FBI Cold Case Initiative offers little comfort for families

Louis Allen, killed in Mississippi

So it's not just me that is unhappy over the Cold Case Initiative and the lack of leadership coming from the FBI.

If you will recall, my friends Gwen Dailey and Nina Zachery-Black, relatives of Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, are pretty disgusted with FBI agents and the bureaucracy surrounding their efforts to learn what happened to their grandmothers who were killed in a suspicious car wreck in 1966. Recently, I spoke to a great-granddaughter, Dianna Mann, and she says here family who lived several states away were so afraid to attend the funeral of Adlena Hamlett, they stayed home.

The names of these two women were never added to the cold case list put out by the FBI and the reasons these women have been given are simply preposterous.

Let's see -- Why didn't their relatives call the police?

Answer: If you were black and called the police in those days, it was the same as calling up the Klan and asking for help.

Here's another comment by an FBI agent: "Well, it was too long ago and it was in Mississippi."

My response to that one would have been, ..."no sh**t Sherlock."

Then there is a law school student who seems to think that "summary judgements" have something to do with criminal cases. She says she "can't get one" for the Keglar and Hamlett case because someone found a white guy who says he was asleep in the back of the car but knows what happened. That's pathetic.
* * * *

Apparently, there are some attempts, once again, to solve the Louis Allen cold case (Libertyville, Miss.). This case deserves to be at the top of the cold case list.

His murder had been brewing since 1961 when he witnessed the killing of local NAACP President Herbert Lee for registering Black voters by state legislator E. H. Hurst. Under threats, Mr. Allen was forced to testify that Mr. Hurst killed Mr. Lee in self-defense.

“My grandfather contacted the Justice Department and the FBI for help but the FBI agent assigned to the case leaked it back to the local officials, the sheriff and the judge, who were members of the Klan,” Louis Allen Ali, grandson and namesake of Louis Allen, told The Final Call last month.

Louis Allen suffered years of threats, jailings and harassment. Pleas to the FBI for assistance were refused. Mr. Allen was making final arrangements to move to Milwaukee the day he was killed by shotgun blasts.
* * * * *

The problem with the FBI investigating these cases now, is that they are compromised. You would know this if you have read about the secret COINTELPRO operations that were run against black leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcom X. The FBI agents were in the Delta, too. These records need to be opened IF the FBI is going to be square with the cold case initiative.

Mississippi had its own spy agency back then, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, that hired FBI agents, military spies,CIA and you name it to make life miserable to its black citizens. Some of the Sov Com files were opened to the public but many still sit in the basements of the relatives of Mississippi's former leaders.

A black lawyer, Cleve McDowell, was murdered under VERY suspicious circumstances in 1997. Most likely he had lots of records (that walked away after he was killed) tha would have helped answer questions from who killed Emmett Till to who killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Like the FBI, Mississippi has "records" problems, too.
* * * * *

The family of Louis Allen of Libertyville, Miss. wants to see their relative's case solved. At least it's on the list, but ... read about how they feel about the FBI and today's agents:

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_6638.shtml

Take some time to read their story.

* * * *

IF you are reading this and can come up with information to help solve this case, or any cold case, please contact me and I will see that it gets forwarded to the right person.

We've asked Sen. Al Franken's office to take a look at the Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett case. Maybe since relatives are from Minnesota he will help. But don't hold your breath...I'm breathless.

There are good people, of course, who are working hard on these cases. keith Beauchamp is traveling with the FBI asking people with any information they may have on cold cases to speak up. He IS the reason we are finally looking at cold cases because he researched the Emmett Till case for years and finally got people involved and working on this and other cases.

* * *

Susan

FBI Won't Open Case Files; Assassination Records of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Still Suppressed

And these are the people who are "solving" the civil rights cold cases?

Nearly half a century after the height of the civil rights movement, hundreds of thousands of pages of government files about the volatile era remain shielded from the American public, buried in FBI field office cabinets, blocked by resistant bureaucracies, or available only with large sections blacked out, according to US officials and researchers.

The situation has prompted a new push in Congress, led by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, to require that all records relating to the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. be located, reviewed, and released by a review board at the National Archives similar to those established for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for Nazi war criminals.

Story Continued--

Who Killed Emmett Till e-Book

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *






















by Susan Klopfer, a new e-book about this important civil rights event that took place in the Mississippi Delta



I moved to the Mississippi Delta in 2003 as the Emmett Till cold case was opened. Living on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary, a notorious compound with a fascinating history, gave me a unique opportunity to take a fresh look at this civil rights ground-breaking event and to meet some of the people who still had the story fresh in their hearts and minds.

Munirah Chronicle Offers 'Today in Black History'

1787 - Prince Hall, founder of the first African American Masonic

lodge, and others petition the Massachusetts legislative for

funds to return to Africa. The plan is the first recorded

effort by African Americans to return to their homeland.

1832 - A major insurrection of slaves on Trinidad occurs.



1901 - Cyril Lionel Richard James is born in Tunapuna, Trinidad. He

will become a writer, historian, Marxist social critic, and

activist who deeply influenced the intellectual underpinnings

of West Indian and African movements for independence. He was

born into an educated family in colonial Trinidad. At the age

of nine He earned a scholarship to Queen's Royal College, in

Port of Spain, Trinidad, and graduated in 1918. In 1932 James

left Trinidad for England. He will become involved in socialist

politics, gravitating toward a faction of anti-Stalinist

Marxists. He applied Leon Trotsky's views about a worldwide

workers' revolution to his colonial home. The result, in part,

was "The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British

Government in the West Indies" (1932), in which he called for

Caribbean independence. For a time in the 1970s he taught at

Federal City College in Washington, D.C. He lived the last

years of his life in London. Three volumes of his collected

works appeared as "The Future in the Present" (1977), "Spheres

of Existence" (1980), and "At the Rendezvous of Victory"

(1984). He will join the ancestors on May 31, 1989 in London,

England.

