God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, Amurder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (9780698170537)

by Safran, John

  Director Craig grabs my arm. “You have to do a piece-to-camera,” he tells me with a disgusted look in his eye. “You have to say the families don’t know what’s happening. That Richard’s duped them. We can’t put them on TV like this.”

  I’ve spent a decade with Craig and Germain. We’ve hung with evangelical hucksters, Holocaust deniers, and terrorists. I have never seen these two scrunch up their faces like Richard has made them scrunch up their faces.

  What Richard Did Next

  A 1967 telegram in the FBI file is headed RICHARD BARRETT INTERNAL SECURITY.

  Soon after the FBI first interviews him, Richard ducks out of Mississippi and heads east. He ends up in North Carolina, where he tries and fails to organize a parade in support of the war in Vietnam. Rumors circulate that he’s a member of the American Nazi Party. He ends up holding his “Victory for Vietnam” parade in Natchez, Mississippi. (Natchez is where those white Southern mansions in your head are, with columns and Scarlett O’Hara fainting out front.)

  Bad reviews come in from the FBI. “The source stated the parade was not well organized and was a complete flop. There were approximately twenty-five automobiles in the parade with two people in each car, making a total of fifty people in the parade. Several individuals participating in this parade were members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  The FBI have high standards. I would have killed for that level of turnout when shooting Race Relations.

  “The general consensus of the people he comes in contact with is that he is a ‘nut.’”

  Two days later, Richard disrupts the Poor People’s March, organized by a black civil rights group, by turning up with a parody sign: Fight Poverty. Go to Work.

  The crowd rips up his sign, and the police arrest Richard for disturbing the peace. The Jackson office of the FBI asks J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, to place Richard on the Rabble Rouser Index. Hoover calls for an investigation of Richard, but “as he is nationally unknown at this time and has precipitated no racial violence to date, the recommendation is turned down.”

  But Richard’s on the up.

  Soon after, a predawn explosion blows a chunk out of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and shatters windows across the street. Richard is a suspect. Agents poke around Jackson; they clear his name.

  Then two months later: “Barrett’s whereabouts were ascertained during the pertinent period in the case of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  The FBI is struggling like I am struggling. Nobody can work Richard out. Is he somebody or nobody? Is he dangerous and important? Or a fantasist? If he is a fantasist, that doesn’t rule out he was a danger to either Vincent McGee or himself.

  Even a fantasist can conjure things into the real world and then lose control of them. One of the things Richard did next attests to this. It involved a man named Edgar Ray Killen.

  The Ballad of Edgar Ray Killen

  Edgar Ray Killen was a Southern Baptist minister and Ku Klux Klansman.

  In 1964, two young Jewish New Yorkers are in Mississippi. They are rallying blacks to register to vote. They’ve met up with a young black Mississippian, also a civil rights activist.

  The three activists have already annoyed law enforcement, many of whom are Klansmen. A black church was razed to the ground in Neshoba County. The three are seen poking around the site, trying to find evidence of Klan involvement. If you’ve seen the film Mississippi Burning—the film that’s shaped the way Mississippi is seen around the world and which is based on this case—then you know what happens next.

  The activists drive from the burned-down church in their station wagon. They’re stopped by a deputy sheriff (and Klansman). He says they were speeding and throws them in jail.

  The deputy sheriff then meets up with Edgar Ray Killen. Killen has a plan.

  That night, the three are released from the jail. The deputy sheriff tells them to leave town. They drive off.

  Edgar Ray Killen has arranged for two carloads of Klansmen to follow them. The Klansmen pull over the activists on a dirt road as they’re leaving Neshoba County.

  The two New York Jews are shot through their hearts. The young black man is beaten (probably with a chain) and shot three times.

  The Klan may run the show in Mississippi in 1964, but they’ve overplayed their hand killing two white New Yorkers. Liberal America notices they’re missing. Mississippi law enforcement doesn’t seem too motivated to find the civil rights workers—they’re also the Klan, after all—so Democratic president Lyndon Johnson becomes involved. Overruling the wishes of Mississippians, he instructs the FBI director to send in agents. They comb the land and dredge the lakes.

  The three are found buried in an embankment dam. Their car is found burned out in a swamp.

  What this means for white Mississippians: Federal troops have infringed on the independence of Mississippi again, just like in the Civil War. So Mississippi officials refuse to pursue or prosecute Edgar Ray Killen or the other Klansmen.

  Murder is a state crime, but the federal prosecutor gets lateral. He charges Edgar Ray Killen and seventeen other Klansmen with the federal crime of depriving the young men of their civil rights.

  He still has to prosecute the case in Mississippi in front of white Mississippian jurors. Seven Klansmen are found guilty and none serves more than six years in jail. But the jury can’t reach a verdict on the mastermind, Edgar Ray Killen. It seems one juror just can’t bring herself to sentence a preacher. So Edgar Ray is released, and that’s that.

  Well, that’s that for forty years.

  If you want to catch Edgar Ray today, you’ll have to do so in Unit 31, Mississippi State Penitentiary, Sunflower County. For this, he and his wife, Betty Jo, blame Richard Barrett.

