A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard

By Devery S. Anderson and James Meredith

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard (1927–1963), a Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attempted repeatedly to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College—now the University of Southern Mississippi—in the late 1950s.

In A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard, Devery S. Anderson tells the story of a man who paid the ultimate price for trying to attend a white college during Jim Crow. Rather than facing conventional vigilantes, he stood opposed to the governor, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and other high-ranking entities willing to stop at nothing to deny his dreams. In this comprehensive and extensively researched biography, Anderson examines the relentless subterfuge against Kennard, including the cruelly successful attempts to frame him—once for a misdemeanor and then for a felony. This second conviction resulted in a sentence of seven years hard labor at Mississippi State Penitentiary, forever disqualifying him from attending a state-sponsored school. While imprisoned, he developed cancer, was denied care, then sadly died six months after the governor commuted his sentence. In this prolonged lynching, Clyde Kennard was robbed of his ambitions and ultimately his life, but his final days and legacy reject the notion that he was powerless.

Anderson highlights the resolve of friends and fellow activists to posthumously restore his name. Those who fought against him, and later for him, link a story of betrayal and redemption, chronicling the worst and best in southern race relations. The redemption was not only a symbolic one for Kennard but proved healing for the entire state. He was gone, but countless others still benefit from Kennard’s legacy and the biracial, bipartisan effort he inspired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496844446

Devery S. Anderson

Devery S. Anderson earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah and a master’s in publishing from George Washington University. He is editor or coeditor of four books related to Mormons and the West, two of which won the Steven F. Christensen Award for Best Documentary from the Mormon History Association in 2006. His book  Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement was the basis for the ABC miniseries Women of the Movement.

Book preview

A SLOW, CALCULATED LYNCHING

A SLOW, CALCULATED LYNCHING

The Story of CLYDE KENNARD

Devery S. Anderson

Foreword by James Meredith

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this book was supported in part by the Jane Hiatt Fund for Books in the Arts and Humanities, in honor of Dr. Wood Hiatt.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951008

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-4404-0

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-4444-6

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4441-5

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-4443-9

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4442-2

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Sophia Paula Cooney and Mia Juliana Cooney, who bring nothing but joy

CONTENTS

Foreword by James Meredith

Prologue: No Better Teacher than Courage

1. A Great Warrior in Battle

2. History Is in the Making

3. To Spy on the Enemy

4. To Follow a Reasonable Course

5. If the Segregationists Have Their Way

6. You Swore to Tell the Truth

7. Every Semblance of Innocence

8. How Can You Continue to Fight?

9. A System So Corrupt

10. Martyrdom

11. Dreams That Live after Death

12. Gestures of Conscience

13. Until Justice Is Restored

Epilogue: So Rightfully Deserved

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

—James Meredith

Like Clyde Kennard’s family, mine owned land and felt the satisfaction that comes from achieving that part of the American Dream. Like Clyde Kennard, I served my country in the military and lived for a time overseas, where I served at Tachikawa Air Force Base near Tokyo, Japan. Another similarity between Clyde Kennard and myself was the fact that we valued education. I took classes while in the military, and so did he. My years as a soldier taught me that when I was overseas, I was seen as a different man from what I was regarded in my own country. Around 1956 or 1957 I was stationed at the Wendover Air Force Base in Utah, just east of the Nevada border. It was here where the atomic bomb was first tested in the 1940s. During my time in Utah, I visited the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, and they told me in so many words to get your black ass out of here. That is something I will never forget. I was shocked, but it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I probably never would have gone to Ole Miss without that experience. That moment of racial discrimination played a major role in my decision.

Indeed, the North had its racial problems, but while still in the military, I became aware of just how tense the race issue was in the South. I knew that it had reached a boiling point at around the same time I had my experience in Salt Lake City. When I was discharged in 1960, I returned to my home state, where I saw in ways that had never registered with me before just how freedom had eluded Black citizens in the past and continued to do so.

That being the case, I came back to Mississippi determined to break down the system of white supremacy. Like Clyde Kennard, I valued an education, as did all my brothers and sisters. Some of them attended college, some did not, but all of us graduated from high school. After my discharge, I enrolled first at what is now Jackson State University, a historically Black school. But I knew this was only the beginning. I knew that I had to do more.