Click HERE for more --

Munirah Chronicle Offers 'Today in

1787 - Prince Hall, founder of the first African American Masonic

lodge, and others petition the Massachusetts legislative for

funds to return to Africa. The plan is the first recorded

effort by African Americans to return to their homeland.

Civil Rights Advocates Uses Text Message to Alert of Racist Sheriff

PHOENIX (psburton) — a civil rights advocate is using text messages to alert residents when the local Sheriff conducts one of his infamous immigration sweeps. Lydia Guzman, the director of a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, is the trunk of a grass roots texting tree designed to alert thousands of people within minutes of sheriff Joe Arpaio deploying his private army of sworn officers and volunteer special deputies called posse members.

MORE --

Emmett Till Audio Book Release Set For January

14-year-old Emmett Till, Lynched in the Mississippi Delta, Aug. 28, 1955

News Release
Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Contact: Susan Klopfer
505-728-7924 (cell)
sklopfer@gmail.com
www.susanklopfer.com



“I interviewed the mortuary assistant who worked all night back in 1955 to prepare Emmett Till’s body as best he could for Emmett’s mother, before he put it on the train to be shipped back to Chicago. While meeting several such eyewitnesses to history and discovering new information about this cold case and others, I knew it was time to write this book.” −Who Killed Emmett Till, Susan Klopfer


Emmett Till Audio Book Set For January Release


Release of the first audio book of the Emmett Till story − Who Killed Emmett Till? − is set for January 15, in time for February’s Black History month.

The story of Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy killed in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1955, has resurfaced as the FBI continues to focus on this and other cold cases from the modern civil rights movement.

“Emmett Till’s lynching sparked the modern civil rights movement. There are many people who still do not know this important story and this audio book will help fill the gap,” Susan Klopfer, the book’s author, said.

While visiting the home of his uncle, in the small cotton town of Money, Emmett Till, his cousin, and several other black youth went into the town’s general store. What actually happened is still disputed, Klopfer says, but according to several versions, Till was dared by one of the other boys to flirt with white store owner’s wife, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant.

“Some accounts state he whistled at her while others say he grabbed her hand and said ‘Bye, baby,’ as he left.”

At about 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s home and taken to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where he was beaten and shot. A 70-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire to weigh down the body, which was dropped into the river near Glendora, another small cotton town north of Money.

Till’s corpse, surfacing three days later, was returned to Chicago where his mother decided it should be publicly displayed to show the world the brutality of the killing.

An estimated 100,000 people viewed the open casket, bringing worldwide attention to racism in the United States. Till was buried Sept. 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.

Less than three weeks later, on Sept. 23, the men accused of killing Emmett Till − J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant − were found innocent by an all white jury, after 67 minutes of deliberation.

Twelve weeks after the acquittal of the two men, who later confessed to the murder in a national magazine, Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

“She was not the first activist to make this move. There had been other attempts. But Parks had been planning her personal protest, and along with the NAACP knew the right time had arrived,” Klopfer said.

There had been two recent murders of black citizens, shortly before Till’s visit to the Delta. Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith were shot to death, their murders instigated by anger over increased voter registration activities and by the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Brown I declared racial discrimination in public education unconstitutional and a second decision, Brown II, ordered one year later that desegregation occur "with all deliberate speed."

“The Delta already was an unsafe place for any black person, considering the heightened tension. It was particularly unsafe for anyone violating Jim Crow standards for acceptable behavior in the segregated south. Emmett Till was a young man who had never experienced living in such hostility. He was known to be a prankster and had no idea that his action of harassing a white woman would end his life.”

No mass movement starts all of a sudden. “Before the Civil War began and well into the 1940s and early 50s, many years before the modern civil rights movement made the pages of the white press and then television, there were brave souls trying to right wrongs. Some worked in the North and others tried their best from inside “the belly of the beast” −- Mississippi.”

Who Killed Emmett Till? covers this entire time period and comes from a unique perspective. “My husband and I moved to the Mississippi Delta in 2003 and one year later, the Till cold case was opened. Because Fred was a prison psychologist, we lived on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary, a notorious place with a fascinating history.

“I quickly learned we were living near the location outside of Drew where Till was killed, and close to Sumner, where the trial took place. I interviewed the mortuary assistant who worked all night back in 1955 to prepare Emmett Till’s body as best he could for Emmett’s mother, before he put it on the train to be shipped back to Chicago. While meeting several such eyewitnesses to history and discovering new information about this cold case and others, I knew it was time to write this book.”

Hedquist Productions, a Libertyville, Iowa group, recorded and produced the 6-CD set. “I’m really delighted at the quality of their work. The audio book was read by Jeffrey Hedquist, a well-known voice talent whose work is associated with projects by St. Martin’s Press, Chicken Soup For the Soul and many other well known organizations,” Klopfer said.

“Hedquist has won over 700 awards, including most of the big awards – from Clio, IBA, ADDY, Hatch, New York International, Sunny, Silver Microphone, Mobius, RAC, London International, ANDY, EFFIE, The One Show, and hundreds of regional awards,” Klopfer said.

Who Killed Emmett Till? − featuring the regional music of delta blues musicians − is set for distribution in major online bookstores and in selected regional, independent bookstores.

# # #