The Ghosts of Mississippi (7 page)

George Lee crawled out of the wreckage and collapsed, blood gushing from a ragged hole where his lower jaw used to be. The neighbors who crowded around loaded him into a passing cab, but he died before he reached Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.

Dr. A. H. McCoy, the new NAACP state president, arrived in Belzoni the next day, in time to be present for the coroner’s inquest into Lee’s death. Every member of the coroner’s jury belonged to the local Citizens’ Council. Although McCoy and two black physicians brought in by Lee’s widow examined the body and found powder burns on the minister’s face and lead pellets in his head, the jury ruled the death accidental.

McCoy sat in astonishment as the white men discussed their theories of how it could have happened.

“A scantling could have punched him in the jaw and killed him where he crashed into the house,” said one.

“He could have died from shock.”

“The noise which sounded like a gun could have been tire blowouts.”

The lead pellets in Lee’s mangled jaw, they decided, must be fragments from his dental fillings.

When McCoy, who was a dentist, pointed out that lead is not used in fillings, one of the jurors remarked, “We will have to find the dentist who filled his teeth to see if he used lead, if it is proved that this is lead.”

The newspapers were already calling the death an “odd incident,” but police found a bullet in the tire of Lee’s wrecked car, and they were toying with a new theory. Reverend Lee, said Sheriff Ike Shelton, might well have been shot “by a jealous nigger.” Police hinted at rumors, which no black in Belzoni had ever heard or believed, that there was “another woman” involved.

Back in New York Roy Wilkins and Gloster Current were reading about Lee’s death in the newspapers and placing increasingly angry calls to Jackson and Birmingham.

On the night Lee was murdered, Medgar Evers was traveling in southern Mississippi, trying to drum up NAACP members in rural communities where there were no phones and no electricity. It would be days before Evers checked in at a prearranged contact point and found himself in the middle of the first crisis of his career in the NAACP.

When he finally heard the news, Evers raced back to Jackson, where he met Ruby Hurley. She hadn’t heard about the killing until Monday morning, when she arrived back in Birmingham from a conference in Florida. Their job now was to get the facts, report to New York, and alert the press.

By the time Evers and Hurley arrived in Belzoni to investigate the shooting, a number of the terrified witnesses had scattered or gone into hiding. Alex Hudson had fled to a relative’s house in East St. Louis. Neither official questioned anyone until Lee’s funeral on Thursday, May 12.

As a bureaucracy the national NAACP organization could rival the most ossified federal agency. Wilkins and Current applied an almost religious devotion to decorum, chain of command, and centralized decision making. Blood and teeth could be splattered from Belzoni to Birmingham, but no steps would be taken until a neatly typed report appeared on Wilkins’s desk in Manhattan.

On Friday the 13th, the day after the funeral, Ruby Hurley phoned in her first report to Gloster Current. Because she was afraid an operator might be listening, Hurley vaguely described the witnesses she and Evers had located and threats that had been made against Lee. Because she was the ranking NAACP staffer on the scene, Hurley was taking heat from the national office for the clumsy investigation. She used the opportunity to divert the blame to the new recruit, Medgar Evers.

For the first and only time, someone accused Medgar Evers of being afraid. Hurley complained that Evers seemed relieved that a mass meeting had been canceled the night before the funeral. She also questioned Evers’s continuing loyalty to the cautious, moderate T. R. M. Howard, who was increasingly at odds with the association. Evers seemed to be promoting a merger between Howard’s Regional Council and the NAACP. The NAACP, like all bureaucracies, was jealous of its territory. It was not about to share the limelight, or the membership fees, with a homegrown organization.

Wilkins was furious. On May 16, he fired off a curt memo to Current: “I still have no report on my desk on the Belzoni, Miss., incident. It is now more than a week since it occurred. As you know, we were not able to take any steps or to send out any kind of story in our press release last Thursday because we had still not heard from our people in Mississippi.” He added a sarcastic snipe at his new field secretary: “Is Mr. Evers, by chance, working for some other organization?”

So it went. Hurley offered to quit; Current persuaded her to stay. Evers was given another chance to prove himself.

Many things were mentioned in the memos that flew back and forth between Mississippi and New York during those hysterical days in May of 1955. Only one mention was made of something almost every black person in Mississippi was aware of by now: there was a death list. It was a list of enemies of Mississippi’s old way of life, and it had been published in newspapers in the Delta. Reverend Lee’s name was on it. And so was Medgar Evers’s.

Medgar Evers took the lessons of the Lee murder to heart. From now on he would be ready. And nobody would ever again say he was afraid.

