Testimony was heard in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen for the June 21, 1964, murders of 3 civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The reputed Klansman was indicted for slaying three civil rights workers who were in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 as part of a movement to register blacks to vote and help run educational programs in the South. The trial Mississippi v. Edgar Ray Killen was held at the Neshoba County Courthouse. Coverage was provided by WJTV (Jackson, MS) for Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Following the fourth day of testimony, Jurors announced they were firmly and evenly divided about the proper verdict. Neither the judge, nor the forewoman, referred to the division as a deadlock, and the panel was due back in court the next day to continue deliberations. ~No footage is available for the first day of the trial with the opening statements due to a problem with the courthouse audio system.

FBI podcast re: Ben Chester White?

Young and old will gather from all parts of the country and beyond June 2-4, 2011, to celebrate and commemorate the struggles and successes of the Southwest Georgia Civil Rights Movement, to address the persistence of racism and poverty, and to formulate plans for future action.  We expect Civil Rights Activists, Community Leaders, Educators, Youth, Professionals, and Community people to join us in Albany for three days of thoughtful talks, informative workshops and proactive planning to pass on the legacy of the Movement.

Timothy M. Casey, NASHUA
Monday, Mar 31, 2003
NASHUA - Timothy M. Casey, 83, died yesterday at home. He was born in Concord, the son of Timothy and Laura (LaPlante) Casey. He was graduated from Concord High School in 1937. He attended Danville Military Academy in Danville, Va. He received his college education from Duke University. Casey served in the Navy as a pilot during World War II and received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He served on the USS Suwannee Aircraft Carrier CVE-27 flight group. Casey worked for the U.S. Department of Justice as a special agent for the FBI, retiring in 1976. He was a member of the North New England chapter of the retired FBI Special Agents, American Legion Post No. 1 in Memphis, Tenn., honorary member of the New Hampshire Chiefs of Police, and the Coos County and Grafton County Law Enforcement Associations. Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Margaret Casey; a daughter, Kathleen Casey of Nashua; a son, James Casey of Merrimack; and one grandson. Visiting hours will be held on Wednesday from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. at the Waters Funeral Home, 50 South Main St. in Concord. A Mass of Christian burial will be celebrated on Thursday at 10 a.m. at St. John the Evangelist Church, 72 South Main St. in Concord. Burial will be held on April 27 at 10 a.m. in the New Hampshire Veterans Cemetery in Boscawen. Donations may be made to the New Hampshire State Veterans Cemetery Association Inc., P.O. Box 626, Concord 03302-0626, or to Home Health & Hospice Care, 22 Prospect St., Nashua 03060.

On the Civil Rights Memorial are inscribed the names of individuals who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern civil rights movement 1954 to 1968. Between the first and last entries is a space that represents civil rights heroes who died before or after this period and others whose stories were not known when the Memorial was created. The martyrs include those who were targeted for death because of their civil rights activities; those who were random victims of vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and those who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought a new awareness of the struggle to people allover the world.

Taylor was one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation. Their pain galvanized an anti-rape crusade that ultimately took a back seat to the push to dismantle officially sanctioned separation of the races, and slowly faded from the headlines.

Many of these rape victims never got justice and the desire for closure is still there, more than 60 years later — leaving some to wonder what, if anything, can be done to address the wrongs done to them.

“I didn’t get nothing, ain’t nothing been done about it,’’ Taylor, now 90, said in a telephone interview from her central Florida home. The AP is revealing Taylor’s identity because she has publicly identified herself as a victim of sexual assault.

The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) conducts research and supports policy initiatives on anti-civil rights violence in the United States and other miscarriages of justice of that period. CRRJ serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers, and organizers involved in various initiatives seeking justice for crimes of the civil rights era.

A civil rights tour is "a gold mine waiting to happen," said Terry Watkins, sales manager for the Silver Star Hotel and Casino. "Every time I have a tour group to come to the casino, they want to know about what we have on the civil rights movement. Where is the church? "If we could find the car...someone would know about the car..."

Ten years after his father's death, Byron De La Beckwith Jr. is sharing secrets, saying those behind NAACP leader Medgar Evers' assassination belonged to the Citizens' Council.

