Today’s unsung hero is the late Clyde Kennard.
Clyde Kennard (June 12, 1927 – July 4, 1963) was an American civil rights pioneer and martyr from Mississippi. In the 1950s, he attempted several times to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now known as University of Southern Mississippi) to complete his undergraduate degree started at University of Chicago. USM was still segregated and reserved for European Americans.
After he published a letter about integrated education, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission conspired to have him arrested on false charges. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years at Parchman Penitentiary, a high-security prison. Although he was terminally ill with cancer, the governor refused to pardon him but released him in January 1963. After 2005 and publication of evidence that Kennard had been framed, supporters tried to secure a posthumous pardon for him, but Governor Haley Barbour refused.
Kennard was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1927; he moved to Chicago at the age of 12 to aid his injured sister, Sarah. He stayed and graduated from Wendell Phillips High School, then entered the U.S. Army.
After serving as a paratrooper during the Korean War, as a veteran he returned to Chicago and started college at the University of Chicago. In 1955, after completing his junior year, Kennard returned to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to care for his stepfather, who had become disabled and needed help. He taught Sunday school at the Mary Magdalene Baptist Church.
On three separate occasions (1956, 1957 and 1959), Kennard sought to enroll at Mississippi Southern College, one of Mississippi’s premier institutions, which was still segregated and had an exclusively white student body. Mississippi governor James P. Coleman offered to have the state pay his tuition elsewhere in the state, but Kennard declined. He preferred that college as it was the closest to his home, a major factor given his family situation. In Brown v. Board of Education (1955), the US Supreme Court had ruled that segregation in public educational facilities was unconstitutional.
On December 6, 1958, Kennard published a letter in the Hattiesburg American newspaper. He wrote that he was a “segregationist by nature” but “integrationist by choice,” and gave a reasoned explanation as to why segregation in education was impractical and bound to be replaced by one integrated system.
Zack Van Landingham of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission urged J. H. White, the African-American president of Mississippi Vocational College, to persuade Kennard to end his quest at Mississippi Southern College. When Kennard could not be dissuaded, Van Landingham and Dudley Connor, a Hattiesburg, Mississippi lawyer, worked together to suppress his activism. Files from the Sovereignty Commission, which were opened in 1998, showed that its officials considered forcing Kennard into an accident or bombing his car.
The Sovereignty Commission conspired to have Kennard framed for a crime. On September 15, 1959, he was arrested by constables Charlie Ward and Lee Daniels for reckless driving. After he was jailed, Ward and Daniels claimed before Justice of the Peace T. C. Hobby to have found five half pints of whiskey, along with other liquor, under the seat of his car. Mississippi was a “dry” state, and possession of liquor was illegal until 1966. Kennard was convicted and fined $600. He soon became the victim of an unofficial local economic boycott (also a tactic of the Sovereignty Commission), which cut off his credit.