THE CLYDE KENNARD STORY
A CLARION-LEDGER EXCLUSIVE

[Illustration containing three items: Black-and-white photograph of Clyde Kennard in military uniform, a caption super-imposed to the right of Kennard’s photo that reads: ‘He wasn’t guilty of nothing’ But 45 years ago, he was denied entry into the University of Southern Mississippi. Below the text is a photograph of the Administration building at the University of Southern Mississippi.]

[Below the illustration is two captions:
Photo Illustration by Earnest Hart/The Clarion-Ledger
Clyde Kennard, an African-American veteran and farmer, repeatedly tried to enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi. The state should permit a few black students to attend all-white colleges, he said in 1959. “If I don’t get in now, somebody else will pretty soon, and it might be someone who doesn’t care about Mississippi.”]

Farmer innocent in 1960 burglary, witness declares
Investigation shows decorated Army war veteran imprisoned on false charges

The Clarion-Ledger
By Jerry Mitchell
jmitchell@clarionledger.com

HATTIESBURG – When Clyde Kennard refused to give up his quest to become the first black student to enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi, authorities sent him to state prison in 1960 for seven years.

Now a three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger has revealed the decorated Army veteran was locked up for a crime he never committed.

In the 1960 trial, 19-year-old Johnny Lee Roberts testified Kennard, a 33-year-old devout Baptist and farmer, put him up to breaking into Forrest County Co-op to steal $25 in feed, even describing how he should leave the warehouse door unlocked.

Now, 45 years later, Roberts said none of that is true. Approached by The Clarion-Ledger, he said he’s willing to swear under oath Kennard never put him up to burglary, never asked him to steal, never asked him to do

See KENNARD, 4A

[Textbox to the right of the above article-section:

Clyde Kennard wrote a letter to the Hattiesburg American in 1958 challenging the idea of separate but equal:

“After our paralleled graduate schools, where do our parallels of separate but equal go? Are we to assume that paralleled hospitals are to be built for the two groups of doctors? Are we to build two bridges across the same stream in order to give equal opportunities to both engineers?

Kennard suggested people work together to build up one another:

“When merit replaces race as a factor in character evaluation, the most heckling social problem of modern times will have been solved.”]

Story of false arrest called civil rights movement’s saddest

By Jerry Mitchell
jmitchell@clarionledger.com

HATTIESBURG – All Clyde Kennard wanted was to walk across a stage and clasp a college diploma.

Instead, the state of Mississippi marched him off to prison on a false charge and worked him in the broiling sun as cancer consumed him.

“Every time I talk somewhere, I talk about Clyde Kennard,” said John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. “That is the saddest story of the whole movement.”

Born in 1927, Kennard’s early life foreshadowed a grim future. When he was 4, his father died. He grew up helping his mother run the family farm.

[To the left of the two above paragraphs is a photograph of a man with a caption that reads Dittmer]

In 1945, war came calling after Germany’s surrender – too late to fight, but not too late to help.

“We went into the Army the same day,” recalled Willie Grant, who became Kennard’s brother-in-law. “We were both out of high school, and we had never been away

See DIPLOMA, 6A

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Kennard: Hattiesburg minister pleads for brother-in-law’s record to be wiped clean

From 1A

anything illegal: “He wasn’t guilty of nothing.”

Those who have long believed Kennard was innocent say this new evidence shows that late Korean War veterans deserves to have his record wiped clean. “His name should be cleared for those of us who knew him that are still living,” said one of Kennard’s last surviving relatives, his brother-in-law, the Rev. Willie Grant, pastor of Martin Luther King Avenue Baptist Church of Hattiesburg. “He was innocent.”

Aaron Condon, professor emeritus of the University of Mississippi School of Law, said nothing in state law prevents the state Supreme Court from taking up Kennard’s case again.

[To the right of the above two paragraphs is a free-floating text box which reads: “There’s no doubt in my mind he (Kennard) got set up, and we were able to show that.”

Glenn White, former district attorney]

The simplest thing would be for Gov. Haley Barbour to pardon Kennard “and restore his good name,” he said.

Georgia used a posthumous pardon earlier this year for Lena Baker, a black maid executed in 1945 for killing a white man she said held in slavery and threatened her life.

Hattiesburg sisters Joyce and Dorie Ladner have fought to clear Kennard’s name for more than four decades. Joyce Lander would prefer a resolution by Congress or the state Legislature that would stipulate Kennard’s innocence in writing. “If you pardon him, the assumption was he was guilty.”

A resolution also could make clear Kennard’s innocence on two prior convictions, she said.