A valued organizer and fundraiser, who was unapologetic about his early Communist associations, Hunter Pitts ‘‘Jack’’ O’Dell ranks among the most controversial figures of the civil rights movement. His role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was used by detractors as ammunition against both Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement at large. As O’Dell wrote to King upon his departure from SCLC: ‘‘Not the least formidable of the obstacles blocking the path to Freedom is the anti-Communist hysteria in our country which is deliberately kept alive by the defenders of the status-quo as a barrier to rational thinking on important social questions’’ (O’Dell, 12 July 1963).

2000 marks the fortieth anniversary of the southern sit-in movement, the emergence of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and the founding of its most dynamic component, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We believe it is important to look back at the achievements of those courageous men and women, both to celebrate their struggle and to learn from their experience. The following article is adapted from a talk originally given last summer at a seminar far college and university teachers, on the history of the civil rights movement at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies. —Eds.

re: "putting your body on the line"

Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series which was originally released in two parts: Eyes I in 1985 and Eyes II in 1988. This series, which debuted on PBS stations, is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. “Eyes on the Prize” won more than twenty major awards and attracted over 20 million viewers. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each transcript represented the entire interview conducted by Blackside including sections which appeared in the final program and the outtakes. For more information, on the various formats of each interview, please contact the Film and Media Archive.

You may also browse and search the Eyes on the Prize Interviews I (1985) and Eyes on the Prize Interviews II (1988) individually.

Book Review

AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

By Danielle L. McGuire

Knopf. 324 pp. $27.95

For Buford Posey, a white man raised in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Second World War had a civilizing influence. "When I was coming up in Mississippi I never knew it was against the law to kill a black man," he says. "I learned that when I went in the Army. I was 17 years old. When they told me, I thought they were joking."

For several decades Posey's assumption about the relative value of black life was effectively borne out by the state's judiciary. Among others, the murders of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, in Money in 1955; the state's NAACP chairman Medgar Evers, in Jackson in 1963; the three young civil rights workers--James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24)--in Philadelphia in 1964; and civil rights supporter Vernon Dahmer, in Hattiesburg in 1966 all went unpunished.

The first section of the new documentary NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM, from filmmakers Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, is so gut-wrenchingly sorrowful that it's an oddly mixed blessing when, as the movie prog-
resses, it becomes both easier to take and less effective. This may have more to do with the way in which events have played themselves out over the 46 years since the original murders around which the film is organized than with the skill of the filmmakers themselves. Still, had Dickoff and Pagano been able to maintain the passion and immediacy of their first third, they might have ended up with one of the most powerful, ground-breaking documentaries of modern times. (Or perhaps one so upsetting that viewers would squirm and head for an early exit.)

In 1964 when she was only 17, Micki Dickoff asked her father if she could go to Mississippi to work with the volunteers  of  Freedom Summer, registering black voters. Her father, a Mississippi native, refused to allow her to go. His was the only Jewish family in a small Mississippi town, and he feared what she would find there. Not long after, his worst fears were confirmed when three of the volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local Klansmen, all of them deputy sheriffs of Neshoba County. 

Tuesday night, celebrated singers including Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan, Jennifer Hudson, Joan Baez, John Mellencamp, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Natalie Cole, and Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon serenaded the First Family and invited guests in a special concert "In Performance at the White House: Songs of the Civil Rights Movement."

The concert was the fifth in a series dedicated to "Music that tells the story of America," as President Obama described in his opening remarks. The evening traced a story from the spirituals born in the early days of slavery to the new songs that evolved and emerged to sustain the marches and protests of the 1950s and 1960s. In a rare overt reference to the role the Civil Rights Movement played in his own path to becoming President, Obama singled out Representative John Lewis as a "man whose sacrifices made it possible for me to be here tonight."

WELLESLEY, Mass.— As a key leader in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, Robert Moses focused on registering southern sharecroppers to vote. Today, he aims to assure the right to learn algebra — arguing that mathematics literacy in today’s information age is as important to citizenship as registering to vote in 1960s Mississippi.

“The first to highlight access to algebra as a gateway to equal opportunity, civil rights leader Robert Moses has had a huge impact on American education,” said Barbara Beatty, professor and chair of the Department of Education at Wellesley College. “Through his groundbreaking work, he has raised awareness of math and technology literacy for all students as the key to citizenship in the 21st century.”

