May 4, 2006
Pardon Unlikely for Civil Rights Advocate
By ADAM LIPTAK

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Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi acknowledges that Clyde Kennard suffered a grievous wrong at the hands of state officials more than 45 years ago. But he says he will not grant a posthumous pardon to Mr. Kennard, a black man who was falsely imprisoned after trying to desegregate a Mississippi college.

Mr. Kennard moved home to Hattiesburg, Miss., after seven years in the Army in Germany and Korea and three years as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He wanted to finish his education at the local college.

But because that college, Mississippi Southern, was reserved for whites, state officials not only rejected Mr. Kennard's repeated applications but also plotted to kill him.

They kept him out of college by convicting him of helping to steal $25 of chicken feed based on what the sole witness now says was perjury. The 1960 conviction drew a seven-year prison term, and Mr. Kennard died of cancer in 1963.

Last month, Mr. Kennard's supporters asked Governor Barbour, a Republican, for a pardon. The state parole board must first make a recommendation, but Mr. Barbour has already said he will not consider granting one.

"The governor hasn't pardoned anyone, be it alive or deceased," said Mr. Barbour's spokesman, Pete Smith. "The governor isn't going to issue a pardon here."

Mr. Smith added that a pardon would be an empty gesture.

"The governor believes that Clyde Kennard was wronged, and if he were alive today his rights would be restored," Mr. Smith said. "There's nothing the governor can do for Clyde Kennard right now."

Mr. Kennard's case, which was the subject of a recent three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., has also been pursued by students at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school, in Chicago. Several of the students involved said they were baffled by Mr. Barbour's response.

"Please," said Mona Ghadiri, 17, a senior at Stevenson High, addressing Governor Barbour, "if you are going to say no, at least give us a decent reason."

The only evidence against Mr. Kennard was the testimony of a black man named Johnny Lee Roberts, then 19, who said that Mr. Kennard, 33, had asked him to steal the chicken feed. Mr. Roberts, who did the stealing, received a suspended sentence. Mr. Kennard, convicted as an accessory, got a year for every $3.57 of feed.

Mr. Roberts has recanted, first to Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger and then in a sworn statement before a judge.

"Kennard did not ask me to steal," Mr. Roberts said in the sworn statement. "Kennard did not ask me to do anything illegal. Kennard is not guilty of burglary or any other crime."

"I have always felt bad about what happened to Clyde," Mr. Roberts continued. "He was a good man."

Joyce A. Ladner, a sociologist, remembered being mentored by Mr. Kennard when she was a teenager. "He was a quiet, very dignified guy, a real gentleman," Ms. Ladner said of Mr. Kennard.

Aubrey K. Lucas, the director of admissions at the college when Mr. Kennard applied, recalled in an interview that it was the governor, J. P. Coleman, who decided against admitting Mr. Kennard.

That was a mistake, said Mr. Lucas, who went on to be president of what became the University of Southern Mississippi. "Kennard would have been the perfect person to integrate this university," Mr. Lucas said. "He didn't bring attorneys with him. He didn't bring the N.A.A.C.P. leadership."

There was little question of Mr. Kennard's qualifications.

"Everybody who knew him refers to him as brilliant  not as a smart man but as a brilliant man," said Barry Bradford, the teacher at Stevenson High who directed its project on Mr. Kennard, available at www.clydekennard.org.

State authorities had a different reaction. The files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's segregationist spy agency, show that killing or framing Mr. Kennard was openly discussed as preferable to allowing him to enroll at the college.

March 30 was Clyde Kennard Day in Mississippi, and Governor Barbour issued a proclamation. He urged citizens to remember Mr. Kennard's "determination, the injustices he suffered, and his significant role in the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi."

There has apparently never been a posthumous pardon in Mississippi, but there have been such pardons in 10 other states and in the federal system. Yesterday, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana posthumously pardoned 78 people convicted of sedition early in the last century.

Mr. Lucas said pardoning Mr. Kennard might cost Mr. Barbour a few votes.

"There are some people around here still," Mr. Lucas said, "who think we should be separate as races and who refuse to see the errors of our past. But I can't imagine it would be a factor in his re-election."

Presidential Chatter Encircles Governor Barbour of Mississippi
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 2, 2005

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When President Bush heads to Mississippi tomorrow to tout his Social Security initiative, some Republicans hope voters see two men of presidential caliber: Mr. Bush and the state's governor, Haley Barbour.

A small but influential group of GOP insiders are urging the former national party chairman to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2008.

"I would handicap the Haley thing seriously," a GOP lobbyist in Washington, Mark Isakowitz, said. "Republicans around the country like him. They just like him. He's been the face of our party for a long time. He's built up a lot of goodwill. Now that's he's governor, it's plausible," Mr. Isakowitz said. "The keys to the kingdom always lie in being trusted by the base."

Talk of a Barbour candidacy has increased decidedly in recent weeks, thanks in large part to the efforts of Ed Rogers, a partner in Mr. Barbour's former lobbying firm. Mr. Rogers declined to be interviewed for this story, but he acknowledged that he recently registered two Web addresses - www.haley2008.com and www.haleyforpresident.com - to help keep Mr. Barbour's presidential options open.

"There's certainly a lot of Beltway chatter about it right now," the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, said. "The level of volume has certainly been picking up."

Mr. Barbour has been coy about the matter, disclaiming any interest in the presidency but stopping well short of an outright refusal to consider the job. "The governor has no plans to run for president," a spokesman for Mr. Barbour, Peter Smith, said.

In a recent interview, Mr. Barbour, 57, jokingly brushed aside questions about his presidential aspirations. "Well, I could lose 50 pounds. I might even grow 4 inches. You never know," he told the Associated Press. "But that's not my intention."

A friend of Mr. Barbour who is eager to see him run said interest in the idea picked up after it became clear that Governor Bush of Florida, and a brother of President Bush, had decided against entering the 2008 contest.

"If Jeb Bush were in, he would clear the field," the GOP loyalist said. Among conservatives, Mr. Barbour's name quickly emerged as a candidate who could appeal to the party's base while also projecting charisma.

While he served as the national GOP chairman from 1993 to 1997, Mr. Barbour was a regular presence on network television. He delivered the party's message with a jocular charm that often disarmed critics.

"He's got tremendous media skills. He's just very smooth," a conservative activist in the capital said.

After winning the Mississippi governor's job in 2003, Mr. Barbour made tort reform his leading priority. Last June, he signed a legal reform package that is likely to bring an end to the state's reputation as a magnet for questionable tort cases and large jury verdicts.

While Mr. Barbour does not have strong ties to New York, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg held fundraisers for him in 2003. Mr.Barbour also made a visit to the city last year, touting the tort reform legislation and seeking investment for his home state.

Some New York Republicans say the native of Yazoo City, Miss., deserves serious consideration as a presidential contender.

"Does he have the ability and the credentials? Yes. He'd be a worthy candidate," a Manhattan GOP fund-raiser, Lewis Eisenberg, said. "This country has some recent history where governors of a small southern state can ascend to the presidency."

Mr. Eisenberg hastened to add that he has not yet decided whom to back in the 2008 race. He said Mr. Pataki, Mayor Giuliani, the governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, Senator McCain of Arizona, and Senator Frist of Tennessee are all serious contenders for the nomination.

Mr. Eisenberg said Mr. Barbour has earned a place on that list because of his successful leadership of the GOP in the 1990s. Mr. Barbour also served for two years as a political director for President Reagan. "He'd be a very strong player on a deep bench," Mr. Eisenberg said.

Senator Lott of Mississippi is among those who think a Barbour candidacy is at least plausible. Last week, he told a Washington newspaper, the Hill, that Mr. Barbour or Mr. Romney would stand a better chance of winning the presidency than the senators who are widely mentioned as possible candidates. "I don't think any senator can win the nomination," Mr. Lott said.

Another Republican insider said the burden of serving and running at the same time will be particularly hard for Mr. Frist, the Senate majority leader. "There's just still too many nicks and cuts, too many distractions, too many other battles," the GOP loyalist said. "It's going to be very difficult for Frist."

Some political pundits dismissed the idea of a Barbour presidency as downright zany.

"It's not a million-to-one shot. I think he's a billion-to-one shot," a prominent political analyst in Washington, Stuart Rothenberg of the Rothenberg Political Report, said.

But Mr. Rothenberg said he understands the appeal of Mr. Barbour in some quarters. "The one great asset he has is he can talk the good ol' boy talk and also talk to the business/banker types," Mr. Rothenberg said.

However, the newsletter publisher said Mr. Barbour's Mississippi roots would ultimately prove more of a liability than a strength with voters across America. "It may not be altogether fair, but when they think of Mississippi, they think of the Old South, not the New South," Mr. Rothenberg said. He said most voters still equate the state with low educational achievement and racial strife.

Some analysts have also expressed doubts about whether Mr. Barbour's Southern charm would win converts in New Hampshire and Iowa, the states whose early contests often wield great influence over presidential races.

"The only reason people find him compelling is they're realizing there's a great chance this field will not have a superstar in it," said Chuck Todd, the editor in chief of a daily tip sheet for political insiders, the Hotline. Mr. Todd said there is a significant chance that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. McCain may choose not to run in 2008, leaving the field to a group of people relatively unknown outside Washington and their home states.

"Suddenly, Haley Barbour and Newt Gingrich look interesting to people, but I think it's by comparison," Mr. Todd said, tossing in the name of a former House speaker who is now being discussed as a possible presidential candidate.

However, Mr. Todd said Mr. Barbour's history as a Washington lobbyist would render him essentially unelectable as president. "The minute he takes this seriously, he's got a million things he needs to answer for in lobbying contracts," Mr. Todd said.

Some proponents of Mr. Barbour's possible candidacy said he could run as a Washington outsider, but Mr. Todd said such an assertion would be laughable for a man whose lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, was dubbed the most powerful in the nation's capital by Fortune magazine.

Mr. Barbour's former clients include the tobacco industry and foreign countries such as Mexico. "That's an obstacle and not a small obstacle," Mr. Todd said. "It would keep reporters busy a long time."

Mr. Barbour's friends point out that all those arguments were raised against him in the Mississippi governor's race, to no avail. Still, they acknowledge the scrutiny of the presidential race would be tougher.

"The firm is going to get raked over the coals," one of those backing a Barbour bid said. "I think he would sail through it."

Gross Neglect
By BOB HERBERT (NYT) 738 words
Published: March 13, 2006

When it comes to providing desperately needed services for children who have been beaten, starved, sexually abused or otherwise mistreated, the state of Mississippi offers what is probably the worst-case scenario.
Mississippi gets more than 25,000 allegations of abuse and neglect each year, and it can't handle them.


Way back in 1992 the Child Welfare League of America issued a blistering report about the backward state of affairs in Mississippi. The league warned that vulnerable children would suffer irreparable harm if steps weren't taken to reduce caseloads, increase staffing and locate additional foster care and adoptive homes.

In 2001, Sue Perry, the state's director of family and children's services, warned top state officials that 'the crisis needs to be addressed by whomever has the power to rectify the situation -- before a tragedy occurs.'

She quit the following year, saying in a letter to then-Governor Ronnie Musgrove that the system was starved for resources and had deteriorated so badly that protecting the children had become 'an impossible task.' At the time she wrote the letter, Ms. Perry was being directed to abolish 88 additional full-time positions.

She told the governor that Mississippi's children had been placed at such great risk that some would die. 'I am sorry to inform you,' she said, 'that this has already happened in DeSoto County. A 19-month-old child was brutally beaten by his stepfather in a case known to this agency.'

Warnings don't get much louder, but the honchos in Mississippi were in no mood to listen. These were poor kids, after all. What claim did they have on the state's resources?

Two years after Ms. Perry resigned, Gov. Haley Barbour acknowledged that the state's Department of Human Services had 'collapsed for lack of management and a lack of leadership.' Collapsed. That was the governor's word. Was he serious? Was he planning to do something about it? You must be joking. He made the comment as he was announcing additional budget cuts for the agency.

When a state abandons its obligation to care for its vulnerable residents, the last best hope has tended to be the courts. Enter Children's Rights, an advocacy organization based in New York. Over the years, it has filed lawsuits in a number of states that have led to the overhaul of failing child welfare systems, and it is currently pressing a class-action suit on behalf of abused and neglected children in Mississippi.

The situation in Mississippi has become so bad, said Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children's Rights, that the state deliberately (and unlawfully) diverts children from the child welfare system by failing to investigate reports of abuse and neglect.

'Mississippi has one of the worst child welfare systems we have ever seen,' Ms. Lowry said.

Mississippi doesn't even try to fully staff its Division of Family and Children Services. Caseloads for child protective workers are absurdly high. Where national standards call for a maximum of 12 to 17 cases per worker (depending on the types of cases involved), there are counties in Mississippi where the average caseload for workers is 100 and beyond. According to the lawsuit, the average caseload in Lamar County is 130.

In that kind of system, kids suffer and may even die without ever coming close to the attention of the authorities.

The kids who do come to the attention of the system frequently get short shrift. Some are placed in settings that are as dangerous -- or more dangerous -- than their original environments.

How bad is Mississippi? In the papers compiled by Children's Rights for its lawsuit is a reference to testimony by a key official of the Department of Human Services, who said the state would 'not necessarily investigate' whether sexual abuse had occurred if a 'little girl' contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

If you don't understand that a 'little girl' with a sexually transmitted disease is a raging signal to take immediate steps to protect the child and to launch a criminal investigation, then you should not be allowed anywhere near vulnerable children.

This is the sort of thing Children's Rights is trying to correct with its lawsuit. It seeks nothing less than to compel the governor and other officials to meet their obligation to protect and care for the most vulnerable children in their state. And that can only be done by transforming a system that at the moment can best be described as grotesque.

Governor's Relative Is Big Contract Winner
By ERIC LIPTON; RON NIXON CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM NEW YORK FOR THIS ARTICLE. (NYT) 976 words
Published: December 7, 2005

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss., Dec. 6 - Rosemary Barbour happens to be married to a nephew of Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour. Since the Reagan administration, when Mrs. Barbour worked as a White House volunteer as a college student, she has been active in the Republican Party.
She also happens to be one of the biggest Mississippi-based winners of federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.


To some contract watchdogs, this could be an example of how the federal government responsibly reached out to give a piece of the billions of dollars in federal hurricane-recovery work to a small Mississippi-based company owned by a Latina. Mrs. Barbour, 39, who was born in Guatemala but now lives in Jackson, Miss., is certified by the United States Small Business Administration as a disadvantaged small-business owner.

But the $6.4 million in contracts received by her company, Alcatec L.L.C., have also elicited questions about possible favoritism.

Federal records show that the company has won at least 10 separate contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the General Services Administration to install and maintain showers for relief workers and evacuees, to deliver tents, and to provide laundry equipment. The most valuable were awarded in September and October without competitive bidding, the records show.

According to a review of federal contracts awarded since Hurricane Katrina, her company ranks seventh in total contracts out of 88 Mississippi-based concerns that have received deals worth $100,000 or more.

'This case should be scrutinized to ensure those awards were based on merits and ability to return value to the American taxpayer rather than favoritism to a politically connected contractor,' said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.

Mrs. Barbour, as well as spokesmen for FEMA and for Governor Barbour, all said in interviews Tuesday that Mrs. Barbour's family and political links to the Republican Party and the governor, as well as President Bush, did not play a role in her selection for the work.

'The governor had no knowledge whatsoever of Rosemary even receiving that contract,' said Pete Smith, Mr. Barbour's press secretary.

Mrs. Barbour's husband, Charles Barbour, who is a member of the Hinds County Board of Supervisors in Jackson, is the son of Governor Barbour's oldest brother. Governor Barbour, a former lobbyist in Washington and chairman of the Republican National Committee and a long-time ally of President Bush, is part of the extended family, Mrs. Barbour said. And the two families see each other on social occasions.

Mrs. Barbour said she was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 and served as the Hispanic coordinator for President Bush's re-election campaign in Mississippi.

Her company, named after her two children, Allen and Camille, was started in 2000 after she had run a laundry service for students at University of Mississippi. Last year, she won two contracts worth $675,750 from the United States military to provide washers, driers and showers at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, where her husband also works as a spokesman and director for special services.

Lt. Col. Doril Sanders, a spokesman for Camp Shelby, whose supervisor is Mr. Barbour, said he could not provide any information about the circumstances of the contract award to Alcatec.

Mrs. Barbour said any business she had secured, with Camp Shelby or FEMA, had been based on merit. 'We are just a normal business trying to build my American dream,' Mrs. Barbour said.

Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Alcatec had been hired based on a recommendation from the G.S.A., which tries to award disaster relief work to businesses owned locally or by socially or economically disadvantaged executives.

'The health of the community has a lot to do with how actively involved local businesses are,' Ms. Andrews said. To date, she said, Alcatec has been paid about $750,000 for services, none of which to her knowledge has drawn any complaints.

The showers are at camps set up along the Mississippi coast, in communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The sign at the entrance of the Pass Christian camp says 'The Village, Est. 2005,' but residents say it is more informally known as 'Tent City.'

Besides providing the showers themselves, which are set up in an old tractor trailer, the contract with the federal government also involves providing water and power to the showers, which operate each day from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Several residents interviewed on Tuesday said the showers -- half designated for women and half for men -- seemed fine.

'Get up and get to work, every day,' said Anthony Jones, 43, who has been cleaning up debris. 'Those showers, you can't beat them.'

Mrs. Barbour would not give a specific reply on Tuesday to the question of how many employees her company has, saying the number was less than 50 and perhaps fewer than 10. The telephone at her office was answered as QuikInternet, a business that Mrs. Barbour says she operates as a franchise out of Jackson, Miss.

Tommy Quattlebaum and Ron Fears, who were helping to maintain the shower operation at Pass Christian, said that as far as they knew, none of the staff at the site actually worked for Alcatec, but rather were contractors.

Mrs. Barbour said anyone was welcome to examine her contracts for signs of favoritism. 'None of my contracts, none of my status, none of my certifications from the federal government have been a result of me asking for their help,' she said, referring to her husband and the governor.