← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Recluse
Thread ID: 3526 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2002-11-15
2002-11-15 10:53 | User Profile
Yessir, using forced integration to turn our cities over to Negroes has been a real blessing for America! Why, every street corner is just chock full o' budding Clarence Thomases!
A true civil rights exemplar
[url=http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021115-75587776.htm]http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/200211...15-75587776.htm[/url]
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
I read the other day in the New York Times' obituary columns of the death of a long-forgotten segregationist figure from America's civil rights struggle, Lawrence A. Rainey, a disgraced sheriff from Meridian, Miss. His death elicited reflections on how far America has come in the struggle for racial equality since his fleeting notoriety in 1964.
A speech I had heard at the District of Columbia Circuit Courthouse about the time Rainey was breathing his last made my reflections all the more poignant. It was made by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I wonder how Rainey accounted for the rise of Justice Thomas. Conceivably, Rainey's views on Justice Thomas were similar to the publicly stated views of the Rev. Jesse Jackson ââ¬â another fearful symmetry that.
Rainey was a rural Southern sheriff implicated in one of the most contemptible episodes of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the disappearance and murder of three young civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white and from New York City; and James Chaney, a black from Meridian. On June 21, 1964, the three men were jailed in Neshoba County, Miss., on a speeding violation ââ¬â a civil rights worker did not have to drive very fast in those days to get stopped. They were released in the late afternoon and drove off into the night, never to be seen alive again.
Over the next few weeks, as the nation clamored for news of their whereabouts, Sheriff Rainey deprecated the nation's concerns for their safety. With the insolence of a bully, he claimed, "They're just hiding out somewhere and trying to get a lot of publicity out of it." Anyone familiar with the taunts of Nazis and communists recognizes the effrontery.
Actually the three civil rights workers were dead. Their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam on Aug. 4. In early 1965, Rainey and 17 other men were tried on federal charges. Most likely the civil rights workers had been murdered hours after leaving Rainey's jail, after his deputy, Cecil R. Price, handed them over to fellow racists. Of the 17 men tried for violating the civil rights of the victims, nine were convicted including Price and a Klan leader. Rainey was acquitted, but history was moving fast in the 1960s. He never got another job in Mississippi law enforcement and spent the rest of his days as a security guard in a supermarket and at a shopping mall.
For 37 years, Rainey and racists like him have been watching their segregationist vision of the world evanesce as blacks have moved up into the middle class and on to some of the highest positions in American life. Like the retired Soviet apparatchiks in Russia, they rattle around in their retirement believing the world has taken a dreadful turn down a dark road. I read an interview some years ago with a retired Soviet pooh-bah. He still believed: Kapitalism doomed, Democracy a sham. Doubtless in the dank holes where the racists of yesteryear brood many still believe a colorblind society is a Gomorrah.
Then there is Justice Thomas, to give them a migraine. I heard him speak the other day at the portrait unveiling for Judge Lawrence Silberman. There were other speakers, all very distinguished and eloquent; but none spoke so eloquently and learnedly as this black justice, who had been raised in poverty in Sheriff Rainey's rural South. Contrary to his detractors, he has a first-rate mind, a fine sense of the law, and character of the finest mettle. He thinks for himself. At Yale Law School, his thoughts followed a radical course. As life went on, he adopted conservative principles. For exercising his freedom of thought, he has been abominated by the career civil-rights mountebanks. Their tireless public contempt for him has made his life a trial.
Listening to him the other day at the courthouse, it occurred to me that he is too sensitive a man not to be wounded by their slanders, but he remains cheerful and unbowed. His laugh is one of the most musical instruments in Washington. I know of no better rounded man than Justice Thomas.
America is moving toward the colorblind free society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisaged, and Sheriff Rainey execrated. Jesse Jackson denounces black conservatives for arriving at positions that blacks are not supposed to take. Like the segregationists of yore, Mr. Jackson apparently believes blacks should "know their place." The higher they climb in American life, the more the career civil-rights mountebanks will make them suffer. Mr. Jackson is not as evil a man as Sheriff Rainey, but he is not a very good man ââ¬â and it is increasingly apparent he is not a friend of civil rights. Clarence Thomas is.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is editor in chief of the American Spectator and a contributing editor of the New York Sun.
2002-11-15 11:15 | User Profile
Originally posted by Recluse@Nov 15 2002, 04:53 ** For 37 years, Rainey and racists like him have been watching their segregationist vision of the world evanesce as blacks have moved up into the middle class and on to some of the highest positions in American life. **
And it was all based on merit, right R.? No affirmative action hires, no make-work gov't jobs, just competent blacks - just axe Chief Moose - getting their just desserts. I should have posted this in the humor section.
2002-11-15 13:16 | User Profile
America is moving toward the colorblind free society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisaged, and Sheriff Rainey execrated.