Moses will talk about the need for high quality mathematics education during a lecture, “The Right to Learn: The Long Campaign for Civil Rights and Education Equity,” Tuesday, March 16, at 4:30 pm in Collins Cinema on the Wellesley College campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Four men still living whose murderous crime in 1964 underscored to a shocked nation and world the evil the regime of legalized racism in the American South fostered.

On February 23, 2009, veteran Black Freedom movement leader Ruby Sales had a conversation with Vera Leone, SOA Watch organizer, about state violence and white violence against people of color in the United States, and the implications of that historical and present context for our continuing organizing to close the School of the Americas and dismantle the racist system of violence and domination which it represents.You can listen to the audio file here .

These are the names of 74 men and women who died between 1952 and 1968 under circumstances suggesting they were the victims of racially motivated violence. The information below was gathered by the Southern Poverty Law Center as it planned a timeline of killings and other civil rights era events for the Civil Rights Memorial. The Memorial, dedicated in 1989, includes the names of 40 civil rights martyrs who were slain during that era. The names below were not inscribed on the Memorial because there was insufficient information about their deaths at the time the Memorial was created. They are, however, identified in a display at the Civil Rights Memorial Center as "The Forgotten."

You may recall that I created the Obama Inauguration cover for The Nation magazine... It's been a while and I've been busy on the poster for that cover. I'm almost finished... (I've added over 30 new figures to the artwork), but I could still use your advice... Updated artwork and more below the fold...

"Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow" stories of Jewish refugee teachers and their black students #black #jewish #relations

Atlanta Progressive News

Tensions over race in the Democratic Presidential campaign rose over the weekend, spurred by comments made by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about who were the dominant role-players in the civil rights movement. Rights' activists offer insight on

The most amazing thing about the 2008 presidential race is not that a black man is a bona fide contender, but the lukewarm response he has received from the luminaries whose sacrifices made this run possible.

Decades after the event, this programme follows the case of 79-year-old Edgar Ray Killen (pictured), the alleged perpetrator of the attacks, as he finally stands trial. With access to both the prosecutors a

The system, from slavery to violently enforced segregation to today's nuanced discrimination, remains without a national apology, no truth commission, no real sign that the nation is fully ready to understand its past. One Klansman is now behind bars. Ame

In a brief news conference, Mueller declined to go into details of any specific investigation from the civil rights era.

Six months before his death in June, former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, whose violent clashes with civil rights activists in Selma angered a nation, gave a statement defending a former state trooper accused of committing murder during a 1965 protest.

Four decades after a Louisiana man was left to burn in his own store, Syracuse law students are trying to solve the crime

Retired Navy diver James Bladh testified Wednesday that his team found a human skull, railroad rails and other objects in a Mississippi River backwater in October 1964, nearly six months after two black teenagers disappeared.

Roland Mitchell, a deputy sheriff for Madison Parish, La., at the time of the killings, testified that he was among those who went out on what's known as the old Mississippi River near Tallulah, La., on July 12, 1964, when the lower torso of a human body

Edwards said there was a rumor in the small town of Meadville that Dee was part of a conspiracy to bring weapons into Southwest Mississippi for the beginning of a race riot. At a weekly KKK meeting, or as the Klansmen referred to it as the “Bunkley Hunt

Self-taught legal expert Alvin Sykes is on a quest to get long-unpursued suspects into court before it's too late.

He addressed his remarks to the families of Dee and Moore: “I can’t undo what was done ... years ago. I ask you for forgiveness for my part in this.”

Before Charles Marcus Edwards testified, defendant James Ford Seale rocked back and forth vigorously in a maroon leather chair. But as Edwards described the events leading to the teenagers' 1964 deaths, Seale sat still and stared at his cousin, a Baptist

Fannie Lee Chaney, “grandmother” of the Mississippi civil rights movement, was honored on Saturday as funeral services were held at First Union Baptist Church in Meridian. Mother to James Earl Chaney, one of three civil-rights workers killed in the

Dee and Charles Moore were not troublemakers, their families say. They were just two 19-year-olds - friends from school in Franklin County and from Mount Olive Baptist Church in the tiny Kirby Community - who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong

Ralph E Powe