Weeks 4 and 5

Weeks 4 and 5

The Program is officially over, for most of my colleagues, as of Friday 25th. It ended with a public presentation of each Legal Fellows' preferred case at Southern University Law Center. I am staying on for a further fortnight. 

Evan Reid (Intern), Professor Margaret Burnham (Director), myself, Rufus Williams Jr. (Legal Fellow)

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And so, it turned out it wasn't attorney client confidentiality. It was a moral obligation not to freely disclose names and relations of people you have spoken to before the cases are publicised, for their own protection and for the protection of the longevity of the Program. Perfectly understandable.

The first details of one of the publicised cases I am working on can be seen here. I have completed another file on Mr. Bell's grandfather, which will be posted shortly. I'm in two minds as of yet as to which is the most crushing narrative in the cases I was assigned to look at.

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The tale of Officer C.

Officer C, as I am referring to him in an un-identifiably abbreviated way, was an officer of the law in Baton Rouge. We encountered him in  uniform, but presumably off duty, in a bar under the freeway running through the city. We had struck up a conversation with Officer C after a heated debate on certain traditional surgical practices that turned out to be far more commonplace in the United States than I previously anticipated. 

When the bar closed the patrons were ushered outside by the dimming of lights and the cleaning of surfaces. Out in the bath-temperature Southern air, Officer C offered to show me the Baton Rouge experience. He spoke of going fishing across the Mississippi river just west of Baton Rouge, with "white folks, you know, kinda hillbilly folk" who he occasionally enjoyed socialising with. The key apparently though, was to pick up some "hood rats", divided into the category of "quarter horse" and "yellowbone". A "hoot rat", as my colleagues explained afterwards, was a derogatory term for a promiscuous female from a lower-income background. 

Officer C's philosophy blossomed when two police helicopters hummed overheard in the night sky, running from slightly different trajectories towards some point eastwards. Officer C's radio crackled to life, with a static-laced female voice speaking in code. We asked him what was happening. He said it was "an armed robbery" but he "probably wasn't going to go". He explained that there was balance that had to be maintained; the criminals do their thing, the officers do theirs, and there has to be some scope for letting the cycle perpetuate. Several sirens screamed past up on the freeway next to us. With that, Officer C bid us farewell, and retired home for the night. 

I still have Officer C's number written down, but I haven't called it. 

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(the woods part 2, part II)

Harking back to last week, with my journey to the county courthouse, I learned just how small the world is. 

There are roughly 3 million people in Mississippi; 30,000 in the county my case concerned, and the Monday before last I was in the Mississippi State Archives with about ten other people. Four of these turned out the closely related to the victim in my case. I had overheard a lady from the group asking for records in same county I was interested in. I thought I would take a gamble and introduce myself and the work I was doing, and ask if she knew any older people from that area who might know something. She said I should go out to the foyer and speak with her husband and his brother, as they might know something.

Lo and behold, they were closely related to the victim through their parents' generation. One of them called their older brother...who knew everything.

To offer the jist of the case, the press at the time (Summer, 1948) reported the shooting of a black man when he was trying to enter a white lady's house. Another paper said he had made advances towards her.
 What the elder brother of the family I met told me couldn't have been much further from either account.

His first thoughts were spoken out loud, addressed to me. "White folks didn't do nothing back then, what are they going to do different now?"

It turns out that, if an African American man did an honest day's work at a white lady's house in that place at that time, and if a white man came past and said something derogatory to him, he wasn't allowed to say anything back. If he did, the man would drive off, and return with a two truckloads of armed men, all incensed by a tale of a black man trying to break into a house with defenceless occupants. 

That day, the victim's six year old son was dropped from his father's truck by the roadside for safety after word arrived about the approaching armed group. He watched as his father sped off towards his sister's house for refuge.  It was the last time he saw him alive. Three years later he was moved to Chicago and never came back.

I called him last Friday afternoon, 66 years after the incident, with the number provided to me by the above interviewee. After introducing myself and the work I was doing, my gut prevailed to make me offer my condolences: "I don't know what this means to you sir, coming from me, but I am very sorry for your loss." 

We spoke for about forty minutes. After hearing about his life, at the end of the conversation I hung up the phone, put on a pair of battered rope sandals, and went for a wander round campus to clear my head. My mind was drawn to the wooded area behind the sister's house,  now abandoned, on that "lonely road towards Cheraw" reported in the press, where the ambitions of the group had soon been realised. 

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I have been afforded the opportunity to travel to Chicago for a personal interview. I currently sit in a suite just off a rain soaked alley beside the French Quarter, New Orleans, waiting on my flight tomorrow morning. 

