You'll mostly hear the tale of Tchula, Mississippi's first black mayor getting persecuted by the white good old boys. It definitely sounds like he was the victim of a racist conspiracy. In the backwaters of Mississippi, I'd certainly think it was possible. The Klan held power in places like this for quite a long time from what I've been taught (but who knows).
But I'm not so sure.
The sources telling Eddie's tale all come from the far left or black militant groups or people who have dedicated themselves to black activism. People's World for example.
The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression sure had his back.
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Murder and conspiracy
In 1980, Tchula’s police chief quit because of ill health. Carthan appointed an African American to the post. In violation of the law, the majority on the board of aldermen appointed its own, white, police chief. When Carthan tried to enter City Hall with his duly appointed police chief he was roughed up by several policemen, charged with assault, convicted and sentenced to three years in jail, and forced to leave office.
The board of aldermen then installed Granderson as mayor. In 1981 Carthan’s two remaining supporters on the board were defeated after an election that later was shown to be full of irregularities. Carthan’s white predecessor was also returned to the mayor’s seat.
Three weeks later, Vincent Bolden and David Hester of East St. Louis robbed Granderson’s store, took him in the back and killed him. The prosecution, ignoring evidence that Hester had once sold Granderson $200,000 worth of cocaine, claimed Carthan had hired the men to kill his old opponent.
The prosecution struck a deal first with Bolden, and when that fell apart then with Hester. In exchange for testifying that Carthan had hired the two, Hester was to get off with a lesser charge.
Local Black farmers raised the $115,000 bail required to get Carthan out of jail. Actor Ossie Davis went on a 66-city tour to raise funds and build support for the struggle to free Carthan.
The story made it to the New York Times and Time Magazine
Here's were I start to wonder.
If you take their word for it, the man Carthan was accused of killing, Roosevelt Granderson was a pretty bad dude. Not only was he a puppet for white racists, he was also a drug dealer.
So why did Roosevelt Granderson have a road named after him in Tchula instead of Carthan?
Why did the school at which he was a basketball coachand teacher dedicate the gym in his honor?
It doesn't seem to make sense.
Maybe this is about something more.
Eddie Carthan has been very welcoming to The Nation of Islam.
Farrakhan himself dedicated Carthan's church in 2002.
However, it looks like the church got sold to the state of Missisippi a couple years ago.
His son, who has moved on to LA to become an actor/model wrote a paper on Reparations.
I can understand why he might have not wanted to stay in MS and take over the family farm. I just hope he's welcome back.
Here's Shermel's version of the family history from an interview about a play he was in
Carthan is the descendant of James Carthan, an African-American sharecropper and prohibition-era moonshine manufacturer who in 1939 purchased 60 acres of Delta land once belonging to a Native-AmericanChoctaw reservation. According to Carthan, his grandfather was “the only African American, at the time, to own land” in the small town of Tchula, Miss., 61 miles north of Jackson. The area’s overwhelming poverty did not prevent his grandfather’s initial investment from growing tenfold. Shermel Carthan’s father Eddie would grow up working his way through law school while farming his family’s 600 acres and raising cotton, soybeans and wheat. An educator at Saints College in Lexington, Miss., Eddie Carthan would later become a business developer for the U.S. Department of Commerce in the Office of Minority Business Enterprise; a president of the Mississippi Family Farmers Association; and, in 1977, the first black mayor of Tchula, where he served two terms. Carthan would eventually see his political career marred by an arrest and trial for the murder of Roosevelt Granderson, an African-American alderman—a charge of which he was acquitted in 1982. Recalling Brick inCat on a Hot Tin Roof, Shermel Carthan grew up in “the White House,” one of the largest mansions in Tchula, set on an 18th-century plantation complete with slave quarters. Before entering college, Carthan attended two private boarding schools: Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and Piney Woods—the latter founded in Mississippi in 1909 by an African-American minister, Laurence Clifton Jones.
Sounds like the Carthans were pretty wealthy and powerful people. It's not the image of a poor farmer being deicscriminated against by the bad old USDA you would expect.
But Carthan also seems to be connected to the Socialist Worker's party--- He was even very vocal about being on the side of rapist Mark Curtis, a white man in Iowa. A huge hoax that the SWP sold for awhile
A victim of frame-up himself, Carthan has lent his support to other fighters under attack. He was a prominent supporter of Mark Curtis, the union activist and Socialist Workers Party member from Des Moines, Iowa, who was framed up on rape and burglary charges and imprisoned from 1988 to 1996. Carthan lent his support to the international defense campaign that finally won Curtis' release.
But there certainly are signs of bad behavior by one USDA official in Tchula
Another link about the Socialist Workers Party in Tchula
Apparently, the UNC libraries have a lot of stuff from the Carthan Case.
It would be interesting to learn more.
This story is garbage !! You need some better sources. You are not kind, you are not smart, and you are not important!!
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