Lee’s case showed the NAACP that the federal government was not going to help its cause. The FBI sent agents to investigate the murder. The FBI lab in Washington analyzed the pellets in Lee’s jaw and found they were indeed number 3 buckshot. But nothing was done. No arrests were ever made in the case.

Evers was learning how futile it was to expect help from the FBI. Its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, dismissed the NAACP as a communist front organization. The few resident agents who lived in Mississippi were white and mostly southern born, and they enjoyed a cozy relationship with the local police. They were not eager to protect NAACP workers or to investigate race crimes. The southern agents were even suspected of complicity. In one report. Ruby Hurley noted that when the FBI sent investigators to Belzoni, members of the Citizens’ Council boasted that they planned to recruit the agents.

A month after Lee was gunned down, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the desegregation of schools would proceed “with all deliberate speed.”

This was the NAACP’s cue to start a fresh campaign in the most segregated state in the country. The parents of schoolchildren, a handful of NAACP leaders, and Medgar Evers took on the monolithic white power structure to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision. The Justice Department did nothing.

Medgar Evers stepped out in front, getting people across Mississippi to sign petitions to reorganize the schools. In Vicksburg 140 parents put their names on a petition. In Natchez 75 signed. The Citizens’ Councils retaliated quickly. Petition signers were fired from jobs, threatened, harassed, and driven out of business. Many community leaders fled north to Chicago. Evers spent his days and nights cajoling people, begging them to keep their names on the list, spiriting them out of town, lending them money, listening to their stories.

On August 17, in Judge Tom Brady’s hometown of Brookhaven, Lamar Smith was shot dead at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning on the Lincoln County Courthouse lawn. Smith was a sixty-year-old farmer who had managed, along with a few of his relatives, to stay on the voter rolls and actually vote in the recent primary elections. He had been organizing a campaign to get blacks to vote by absentee ballot when he was killed in front of half the town on a busy shopping day. Oddly enough, there were no witnesses.

By the end of the year, the NAACP would put out a concise pamphlet chronicling the state-sanctioned campaign of terror. And once that little booklet was published, Mississippi became a place name linked with an atrocity, like Waterloo, Pearl Harbor, Dachau. For decades to come, “M” would stand for Mississippi and murder.

Emmett Till was born and raised in Chicago. Before he left home, his mother warned him to stay away from the white folks in Mississippi, but he was sure of himself and his charm. He was only fourteen, big for his age. His friends called him “Bobo.”

On August 21,1955, Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, population 55, a flyblown speck on the map a dozen miles north of Greenwood. He expected to spend the rest of a lazy summer with his mother’s uncle, Mose Wright, a sixty-four-year-old preacher, and his large extended family.

Three days later Till and six of his teenage cousins piled into the preacher’s old ’46 Ford to go for a drive. They ended up at the tiny grocery store in Money. The store was operated by a young couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, who lived with their two small sons behind the shop. Roy was away that afternoon.

Outside on the porch Till and his cousins were joking around. Till pulled out his wallet and showed them a picture of a white girl he knew in Chicago, started boasting he’d “had” her.

If he was so good with white girls, one cousin told him, why didn’t he go on in and talk to the woman in the store? Or was he chicken? The cousins giggled, wide-eyed, as Emmett Till walked into the store alone.

Carolyn Bryant later testified that Till grabbed her and asked her for a date. All the kids outside heard was Emmett Till saying, “Bye, baby,” as he came back out on the porch. Some say he whistled, a wolf whistle. Some say that since the boy stuttered, his words sometimes came out in a whistle. He didn’t mean anything by it.

The cousins hustled Till into the old Ford and drove back to the preacher’s house. Nobody told Mose what had happened.

That Saturday night Mose Wright woke up to a pounding at his cabin door. Roy Bryant and his brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, had come for Emmett Till.

Three days later some fishermen found Till floating in the Tallahatchie River. The body was bloated and eaten by fish. One eye was missing; part of the head was crushed. A seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan had been fastened to the neck with barbed wire. There was a bullet in the skull.

For all the black men who wound up dead in the Mississippi swamps, this lynching was different. He was a stranger from Chicago, and his grieving mother wanted an open casket for his funeral.
Jet
magazine printed a photograph of the corpse. A red spotlight was focused on Mississippi. The lynching of a fourteen-year-old Negro boy made headlines in every state. Before long the Delta was crawling with reporters. They sent back stories about the conditions in Mississippi that a hundred NAACP press releases never could have inspired. Emmett Till’s murder gave a name and a face to the unspeakable.

For Negroes in Mississippi the lynching telegraphed an unmistakable message: the white man could kill you for any reason. It didn’t matter whether you tried to vote or joined the NAACP or did nothing at all. They would kill you just for being black.

