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McDowell and friends decided to drive to Alabama for the funeral, but McDowell said he would "go out first and try to find out what happened" and then call back to give an update before the others left town.

When McDowell arrived, Mims' widow would not let him view his friend's body and he learned she was demanding a closed casket during the funeral.

McDowell would not have taken such news sitting down, but most likely went to the funeral home to examine the body himself, Gresham believes. "Cleve would have worked to find out what happened to Mims and he would never take 'no' for an answer." By telephone, McDowell reported Mims' body displayed "cuts and broken fingers." Something was very wrong with the suicide story, McDowell told Gresham. "It made no sense."

McDowell sounded shaken and said he would not stay for the funeral; he also suggested that his friends not drive to Alabama, as planned, Gresham said.

But McDowell's friends drove out to the funeral 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 and his minister got together back in Drew, McDowell again asserted there was no evidence of a suicide and that Mims showed definite 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." And then McDowell said something strange, something "out of character."

"He asked me to promise I would conduct his funeral when the time should come -- and he meant it," Gresham 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 -- rigorously decreased time spent working in his law office to build up his church congregation.

"He spent more time picking out the dishes and other special purchases for the church than coming to work," recounted Davis, who with her husband, now deceased, confirmed the Mims story. "Sometime I'd get worried about Cleve's absence from the office and tell Cleve 'we' might get sued," she laughed, explaining that she did a good share of the office work via McDowell's telephone instructions. "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 visited friends and family in Drew only a few weeks before he died. "He looked fine. He was happy then and I remember we all had dinner together," Davis' husband said, adding he could not imagine Mims committing suicide.

Mims' relatives in Drew all refused interviews. One family member said they were afraid to talk, adding ".... but don't give my name." Most of McDowell's friends contacted asked not to be named if they talked about his murder. 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. Molestation 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."

In 1962, when James Meredith was attempting to enter the University of Mississippi, a "rich, white planter" approached him and "tried to hire me to kill Meredith."

Even though the event took place over 40 years ago, the retired guard would not give the planter's name.

"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." * * * * *

CLEVE MCDOWELL BEGAN his public life as the quieter of two black students breaking grounds at the University of Mississippi. James Meredith in 1972 became the school's first black student during a pivotal moment in civil rights leading to violence that left two dead and dozens of soldiers and federal marshals wounded. Then in 1966, Meredith was shot while walking from Memphis to Jackson, Miss., to protest racism. Throughout his lifetime, Meredith was known as an outspoken conservative who could easily upset liberals as well as conservatives.

McDowell never made such a splash on the civil rights scene. He was "the briefcase guy" during undergraduate days at Jackson State University where he quietly assisted freedom riders who were coming into Jackson bus stations. And unlike Meredith, his entrance to the University of Mississippi's law school was quiet and uninterrupted; the Sovereignty Commission spies tried to find evidence to block his application -- combing through grade school and high school files, interviewing teachers and family friends -- but nothing of any use was found, according to their files.

But through the years, as civil rights heroes Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King, and Sen. Robert Kennedy were all slain, McDowell became more outspoken. Evers, his early mentor, had persuaded him to apply to law school; and through his years of state and national NAACP involvement, McDowell met Rev. King who once visited him in Drew. Rev. Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and a host of others also stopped by McDowell's office when coming into the region.

McDowell gave countless interviews to the national press about resolution of civil rights murders:

In 1988 he told of his sense of devastation following the murder of Evers for a twenty-fifth anniversary story published by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and called for a watchdog organization to locate and identify persons responsible for civil rights murders, "just as Nazi war criminals were prosecuted."

"There ought to be some organization to track them down.... Right now some of those people are smiling and grinning in our faces and asking us to vote for them." McDowell did not elaborate, but stacked in the corner of his Drew office was a growing mound of boxes filled with files holding notes and reports. The same was true of his coffee table at home: between the two sites were every piece of paper McDowell had collected that had to do with a murder, lynching or some other civil-rights-based crime, Davis said.

McDowell and two other lawyers (".... perhaps Texans who went to school with Cleve," Kwasi McDowell said) were doing their own investigations, by then -- from the murders of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and forward, gathering every piece of information they could lay their hands on to solve crimes against black people, local, state and national.

In the fall of 1991, McDowell told National Public Radio reporter Vicki Monks there had been "a meticulous effort to reconstruct many of these murders and many of these people are in fact known, but it's just a question of whether you can get to them legally." McDowell was referring specifically to the 1966 murder of an NAACP voting rights organizer whose Hattiesburg store and home were bombed by Klansmen. Appearing with Vernon Damer's son, Dennis, and a former county district attorney, Jim Dukes, McDowell asserted there was "enough new evidence and enough of a change in attitudes that it's now possible to get conviction."

While Duke disagreed, citing passage of time, evidence, deceased witnesses and "the legal constitutional question of speedy trial," McDowell asserted that convictions were not the point. That it was a matter of making the attempt to address old injustices.

