Kennard `a great warrior in battle'
The determined but unassuming farmer wanted to enroll at Mississippi Southern College - but the white power structure was just as determined to stop him.
Pioneer's struggle not forgotten

By Rachel Leifer
Staff Writer
The Hattiesburg American

When 17-year-old Raylawni Branch served Clyde Kennard a biscuit breakfast at Fats' Kitchen on Sept. 15, 1959, she had no idea it would be the last time she saw the unassuming civil rights pioneer. It was a sunny Indian summer day, Branch said, and Kennard, 32, was en route to Mississippi Southern College - now the University of Southern Mississippi - to make what would be his third and final attempt to become its first black student.

"Who's going with you?" Branch asked Kennard, a soft-spoken Hattiesburg chicken farmer whom she got to know when he made egg deliveries to the Mobile Street neighborhood restaurant. "No one," he replied. "Somebody should go with you," Branch remembered telling him. "No," he said. "Nothing's going to happen."

Less than three hours later - after state and college officials had denied Kennard admission - he was arrested on charges of reckless driving and possession of liquor in a dry county. He would never again be outside the crosshairs of Mississippi law enforcement.

After being convicted and fined, he was arrested again the next year and charged with accepting $25 worth of stolen chicken feed. He was sentenced to a maximum term of seven years at the notorious state penitentiary at Parchman.

Stricken with colon cancer and denied medical care, according to friends and some contemporary news reports, Kennard was granted an early release in 1963. He died later that year, on Independence Day. Records of the Sovereignty Commission, the state's segregation-enforcement agency, unsealed in 1998, show Kennard was framed on the driving and liquor infractions.

And last December, the key witness in Kennard's chicken-feed trial admitted to Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger that he had lied - throwing open the door on a case that had been all but forgotten in the annals of civil rights-era lore for almost 50 years.

"He wanted to finish his college degree and take care of his farm," said Branch, who in 1965 would become one of the first two black students at MSC. "And they finally found something they could stick on him."

He was unusual

Even as a child, Clyde Kennard was a quiet maverick.

"The other boys would always try to get him to act out, go with them to steal a watermelon from a farm or something," said Wilma Backstrom, 83, who grew up with Kennard in the Eatonville community. "He wouldn't have any of it."

The Rev. Willie Grant, who would later become Kennard's brother-in-law, remembers him as a history lover at the now-defunct Bay Springs Consolidated High School. "He was an A student, one of the best students in class," said Grant, 79, who now pastors Hattiesburg's Martin Luther King Avenue Baptist Church.

Kennard left Hattiesburg in 1945 when he entered the U.S. Army with Grant. After he was honorably discharged in 1953, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. Three years into his studies there, his mother's second husband died and he moved back to Hattiesburg to be with her, buying a plot of land in Eatonville and purchasing 3,000 hens to start a chicken farm, according to Sovereignty Commission records.

He was active at Mary Magdalene Baptist Church, teaching Sunday School and co-directing the youth choir. Kennard taught his students with a firm but gentle hand, planning Christmas plays and delivering fruit baskets to every child in the area on the holidays, said Gloria Pack, who was in his Sunday School class as a young girl.

Even his fellow church volunteers thought he was a bit of a "goody-goody," said Viola Grant, 74, who also worked with the youth choir.

In an effort to "corrupt" him, she once brought him to the Embassy Club in Palmer's Crossing. "We were just going to make him be a bad guy for once," Grant said. She ordered a bottle of wine for the group and poured a glass for Kennard - whom she knew never drank or smoked.

"We danced and had a good time," Grant said. "But when we left the club that night, that glass of wine was still there. "He was just a different sort of person. Unusual."

Duplicity and deception

In the late 1950s, Mississippi Southern College under President William D. McCain was the state college system's "kid brother that had gotten too big for his own britches," said David Sansing, professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi and author of "Making Haste Slowly: The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi."

The school was fighting to shed its reputation as a teachers' college and become a full-fledged university and peer of the state's flagship schools, Ole Miss and Mississippi State University.

Campus social life revolved around rallies for sports events and bus trips to downtown theaters to see Elvis Presley movies, said Ken Shearer, 68, a 1960 graduate of MSC who lives in Jackson.

Freshman girls had a 9 p.m. curfew and never wore slacks; fraternity brothers sported ties and jackets once a week. Talk of racial politics among students, he said, was rare. The last thing McCain wanted during MSC's growth period was violence or negative attention - and in the late 1950s he was a "hardcore segregationist," said Bill Scarborough, 73, a Southern Miss professor of history who came to the university in 1964 and acknowledged that he too was a segregationist at the time.

Rather than face confrontation with Kennard, McCain, Gov. J.P. Coleman and Sovereignty Commission representatives persuaded the soft-spoken farmer and decorated Korean War veteran to withdraw his first two applications in 1957 and 1958.