I still can't quite get my head round 80% of what I hear; that it all actually happened.  I can't fathom the sort of pain that has been carried around day-to-day. I would like to say it was caused by arbitrary hatred, but it wasn't. All too often I have heard, "that was just what it was like back then", and it truly hits home that almost anything can be normalised.



For now, Cajun/Vietnamese pho, followed by blues on Bourbon Street.

Weeks 2 and 3

Weeks 2 and 3

A two week interlude has resulted from two concurrent investigative field trips. Two of my cases took me to 'the woods'.  The details of these cases will be publicised on our website shortly. Before this, a 4th of July weekend in New Orleans. I will start with 'NOLA', so anyone who wishes to cry paid holiday can get it out of their system.

Houses looking over the Bayou St. John canal.

French Quarter

Bourbon Street...by day. By night however...

Cafe Beignet

 The Cabildo (old town hall) next to Jackson Square (previously Place d'Armes)

St. Louis Cathedral. 

 Republic: New Orleans (approx 1.00 am)

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Before leaving for the woods, I enjoyed a day of archive research and consolidation of work in Louisiana State University's Memorial Library...one of about four on campus. 

As someone who spent four years at the University of Glasgow taking for granted the imposing, smog-stained, Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott building and Professor Square, LSU was again something else.

Meet LSU's School of Law. 

The campus had its own police patrol.

And an American Football stadium with a capacity of 102,000, the ninth largest in the world, with a peak season attendance of about 92,000 people.

Unfortunately I never got to attend a game. The above shot was pulled from Google. 

The facilities here were like nothing the University of Glasgow has ever, or probably will ever, seen.

***Update 03/08/2014***

According to financial statements 2012/13 the University of Glasgow actually turns over about the same amount c. £500 million,  per annum, as LSU. My humble pie is eaten. I guess its all about putting on a show...

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And so...the woods (part 1). 

One of my cases required me to locate a relative; the only known witness who gave testimony to the crime that was perpetrated, in the 1940s, somewhere between Louisiana and Mississippi. They had fled their ancestral home for safety. There were four reported variable spellings of the same name, each of them horrendously common in the South. If I found the individual, they would be in their nineties. 

Thanks to a creative spike in a painstaking people search at a library desk in Baton Rouge, I managed to locate who I thought was the individual, living at an address in a very rural area of Mississippi. From now on I should probably refer to him as 'the man at the edge of the world'. 

A neighbouring home. 

The surrounding fields.

A sequence of increasingly smaller country roads had led us to this area. The Program Director had brought along two older African-American NAACP agents who knew families in the area, in order to build trust and rapport, otherwise the locals wouldn't speak. As we pulled up to the residence, a tall, bearded, shirtless man strode across his property.  I was asked to wait in the car.

It wasn't him, it was his neighbour. The individual we sought lived on the property over the adjoining field, and unfortunately in the past tense; he had passed away some years ago, having returned to the land he was forced to flee, but his son then continued to live there. I have heard he is interested to discover what happened with his family; hopefully I'll speak with him this afternoon.

The woods (part 2)

Not so much wooded as small town, my other case required  me to travel a county's primary 'city' (a generic name for the largest town in a county, no matter how small it is). My purpose was to look into old birth/marriage/death and court records regarding individuals at the centre of the case.

Fortunately, my colleague lived in the adjoining county, and kindly invited me to stay at her parents place, again in a rural part of Mississippi. During 1964 the area had been subject to the second highest occurrence of  racially motivated bombings in the state.

After hours of travelling (I have no idea how people stay awake through the mundanity of driving in a straight line for hours), we arrived.

The next morning, we drove across the county line.  Local properties flashed by, tucked in amongst wooded areas.

Apparently it was common practice to buy a trailer home and have it placed on a purchased patch of land. The roadside for miles was frequently lined with rusted P.O mail boxes with little or no properties in the fields adjacent to them.

My objective for going to the town in question was to search for old records in its courthouse; chiefly to discover whether an alleged perpetrator was ever indicted for a killing.

Now here I was wary of the South's 'reputation'. I was also wary of any preconceptions I held leading me to have a skewed view on the actions and expressions of townspeople which wasn't really justified.

However, there was just something that wasn't...quite right.

First and foremost, the circuit and chancery court staff were lovely to speak to, and very helpful. I had spoken to them on the phone the week before, and they reported back that they had not dug up any jury minutes containing the names of the individuals I gave them.

