Emmett Till and the Kansas City Voting Rights Massacre

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act seems to be moving toward easy passage in congress. The Star ran a great story about it yesterday, as did Blue Girl and so did Pub Defender.

So, Emmett Till was the young, 14-year old Black kid from Chicago that was lynched because he whistled at a white girl. It clear to almost everyone in congress that these unsolved civil rights crimes need further investigation.

Yet it is easy to do the right thing while looking backward. Looking forward (or at the present) is harder. So the same Department of Justice that employs Bradley Schlozman will be asked to investigate these old massacres. Ironic?

No, because I believe in the power of government to redeem itself. I believe that the past helps remind us of the best in our selves. It seems clear to me that Bradley Schlozman was trying to turn an election by publicly "lynching" four poor Blacks. Who was Schlozman trying to help? Sen. Jim Talent, the original co-sponsor of the Emmett Till bill.

See the Kansas City Voting Rights Massacre happened here for a reason. Yet part of the reason is because of St. Louis. The Public Defender was a key part of the story. They ran accusations of a disgruntled ACORN employee, Josephine Perkins. Plus, Antonio D. French was on the cutting edge of the blogging technology, he used video. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, how much is video worth?

I was in Saint Louis the day that Antonio French video taped, Josephine Perkins in front of the St. Louis ACORN Office and the response from one of ACORN's staffers, Johanna Sharrard. Johanna was ambushed by French. And the "Public Defender" got the story wrong. Josephine Perkins was wrong.

French got his 15-minutes of fame (and a kick-start to his consulting business) and Josephine Perkins got a job with the Republican Director of Elections Scott Leiendecker at the St. Louis City Board of Elections.

The PubDefender story helped fuel the media outcry against ACORN and gave Bradley J. Schlozman the cover he needed to indict the ACORN4 before the 2006 Senate election for Jim Talent's seat.

Why didn't the indictments happen then in St. Louis? Was it because Catherine Hannoway the US Attorney for Eastern Missouri is considering running for Attorney General for Missouri? Perhaps. The FBI was playing far harder ball in St. Louis than they were in Kansas City (insert your favorite Cardinals/Royals Baseball joke here).

There reasons why indictments didn't happen in St. Louis are numerous. Yet you can't understand the Kansas City Voting Rights Massacre without knowing the story of the other urban city in the state.

Yet how does this tie into Emmet Till? See, I sat down several times with a FBI agent and a Boone County sheriff's deputy and looked over the voter registration cards for a short voter registration drive that ACORN did on the University of Missouri Campus in Columbia.

The deputy sheriff looked at one of the cards that a young female student had filled out. It seemed likely that the young co-ed had filled out erroneous information on the voter registration card and signed her name to it. The deputy sheriff wanted to refer this young girl to the prosecutor for fraud. Why didn't we hear about this young white girl who committed voting-registration fraud? She lied to an authorized "voter solicitor" of the State of Missouri and allegedly committed fraud. Why didn't Bradley J. Schlozman indict this young, white, educated college student? Perhaps because the voter solicitor was a young Black man from Kansas City?

No jury in the world would have convicted a white MU college-girl for lying about her name and phone number to a Black man from the City. Thank God he didn't whistle at the girl, otherwise we might have had the ACORN Five.

cross-posted at The Blog of Independence.