JACKSON - Well-intended as they may be, such gestures as declaring a "Clyde Kennard Day" don't begin to blot out the deep stain on Mississippi's name left when the state literally crucified the black Korean War veteran from Hattiesburg four decades ago.
What makes the tragic life of Clyde Kennard an especially dark chapter in Mississippi history is that in his mere pursuit of a degree at then Mississippi Southern College (now USM), he became an innocent victim of perfidy by officials acting in the name of the state.
Then 30 years old and a chicken farmer, in 1959 Kennard had been framed for allegedly planning theft of chicken feed worth $25 and given a seven-year prison sentence, ordinarily a maximum 90-day maximum penalty.
We know now, thanks to the reporting of The Clarion-Ledger's Jerry Mitchell, that a feed store worker whose testimony was used to convict Kennard has admitted he lied about Kennard having any role in the chicken feed theft.
After serving three years at Parchman Penitentiary, Kennard was diagnosed by doctors at University Medical Center as suffering from terminal stomach cancer. Despite pleas from the physicians, prison authorities refused to release him until just prior to his death in 1963.
Obviously, Kennard wouldn't have been targeted in the chicken feed case if he had not sought earlier to enroll at Southern Mississippi.
As Mitchell's reporting indicates, and as some of us who followed the case back then suspected, Kennard's conviction in the chicken feed case was set up by law officers who knew the illiterate 19-year-old feed store worker was lying but coached him to involve Kennard.
A Forrest County native, Kennard had joined the Army in 1945 and served with distinction as a paratrooper until he left the service in 1952. He then enrolled at the University of Chicago and was in his senior year, when he was summoned by family to move back to Hattiesburg and run the chicken farm after his stepfather's death.
Determined to complete his college education, Kennard in September 1959 met the with Mississippi Southern president, Dr. W.D. McCain, to discuss his enrollment. His interest in attending the college had already drawn the interest of Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission, and commission agent Zach VanLandingham had been assigned the case.
As the state Sovereignty Commission files later showed, the agent had learned from his contacts among black church leaders that Kennard was a "quiet, intelligent" man who was conscientious about bettering members of his race.
Immediately after Kennard left the interview with McCain, he was arrested by campus officers for having several bottles of moonshine whiskey in his car while it was parked on the campus. Later-released Sovereignty Commission files confirmed what I and a few other journalists suspected at the time: The liquor had been planted in Kennard's automobile by the campus authorities.
My belief back then (and still is) was that W.D. McCain instigated the plot to frame Kennard and have him arrested before leaving the college campus.
VanLandingham wrote in a Sovereignty Commission report that "no one would believe that the arrest was not connected in some way to Kennard's attempt to register (at Mississippi Southern)." McCain, who claimed to a reporter he regarded Kennard's attempted enrollment a "silly martyrdom," made speeches in the North for the Sovereignty Commission.
McCain and I had collided over another incident wholly unrelated to the Kennard case but having to do with McCain's professional integrity.
I had found in 1968 that McCain, who considered himself a distinguished Mississippi historian, in an article for the Journal of Mississippi History had plagiarized large portions of a graduate thesis written previously by a woman student at Emory University in Georgia .
After I wrote about McCain's lifting verbatim whole passages written by the Emory graduate student without giving her credit, an investigation was launched by the American Historical Association and the American Association of University Women.
The AHA and AAUW jointly reprimanded McCain for violating ethical standards of "approved scholarly usage" of another's literary property. A letter written by the AHA to the Journal of Mississippi History, then edited by one of McCain's Southern Mississippi faculty members, was never published.
I recall hearing McCain in 1963 roundly criticize President D.W. Colvard of Mississippi State University when he allowed the school's basketball team to break the state's color barrier and compete against black players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament.
Regrettably, at least one building at the present University of Southern Mississippi bears the name of W.D. McCain. If the state College Board wants to do something in memory of Clyde Kennard, they could start by ripping the name of McCain off any public building.
Kennard had trustingly believed that McCain had nothing to do with the hurtful things done to him. Even shortly before he died in a Chicago hospital, Kennard said he hoped to live and help "coordinate" the state's race relations.
