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. Th
ey 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.
This spectacle so aroused the authorities of the sleepy little farm town that they went to the Illinois Central railroad yards the next morning to arrest C. C. Bryant on a warrant signed by the police chief, who reasoned that as NAACP president Bryant was “behind some of this racial trouble.” Police also arrested Cordell Reagon, a teenage Freedom Rider from Nashville, and Charles Sherrod. The only SNCC leader who remained free in McComb was Charles Jones, Sherrod’s cellmate from the Rock Hill jail-in. Petrified, Jones put on a blood-smeared white smock and crouched in a corner of the shop beneath the Masonic Temple, hoping to pass for a butcher. On a pay phone, Jones alerted outside news services to the first civil rights mass arrest in the history of Mississippi. Fearing that Moses and the others could be dragged out of jail to a lynching at any time, he also called Harry Belafonte and John Doar for help. Doar went immediately to McComb, slipped into the butcher shop by night, and whispered that Jones should draw all the shades. When Jones recovered from this introduction to the mighty federal government, he counted it as a significant moment in his political and racial education to realize that its boldest representative was almost as apprehensive about Klan surveillance as he was.
C. C. Bryant had not attended or even known about the student march. If he had known, he would have disapproved strongly, but the sting of his own arrest nullified some of his tactical arguments about maneuvering to keep the goodwill of white people. Such things didn’t matter in a crunch, he decided, and he was surprised to discover that many parents rallied behind their arrested sons and daughters. Hollis Watkins’ father delivered a moving speech of support at the first mass meeting. Some parents expressed new interest in registration classes. At an NAACP meeting after he obtained bail, a changed Bryant declared, “Where the students lead, we will follow.” His new outspokenness as an NAACP leader, plus the arbitrariness of his arrest, made him the news focus for the reporters who began to trickle into McComb. To a Time correspondent, Sheriff Clyde Simmons attributed the crackdown frankly to Bryant’s attitude, saying he “puts himself in the class of the white people.”
In court, Judge Hansford Simmons sentenced Brenda Travis indefinitely to reform school, released a hundred of the younger students to their parents, and ordered Moses, McDew, Zellner, and a score of the older students held pending trial on disturbing the peace charges. Guards transported the prisoners to the Amite County jail in Liberty, across county jurisdiction, in a move that was explained as something to make them think about the fate of Herbert Lee before they got into more trouble. Harry Belafonte sent them $5,000 in bail money a few days later.
Moses and the newly freed SNCC workers drove to Atlanta for an emergency staff meeting to discuss whether they could continue tactics that posed such enormous legal costs and immobilized nearly all SNCC’s national leadership. The sleepy omniscience of rural communities was attuned by then to the tension buried around McComb. The Negroes seemed to have an idea of what was being discussed at the White Citizens Council meetings, and whites were vaguely aware of SNCC’s movements. On the morning after the leaders departed for Atlanta, a hand-lettered victory proclamation was found taped to the front window of the Masonic Temple in McComb: “SNCC Done Snuck.”
On September 26, the day after Herbert Lee was murdered, King went to Nashville for the SCLC’s annual three-day conference. The killing and other sacrifices of the Moses project tempered the congratulatory spirit of the Freedom Ride summer. Neither James Farmer nor James Lawson called for extending the rides into Mississippi. Farmer vaguely predicted that Negroes someday might have to withhold income taxes from states that enforced segregation. Lawson declared that the Freedom Riders, for all their success, had been too few in number to pack the Jackson jails. Tacitly, he was rejecting the notion that nonviolent direct action could be enlarged to attack all segregation in the core state of Mississippi. The cost was too high, and repression would be so harsh as to crush rather than encourage a movement. After the heavy sentences meted out to James Bevel and Diane Nash, young people were shying away from demonstrations, just as they were falling away from registration classes after the Herbert Lee murder. For that reason Lawson disappointed those who hoped that he would move his workshops to Mississippi and spend years re-creating the Nashville experience. Without his guiding discipline, nonviolent direct action stood no chance of sustained application there. As events turned out, direct action never did rise to the supreme test in Mississippi, leaving voter registration specialists like Moses to wonder whether Lawson could have made a difference.