During my first quarter at Jackson State, I began to develop ideas on what it was I needed to do. I did not like some of the strategies of the civil rights movement, but I knew that I had to break down segregation and fight for racial equality in the South my own way. And my way was to insist on my right to an education at the school of my choice. I did not really care where I did it. I did not feel destined to attend the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, as it is called. But that school, located in the city of Oxford, turned out to be the most probable place, in my mind, to register.

I sent a letter requesting an application and copy of the university catalog the day after President John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961. Kennedy’s stand on civil rights during his inaugural address gave me hope that any obstacle I faced in challenging white supremacy in Mississippi would ultimately be thwarted by federal intervention. At least this would be the federal government’s chance to put its money where its mouth was.

I knew it would not be easy, and there was precedent for that realization. One month after my August 1960 discharge from the air force, Clyde Kennard was arrested as an accessory to a criminal offense. Two months later, he was convicted of that crime. Few doubted the fact that he had been railroaded and that the real reason this happened to him was that he tried—more than once—to enroll at the college of his choice, one near his home, one that had always been off limits to Black students.

Clyde Kennard’s attempt to integrate a white school came after the US Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. He had the law on his side. When I sought enrollment at Ole Miss, the law was on my side also. But that did not matter in Mississippi. From the moment of the Supreme Court ruling, Mississippi decided to fight back. Kennard lost his battle to get the state to conform to the law, and he paid a heavy price for those efforts.

I had two men in mind when I decided to enroll at Ole Miss. A Gulfport minister named Clennon King had tried to get into that same institution several years before me. I was angered by how school and state officials treated him and what they did to get rid of him. They denied his entrance and even committed him briefly to a mental institution. Later came Clyde Kennard, who tried to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi [USM]), in Hattiesburg.

His story was different than mine in both the tactics Kennard used and the outcome that put him in the state penitentiary. We were both denied outright to attend our respective universities and denied more than once. In Kennard’s case, it was three times. Medgar Evers, who intervened on Kennard’s behalf, also advised me in my efforts, and I filed a lawsuit in May 1961 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The state lost but appealed. Eventually the US Supreme Court ruled on my behalf, but that did not make things any easier. Governor Ross Barnett remained as defiant as ever that segregation would be maintained in Mississippi. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy intervened; President Kennedy intervened. Once it was determined that I would be allowed to register, a riot broke out on campus. Two people were killed. It took thousands of National Guard troops, nationalized by the Kennedy administration, to quell the violence and allow me my rightful place on campus. Known as the Battle of Oxford, it was a defining moment in racial segregation in the South.

Yes, Clyde Kennard’s story is different than mine, but only in its outcome, not in its roots. It is an important part of Mississippi’s fight to maintain white supremacy, and the state was willing to do whatever was necessary to maintain it. In this book, Devery S. Anderson has dug deeply into that story to tell it in full for the first time. As his notes and bibliography reveal, he did his homework. He details the life of a man whom all Americans should know, and he tells a story that should anger anyone who cares about justice. Anderson interviewed well over sixty individuals and researched in several archives. He scoured numerous newspapers. He located hard-to-find documents. His knack for researching and leaving no stone unturned in the process is impressive. His passion for his subject is evident.

Clyde Kennard is known to scholars of the civil rights movement, but his name is not familiar to most Americans. It needs to be. He paved the way for many, and some, like me, learned from his mistakes as well as his perseverance. My hope is that this book goes a long way in finally giving Clyde Kennard his due.

Civil rights figures and others who gathered for the unveiling of Robert Shetterly’s portrait of Clyde Kennard at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, on November 14, 2013. Valencia Wall, Julian Bond, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Khyla D. Craine, Dorie Ladner, Robert Shetterly, Dick Gregory, Joyce Ladner, Aaron Jenkins, Delores McNair, and Eddie Holloway. Photo by permission of Rick Reinhard.

Prologue

NO BETTER TEACHER THAN COURAGE

How he refused bitterness, how deep his courage ran, one cannot but marvel at him. Knowing a story like that of Clyde Kennard allows each of us to be a better person. There is no better teacher than courage. Clyde Kennard is a great teacher.

