The Grimsley deputy unavailable for conversation was Harold Jones, who’d broken ranks with the other deputies and had left the state and had said in a signed statement (forwarded to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department) that the town and the whole county were stinking corrupt, and that Grimsley was the leader of it all, and that he, Jones, would be willing to go before a grand jury and say what he knew. (He never did, it seems.) But Harold Jones, like the ghost on a page in a magazine, was long dead.
In the immediate aftermath of the events that unfolded at Oxford, Grimsley, back home, made a darker, more malevolent turn. And then he got turned on by his townsmen, though hardly for the right reasons.
A lot of this is detailed in a very brave and literate and long-out-of-print book called The Smell of Burning Crosses by Ira B. Harkey, Jr. He was the editor and publisher of the small daily called the Chronicle that served Pascagoula and Jackson County when Grimsley was the sheriff. Harkey’s was one of the very few liberal journalistic voices raised in Mississippi in the early years of civil rights. The best-known and perhaps most heroic voice of those years belonged to Hodding Carter II, publisher of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, up in the Delta. And yet Harkey’s editorial voice, along with a handful of others throughout the state, was nearly as heroic—even if it didn’t last nearly as long as Carter’s. You won’t find the name Ira Harkey in many civil rights books. He’s been forgotten altogether by the historians or else relegated to the back notes, and perhaps one reason for this is that he left the state early, before the war was won. But he should not be forgotten. His courage was great. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials that he had written during—but especially after—the Meredith crisis. Really, he won the prize for standing up to James Ira Grimsley’s bigotry and to a Jackson County hate group that Grimsley led in Pascagoula in the several months following the crisis at Ole Miss. To this day, Harkey feels that several contracts were put out on his life, and that most probably they originated from the office of the Jackson County sheriff, and there are several FBI documents to suggest he may be right. It’s important to repeat that most of the declassified government documents are full of obfuscations and blotted-out passages and hot defenses by Grimsley protectors and deputies, whose names, like almost everybody else’s in the documents, are not possible to know. The censors inked them out long ago. It is true, as Pete Pope said, that Grimsley was never indicted by the government for any charge. The investigations seem suddenly to have been dropped. It’s as if the government lost interest. Really, the documents raise far more troubling questions than they ever get close to answering.
Ira Harkey and his newspaper were not destroyed in the aftermath of Oxford by Grimsley and his Klannish vigilantes, though he had to stand up almost entirely alone to threats on his life and to acts of terrorism toward his newspaper. Only one other public figure in the corrupt, racist town—the state president of the AFL-CIO, Claude Ramsay, who lived in Pascagoula—came publicly to his defense. But Ramsay’s appeal to his townsmen went first to economic fear. As Harkey wrote in The Smell of Burning Crosses, which was published by a small Illinois publishing house four years after he left the state: “Pounding at the one single argument that is likely ever to force white Mississippians up the path to racial justice—dollars and cents—Ramsay pointed out that a racial explosion in Pascagoula could cost Ingalls its contracts, all of them dependent to one degree or another upon the federal government.”
Ira Harkey is not a native Mississippian; he is from New Orleans. He came to Pascagoula and the Gulf Coast in 1949 as a still-idealistic thirty-one-year-old, not long out of the Navy and the war. He had just bought the town’s struggling weekly. He was a graduate of Tulane University who’d grown up wealthy and privileged in the Garden District of New Orleans. Yet somehow he’d also grown up very sensitive to the plight of black people in the South. As he wrote in Crosses, which is both his autobiography and the story of what happened at Pascagoula after Oxford: “I was possessor of an un-Southern and radical opinion that Negroes were human beings. I held also a quaint belief that the white people of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana—the old darkest South—needed to have this truth revealed to them.” Two men of the Deep South, both named Ira, of roughly the same age, whose lives had intersected and proceeded in such opposite directions.
