Clyde Kennard (June 12, 1927 – July 4, 1963) was an American Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
[2] After Kennard published a letter in the local paper about integrated education, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state-supported agency, conspired to have him arrested on false charges.
Supporters gained Barbour's cooperation in petitioning the court to review Kennard's case, and in 2006, his conviction was overturned completely.
Files from the Sovereignty Commission, which the state opened for public review in 1998, showed that its officials went to the extreme of considering forcing Kennard into an accident or bombing his car to stop his quest.
After he was jailed, Ward and Daniels claimed before Justice of the Peace T. C. Hobby to have found five half-pints of whiskey, along with other liquor,[9] under the seat of his car.
He soon became the victim of an unofficial local economic boycott (also a tactic of the Sovereignty Commission and White Citizens Councils), which cut off his credit.
Kennard was arrested again on September 25, 1961, with an alleged accomplice for the theft of $25 worth of chicken feed from the Forrest County Cooperative warehouse.
[citation needed]) Kennard was sentenced to seven years in prison, to be served in Parchman Penitentiary, the state's high-security facility.
"[11] Just after the conclusion of the trial, Medgar Evers, president of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was cited by the court for contempt after he issued a statement that Kennard's conviction was "a mockery of judicial justice."
After the story gained national attention in 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement was growing across the Deep South, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett gave Kennard an "indefinite suspended sentence" or parole.
Kennard twice underwent surgery at Billings Hospital on the University of Chicago campus over the next five months, but he died of cancer ten days after the second procedure.
It's true my eyes are dim My hands are growing cold Well take me on then, that I might at last become my soul Kennard was buried three days later in his family's plot at Mary Magdelene Cemetery in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
On December 31, 2005, Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter, published an interview with the informant Johnny Lee Roberts.
[13][12] (Bradford had worked with other high school students to collect information that led to the successful 2002 prosecution of murderers of the three civil rights workers in 1964.)
Against the advice of leading Mississippi politicians, academics, and media, Barbour declined to give the pardon, concerned that it was for a deceased person.
[14] Students from the University of Southern Mississippi had previously joined the campaign to clear Kennard's name and collected more than 1,500 signatures in support of the pardon.
They contacted Charles Pickering, a former Federal judge, and William Winter, a former Mississippi governor, who fashioned precedent-setting legal strategy.
Barrett was a vocal supporter of Edgar Ray Killen, convicted in federal court in June 2005 of manslaughter in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964.