The Ghosts of Mississippi (24 page)

The White Knights were a fast-growing group. To celebrate Beckwith’s release from jail and demonstrate their widespread appeal, members had burned crosses in nearly half of the eighty-two counties in Mississippi on the same April night.

White supremacists hadn’t been very organized in Mississippi until the trouble at Ole Miss. The first real modern Klan had crossed the border from Louisiana at Natchez back in 1962 or 1963. They called themselves the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were a nasty, violent group, but not much different from other Klans across the South. Like the others they held some public rallies and bickered among themselves over the usual things: money and power.

In February of 1964, while Byron De La Beckwith was still in jail, a hard-nosed group of Klansmen broke away from the Originals to form a new, secret Klan. Their aim was to act instead of talk. They called themselves the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. There were two hundred to three hundred men at the first meeting. By the end of the year there were somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand Klansmen in the state.

The imperial wizard of the new, secret Klan was a peculiar man from Laurel named Sam Bowers. Most rank-and-file Klansmen fit the stereotype of ignorant, sadistic, redneck laborers with a grudge against anyone who might be different. Bowers was an exception. He was the grandson of a four-term Mississippi congressman with a distinguished social pedigree. He had studied engineering at the University of Southern California and Tulane before joining the navy during World War II.

Bowers was thin, sandy-haired, ferret-faced, smart, charismatic, and crazy. He was a religious fanatic with a swastika fetish who had been observed in his living room saluting his German shepherd dog with a stiff-armed “Heil Hitler.” He never seemed to date women. The wizard lived with his business partner in the back room of their vending machine enterprise, Sambo Amusements, across the street from the Masonite plant in Laurel.

Sam Bowers was Beckwith’s sort of person, an archconservative soul mate. If they hadn’t known each other before the murder trials, there are people who will tell you they became close associates soon afterward. According to government sources, Byron De La Beckwith was officially sworn into the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi in a secret ceremony in Gordon Lackey’s living room in the summer of 1964.

After the trials had ended and the school year was over, Myrlie Evers moved with the children to southern California. She brought only her car, clothes, a few pieces of furniture, a Cable and Nelson piano, and a trunkload of letters and photographs and other mementos of her life with Medgar. She told friends that she chose the Los Angeles area because Medgar had once said that if he ever left Mississippi, that was where he would go.

Althea Simmons, the West Coast NAACP field secretary, had found a nice little beige-and-pink stucco house in a quiet neighborhood in the suburb of Claremont, thirty miles east of Los Angeles. The three-bedroom ranch had a low-slung roof with an Oriental flare, a eucalyptus tree in the front, and a lanai in the back. There were six colleges in the town. The public schools were excellent. The NAACP bought the property for $26,500 out of proceeds from the Evers Trust Fund, which had grown to $60,000, and turned the deed over to Myrlie.

The Everses were the only blacks in the neighborhood. In fact there were only five Negro families in the entire town of Claremont. Myrlie knew none of them, or anyone else in Claremont.

But even before she arrived, Myrlie had received congenial handwritten notes from some of her new neighbors. An editorial in the Claremont
Courier
singled her out for a hearty welcome.

The two older children enrolled at the previously all-white Mountain View Elementary School. Myrlie registered at Claremont College. She would get the degree that she had given up when she married Medgar Evers.

Myrlie found it ironic that she was now surrounded by white people. A hatred still smoldered in her even though she knew it was wrong. That was not, she told herself, what Medgar would have wanted. So she quietly began to shed her bitterness.

Just as Medgar would not abide her hatred, she knew he would not want her to grieve forever. He would want her to get on with her life. But that was something she could not yet do.

Sometimes, when she could no longer take the pressure at home, she would drive out into the unfamiliar, dry desert air, up into the San Bernardino Mountains to a chaparral-covered ridge. She could see a long way from there. She could be alone and think about Medgar and cry without the children seeing her cry. Then she could go back down the mountain and start another day.

A few months after the second mistrial Bill Waller told a reporter from the
New
York Times
that he would not attempt to try Byron De La Beckwith for a third time without new evidence. The case remained open but dormant. Gloster Current suggested, in a memo to Roy Wilkins, that the NAACP should “not let this go by the boards without some effort on our part to have this man put under peace bond to prevent him from doing further damage to the Negro cause.” But nothing was done. All the prosecutor could do was watch and wait for a new witness to come forward or for Beckwith to make a mistake.