Three years before McDowell was murdered, he spoke to The Philadelphia Inquirer's Washington Bureau reporter Donna St. George shortly after prosecutors opened their third trial in the Evers case -- attempting for the third time to prove that Byron De La Beckwith was the midnight sniper who killed Evers. Two earlier trials had been a "sham," McDowell told St. George.

THERE IS NO QUESTION that McDowell and several other "well-known" civil rights veterans were quietly gay. It was a time of forced anonymity since gays were considered immoral if not communistic. Their lives would have been in peril had they practiced homosexuality in the open, a London researcher from Queen's College explained.

Sovereignty Commission files show that agents reported by name any alleged gay behavior of blacks (including a brief mention of McDowell). And yet long-established rumors still circulate throughout Mississippi that Governor Ross Barnett, white and a Citizens Council member, was gay and "slept with at least one well-known black activist." Barnett was governor at the time of Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, and the name usually associated with the late governor is Aaron Henry, a well-known black activist who died in 1996. But no Sovereignty Commission reports regarding Barnett's sexual behavior -- if such records exist -- have seen the light of day. Though Commission records alleging Henry's gay sexual behavior are easily found.

Professor John Howard 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." "Generally speaking, before the 1960s, [gay] Southerners, black and white, participated in similar practices and networks. But they were doing so in two parallel, segregated worlds."

Howard was not surprised that any of McDowell's family or friends would share knowledge of McDowell's secret gay life, and did not question his murder because of their embarrassment.

"A deep-rooted and longstanding homosexual homicide mythology associates gay men with dangerous lifestyles and disgraceful deaths." 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," Howard said.

"....many .... [prefer] silence or subtlety over open confrontation, despite all the whooping and hollering of evangelical ministers." Howard questioned rumors that McDowell was 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."

The professor questioned if 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.]

But McDowell's ghost is fading -- helpful for the state of Mississippi and for many of his old friends and family members who appear embarrassed over aspects of his life. The Mississippi civil rights collection housed at the William Winters Library in Jackson shows no records on file for McDowell (even though he was appointed to several state positions by former governor Winters) and curators said they had never heard of him.

Officials from the James O. Eastland School of Law at the University of Mississippi refused to share any records about his short attendance there. When asked for a copy of a letter praising McDowell (its existence acknowledged by a staff member), the school's dean said the letter did not exist.

Charles McLauren of Indianola, an active civil rights advocate and SNCC member, who knew McDowell well, said he did not want to talk about him and deferred questions to McDowell's family. Conceding that family members would not talk about McDowell either, McLaurin offered, "They think it's better to let a sleeping dog lie," before quickly ending the phone call.

One Drew friend of McDowell's confirmed that she often accompanied the attorney to statewide events, serving as his female companion for appearance sake -- "so people wouldn't know he was gay." She did not want to give her name.

A young man from McDowell's hometown claimed he was "molested" by McDowell "for years" and "wish I'd shot him, myself." But the Drew native who did not want to state his name said that an attempt in later years to "make [McDowell] look like a pedophile" was a "set-up." Cleveland parents of a young child made the accusation, he said, "but no charges were ever filed."

He remembered the day McDowell was murdered. FBI personnel were in Drew "by noon" after McDowell's body was discovered. "They had been watching him," he said, but gave no details.

Mississippi attorney Constance Slaughter, who'd known McDowell professionally and personally over the years, told Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger reporter Eric Stringfellow that "[Cleve McDowell] has a place in history. I thought he was a person who felt that he had paid his dues and one who knew that he made quite a few sacrifices to try to achieve equality for everybody. He stood up when it was crucial." Slaughter refused to be interviewed for this story, though.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers, told Stringfellow that she first met McDowell when he studied at Jackson State University and was involved in the NAACP; the long-time friend was described as speechless when told of McDowell's death.

Her strongest memories of McDowell were "when [Cleve] applied to Ole Miss and the difficulties and the harassment and how proud I think the entire community was.

"He was one of the few who would mention Medgar as a role model, and he did it during a time when others wouldn't mention Medgar -- either they had forgotten or chose to forget. Whenever Cleve would speak, he would always mention something about Medgar," she said. THE FAMILIAR SMELL of pan-fried catfish and steamy greens float into the air as an old friend of McDowell's talked about the man he'd known for so many years.

"The streets are quieter now in Drew. Cleve was so bright and he was a true character."

Walter Scurlock stopped preparing lunch for a moment at his restaurant on the center block of Drew's Main Street near McDowell's former law office and chuckled about his old friend as he recounted several stories of this small town's first black city councilman and former Masonic leader.

"He would always make sure that everyone's Masonic dues were paid every year. He would pay them himself just to see that no one lost their membership. He was a conscientious leader."

Scurlock's voice warmed when remembering how the small town lawyer would "fire" his secretary every so often. "Oh, she'd stomp home, carrying her pink purse. I can see it now. Sometimes Cleve called out after her, saying he was really sorry and asking her to come back. Other times he walked to her house -- sort of like he was crawling there -- begging her to come back to the office."

"Old Cleve was a special kind of guy," Scurlock said with a smile as he set out the day's fare of deep-fried catfish, collard greens, fried okra and sweet tea.

"I sure miss him -- We all do."