The Ghosts of Mississippi (6 page)

As soon as Beckwith heard about the Citizens’ Councils he signed right up. He was a big joiner. On a business resume he compiled thirty years later, Beckwith listed all of his affiliations, starting with the Boy Scouts. Along with his church groups, there was the 4-H Club, Knights of Pythias, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Masons, Knights Templar, Shriners, LeFlore County Hunting and Fishing Association, Greenwood Historical Society, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Sons of the American Revolution (he held state offices in that one), the NRA, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, and the Moose Lodge of Greenwood.

Yet Byron De La Beckwith would never admit that he had joined the Ku Klux Klan. In later years, after his name was linked with various hate crimes around the South, Beckwith would issue a standard non-denial when asked outright if he was a member: “I’ve been accused of it.” He often added that he found the group to be a wholesome outfit.

Back in the fifties there was not much of a Klan in Mississippi. There wasn’t any reason to have one. The state government was so radically segregationist, and the Citizens’ Councils, often called the white-collar Klan, were so firmly in control of business, that a Ku Klux Klan would have seemed redundant.

There was a group across the border in Louisiana called the Original Knights of the KKK, and some scattered members of old, traditional outfits like the Knights of the White Camellia in southern Mississippi. People joined out of family tradition more than anything else. It was a racist’s low-rent fraternity, with costumes and funny titles. All that would change after John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to Oxford in 1962 to integrate Ole Miss. But back in the halcyon fifties, a racist could be fairly secure without organized vigilante groups. The violence was ad hoc and applied as necessary.

By 1956 the State of Mississippi had organized itself to battle integration by creating the Sovereignty Commission. It had a broad mandate and a long leash. Nowhere in its charter were the words
integration
or
segregation
mentioned. The code words were
encroachment
and
sovereignty.

The law that the state legislature passed in establishing the commission read, in part, “It shall be the duty of the Commission to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi . . . from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof; and to resist the usurpation of the rights and powers reserved to this state.”

The original purpose of the Sovereignty Commission was to serve as a big PR agency, to educate the nation about the benefits of the southern system, and to lobby against outside interference. It quickly became much more than that. An investigative department was established, headed by L. C. Hicks, the former head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol (which had its own intelligence unit). A former FBI agent named Zack Van Landingham was hired to do the “investigations.” A two-year appropriation of $250,000 was set aside for the commission, some of which was quietly diverted to the Citizens’ Councils. People quickly caught on to the true nature of the Sovereignty Commission. It was Mississippi’s state spy agency.

Now here was an organization Byron De La Beckwith could get behind. He wrote to Governor Coleman on May 16, 1956, asking for a job as an investigator to help in “uncovering plots by the NAACP to intergrate [sic] our beloved State.”

The letter was written in a distinctive style that would be recognized by prosecutors and FBI agents in the years to come. Beckwith outlined his current obsession: “To me [ the fight for segregation ] is a life or death struggle and NOTHING ELSE IS MORE IMPORTANT AT THIS TIME! I. . . will tear the mask from the face of the NAACP and forever rid this fair land of the DISEASE OF INTEGRATion with which it is plagued with.”

He wrote that it would be a sin to squander his talents selling tobacco when his “useful energy may be expended in acquiring the information needed to thwart efforts of the power mad integration mongers.”

He mentioned in his resume his favorable war record, his happy home life, and that he was on the Membership Committee of the Greenwood Citizens’ Council (it later booted him out for his overly zestful recruitment techniques). Other skills that he felt qualified him for the job were “expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun — and — RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION!”

The letter was found many years later in Coleman’s papers after the governor’s death. The Sovereignty Commission sent Beckwith a form letter saying that it would consider his application. It is not generally known whether he was ever called upon to help out.

Gloster Current knew he had his man. E.J. Stringer and Aaron Henry had told him that Medgar Evers had what it took for the job. Right away he could see it too. Medgar Evers was not afraid. Besides, he had the most important qualification to be the first field secretary of the NAACP for Mississippi: he was available.