  The 2004 Mississippi State Fair

  The annual Mississippi State Fair celebrates the best of Mississippi: its food, its music, its culture, its history. In 2004, Richard decides a fair like this needs to celebrate Edgar Ray Killen. He prints up pamphlets. Richard’s going to organize a stall and tells everyone the man himself will turn up to shake hands and autograph photos.

  For a few years, a new case against Killen has been bubbling away on low. Among other things, a schoolteacher and his students teamed with a reporter to dig up new leads, new evidence, new witnesses. But Killen has kept his head down, and keeping your head down counts for a lot in Mississippi.

  Richard’s stunt cascades everything into the sunlight. Black people want to know why this Klansman will be goose-stepping up and down on their family day. And the national media starts to file stories: Here are those Mississippi yokels, still trying to lynch blacks. A white sheriff calls for the reopening of the case against Killen.

  Soon eighty-year-old Killen is arrested on three counts of murder. This time the Neshoba County district attorney and Mississippi attorney general prosecute the case. Mississippi itself has been forced to act.

  After a delay—Killen somehow breaks both his legs chopping wood—the trial starts. Killen rolls up each day in a wheelchair. Then someone says they spotted him after court just walking around. Others say they saw him driving a car. The judge had let Killen out on bond because he thought the old man couldn’t get far in a wheelchair. Now Killen has to spend his nights in prison for the remainder of the trial.

  The trial lasts one week.

  Then there’s almost that cathartic moment for Mississippi, but not completely. The jury—nine white, three black—don’t accept that Killen murdered the boys. But they do agree he masterminded the killings, recruiting and organizing the Klansmen on that day in 1964. He gets sixty years for manslaughter—twenty for each civil rights worker—to be served consecutively.

  Here’s the thing: Edgar Ray Killen says he knew nothing about the stall at the Mississippi State Fair until law enforcement started ringing. He says keeping a low profile served him well and he would never have tu
rned up at the fair. He certainly didn’t give Richard permission to set up the stall or use his name. Richard just printed the pamphlets and rang the media.

  Instead of promoting the white supremacist heritage of Mississippi, through his vainglorious bumbling Richard managed to get the state’s most famous white supremacist locked up for life.

  The fantasist lost control of what he started.

  Richard Barrett was a real racist, but always on the fringe of trouble rather than ever caught at its center. So how did he end up getting in the worst trouble possible? Could Richard have made the first move—pulling a knife on Vincent, or pulling down his pants—or is it more likely that he just tried to weasel the wrong guy?

  Documents will only take me so far. To find the people who knew him, I need to get out of my motel room and go deeper into Mississippi.

  5.

  WHAT WAS RICHARD BARRETT THINKING?

  #2 WAS RICHARD GAY?

  Just Suspicious

  Jim Giles is driving me to White Haiti. That’s what he calls the poorest white area in Rankin County.

  Now that I can see him, Jim is a youthful-looking fifty-two: tall, short blond hair, and a strong straight back. Back at the farm he maintained better posture with a heavy sack of chicken feed on his shoulder than I did with nothing to weigh me down. He seems very serious but not unkind, softened a little by a baby-blue Windbreaker.

  While I’m waiting for Joe McNamee and Vince Thornton to return my calls, I’ve been talking white supremacist history with Jim. Among other things.

  “Real strange figure,” Jim says of Richard. “Definitely the radar went off with him—with me and him. Every time I turned around he was calling me.”

  “You think he was hitting on you?”

  “I think possibly.”

  Jim can’t point to an unambiguous instance of Richard hitting on him, but says it was just a feeling he got.

  “I think his interest was in males,” he says as we drive on. “I don’t think he was interested in girls. I am without a girl, but I am pursuing them.”

  “Why don’t you live in the house with your mother?” I ask. “Why do you live in a separate trailer next to her?”

  “Well, I mean, I’m a grown man, I’m not really expected to live with my mother,” he says.

  “Oh yeah, I guess so, but you’re living on the same plot of land . . .”

  “On the family property, but that’s much more appropriate. Do you live at home?”

  “No, I’ve got my own home.”

  “Why don’t you live with your mother?”

  “Well, my mother’s not alive, but besides that, I know what you mean, but it’s, like, you are living right next to her.”

  I’m doing this for a reason. On Radio Free Mississippi, Jim has been moping recently that girls are turned off by his trailer.

  “I just wonder,” I say, “if on these Match.com dating things, if you could bring her back to a house . . . you know?” I’m thinking of this rich Jewish frenemy of mine. In university he’d had this decked-out, funky apartment that he’d insinuate was his, when it was his parents’.

  “That would be misrepresentation. I would never, I wouldn’t do that,” Jim says, at his most serious. “I would much rather have a girl really recognize that I live in the trailer and it’s okay with her. I could see some people doing that, I get your drift there.”

  An idiot carrying a plank of wood walks out into traffic to cross the road. Jim is forced to swerve. We both chuckle.

  “I bet he’s not American,” Jim says. “I bet he’s Hispanic, what do you bet?”

  Wood Plank Man’s hat was pulled down, and we swerved past fast.

