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Eleven long years have come and gone since the murder of black criminal lawyer Cleve McDowell, who was shot to death in his Mississippi Delta home. McDowell spent his entire professional life investigating the lynching of Emmett Till and others slain in Mississippi.

On the morning of March 13, 1997, the naked, lifeless body of Cleve McDowell, 56, was discovered by his youngest sister propped up against a bathroom wall.

Throughout his home, dozens of powerful handguns and rifles -- "always one within his reach" -- had been strategically placed by McDowell for self-protection. So why didn't he use one to save his life?

On this quiet anniversary, questions still surround the death of this important but forgotten civil rights leader:

What happened to bullets taken from McDowell's body during the state's autopsy? Would such evidence show if more than one shooter was involved? What happened to McDowell's guns? Why do county officials maintain a gag order on all investigation records of this murder? And what happened to all of McDowell's investigative files?

For over forty years, McDowell studied hate crimes and murders taking place during the modern civil rights movement. Where is all of the information he collected about the murders of Emmet Till, Medgar Evers and countless others?

Learning of McDowell's murder, the Associated Press first reported McDowell, 56, was found dead in an upstairs bathroom early that morning after relatives called police to say the door to his apartment was open and his car missing. Police continued to look for McDowell's Cadillac for two days before discovering it in a small, nearby town.

McDowell had been a public defender in Sunflower County for three decades. He was part of a group of black leaders organizing to pressure district attorneys and revive interest in many never-prosecuted cases in which blacks were killed for doing civil rights work . . .

IN 1956, TWO YEARS AFTER Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and one year following the Delta murder of young Emmett Till, Mississippi legislators had installed a quiet and effective spy agency over their concerns of "forced integration" and related race issues. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission did not close its doors until 1977.

Only in 1998, after twenty-one years of legal wrangling, United States District Court Judge William H. Barbour, Jr. ordered all Commission records not involved in litigation to be opened to the public.

McDowell was killed exactly one year to the day before this first court-ordered release of secret records -- records that had been gathered on private citizens by former FBI, CIA and military intelligence agents performing their clandestine work during some of Mississippi's most tumultuous years of civil rights strife. When these secret records were first handed over to the public, many of the Sovereignty Commission's files were considered missing by investigative journalists and other longtime civil rights observers.

Hence, McDowell's extensive private collection of his own criminal and civil rights investigations -- papers stored in high stacks of cardboard boxes and in his office safe -- could have filled in some of the gaps, had his files been available.

But McDowell's investigation records officially disappeared between the time of his murder and the official release of Sovereignty Commission files when fire engulfed his old law office where all of his papers were stored. Family members later told reporters McDowell's records were in his former office when the fire started -- after McDowell's death -- because they wanted someday to turn the office into a civil rights museum.

McDowell's records could have easily filled such a museum, say friends and colleagues who saw the mounds of boxes grow higher each successive year until McDowell's life was ended by gunshot wounds. AS THE CIVIL Rights Movement years waned, McDowell never quit looking into Mississippi's race-based murders and other hate crimes. His interest in Till's murder remained strong; coincidentally, he and Till were born two weeks apart in the summer of 1941 and young Till's murder influenced McDowell's decision to study law and then investigate Till's and other hate crimes against blacks.

Till was kidnapped from a nearby Tallahatchie County relative's home in the small cotton town of Money back in 1955 and taken to a Sunflower County plantation outside of Drew where he was beaten, tortured and slain. Till's body was taken to a neighboring county and thrown into the Tallahatchie River from a bridge. Ironically, McDowell would be killed in his Drew home forty-two years later, less than five miles from Till's murder site.

And over the years, stacked boxes of papers and files on the Till case grew high in McDowell's office while other papers were stored in his locked office safe as well as at home, his former office manager said.

"Cleve never let me go through any of those papers. So I don't know exactly what he had. But Cleve often spoke to Emmett's mother and promised he would find out what happened to her son and who was involved in his murder," Nettie Davis said. "I know Cleve talked to her on the phone just a month before he was killed." Davis was McDowell's office manager and had known him since high school days in Drew.

Kwasi McDowell, McDowell's godson, also knew about his uncle's investigations and said his uncle was always very quiet about what he was working on but "it was evident that his investigations were serious." McDowell's nephew said he once worked on a civil rights paper for school that required his uncle's help.

While he was busy writing down notes, McDowell "looked away and quietly said that people in this state would be surprised if they knew about all the politicians and their families who have murdered people."

"He didn't say anything else, but he looked upset," Kwasi McDowell recalled. "Cleve may have been working with two lawyers in Texas at one time to track down civil rights murderers.... I think both of those lawyers died in car wrecks, but I don't recall any specifics," McDowell's nephew said.

ONE OF CLEVE MCDOWELL'S CLIENTS was quickly arrested and charged with capital murder -- those charges were reduced to manslaughter in return for Juarez Webb's confession. Webb, a Delta black, later retracted his admission but was convicted of the lesser charges and remains locked up in a state maximum security prison.

Within several hours of discovering McDowell's body, a county judge placed a gag order on the ensuing investigation; one decade later the same order remains on all public records of McDowell's slaying, including records on a fire that destroyed his office and criminal investigative papers.

The decision was to keep a local police chief from damaging the crime scene and from spreading inflammatory rumors, Davis said. "But I don't understand why these records stayed closed." Davis remembered how unusual McDowell's home appeared when she first entered it with his sister; together, they discovered his body:

"The strangest thing to me was how neat the coffee table looked. I went into the house with Cleve's sister and that was the first thing I noticed. It was always a mess, with papers, files, and books stacked up and even falling off. Everyone who knew him would remember that table. But this morning it looked like it had been cleaned up when we went into the house. Every paper was stacked neatly in a pile.

"There were these neat piles all over the table. My eye caught the coffee table immediately, as soon as I walked in. I had never seen it like this before."

Even the dirty dishes that "usually filled the kitchen sink" had been washed, and this also struck Davis as odd.

Woodrow Jackson of nearby Tutwiler also finds it "intriguing" that his old friend's coffee table was cleaned up and the dishes washed. Jackson, a retired funeral home employee, had embalmed Till's body before it was returned to his mother in Chicago and knew McDowell through their shared interest in the murder.

"I knew Cleve very well. I didn't embalm his body. I believe it was someone from Cleveland who did. But Cleve was a good lawyer and we often spoke about Emmett Till because he was very interested in finding all who were involved in the murder.

"Cleve kept boxes of records in his office. I know because I saw them. I remember a year or so ago before Cleve was murdered he brought Emmett Till up again and still seemed upset, but he would never give out any details. When his office burned down after he was murdered, a lot of important papers had to have been lost." Still one more person who knew McDowell was surprised after hearing about the clean coffee table.

"Now that means something," Margaret Block said. The former SNCC activist was preparing to have McDowell do some legal work for her when she heard he was murdered. Block and her brother, Sam, had both known McDowell beginning in the early 1960s when they were all involved in voting rights activities throughout the Delta.

Davis also asks why the town police chief was allowed to disturb and even "tear up" the crime scene. "He came to the house and told us all to leave -- all of us including the police officer -- and he stayed in the house for a long time, tearing up the floors and walls -- like he was looking for something.

"He walked out with a small sack, but I don't know what he had. It was obvious that he messed up the crime scene before the state investigators could even get there."

Continue to Part 2...

Keywords: Cleve McDowell, Emmett Till, Mississippi, Delta Blues, civil rights, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, cold cases

About the Author
Susan Klopfer, Mount Pleasant, IA, USA
sklopfer542@yahoo.com