Milam and Bryant were arrested and charged with murder within days of the abduction, and tried two weeks later.

The NAACP scrambled to investigate the case. Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley, and Sam Baily put on dungarees and field hats and drove north to Money to look for witnesses to the abduction.

Mose Wright was the prosecution’s star witness. The old man sat in the witness box in his Sunday best and slowly told the story of the night Milam and Bryant had come for the boy. Milam had said he was going to take the boy.

Do you see this man in the courtroom?

Mose Wright stretched out a long bony finger, and in a courtroom so quiet you could hear sweat drop, said, “Dar he,” as his finger fell to Milam. The judge was already pounding his gavel, shouting, “Order, order!”

The white men never denied kidnapping the boy to teach him a lesson. They just said he was alive the last time they saw him.

A jury of twelve white men took one hour and seven minutes to acquit the killers. Two months later Milam and Bryant sold their story to
Look
magazine and described in great detail how they had killed Emmett Till. Since they couldn’t be tried again for the same crime, they felt that they could say whatever they wanted. They insisted they never meant to kill the boy, just teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. It was the boy’s smart mouth that killed him. He just wouldn’t back down, they said, wouldn’t see the error of his ways. He told them that he’d had white women. They said he told them he was as good as they were. So they stripped him naked, beat him, and made him carry the heavy metal fan to the river. Then Big Milam shot him in the head.

This is what J. W. Milam told the
Look
writer: “Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless.”

This is more of what Milam told that writer:

“I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers in their place — I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.”

Back in Belzoni Gus Courts refused to be intimidated. The murders of George Lee and Emmett Till only hardened his determination to fight back. All through 1955 he recruited new members for the local NAACP, doubling its charter. That summer he started talking about filing a lawsuit against the Citizens’ Councils.

Courts owned a bus that he used to transport field hands to cotton plantations around the Delta. One local planter and Citizens’ Council leader made it his business to follow the bus every morning. When it stopped at a plantation, the white man would get out of his car and have a talk with the owner. Before long there wasn’t a plantation in the Delta that would hire field hands hauled by Courts.

Courts consulted a local white lawyer about filing a suit over his loss of business. Apparently word got around. In late November another white citizen stopped by Courts’s grocery store.

“They’re planning to get rid of you,” the man told Courts. “I don’t know how, and I don’t want to know.” It was a threat as much as a caution. And Courts had no doubt who “they” were.

Three nights later, at 8:30 on November 28, 1955, Courts had just rung up a sale and was standing behind the counter of his store when a shotgun blast shattered the front window and hit him in the left arm and abdomen. Savannah Luton, who had just bought a can of kerosene, ran outside and saw a two-tone green sedan pull away in the darkness. She clearly saw a white man in the rear window.

Someone tried to call Sheriff Ike Shelton, but nobody could find him. Courts was bleeding and in pain when another police officer arrived at the scene and the witnesses described what had happened. Friends gently lifted Courts into a car and drove sixty miles to the hospital in Mound Bayou.

Medgar Evers got the call in Jackson that night. This time he followed procedure: he called Ruby Hurley, the national office, and the press. And then he got in his car and drove to Mound Bayou.

Roy Wilkins would often show people a picture of Gus Courts lying in his hospital bed. In the photograph was a grim young man standing next to Courts, one hand gripping the bed, the other plunged deep in his coat pocket, like a vengeful guardian angel, ready for anything. The man in the picture was Medgar Evers.

Gus Courts lived. He gave a number of bedside interviews to northern reporters who flocked south to cover the latest outrage.

Courts was philosophical. He said he’d known his time was coming, that he had “tried to prepare my mind for it.” The hard part, he said, was knowing that his enemies could slip up on him any time, and that the shot would come out of the darkness.

A reporter from the New York
Post
drove to Belzoni to ask Sheriff Shelton whether he had located any suspects.

“I honestly think some damn nigger just drove there and shot him,” Shelton told him. He still hadn’t interviewed Courts.

Two FBI agents from Greenville were assigned to the case, but they got sidetracked by a bank robbery before they could interview Courts or any witnesses.

Incredibly the Belzoni Citizens’ Council posted a $250 reward for information leading to the conviction of the gunman. It was never claimed. No arrests were made.

The brave old man finally packed it in and moved to Chicago. It was, for many, the only way to stay alive.

The Citizens’ Council of Philadelphia, Mississippi, worked long hours to drive Charles Evers out of town. He held out as long as he could.

By the end of 1954 Charles had so many things going it was hard to keep track of them all. He was married with children now. His wife, Nan, was a smart, patient woman. She had to be to stick with Charles, who never believed a man should be anything but free. But he had responsibilities for his family. He wanted a good life for his daughters.

