Memories of the Ku Klux Klan in my
childhood town of Philadelphia, Mississippi
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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