"That was the strategy of the Mississippi power structure," Sansing said, "to employ a strategy of delay, duplicity and deception and just wear down the applicant. "Kennard made the mistake of trusting and believing public officials," he said. "They just tricked him. ... It was a despicable deed."

`Indescribable'

By the early 1960s when Scarborough moved to Mississippi from North Carolina, he said the atmosphere was "indescribable" - thick with racial strife.

"Rebel Radio" of Jackson constantly played "Dixie," and the Fourth of July was not observed as a holiday at MSC because that was the day Vicksburg fell in 1863, he said.

"There were almost no voices speaking out against the policy of state leadership," Scarborough said. Black residents would rarely venture outside their neighborhoods after dark, Branch said.

"There was no such animal as social togetherness," she said, adding she often walked in the shadows in downtown Hattiesburg to avoid calling attention to herself on evenings she had no ride home from MSC.

Aubrey Lucas, the college's director of admissions, was 25 when he was called into McCain's office Sept. 15, 1959, to hand-deliver Kennard's denial letter. Sovereignty Commission records show that Kennard's applications never came to Lucas; the matter was immediately taken over by McCain and Coleman.

But Lucas never objected to Kennard's treatment. "I know there was a part of me that did not think it was right," said Lucas, who became president of Southern Miss in 1975 and dedicated Kennard-Washington Hall in 1993 in honor of Kennard and Walter Washington, the first black recipient of a doctoral degree from Southern Miss.

"But the very fabric of society pretty well in America was separation" of the races, he said. One person in whom he did confide some of his trepidation was his housekeeper - Kennard's friend Wilma Backstrom.

He remembered Backstrom telling him that Kennard "was the kind of person who could walk with kings and not lose the common touch." Backstrom said Lucas was caught in a system beyond his control. "Dr. Lucas looked troubled during that time," she said. "You just knew he wasn't a racist."

But Lucas acknowledged his complicity - and that of the whole community. "We did horrible things trying to maintain a social order that was wrong," he said. "And I say we even though I think I had a keener sense of guilt, perhaps, than some. But we were all a part of it - you just couldn't help but be a part of it."

Compassion, forgiveness

Clyde Kennard was buried at Mary Magdalene Baptist Church after his death in 1963. According to an article in Jet Magazine, about 300 people attended his funeral, while 200 others held a service in Chicago where he died. The Rev. A.J. Benns offered a eulogy, according to Jet.

"Clyde was like a great warrior in battle," he told mourners. "The Bible says the dead shall rise again and I hope we can see Clyde rising again in some of you." Kennard would not have wanted his survivors to use his name as a weapon for revenge, Backstrom said.

"He had so much faith in mankind," she said. "He knew redemption comes through hardship." In his last interview with Jet while still imprisoned and ailing, Kennard himself demonstrated an almost unbelievable level of compassion and forgiveness. "I still think there are a few white people of good will left in the state, and we have to do something to bring this out."

From a Hattiesburg American letter to the editor, written by Clyde Kennard Sept. 25, 1959

The question is whether or not citizens of the same country, the same state, the same city, shall have equal opportunities to earn their living, to select the people who shall govern them, and raise and educate their children in a free and democratic manner; or whether or not because of the accident of color, one half of the citizens shall be excluded from society as though they had leprosy?

... It is an easy manner, I suppose, for White people to misunderstand the aspirations of Negroes; this is understandable. But we have no desire for revenge in our hearts. What we want is to be respected as men and women, given an opportunity to compete with you in the great and interesting race of life.

We want your friends to be our friends; we want your enemies to be our enemies; we want your hopes and ambitions to be our hopes and ambitions, and your joys and sorrows to be our joys and sorrows.

... The big question seems to be, can we achieve this togetherness in our time? If the segregationists have their way we shall not. For instead of teaching brotherly love and cooperation they are declaring the superiority of one race and the inferiority of the other.

Instead of trying to show people how much they are alike, they are busy showing them how much they differ. In this matter I like to quote from the great Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi, in his discourse on the existence of God. He says: "In the midst of death, life persists; in the midst of untruth, truth persists; in the midst of darkness, light persists." So, let it be, in our case. Respectfully submitted, Clyde Kennard

Item courtesy The Hattiesburg American. Republished with permission.

Jail Nightmare
Inmates describe hideous beating; Suspect allegedly was kicked, punched, shocked with Taser and head-slammed on concrete floor

By Robin Fitzgerald
The Sun Herald

Jessie Lee Williams' face and voice haunt Paul McBee.

Nightmares, he said, have plagued him since the night of Feb. 4 when he watched from the Harrison County jail booking room as a deputy allegedly antagonized and assaulted Williams. A brawl erupted and, according to McBee, several officers became involved, but most backed off as a Taser (an electro-shock stun gun) subdued Williams.

Most, that is, except for the jailer who, according to McBee and other witnesses, instigated the fight. McBee described the jailer as a young, large white man with a green shamrock pin on his ballcap.

That jailer, according to McBee and other witnesses, continued to punch the slender Williams as multiple restraint devices were used: