Truth-seeking; Mississippi cold cases remain unsolved

Several Drew friends decided to drive to Alabama for the funeral of Henry S. Mims, an old school friend of Cleve McDowell’s. But McDowell suggested he would "go out first and try to find out what happened" and then call back to give an update.

Paying a visit to Mims’ widow before the funeral, McDowell asked to see the body, but she refused permission. The widow also said the casket would be closed for the funeral, McDowell later told his own minister.

Those who knew McDowell said he would not have taken such news sitting down, but most likely went to the funeral home to examine the body himself, his friends said. "He would find out what happened to Mims and he would never take ‘no’ for an answer."

From Montgomery, Alabama, McDowell phoned a friend back in Drew to report seeing Mims’ body with "cuts and broken fingers." Something was very wrong with the suicide story, he told a friend. "It made no sense."

McDowell planned his immediate return home and said he would not stay for the funeral. He also suggested that his friends not drive to Alabama, as planned.

"He told me this was not going to be open casket and that he was angry with his friend’s wife. He also said something was very wrong."

McDowell’s friends went to the funeral, anyway and were surprised at "all of the California people" who attended. "So many, that most of his Mississippi friends could not get inside of the church."

Mims was a graduate of the City College of Los Angeles, and apparently had maintained contact with the Californians.

When McDowell returned to Drew, he told his minister there was no evidence of a suicide and that Mims showed signs of torture; Mims had been found by his wife, "hanging from a ladder inside of his garage," but "the whole thing looked like a setup to make his murder look like a suicide."

Then McDowell said something strange, something "out of character," according to his minister. "He asked me to promise I would conduct his funeral when the time should come – and he meant it," the minister said.

"I thought he was kidding at first, and I told him I would be dying before he would since I’m quite a bit older. But he was serious and he looked scared. I asked him if he knew what happened to Mims and if he knew who did it. He said yes, and then looked down and said nothing else."

For the next several years, McDowell – also a Baptist minister – severely decreased his time spent working in his law office, instead working at building his own church congregation.

"He would spend more time picking out the dishes and other special purchases for the church than coming to work," recounted Nettie Davis, who with her husband also confirmed parts of the "Alabama funeral" story.

"Sometime I’d get worried about Cleve’s absence from the office and tell Cleve ‘we’ might get sued,’" she laughed. "He just really changed after the Alabama trip, and it was so important for him that everything be done exactly right for the new church. That mattered to him more than anything else."

Mims had been to Drew visiting friends and family only a few weeks before he died. "He looked fine. He was happy and I remember we all had dinner together," Davis’ husband said.

Mims relatives in Drew all refuse to be interviewed.

NEARLY ALL OF McDowell’s friends requested anonymity when asked to talk about his murder. One friend, a former Parchman prison guard, explained: "Most of us know that Cleve’s death was not just a matter of a young kid shooting him because he thought Cleve was trying to molest him.

"That would be impossible, anyway, because Webb was too old, legally, to be molested.

"But, there had been FBI hanging around here, and I personally think Cleve had to be one of the reasons why…. His family and friends, I think, are still afraid to talk. They know what it is still like in the Delta, and so do I [since] I know how some of the richest people work."

The former Parchman guard, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, stated that in 1962, when James Meredith was attempting to enter the University of Mississippi, he was approached by a "rich, white planter" who "tried to hire" him "to kill Meredith."

"He wanted me to ‘do something’ about Meredith. Of course, I said no. But that is how it has always been around here – rich white people paying off others, including blacks, to murder black people. They think this keeps us in line. And this has not stopped – it still goes on."

For some old friends, it would be better if McDowell's ghost would just disappear.

Mississippi attorney Constance Slaughter, quoted in The Clarion-Ledger at the time of McDowell’s death, refused an interview when contacted, becoming angry enough to hang up the telephone.

Charles McLauren of Indianola, an active civil rights advocate and SNCC member who knew McDowell did not want to talk either, and deferred to McDowell’s family.

Conceding that family members would not talk about McDowell, McLaurin offered, "They think it’s better to let a sleeping dog lie."

It is the "gay" issue that keeps many friends and family from talking about McDowell, McLaurin confirmed before quickly ending the call.

One young man interviewed in Drew, also requesting anonymity, claimed that he had been "molested" by McDowell "for years" and "wish I’d shot him, myself."

But he also said that an attempt to "make [McDowell] look like a pedophile" had been a set-up.

Cleveland parents of a young child made the accusation, he recounted, but no charges were ever filed. The young man, who reported he also knew Webb, asserted that Webb told him he’d "had sex with McDowell first and then shot him afterwards."

This interviewee also stated that FBI personnel were in Drew "by noon" after McDowell’s body was discovered. "They had been watching him," he said, but gave no details.

WHAT OF THE "gay issue"?

Rumors persist that McDowell and several other "well-known" Civil Rights veterans were "closet" gay. It was a time of forced anonymity, since gays were considered immoral if not communistic. Even in 2005 a gay in rural Mississippi would quite possibly have a rough time.

