Sheldon Bray of Blue Springs said he took his wife and two sons to the “March to Save America” rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, because he wanted to show his boys the importance of making their voices heard.
“I don’t like people that complain about what’s going on, but you don’t participate and let your representative know,” Bray told Mississippi Today. Instead of “sending somebody up there to read your mind,” Bray said, people should “get involved.”
He said that in months before Jan. 6, he had worriedly watched the imposition of mask mandates and the rapid expansion of absentee voting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Politicians on both sides of the aisle had told us for years that our elections are being messed with and our elections aren’t secure,” he said. “And then we get to 2020, and all of a sudden, this election was perfect.” But he “just kept getting the feeling like an investigation was off the table.”
Four years after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bray and others among the 13 Mississippians charged in connection with the events of that day – even those who pleaded guilty – defend their actions, which they maintain were misconstrued by the media and misunderstood by a broad swath of the public. As some Mississippians served sentences over the past three years, a community emerged around them, hailing them as patriots and political prisoners. That community now considers the pardons a sign of victory.
In all, Trump granted sweeping clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack on the Capitol.
State Rep. Daryl Porter, Jr., D-Summit, called the pardons “a slap in the face to law enforcement.”
“I think it is a slap in the face to the Constitution. I think it’s a slap in the face to this country,” Porter said. “It sends a really poor message, that if something cannot go your way, you can thus break the law and then be let go, and not face any consequences for what you’ve done.”
A Hero’s Welcome in Oxford
Bray and five other Jan. 6 defendants spoke to about 50 people in a Lafayette County chancery courtroom in Oxford on Feb. 21.
Bray told the group there had been many times when he had to tell the stories of incarcerated Jan. 6 participants on their behalf, “but through the grace of God, I don’t have to do that tonight.”
The meeting was hosted by the Union County Republican Women’s Club, the Mississippi Conservative Coalition and My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, a group founded in 2022 to organize letters and donations for Mississippians charged in connection with the Capitol breach. The Oxford-based group is unrelated to a nonprofit of the same name that works to reduce health disparities, as well as an Obama Foundation program that supports boys and young men of color.
Lori Richmond Cyree, the founder of My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford and lead organizer of the event, described the community that formed around Jan. 6 defendants as “the heart and soul of this country.”
Cyree said she hoped the event would foster understanding by allowing people to hear from Jan. 6 defendants in person. “I just believe that if you get people together and they can have honest conversations, wonderful things can happen,” Cyree said.
Several speakers described their actions on Jan. 6 as part of a sea change that had shifted the country off a path they said was corrupt and authoritarian.
Mike Brock of Walls told the audience he never intended to partake in an insurrection – just to pressure Pence to delay lawmakers’ certification of the electoral vote count. Brock said he told federal agents that he felt he had no choice but to travel to Washington in January 2021.
“It’s disgraceful to all the people that have shed their blood for this country to not do nothing, not stand up and even raise a hand, to say, ‘Hey, I’m against this,’” Brock remembered telling the agents.
Brock, who was charged with obstructing and attacking law enforcement, violence on Capitol grounds and disorderly conduct, said he was pushed into a police line by “a whole football team” of running protesters after making his way from the rally to the Capitol. He was awaiting the announcement of his trial date when Trump pardoned him.
Thomas Webster of Oxford suggested that “deep state actors” used the public’s fear of the COVID-19 virus to make way for fraudulent election practices.
“Do you believe COVID was an accident?” Thomas Webster asked the attendees, some of whom responded, “No!”
“The timing of that was just unbelievable. And I believe it was intentional, designed to create that atmosphere to make everybody so afraid.”
Webster, a retired New York City police officer and Marine Corps veteran, was convicted of charges including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, a flagpole bearing the Marine Corps flag. He said that law enforcement officers outside the Capitol failed to use proper de-escalation methods and that he acted in self-defense after an officer provoked him. He was serving a 10-year prison sentence at the time of his pardon.
At the end of the event, the pardoned speakers gave Cyree and Marie Thomas, who also works with My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, plaques engraved with Mississippi Jan. 6 defendants’ signatures. “For Love of the Forgotten,” the plaques read.
