Not to mention, his anal reputation.
Guess the certain public figure said this, and about whom.
Give up?
Morris Dees said it, and about Bobby DeLaughter.
That’s right. Bobby DeLaughter, the Hinds County, Miss. D.A. who got a guilty verdict against Byron de la Beckwith two decades after the fact, and after two previous not guilty verdicts, is going to Club Fed. Obstruction of Justice, FYI.
I think Beckwith did murder Medgar Evers, b/c of the evidence, and that from what I understand, Beckwith had a reputation of being a sort of a do-badder. (A convicted murder, a do-badder rep? Nawwwwh. I’d a never guessed.) But I also think the third and ultimately successful trial was cynical in nature. DeLaughter was worried that a black would topple him in the next election, and Hinds County has been heavily black for a long time. (Ironically, Beckwith murdered Evers within 24 hours of President Kennedy delivering the famous “Old as the Scriptures” call for civil rights legislation on national TV. That itself was a cynical move on the part of the White House, b/c, at least in the states where they could be a major political factor, black voters helped put JFK over the top three years earlier. And groups like the NAACP and people like MLK were demanding action, and JFK was worried about disillusioned black voters staying home in 1964.) At about the time of Bobby DeLaughter, I think that blacks finally outnumbered whites in either total population or voters in Hinds Co., as whites fled black crime to cities to the east like Pearl and Brandon. (Most of Jackson is in Hinds County.) This was his Hail Mary toward the end zone with five seconds left, and daggummit, someone with the same uniform caught the ball. Morris Dees and the SPLC tangentially participated in the 1990s trial, though from what I understand, they didn’t participate as much as SPLC propaganda/beg letters would have you believe. AMAF, it seems the part in Ghosts of MS, the only part where Dees’s character (Wayne Rogers, of M*A*S*H fame) has a part, that when DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin) defended the Hinds County D.A.’s office of two decades prior against Dees’s outburst, that that part was true to the reality. So the “racist” D.A.’s office that Dees whined about did try, twice AMAF, to get a guilty verdict against Beckwith. Since (IMHO) Beckwith murdered Evers in 1963, and almost all of the first two trials’ proceedings took place before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law, the Hinds County D.A. ran in a county where it was heavily black, but there were almost no black voters. And, the ultimate power of law enforcement in the state rested in the hands of Ross Barnett at the time. Therefore, they tried to prosecute Beckwith in spite of the county voting base being almost entirely nothing but POed whites, and their Governor being a seggy. That was more courageous than what DeLaughter did, IMHO. And Morris Dees still doesn’t have a clue.
Now, the salient question is this: How would the SPLC be crowing today if it were Beckwith’s defense attorney being sent to Federal prison for obst/just?
UPDATE 1/5: Follow the link in this article. It turns out that BDLB may not have done it. And also, BDeL was not the elected D.A., he was an assistant. The elected D.A. was named Peters, and he’s the one who threw the Hail Mary. BDeL played along b/c he imagined a bright future for himself.
I know that in the final year of his term, Kirk Fordice (whose autograph I have, and who is the only sitting Governor I have been able to talk to personally) wanted to pardon BDLB. That obviously didn’t happen, b/c he died in prison, and about a year after Ronnie Muskrat became Governor. Fordice died a few years after BDLB did. But Fordice did appoint BDeL to a state judge position, and his time as a judge is where the Federal felony came in. Now, you would think it would be stupid for MS’s first real Republican Governor to have appointed a big time panderer like BDeL to the state judiciary, after that Governor won two elections based on the votes of white Mississippians, and proudly associated himself with the Council of Conservative Citizens. (That’s how I met him.) Now I’m starting to wonder if his appointment of BDeL was an attempt to grease the skids for pardoning BDLB based on the kangaroo nature of his third trial. I think Fordice knew there would have been controversy, and maybe that was his way of softening the blow. Perhaps he got cold feet at the last minute. Though it wouldn’t have mattered — he wasn’t going to run for a third term in ’99, b/c of his health. He knew he wasn’t going to live too long after leaving Jackson, so it wasn’t as if he had any thoughts of sinecures.
