Parting the Waters (90 page)

Unfortunately for the Justice Department, Doar wound up in the Federal District Court of Judge Harold Cox, the Kennedy Administration's first judicial appointment in the South. Cox was the son of the sheriff in Sunflower County, home of his powerful sponsor, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland. As a segregationist who was to make himself notorious with remarks from the bench in which he called Negroes “baboons,” he was not favorably disposed toward the Justice Department's audacious motion. He denied it, whereupon Burke Marshall flew to Atlanta to seek review by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There the issue was technical. Under federal rules of procedure, the denial of a motion for a temporary restraining order was not considered “final” enough to merit judicial review. Marshall, knowing that the issue would be moot before a hostile Judge Cox got around to hearings on a permanent injunction, argued that this extraordinary situation justified a reversal. In what became a pattern of the civil rights movement, two Eisenhower judges agreed with the Justice Department against one of the Administration's own Democratic judges. They issued an order that effectively forestalled Hardy's state trial. Mississippi appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Two of the Civil Rights Division's staff lawyers returned to Washington with a scouting report. One of them was a protégé of John Doar, from the same hometown in Wisconsin, and his first field trip affected him no less deeply than had Doar's own trip to Tennessee a year earlier. Around the courthouse in Jackson and on visits to Tylertown, McComb, and Liberty, Doar's friend felt the climate of fear as a prickly sensation under his collar. Like Doar, he drove out to Negro country churches to meet those making the registration complaints, and he was moved by the courage of those who persevered without protections. His dominant impression of Moses was that he was hauntingly peaceful.

Doar flew to Mississippi to investigate for himself. On September 24—a Sunday when King was introducing the illustrious Mordecai Johnson as special guest preacher at Ebenezer—Doar drove out to Steptoe's farm and met Moses in person, some five weeks after accepting his collect call from the Pike County jail. What he first noticed were the still-unhealed head wounds from the Caston beating. Because the FBI report on the beating had made no mention of cuts or stitches and had included no photograph, contrary to Bureau procedure in cases of substantial injury, Doar had assumed that Moses had suffered only minor bruises. And because Moses, for all the detail in his letters about the incident, never had set forth the gory specifics, Doar had suspected that Moses as the plaintiff in the case had understandably exaggerated the seriousness of a minor assault. Sight of the fresh scars caused Doar to reevaluate the quality of the FBI reporting as well as his estimate of Moses' character.

After listening to long, careful reports from Moses and Steptoe, Doar was convinced that there were grounds for their forebodings of further violence against voter registration workers in Amite County. Steptoe explained the reasons why he felt particularly menaced by Representative Hurst and the Caston family. He feared reprisals against himself and two other local farmers. One of them, Herbert Lee, had volunteered on occasion to drive Moses around the county. Lee, like Steptoe, had nine children, but he was a younger man, still actively farming. His wife had never attended the registration classes and was fearful for her husband. Lee, a small, wiry man, had attended many of the classes, but he said little and had not yet attempted to register. In trying to account for the threats against Lee, Moses could only speculate that whites were angry because they had seen Moses riding in Lee's car. Or possibly they were angry because Lee had once arrived late for a registration class and come upon a group of whites taking down the license numbers of cars parked outside the church. Moses had reported Lee's discovery to the Justice Department and the FBI, and the word had either seeped back into Amite County from there or spread from someone who recognized Lee at the church. Somehow, Moses reported, Herbert Lee was being singled out for resentment as a detective or “spy” for the Negroes.

Doar took these reports seriously enough to ask Moses and Steptoe to take him out to Lee's farm for a talk. Lee was not there, however, and Doar had to leave for Washington that night. When he walked into his office at the Justice Department the next day, Doar found a phone message that Herbert Lee had been murdered.