They met for the first time on October 29, 1954. Medgar drove to Stringer’s hometown of Columbus for an airport interview with Current, who was NAACP director of branches. After the Brown decision in May, Thurgood Marshall had suggested the NAACP increase its field staff to monitor compliance and gather affidavits for further school desegregation suits. Mississippi was a hard position to fill. It was essentially a suicide mission.

Gloster Current was a tall, dark-skinned man with a prominent nose and a dour countenance. He was an abstemious Methodist preacher, which somehow contradicted his previous claim to fame as the leader of a Detroit swing band called Gloster Current’s Nightingales. Current had joined the NAACP youth council back in the thirties and later assumed the leadership of the Detroit branch. In 1946 he had been hired as the director of branches by the legendary NAACP leader, Walter White.

Although almost all its foot soldiers were black, the NAACP was an integrated organization. In fact it had been founded by whites in 1909. By the beginning of World War II the association had some eighty-five thousand members. About 10 percent were whites, most of them occupying executive roles. There were nearly five hundred branches.

Policy was directed from the NAACP’s national office in New York, where a dozen or so salaried executives worked. They were all Negroes, including the secretary, who ran the operation. The president of the NAACP was traditionally a white man.

The NAACP’s weakness was its inability to attract working-class Negroes. It had a reputation as an elitist, bourgeois organization. All policy came from the New York office, which dictated goals and strategies to the branches. The branches were semiautonomous units that elected state leaders and met in state conferences.

The NAACP strategy was simple and focused: change the laws and then change society. In a world with so many injustices the organization narrowed its mission to attacking legalized racism in the forms of Jim Crow laws and school discrimination and promoting voting rights and new laws, such as antilynching legislation, to protect the lives of black people. The organization lobbied state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. The independent legal section fought in the courts. Every case was carefully selected to build a precedent. The association was opportunistic, and it was capable of sacrificing short-term gains for long-term goals. The NAACP never advocated violence — or even civil disobedience. It was, above all, a “respectable” organization. But this did not prevent NAACP branches, particularly in the South, from being labeled radical and subversive.

During the early years, when the NAACP had a near monopoly on black activism, it was directed by Walter White, an amazing, tireless crusader. White set the standard for NAACP endurance by working eighteen-hour days, often risking his own life to investigate hate crimes. What made White all the more remarkable was the way he looked.

With his blue eyes and fair skin and silky straight hair he could easily have slipped into the white world — “passed” — and abandoned his Negro identity. Instead Walter White, the son of an Atlanta postman, used his white skin to infiltrate southern towns to investigate lynchings.

Under White the NAACP grew strong and influential. He demanded and got complete loyalty from his New York lieutenants, and they in turn required the same from the field staff. Working for the association was more than a job; it was expected to be a way of life.

Gloster Current recognized that Evers was NAACP material. In his recommendation to Roy Wilkins, who had succeeded White as executive director, Current described him as “qualified, courageous, and impressive.” The association offered Evers the job for forty-five hundred dollars a year, as well as a secretarial job for Myrlie. They would have to move to the capital, Jackson.

Myrlie was not thrilled. Not only was this a dangerous job, but it meant the end of Medgar’s career at Magnolia Mutual. But there was no way to dissuade Medgar, and at least the job got them out of Mound Bayou.

Medgar accepted the offer on November 27. He was expected to begin work on December 15. On November 29, Medgar’s new immediate boss, Ruby Hurley, the regional director who was then based in Birmingham, wrote him a curt letter. She realized he was not being paid yet, but she needed a detailed report on the state of affairs in Mississippi, including documentation of intimidation by the Citizens’ Councils. She had to have it in two weeks, in time for a regional meeting in Columbus.

The pattern of demanding the impossible, yesterday, had begun. So had Myrlie Evers’s simmering resentment. She knew already she had met her most powerful rival.