Like his brother, Medgar, Charles had returned from World War II with an active hatred of racism. The NAACP was the most practical outlet for change, and so Charles got involved. He was chairman of voter registration for the NAACP state conference, and he was as passionate a recruiter as Medgar. When the position of NAACP field secretary came up, Charles thought about taking it himself. But he had his businesses to consider, and he knew himself well enough to realize that he wasn’t suited to the NAACP management style. He decided to leave the civil rights work to Medgar, reasoning that he’d make enough money for both of them.

Charles Evers had by then built a small business empire in Neshoba County. He was acquiring a new funeral home, he was selling burial insurance, he ran a cafe, and was starting up a motel in the black section of Philadelphia. He had started the town’s first black taxi service. Charles was so legitimate and prosperous, he had even opened a bank account.

The Citizens’ Councils didn’t like to see a black businessman succeed. But what really brought Charles down was his radio show.

Charles Evers was Mississippi’s first and only Negro disc jockey. A white man owned WOKJ, but he gave Charles a chance to go on the air. Charles didn’t have the slightest idea how to be a disc jockey, but he learned fast, and the sponsors of his blues and gospel show were happy with the response in the black community. Charles made the most of his radio hour. He opened and closed every show by saying, “Pay your poll tax. Register and vote!” He had added two hundred new names to the rolls with his one-man campaign.

The pressure started right away. He couldn’t renew the lease on his cafe or taxi stand. His coffin suppliers were demanding cash up front. Somebody loosened the lug nuts on his car wheels. A white man called warning him about an assassination plot.

The Citizens’ Councils boycotted his radio sponsors. The station owner was a good man, but he was eventually pressured into firing Charles Evers. Charles said he understood. No hard feelings.

But as he was driving away from the station, a woman ran her car into his. She sued him and won. Finally Charles Evers was wiped out. The last straw was when his creditors repossessed his furniture, set it out in the street for everyone to see.

Charles sent Nan and the girls to stay with her mother in Mt. Olive, Mississippi. All he had was twenty-six dollars in change. He loaded up his beat-up car and headed north.

The killings and beatings and financial ruinations of 1955 had the desired chilling effect on the black people of Mississippi. Membership in the NAACP in Mississippi had dropped from 4,639 to 1,716. Soon it was practically an underground organization.

People were paralyzed with fear, terrified of the Citizens’ Councils. There was little for Medgar Evers to do but try to stay alive and hold on to as much of the NAACP membership as he could.

In December 1955 Evers watched with growing excitement as the civil rights movement took a new direction in Montgomery, Alabama. One cold evening a former NAACP secretary and seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. In the wake of indignation that followed the incident, a young minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led fifty thousand Negroes in a mass boycott of public buses to end Jim Crow practices in the city.

In New York Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall watched the same movement with growing alarm. King and his legions in Montgomery were grabbing public attention — and donations — away from the NAACP. For the first time the old association had a serious rival in the Deep South.

The dilemma of what to do about Martin Luther King threatened to become a crisis in January 1956, a few weeks after the boycott had begun, when the NAACP held its annual national convention in San Francisco. King showed up to give a speech and was heartily welcomed by Mississippi’s fledgling field secretary, Medgar Evers. Evers publicly invited King to visit Mississippi to inspire a movement there. On the first night of the convention a group of renegade delegates met in Evers’s hotel room and hammered out a three-page resolution calling for total NAACP support of King and his boycott.

Both Wilkins and Marshall were stunned and angered, but Wilkins averted a floor fight with Evers and his group by offering to give “careful consideration” to adopting the boycott as a civil rights tactic and, further, by offering the resources of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to cover legal fees incurred by the Montgomery movement. This mollified Evers and the other Young Turks, but the tug-of-war between the NAACP old guard and Martin Luther King had only begun.

Later that year King founded a new national group called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and invited Medgar Evers to attend its first convention in New Orleans. Evers was duly elected secretary of the SCLC.

Roy Wilkins was outraged. Evers was ordered to resign. He could serve only one cause, and it had to be the NAACP. Evers agreed to abandon the SCLC.

Evers privately fretted about Wilkins’s refusal to cooperate with other civil rights groups, but he had made his choice. He followed instructions from New York and used his influence to keep the SCLC from setting up an office in Jackson.

The NAACP strategy remained unchanged: avoid violent confrontations while slowly challenging segregation in the courts. But the NAACP needed test cases to bring to court. In early March 1958 Medgar Evers decided, on his own, to test the law forbidding segregation on interstate transport. On his way home from an NAACP conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, he switched buses in Meridian, Mississippi.