  “We’ll never know,” I swerve, too. “So how does it work on Match .com?” I ask. “You just like each other’s photos and profiles and then you, like, e-mail each other or something?”

  “Exactly. And you can propose to meet. And I did actually meet with one, I had my first date with her via Match.com on Saturday.”

  “Last Saturday? No way!”

  “Yep, just the day before yesterday.”

  “Wow. And hang on, where did you . . . Why did you like her enough to meet up with her?”

  “Well, I mean, she was an attractive girl, her profile picture was pretty and she was a younger girl, thirty-six, blond, height medium. It didn’t go . . . I mean, it went okay, but she was clearly interested in a different type of guy. I think she was interested in somebody with money. She was a Russian girl.”

  “And where did you go for the date?”

  “I brought her to Borders.”

  “Oh, yeah. Like in the café there?”

  “Yeah. And there were two strange guys. It was almost like she had them be there for her personal protection. I may be totally mistaken by that, I might be a tad bit paranoid. Two very conspicuous-looking guys.”

  “So how did it end?”

  “She kind of abruptly said . . . she didn’t say it exactly this way, but the gist of it was, she said, ‘This is the way it works, we just meet briefly, and I’ve got to meet somebody back at my home, and maybe we will get together again.’ But I think that was her nice way to dismiss me. I was dismissed.”

  Jim turns to me.

  “My problem is,” he says, “it’s hard to get the kind of girl I want when they see that trailer and they know I am unemployed.”

  “I’d spin it around,” I tell him. “It seems like you’re self-employed. When I came to your farm before, I wasn’t like, Here is this bum who is unemployed and doing nothing. I’m like, Here is the guy running a farm that’s going to build up into a business.”

  Now I feel like I’m running a seminar: Jewish Dating Tips for White Supremacists.

  His farm did look amazing and high-maintenance, by the way, with cows and quails and fish and bees.

  We enter White Haiti, where the small, flimsy houses look like they would easily be sucked into the sky in a twister.

  Jim says he didn’t grow up with white separatism coursing through his veins. Progressives trying to deny Mississippi its flag triggered his teetering to white pride. Why couldn’t his people have their history? But what really sealed the deal was the 1990 murder of the Parker family. Two black men slaughtered a white Mississippian family. They sliced a finger off the father to steal his wedding band, raped the nine-year-old daughter, and burned down the house. Why didn’t Jerry Mitchell from the local paper chase that story like he chased all those octogenarian Klansmen? Why aren’t there Hollywood films about the Parkers like there are about blacks who were lynched?

  Jim rolls the car up beside a man with three teeth.

  “Hey, I’m Jim Giles, nice to see you,” he says. The man looks confused. “This fella here, he’s an Australian writer, and I’m taking him around and kind of showing him the local place, and showing him how poor, how hard people got it here.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the man says, trying to figure Jim out.

  “And my complaint to him, and I’ll just ask you, you’ve heard about all these Baptist churches and their foreign missionary work. How they go to places like Haiti to help people? Have they ever knocked on your door?”

  The man seems to want to say whatever Jim wants him to say. But he doesn’t know what Jim wants him to say.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Jim continues. “Did you know that our government gives Israel ten million dollars every day?”

  “Nope, didn’t know that.”

  Jim wanted the man to be outraged. But he doesn’t seem stressed that the government gives Israel ten million dollars every day.

  “Could you use a few nickels?” Jim says.

  “Oh, yeah,” the man says cheerily. “I don’t even need a million dollars, I just need ten grand. I’d be set. I mean, I’d pay all my bills off and be fine, I mean—”

  Jim interrupts.
“Some of these homes, especially right across the tracks there, you don’t see homes like that in Haiti, in the country of Haiti—and I’ve got a brother who literally goes down there to do missionary work and I’ve challenged him to do the same thing and help y’all here locally. He doesn’t have to go a long way away. Y’all have much crime around here?”

  “No,” the man says.

  Jim, it seems, was relying on the man to say yes. So he shifts gears.

  “Has Jerry—do you know who Jerry Mitchell is, with the Clarion-Ledger?”

  “Yeah, I know who he is.”

  “Has he ever been down here to report on y’all tough situation?”

  “No.”

  “You know the Clarion-Ledger seems to care a lot about black folks, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do they care about you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Yep. Have a good day.”

  Jim drives off.

  Jim stops another White Haitian, then another, outside their houses. Both are polite, but seem mildly insulted that Jim is presenting their town as a shithole. They don’t seem to care that the government is giving ten million dollars to Israel every day, either.

  “When I was in university,” I tell Jim, “they used to always say that the rich people are pitting the black people against the white people, you know what I mean? When really, both sides were poor, so the working class should just stick together and just fight the rich people.”

  “I see your point,” Jim says. “I think both the poor whites and poor blacks would be aided if we closed the borders and stopped free trade. The thing I see, though, that it’s hard for someone like you, who sees the races as equal, is that if left to their own devices, white folks are going to arrange it in a way that tends to be safer, quieter.”

  Jim says whites left on their own create ancient Rome or modern Berlin. Blacks create Haiti.

  “Do you have a lot of, like, white friends,” I ask, “or are you a bit of a loner?”