Right along with those other notorious racist pigs Washington, Jefferson & Madison. Pretty good execration company, I'd say.
Tyrell is just a jew-owned neo-con fartbag, burbling about the colorblind utopia that's always right around the next corner, but somehow never seems to arrive. He'll ignore all contrary facts and keep lying to the impotent Dittoheads who buy his tripe. Hey - it's a living!
When the mestizo hordes arrive in sufficient numbers, they'll combine with his beloved Middle Class African Americans to sweep Tyrell & his ilk away like so much rubbish.
2002-11-16 02:36 | User Profile
NB - when the collapse finally hits - I hope it is guys like us that get the chance to take care of these puppets before the opposing hordes of muds enjoy their last hurrah before being sent to the big Freaknik bash or Aztlan Taco fests in the sky.
BTW - remember when RET would never have thought of writing this type of drivel? The buy-outs must be handsome, or the sword over the head must be mighty sharp.
2002-11-16 03:45 | User Profile
Sigh. It must suck to a shabbas goy neo, dancing like an organ-grinder's monkey for that check every week, eh, RET? Count your blessings that they don't require you to wear the little fez, too.
Tex, Recluse is on to something: we need to add a humor section. (Besides Neo-Con Watch, I mean.)
2002-11-16 04:14 | User Profile
This only shows us how far down hill the so called "Right" has gone.
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2002-11-17 03:02 | User Profile
Jared Taylor on a somewhat related note. :P
"The many deaths of Viola Liuzzo," National Review,July 10, 1995
url: [url=http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Taylor/taylor-viola.html]http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Peop...ylor-viola.html[/url]
[url=http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Taylor/taylor-viola.html]http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Peopl...ylor-viola.html[/url]
The many deaths of Viola Liuzzo.
By Jared Taylor
Mr. Taylor is the author of Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America.
Vol. 47, National Review, 07-10-1995, pp 38.
THIS year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, one of the most effective demonstrations of the entire civil-rights era. It is also the anniversary of a sordid murder committed because of that march. The murder and its improbable aftermath make a fascinating story that throws light on two very contemporary questions: Should the FBI infiltrate radical organizations? And, Can the jury system handle high-profile cases with a racial angle?
On March 25, 1965, the Selma-to-Montgomery march for black voting rights had come to a triumphant close. That evening, a woman from Michigan named Viola Liuzzo, who was shuttling demonstrators from Montgomery back to housing in Selma, was killed by a volley of bullets fired from a passing car.
Viola Liuzzo, as it happens, was just the sort of "Northern meddler" whom segregationists despised. The 39-year-old woman was thrice married and mentally unstable, and she had needle marks in her arms when she died. Although she had once registered, she had never voted; segregationists pointed out that she was demanding a right for blacks that she herself had never exercised.
President Lyndon Johnson took an intense interest in the case. Within 24 hours of her death he had gone on television and radio with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at his side to announce the arrest of four suspects, all members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Johnson heaped praise on "the very fast and always efficient work of the special agents of the FBI who worked all night long, starting immediately after the tragic death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo." He heaped abuse on the Klan, and urged Congress to mount a full-scale investigation of its activities -- a charge that was promptly accepted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Johnson did not mention that the crime had been solved with such miraculous speed because one of the arrested Klansmen, Gary Rowe, was a paid FBI informer.
Collie Wilkins, the alleged trigger-man, was tried in a segregated courtroom in Hayneville, Alabama. He was defended by Matt Murphy, "Imperial Klonsel" (general counsel) of the United Klans of America. Imperial Klonsel Murphy made much of the fact that the state's case depended almost entirely on the testimony of a paid informer who had broken his oath of loyalty to the Klan and had betrayed his brothers. "What kind of man is this," he thundered, "who comes into a fraternal order by hook and crook, takes the sacred oath, and sells his soul for 30 pieces of silver?"Arguing before an all-white, all-male jury, Murphy also tried to make white supremacy and segregation the central questions rather than guilt or innocence. "I'm proud of my heritage; I'm proud that I am a white man," he shouted in his closing argument. "I'm for white supremacy. The Communists and the negroes have taken us over." In the end, the panel deadlocked, with two jurors holding out against conviction on manslaughter charges.
Wilkins was retried in October 1965. Interest in the case was heightened, if that could be possible, by the HUAC Klan hearings, which started on almost the same day. Kleagles, Kludds, and Kligrapps testified before a Klan-happy Washington press while the out-of-town corps descended once again upon Hayneville.
This time, the prosecutor tried to show that some prospective jurors were racist by asking them whether they believed that Negroes, and white integrationists like Mrs. Liuzzo, were inferior to themselves. Although 11 of 30 prospective jurors said that they did believe this, they also claimed they could fairly consider the evidence and impose the death penalty on a man who had killed an "inferior" civil-rights worker. The judge ruled that the men were fit jurors.
