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My earliest memories of Mississippi are clear-cut and engraved in
my mind. Fleeting memories loom up and are re-submerged......like the
intense hunger I knew during my first 4 living years .....or
like the time I was savagely bitten by a German police dog whose white
owner "set" him on me when I was returning from school. I was about 6
then. Indeed, school and these ugly memories go hand in hand. Or take
the time a pack of whites attacked the black kids, who had to pass
thru their neighborhoods to and from the black school. These attacks
became such an amusing sport for the young toughs and their elders
that at times we on the slum side of town would all get together to
design strategies for dealing with these unprovoked attacks. We had a
big battle with the whites using rocks, bricks and bottles, but at one
point their dogs were called and we all took to our heels seeing
behind us some of our less fortunate brothers and sisters being
massacred.
In any case both he and Billy Wayne Posey - who is seen in this
photo from the trial - later joined the Ku Klux Klan and apparently one
of them was among the triggermen, who executed the 3 young men after
they had been jailed by our hated sheriff Rainey. In this photo Rainey
and his deputy sheriff are laughing in the courtroom at their
indictments although they had just helped in the murder. They knew that
the Mississippi courts would let them off. Here the deputy sheriff is
with one of the bodies he just killed pretending he knew nothing. At
the same time the Klan had a campaign of terror bombing both houses and
churches of blacks. After federal intervention some of the Klan people
were finally sentenced to minimal prison terms, but today they are all
out again. Recently, when my mother was shot to death in Chicago, I was
back in Mississippi for the first time in ten years to attend my
mothers funeral and I realized that it had not changed much at all. The
whites in town still hated and resented me remembering that I was the
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