When we parked in the town centre, my colleague, who is African-American, continued her bubbly habit of saying 'hey y'all' to people we passed by. This I had observed was fairly common in the South. Everywhere else this had been received by either an enthusiastic hello or a half hearted acknowledgement. Here there was nothing, maybe perhaps that sort of tenth-second glance you make when someone is shouting to another in a crowded area, just to make sure its not aimed at you. Again, the same with the local police officers. One of the older, silver haired officers heartily greeted me when I temporaily stepped past the retro-beige metal detectors and into the courthouse to ask for directions. Maybe I was just looking for it, I mean, there was an African-American clerk and part time assistant in the courthouse. My colleague said she was aware, but it was better just to ignore and carry on as normal.

We were kindly escorted by the clerk's two part-time assistants to the county's sheriff office, and into a partly-refurbished cell-like room with old records stacked onto fresh wooden shelves. As many of the cases we were looking at were swept under the carpet, the secret indictments looked most inviti 'you can look at any of the items in here, apart from the secret indictments', the clerk informed us. We found this slightly odd, as they were stacked amongst public records.  To clarify, the clerk decided to call her colleague, who was in a meeting with the District Attorney and could ask him personally.

The part-time assistant, a polite, friendly guy, waited in the room with us the whole time. We never really got a clear answer as to what the situation was. His phone had a sudden burst of messages and then fell silent. We did dig up some interesting material, but, curiously, no record whatsover of the alleged perpetrator's actions in the case even being considered by a jury. He simply disappears.

I was pleased I found enough original materials to help continue the narrative of the case. After leaving the courthouse, I called a contact I had been given from Mississippi Vital Records. 'Those should be public records, if they're in there, I'm pretty sure of it'.

I guess I will never know at what point the legal process met a dead-end and was left alone. Whatever the reasons were for the decision, they could have been a foot away from me.

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That afternoon I enjoyed a meeting with the county's local historian. He ran the city's museum, packed with Civil War era regalia and reference books. I had prior discussed the location of where the incident in my case occured over telephone, in order to determine whether there was any older locals who would recall anything, and to let him know I was visiting.

The little museum was empty, and to my surprise we were joined by his brother, apparently his older brother, although they looked like twins. He seemed to work for a pest control company, as I remember a name being stitched on his shirt. He said he knew a lot of the locals in the area, and travelled around a lot. Unfortunately neither brother had heard of the case, or the individuals involved, although they knew the area well.

We enjoyed a long, pleasant exchange. I picked up a few stories that could be added to the Program's case files for future, although these seemed to be around the turn of the 20th century, and as such anyone who bore witness would be long gone. Only two cases were from 1940 onwards; one which a local had mentioned to them, and another they knew of but declined to speak about it because individuals connected to it were still around. 

After leaving, my colleague and I pulled up next to a blue-painted food stall in order to buy a 'snowball', essentially a slush puppy with ice cream stuck in the middle of it. I had promised her I would eat one. As the charming, chirpy girl serving customers asked for my order in a Southern drawl, she picked up on my own accent.
 'What are y'all doing here then?' she enquired. For the first time on the trip I wasn't so enthusiastic to tell people what I was doing.
I though about it for half a second and just said, 'research for a University program'.

Week 1

Week 1 

Beyond casework which I am limited in discussing, this week involved a satisfying bit of state-hopping. There was a week-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer in Jackson, Mississippi, consisting of a number of seminars, presentations and lunches involving the original contingent of civil rights activists who risked their lives for their cause.  

It was a good few hours drive south to the Louisiana coast, then north-east across the border.
Socio-economic indicators were abound, even right next to our campus

My colleague took us along Highland Road en route, which bore a few relics of its past...

You could still make out what I guessed was old field boundaries and irrigation ditches next to the lodgings.

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We arrived in Jackson in the midst of the Freedom Summer events. Our first stop was a photography and artwork exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Not just any old photography, but breathtaking heat of the moment snapshots of the political and racial turmoil of the 1960s, as well as work by the renown portraiture artist Norman Rockwell.

My personal favourite was an award winning series taken by Matt Herron in 1965, of a five year old boy named Anthony Quinn refusing to let go of his American flag despite the attempts of an officer twice his size to take it off him.

I actually attended a Baptist Church sermon today in McComb, and to my surprise one of the reflection speakers was Anthony himself.

He said he didn't really appreciate the gravitas of  what he was protesting at the time. His mum had simply told him not to let anyone take the flag off him; he was far more scared of what she would do rather than whatever armed officers could....

The centrepiece of the Rockwell exhibit was his work 'Murder in Mississippi'; a depiction of the last moments of  Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner  in 1964 (on the right below).