—Robert Shetterly, Clarion-Ledger, November 16, 2013

Around eighty people gathered in the Langston Room, a long, narrow meeting place at Busboys and Poets on Fourteenth Street in Washington, DC. The restaurant, bookstore, and events venue, established in 2005, had already become an institution, and today nine locations thrive throughout the metropolitan area. Founded by artist and activist Andy Shallal, an Iraqi immigrant, Busboys and Poets fast became a progressive hangout, a place where writers write, and liberals harness their idealism and devise ways to make the world better. The name Busboys and Poets refers to Langston Hughes (1902–1967), who in the 1920s worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel before gaining fame as one of America’s greatest poets. Americans opposed to the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq found their anger escalating throughout the duration of the war, and naturally, some found solace at a gathering place such as Busboys and Poets, which quickly became the glue that kept them connected.¹

Those who came to the flagship location on November 14, 2013, were there to meet and honor artist Robert Shetterly, but they had also come to pay tribute to Clyde Kennard, the man whose portrait Shetterly was there to unveil, a man dead for over fifty years. Kennard, a Black Mississippian once targeted by the state’s most powerful segregationists, suffered for years at their hands simply because he had sought to acquire his share of the American Dream.

From the beginning, Shetterly, like most progressives, stood firmly against the Iraq War. That opposition became the catalyst for his painting people like Kennard in the first place. The world changed on September 11, 2001. For some, that change spurred on action. For Shetterly, 9/11, but more particularly, its aftermath, inspired the next step in what had been a lifetime of finding his voice and using art to express it.

Shetterly has lived his adult years in Maine but was born in Cincinnati to an upper-middle-class white family and raised there. His brother, a student at Harvard, declared to his mother and father in 1964 that he was heading down to Mississippi to help Blacks register to vote as part of the ambitious project known as Freedom Summer. Stunned, his parents did their best to persuade him otherwise, but to no avail. Before he left for the South, he encouraged Robert to read the writings of such notable figures as James Baldwin. Through Baldwin and other thinkers, Shetterly changed his worldview on matters of race and history. When he later went on to college, he became involved not only in civil rights but also in antiwar activism.

Art had always been an integral part of who he was, and poetry was his earliest means of expression. This changed after he and his brothers took a trip to the Soviet Union. They moved about by rail, which took them next to Western Europe. Throughout their travels, they visited the Hermitage in St. Petersburgh, the Louvre in Paris, and other museums throughout Germany and Italy. As he beheld the world’s greatest art for the first time, he felt inspired to articulate his voice through this medium. Its visceral connection felt more powerful than words.

When he returned to Maine, he began drawing and even enrolled in a course to hone his skills. He developed his talents primarily on his own, however, and within a few years, he had become skilled enough to secure work as an illustrator. With Leonardo, Degas, and Picasso as his inspiration, he kept learning and eventually took up painting. By then he was living off the grid and feeding his family from crops raised on his own land. He began drawing for Farmstead magazine, found work illustrating books, and provided drawings for the editorial page of the counterculture paper, Maine Times. Over time, his work became more surreal, influenced by Francisco de Goya’s etchings and the dark, funny, lyrical, and poetical messages they sent. Shetterly’s art became his livelihood, and he wanted people to use their imaginations and experience to find meaning from the images he created.

After 9/11, Shetterly became distraught with all the government fearmongering about Iraq. First, it was Afghanistan, but the push for a conflict against Iraq came almost immediately. For Shetterly, who believed the Bush administration had lied to Americans to garner support, this was too much. I just went berserk. Almost literally. I was so angry. We’ve all seen this way too many times since Viet Nam, except not on this scale. He had to do something and to find a voice with what I do best, which is paint—to somehow do something positive so that I wasn’t ranting all the time. I was driving myself and my wife crazy. By using that energy to create something positive, the thought came almost immediately: Why don’t I start surrounding myself with people that make me feel good about this country rather than rant about the ones who enrage me?²

In early 2002, as the political debate became more intense, he thought about who he might paint first. While almost literally banging my head in my wall, he looked up at a quote from Walt Whitman he had taped up in his studio.³ Whitman, a nineteenth-century journalist and poet whose views on sexuality and slavery made him a controversial figure in his day, was a true democrat (small d) who believed fully in equality of all species. He unabashedly criticized greed and corruption as exemplified in America’s Gilded Age in his 1871 pamphlet, Democratic Vistas. He published his greatest work, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, poems that spoke to humankind’s endless capabilities and of divinity as something to be discovered and tapped through nature. He expanded and revised the book eight times before his death in 1892.⁴

The quote that commanded Shetterly’s attention was from the book’s first edition preface: This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown.⁵

This was Shetterly’s cue, or more accurately, his calling, to start with Whitman. I’d never painted a portrait in my life, so I had to figure out how to do that. He had always tried to speak through his art but now his goal was to use it to become a better citizen. And whatever influence it may or may not have, I’m going to feel better.