Minutes after Kennard tried to enroll at Southern in 1959, constables arrested him on reckless driving and illegal liquor possession – charges for which he was convicted.

In 1991, The Clarion-Ledger published secret documents from the state’s now-defunct segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, that showed how authorities framed Kennard on those charges.

After the story appeared, then-District Attorney Glenn White investigated the matter, “There’s no doubt in my mind he (Kennard) got set up, and we were able to show that,” he told The Clarion-Ledger this week.

A constable who arrested Kennard on those charges also arrested Kennard in the burglary.

White said he wasn’t aware of that: “Now that’s a red flag.”

He said the four-hour gap between the time of Kennard’s arrest that morning between 7:30 and 8 and the execution of the search warrant more than four hours later also raises questions since it could have given someone plenty of time to plant evidence against Kennard.

Roberts’ recanting means Kennard’s burglary conviction can’t stand up since Roberts’ testimony was the sole evidence linking Kennard to burglary, legal experts say. “You’ve got to know the breaking and entering is going to take place to be guilty of burglary,” Condon said.

In 1993, USM honored Kennard by renaming its students services building after him and Walter Washington, the first African American to receive a doctorate from the institution.

A biography on Kennard on the university’s Web site calls the charges against Kennard “false,” but Mississippi never has taken any official action to clear his name.

In the first interview he has ever given, Roberts explained what happened that fall in 1960:

Roberts was working two jobs to support his wife and two children, one of them at the Forrest County Co-op.

Kennard could no longer get feed from places such as the co-op “on account of him being the only black man trying to enroll at Southern,” Roberts said.

[Above the three columns on the right side of the page is photograph of a woman wearing a jacket and wide-brimmed hat. She is standing next to a Mississippi historical marker dedicated to Vernon F. Dahmer, Sr., and her left hand is resting on a smaller sign on the same post.

The photograph has a caption that reads:
Matthew Bush/Hattiesburg American
Raylawni Branch of the NAACP stands in front of the memorial sign for Vernon F. Dahmer Sr. Branch and Elaine Armstrong became the first black students at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1965.]

Employees could buy damaged feed at a reduced price or get it free because such feed ruined quickly, Roberts said. “I bought a whole lot of it, and a whole lot of it they’d give me.”

He sold the feed to others, including Kennard, usually at $2 for a 100-pound sack, he said. “He said, ‘Just get me some feed for my chickens, and I’ll pay you whatever you charge for some damaged feed,’” Roberts said.

On several occasions, he sold damaged feed to Kennard, he said, only to be told by the co-op he couldn’t do that.

Torn between keeping his word to his employed and wanting to help Kennard, Roberts said on Sept. 25, 1960, he sneaked before 5 a.m. into the warehouse, which he had left unlocked.

He said he loaded five sacks of damaged feed into his trunk but was spotted by a night watchman. He said he delivered the sacks to Kennard, who paid him $10.

Roberts said he told Kennard the watchman had seen him. Kennard advised him to stay at his mother’s house just outside Hattiesburg, he said.

Instead, Roberts said he drove home, where police arrested him.

In Kennard’s November 1960 trial, James Tatum, then-manager of the co-op, testified for the prosecution.

[To the right of the above three paragraphs is a free-floating text box which reads: “Why is it that the man who broke into and entered the store and stole the chicken feed is free while this man who bought it received seven years of hard labor?”
McComb Enterprise-Journal editor Oliver Emmerich, 1960]

Although the co-op had once sued Kennard and seized his hens, Tatum told The Clarion-Ledger this week he recalled no problems between the co-op and Kennard but did remember Kennard tried to enter Southern.

Confronted with the charges against Kennard, Tatum recalled “a little problem with the feed,” saying an employee had given Kennard an extra bag or two.

But after that was cleared up, he said, “we had no real problems with Clyde.”

He said he knew nothing about Kennard going to prison.

On Nov. 14, 1960, a Forrest County grand jury indicted Kennard and Roberts for burglary. They trial began a week later, despite a request from Kennard’s attorney, R. Jess Brown of Jackson, for additional time to prepare.

Because all evidence pointed to Roberts committing the burglary, prosecutors tried to show Kennard was an accessory before the fact. An all-white jury convicted him in 10 minutes – less time than some juries take to pick a foreman.

Circuit Judge Stanton Hall, who had headed legislative investigation into the NAACP, sentenced Kennard to the maximum seven years in prison. Roberts, who pleaded guilty, got a suspended sentence.

The disparity in sentences raised eyebrows.

