Racism and anti-communism: two sides of the same coin

By Frank Chapman

This article was reprinted from the March 28, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

The secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission were opened to the public March 17. For over two decades, civil rights activists had struggled to have the files unlocked.

The state of Mississippi wanted the 132,000 pages of documents sealed until 2027. But the countless victims, thousands of civil rights activists - African Americans in particular - wanted the decades of terrorism and denial of civil liberties exposed.

The commission used spying, extortion, intimidation, bribery and false imprisonment to keep the citizens of Mississippi under a reign of Nazi-like terror from 1956 to 1977.

"It will probably bring forth some memories of a bad time in the state," said former Gov. William Winter, now a member of the President's Advisory Board on Race. "I hope it'll be the basis for understanding that we can't ever lapse back into the kind of intolerance we once had."

"Whether it was legal or not ... never bothered me ... we needed to have those spies who told us what [the opponents of racist segregation] were doing ... we kept the radicals and communist-led marchers from taking over Mississippi," Harned said.

The commission, created by the Mississippi legislature in 1956, defined its mission as protecting "the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi and her sister states." That meant not only keeping the "communist-led" marchers from "taking over," but also breaking the law.

In 1961, police beat nine students from Tougaloo College for sitting-in to desegregate Mississippi's public libraries.

Relying on information supplied by an in-house spy, the commission threatened to cut off the school's funding under guise of getting rid of Communists.

The commission records reveal it considered the college a "hotbed of communist sympathizers and racial agitators."

An even more tragic example of the commission's illegal acts is the murder of Vernon Dahmer, whose house was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

The day the files were opened, Dahmer's widow, Ellie, obtained an extensive file on her husband. She is in search of information that would help prosecutors retry Sam Bowers, the KKK imperial wizard who allegedly ordered the firebombing.

Bowers was tried for arson and then for murder; each time the jury ended in deadlock.

"Twenty-one years is a long time to wait to see what is in here," Dahmer said outside the archives building. "It shows what kind of state we lived in, what kind of environment there was, what they really thought of Black people"

One document leaked to the press revealed how the commission aided Byron De La Beckwith's defense in two trials for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Both trials ended in deadlock. Beckwith was tried again in 1994 and convicted.

The commission was a vicious state-operated agency that committed murder and destroyed the lives of people who were only demanding the enforcement of the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the land.

Sovereignty Commission Director Earl Johnston once boasted of how he destroyed the Mississippi Head Start program, which served tens of thousands of Black and white children.

In the name of preserving segregation, the state of Mississippi stunted the education of future generations of poor children.

In case after case, anti-communism was used as a rationale for terrorizing or ending the lives of decent, ordinary people. The victims were mainly workers, farmers, students and ministers.

They were white and Black, young and old, people who simply had the courage to stand up for themselves and their children against one of the most inhuman vestiges of slavery - Jim Crow.

The great lesson here is how anti-communism and racism are used as a battering ram to destroy democracy. Then-Gov. Ross Barnett repeatedly called Martin Luther. King Jr. a Communist, claims which were calculated to inspire acts of terror against the civil rights movement.

This set the stage for the murders of Viola Liuzzo, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, Evers, Dahmer and others.

And on the eve of Dr. King's assassination, there was a huge billboard in Memphis with a picture of him supposedly attending a "communist training school."

Before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was the CIO and left-led Southern Conference of Human Welfare as well as the International Labor Defense and, later, the Civil Rights Congress led by the outstanding African American leader and Communist, William L. Patterson.

The Southern States Industrial Council, a reactionary association of businessmen, with headquarters in Nashville, Tenn., responded to the progressive trends set in motion by these initiatives.

In 1946, this organization of Southern employers declared: "One of the most pitiful and, at the same time, most dangerous features of this drive to organize the South is the way the Negroes are being misled and used by these Communist groups.

"By advocating a system of social and economic equality, and by arousing ill-will and hatred between the White and Negro races, these people are promising the Negro an earthly Utopia which they know they cannot deliver"

The great crime here was to organize Black workers in the South against their exploiters - and worse yet, to organize Black and white workers together into the same unions.

The deceit is clear: we are told that Communists are champions of "social and economic equality" and, in the next breath, we are urged to hate them.

In his tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois, who joined the Communist Party in 1961, Dr. King said anti-communism is based on lies.

But these are lies that invariably lead to murder, the murder of democracy.