Nancy Frohn, of the Union County Republican Women’s Club, cast Trump’s second term as a new beginning for the country.
“I think God let Joe Biden go into office to let us see how bad things could really get,” said Nancy Frohn of that group.
“We have to thank God every day that he has given our country a second chance.”
‘Every background you can think of’
The Jan. 6 defendants interviewed by Mississippi Today had a wide range of reasons why they were supporters of Trump and part of the broader “Trump community,” as Bray put it.
Thomas Harlen Smith of Mathiston said he never voted in a presidential election until 2020, and he didn’t like Trump until he ran for president. “I thought, he’s a rich guy, you know? I’m just a poor Mississippi guy.”
But Trump “stuck to what he said,” said Smith, and put the country’s economy first.
Smith said Trump’s policies before the COVID pandemic benefited small businesses like his excavation and construction company. “We owe it all to Trump, whether people like that or not,” he said.
“Even during COVID,” said Smith, “I still did fine.”
Smith was convicted of 11 charges in 2023, including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon and obstructing an official proceeding. Smith said he accidentally grabbed a police officer as he tried to pull protesters out of a clash with law enforcement on the West Terrace of the Capitol. He was serving a nine-month prison sentence when Trump issued the pardons.
James McGrew of Biloxi, who served in Iraq and suffered injuries and substance dependency as a result, said he began supporting Trump because of his positions on veterans affairs and in particular, the Veteran’s Choice program, which allowed veterans to choose their healthcare providers.
“All the VA did for me up until about 2016 was give me pills,” he said. It wasn’t until “the middle of 2016, 2017, that the VA started changing.”
The Trump administration expanded eligibility for the program in 2017, though it was first passed in 2014 during the Obama administration.
“I supported Donald Trump just for that reason alone – that he supported me.”
McGrew pleaded guilty in 2022 to “assaulting, resisting or impeding” law enforcement officers and was sentenced to 78 months in prison.
Some of the Jan. 6 defendants made it clear they did not consider themselves uncritical supporters of Trump. Brock said that he’s a Trump supporter at the end of the day. But “I got a lot of stuff that I could say against Trump,” he said, “that I wish he’d have done different, or would do different.”
Brock said that although Trump is “the man of the hour,” he thinks the president doesn’t “admit any of his mistakes” and pushed COVID restrictions and vaccines too hard during his first term.
As general principles, he believes in small government and worries about the role of money in politics.
“We don’t need the federal government to do nothing for us,” Brock said. “What we need, worse than anything, is somebody to get the federal government out of our business.”
And Brock said something needs to be done about corrupt politicians.
“They call bribing lobbying,” he said. “To me, that’s become the same thing.”
Bray said he had a distrust of billionaires, and Trump being a part of that club made him wonder whether one could really believe that he was for the people.
He also took issue with people seeing Trump as a savior. “There’s a lot of Trump voters that are like, ‘This will fix everything. We just gotta elect Trump, and everything’s fixed.’”
Bray was convicted in 2024 of obstructing law enforcement, and of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. He said he used a police riot shield to part crowds in the Capitol rotunda as he and his son were trying to leave, but he denied interfering with law enforcement. He recalled complying with officers’ instructions and offering his first aid kit to an officer who appeared injured. Before the Justice Department dropped his case last month, his sentencing was scheduled for February.
Bray spoke about the importance of engaging with politics, learning about representatives, tracking how they vote, and speaking up. “You can’t just flip on the TV for one hour each day and watch whatever your favorite brand of news is, and just take that and say, ‘Okay, I’m informed’,” Bray said.
“All the nationwide media, the legacy media companies, they portrayed us as terrorists, extremists, conspiracy theorists,” McGrew said. To a lot of people, he said, “we were monsters.” But he wants people to know that the people who participated in Jan. 6 aren’t a monolith. “We’ve had every background you can think of as part of this movement.”
Cyree believes that the way to make progress is for individuals to talk to each other directly.
“We’ve got this groupthink that needs to stop,” Cyree said. “Groupthink sometimes goes to group hate and group misunderstanding. If you can get one person to talk to another person, they can find out they have a lot more in common that unites them, than separates them.”
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