And there isn’t time or space to tell the Harkey part in the detail it deserves. Let his own words sketch what happened. Grimsley’s hate group was called the Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit (JCCEU). This is how The Smell of Burning Crosses opens:
For four months in 1962–1963 Pascagoula citizen leaders abdicated their duty and allowed their community to be ruled by fear imposed by an organized gang of white supremists. This was an aftermath of the entrance of Negro Mississippian James Meredith onto the campus of his state university. The Pascagoula gang was cloaked in a quasi-legality lent it by the office occupied by its leader, the Jackson County sheriff, a bloated hard-drinking semiliterate ruffian. The nucleus of the gang was a group of men who had gained local fame by taking part in the riots at Oxford after Meredith’s admittance September 30. These, numbering about thirty, had been called out over the Pascagoula radio station to be led by their sheriff in cars and a chartered bus to the University of Mississippi campus, arriving in time to enjoy the bone cracking and property destruction. They returned to Pascagoula as heroes of the Southern cause, these hoodlums who would have been barred from entering the back door of Robert E. Lee’s stables.… Encouraged by the widespread approval that surrounded them … they decided to make their association permanent. They organized under a charter.… Calling themselves the “Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit,” they began to meet several times weekly in the County Courthouse, of which the sheriff was the custodian.… [T]hey outlined their program of civic improvement: to eradicate local “niggerlovers,” to boycott all businesses that employed or sold goods to Negroes, to “attend to” persons placed on a list by an “action committee,” to train a strongarm squad at weekly maneuvers … and in the main and particular to put out of business the Pascagoula daily newspaper, the Chronicle, identified by them as “the leading niggerlover in the State.” I know about these things and what the 600-member Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit intended to do in Pascagoula because I was editor and publisher of the Chronicle, the despised “niggerlover” who “ridicules our great Governor Barnett,” “calls niggers ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ ” “writes news stories so you can’t tell who’s a nigger and who ain’t.” For four months—from October, 1962, to February, 1963—my newspaper was the target for a campaign of vilification, boycott, threats and actual violence.… In Pascagoula, there was no power to which I could turn for help. The President of the County Board of Supervisors remained mute. Pascagoula’s mayor, when it was suggested to him that the Chronicle needed police protection, thrust out his middle chin and replied, “I am a segregationist.”… City and county police authorities shrugged. The Unit, after all, was sponsored by the sheriff, the chief law enforcement officer of the county … Not a teacher, not a politician, not an industrial leader; not a clergyman, a physician, an insuranceman; nor yet a lawyer, a fisherman, a welder, a pecan rower, a shrimper, a banker, a pogyman nor a shipfitter—not an idler, a sage nor a maniac said a word on my behalf.
Harkey bought a .38-caliber ranger pistol to try to protect himself. “I received a long-distance call with information that facts ‘usable’ against Grimsley would be given me if I went to a certain Eastern city and interviewed a certain person. I flew there and received a sworn- to pile of dirt that I did not ever use.”
A few weeks after the state president of the AFL-CIO publicly denounced what was going on in Pascagoula, authorities at the Justice Department and the FBI announced in Washington that they were stepping in to investigate. The story appeared as a news item in papers in New Orleans and other large Southern cities. Suddenly, the shipbuilding town on the Gulf was quite willing to disown terrorists
in its midst. As quickly as they had made Grimsley the hero of Oxford, Pascagoulians just as quickly began to shun their most visible and besotted bigot, who was also their sheriff. As Harkey later wrote in Crosses: “The sheriff’s Unit, which I referred to editorially as ‘goons,’ steadily lost attendance at its meetings. Only twenty-two hard-core hateists were present at the last session at which the Chronicle was able to slip in an undercover observer. There was not enough of the Unit’s influence left by August to allow the sheriff to be elected to the minor post of state representative for which he was a candidate, being ineligible to succeed himself. The great warrior of Oxford received only 1,226 votes from an electorate of more than 16,000, running fourth in a five-man race.”
Shipyard contracts weren’t canceled. Within a year, Ira Harkey sold his paper and moved away. His personal life had unraveled by then; he and his wife had separated and would eventually divorce. Again, let an old newspaper wordsmith tell some of this, from Crosses, in moving and eloquent words:
When it was all over, after we had welcomed back the defecting advertisers and had increased circulation to 8500—fifteen percent more than it ever had been—I found I could not remain in Pascagoula, could not bear to exist in the vacuum of an ostracism that remained in force even after victory, could not function in a silence of total isolation as if I were underwater or in galactic space. I was a pariah. I do not know whether this was because hate had become a permanent attachment to my person and accompanied me everywhere, repulsing all among whom I moved, or whether I had become an ambulatory and ubiquitous monument to the shame of my fellow townsmen, galling their late-blooming consciences.
