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Mississippi Civil Rights Attorney Found Dead

DREW, Miss. (AP) - A civil rights attorney who was the second black to attend the University of Mississippi was found shot to death at his home, and a judge immediately slapped a gag order on investigators.

Cleve McDowell, 56, was found dead in an upstairs bathroom early Thursday after relatives called police to say the door to his apartment was open and his car missing. Police continued to look for McDowell's Cadillac on Friday.

McDowell had been a public defender in Sunflower County for three decades. He was part of a group of black leaders organizing to pressure district attorneys and revive interest in many never-prosecuted cases in which blacks were killed for doing civil rights work.

During the 1980s, McDowell was the executive field director of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Should the murder of this lawyer be re-investigated?

Possibly so ...

FBI offices across the country are searching for unsolved civil rights-era murders in anticipation that a cold case unit will be established within the Justice Department.

Sen. Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican, plans to reintroduce a bill to create and fund the unit, along with Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who introduced the measure last year. The Senate approved it, but it was stripped out of a House appropriations bill.

The bill prompted the search for cold cases, so that the FBI would be ready to go, said Jeff Lanza, an FBI spokesman in Kansas City.

According to Lanza, all 56 of the FBI's field offices have been ordered to explore possible cases and report to FBI headquarters by May 1.

AS FOR MCdOWELL, IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1997, the popular black Mississippi Delta lawyer, described by civil rights icon James Meredith as "bright and articulate," was murdered late at night in his home.

One young man, the attorney’s client, was arrested and convicted for the murder; he remains in prison.

But many questions remain unanswered while law enforcement officials and court officers have retained a gag order on all related police and court records.

The order to keep all records out of the public reach was first placed on the initial investigation to keep a local police chief from damaging the crime scene and spreading inflammatory rumors, says the deceased lawyer’s former office manager.

Cleve McDowell, once the state field director of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP, had represented clients in civil rights cases over three decades.

McDowell was born only two weeks after Emmett Till. And it was only several miles outside of McDowell's home town of Drew where the young Chicago visitor was killed in 1955. Throughout the years, McDowell investigated numerous murders of African Americans; he often spoke with Emmett's mother in later years about her son's death.

Often setting records for the state’s African Americans, he was a member of the state Penitentiary Board from 1971 until 1976 and served as state director for Head Start from 1972 to 1976. He was the first black in Mississippi since reconstruction to be appointed to a statewide position by a governor.

McDowell, well known around the state and sometimes controversial, was a Sunflower County judge from 1978 to 1982; the IRS will not release tax records covering these four years.

He ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1978 and 1987; Rev. Jesse Jackson helped his old friend campaign in the second run. For a short period of time, McDowell was a legislative aide to conservative U. S. Senator Trent Lott, leading some friends and political observers to question his motives, "at the least."

HEARING THE NEWS of McDowell’s murder, Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, told the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger reporter Eric Stringfellow that she was speechless when told of his death.

Evers-Williams first met McDowell when he was a student at Jackson State involved in the NAACP.

"All I can say is I’m shocked and saddened. My strongest memories are 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," Evers-Williams said.

"The streets are quieter now in Drew," mused another long-time friend of McDowell’s. "Cleve was so bright and he was a true character. Every so often, he would ‘fire’ his secretary. 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 would be seen a few minutes later walking to her house – sort of like he was crawling there begging her to come back to work."

Walter Scurlock chuckled while preparing the daily luncheon fare at his restaurant on the center block of Drew’s Main Street and recounted stories of this small town’s first black city councilman and former Masonic leader.

"Yeh, Cleve was a special kind of guy," Scurlock said as he set out the deep-fried catfish, collard greens, fried okra and sweet tea.

"I sure miss Cleve – We all do."

Cleve McDowell had distinguished himself academically early on in life – first as an outstanding Drew High School speech and debate competitor who went on to study at Jackson State University.

In the fall of 1963, as the first black student after James Meredith to be admitted to the University of Mississippi, he became the first ever to study law at the James O. Eastland School of Law.

Shortly after the murder of his friend and mentor, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, McDowell learned that he and James Meredith were next in line for assassination, a fact confirmed years later by a retired Parchman Penitentiary guard who said he was asked to perform this act by a Delta planter.

And so, McDowell bought a gun.

"Most everybody else had one," McDowell told a historian one year before his murder, "but when mine was discovered, I was expelled." Later praised in a letter by the law school dean, McDowell finished his education at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Texas, a "better and safer" place to be, McDowell believed.

