 Clyde Kennard
The exoneration was triggered by a three-month investigation by Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger newspaper. On December 31, 2005, Mitchell reported that Johnny Lee Roberts admitted that he falsely implicated Kennard after being threatened by police. Roberts, who was 19 at the time of the crime in September 1960, said Kennard was not involved at all.
At the time, Kennard was a Black activist and civil rights leader who had been targeted by segregationists because he had attempted to enroll in all-white Mississippi Southern College. He had been released from prison on January 29, 1963, when Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett suspended his sentence because Kennard was suffering from cancer. He died on July 4, 1963.
By 1960, Kennard was running the family chicken farm near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and was attempting to resume his college education. Born in 1927 in Hattiesburg, his father died when he was 4 years old. Kennard spent his early years helping his mother, who later remarried, run the farm. At age 12, he moved to Chicago to live with an older sister and go to school. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in September 1945 and served two hitches. His second stint, during the Korean War, had interrupted his attendance at a college in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was honorably discharged in 1952. He later began attending the University of Chicago, but dropped out in 1955 when his stepfather became disabled. He returned home to help run the farm.
Back in Forrest County, Kennard joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and became active in attempting to desegregate local schools. In 1956, he sought to enroll at all-white Mississippi Southern college. His request was put off.
According to Mitchell’s account, Kennard tried again in 1958, this time with the support of Medgar Evers, then field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP. The Mississippi Sovereign Commission, the state’s “segregationist spy agency,” investigated Kennard and called him a “race agitator…known to associate with…a self-confessed communist,” who was actually a local rabbi, Mitchell reported.
On September 15, 1959, Kennard showed up on the campus of Southern to attempt to apply in person. When he returned to his car, police arrested him. He was charged with reckless driving and illegal possession of four half-pint bottles of moonshine. He was brought before a justice of the peace who found him guilty and fined him $600.
Kennard said he would continue his efforts to enroll at Southern.
A year later, on September 25, 1960, he was arrested for helping Roberts steal five bags of chicken feed worth $25 from the co-op.
Kennard was indicted on November 14, 1960 on a charge of burglary. He pled not guilty at his arraignment on November 17 and – over the objection of his defense attorney – went to trial in Forrest County Circuit Court on Monday, November 21 - four days later.
A jury consisting of only white men was selected. Judge Stanton Hall rejected the defense objection that Blacks were excluded from the jury.
The primary witness was Roberts, who had agreed to plead guilty and testify for the prosecution. Roberts testified that he burglarized the co-op at the insistence of Kennard because Kennard’s credit at the store had been cut off. Robert said that Kennard had asked him to get him some feed “on the side.”
Police testified Roberts broke into the feed store about 4:30 a.m. A watchman got the license plate number of his car. After the police arrested Roberts, he implicated Kennard. Roberts said he had driven the feed to Kennard’s chicken coop, which was several miles from Kennard’s farmhouse. He said that Kennard was waiting for him and had paid him $10 for the feed.
Police said they found feed sack tags from the co-op at the chicken coop.
Kennard denied any involvement in the crime.
That afternoon, the jury convicted Kennard after deliberating just 10 minutes. Judge Hall sentenced him to the maximum term of seven years in prison. Roberts was sentenced to five years of probation.
Days later, Evers issued a statement condemning the trial and sentence as a “mockery to justice perpetrated by a courtroom of segregationists who wanted to put him away legally.”
In December 1960, Judge Hall found Evers guilty of contempt. He sentenced Evers to 30 days in jail and fined him $100.
In March 1961, while Kennard’s burglary appeal was still pending, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned his convictions for reckless driving and possession of moonshine. The court held that Kennard had been denied the right to appeal the justice of the peace verdicts in the Circuit Court. The case was remanded for a new trial.
In April 1961, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed Kennard’s burglary conviction. Kennard sought leave to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, represented by Thurgood Marshall in one of his last cases as chief counsel for the NAACP before being sworn in as a federal judge.
In June 1961, the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the contempt conviction of Evers, ruling that his comments were permissible speech.
In October 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Kennard made another bid to overturn his conviction based on a ruling in federal court that the Forrest County Circuit Clerk Theron Lynd had discriminated against Black people in their efforts to register as voters. At the time, only male voters were allowed to sit on Mississippi juries. On January 14, 1963, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected that bid for a new trial.
By then, colon cancer was ravaging Kennard. Prison health officials misdiagnosed him as suffering from sickle cell anemia and he continued to be sent out to work in the cotton fields at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. But his condition worsened and on January 24, 1963, he was transferred to a hospital in Jackson, Mississippi.
On January 29, after supporters petitioned for clemency, Governor Ross Barnett suspended Kennard’s sentence and he was released. Kennard went to Chicago for treatment and surgery. He died on July 4, 1963. The liquor and reckless driving case was still pending.
By the time Mitchell’s article was published in December 2005, he had written scores of articles exposing injustice, including the coverup of murders and other crimes. He had obtained files of the Sovereignty Commission, which revealed that police had framed Kennard in the liquor and reckless driving case – the moonshine had been planted in his car.
Mitchell’s 2005 report said that in 1962, while Kennard was still in prison, Roberts told an official of the local NAACP that “Clyde had nothing to do with stealing the chicken feed.” However, he refused to say it in public. “I can’t do what you all want me to do…they’ll hurt my family,” Roberts said.
Steven Drizin at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law as well as Barry Bradford, a teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, whose students were working on a documentary on Kennard, became involved.
On Friday January 27, 2006, Sarah Geraghty, an attorney, and Atteeyah Hollie, an investigator, both from the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, at the request of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, obtained a signed affidavit from Roberts in which he recanted his trial testimony.
“Kennard did not ask me to steal, Kennard did not ask me to break-in to the Co-op, Kennard did not ask me to do anything illegal,” Roberts declared.
A petition was filed with the Mississippi Supreme Court seeking to overturn Kennard’s conviction, citing Roberts’s recantation. In February 2006, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected that request, ruling that it had no authority to do so under the state’s post-conviction laws.
They then asked Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to pardon Kennard. On April 14, 2006, Governor Barbour, although he said he believed Kennard was innocent, refused to grant Kennard a pardon. “I haven’t pardoned anybody since I’ve been the governor and I don’t have any intention of pardoning anybody,” he declared.
On May 10, 2006, the Mississippi Parole Board refused to grant a posthumous pardon request.
Drizin then filed a petition in Forrest County Circuit Court, which was joined by District Attorney Jon Mark Weathers. Weathers, after interviewing Roberts, said, “I personally believe Mr. Kennard was innocent.”
Following a hearing, Judge Robert Helfrich granted the petition to vacate Kennard’s conviction and dismissed the case.
– Maurice Possley
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