Kay Mills

Along with always making one more phone call, I have often told students to be nice to secretaries and clerks. In the first place, it’s polite, but in the second place, they can often provide information or faster access to their bosses. Assume nothing about what their attitudes toward your project will be. This rule holds for books as well as journalism. I had this reality reinforced for me when I was working on that part of my book about Fannie Lou Hamer that dealt with the beating she and several other civil rights workers received from police in jail in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963. The story provided a centerpiece for Hamer’s later testimonials to the difficulties black people faced in trying to vote and win other civil rights. The law officers had been acquitted by an all-white jury. The transcript of that trial would help me tell that episode.

In those days before computers and e-mail, I had to have the transcript sent to the federal court in Oxford, Mississippi, from a federal records center where it was stored. It arrived and I spent several days going through it and making copies of key sections. As I read the testimony of the law officers, I was struck by a sobering thought: suppose they were telling the truth? Suppose the beatings hadn’t occurred or hadn’t occurred the way the civil rights workers said they had?

One day I was chatting with the clerk of the court, and it is important here to say that she was a white woman, and she asked me why I was so interested in a case that was at least two decades old. I didn’t know what her attitude would be to my project but I plunged ahead and told her. And I told her that I wished there was some way to check on the atmosphere in the courtroom. Had the judge treated the civil rights workers fairly? Was their point of view well represented?

She asked me who the U.S. attorney had been who had handled the case. I told her. Well, she said, he’s practicing law in Jackson now so why don’t you call him? Why not indeed. I did, and he said he had been in Washington when Hamer visited the Justice Department immediately after leaving the Winona jail, and he had no doubt whatsoever that she had been severely beaten.

So don’t stand on ceremony—use every source you can.

To be continued