“Why is it that the man who broke into and entered the store and stole the chicken feed is free while this man who bought it received seven years of hard labor?” editor Oliver Emmerich asked in the Dec. 30, 1960, McComb Enterprise-Journal. “The question becomes more pertinent when they learn that the man who was given the seven-year sentence was convicted on the testimony of the thief…

“Was there any relationship between the severity of the sen-tence of one of the Negroes and his attempt to enter a white college? If ever such an influence should affect our courts, we would be approaching the evils of political imprisonment.”

On appeal, Brown said Kennard’s conviction should be reversed for the same reason the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed other cases—black Mississippians had been barred from voting and, therefore, from serving on grand juries and trial juries.

On April 3, 1961, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Kennard’s conviction, concluding, “The jury box is filled without regard to race.”

That same year, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Forrest County Circuit Clerk Theron Lynd with discriminating against black voters, but it would take several more years before the courts found him guilty of contempt.

“The only reason the 5th (U.S.) Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t send Theron Lynd to prison was his health,” said civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot, who was a part of that battle.

Kennard died in 1963. Two years later, Southern welcomed its first two African American students, Raylawni Branch and Elaine Armstrong.

Branch recalled Roberts telling her in 1962 shortly after she became secretary for the local NAACP, “Clyde had nothing to do with stealing the chicken feed.”

When she confronted him about his testimony, she said Roberts replied, “I can’t do what you all want me to do.”

She said she and other NAACP officials promised him safety in Chicago, but he replied, “They’ll hurt my family.”

At The Clarion-Ledger’s request, Branch met with Roberts last week for the first time since that conversation.

After hearing his story, she told him she had long thought badly of him: “Now I realize you were actually trying to help Clyde and were a victim of the whole system.”

By the time the trial ended, Roberts had lost his job and found himself rejected by black and white, he said. “I had people that tried to jump on me.”

He turned down a probation officer’s offer to let him tote a gun. “I told them the best thing to do when they want to jump on me was what my mother said, ‘Give ‘em some heel dust.’”

At 64, an age when many might retire, Roberts continues to work with his hands, cleaning and doing other janitorial work.

He acknowledged he’s felt guilt for what happened to Kennard. “I hate the way they did, but you know how people feel. With somebody like me, I couldn’t control nothing back then,” he said.

He’d like to see Kennard’s name cleared, he said. “I thought the world of him. He was a good man.”

There’s no doubt Kennard’s efforts to break the color barrier led to his imprisonment, Roberts said. “Why they got him was not the feed. It was because he was trying to go to Southern. If he wasn’t a black man trying to go to Southern, you wouldn’t have heard nothing.”

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Diploma: Kennard underwent cancer surgery while in prison

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from home.”

Grant served in the infantry in Europe, and Kennard taught denazification courses to German youths.

In 1950, Kennard began attending college in Fayetteville, N.C., when war came calling again, this time the Korean War. Kennard served as a paratrooper and rose to the rank of sergeant, receiving three medals including the Bronze Star.

After the war, he attended the University of Chicago and sent home what money he could to his mother, now remarried.

His dream of a political science degree, however, came crashing down in 1955 when his stepfather became disabled. Rather than finish school, the bachelor came home to run the family farm.

Back in Mississippi, the 28-year-old devout Baptist joined the NAACP, where he became friends with fellow farmer Vernon Dahmer Sr., who died in 1966 defending his family from an attack by the Klan.

Kennard served as president of the local NAACP youth chapter, mentoring 15-year-old sisters Dorie and Joyce Ladner. “He took his time with us,” Dorie Ladner said. “He was very patient.”

He served on the school board and was outraged the area’s 125 black students had to travel 11 miles past the all-white Eatonville School to attend classes. He circulated an unsuccessful petition to have children attend the closest school.

Commission dossier

Kennard yearned to finish college. In 1956, he approached President William D. McCain at all-white Mississippi Southern College. McCain put off his request.

“Clyde just wanted to finish school,” recalled Dorie Ladner. “He wasn’t trying to make a political statement.”

[To the right of the above paragraph is a headshot of an adult woman with a caption below that reads: J. Ladner]

By the time he tried to enroll again in 1958, he enjoyed the support of Medgar Evers, field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP. “Clyde was like a brother to him,” recalled Joyce Ladner.

Kennard believed segregationists could be won over with reason, Dittmer said. With his intention to attend Southern made public, the state’s segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, compiled an extensive dossier on the small-framed farmer. The commission sought to smear Kennard, but many interviewed praised him.

“Persons who know Kennard describe him as intelligent, well-educated, quiet spoken, courteous, with a desire to better the Negro race in Mississippi,” the commission’s own report concluded. The only “dirt” it could find against Kennard was a claim he was “known to associate with…a self-confessed communist,” who in reality was a local rabbi.