There were six blacks in the jury pool, but they were all disqualified for various reasons; the resulting panel was all white. Murphy had died in a car crash shortly after the first trial, so Arthur Hanes, former mayor of Birmingham, conducted the defense.
Rowe, the informant, once again swore that Wilkins had fired the fatal shots. But he admitted that he had held a gun out the car window and pretended to shoot. For the defense, Hanes referred to the informer as a "Judas goat" and the alleged trigger-man as a "scapegoat," and called the trial the "Parable of Two Goats." Hanes also managed to find two alibi witnesses, who testified that they had seen Wilkins drinking beer at a VFW Hall near Birmingham, 125 miles from the murder scene, an hour or less after Viola Liuzzo was shot.
In his closing argument, Hanes gave no sermons about segregation or white supremacy but concentrated on the "Judas goat," who, he said, "sells information for money. If there is no information, he makes -- he fabricates -- information and then he goes and peddles it." Wilkins was acquitted.
The three Klansmen were then retried for the same crime on federal conspiracy charges. The expected double-jeopardy arguments were quashed. Once again, an all-white jury was empaneled. The arguments were the same, but this time the results were dramatically different: The jurors, mostly from small Alabama towns, found all three men guilty, and the judge imposed the maximum sentence of ten years. One of the three Klansmen died of a heart attack not long afterward, but Collie Wilkins and Eugene Thomas served full terms in federal prison.
The legal drama was far from over. Thomas, fresh from the guilty verdict in federal court, was tried in state court on murder charges in 1966. In the same Hayneville courthouse, he was acquitted by a jury of eight blacks and four whites. "Jury With Negroes Acquits Klansman in Liuzzo Slaying," was the surprised headline in the New York Times.
The case lay dormant until 1978, when it resurfaced during investigations of the FBI's covert Internal Security Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. By now, J. Edgar Hoover was dead, and the program that had hired Rowe was under intense scrutiny, mainly for its infiltration of leftist organizations.
Much was revealed about Rowe, a former bartender and nightclub bouncer. The FBI thought he would make a plausible Klansman and asked him to join the Klan as a spy. Rowe was the agency's top informer there for years, partly because he threw himself so enthusiastically into Klan work.
The 1978 investigations implicated him as an agent provocateur, and he was accused of helping plant the bomb that killed four black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963. Wilkins and Thomas, now out of jail, walked away from their beer-drinking alibi and claimed they had seen Rowe kill Viola Liuzzo.
Rowe repeated his story that he had only pretended to shoot her. The Alabama district attorney thought otherwise. In November 1978, a grand jury indicted Rowe for first-degree murder in the killing of Viola Liuzzo. The state initiated extradition proceedings against Rowe, who was living in Georgia, where the FBI had given him a new identity under the witness-protection program.
In 1980, while Rowe was still fighting extradition, things got worse for him. An internal FBI file came to light which acknowledged that Rowe had led attacks on Freedom Riders, clubbing them with a lead- weighted baseball bat. The FBI paid the medical bills for Rowe's own injuries and gave him a $125 bonus. One of his FBI handlers was found to have said, "If he happened to be with some Klansmen and they decided to do something [violent] he couldn't be an angel and be a good informant. "
Viola Liuzzo's children now waded in, smelling money. With the help of the ACLU, they sued the FBI for $2 million, charging that Rowe and, therefore, the Bureau were at least partly responsible for the death of their mother.
Luckily for Rowe, in October 1980 a federal judge blocked extradition to Alabama, saying that a federal "agent" has rights that protect him when "placed in a compromising position because of his undercover work." This surprising ruling, which exempted Rowe from any number of possible criminal charges in Alabama, was sustained by the federal appeals court.
The Liuzzo children did manage to get Rowe into court in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1982. Eugene Thomas repeated his 1978 allegations that the informer was Mrs. Liuzzo's killer. The judge disbelieved Thomas. He threw out the Liuzzo children's case, ordering them to reimburse the government the $80,000 it had spent defending itself.
The saga of the Liuzzo murder seems -- finally -- to have come to its sorry end, but there are lessons here. One is that the jury system, admirable as it may be in a homogeneous society, can crack under racial pressure. At least one of the four men who drove by Viola Liuzzo' s car that evening fired the shots that killed her. All four may have been guilty of murder. There is only one thing that kept the state from getting a conviction: race.
The other lesson is that FBI infiltrators can cause a great deal of trouble, and leave mysteries that are never cleared up. In order to be accepted by the bad guys, they have to encourage people to break the law, or at least not discourage them, and they may sometimes break it themselves. It is always a temptation for infiltrators to encourage vicious behavior that they can then gloriously expose. And some, like Rowe, develop a taste for the very crimes they are supposed to help prevent.