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Advocates call for Kennard’s pardon

By Jerry Mitchell
The Clarion-Ledger

Then-Gov. Ross Barnett believed civil rights pioneer Clyde Kennard was innocent of the crime that sent him to prison, his daughter says.

“He said he thought it was disgraceful,” said Barnett’s daughter, Ouida Barnett Atkins of Jackson, a retired school teacher who supports efforts to clear Kennard’s name.

Akins [sic] recalled the words of her father shortly before he freed the decorated Korean War veterans in January 1963 from the State Penitentiary at Parchman.

“He said, ‘He (Kennard) has cancer. He doesn’t have long to live, but he deserves to go home to die.’”

[To the right of the above paragraph is a headshot of Clyde Kennard in military uniform. The caption below the photo reads: Kennard]

Hattiesburg native Joyce Ladner – who was mentored by Kennard and who fought to win his freedom in 1963 – recalled Barnett being initially opposed to freeing the veteran.

“He was appealed to continuously but failed to act until a lot of national pressure was brought against him,” she said.

Barnett had to know Kennard was suffering from cancer, Ladner said.

“He was in charge, ultimately, of the penal system, so either the warden would have informed him, or he would have inquired about Clyde.”

Atkins defended her father’s motives in freeing Kennard in 1963.

“I don’t remember him being embarrassed to do this, as some writers have said,” she said. “I was there, and I remember he said it was the right thing as a humanitarian act.”

Kennard spent his last days in a Chicago hospital, where he died July 4, 1963, and the story of his life and his unsuccessful attempts to attend the then-all-white Mississippi Southern College, now known as the University of Southern Mississippi, have been largely forgotten.

A three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger showed Kennard was falsely convicted of burglary in 1960 before being sentenced to a maximum seven years in prison. Forty-five years later, the man who had testified Kennard put him up to the burglary now says Kennard never asked him to do

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anything illegal.

“If he wasn’t a black man trying to go to Southern, you wouldn’t have heard nothing,” Johnny Roberts told The Clarion-Ledger.

After the story appeared Dec. 31, former Hinds County Chancery Judge Chet Dillard filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to throw out Kennard’s conviction.

On Friday, the Mississippi Senate unanimously passed a resolution praising Kennard’s contributions, but stopping short of saying he was innocent. In the wake of that vote, state Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, is asking Gov. Haley Barbour to issue a posthumous pardon for Kennard.

He’s not alone. On behalf of Kennard’s brother-in-law, the Rev. Willie Grant of Hattiesburg, the Center on Wrongful Convictions and three Illinois students also have asked the governor to pardon Kennard.

“Makes me happy to know somebody is working toward it,” said Grant, who pastors the Martin Luther King Avenue Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. “I have great faith it’s going to work out.”

Their letter to Barbour called Kennard’s burglary trial “a travesty. He was forced to go to trial within a week of his indictment on burglary charges. Repeated requests by Kennard’s trial attorney, a legendary local black attorney named R. Jess Brown, were denied. An all-white jury convicted Kennard after only 10 minutes of deliberation.”

The center’s legal director, Steven Drizin, professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, said the case against Kennard, already thin, has now come unraveled.

“It’s taken 45 years but Johnny Lee Roberts has finally felt comfortable enough to tell the truth of what happened to Kennard,” Drizin said. “His courage is now causing others to come forward, including prominent whites, to express their long-held misgivings about Kennard’s convictions.”

The time has come, he said, “to recognize Kennard for his heroic efforts and to right the wrongs to which he was subjected.”

The students from Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., who have been conducting interviews on Kennard’s case for a National History Day documentary, brought the case to the attention of the center, which has relied on their work to help make the case for Kennard’s pardon.

“It’s part of the American dream to get an education,” said Mona Ghadiri, whose family emigrated from Iran. “To see someone denied that is wrong.”

The late governor’s daughter said she was 29 when she overheard her father’s conversations on Kennard.

Her father believed in Kennard’s innocence and so did Erle Johnston Jr., who headed the state’s now-defunct segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, Atkins said.

“They all thought he was railroaded.”

Johnston’s beliefs are contained in his Oct. 15, 1965, letter to an Ohio man in which Johnston wrote, “Many responsible Mississippi citizens recognize there was a miscarriage of justice in the Kennard case.”

In March 1962, Kennard underwent cancer surgery but wasn’t freed by Barnett until January 1963.

His daughter doesn’t know why her father didn’t free Kennard sooner, she said. “He said he really felt sorry for him and that it was the right thing to do. I thought so, too.”

Now 72, she still volunteers at Lanier High School, where she taught 11 years.

She received a degree in history from Southern in 1955 and is pleased the university in 1933 named the student services building after Kennard and Walter Washington, the first black to receive a doctorate from the institution.

“Clyde Kennard’s name should be cleared,” she said. “I do think my father would support it. I certainly do.”