[To the right of the above paragraph is a free-floating text box which reads: “The two most Christian people I’ve ever known were Clyde and my husband. They were always concerned about doing something for somebody else with nothing in return.”
Ellie Dahmer, widow of Vernon Dahmer]

The commission called Kennard a “race agitator,” but the Dahmer family said nothing was further from the truth.

“The two most Christian people I’ve ever known were Clyde and my husband,” recalled Dahmer’s widow, Ellie. “They were always concerned about doing something for somebody else with nothing in return.”

An agent reported back to the commission that a white Citizens’ Council leader said if the commission “wanted Kennard out of the community and out of the state just to let him know and he would see that this was taken care of. He claimed that no violence and no publicity would take place. He indicated that it would be handled by bringing economic pressure on the Negroes.”

Kennard felt that pressure and so did other Mississippians in the civil rights movement.

“We couldn’t get loans. They put the squeeze on us,” recalled Ellie Dahmer. “You couldn’t believe you were an American, and this would happen to you – all because of the color of your skin.”

Gov. J.P. Coleman met with Kennard. “State officials offered to pay for his education out of state, and he said, ‘No, I want to be near my family. I just want to finish,’” recalled Dorie Ladner.

Officials secretly sent leaders from all-black universities to get Kennard to stop his registration efforts.

In fall 1959, he decided to apply in person at Southern. When he returned to his car, two constables arrested him, charging him with

[Above the three columns on the page’s right side is a photograph of an older woman from hip-height up. She’s wearing sunglasses and a patterned jacket and is holding a large frame which has a photograph of two figures in it. She’s standing in front of a grassy field with trees in the background.

There are two captions below the photograph, which read:
Matthew Bush/Hattiesburg American
Ellie Dahmer holds a photograph of her late husband Vernon Dahmer Sr. (right) and Clyde Kennard. She says both men dedicated their lives to serving others and expected nothing in return. She says she believes Kennard was innocent of burglary and should now have his name cleared by the state of Mississippi.]

both reckless driving and illegal possession of whiskey.

Authorities’ framing of Kennard is made clear in Sovereignty Commission records.

College security officer John Reiter, a former FBI agent, told commission agent Zack J. Van Landingham that when Kennard tried to enroll in 1958, Reiter “had been approached by individuals with possible plans to prevent Kennard’s going through with his attempt. One of the plans was to put dynamite to the starter of Kennard’s Mercury. Another plan was to have some liquor planted in Kennard’s car and then he would be arrested.”

Van Landingham called the arrest an apparent “frame-up with the planting of evidence in Kennard’s car,” but neither he nor any other state official did anything to stop a court from convicting the Army veteran of both charges.

The constables testified they knew nothing of Kennard’s attempt to enroll at Southern, despite the fact they arrested him on campus minutes after he tried to register.

Justice of the Peace T.C. Hobby promptly found Kennard guilty, fining him $600 for possessing whiskey and driving recklessly.

“Of all the cases I have ever heard,” Hobby told the 75 who crowded into his office to hear the case, “the state has proved more in this one the guilt of the defendant.”

Hobby had a serious conflict of interest in hearing the case. Commission records reveal he opposed Kennard’s enrollment, telling state officials he was responsible for “persuading Kennard to stay out of Mississippi Southern College last January.”

Kennard appealed to County Court, which held a hearing without notice to him or his lawyer, R. Jess Brown of Jackson. Rather than grant a delay, the county judge upheld the conviction.

Kennard vowed to continue his efforts to attend Southern.

Burglary arrest

On Sept. 25, 1960, as he walked toward his house to get ready for Sunday school, authorities arrested him, this time for burglary. The state relied on the testimony of Johnny Lee Roberts, who said Kennard put him up to breaking into the Forrest County Co-op and stealing $25 in feed, even describing how he should leave the warehouse door unlocked.

Kennard insisted on his inno-cence, but the jury made up entirely of white men convicted him.

Circuit Judge Stanton Hall, a former senator who had led a legislative investigation into the NAACP, sentenced Kennard to the maximum seven years in prison. Roberts, who pleaded guilty to burglary, received a suspended sentence.

Evers called the outcome a mockery of justice: “In a courtroom of segregationists apparently resolved to put Kennard ‘legally away,’ the all-white jury found Kennard ‘guilty as charged’ in only about 10 minutes.”

Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, said her husband was so angered by the verdict he put his first through the wall of their home.