The editor was told later that as he walked from the Chronicle office for the last time, a reporter he had recently hired “wrung his hands and drooled, ‘Boy, I can’t wait to start writing nigger again.’ ”
Grimsley, and the group he led, became pariahs, too, once agents from the New Orleans office of the FBI began to investigate the sheriff and the JCCEU. Word that the feds were in town asking questions spread quickly through the county, even if no Pascagoulian was privy to the reports being compiled. A high official of the Justice Department wrote a memo to a fellow DOJ attorney: “There is also a lot of Citizens’ Council activity in Jackson County, including the Jackson County Citizens’ Emergency Unit, whose main purpose, apparently, is to kill Meredith.” From another page of the hundreds of pages of compiled documents: “Sheriff JAMES IRA GRIMSLEY, who took group of officers to University of Mississippi campus 9/30–10/1/62 was reported leader of unit being organized … the purpose of the Unit was to secretly go to the University of Mississippi, at Oxford, Mississippi, ‘to get’ or kidnap [blacked-out name], recent Negro enrollee at the University.” A few lines down in the same document: “Also, that [blacked-out name] told him the aim of this emergency unit was to go to Oxford, Mississippi, some night to get [blacked-out name]. He said from his conversation with [blacked-out name] he got the impression the group would kidnap [blacked-out name].”
Another document refers to “the reputation of Sheriff GRIMSLEY being what it was for non-intelligent action most of the time.” Another document refers to the Ingalls Corporation worrying about the “Unit and the possibility it might get out of hand under the leadership of Sheriff GRIMSLEY, who has lost the respect of a good many of the top people of the county, due to his alcoholism and other general conduct.” Another document mentions the “publicity Grimsley obtained both locally and as a result of his photograph being in full spread pictures of LIFE Magazine.” Another document talks of the JCCEU and its plan “to do away with [blacked-out name] and/or the newspapers the Chronicle Star and Moss Point Advertiser, of which [blacked-out name] is Editor. [Blacked-out name] has also written articles agreeing with the action taken by the Federal Government in the Oxford incident and has been very liberal in the past with his racial viewpoint.”
The New Orleans agents also wrote documents in the weeks after Oxford that contained never-acted-on allegations such as this one: “According to the victim here, she was arrested along with a female friend.… Thereafter, the sheriff attempted to rape her but didn’t succeed.… The sheriff denies molesting victim and there are not witnesses. Other witnesses state that victim was intoxicated on both occasions.” J. Edgar Hoover himself looked into the many charges against Grimsley. Hoover and Burke Marshall—Bobby Kennedy’s assistant attorney general for civil rights—exchanged several classified memoranda. On May 31, Marshall wrote to the U.S. attorney in Jackson: “We agree this matter lacks prosecutive merit. Accordingly, our file has been closed.” On one of the documents, this handwritten note: “Discussed with … Criminal Division, who advised me that Division would not be interested in pursuing the allegations in this complaint.”
When his term of office was up, the unindicted and mostly shunned Grimsley left his quarters in the courthouse—but not Pascagoula. For a time, he served as a deputy to his successor. The word “pathetic” had seemed to attach to his name. “Hello, son,” he’d still cry at townsmen from across the street. He tried to put himself up for top dog again—the outcome was foregone. In the 1972 city directory, he is listed thusly: “Grimsley James I (Betty R) emp County Sheriff Dept.” He did odd jobs around the county and the courthouse, and for a time he worked as a security guard in a firm owned by some of his old employees. He ran his grocery. He spent time in a little “camp” he had built outside Pascagoula. In 1986, the local paper—it was now called the Mississippi Press—came to do the small feature and published a photograph of a pathetic-looking man with a bulbous nose. Perhaps some late-blooming civic consciences had been galled into a minor shame. Within a year he died. The obituary, published the day after his death, on October 20, 1987, was six paragraphs on an inside page. Four years after that, in 1991, it was possible to look him up in a just-published reference tome entitled The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia. James Ira Grimsley would get his own separate entry—fourteen lines—as would his long-since-defunct JCCEU.
