Prof. John Dittmer Discusses Recently Discovered Klan Documents with Mississippi Newspaper

May 30, 2007

May 30, 2007, Greencastle, Ind. - "What's really sad is these Klansmen believed that stuff," John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi and professor emeritus of history at DePauw University, tells the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Dittmer is quoted in a story that examines a cache of recently uncovered Ku Klux Klan documents from the 1960s.

One of the Klan's memos stated, "The communists, either by way of Russia or Cuba, are systematically arming the southern negroes (sic) for the purpose of effecting a Marxist revolution in the South." On May 2, 1964, teenagers Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were abducted and killed, allegedly because the Klan believed they were gun-running for Fidel Castro.

Today, "Klansman James Ford Seale goes on trial in connection with the deaths and has pleaded not guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges. In a 2000 interview with The Clarion-Ledger, Seale denied he was a member of the Klan or that he even knew anybody in the Klan," reports the Clarion-Ledger's Jerry Mitchell "What makes the documents valuable beyond their historic significance is that Bowers ordered them destroyed when the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began to investigate 'so they couldn't be traced because informants were starting to leak us copies,' former FBI agent Jim Ingram remarked after the 1998 trial in which Bowers was convicted for ordering the 1996 killing of Vernon Dahmer Sr. Relatives of a now-deceased Klansman recently found the documents."

Access the complete article at the newspaper's Web site.

John Dittmer received a 2006 Indiana Humanities Award for his work in helping to advance and strengthen American culture. The recent television documentary 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America: Freedom Summer, which aired on the History Channel, included analysis from Professor Dittmer. The New York Times' Adam Nossiter wrote that Dr. Dittmer's Local People is "what many people consider the definitive chronicle of the Mississippi civil rights movement."

Source: Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger

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