Hall cited Evers with contempt and ordered him to serve 30 days in jail, but Evers refused to back down. “I have no apology to make even if it means six months in jail,” said Evers, whose charge eventually was dismissed by the high court.

The McComb Enterprise-Journal, which defended segregation, warned readers in a Dec. 30, 1960, editorial, “Our cause will not be regarded as righteous if the people of the other states believe that equal justice for all people is not provided in the courts of Mississippi…Justice has no relationship to the popularity or unpopularity of an individual or a movement. Justice stems from equality under the law. We of Mississippi must be concerned because we cannot be unconcerned with truth nor immune to principle. Truth implies fidelity to the best that is within us.”

On March 6, 1961, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new trial on reckless driving and liquor charges for Kennard, but it did him little good. He remained behind bars, where he’d been since his September 1960 burglary arrest.

Less than a month later, the same justices upheld Kennard’s conviction, sending him to the State Penitentiary at Parchman. He joined other black inmates on the “sunup to sundown gang,” forced to pick cotton all day on the segregated prison farm underneath a steamy Delta sun. “We were like slaves,” Kennard later said. “They even fed us leftovers from what the white prisoners ate.”

Release from prison

Evers assisted Thurgood Marshall in Kennard’s unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. During an NAACP banquet, Evers, a man who never cried, began to weep as he talked of Kennard, said David Oshinsky, author of Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.

[To the left of the above paragraph is a headshot of Medgar Evers, with a caption that reads: Evers]

By summer, Kennard suffered weight loss and severe abdominal pain. He was hospitalized, where doctors misdiagnosed him with sickle-cell anemia.

Back at prison, guards forced him to continue to work, Oshinsky said. “Despite the fact everybody knew he was ill, he was pretty much denied medical care.”

In March 1962, he underwent colon cancer surgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Kennard’s cancer continued to spread, and Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Gregory and others put pressure on Gov. Ross Barnett to release the Army veteran.

Oshinsky said this was the first civil rights case that drew attention to conditions in Mississippi’s prison system, “and we can certainly thank (Kennard) for that.”

Avoiding a potentially embarrassing situation, Barnett granted clemency to Kennard on Jan. 30, 1963, allowing him to return to his family farm, which Evers had fought to keep out of foreclosure.

Hours after he arrived, so did Victoria Gray and other NAACP officials, who had come in search of information to speed Kennard’s release.

“It was quite a pleasant surprise,” she recalled.

Gray and others listened as Kennard spoke.

“There was not a trace of anger or revenge or anything whatsoever,” she said. “He was just very thankful to be home.”

Gray sat there in awe, she said. “I would be mad. I would be angry. I would be thinking how I could get even. There was absolutely none of that. He was the same Clyde – kind, caring, thoughtful.”

If anything, Kennard expressed sorrow for his abusers, she said. “It was just like, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do.’”

Before the day ended, a reporter arrived, and Kennard talked of his continuing love for Mississippi: “I still think there are a few white people of good will in the state, and we have to do something to bring this out.”

Kennard traveled to Chicago for treatment, Oshinsky said. “He would have died of colon cancer, but he was pretty well worked to death. He simply went up North to die.”

Dorie Ladner recalled visiting Kennard in the hospital at the University of Chicago.

He was emaciated, weighing less than 90 pounds. He spoke of his innocence and the horrors of his prison, but she sensed no bitterness. “He was just very calm and encouraged us to continue fighting,” she said.

On June 12, 1963, word came that Medgar Evers had been fatally shot in the back outside his Jackson home. After an eight-hour operation, Kennard learned death of near for him, too.

John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me, described his visit with Kennard: “He was a tiny little dwarf. He lay with a sheet pulled up over his face so no one could see the grimace of pain.”

Kennard consoled those gathered and finally remarked, “Mr. Griffin, I’d be glad it happened if only it would show this country where racism finally leads. But the people aren’t going to know it, are they?”

Griffin vowed to share Kennard’s story.

“Be sure to tell them what happened to me isn’t as bad as what happened to the guard,” Kennard replied, “because this system turned him into a beast, and it will turn his children into beasts.

Kennard died July 4, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that promised, “All men are created equal.”

Grant—one of Kennard’s last living relatives, who pastors Martin Luther King Avenue Baptist Church in Hattiesburg—said Mississippi authorities “only knew him as a black man. They didn’t know his character."

David Sansing, professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi, said the Kennard case was “the clearest and best evidence of how mean the state was and the extent to which they would go to destroy anybody who challenged that system. I would love to see justice come to him at last. This guy deserves to be exonerated.”

[To the left of the above paragraph’s beginning is a headshot of an older man, a caption below it reads: Sansing]