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Sovereignty Commision Discussion

Gene Edwards: The Sovereignty Commission. We were talking about the powerful roots. How did you learn out about the Sovereignty Commission and where did you find that file?

Jerry Mitchell: I got interested in the Sovereignty Commission, I guess I first found out about it um in February of '89 and um another reporter told me there are these Sovereignty Commission files that are supposedly accidentally filed in an open file. And there was a lawsuit trying to open up the records of this Sovereignty Commission, the state segregationist spy agency. So there was a long, long, long battle. The suit was filed way back in 1977, trying to open them up. Sure enough. I went over there and there was a report, Sovereignty Commission report, that accidentally, a sealed one that accidentally got filed in the this open file, and so it showed that this person working for the Sovereignty Commission infiltrated the COFO office, which was basically the umbrella organization for all the civil rights organizations in '64 in Jackson . People traded that and basically stole documents and photographs of incoming freedom summer volunteers, and of course, gave those to the Commission and then returned all that to the file. So that was kind of my first glimpse of the Sovereignty Commission stuff. I was kind of like "Wow, you know (laughs) That's pretty wild stuff." So then of course, my next question was "What else did they do?" So I began to kind of develop sources that would first began to tell me what was in the file and eventually started leaking to me the actual documents

Gene Edwards: And is that what led you to Beckwith?

Jerry Mitchell: Yep. That was, that. The commission files were the ones that showed that the commission had secretly assisted with Beckwith's defense.

Gene Edwards: Byron de la Beckwith

Jerry Mitchell: Byron de la Beckwith's defense. He was tried for killing Medgar Evers.

Diane McWhorter: And Jerry, where were the the commission papers physically? Were they in the archives at that point?

Jerry Mitchell: No. They were sealed. They were like, there's a lawsuit involved? I guess they probably would have technically been in archives at that point. You're right. But they were sealed. They were sealed and kept in archives at that point.

Karl Fleming: Jerry, was, is it not a fact that the Sovereignty Commission was unique in the south, in that it was the only state that had an official, state-funded secret?

Jerry Mitchell: Nope.

Diane McWhorter: Alabama had one, too but it was

Jerry Mitchell: Alabama came over. Alabama was so impressed with Mississippi 's Sovereignty Commission, they came over and looked at the way they had their system set up and everything and went back and formed their own. And not all of them were called Sovereignty Commissions. I think Florida had kind of an equivalent of it, but it went by an entirely different name.

Diane McWhorter: Yeah. Alabama had another one, called the Peace Commission. There was an executive one and a legislative one.

Karl Fleming: And all funded by taxpayers.

Jerry Mitchell: Exactly.

Diane McWhorter: R ight

Karl Fleming: Which was what was unusual about it.

Jerry Mitchell: Of course.

Diane McWhorter: Black taxpayers, as well.

Karl Fleming: Citizens' Councils

Diane McWhorter: I don't think they got to deduct

Karl Fleming: Yes.

Jerry Mitchell: And the other interesting thing. You mentioned the Citizens' Council. I've talked to some of the Citizens' Council leader,s and the whole concept behind the formation of the Sovereignty Commission-it was formed in '56, so just think about this-Brown versus Board of Education, 1954, all the white citizens councils form etc. By '56, all this is privately funded. People are having to fork over money. Well, citizens councils suddenly realize, "Wait a minute. Let's get the state to do this. They can pay the bills." And that's what they did. That's what the citizens council people have told me. Then, of course, not surprisingly, as time went on, then the commission started funneling the money back to the citizens council. They started like handing money over to the citizens council.

Background of Bombing

Diane McWhorter: I remember in one case. You know, there's a lot of stuff in my book about the labor movement and how the anti-labor movement sort of morphed into the segregationist movement. And the labor movement had this, the civil rights movement had roots in that. There's a very anti labor family in Birmingham that also produced a huge number of the coal. They had a coal operating um company; they were coal operators, had a coal mining company. And just an insane number of the most racist Klansmen in Birmingham came out of that, out of some of their coal towns. And so that's kind of where I started connecting the anti-labor stuff, with the Klan. And the guy who built the church bomb had grown up in this coal camp with the DeBardeleben family it was called. They had sent bombs, to plant bombs themselves against union organizers if they were going to march against their company. So that's where the guy who built the church bomb learned about dynamite and learned to build bombs. It was anti labor bombs, so anyway, the son, the grown son of the patriarch of this anti-labor family had machine gunned some labor organizers when they marched onto the property in 1934. And I talked to the old patriarch, and when I got to the question about-and I knew he was there, I knew he was on the premises that night when they shot them. And one guy, one guy got killed. So when I asked him-he was this sort of frail, elderly fellow at that point-and when I said to him, "So were you, were you like there when the machine guns were going on?" And he said, "there?" He goes, "I was in it." And then he said, "We started firing. They fired back. They started running and we fired some more." And so he lit up for the first time in the whole conversation about this. He not only confirmed it, he was delighted to confirm it. He didn't think he had done anything wrong. The Klansmen I talked to, that's a whole 'nother story, but uh I had kept a running list every time-you know, I worked on my book for nineteen years-but every time I would go down there I would check the phone book to see if those Klansmen were still there. And I'd kind of go Oh God, I've got to go

Gene Edwards: Another one's gone.

Diane McWhorter: Talk to them, yeah,

Gene Edwards: Yeah.

Diane McWhorter: And so finally, when I couldn't put it off any longer, I went to the city directory to see if they had a job and to see if they were still married. I thought maybe if they held a job and were still married, they're not total social misfits, and then I talked to some e- wives and girlfriends to see if they thought they would hurt me. One of them said, "Sugar, he wouldn't hurt you. He's a fine Christian gentleman."

Karl Fleming: Yeah.

Diane McWhorter: This is one of the most violent Klansmen. He wasn't the church bomber, but he had bombed Fred Shuttlesworth's church in 1956.

Diane McWhorter on Winning the Pulitzer Prize

Gene Edwards: Twenty years.

Diane McWhorter: Almost

Gene Edwards: Nineteen years and nine months.

Diane McWhorter: Yeah.

Gene Edwards: And originally this was this thick, right? (Gestures with hands about one foot apart)

Diane McWhorter: Uh huh

Gene Edwards: How did it get to be this thick? (Holds up book)

Diane McWhorter: Get from there to there?

Gene Edwards: And why does it take twenty years?

Diane McWhorter: (Laughs)

Gene Edwards: And what's your advice for Jerry who hasn't done this yet who has probably this much?

Diane McWhorter: Well, actually, one of my favorite questions from a writer was like how tall was the manuscript when you printed it out. And I went, "It was like the size of a toddler."

Gene Edwards: It was like one of your kids?

Diane cWhorter: Yeah. (laughs) Well, I remember reading this story about Neil Sheehan who worked sixteen years on his book about Vietnam and I remember his wife saying with some disgust in some interview that it took him a year to cut it. And I remember reading that and going how could it take you a year to cut a book. You just go into it and do it in about six weeks. So it took me five years to cut it.

Gene Edwards: Five years to cut it?

Diane McWhorter: Yeah. Yeah.

Gene Edwards: What did editors say?

Diane McWhorter: They couldn't get their minds around it. And the reason it took me so long with it was I just kind of cut it. I reduced the size of each piece of the pie and so then I ruined it. So then I had to go back to the drawing board and rethink it and it was an it was an awful process.

Jerry Mitchell: I'm looking forward to it.

Diane McWhorter: Welcome aboard.

Gene Edwards: And then when the phone rings and somebody on the other end says, "Oh by the way, you won a Pulitzer Prize!"

Diane McWhorter: Yeah that was pretty great.

Gene Edwards: Tell me about that.

Diane McWhorter: If somebody had told me that at the outset, I would not have had any sleepless nights about this but unfortunately, life doesn't work that way. You don't know how it's going to turn out, but that made it all worth it. What's really amazing about writing a book, as all of you can attest, is that, when you're in it, it's nothing, you don't know what it is. It's like having a, it's like being pregnant and then you just don't know what's in there. Then when you look back on, when your child is born, you just look back on the pregnancy, "Oh, that's when I was pregnant with Lucy or Isabelle." Whereas you write, you look back on the process of writing the book and I go, "I was working on that book." I didn't know what that book was going to be when I was working on it. I was just drowning in this material.