The shadows of the perpetrators allude to what was proven at trial  to be  the collusion of local police authorities with Klansmen. As the depiction is from the imagination of Rockwell, the picture on the left was the inspiration for his composition. It shows Chaplain Louis Padillo defying sniper fire to give the last rites to a dying solder in Venezeula in 1962.

An individual I had the pleasure of talking to was Hezekiah Watkins. He was 13 years old when he joined the mass movement of activists in the South; the youngest of the lot. His group staged a sit-in at a Greyhound bus station, refusing to budge from the 'whites only' section, and he was arrested for breach of the peace.

I asked him if he lied to his parents about where he was going. 'Yup'.

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I had the extreme pleasure of walking through Tougaloo College campus. The College was founded by New York based Christian missionaries in 1869 for the education of freed slaves, and bore a very proud heritage. The sleepy willow trees sighed over the rolling lawns, and th...I'll just show you some pictures.

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So everyone has their heroes. Whether it's Danny Glover...

...or maybe something more nuanced....like for example Robin Williams' character in Good Will Hunting; the world-weary mentor who tames the vulnerable but brilliant undiscovered prodigy played by Matt Damon. Rumour has it that Damon's history teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Larry Aaronson, was his inspiration  for the mentor.

Larry and I had a Whataburger together. He was working at the start of the year on one of my cases with a couple of fantastic High School students who laid a lot of the groundwork. The world really is short of good history teachers. I enjoyed a  vibrant 15 minute crash course in the history of the South, as well as a sobering discussion about the Boston bombers; the younger of the brothers was Larry's neighbour and he knew him well.

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By today (29th) the commemorations had drawn to a close. We were kindly driven cross-state back to Baton Rouge by our Program Director, stopping on the way for the sermon I mentioned above, which was held in Society Hill Baptist Church. The Church had been bombed during the 1964 Freedom Movement...

And rebuilt thereafter...










And so, I sit once again in my well air conditioned Baton Rouge student apartment. The next potential trip is Houston, Texas, where I may get to visit family members surrounding one of my cases...

Arrival/Digs/Expectations

 I am currently sitting in what will be by accommodation for the next two months. I am staying in Dunn Hall; new modern apartment buildings adjacent to Southern University Law Centre. To give you a decent picture of what the campus is like...

(oops...bit shaky at the start. The Law Centre is just off to the right in the panoramic, to the left is the Mulatto Bend of the Mississippi River)

The Law Centre is part of the wider Southern University and A&M College; founded in 1880 in the wake of the American Civil War and out of consensus for a higher educational institution for 'persons of color'.

As a historically black college, there has been contemporary tension as to whether admissions to the Law Centre should be discriminate, so as to preserve its raison d'être.  It was pretty surreal to hear my colleagues on the Program discuss their recent or prospective choices in Law Schools across the US being affected by a University's status as a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) or a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). 

Some more information on the genesis of the CRRJ Program emerged today after meeting one of the attorneys (and previous legal fellow) working on the Program. It was established following (and using some funds derived from) the successful settlement of a 2010 federal lawsuit under legal counsel of the Program's Director, Margaret Burnham, which concerned alleged participation by Franklin County police  in the kidnapping, torture and murder of two 19 year olds by Klu Klux Klan members in the summer of 1964. You can read the details of what happened to them in the above link. This incident was tangled in with the killings of three civil rights activists in the same summer; which formed the basis of the popular Hollywood film Mississippi Burning...

So, understandably I am feeling a fairly substantial weight of expectation. 

In terms of the work I will be carrying out, for the duration of the Program I will be bound by attorney-client confidentiality (whilst not enjoying the status of an attorney, these cases can still lead to a civil suit) and as such I'm not sure as to what I can disclose as I go along. I'll get back to this inevitably.

What I can say is the nature of the work will lead me to what was described to me as 'the woods'; rural areas where people keep to themselves and are still very much gripped by the past. I asked if there was a chance that, as a white man, interviewees (mainly older ones) would not be particularly trustworthy or receptive in recounting their stories. 'It is possible'... which is why I would be paired with one of the other legal fellows, who from what I know so far are all of African American descent. The caution exercised by these people isn't unfounded. The Program's research is tactfully conducted with the concerns of individuals affected at its heart. Nevertheless I was advised to err on the side of caution as to telling people who I was/what I was doing here/where I was staying. People know people. Even today there is an estimated 5,000 Klan connected individuals out there, somewhere.

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So, in terms of expectations v. reality. I had the expectation that the South in particular would not be a public transportation utopia, rendering a car the utmost necessity.

Yup. Where does it go? When does it arrive?

I also had the expectation of pastel coloured wooden houses, with a rocking chair on the porch.

Check.

