Winona alderwoman under house arrest gains support in appeal of her case

After winning election to the Winona Board of Aldermen in 2021, Sylvia Clark was determined to be a good steward of the town’s finances and to keep her constituents abreast of the public business.

In a Black majority municipality where Fannie Lou Hamer and many other Mississippi Civil Rights workers had been beaten and arrested three decades earlier for trying to desegregate the town, Clark, now 55, said she held no inherent animosity against Winona’s white mayor Aaron Dees. She likewise sought a harmonious relationship with the two white aldermen who strongly supported the mayor on the Board, and with Ward 4 Alderman Charles Harris, of mixed parentage, a sometimes strong supporter of the mayor.

Winona’s population is 59 percent Black and 40 percent white, with a small number of other ethnic group members scattered among the two largest groups.

Clark had said early into her maiden term as alderwoman that she wanted “to make Winona work for everybody” and promised a better town government during her term in office. She had no idea of the massive roadblock that would be put in her way and would shatter her dreams of a better Winona. 

Despite her good intentions, Clark had a long list of questions about why money streaming in and out of the town’s coffers was so loosely managed without any regular system of accounting. There hadn’t been a complete audit of the town’s books in over five years, Clark complained. Furthermore, the park director held his position for nearly 12 years and had never had a cash accountability system.

Instead of getting answers to her questions, Clark wound up being arrested at a Board of Aldermen meeting in July 2023 after the mayor and his supporters charged Clark with being “disruptive to members of the Board, bystanders, and other officials conducting business.”

MONEY QUESTIONS

Clark and Ward 4 Alderwoman Linda Purnell questioned the handling of money received from the city’s parks and recreation events. Rather than placing the money in the city treasury, the parks and recreation manager said he kept the receipts in a safe at his house. 

It was apparent Clark had become an irritant for the mayor and his henchmen, and so their plan to have her removed from the Board was put in play, knowing they would soon be rid of her, a Clark supporter alleges. 

Mayor Dees designed and implemented a new rule that the aldermen should not question department heads directly. Their questions should be submitted to him, and he would question the department heads himself. 

“The mayor said that he would require written reports, which never happened,” Clark said. “What did happen was that the mayor created a plan to make sure that department heads would never have to answer questions from the two alderwomen. The mayor’s justification was that department heads might be asked a question in a Board meeting that they couldn’t answer. Therefore, the instructions were to bring all questions and concerns to him and he would take them to the department heads.” 

When she brought up the issue of completing an audit of all city finances at the July 20, 2023, regular Board of Aldermen meeting, the mayor kept telling her to shut up and to sit down, Clark said. 

Clark ended up being arrested that same day by the three police officers present in the meeting room. Usually, the chief of police would be the only police officer present at the city government meetings. Clark was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. 

On the following day, Clark said, the mayor filed a third charge against her, claiming she had committed a felonious assault on one of the three officers by groping his groin area. 

MISSING ACCOUNTS

There had been many rumors that the park activities were bringing in a good deal of money, yet the city could not report exactly how much was coming in. There was no revenue listed under the Parks and Recreation line item on the budget, and it was unheard of for alderwomen to dare question anything money related, Clark said. It was assumed that they should sign the Docket of Claims and not ask any questions.

When Clark announced at a Board meeting that the park and recreation revenues were being claimed by some employees, a secret cabal was organized against her and some park employees began confronting her on the phone about making false accusations at the Board meetings, she said.

Several raucous exchanges between the supporters of these park workers and Clark went on for a number of weeks. At one Board meeting, Clark asked them to “please be quiet” or she would have them removed from the meeting. 

Linda Purcell, whose 4th Ward sits at the very heart of Winona’s Black community, said she was also confronted by several parks and recreation employees who complained that the two Black alderwomen were falsely accusing them of stealing park revenues.

“They had to come at one of us, either Sylvia or myself,” Purcell said. “I had caught on to what they were doing. I was sitting in front of the mayor at the Board meeting. And I noticed that he and the police chief kept texting each other. And the chief kept going out of the door. They were up to something. And that day they had all the park and rec workers there. Aaron Dees had no control at all over the meeting. Ms. Clark was being confronted by the park director’s wife, who was seated behind her.”