Reporters on Reporting

Karl Fleming: I'm here looking at Jerry, looking at Diane, and my book is dedicated to all the reporters who did the right thing. And my books is not intended to be so, but I hope it is a tribute to reporters because in the current atmosphere with the media under such attack, I think about my past and my career and I think that reporters are the most ethical, honorable class of people I have ever known. I honor reporters. People have asked me about this stuff and being involved in all the civil rights stuff--if I felt like I was doing something heroic and the answer is no, and I'm sure the feeling is shared. I was the mere witness. The brave people were the black kids and the Jewish kids who laid their lives on the line every day. But nonetheless, I honor reporters, and I've very sorry, they have been under such attack from the right wing for the last twenty years and they're not held in more esteem than they are now because they should be because the media. I think today's reporters are better educated than they've ever been in the history of this country, and we do have in this country the best media on the face of the earth.

Gene Edwards: Well, we do, but there's the argument too, that there's so much garbage out there these days. The standards have gotten so low, and so how do you keep your standards up?

Diane McWhorter: Well I, I think the problem is the uh is the careerism that effects reporters. You can see it being played out in the who Karl Rove thing now. If you look at the Matt Cooper emails, you know, you can tell that the issues aren't really being engaged about whether I'm being used by this guy. You know, it's protecting your sources; it's sort of covering yourself, and everything. That's a whole different story.

Gene Edwards: But how do you go about convincing a newspaper like the Clarion Ledger that it's important to invest, they've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in your, your work over the years? And there was no promise of reward in the beginning.

Jerry Mitchell: No, No.

Gene Edwards: How did you convince them to do it?

Jerry Mitchell: One day at a time.

Gene Edwards: And by the way, this was the same Clarion Ledger that never would have printed your stories years ago.

Karl Fleming: Are you kidding?

Jerry Mitchell: Quite the opposite. They were part of the problem in the 60s.

Karl Fleming: That' right.

Jerry Mitchell: They were getting Sovereignty Commission reports directly and printing a lot of that stuff, so I think it's just a day at a time. You know, Bob Woodward said one time, and I agree with this statement to a certain extent. I mean I've enjoyed the support of management throughout this, but I think there's a certain amount of truth to what Woodward said one time which was that great stories are done at the fines of management. And I think that there's a certain truth to that because what it means is, at least I view it from a reporter perspective, which is you have to want to push the envelope. I mean it's your job as a reporter to go out there and expose the truth. And you can't let anything get in the way of that. You know, even management to a certain extent. And I think it's an important role, and I agree with Karl, I mean I'm extremely prejudiced being a reporter talking about my profession, but I really believe that journalism is one of the most noble professions that there is, and I think it's a real shame that some of the things that people who call themselves journalists. It's been part of the problem, Gene. And you have people who, you know, you can't help as a member of the public. You see the paparazzi chasing these celebrities around and it makes more headlines when Tom Cruise jumps up on Oprah's couch than it does the war in Iraq . So you know, all these things have an effect on the public's perception, I think.

Karl Fleming: I also think it's damaging. I think reporters make too much money, and I'm not being glib except I am, sort of. But when I was coming along, reporters were members of the working class. The celebrity that she sort of alluded to, I think has had a damaging effect These guys get on these perches where they become minor celebrities and some of them major celebrities. They're out on the road getting twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars a pop. They're making speeches. They're on television, and when you get in one of those TV spots you're less inclined to rock the boat. You don't want to be pushed away from the trough, so there is a kind of deadening effect upon reporters. Reporters are human beings and they're not immune to celebrity and big money, and there's a lot of that, and I don't think it's had that great of an effect on journalists.

Gene Edwards: Did you ever sense a deadening effect?

Diane McWhorter: I think the consolidation of the big media companies has had the most deadening effect, and I think that, that we're seeing a generations of reporters now who are just self censoring because they know that there's not going to be a big unwillingness to fight against management. I mean that I think that reporters are temperamentally kind of malcontents and bellyachers, and now when you see them.

Gene Edwards: Every news room I've been in has been like that.

Diane McWhorter: Of course, but of course.

Karl Fleming: A s well they should be.

Diane McWhorter: Thank God, Thank God, But I think you're seeing that, you're seeing less of that now. You're seeing these sort of corporate geeks willing to toe the line, and that's dangerous because we, you know, we're supposed to be. If we can't fight against our own managers, how are we going to take on the government or whatever?