Every working day after Medgar’s murder, Charles Evers went to the NAACP office on Lynch Street and sat at his brother’s desk, trying to think what to do. The tempting old idea of a Mississippi Mau Mau still circulated in his brain from time to time. It was a guaranteed way to get the white man’s attention, and it fit Charles’s general strategy in dealing with them: always give back to the white man what he gives you. If he smiles, meet him with a smile. If he kills, meet him with a rifle. Charles went so far as to stockpile some weapons. He thought about knocking off the biggest white racists in every county in Mississippi. It was a long list. But when Charles sat at Medgar’s desk, sitting below a large framed portrait of his brother, something would tell him, “That’s not the way.”

So instead of seeking revenge, Charles Evers carried on Medgar’s work. He drove around the state visiting NAACP branches. He encouraged voter registration. He schemed economic boycotts that would hurt the white man in his most sensitive place — his pocket. Charles put himself out front and took risks he shouldn’t have taken, such as driving alone at night and talking back to cops who were just looking for a reason to hurt him. He later said that he was hoping someone would try to put a bullet in him and that would be his excuse to take some of his enemies down with him. He had the survivor’s guilt.

Charles Evers did not work well with the national NAACP staff. He was accustomed to being his own boss, and he could never tolerate a New Yorker telling him how to run Mississippi. Roy Wilkins and Gloster Current, with their nearly religious attachment to procedure, were driven to bemused distraction by their renegade field secretary. Still there was no way to get rid of him without causing a scene. Charles had name recognition and power in Mississippi.

Charles also had cultivated a warm relationship with Robert Kennedy, who had stayed on as attorney general for Lyndon Johnson after John Kennedy’s assassination. The two men had met at Medgar’s funeral in Washington, and they formed a powerful, inexplicable bond. Bobby Kennedy called Charles often that summer, and when his brother was killed in November, Charles Evers went to his friend’s side. Charles backed Kennedy’s U.S. Senate campaign, even when the NAACP endorsed Kennedy’s opponent.

Charles Evers’s irascibility and essential conservatism surfaced frequently during his early days as field secretary. He clashed with other civil rights groups from the outset. Evers didn’t like the long-haired, scruffy college students who had taken over SNCC and were now dominating COFO. He was offended by a man who wore dungarees when he could afford better. The SNCC style of consensus leadership clashed with Evers’s authoritarian streak. And like the NAACP leaders, he didn’t want outsiders coming into the state and stirring up trouble they couldn’t handle. Charles knew what he was dealing with in Mississippi, and he knew what was going to happen when COFO announced a huge voter education project for the summer of 1964.

Dave Dennis and Bob Moses also knew what it meant when COFO invited more than a thousand fresh-faced and eager white college kids to Mississippi. The object of Freedom Summer, as it came to be called, was more than literacy classes and registration drives. It was to get the attention of the whole country and to involve the federal government in the civil rights business. Folksingers and governors’ sons, white boys and white girls ready to change the world, preferably from the best schools and the most prominent families, would attract attention the way no black Mississippians could. The organizers knew some of them were going to get hurt or worse. But the strategy worked in a way that would haunt Dennis for the rest of his life.

The state of Mississippi hired seven hundred extra highway patrolmen in anticipation of the summer “invasion.” Jackson’s mayor Allen Thompson responded with typical panic. He hired another hundred policemen. “This is it,” he said. “We are going to be ready for them…. They won’t have a chance.”

Like so many white boys in the South, Delmar Dennis grew up hearing the stories about the “good” Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction and how it saved the southern way of life from the evil Yankees. At his father’s knee he learned about the “second Klan” organized in the early twentieth century to fight back against the waves of immigrants and Catholics who seemed to be overrunning the country.

In the spring of 1964 Dennis was a twenty-four-year-old Baptist preacher with a wife and two children. He had what he felt was a healthy interest in politics. He believed in God, country, and a segregated Mississippi. The Klan was still a shadowy, romantic outfit to him. And so, when a friend from the local Masonic Temple asked Delmar if he wanted to come to a real-life Klan meeting, he was curious.

Three dozen men sat on folding chairs in an old army barracks outside Meridian. The meeting started when three robed Klansmen came in and led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. The new men were sworn to secrecy, then one of the Klansmen gave a lecture explaining what the Klan was all about. It was pro-American and anti-Satan — a fine Christian organization sworn to destroy communism and uphold segregation and the U.S. Constitution.