From my previous experience working abroad, it would be cheaper for me to buy a wee cellphone with a month-only contract for unlimited texts and calls, which I would undoubtedly need. So began my Saturday journey on foot to my local Walmart to get one. To avoid running up a three figure bill in data roaming costs for Google maps, I decided to rely on the generous advice of locals, who every 20 minutes would tell me the Walmart is 20 minutes thataway.

No, I wasn't sending SnapChats, I saved that one for later, but you have the pleasure of seeing it now.

After an hour's journey  in the 27 degree heat, without ever seeing the glorious Walmart logo shimmering in the distance like a desert mirage, I gave up and called a taxi from a motel I passed. I was picked up by my hero of the weekend, Herbert:

Herbert didn't need a satnav, he had grown up in Baton Rouge. He spoke in a low mumble which made it hard for me, as someone who speaks in a low mumble, to understand. His told to me about the cultural diversity in the area; his grandfather was a Frenchman and his grandmother was a Cherokee Indian, so basically he was the embodiment of Creole Louisiana. His outlook on the area was certainly more positive than the Armenian born taxi driver that took me half asleep from the airport when I arrived; who opined 'people in this area don't care about you, they will kill you for two dollars, my son was shot when he was 26 years old'.

Herbert coincidentally picked me up when I called a taxi from the Walmart to go back to my hotel. He was kind enough to let me take a picture of him, then off he drove into the generic rush of inner city traffic.

Fast forward to today, where I have met my roommate and fellow legal fellow from Atlanta, who is (1) keen on sports (2) a jazz trumpeter who has been down Bourbon street before (3) is 21 in eight days, and wants to go back to Bourbon street (4) has a car with him (and I'm informed fuel expenses are reimbursed). Glorious. Our relationship was christened by portion of chicken wings at a local sports bar to the background of the pains and joys of a packed bar of Americans watching the USA/Portugal game, who I am told have a new-found national love for soccer.

Orientation in six hours, sleep time. 

Intro

Through popular demand I have been called to write a blog.

For the next two months I have been afforded a fantastic opportunity. A preliminary thanks should go out to the International Officers at Northeastern University for securing me a visiting scholar visa in a remarkably short amount of time. To avoid this sounding like an Oscar speech, I invite you to watch this instead. Tissues may be required ( I managed, just).

Some press coverage of the Program's success can be found here. 

A couple of FAQs to cover first:

(1) How did I find this? 

A Google search, a speculative enquiry and an attached cover letter and CV. This is the second summer I have spent working abroad after going off the beaten track (as opposed to haring after a legal placement at home) and there is little to invalidate the old world/oyster cliche by showing strong academic/extra curricular ability, which most people I know are capable of, and a genuine interest. And nope, the Program pays expenses and provides accommodation at Southern University, Baton Rouge, suitably located on the banks of the Mississippi.  .

(2) Why am I doing this?

If you haven't already, watch the first link above. A quote springs to mind: 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'. Now for the negative part. At some point in your lives you may encounter a wrongful situation and stand next to alone whilst it is allowed to fester in its petri-dish conditions of facilitation, lying and by-standing. Instead of solidarity, survival kicks in, and supposed good, intelligent people follow the path of least resistance, and may prosper, leaving a stark, perverse notion: 'why weren't you 'strong' enough to turn a blind eye too?' The world turns and nothing appears to change.  

It can be argued that this 'sort' of feeling, as the very lowest common denominator, featured in the individual stories like those told above that accumulated into the overwhelming mass of injustice suffered by African American minorities in the United States throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, some of the individual stories that I've read so far are truly horrific; I can't imagine being part of them. As the sun is inevitably setting on generations of victims and witnesses, it is perhaps a small consolation that this sort of work provides some redress to those who simply had to watch the world turn, for a very long time. Of course, it's not 'my pain', but I feel I can help alleviate it.

And now the positive part!

I had long dreamed of travelling to the Deep South, including Louisiana and especially New Orleans. A lot of people who have never been, myself included, have a heavily romanticised vision, fuelled by literature, music, sport and Hollywood, hence the pungent cheese of my chosen blog title. Anyone who I have met who has in fact been has confirmed it is exactly like it! Being greeted at Baton Rouge airport by a blast of oven temperature air and eternal ambient chorus of crickets in the tall grass provided a tingle of excitement as I stumbled after 16 hours of flights into a taxi to my hotel for the night.

This sort of opportunity will hopefully enable me to be immersed head first in it all, by being thrown into the heart of local communities in a truly 'live' project aimed to truly benefit others as opposed to insular self-congratulation. I hope to provide a deluge of photographs of food, locations and people, with plenty of my own attempts at wit and the wit of others peppered in...