Through Whitman he reconnected with something essential about the way America was supposed to be. He borrowed books from the library, found some black-and-white photos as inspiration, and went to work, painting on a 30 × 36 wood panel so that he could scratch the quote that inspired him into the surface of the finished piece. He knew he could not stop at Whitman and laid out a plan to paint around fifty such portraits, each requiring extensive research so that he could come to know his subjects and feel some intimacy toward them. It was all therapeutic. He called this series Americans Who Tell the Truth.

He focused at first on nineteenth-century figures, but in time he became fixated on the living also. The intensity and dedication driving the project forced him to give up his other art and thus, his income, but it was a leap of faith he needed to take. He assumed the project would consume him for a time, the portraits possibly seen by his eyes only, and then he’d move on. If the paintings simply accumulated in his basement, that was all right. He was doing this for himself.

But he never stopped. Before long, the project took on a life of its own. He featured his first fifty paintings in a book named after his series, published in 2005. As he continued, his method never changed, and the rewards are always the same. He dives deep into the research of his various subjects and finds himself fascinated by their courage, determination, and the place they carved for themselves within society. I was able to start reinterpreting American history through the eyes of the people I was painting and the importance and the necessity of the work they were doing. It was totally changing my life. It became a mission.

Each portrait takes about a week to create and it consumes him until finished. The process for me is almost like falling in love. It’s very intimate. I paint with my fingers—it’s almost like sculpting—I’ve got my hands all over the face of every person I’m painting. Such is the gift an artist gives to the world, one often lost on the observer, at least consciously, but from which they benefit immensely. I’m communing very deeply with my subject while I’m painting the portrait, feeling an intense love for the person I’m painting. The process of doing this and feeling that way about each one is my antidote to despair and cynicism and anger about this country.

He showed the first ten paintings in the months before the war began. Because of how polarizing the debate had become, I was expecting to have to duck and run, because it was clear what I was doing and why. To his surprise, however, people began sending him money; others called inviting him to speak about the people in the portraits—like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones—which enabled him to earn an income from this project. Some emailed suggestions for people to paint, for which he was grateful. I’d often find there was an incredible story there that I knew nothing about.⁶

One such story came through a friend, Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change, an organization in Washington, DC, dedicated to providing a greater teaching and learning experience for students and their parents and giving them the tools necessary to transform the world. Menkart had helped place Clyde Kennard’s story into the curriculum of several schools. During a phone conversation with Shetterly, she told him about Kennard and suggested he consider him for his series. I’d never heard of Clyde Kennard. But once she told me about who he was and what had happened to him, and the spirit with which he’d done what he had, he thought Wow, what a great story.⁷

As always, he began searching for images. As he researched Kennard’s life, he became fascinated. Much of Shetterly’s work had centered on civil rights figures, so painting Kennard was not a departure from those he was regularly drawn to. It is one of my goals to find stories like Clyde’s and resurrect them—not simply to honor them, but to inspire others, to fill in lost history, he explained. Many people know about some of the people who integrated schools in the South in the 1950s and ’60s. What they don’t know is who tried first and failed, was blocked, was martyred.⁸

Once this series became known, Shetterly unveiled his paintings publicly more and more, often to help various causes, to bring in one of his subjects to speak, or to otherwise honor them. Menkart wanted the Kennard unveiling done in Washington and rented the room at Busboys and Poets. She also reached out to people who she knew needed to be there, such as NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond, civil rights activists Dorie Ladner and Joyce Ladner, who had known Kennard in their youth, and comedian Dick Gregory, who had befriended Kennard and helped him financially shortly after Gregory rose to fame in the early 1960s. Other guests included former Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Hattiesburg native Eddie Holloway, then dean of students at USM, and NAACP attorney Khyla D. Craine. The popular youth slam team Split This Rock read excerpts from Kennard’s writings.⁹

