Biography
Clyde Kennard was the subject of a SNCC campaign demanding his release from Parchman after his efforts to enter the segregated Mississippi Southern College. The December 19, 1962 Student Voice describes him as an individually imprisoned chicken farmer, reports a seven-year sentence as an accessory in a chicken-feed theft prosecution, and says he had been imprisoned for about two years. That is a historical custody snapshot, not a precise admission date, completed total or current custody claim. The report also describes a separate 1959 reckless-driving arrest and fine after an application for admission, but supplies no custody endpoints for that earlier encounter.
Contemporary SNCC custody report
Clyde Kennard was the subject of a SNCC campaign demanding his release from Parchman after his efforts to enter the segregated Mississippi Southern College. The December 19, 1962 Student Voice describes him as an individually imprisoned chicken farmer, reports a seven-year sentence as an accessory in a chicken-feed theft prosecution, and says he had been imprisoned for about two years. That is a historical custody snapshot, not a precise admission date, completed total or current custody claim. The report also describes a separate 1959 reckless-driving arrest and fine after an application for admission, but supplies no custody endpoints for that earlier encounter.
Individual physical custody is established by the report; warrant, offense, arrest, trial and release dates are not interchangeable. Unnamed demonstrators are not assigned this person’s custody history. No race, gender, date of birth, age, portrait or organizational taxonomy value is inferred from a name, appearance or membership. The historical account is not a claim of present-day detention.
The Student Voice, volume 3 number 4, December 19, 1962, original pages 1, 4.
Payne reports that Governor Ross Barnett suspended Kennard’s sentence in 1963, after about three years actually imprisoned, and that Kennard died shortly after his release. The approximate three-year retrospective account is not converted into an exact numerical total. The release year is recorded without an invented month or day; the exact physical admission and final discharge day remain unknown.
Source: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 54.