Nothing wrong with that, Dennis thought. All it took to join was a ten-dollar bill. Everyone seemed to be signing up. Delmar’s friend nudged him. “C’mon. Let’s do it.” He even loaned Dennis the ten dollars.

And so Delmar Dennis was sworn in as a citizen of the Invisible Empire, a White Knight of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. After the oath was over, the robed leader said, “All right, all you old members sit down.”

Only Delmar and three strangers were left standing. His friend grinned up at him.

The kleagle at the front of the room took off his mask and looked Delmar Dennis in the eye. “I want you to know,” said Edgar Ray Killen, a rawboned man nicknamed “The Preacher,” “that you ain’t joined no Boy Scout group.”

Even though he suspected it was a bad outfit, Delmar agreed to go to a meeting of the local Klan unit, or klavern. It was held at night down a lonely dirt road near the little town of Chunky. There were ten Klansmen in full white robes. The “exalted cyclops,” or klavern leader, was there with news from the imperial wizard. He had ordered a “number four” on Michael Schwerner, the CORE/COFO organizer in Meridian. What that meant, Dennis learned, was that the young, bearded New Yorker the local Klan boys called “Goatee” was marked for assassination.

On the night of June 16, 1964, a group of White Knights raided a church meeting in the Longdale community in Neshoba County, where COFO had arranged to set up a freedom school that summer. Several people were ambushed on the road and savagely beaten. Later that night the Mount Zion Methodist Church was burned to the ground.

The next Sunday, June 21, Mickey Schwerner and two other civil rights workers named James Chaney and Andy Goodman drove from Meridian to Longdale to visit the church and talk to the injured parishioners. On their way back to Meridian Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled over their station wagon and arrested Chaney, the driver, for speeding. All three young men were taken to the Neshoba County jail in Philadelphia, where they were locked up and fed a hearty home-cooked supper by the jailer’s wife. At about 10:00 p.m. Price returned and released the three after Chaney paid a twenty-dollar fine. He told them to get out of the county. For some reason they never made a phone call.

Deputy Price followed them out of town in his cruiser, letting them gain some distance.  Then, trailed by two carloads of Klansmen, he took off after them again. At the end of a wild chase down the backroads of Neshoba County, the station wagon finally came to a stop.  Price threw the boys into his patrol car, drove them down a deserted dirt road and handed them over to the Klan. Mickey Schwerner was the first to die. He told his killer, “I know just how you feel,” right before the man pulled the trigger and shot him in the heart. Goodman was next. James Chaney, who was black, struggled to get away, but he didn’t get far.

When Schwerner did not phone the COFO office at the usual time, the duty staffer alerted headquarters in Jackson that Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner might be in trouble. By Monday morning the three missing civil rights workers had become a national news story. Pressure was brought to bear in Washington and in Jackson. Everyone seemed to want this case solved quickly, from J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon Johnson to Mississippi’s commissioner of public safety.

At the same time white Mississippians started speculating out loud that the disappearances were probably a hoax, a publicity stunt. Governor Paul Johnson suggested that the boys might be hiding in Cuba, for all he knew.

On Tuesday afternoon, June 23, Choctaws living on a reservation north of Philadelphia reported seeing a torched car mired in the Bogue Chitto swamp. The FBI pulled it out of the muck. It was the missing station wagon, but Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were not in it.

The next day three buses full of sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station arrived to drag the snake-infested bog. They found nothing. Meanwhile federal investigators poured into the state to look for what were now assumed to be the killers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

Later that week a letter, dated June 24, arrived at Governor Paul Johnson’s office. It began,

The letter asked the governor why he was letting those “nigger-lover college students” into the state at all. It suggested “they ought to be publicly stoned, to say the least, ‘strung up & quartered’ as any other enemy of the people.” The letter was signed “a group of northerners who love you!”

If anyone had looked closely at the penmanship of the handwritten inserts crawling along the margins of the page and then compared it to samples of Byron De La Beckwith’s hand, they may have found a marked similarity. But apparently nobody did this.

The governor simply filed the letter away in a folder marked “Klan,” where it stayed, unread, for two decades.

With the specter of a third trial hanging over him, Beckwith kept a reasonably low profile all summer. He was still living in the Rebel Court Trailer Park with Willie and their teenage son. On that front things were going from bad to worse. The couple still drank too much, and when they drank they fought. Pistols were fired, and the police came. During their drunken brawls Willie would sometimes call Delay a murderer. “Did you kill him?” she would scream.

He’d scream back, “He’s DEAD, ain’t he?”