Aaron Jenkins, of Operation Understanding DC, an organization dedicated to building leadership within Black and Jewish communities and eliminating racism and anti-Semitism from society, moderated the occasion. Menkart described the talks and presentations as touching and moving in how they honored Kennard. The event lasted about two hours. Most memorable for Shetterly was a reading by Holloway of The Bridge Builder, a poem by Will Allen Dromgoole about an old man who built a bridge over a deep ravine for the next generation to cross. Holloway used that poem to describe how Kennard used his life to build a bridge for that same purpose.¹⁰

In the past two decades, Shetterly has painted more than 250 portraits in this series, growing it far beyond his original intent. When they are not traveling or rented out for display, they sit on racks in his basement. Shetterly is quick to point out that those he paints, like everyone, are flawed people, which adds to the beauty and meaning behind his work. Although these people made a difference in society, they aren’t saints. When he speaks about some of the unknown heroes in the series, people often ask, Why don’t we know these stories? Why aren’t we taught these people? They would empower us.¹¹

Toward the end of the evening at Busboys and Poets, as the guests sat at booths, small tables, or on chairs tightly packed or scattered throughout the room, they focused their attention on Aaron Jenkins, who stood alone on the stage near Shetterly’s portrait, which was covered in a borrowed tablecloth. With all eyes on Jenkins and everyone eagerly awaiting, he carefully removed the cloth to reveal Clyde Kennard, wearing a fedora hat, suit, tie, and above all, his ever-present smile. The audience erupted in applause. There were many emotions behind the ovation. But one that Shetterly easily observed was that they knew what this man had suffered to claim his own dignity. For Shetterly, one of the many rewards of being an artist is restoring to his subjects a level of dignity that had been stripped away. And in an instant, during this unveiling, he did that for Kennard. People lingered, mingled, took photos of the portrait and of themselves with it. It was a satisfying night for Shetterly, Kennard’s friends, and those who wished they had known him.

The painting stood out from most in the series. I usually think that painting a smile on somebody is often almost like a mask. It doesn’t help you see into the person’s integrity. But he had a reason for choosing the photo he did as his inspiration. When it was taken in February 1963, Kennard was dying. Thus, With Clyde Kennard that smile is such an act of courage and character. That tells you a lot about who he is. Some people’s smiles don’t.

Shetterly painted a dying individual only once before, someone he had met in life. Humorist and political commentator Molly Ivins was near death when she visited Shetterly at his studio. As she sat smoking and drinking a beer, she gazed at the portraits stored there and complained that everyone looked so serious. If you’re going to paint me, paint me laughing, she insisted. The only way to get these sons of bitches is to make people laugh at them. Her smile and her humor were essential to who she was. For Kennard, it was just the smile. In a way, Shetterly says, that smile was the thing that got Clyde through the world, even as he suffered.¹²

As with all his paintings for Americans Who Tell the Truth, Shetterly scratched a quote at the bottom. It was somewhat cryptic but invited the observer to learn more: What happened to me isn’t as bad as what happened to the guard [the prison guard who abused me], because this system has turned him into a beast, and it will turn his children into beasts.¹³

Shetterly was drawn to these words because although Kennard had endured much at the hands of others, he managed to see a bigger picture, a tragedy within society far worse than his own personal suffering. To be sure, the racist does more damage to himself than those he hates. But Kennard also knew that racism and hatred could ultimately destroy humanity by one generation perpetuating and nurturing that evil on the next. That just moved me enormously, Shetterly said, looking back on the day he first read Kennard’s words. He had that emotional and moral distance to see that.¹⁴

Kennard’s courage is ultimately what stood out to Shetterly. As Kennard battled for his rights, he paid a price by losing even those he had long enjoyed. He was an American who told the truth and in doing so, he often spoke truth to power, despite being powerless himself. The portrait illuminates Kennard’s story, and so too should his story, when fully told, allow a fresh interpretation of the painting. Such is the power of art when the subject, obscure or not, has that unique ability to move, enlighten, and thus, illuminate, us. In that sense, Clyde Kennard has emerged as anything but powerless.

A SLOW, CALCULATED LYNCHING

1.