Forty years from the tumults of Oxford and the stand he took, newspaperman Ira Harkey was a spry old gent in his eighties in a red sweater with a thatch of chin beard and a white mustache. He had lived in Ohio and Alaska and Nevada but finally had settled in the Hill Country of Texas. He had gone back to college and gotten a doctorate in journalism and had taught journalism at universities and had written a couple of books—but you could sense that there has always been a part of him since Pascagoula that has been unresolved and restless and sad. I was in his home in Kerrville about five minutes when he brought up a brother who had killed himself years earlier. Then he said, “He was an alcoholic, and so was I.” That sentence seemed to come from nowhere, because all I had been thinking of on the trip to Texas was the framed alcoholic ghost.
“How were you able to stand up to a guy like Grimsley?”
This is the way he answered: “Yeah, but here’s what I think: If I’d continued drinking, I don’t think I could have stood up. I think I might have just taken the easy way. Just shut up.”
He talked about many things, including his own failures as a father and husband. He told of the Pascagoula lawyer who had helped arrange for the purchase of his newspaper in 1963. “He was like all of them, this attorney. He said to me one time, when I was running the paper and not identifying people by race: ‘I want to know who’s a nigger, and if it’s a nigger, I don’t want to read the damn story. And, dammit, Harkey, you’re lousing it up.’ ”
“They were all cowards.” Perhaps it was said a little too easily.
“Yes and no,” Ira Harkey said. “Later on, there were two or three people who gave me encouragement, to the extent of a few words. One or two people, a banker, a music store guy. They passed it to me privately and said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell my wife.’ But only one public official, Claude Ramsay, said anything.” And then Harkey said, “One of the great changes that came in people’s minds after segregation was this great relief: ‘It’s gone. It’s off our backs.’ This
huge relief. They couldn’t have articulated it. They didn’t understand it in that sense. They knew it was wrong, and they were obsessed with it, and after it was over, there was this huge relief.”
He looked at the issue of Life, and he opened it to the picture, and he laid out the big double-truck spread on his lap. He moved his head slowly back and forth, studying it. He put his index finger on Grimsley’s face. He laughed softly. “To think, this guy wanted me dead.” And then he said, in response to a question, “No, I don’t feel hate for him at all. If anything, pity.”
“He was a bigot.” Once again, it was said perhaps a little too easily.
Once again, Ira Harkey said, “He was lots of things. Like any life.”
On the next trip to Pascagoula, I stopped in to see Ira Harkey’s son. He was a circuit judge now, and his office was thirty yards across the walk from where Grimsley ran the sheriff’s department. Dale Harkey, middle-aged, said, “A lot of people, who wanted to speak up back then and couldn’t, realize it was wrong and maybe they look at me and want to repair that a little. Things are better in Mississippi now, and things aren’t better. We’ve changed the law and you can’t argue with that, but have we changed people’s hearts?”
I left the courthouse and drove down near the shallow water of Mississippi Sound and knocked on the door of Kathleen and Julius C. McIlwain’s house. I had no idea if Kathleen McIlwain would be alive, although she and her husband were listed in the phone book. I needed to find out. I knew her name because I had found it in an old declassified document from the State Sovereignty Commission. She used to be the town librarian. She was never a public official. In her own quiet way, she tried to do what was right—I’m sure more than once. On August 6, 1962, about two months before the events of Oxford, an investigator from the Sov-Com walked into her library and demanded to know why black children were using its facilities. To quote from the report that the investigator from Jackson filed a week later to his superiors: “Mrs. McIlwain expressed a disapproval of the purpose of my visit.… She stated that she has never had any trouble with whites or Negroes and that she hoped I was not down there to cause trouble. She stated that she thought that the Negroes had the same rights as the white people had because she said that the Negroes pay taxes the same as the white people and why wouldn’t the Negroes have the same rights to the facilities of the library as the white people.” The town librarian wasn’t murdered for such insolence; she wasn’t driven out. But she had to have paid prices.
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