curtis Flowers you try him a sixth time. ![]() What happens when the state of Mississippi takes a man to trial five times and fails to obtain a final conviction? Information on the Flowers case can be found here.) (This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.
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