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He was the second black student to graduate from Ole Miss in the 60s. He got his start as a student in the Jackson Movement led by Medgar Evers. Jerry Mitchell reports: “Cleve was one of the student leaders,” [Leslie] McLemore said. “The movement gave Cleve the foundation for what he did later in [...]  There’s a dogtrot house in Union County just East of the Enterprise community (where the West Union School is on Highway 30, for those who have driven from New Albany to Oxford) that I’ve admired for decades. In the past, it could be hard to spot because of some woods near it, but there’s [...] I always (since I was a small child) knew that the interior of the First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson was special and beautiful (and always seemed peaceful in a way a church should be). I had no idea about the Catholic Church just up the street (and around the corner from my [...] Photographer Joe Clark is a little known photographer from Cumberland Gap, Tennessee whose first photograph was purchased by Life Magazine. He spent his life making pictures in Appalachia and Detroit and elsewhere, producing beautiful images. And you know his work, but don’t realize it. In the 1950s, when Art Hancock wanted to establish the [...] On Veteran’s Day, a historical marker was unveiled in Winona to Ens. William Devotie Billingsley, who in 1913 was the first Naval aviator to die in the line of duty. He was from Winona and went to Annapolis. After graduation, he entered the brand-new Naval aviation program at Aviation Camp in Annapolis; he was [...] Ratliff v. Beale, 20 So. 865 (1896), the Mississippi Supreme Court case quoted in my last post, is a case of breathtaking honesty. Not in a good way. There are two passages which are particularly striking that I want to post here. The lawsuit seems to have been a set-up. On the one side, you have J.A.P. Campbell working with the state AG. Campbell was a congressman during the Confederacy and served for years on the Mississippi Supreme Court; he was considered one of the better justices on the court in the late 19th Century. On the other side, you have S. S. Calhoon, J. Z. George, and Frank Johnston. That would be James Zachariah George, who became one of Mississippi’s US Senators at the end of reconstruction, and was as prominent as lawyers and politicians got. He was at the 1890 constitutional convention and involved in the legal defenses of that constitution. S.S. Calhoon was the president of the 1890 convention and was within a couple of years on the Mississippi Supreme Court, writing well enough to be quoted over a hundred years later. The dispute was over the seizure of a piece of furniture by the Hinds County tax collector. Seriously. The tax collector (represented by Campbell and the Attorney General) had seized ”an article of household furniture,” by law exempt from taxation, to cover payment of a tax due; the property owner, represented by George and Calhoon, sought and obtained a permanent injunction against proceeding against the property. They appealed on agreed facts.
What was all this legal talent doing in a fight over a chair or the like? When nothing really was in factual dispute?
The habitual disregard of one law not only brings it finally into contempt, but tends to weaken respect for all other laws. The most dangerous and insidious form in which this evil can exist is that which manifests itself in the disregard of public rather than private right, for not only are the consequences more widely [...] “any intelligent man is not going to remain long in a state where jackasses roam the legislative halls, braying at their betters.” Hodding Carter, suggesting that Ole Miss Law Professor William Murphy would soon leave Mississippi because of the attacks on him from state officials. Quoted in a footnote in Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. I want to [...] “What we was playin’ in the ’30s was true country music — no electric instruments, no copyrights,” he once said. “Something’d happen and someone’d write a song about it — nobody owned it, nobody’d know who wrote it. The music just told a story.” There’s a very fine obit for Wade Mainer in the [...] Honeyboy Edwards began playing blues in the 30s in the Delta, came to know Robert Johnson there– was with him about the time of his death– recorded for Alan Lomax in the early 40s, and moved to Chicago. He has been the last link to prewar recorded blues from Mississippi for some time, and [...] |
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