The message was from Moses. With SNCC chairman Charles McDew, he had been working at the Masonic Temple that morning when a call came in from Dr. Anderson, the man who had sewed up Moses' head wounds. In a chilled voice, Anderson reported that he was at a McComb funeral home with a mysterious corpse, which had lain amid a crowd for some hours in the parking lot of a cotton gin over in Liberty. No white or Negro in Liberty would touch it. When the McComb hearse arrived from across the county line to fetch the body, summoned by a cryptic message from Amite County authorities, no one at the scene dared to disclose even the victim's name. These circumstances led Anderson to suspect that it was someone from the voter registration classes. Moses soon identified the body as Herbert Lee. It lay on a table with a single bullet wound in the left temple.

At the funeral, the new widow Lee left her children to walk up to Moses and McDew, beating her chest in anguish and shouting, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” Her cries echoed in the cold misery of Moses' reflections. He labored to reach a philosophical perspective on his guilt, acknowledging that he was a “participant” in the killing, in the sense that it probably would not have occurred without his registration classes. Still, Moses could not convince himself that he should have acted differently unless he also accepted the reality of Amite County as permanent—that Negroes could always be gunned down with impunity for showing interest in the ballot.

There was no doubt about the identity of the actual killer. Representative E. H. Hurst, driving Billy Jack Caston's pickup truck, had followed Herbert Lee to the cotton gin and pulled up beside him. Lee slid away from Hurst, across the front seat of his own pickup and out the passenger door. Hurst ran around the trucks to confront him. According to Hurst, Lee then moved to attack him with a tire iron, whereupon Hurst struck Lee on the head with his pistol, which went off accidentally. Sheriff Caston and the town marshal arrived quickly on the scene and said they found a tire iron under Lee's body. Two eyewitnesses, one white and one Negro, told the same thing to a coroner's jury that same day, after which the killing was ruled an act of justifiable homicide.

Moses finally located the Negro witness at a small house in the country. Louis Allen was a forty-two-year-old logger with a seventh-grade education. He had a wife and three children; a fourth child had died of what Allen described as epilepsy. During World War II service in New Guinea, he had come down with ulcers, which had made the arduous work of cutting and hauling raw timber difficult ever since, but Allen did better with logs than with farming. Because he lacked capital and access to any of the three Negro lawyers in Mississippi, Allen relied on white men to “fix up the papers” for his equipment loans and to buy or lease timber tracts for him to cut. He had logged for Mr. Jewel Sugarman until Sugarman broke his back. Now he was logging for Mr. Roy Newman. His lawyer was Mr. Joe Gordon.

Allen related such details about himself openly, and was equally frank with Moses about what he had seen at the cotton gin. Lee didn't have a tire iron or anything else, he said. Lee had told Hurst that he wouldn't talk to him as long as Hurst had a gun out, and Lee had jumped out of his truck near where Allen had been standing. Hurst then had run around the truck and shouted, “I'm not playing with you this morning!” Then he shot Lee in the head from a few feet away. Allen had testified about the tire iron because that's what he was told to say, and he went along to protect his own life and his family. But he hated to lie about Lee, whom he knew to be an upstanding Negro farmer in the county. Allen told Moses what he had told his wife: “I didn't want to tell no story about the dead, because you can't ask the dead for forgiveness.”

Moses had no doubt that Louis Allen was telling the truth, just as he knew that the prudent Herbert Lee would never have dreamed of attacking one of the county's most powerful white men, in public on a Monday morning. Yet Moses also realized that truth was worth little in obtaining justice in the Lee homicide. Trapped between victim and executioner, Moses realized that to push Allen forward might be to kill him. Yet to counsel silence would be to add his own complicity to the injustice of the Lee homicide.

From Washington, John Doar sought to obtain evidence that did not depend on the credibility of human witnesses, Negro or white. “Please examine Lee's body and photograph the wounds before burial,” he instructed the FBI on the day after the murder. “…Perhaps the angle of the bullet's entry and the nature and location of the powder burns will confirm or refute the witnesses' descriptions.” Dr. Anderson told Moses there were no powder burns at all. Confirmation of this fact would provide objective grounds for opening a full FBI investigation. There was no FBI office in the state of Mississippi, however, and by the time Doar's instruction got from FBI headquarters down to the New Orleans office and from there to the lone FBI agent in Natchez, the corpse was buried. Doar never received an official report on Lee's wounds. This left him with no independent evidence that Lee's killing was anything but the routine dispatch of a crazed Negro, as it was presented in the local newspaper.