Purcell said Clark told the man’s wife, “If you continue to keep talking to me like that, I will ask that you be removed from this meeting.”

“Aaron Dees spoke out so that everyone could hear, ‘No, she won’t be removed. You will be removed.’ And from that point on, Aaron began calling Ms. Clark a lie. And after that, he told her she needed to get out of the meeting,” Purnell said. 

MAYOR’S PLOT

Charles Hampton, Montgomery County NAACP Legal Redress Committee member, said that Mayor Dees had stirred up the conflict between Clark and the city’s park and recreation employees. 

“What the mayor did at the aldermen’s meeting was to bring in these people from the parks and recreation department so they could confront her at the Board meeting. And he was telling her to shut up. And finally, he had the police to arrest her. She’s accused of groping the policeman in the groin. The case should never have been taken to court.” 

Police Chief Roshaun Daniels was present at most Board meetings, but he never tried to intervene. The police chief had issues over ordering the mayor’s son-in-law, the Animal Control Officer, to shoot a number of dogs from the city’s dog pound. The Board voted to suspend both the police chief and the mayor’s son-in-law without pay for two weeks for shooting the impounded dogs. Dees later had the Board of Aldermen to reverse the pay deduction for both the police chief and his son-in-law. 

Clark said she had a stroke in 2023, months before the council meeting clash took place, and that it would have been impossible for her to have performed the act she was accused of, due to her inability to use her right arm and hand.

“This was in a room full of people,” she said. “All this is on video. Nobody had seen me assault him in any way. The officer didn’t make a sound. He didn’t say a thing.” 

Clark was booked and charged with a felony and was brought to trial April 11-12 of this year. 

“I had a court appointed lawyer,” she said. “It was because I couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer to defend me.” It took the jury of three Black men and 9 white women only 30 minutes to reach a guilty verdict on the second day of the trial. 

Clark was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum of five years. After intervention by the Montgomery County NAACP, her sentence was modified to three years under house arrest and two years suspended. She has to pay $80 for the court-ordered ankle bracelet and $50 monthly for court costs,

The conflict between Clark and the mayor might have begun as early as August 2021, when she was reported in the local news as telling Dees he needed to display “consistency” in his support of the Board.

RACIST PRACTICES

Sylvia Clark’s unequal clash with white authorities in a Mississippi Delta town is just one of many such legal issues brought to the nation’s attention in recent years. 

In 2023, civil and human rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson was convicted in a bench trial in Lexington of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, failure to comply, and blocking a public roadway for filming a traffic officer ticketing a driver. Those charges were dismissed in February 2024 upon appeal. Jefferson is the legal representative of a number of Holmes County residents who filed abuse and assault charges against the city’s police.

Rankin County police and sheriff’s deputies, operating under the name of the “Goon Squad”, pled guilty in August 2023 to 16 felony counts of violation of civil rights, criminal abuse, and assault on two Black men, shooting one of them in the mouth in the process. 

Another case tinged with racial bias in Winona saw accused Black furniture store employee Curtis Flowers freed in September 2020 after being subjected to six trials for the murder of his employer’s son. Flowers spent 26 years in prison while being put on trial. A team of lawyers from the Innocence Project, the Cornell Law School, and the Mississippi Center for Justice represented Flowers before both the Mississippi Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, and ended with the reversal of his conviction. “Curtis Flowers never should have been prosecuted, let alone been forced to stand trial six times,” his lawyers said.

Hampton says the problems in small Mississippi towns today are mostly rooted in the past. White political domination in majority-Black communities is problematic, he says. Injustices that happened years ago, years before the new civil rights laws were enacted in the state, are still present in many of these communities.

“What I’m finding out is that some of our people in the small towns still don’t know that they have the right to go to the courthouse, to go to the library,” Hampton said. “And by one means or another, we’ve got to educate those communities. But in order to do that, there’s got to be a push from the locals to bring in outside people to tell them how they brought about a change.”