The SCLC leaders confessed their worries more freely among themselves than in public. They wanted time to consolidate the gains of the Freedom Rides and to recuperate financially. The SCLC was already burdened by legal debts from demonstrations in North Carolina as well as the defense of the Freedom Riders. Most pressing of all was the New York Times v. Sullivan libel judgment, which was still making its way upward through the appeals courts of Alabama. To raise money to pay all these lawyers, they rented the Grand Ol’ Opry for a “Salute to the Freedom Riders” fund-raising concert. Harry Belafonte, the headline performer, recruited Miriam Makeba, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and several other popular entertainers to back him up as the “Belafonte Troupe.” Unfortunately, Belafonte himself fell ill before the concert. Public announcement of his cancellation stifled ticket sales, and the SCLC wound up losing a large sum on the venture.
Financial straits complicated King’s delicate, multilayered diplomacy with the Kennedy Administration. Burke Marshall, Harris Wofford, and other Kennedy officials remained important people in the complex arrangements to create the Voter Education Project, from which the SCLC stood to gain enormous grants of tax-free money for voter registration. The Administration’s demand for strict secrecy meant that King had to be careful about discussing the VEP negotiations even in the SCLC’s closed board meeting at Nashville. Wyatt Walker’s report on the SCLC’s voter registration plans for 1962 did not mention the subject, and the Nashville board meeting drifted into what King’s friend Lawrence Reddick feared it would be: a ceremonial procession of preachers’ speeches, “in which every ‘dignitary’ present has to have his say.” The official minutes recorded a “very, very lengthy discussion on what the Conference [SCLC] should do to show its appreciation to the President, Dr. King, Jr.” Eventually, on the motion of Ralph Abernathy, the board asked King to appoint a committee on resolutions to formulate a presentation for King. Someone amended the motion to include Coretta. Abernathy later moved that the board issue a proclamation to let J. H. Jackson know that it would not back away from King. After a nonpreacher on the board objected that a personal attack on Jackson would be a mistake, Abernathy’s motion also was referred to a committee.
King sent Robert Kennedy an immediate telegram of protest over the rash of events in Mississippi—the beatings, the Lee murder, and the mass arrest—calling them “an apparent reign of terror.” Even so direct a request was swallowed up, however, by overriding questions of political etiquette. What registered in Washington was that Robert Kennedy first heard about King’s Mississippi telegram from a reporter. This insult undercut Kennedy’s confidence that he and King could do business privately. King surrendered the point. Wyatt Walker sent Kennedy an abject follow-up telegram accepting blame for the earlier one as “my own personal administrative error.” He advised Kennedy that “it is never Dr. King’s or SCLC’s practice to release the text of any message to the press without it first being transmitted.”
K
ing soon received what he thought was an opportunity to repair his political relations with the Kennedy Administration. Harris Wofford invited him to meet privately with the President. Again, like the spring luncheon with Robert Kennedy at the Mayflower Hotel, the session was to be completely off the record. Implicitly, at least, it was another test of King’s willingness to play by the rules, after the public controversies over the Freedom Rides. King welcomed the chance, but he knew something else was afoot as soon as he saw Wofford’s uncommonly grave face at the White House. Wofford said he had been instructed by the President and the Attorney General to deliver an official message about Stanley Levison.
The genesis of the message lay in FBI Director Hoover’s memo notation (“Why not?”) during the Freedom Rides in May, demanding to know why the FBI had not thoroughly investigated the troublemaker King. That question had reverberated among his subordinates, who gleaned from Bureau files the information that both King and Harry Belafonte were close friends of Levison. Summary comments about Levison had sounded so ominous to Burke Marshall in the Justice Department that he requested to see all the Bureau’s files on Levison. The FBI responded that the files were too sensitive to be shared with Marshall but that Levison was an important operative of the Soviet espionage network in the United States. Soon thereafter, Marshall had lingered in Harris Wofford’s office following one of the interagency meetings to raise the matter in strict privacy.
Parting the Waters Page 73