Within two weeks Evers’s first official report was ready. It sizzled with the enthusiasm of a fresh recruit. He wrote about Mississippi’s “progress” in 1954, due to the “phenomenal . . . unequaled leadership” of the NAACP, as well as Dr. Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership.

It was encouraging to Evers that black leaders had defied Governor Hugh White at a state-sponsored meeting called to demonstrate Negro support for voluntary segregation.

“On that momentous day, July 30, 1954, 99 out of 100 Negro leaders before the Governor of Mississippi and his Legal Educational Advisory Committee . . . told him in no uncertain terms that they would have no part in any scheme to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on segregation in the Public Schools,” Evers wrote. The bad news was that the governor then decided to back a plan to abolish public education instead of desegregating schools.

The report outlined the ominous rise of the Citizens’ Councils, which Evers called “the up-town Ku Klux Klan.” By the end of 1954, according to T. R. M. Howard’s estimates, councils had been organized in thirty- five of eighty-two counties. The objective of the councils, Evers wrote, was to “keep the Negro in his place” by keeping him out of white schools, keeping the ballot out of his reach, and keeping him dependent on the white man’s dollar.

Since the time of Evers’s application to Ole Miss, public universities had begun requiring recommendations from five alumni. In addition, an amendment had been passed in the November state elections allowing circuit clerks the authority to reject anyone who registered to vote if he or she could not interpret the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile the Citizens’ Councils plotted to keep Negroes in low- paying jobs and to organize economic reprisals against troublemakers.

In his report Evers told the story of one black farmer who had owed five thousand dollars on his house and 120 acres to a bank in Hollandale. The president of the bank called him in and told him his note was due and that it would not be renewed. “We are not going to renew notes for any of you niggers in the Negro Council or the NAACP. We are going to use peaceful means but if that won’t work, we shall use other means,” the bank president said.

White employers who extended credit, called “scrip,” to their workers or sharecroppers to get medical or dental attention refused to give credit for Dr. Howard or E.J. Stringer or any other practitioner associated with the NAACP or the Regional Council. The intimidation extended to the local draft board. Dr. Howard, who was forty-seven years old, received a notice telling him that he might be reclassified as 1-A.

Evers concluded his presentation with a number of recommendations. The most important one was that the national NAACP set up a cash fund to loan money to Negroes who were under pressure from the banks. To a limited degree the association accepted his recommendations and made some funds available.

Evers’s first job for the national office would be to collect signed affidavits attesting to intimidation by the Citizens’ Councils. But first he was flown to New York City on New Year’s Day, 1955, and put through an intensive training course in NAACP history and procedures, everything from how to take a deposition to how to dress.

Medgar and Myrlie moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Jackson. Myrlie’s grandmother came to live with them to watch the babies while Myrlie worked as Medgar’s secretary at the NAACP office.

The organized backlash against integration in Mississippi grew stronger with each passing month. In April 1955 Ruby Hurley and Medgar Evers traveled together through the Delta on a fact-finding mission. Hurley was a tall, elegant single woman with a taste for good clothes and fine Scotch. She smoked long cigarettes. She was utterly fearless and totally devoted to the NAACP. Whenever there was a crisis in Mississippi or anywhere in the Deep South, Hurley would wade right into it. She and Medgar Evers would drive this route again and again during the long, bloody months that followed.

Like foreign correspondents in hostile territory, Evers and Hurley discreetly met with Negroes in the Delta and recorded their statements: Fit Simmons once hauled wood for a sawmill owned by a member of the local Citizens’ Council. The sawmill owner had threatened to repossess Simmons’s truck if he didn’t quit the NAACP and remove his name from the voter rolls. The truck driver still owed $800 on a $2,200 note. Simmons did what he was told, but the white man took his truck anyway. There were other incidents: Just before Hurley and Evers arrived, the windshields of ten cars had been smashed outside an NAACP branch meeting. About that time, a white woman had told some Negroes that “the Yazoo river was muddy now, but it would be muddier than that when some of their bodies were thrown in.” Tensions had been building in the small town of Belzoni since 1953, when a group of local black businessmen filed a complaint with the Justice Department that Sheriff Ike Shelton was preventing Negroes from voting in Humphreys County.