Steptoe continued to let Moses stay with him in his house across the highway from the Hurst home, but Moses felt uncomfortable there because of the guns. The Steptoe farm always had been a minor arsenal, and Steptoe had a reputation as a magician who knew how to conceal an extra pistol or two. Now, after the Lee murder, Moses kept finding new guns under pillows and in bedside tables. The atmosphere was thick with the anticipation of a frontier shoot-out. Moses, not wishing to impose his own nonviolence on Steptoe, nor to have his own presence ignite the violence, retreated briefly to McComb. The aftershock of the Lee murder was pervasive there too, and it added to the tension that was building over the continued jailing of the four young sit-in students.

Moses had much to answer for with C. C. Bryant, who was upset that the civil rights campaign had strayed so far from the accepted plan. Bryant reminded him tersely that he had been invited to register voters in McComb. Now a farmer was dead in the wilderness of Amite County, and the McComb registration campaign was stalled anyway, because of the sit-ins. Moses confessed to Bryant's charges, but he exercised little control over events. On the morning of October 4, two of the newly released sit-in students returned to high school only to be informed by the august principal, Commodore Dewey Higgins, that they were suspended from classes because of their scrape with the law. This announcement caused an explosion of resentment against Higgins. Negro principals in segregated school systems were towering figures who controlled scarce, precious commodities such as teaching jobs, diplomas, and college recommendations. Often they converted the school system into an economic fiefdom as well—personally collecting the ticket receipts at school sporting events, and other emoluments—under franchise from the white school boards, on the condition that they stifle racial agitation in the schools. When Principal Higgins turned Brenda Travis and Ike Lewis away that morning, rebellion swept through the classrooms. More than a hundred students walked out behind them.

The students made a spontaneous march to the voter registration office at the Masonic Temple. Several of the Freedom Riders still in town urged them to mount a protest march that would draw attention to the injustice of the Lee killing as well as the sit-in punishments. Moses and SNCC chairman McDew spoke against the march, arguing that the suspensions were probably a pro forma move by Higgins, which could be revoked quietly in a few days, but that a march would flush out more vigorous opposition from the whites. Such caution was overwhelmed by the general enthusiasm of the students, however. When they resolved to march to the Pike County Courthouse in Magnolia, Moses and McDew felt obliged to go along in support.

They set off that afternoon for Magnolia, eight miles away, but they had barely passed the city limits when the late hour and the bleak highway ahead caused them to turn back toward the McComb city hall. They arrived on its steps to be greeted by a crowd of whites that had gathered to discuss where the Negroes were going. With police and bystanders looking on, gazing at the makeshift placards, a student spokesman went to the top step and began to pray. Police officers interrupted his first words with warnings that such prayers were not authorized on the steps. They arrested the student when he persisted. Another student then stepped up to pray and was arrested after the first few words—then another and another, including Brenda Travis, in what became a lengthy ritual. The police officers, apprehensive of a riot, finally cut short the procedure and placed the remaining marchers under mass arrest.

As they moved off toward the jail, several civilians darted in to attack Bob Zellner, a SNCC student newly arrived from Atlanta. As the only white person among the marchers, Zellner was a conspicuous target. One man was choking him before Moses and McDew reached his side and pressed themselves against him in an ad hoc maneuver of nonviolent protection. They absorbed some of the blows meant for him. When the attackers tried to pull them out of the way, McDew clutched Zellner around the chest and Moses clung to his waist. Zellner dropped his Bible, trying to hold on to the metal railing of the city hall steps. One attacker reached over the railing to gouge his eyes, and another kicked him squarely in the face. Knocked down in a heap, the three of them were dragged and kicked down the steps until policemen came up to shoo away the attackers. Then the officers jailed the SNCC trio along with 119 students.