Sovereignty Commission files show that agents jumped at any chance to report (by name) the alleged gay behavior of blacks. Yet long-established rumors still circulate that Governor Ross Barnett, white and a Citizens Council member, was gay and "slept with at least one well-known black activist."

Apparently no Sovereignty Commission reports claiming as such – if they exist – have seen the light of day.

Professor John Howard of Queen’s College in London offered an insight to gay activities in the Mississippi Delta during the Civil Rights Movement in his thesis on "[T]he love that dare not speak its name in the Bible belt."

Howard’s academic paper was turned into a popular press book, Men Like That, as the author worked to "debunk the myth that same-sex desires can’t find expression outside the big city."

Nominally conservative institutions of small town life – home, church, school, and workplace – were the "very sites where queer sexuality flourished," Howard stated.

"Far more" is to be discovered: "It’s still early days for Southern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface," Howard offered through an e-mail interview in 2004.

QUESTION: To what extent did race place a role in selection of sexual partners in homosexual men and women in Mississippi in civil rights and pre-civil rights days?

HOWARD: I'm thinking of Gov. Ross Barnett … since the rumors are still thick. Generally speaking, before the 1960s, LGBT Southerners, black and white, participated in similar practices and networks. But they were doing so in two parallel, segregated worlds. If gender and sexual non-conformity had to be very carefully negotiated, then all the more so if it involved interracial interaction.

That’s not to say that there was no interracial homosexual activity before the civil rights era. Obviously, it was easier for whites to approach blacks. And of course we have more evidence of that.

Some have even suggested that many elite white males in particular assumed access to black male bodies, in the way that, since slavery, they had expected access to black females.

Especially illuminating here is William Armstrong Percy III’s article about his kinsman, William Alexander Percy, with whom I’m sure you’re familiar. The article appears in my edited collection, "Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South" (New York University Press, 1997). That, along with what I’ve written in "Men Like That, "is about as much as we know at this point about queer history in the Delta.

Aaron Henry is probably an exception, not the rule, when it comes to black-white gay activity. There were few with his level of power, few who would have taken the risk of approaching a white male. His life history also demonstrates that at least some young white gay Southerners would have been willing to engage in interracial, intergenerational, homosexual activity.

That is, they would have been able to ignore all the social norms and taboos – those which described blacks as inferior, older people as undesirable. And of course we have evidence to suggest that those willing to combat racial injustice and get involved in the Civil Rights Movement may have been more willing to challenge prevailing sexual attitudes and values as well.

QUESTION: Nobody who really knew Cleve McDowell wants to talk, even now. While he was probably gay, the evidence I've collected shows he was shot in the back and quite possibly by two men. Why won't his friends and family get past this to try and find out who murdered him?

ANSWER: A deep-rooted and longstanding homosexual homicide mythology associates gay men with dangerous lifestyles and disgraceful deaths. Further, up until the late 1960s, homosexuality in the South was largely accommodated with pretence of ignorance, a system of mutual discretion in which much was understood but left unsaid. To this day, many rely on that quiet accommodationism, preferring silence or subtlety over open confrontation, despite all the whooping and hollering of evangelical ministers.

That’s a very recent phenomenon. Protestant ministers in the South didn’t begin railing against homosexuality, at least in large numbers, until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I’d be curious to know more about your evidence on McDowell, especially the notion that he was "perhaps a pedophile." Of course, his enemies would have wanted that sort of idea to circulate. But do you have proof that he had sexual intercourse with children? With pre-pubescent youth? It’s worth mentioning that the legal age of consent here in Great Britain is sixteen for both heterosexual and homosexual sex.

Are you sure McDowell’s partners were incapable of consenting? I mention this because such accusations are a classic form of intimidation by white supremacists.

Bill Higgs [a well-known, white Mississippi civil rights attorney], as you know, was accused of having sex with a sixteen-year-old. This may have been true. But it also may have involved what I would refer to as a set of consensual acts. You need only look back several decades to find a time when the age of consent in Southern states was what would now be seen as shockingly low. [The statutory age of sexual consent was increased from 14 to 16 in Mississippi as of January 1, 2000.]

* * * *

Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, died in 2003 at the age of 81. She had kept frequent contact with several Mississippians, including the late Cleve McDowell, who was born in the same year as her son, Emmett, in 1941. Till was lynched outside of the small town of Drew, where McDowell was born and raised.

McDowell spoke with Till’s mother often, confirmed Nettie Davis. "Cleve kept many records on the Till Case. Boxes and boxes were in his office and in his office safe, not only about Till but about hundreds of civil rights murders.

"Unfortunately, they were burned up [or somehow disappeared] in a fire that happened six months after Cleve was murdered."

The fire took place one week before the first set of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files were first released to the public.

Part I: In Mississippi, still another cold case murder remains unsolved
Part II: Cleve McDowell: a place in history