Peggy is no stranger to suffering for telling the truth. She saw her mother beaten until her eyes were hanging out of her head due to her mother's desire to tell the truth about the Emmett Till murder. Peggy testified against the killer in the Medgar Evers case and has suffered greatly for that.
Much of her story can be found in the book, My Mother's Witness authored by Carolyn Haines. Buy the Book
This powerful "as told to" memoir chronicles the lives of Peggy Morgan and her mother, Inez, as they struggle to raise their families in Jim Crow, and after, rural Mississippi. The women, both white, with little money, education or social support, live and almost die under the terrorizing reigns of alcoholic, abusive husbands. What's more, amid the emerging civil rights movement, Peggy's father and husband both become white supremacists who force Peggy and Inez to keep deadly secrets. Peggy's father commits Inez to a mental institution when she threatens to reveal facts about the racially motivated 1955 murder of black teenager Emmett Till. Then, in the late '60s, Peggy overhears her husband's business associate confess to the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Each woman is burdened by the knowledge. Inez takes it to the grave, but Peggy comes forward 31 years later to testify against and help convict Byron De La Beckwith. Clearly, this account's pull is the evolution of social conscience. But the strength of the writing is in the personal details rather than the political ones. Novelist Haines (Crossed Bones; etc.) nimbly illustrates the minutae of rural Mississippi life: what it's like to pick rows of cotton while hauling an infant, or what the lunch crowd talks about at Charmaine's Cafe, in Greenwood, Miss., where 16-year-old Peggy works as a waitress. Those expecting courtroom drama will be disappointed, as only three short chapters focus on Peggy's decision to testify, and Haines covers the trial via verbatim excerpts of Peggy's testimony. Still, this is powerful storytelling.
She was portrayed by Sarah Hunley (as a witness in the Beckwith trail) in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi directed by Rob Reiner and starring Alec Baldwin, James Woods and Whoopi Goldberg. Now she can keep quite no longer about another landmark case. She says that there was a conspiracy to kill Michael Donald and some of the conspirators have never been charged and prosecuted. On March 20, 1981 the 19 year old African American was murdered by two Ku Klux Klan members in Mobile, Alabama. It took Special Agent Moss Stack and more in the FBI to get the 2 prosecutions, she believes. The murder is sometimes referred to as the last recorded lynching in the United States. With evidence to prove what she says is true she's going public for the first time to bring justice to this case. It's true that 2 convictions and one other charged but never convicted stands; She believes the case is still not solved. Knowing there will be consequences she looks across the road from her house and sees KKK on a tree, put their to warn her to keep quiet.
Leutrell Osborne Sr., a'Drum Major for Justice' and advocates for
African Americans who have been victims of hate crimes and violence, is using his experience as a 26 year a former CIA Case Officer and Counter Intelligence expert to look into this case. He doesn't know what will be found but knows that justice is worth the effort, even if delayed.
Leutrell (Mike) Osborne Sr. Buy the Book
Author: Black Man in the CIA