A voter had to pay two dollars a year for the right to register; blacks were forced to pay for two years to qualify. But when they showed up to vote, their receipts were torn up in front of them. The money was never refunded. No black had managed to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, but there were still about four hundred Negroes on the register.

Evers and Hurley dropped in on Gus Courts, who ran a small grocery store and owned a bus that transported laborers to the cotton fields. He told them some frightening stories.

Courts had been the first president of the new Belzoni branch of the NAACP, chartered on February 8, 1954, with a membership of sixty- four. That summer a branch of the Citizens’ Councils was founded in a town just a few miles west of Belzoni. Courts found himself at ground zero of the white backlash. The newly organized planters and local businessmen lined their sights on the nearest NAACP fledgling branch.

Belzoni, with about four thousand residents, a third of them white, was virtually run by the newly formed Citizens’ Council. Its first target was Courts. He was a big man who talked slow and thought fast, though, like most Delta blacks of his generation, he could barely read and write. Soon after the NAACP chapter was formed, Courts was called into the local bank for a meeting. The bank president wanted to see the NAACP books. When Courts refused, he was told that if he wanted to keep his credit, he’d better resign from the NAACP.

“We will tie up your bus and tie up your store,” the man said. “We will run you out of town.” Before long the wholesaler who sold him groceries cut off his supplies. His landlord evicted him from his store. And he started getting death threats.

In August 1954 Gloster Current had received a sad, painfully typed letter, special delivery, from Gus Courts: “This is to nofie you. that thay have fosted me under preasher to resine as preaident of Belzoni branch NAACP.

“And thay are so putting preasher on other members of the branch Thay say we cant oprate hear.

“Any mail sent to me pleas send in A plain Envelope and leave NAACP of. I have a reason for this.

“Yours truely Gus Courts.”

The grocer managed to find another location for his store, across the street in a building owned by another NAACP member. But the harassment didn’t end. And Courts didn’t give up. When the man who took over Courts’s position at the local NAACP branch left town, Gus Courts resumed his job as president.

Courts told Evers and Hurley that the planters were pressuring sharecroppers to boycott NAACP-connected businesses and, more serious, were forcing the ones who were registered to vote to tear up their poll tax receipts or face eviction. By then the number of qualified black voters in Humphreys County had dropped from four hundred to about ninety-one. All Ruby Hurley and Medgar Evers could do was write down the details and report back to New York, hoping to secure some financial relief for the people of Belzoni.

Reverend George Lee also ran a grocery store, just like his friend Gus Courts. The fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was active in the NAACP, and he was having the same financial problems as Courts. He also had been told to take his name off the voting rolls.

On Saturday afternoon. May 7, 1955, Courts stopped by Lee’s store. Lee told him a white man at the courthouse warned him to take his name off the list.

“I’ve got a funny feeling,” George told Gus.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” Court asked.

“No, I’m not afraid.”

Around midnight that same night Alex Hudson was sitting on the porch of a house on Church Street, in the black section of Belzoni. He was talking to his girlfriend, Angie Wellsby, when he noticed a black Buick pass slowly by the house, followed by a two-tone Ford or Mercury convertible. The second car, with the top up on a clear, warm night, was gaining speed, trying to catch up with the Buick. Then Hudson heard what he thought was a loud backfire. He looked up and saw the convertible pull next to the Buick. He saw the muzzle flash as a second shot rang out. The Buick veered off the road and crashed into the house of a neighbor, Catherine Blair.

Blair heard the first shot and got out of bed to look out the window at whoever was fighting. It was Saturday night, after all, so she figured the neighbors were at it again. From the window she saw the convertible and some white men in it. Then there was a flash and an explosion. Moments later Reverend George Lee’s Buick crashed through her bedroom wall, knocking her house off its foundation and crushing the bed where she had slept.