A GREAT WARRIOR IN BATTLE

Clyde was like a great warrior in battle. He would not want us to stop now. Just as soldiers step over the dead bodies of their comrades to move forward, we must keep going ahead to complete the work he was trying to do.

—Reverend A. J. Benn, July 10, 1963

Death at the hands of southern lynch mobs was always barbaric, always tragic. It could be over within minutes, but the torture could last for hours when the most sadistic of vigilantes had their way. Yet compared to the death of Clyde Kennard, even the most heinous lynching was carried out quickly. It took several years for Mississippi’s caste system to end Kennard’s life, and those determined to rid him from their midst wore the cloaks of officialdom. The state of Mississippi killed his dreams first, but Kennard persevered. They finally killed his body, albeit slowly, but even after sickness had eaten him away and death was imminent, he remained determined to use his final days to help lift African Americans still living in a state that had systematically oppressed them, a state Kennard had never ceased to love.

Sitting in a bathrobe and pajamas in early 1963 at his sister’s Chicago home, surrounded by friends, the thirty-five-year-old did not really care how much time he had left to do it all. None of us are going to be here 100 years from now and what’s the difference if you go a few days sooner. I just want to get as much done as possible.

Indeed, Kennard remained ever the optimist, hoping that by some miracle he might live to attend law school. You know, there are only three Negro lawyers in the state and you can’t get white lawyers to take civil rights cases, he said. Lawyers are what we need. Despite what he saw as the clear attitude of most Mississippi whites, he believed there were still some in the state who empathized with the plight of its Black citizens and who would help usher in the change he hoped he would live to see. Kennard had always professed a love for all of humankind and never said a derogatory word about anyone—Black or white—and would not tolerate anybody doing so in his presence.¹

The miracle he longed for never occurred, and in less than three months, he was dead. State officials took away his freedom and ultimately his life, for doing nothing but what thousands of others had done before him without any consequence. What they all had in common, including Kennard, was a dream to attend Mississippi Southern College. For everyone but Kennard, this was no crime. Their skin was white. His was black.

Clyde Kennard, blessed with a superb intellect, temperament, and a drive to match, was not destined for the ordinary or mundane, nor was he willing to settle for it. The fifth child of Will and Leona (or Leonia) Fairley Kennard, he was born near Hattiesburg, Forrest County, Mississippi, on June 12, 1927. He was delivered by Dr. Charles W. Smith, secretary of the Hattiesburg Branch of the National Negro Business League, the organization founded by the late Black author, educator, and presidential advisor Booker T. Washington. Will and Leona married in 1915 and provided four older siblings for Clyde to learn from and emulate. Sara, the oldest, was born in 1919; Lawrence came next in 1922, followed by Albert one year later. Melvin, two years Clyde’s senior, came along in 1925.² Active in the Baptist Church, Leona saw to it that her children attended Sunday School and studied their lessons thoroughly. She explained that she taught them to be nice, and kind, and polite, especially to lady people, grown people, and older people. And to do to people only what you’d have them do in return. Deeply religious, she prepared Sunday dinner on Saturdays to avoid excess work on the Sabbath Day.³

Hattiesburg, situated in southern Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods district, was founded by William Harris Hardy and named after his wife, Hattie Lott Hardy. Incorporated in 1884, it was originally part of Perry County until the creation of Forrest County in 1908. The town not only survived but thrived off the timber industry and the four railroads built to export its lumber. The railroads connected Hattiesburg to other major cities, and by 1893, fifty-nine mills outputted one million board feet of lumber daily. Hattiesburg’s population grew quickly as a result. In 1890, 1,172 people occupied the town; by the turn of the century the population had jumped to 4,175. At the time of Sara Kennard’s birth in 1919, the city was home to 13,000 inhabitants. Wage earners had recently increased from 587 to 1,267, and by the start of the new decade, the combined income of those working in manufacturing totaled $86,500 a month.⁴