Karl Fleming: I heard a story a couple of weeks ago about a very well known network guy, one of the major networks and he proposed to go to the middle east and do a story in Iraq, and Israel and do a story about the children, about the victims, and he got over there and suddenly word came down from management. No. Don't do that story.because it would have shown another kind of ugly side of this whole stuff, the children, victims, and that would not be popular with the power brokers in Washington. So instead they sent him off to do tsunami victims and that story was put on the shelf and it will not be done and that's exactly what Diane is talking about.

**

Diane McWhorter : I think it's from your book Karl, one of my favorite lines is when somebody from Tupelo has a relative that works for one of the papers. She says, "Y'all aren't going to come down here and tell lies about us?" And he says, "No we're going to do much worse than that. We're going to tell the truth."

**

Karl Fleming: I think it's very hard for reporters, like Jerry and Karl to write books because number one if you're a newspaper reporter or even a reporter for Newsweek like I was. You get an assignment, it's very quick, and then you finish it, and then you're done.

Gene Edwards: And you move on to the next story.

Karl Fleming: And the next day you do something else.

Gene Edwards: Mmmm

Karl Fleming: For me, the second thing is you always had somebody saying do this story, get it in by X date, so.

Jerry Mitchell: Right definitely.

Karl Fleming: S o when you're on your own, you don't have that outside discipline. It becomes very hard.

Gene Edwards: And so tell me about how hard this was.

Karl Fleming: Well, people ask me how I came to write this book and I always say I wrote it because of the pain of not writing it. Finally became greater than the pain of writing it. And I had been wanting to write this book for many years, and people kept urging me Karl, write your book, write your book. And I just couldn't do it because the enormity of it was so overwhelming and then because, too, at this stage of my life I had totally lost confidence in my ability to write anything. I was just kind of shattered, but once I got going, it came just like that. I took a couple of chapters to my publisher and he said go. This was in February, and what I said was I need a deadline. He said how about August first. I said fine. So between February and August, I wrote the book and it came pretty quick. But I needed a deadline. I needed somebody with a whip saying.

Gene Edwards: We're going to press.

Gene Edwards: Did it amaze you, though, all the things, all the memories?

Karl Fleming: I am fortunate in having an extraordinary. I remember everything, particularly from my early childhood in the orphanage to my early reporting days. And I had written bits and pieces of this but I had to go back and do some reading and do some research and make sure I had everything in order. The dates and all that stuff, but again, once I got the energy and got going, I told Diane last night, I go back and read some of this stuff and it seems almost like an out of body experience. Did I write that? It's pretty damn good.

**

Karl Fleming: We do bad things, but our democracy is a self-correcting enterprise. We do bad things and then we fix them. That's certainly unlike many, perhaps most countries on the face of the earth. We take a step back and then we take two steps forward. Our country today, more people have more rights than at any time in our history and that's all because of the bravery of, not, I guess about a hundred black and Jewish kids and Martin Luther King and the people around him. They changed this country. And it, it is a better place. Some people look at what's going on now and they think this is a bad time, but when you look at it in a in another sense, in a sense of what happened, in a what the civil rights people did, it brought on the anti-war movement, and the women's movement and the gay rights movement. We're a less prejudiced country than we've ever been and that's a good thing. So Mississippi and the rest of the country, we have a lot of stuff to feel good about.

Other Civil Rights reporting

Gene Edwards: It was interesting to me during the Killen trial, the reporters' accounts of the hospitality center and people being offered.

Karl Fleming: Oh, I was there. I was down here on book tour, and I drove over to Philadelphia on the last day of the trial. Jerry was in the courtroom, and I was stunned at walking around the courthouse. The cops were just as friendly as they could possibly be. We went around to this media center. The woman there was quite effusively friendly, and the ladies of the town were volunteering to bake cookies.

Jerry Mitchell: Bake cookies

Karl Fleming: for the

Jerry Mitchell: for the media

Karl Fleming: for the reporters. I couldn't believe it. Baking cookies for the reporters. I thought, that's change.

