Activist Leroy Clemons stresses the importance of history preservation on shaping communities to MLK students
- Samantha Siedow
- Mar 13
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 13
By: Samantha Siedow
March 10, 2025
Philadelphia, Mississippi, a small town with a population of around 7,000, has long been defined by its painful past. Thanks in part to Leroy Clemons, president of the Neshoba County NAACP, the community is confronting its history and reshaping its future.
Historians sometimes refer to Mississippi as “the last frontier” of the Civil Rights Movement due to its violent enforcement of segregation and fierce resistance to change. Philadelphia is infamous for the murder of three civil rights activists on June 21, 1964.
Clemons took University of Minnesota MLK 3000 students on a guided tour to sites relevant to the triple-murder on day three of the 2025 immersion trip to learn about how the area's history has shaped its present.
Ku Klux Klan members led by Edgar Ray Killen, including the Neshoba County deputy sheriff, kidnapped, tortured and killed Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, both Jewish men from New York, and James Chaney, 21, a local Black man, who were in town to register Black voters during the Freedom Summer campaign.
Mississippi remained home to the most organized Ku Klux Klan activity in the nation in 2017, with five active groups, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.
The Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner murders gained national attention and an extensive federal investigation in large part because two of the men involved were white, according to Clemons.
According to Clemons, the Klansmen said they had learned from Emmett Till’s murder and buried the bodies instead of dumping them in a river. Before police found the civil rights workers’ bodies, they found nine Black men’s bodies in rivers around the murder site.
“The only way they didn't find more is after they found those nine, they stopped looking,” Clemons said.
Mississippi refused to prosecute any of the 20 Klan members involved, but the federal government convicted seven, all of whom served six or fewer years. These were the first-ever convictions for the killing of a civil rights worker in the state.
Brianna Jackson, a 20-year-old sociology of law, criminology and justice second-year from Brooklyn Park, said walking through locations relevant to the murders as Clemons detailed their history made her aware of how odd it was that the city seemed so normal.
“What always blows my mind is that I'm standing on ground that someone lost their life on,” Jackson said. “And then looking around, and it was just a forest. It was just like in the middle of nowhere, just a random forest. And it had so much significant impact.”
Jackson said she tries to think of a question for every speaker the class engages with to make sure she’s actively appreciating the opportunity to speak with people so significant to civil rights history.
She asked Clemmons how to organise and be heard by people in positions of power.
“I'm standing in front of history,” Jackson said. “These are people who lived through it, people who experienced it first hand, so I have to take advantage as much as I can.”
Clemons co-founded the 2004 Philadelphia commission to push for justice in the Freedom Summer murders. The largest undertaking was the conviction of Ku Klux Klan leader Killen for organising the murders.
Killen was convicted in 2005, 41 years after the murders, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He died in 2018 while incarcerated.
“We had always told people that it was not about the conviction of an 80-year-old man,” Clemons said in an interview. “It was about bringing our community together and changing the narrative of how people viewed our community.”
Clemons, who was born in 1962, did not learn about the triple murder until he was in 8th grade, which he attributes to the community not knowing how to productively talk about its painful history.
“This is part of my history, and it's part of the history of my city that I love and a place that I grew up in, a place that nobody talked about,” Clemons said.
Clemons told students making civil rights history more accessible to young people is an important step in healing generational trauma and preventing history from repeating itself. His efforts led to the passage of a landmark 2010 bill mandating civil rights curriculum in Mississippi’s K-12 public schools, the first of its kind in the country.
"Kids in these communities now are learning about their history, their local civil rights history, from what happened in Mississippi to what happened in their own hometowns," he said.
Second-year computer science major Maimun Hussein, 20, said one of the reasons she joined the MLK class was to unlearn the single-minded perspective she has grown up hearing from white teachers and curriculums that prioritised white history.
“Today it was like I was walking through history, and I was getting the firsthand experience from people who lived at that time and their perspective,” Hussein said.
Although Hussein knows she was taught a narrow version of history, she said hearing firsthand how real events differ from recorded events was shocking.
“If you say the word history, it sounds like it's almost a long time ago,” she said. “Like the people that went through it are not living. And I just love to see that these people are alive, thriving in their communities.”
Clemons said since founding the Neshoba Youth Coalition in 2010 to educate Philadelphia youth about history, Philadelphia has become one of the safest cities in Mississippi.
Philadelphia is safer than 71% of U.S. cities, according to the FBI’s 2023 Crime in the Nation report. Violent crime rates are 1 in 1,384 in Philadelphia, compared to 1 in 493 in Mississippi.
Out of the 2,500 students he’s worked with so far in the Neshoba Youth Coalition, Clemons said not a single boy has gone to jail, teenage pregnancy is down and high school graduation rates have risen 25%.
“I am extremely proud of everything that we've been able to accomplish, but I'm more proud of these young people,” Clemons said. “Now they see that their lives can be different, and they don't have to live under the shadow of what happened here in 1964. They can create their own story, and they've got a clean slate to do it on.”
Building bridges to create change
Clemons’ remembers growing up in a time marked by forced desegregation in Mississippi. He was the first Black student to integrate his local middle school once Mississippi integrated in 1970, 16 years after the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs Board of Education that ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Clemons said the friendships formed between white and Black students through integration lessened racial divisions. Clemons took this as a lesson that real change happens only when relationships are formed.
“When you build relationships, it tears down walls,” he said. “It revives empathy. You can put yourself in the shoes of someone else, and you can see what they're going through.”
Clemons told MLK students that to create change in their communities, they need to focus on deepening relationships within their communities, coordinating with like-minded people and creating actionable plans.
“Politicians care about who’s going to vote,” Clemons said. “If you want to change things in your community, get on the ground. Get on the ground. Organize and go vote. And watch things change.”
The next step for Clemons? Running for mayor.
Current Mayor James Young, the first Black Mayor of Philadelphia who Clemons called a long-time friend, is part of the living history Hussein described.
Young said despite negative reactions from some community members and politicians when he first decided to run for mayor in 2009, change wasn’t going to happen unless someone stepped up to try.
“Coming in, there was a lot of people saying Philadelphia is not ready for a Black guy. I chose to differ and work real hard, home to home, house to house,” Young said.
Running against Rayburn Waddell, a white, three-term incumbent, Young was prepared to lose. If he had lost within a margin of 100 votes, he said he had already planned to run again. But Young won, and Philadelphia swore in its first Black mayor 45 years after the brutal triple-murder that shocked the country.
According to Young, students need to remember change requires having a clear vision and consistency. He believes the exciting social movements in recent years have died down because they didn’t have a clear direction.
“Just because you march a few weeks, you think they're going to change anything? They’re not,” Young said. “Consistency is what changes things. You continue to hammer at the things that you say are wrong by being right in your approach.”
Young said approaching a situation “right” means avoiding violence or hatred—not for the sake of the prejudiced or disagreeing person, but to maintain their own dignity.
“You owe it to yourself not to be like that. What they're doing, that's them, but I owe it to me to not give it back the way you're giving it to me,” Young said. “You can't fix them. You can't fix them by confronting them. That's where I think we make the mistake. We try to fix them.”