Residents early on founded a school for African Americans and housed it in a local Baptist church. Hattiesburg also saw Mississippi’s first brick school for Black students, Eureka School, built in 1921. The Kennard family lived six miles north in a rented house on Hattiesburg Road at the Kelly Settlement, eight miles north of Hattiesburg proper, and the children attended Bay Springs Consolidated School, walking the distance to and from class daily. Built in 1925 by the Black community, Bay Springs educated pupils from kindergarten through high school.⁵ The 640-acre settlement was founded around 1802 by an Irishman named John Kelly. He brought sixteen slaves with him, plus a Black woman named Sarah, who bore him around a dozen children. Their descendants are legion, many inheriting land at the settlement that is still passed down to posterity to this day. Shady Grove Baptist Church, established in 1864, became an integral part of the community and remains so. The Kennards lived next door to the George and Ellen Dahmer family and may have sharecropped on land owned by them or a later generation of Kellys.⁶

Jim Crow laws had long been in force, and thus the Black and white populations in Forrest County, like everywhere in Mississippi and throughout the South, were strictly segregated, with discrimination against Blacks in most societal situations carried out by statute. This began following the end of slavery, the Civil War, and the Republican-led Reconstruction of 1865–77. There was little controversy after Congress passed, and the states ratified, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865, abolishing slavery. But because the former Confederacy began passing Black Codes limiting the freedoms of African Americans—which essentially put them back under white control—Congress became outraged. This brought on the era of Radical Reconstruction, and lawmakers developed a new plan to deal with the South. With slavery gone, they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, followed by the Fourteenth Amendment a year later, both of which granted citizenship to all people born in the United States. Ratification of the latter became a prerequisite before the states of the former Confederacy could be readmitted into the Union.⁷

These changes to the Constitution were significant, but the interpretation of other parts of that document in the South meant that the rights of Black citizens continued to be undermined or eliminated altogether. The laws leading to fullblown Jim Crow began in New Orleans when, in 1890, the Louisiana state legislature approved segregation in its railcars. Although companies were to provide equal but separate cars for Black and white passengers, New Orleans’s African American and Creole citizens protested. Fearing white retaliation, their noise was at first minimal. But in 1892, a committee of whites and Blacks chose Homer Plessy, an African American shoemaker of mixed ancestry, to challenge the law as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizens equal protection of the laws. Plessy was so light he could pass as white. As planned, he refused to give up his seat on a white-only train and was quickly arrested. Early defeats eventually led the case to the highest court in the land.⁸

The US Supreme Court heard Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 but upheld the Louisiana statute with a 7-1 vote (one justice did not participate). The majority reasoned that racial separation in public accommodations alone was not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the justices reasoned, the provision of separate but equal facilities was the key to maintaining the constitutionality of segregation.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter, said in countering the ruling that in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.⁹ The ruling of the majority validated all previous laws and customs regarding segregation and created a precedent for the future. Legalized discrimination then spread like wildfire throughout the South, and what occurred over the following half century took racial separation to an extreme.

The new laws brought greater power. Segregation in public transportation, which prompted the Plessy case, became more rigid after train conductors obtained police power to force compliance more efficiently. As buses later emerged into the system, they too were segregated. Whites sat in the front seats, and Blacks sat in the back. Beginning in 1922, taxis in Mississippi forbade white and Black passengers from sharing rides unless the Black passenger was a domestic servant to the white one. Segregation eventually made its way to every social situation, either legally or through well-established custom. Blacks were relegated to a segregated section in theaters or restaurants or excluded altogether; they were also forced to use separate restrooms and drinking fountains. When it came to libraries and amusement parks, they had to come up with their own or go without.¹⁰

Black life in Hattiesburg centered around Mobile Street, north of downtown, which witnessed the rise of many Black-owned businesses, from stores and restaurants to banks and hotels; churches and schools also dotted the neighborhood. All of this allowed the Kennards and other Black citizens to spend at least some of their time within a self-sustained community. On weekends, those living at the Kelly Settlement or nearby Palmer’s Crossing also gravitated to Mobile Street, its businesses and residences tightly packed together. Social activities at the churches and clubs built a solid and much needed cohesion among local Blacks and allowed an escape from the stress and humiliation of life under Jim Crow.¹¹

Fear of interracial sex was the basis for segregation, and the consequences were often deadly if lines were crossed or even rumored to be. Throughout the years of Jim Crow, accusations of interracial intimacy unleashed emotions in white men that only violence could satisfy. As the myth of the over-sexed Black male developed, vigilantes were quick to dish out punishments that had the tacit approval, if not outright sanction, of the law, government officials, the press, and even the clergy. The nightmare that emerged was a long, dark era of lynching, during which thousands of African Americans died at the hands of angry white mobs. The Tuskegee Institute, which kept statistics of all known lynchings between 1882 and 1954, documented 4,730 in the South during that time; of those, 524 took place in Mississippi alone between 1889 and 1951.¹²

