By Elmetra Patterson
Charles Hampton, president of the Winston County Branch NAACP, Louisville, MS
Many across the country cheered at a news conference that was held by the president and CEO, Benjamin Todd Jealous, of the NAACP on December 29, 2010. None cheered louder than local leader, Charles Hampton, president of the Winston County Branch NAACP, Louisville, MS and the 1st Vice President of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP as shown on CNN. This news conference took place after Governor Haley Barbour of MS issued this press release:
“Today, I have issued two orders indefinitely suspending the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott. In 1994, a Scott County jury convicted the sisters of armed robbery and imposed two life sentences for the crime. Their convictions and their sentences were affirmed by the Mississippi Court of Appeals in 1996.”
“To date, the sisters have served 16 years of their sentences and are eligible for parole in 2014. Jamie Scott requires regular dialysis, and her sister has offered to donate one of her kidneys to her. The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society. Their incarceration is no long necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi.”
“The Mississippi Parole Board reviewed the sisters’ request for a pardon and recommended that I neither pardon them, nor commute their sentence. At my request, the Parole Board subsequently reviewed whether the sisters should be granted an indefinite suspension of sentence, which is tantamount to parole, and have concurred with my decision to suspend their sentences indefinitely.”
According to Ben Jealous in a letter to NAACP members, the sisters’ sentence was an “extreme and biased ruling” handed down by Judge Marcus Gordon that condemned each of the women to double life sentences for an $11 robbery in which no one was injured – a robbery of which the sisters claim their innocence. Two of the sisters’ three coconspirators were released after less than 3 years of their prison time. According to the sisters’ attorney, Chokwe Lumumba, there are now facts to support that these witnesses were intimidated.
Charles Hampton was involved on September 14, 2010, when he along with Ben Jealous and the Scott sisters’ lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba, filed the petition for clemency or pardon for the Scotts with Governor Haley Barbour.
Later, on November 24, 2010, they delivered a stack of papers bearing the names of 24,000 people who signed an online petition for the Scott sisters’ release. Lumumba later took another 1,500 letters of support that he received personally at his law office. This action by Governor Barbour is being seen by some as ‘political damage control’ because of the comments he made earlier in December praising the former White Citizen’s Counsel of Yazoo City, MS, his home town. Barbour claimed that the Citizen’s Council movement helped avert violence in his hometown of Yazoo City, after schools were ordered to desegregate. However, the council later became known as the Citizens’ Councils of America, fought against racial desegregation in the fifties and sixties after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The segregationist group publicly renounced the use of violence, but vowed to use economic reprisals against those who supported desegregation, unlike the Klu Klux Klan. The governor received bad press when the chatters began about his comments and many thought it might end his chance of him becoming a candidate for president in the 2012 election.
According to Charles Hampton, “Even though we are cheering and are grateful for the Scott sisters’ release, it is not over yet for them. They will have to be on parole. We would like to see Governor Barbour give them a pardon. We want the community to know that there are still a lot of injustices that we are investigating. We (NAACP) are in constant contact with the Justice Department. We want the community to continue to support us and to remember that as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated that our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Injustices matter.”
Charles Hampton, a retiree from A. O. Smith in Milwaukee, WI, has been president of the Winston County Branch NAACP for 6 years and was recently reelected to serve another two year term. He is in his 2nd year as 1st Vice President of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and is the chairman of the Mississippi Legal Redress Committee of the NAAP. Charles and his wife Carolyn have been very active in their church and the community in Louisville, MS since they moved from Milwaukee in 1998. Charles became immediately involved in the NAACP and since he has been president, the branch has come alive and is on top of injustices in Louisville as well as in the state of Mississippi. Carolyn is presently the chairperson of the Women in the NAAP (WIN) and recently introduced to the branch Kwanzaa 2010.
(For more on this story, please see www.naacp.org).