As the Mississippi Department of Public Safety was preparing to move from its old headquarters in Jackson to the agency’s new headquarters in Rankin County recently, staff found a blue suitcase in a closet containing a trove of 1960s-era Ku Klux Klan materials: full Klan regalia, notebooks with minutes from meetings, a ledger with the names of Klan members and dues payments and propaganda pamphlets. One booklet was titled, “The Ugly Truth About Martin Luther King.”
“We assume that these materials were used for investigations,” Bailey C. Martin, an MDPS spokesperson, told the Mississippi Free Press on Wednesday, a day after Mississippi Today’s Jerry Mitchell first reported on the suitcase.
MDPS announced the findings in a joint press release on Tuesday with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which is now in possession of the items and plans to archive them.
“Mississippi Highway Patrol troopers and agents with the Mississippi Department of Public Safety have worked for decades with our federal law enforcement partners to shed light on the darkness in which groups like the Ku Klux Klan chose to operate,” MDPS Commissioner Sean Tindell said in the statement. “By preserving these artifacts and shedding light on such organizations, we help ensure that future generations are never led astray by such hate.”
The Klan Infiltrated Mississippi Law Enforcement
The Mississippi Highway Patrol’s history when it comes to the Klan is not so simple.
After the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Highway Patrolman Maynard King tipped off the FBI about the location of the bodies based on information he obtained from a third party.
The Klan had long worked to infiltrate law enforcement at every level, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, which was all-white at the time, was no different. Mississippi’s Black freedom movement saw the highway patrol, which Gov. Hugh White directed Thomas Butler Birdsong to create in 1938, as an instrument of white supremacy. Black Mississippi drivers often described beatings on the sides of state roads in the middle of the 20th century.
In 1963, state trooper John Lutellas Basinger arrested several Black activists, including Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer, in Winona, Mississippi, and subjected the groups to torture over a matter of days alongside local policy. Hamer would later describe physical and sexual violence, calling it “the most horrifying experience I’ve ever had in my life.”
After the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, which involved members of the Klan and law enforcement, the Mississippi Highway Patrol began investigating Klan connections with its own members. Gov. Paul B. Johnson ultimately fired several troopers who were members of the Klan.
Just months before the Mississippi Burning murders, though, in March 1964, Johnson had asked the Legislature to triple the size of the all-white Mississippi Highway Patrol, despite the protests of Black freedom activists.
In 1967, a jury convicted seven klansmen for the murders, including White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan co-founder Sam Bowers, and another jury convicted him for the murder of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer. In 2005, a Mississippi jury would convict Edgar Ray Killen, another klansmen, of manslaughter in relation to the 1964 killings.
The Mississippi Highway Patrol would not desegregate until after the May 1970 Jackson State shootings, in which 43 state troopers opened fire into a dormitory on the historically Black campus, killing students Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green. The highway patrol hired its first three Black troopers in 1972, under a federal court order following a lawsuit filed by civil rights lawyer Constance Slaughter Harvey.
MDAH to Preserve Records
The Klan materials recovered in the blue suitcase include a White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of the Sovereign Realm of Mississippi charter KKK dated May 21, 98 A.K, which stands for the Latin “Anno Kuklos,” or “Year of the Klan.” The Klan’s dating system began with the year of the KKK’s founding in 1865, meaning the charter likely dates to May 21, 1963, exactly one year and one month before the Mississippi Burning murders.
“The recipient and holders of this Kharter are hereby charged with the Sacred Responsibility for preserving Christian Civilization, and with the task of effectively and intelligently destroying any and all agents or agencies of Satan, whensoever they may detect any such demons in juman flesh at their evil and treasonous Work,” the 1963 document reads.
Other items that Mississippi Department of Public Safety staff found in the suitcase include file folders containing news clippings about the Mississippi Highway Patrol, MDPS, then-Commissioner T.B. Birdsong and documents about the civil rights Freedom Riders, Tuesday’s press release says.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History says that work to process the items could take months, involving housing, describing, scanning and indexing the material for use by patrons.
“MDAH is grateful to Commissioner Tindell for recognizing the significance of this material and transferring it to the archives,” Barry White, MDAH’s incoming director, said in the press release on Tuesday. “These records will give researchers broader access to documentation that deepens our understanding of Ku Klux Klan activities in Mississippi during the 1960s. Receiving a set of materials that includes both administrative records and propaganda from a local chapter of a national organization known for its secrecy is particularly significant.”
See more photos of the 1960s-era Klan materials that MDPS staff unearthed at our photo gallery here.