**

Karl Fleming: I went once. I went with the Klan through Georgia , and we were having dinner one night with the Grand Dragon of the Georgia Klan and the Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton from Tuscaloosa , Alabama . The Grand Dragon of Georgia Klan was trying to convince me that he was a kind of moderate. He said, "Well, Karl, I think niggers ought to be able to get jobs." And Bobby Shelton said, totally without embarrassment, with my notebook out, he said, "Well, now wait a minute, Calvin, before we start giving these niggers jobs, they've got to start improving their own status quo." And it was just a devastating. I mean, it told everything you needed to know about the Klan. But they would say this stuff with utter unembarrassment. They were proud of it.

**

Gene Edwards: Tell me about James Meredith.

Karl Fleming: Well, I say in the book in the chapter on Meredith, when I first saw the guy, I thought this is either the bravest man I ever met or the nuttiest. The two first guys who had tried to get into the Mississippi state school system, one they sent to Parchman pen for nine years.

Jerry Mitchell: Right

Karl Fleming: On a trumped up charge of stealing nine sacks of chicken feed, and the other they immediately clapped into the state nuthouse on the grounds that anyone who would do this has got to be crazy so they just locked him up. So I just thought this guy has to be nuts. And he looked so unfit for this role. Tiny little guy, five feet six inches, one hundred thirty five pounds, impeccably dressed with a suit and a tie and a briefcase and these long eyelashes in this delicate little face. I mean about the most unlikely person you could possibly imagine. But boy did he have a lot of guts.

Gene Edwards: When you talked to him, what did you think?

Karl Fleming: I thought this was about the coolest guy, I mean cool in the sense of not being rattled. After he got in, I would go down to visit him on the campus, and we'd walk across the campus and these white kids would walk up behind and they'd throw cherry bombs on the sidewalk and they'd explode like guns. He never flinched. I was terrified all the time. He never knew that somebody wasn't just going to put a gun to his head and just blow him away, and he lived under that threat all the time. He was just in the southern, in that southernism, he was as cool as the center seed of a cucumber.

**

Gene Edwards: You alluded to your heroes. One of your heroes had to be Fred Shuttlesworth.

Diane McWhorter: Oh yeah, yeah

Gene Edwards: I love what he, what you wrote, what he said when someone wanted him to call off one of the meetings.

Diane McWhorter: Oh yeah. He said that the Lord had told him to call off one of the meetings and Fred Shuttlesworth said to the fellow, "When did the Lord start sending my messages through you? Tell the Lord if He wants me to call it off, He better come down here Himself in person, and He better have identifying marks on His hand and spear marks on His side and then I'll call off the meeting."

Gene Edwards: And we know so little about Fred Shuttlesworth.

Diane McWhorter: Well, people who know about the movement know about him. When my book came out that, and I would go on radio shows, people were just knocked out by Shuttlesworth. They just wanted to hear all about him because they couldn't believe they had never heard about him before. And that wasn't completely accidental. He was one of the few people who challenged Martin Luther King publicly. And he, there was a sense that he kind of got frozen out of the movement a little as a result of that.

Gene Edwards: So the difference in styles between him and King.

Diane McWhorter: Yeah. It was a real dialectic, though. They both needed each other. I would never argue that the movement could have, that Shuttlesworth should have been the big leader of the movement because you really needed both personalities to work. Shuttlesworth was so confrontational, and he was kind of pushing, pushing the envelope all the time, and was the first person to do direct action as opposed to passive resistance to break the unjust laws in the among the Southern Christian leadership conference group. But you also needed King to sort of be that conciliatory presence in the white world.

Gene Edwards: And you said in your book was one of the things that King learned how to do, finally, was learn how to pick his enemies.

Diane McWhorter: What do you mean?

Gene Edwards: Learn how to pick the right people to be his enemies.

Diane McWhorter: Right. Because at first, they first thought that all they needed to do was to sort of display the virtue of their cause, to bear witness to their own suffering and everything. And then they realized, no, we need the racists to actually to show how bad they are.

Karl Fleming: Well, they had the, King had been in Albany , Georgia . The year before and I was there covering that, and it was an abysmal failure because the police chief was so clever.

Diane McWhorter: Albany , yeah, Lloyd Pritchett

Karl Fleming: Lloyd Pritchett was just a very sophisticated cop, and King would lead these people out in the morning to march downtown and protest. And the police chief would just politely just lock everybody up. They didn't beat anybody up. No dogs,

Diane McWhorter: He was about

Gene Edwards: No fire hoses.

Diane McWhorter: Lloyd Pritchett would bow his head sometimes, say a little prayer as he arrested them. He was converting to Catholicism, you know, so he was a godly man and he'd he hated to do it. But my, he said to one of the student leaders there, Charles Sherrod, he said, "It's just a matter of mind over matter. I don't mind and you don't matter."

Karl Fleming: Right.

Diane McWhorter: So that was how he really felt.

Karl Fleming: Right, but the King people came out of that, as Diane said, knowing that they needed to pick the right enemy. That enemy was Bull Connor. They knew, they could predict that Connor would react the way he did. And therefore, I think in the civil rights movement, this was the first major, planned media event in a sense, that they knew King and his guys knew that if they marched out into Kelly Ingram Park, here would come Bull Connor with his dogs and the fire hoses, and it would end up of the cover of Life Magazine and on national television.

Diane McWhorter: And in fact, they were disappointed at first because the policeman, Lloyd Pritchett, the aforementioned police chief from Albany who had quote killed the movement with kindness, came up and gave the police of Birmingham lessons on how to behave and how not to be suckered into any kind of reaction that they could get a picture of. And so the movement was very disappointed initially because they weren't, the policemen in Birmingham were being so nice and polite and finally when they turned the children out into the streets, they got the reaction because the police couldn't handle them anymore.

Karl Fleming: Old Bull got out of control.

Diane McWhorter: Bull got the dogs and fire hoses and that that really put it over.

**

Gene Edwards: The Sam Bowers trial different?

Jerry Mitchell: I'd it was pretty straight forward, but certainly there was a lot of discussion about Bowers and, and his role and uh the Klan and what the Klan did. I had to say it was, I like to tell people this, "It was the funniest trial I've ever covered." It was just obviously deadly serious matters, but there was a lot of things that happened in the trial that

Gene Edwards: For example

Jerry Mitchell: Well, Bowers was represented by Travis Buckley, who is kind of the lawyer for the Klan. I guess one of the perks, if you want to call it that, of being lawyer for the Klan, is you get free membership

Diane McWhorter: Oooh, no dues.

Jerry Mitchell: No dues, right.

Karl Fleming: Free crosses.

Jerry Mitchell: Exactly, free crosses, free membership. All those things. So Buckley is cross examining Billy Roy Pitts who is involved in the killing of Vernon Dahmer, one of the Klanmen who is involved in the killing of Vernon Dahmer, and he's testifying for the state. Buckley is cross examining him about this planning meeting which took place about a month before Vernon Dahmer was killed by the Klan. He was asking who all was at this planning meeting. Buckley was asking and Pitts is like, "Well, let's see. I was there. Sam Bowers was there. This other Klansman was there. Well, you were there." And so Travis Buckley is like, "Oooh, oooh, objection, Your Honor." I always tell people I've covered a lot of trials in my life, but this is the first one I've ever covered where the witness implicated the defense lawyer in the case.

Karl Fleming: Were you ever threatened by any of these guys?

Jerry Mitchell: Yeah.

Karl Fleming: What's the scariest time you ever had?

Jerry Mitchell: Well, I guess I had a moment with Beckwith, but probably the scariest one, the most unnerving one, this guy called me in '98 while I was working on the Dahmer case, and basically said we've got pictures of you, pictures of your family. We know where live and that kind of thing. So the feds did investigate it. I found out he lived in South Carolina so I thought well, at least he's got a ways to drive.

Gene Edwards: You had people looking through holes in the motel room, didn't you?

Karl Fleming: Well, I think the scariest time was in Greenwood , Mississippi . They were trying to register people to vote and there were a lot of protests. My friend Claude Sitton and I always stayed in the adjoining rooms near the front of the motel in a well lit place because of our fear of being dragged out. We were asleep about 2:00 AM one morning and there was this pounding on the door. Claude came flying through the door and said, "Don't open the door!" And I said, "Are you nuts? I'm not about to open the door." Anyway the pounding went on and I got up and looked, there was this tall window, and I got up and looked down and there was this black woman pounding on the door. And the first thought that we had was that this was a set up that this woman had been sent there and had we let her in we would have been immediately charged