Hattiesburg witnessed horrific violence against some of its Black citizens. The first known lynching there occurred on June 2, 1890, when George Stevenson, a suspect in the rape of a white woman, was mobbed and killed. Five years later, Tom Johnson was dragged from jail, taken to the scene of a crime he admitted to committing, and shot dead. Exactly four years after that, Henry Novels was shot and killed while tied to a tree after a mob got word that Novels had allegedly attacked a white woman. Extralegal remedies prevailed even when interracial sex was not an issue. In 1903, Amos Jones, accused of shooting and killing a jailer, was hanged from a telegraph line and shot. Having already been dragged through the streets of town before his body was raised up the tree, he was dead before the bullets struck. An order from the governor to the local militia to protect Jones from the mob came too late.¹³ Due process in a court of law, despite its guarantee to all citizens accused of crime, commonly eluded Black men.

A few other lynchings followed within just a few years, but perhaps the most shocking of all occurred two decades later. Clyde Kennard was only a year old at the time, but others in his family would have remembered it clearly. On December 26, 1928, at around midnight, a mob of twelve white men posing as the law went to the home of local mechanic Emanuel McCallum, knocked on the door, and once inside, found McCallum sleeping in a back bedroom. They took McCallum, a married father of two young children, placed him in a car, and sped off. The men stopped at a gravel pit where they put a noose around his neck, hoisted up his near-naked body, and there watched him slowly strangle to death. McCallum’s alleged sin that precipitated his lynching occurred during an altercation with a white man named William Easterling six weeks earlier. After McCallum helped pull Easterling’s car out of a ditch, Easterling refused to pay him and then accused McCallum of striking him. McCallum was arrested, jailed, and then let out on $500 bond after Easterling failed to press charges. Apparently, the only means of justice Easterling wanted was to be had vigilante style.

The McCallum lynching outraged the community, and white leaders, ministers, and others openly condemned the act. The Hattiesburg American even made a plea that McCallum’s home be dusted for fingerprints to identify the lynchers, but the house happened to burn down the next day. The Chamber of Commerce met and offered to finance an investigation, and a special committee put up $20,000 in reward money to apprehend those responsible for McCallum’s death. Locals also began a collection to pay for McCallum’s funeral. At the demands of citizens, Judge Robert Hall initiated a grand jury to investigate the matter, but after four days, they failed to find what they needed to issue indictments, even though evidence suggested that Easterling had been part of the mob.¹⁴

It was around the time of the McCallum tragedy or shortly thereafter that the Kennard family left Hattiesburg and moved 110 miles northeast to Tom Cain Road in Utica, Hinds County, where Will worked on a cotton farm.¹⁵ The move may have been a forced one, as the Great Depression, which began in 1929, had a profound effect upon Mississippi’s agricultural economy and sent cotton prices spiraling downward by as much as 50 percent. Black residents were so frightened in the aftermath of the McCallum episode that over 150 families from Hattiesburg and surrounding towns left, with a good share migrating to Chicago. More departed in the spring after the weather turned warm, which created a crisis. The Chicago Defender reported that white farmers are becoming alarmed over the exodus and have asked railroad officials not to sell tickets to those who seek to leave. Not all of those who fled went north, and it is possible that if McCallum’s lynching played a role in the Kennard family’s decision to move, perhaps Hinds County was distant enough to ease the family’s fears.¹⁶

This new start in Utica was soon met with a tragic setback when Will died of pellagra on May 2, 1930. The disease, brought on by low levels of niacin, produced diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia in its victims, resulting in death. Will’s condition was made all the worse by the fact that he never saw a doctor for treatment.¹⁷ Eleven months later, on April 1, 1931, Leona gave birth to a daughter she named Dorothy. The father is listed as Willis Kinnard on the birth certificate, but the timing of Will’s death made this an impossibility, and thus the father remains a mystery.¹⁸ The widowed Leona continued to raise her family in Utica for the time being, and over the next several years, all six Kennard children attended school variously in the Adams, Brown, Hart, and Water Valley districts in Hinds