The Texas black law school was emphasizing civil rights law while the University of Mississippi lagged far behind, McDowell told oral history interviewer Owen Brooks.

On March 14, 1997, McDowell’s body was discovered in his home by his sister, his office manager, and a Drew police officer. McDowell’s sister said she was checking on her brother who did not call her the night before on the telephone, as was his custom, and said she was concerned when she drove by his home and noticed the front door ajar.

She called Nettie Davis and together the three found him upstairs in his dressing room, leaned up against the wall naked and covered with a comforter and "It didn’t make sense."

The city’s police chief quickly came to the scene, and according to several eye-witnesses, including Davis, "he told us all to leave the house, all of us including the police officer, and he stayed in the house for a long time, tearing up the floors and walls – like he was looking for something.

He walked out with a small sack, but I don’t know what he had. It was obvious that he messed up the crime scene before the state investigators could get there."

"About 20 minutes" after the police chief’s departure, Sunflower County Circuit Judge Gray Evans filed an order to seal the premises of McDowell’s residence making discussions of "any findings or evidence from the crime scene" illegal for any officers and personnel working the crime scene.

But the same gag order "remains in effect," even though the investigation was closed years ago, according to the Sunflower County assistant district attorney who in the fall of 2003 refused access to any of the police investigation or court records stored in the courthouse basement in Indianola, even though the gag order never covered court officers.

"The family would have to approve first," stated a Sunflower County judge upon receiving a private attorney’s request for McDowell’s records.

"The police chief was saying awful things about Cleve when he came out of the house. I know that Judge Gray was just trying to tone things down before the gossip got out of hand," Davis said. "But I wouldn’t think he meant for the gag order never to be lifted."

FIVE MONTHS AFTER McDowell’s murder, on August 21, 1997, nineteen-year-old Juarez Webb of Indianola, one of McDowell’s clients through the county public defender’s office, was indicted by Sunflower County grand jurors on charges of capital murder and robbery of McDowell.

And for several months, the charges stuck.

Webb’s case files kept in the courthouse were accessible and indicated the following:

•An autopsy performed in Jackson that night on McDowell by Steven T. Hayne, M.D., the state’s deputy coroner, indicated "negative" signs of any drug abuse.

•Cause of death was given as a "gunshot wound of the left neck, distant and perforating."

•The death was listed as a homicide.

•Three gunshot wounds fired in "close temporal proximity" but not at close range, perhaps up to a distance of 15 feet, were described by the coroner: a "nonlethal" wound consisting of a "nonlethal distant and perforating gunshot wound of the left back," a "nonlethal distant and perforating gunshot of the left shoulder with re-entry penetrating gunshot wound of the left temple" and a "lethal distant and perforating gunshot wound of the left neck."

These descriptions could not be put into sequential order, the report stated.

While the autopsy report did not give information regarding the range from which the gun was fired, in 2004 a Jackson, Miss., physician practicing forensic medicine was asked to read the report and give his opinion. The physician noted the shots could have been fired from fifteen feet away.

The physician also speculated there could have been more than one shooter, given the angles of the three shots. Further, he stated that “expected” information about all of the bullets causing these wounds was not available in the report.

SIX MONTHS AFTER McDowell’s murder, a fire occurred in downtown Drew, devastating the town’s largest department store and the vacant office next door. All of the records McDowell had collected over the years from his personal research on unsolved race-based murders and lynchings were stored in the vacant office and reportedly destroyed.

The fire’s flames were so high that some Cleveland residents could see the "lighted sky" eleven miles away from Drew. Others reported hearing an "explosion" in Drew at the beginning of the fire. Drew police chief Burner Smith refuses to release the records of the fire. Smith says the records are at the Sunflower County Courthouse in Indianola.

But the county's assistant District Attorney, Hailey Gail Bridges, states the records – “if they are at the courthouse” -- are “not available” to the public.

Bridges, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, never did get along with McDowell, several former colleagues said.

"He would beat her nearly every time in court. And then he would make fun of her. She really hated him," Nettie Davis said. Last summer, Bridges was given the task of overseeing the Emmett Till cold case project. To date, no court action has been taken and some observing civil rights veterans assert Bridges will never do anything to resolve the 1956 murder.

Bridges is white.

(Excerpt from "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," by Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005, LuLu Press.)