Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  Barnett: That won’t do at all!

  RFK: You broke your word to him.

  Barnett: You don’t mean the president is going to say that tonight?

  Kennedy: Of course he is; you broke your word; now you suggest we send in troops, fighting their way through a barricade.

  Barnett: Don’t say that. Please don’t mention it.

  Late Sunday afternoon, Meredith was installed in a dormitory room at Baxter Hall on the back end of campus. The plane carrying him had landed at the Oxford-University Airport close to 6 P.M., and Meredith and his bodyguard of marshals were able to slip into the campus through a rear gate. A force of more than 500 federal marshals had now been assembled, for whatever lay ahead. (Actually, there were very few marshals per se. The force consisted of deputy marshals, border patrolmen, guards from the federal prison system.) Even into middle afternoon, much of the campus was deserted—many students were still returning from the football game in Jackson. Some had driven to the capital on their own, others had ridden a “Barnett Special” train. The relatively empty campus is one reason why the federal forces were able to slip Meredith in undetected. The applicant came to his destiny in a suit and with a slender tan briefcase.

  Earlier, about 3:30 P.M., the first transport planes carrying marshals had begun arriving at the university airport. An Air Force Jetstar brought Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. He and other officials and marshals climbed into seven Army trucks for the two-mile ride to campus. A crowd gathered on the central lawn, known as the Circle, which is just west of the Grove, adjacent to it. They positioned themselves in front of the Lyceum, a stately old white-columned building predating the Civil War, the only survivor of the five original buildings constructed for the opening of the university in 1848. The afternoon lengthened. Some bricks and bottles were hurled at a line of about thirty marshals who were acting as a decoy in front of the Lyceum. They had on white helmets and yellow-orange riot vests, and in the vests were stubby tear-gas canisters. The Lyceum, which is the main administration building, had served as a hospital during the Civil War. When still more marshals arrived in Ford Falcons, students raced out from bushes and smashed the car windshields with bricks and crowbars. After dark, the campus became illumined with military floodlights—and eventually tear gas enshrouded and choked everything. By then, the student rioters were in the minority. Outriders and inriders had taken over what writer Willie Morris later termed “the echo of the Civil War’s last battle.” If the bigots had had their way that evening, they would have torched the campus, starting with the Lyceum. As historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Strange Career of Jim Crow: “This was not an attack on Negroes or demonstrators. It was an insurrectionary assault on officers and soldiers of the United States Government and the most serious challenge to the Union since the Civil War. The mob fought with stones, bricks, clubs, bottles, iron bars, gasoline bombs, and firebombs.”

  At 7:30 P.M., Barnett went on the air in Jackson to announce that Meredith was inside the university, and that he, Barnett, was yielding peacefully to the “armed forces and oppressive power” of the United States. It was the same old rhetorical attempt to offer surrender while simultaneously fanning flames and feigning resistance. (At midnight, he’d issue a “We will never surrender” statement.) Just before Kennedy spoke to the nation on television—the talk was set for 8 P.M. in Mississippi, 10 P.M. in Washington—the mob surged toward the marshals. The orders of the court “are beginning to be carried out,” the president said into the cameras even as the first orders to fire tear gas were being given, or perhaps had just been given, two or three minutes before. (There are many arguments about time, and, like so much else, they remain unresolved.) Kennedy appealed to reason and patriotism, saying to Mississippians, “the honor of your university and the state are in the balance.” He spoke directly to the university community, referring to Ole Miss traditions “on the gridiron, as well as the university campus.” He said that neither Mississippi “nor any other Southern state deserves to be charged with the accumulated wrongs of the last 100 years of race relations. To the extent that there has been failure, the responsibility for that failure must be shared by all of us, by every state, by every citizen.”

  An Ole Miss author and literature professor named Evans Harrington was listening to the speech at his home near the campus when a Memphis newscaster broke in with a report that matches had been dumped onto a fuel truck, and that the truck had ignited. Harrington, who lived a mile and a half away, got into his car and drove toward the campus. He was terrified but felt he had to try to do something to stop the madness, and another reason why he was bolting from his home was because he couldn’t get out of his brain the idea that “Moby Dick had just come to me.” He approached the campus from a side drive and was waylaid by a newsman desperate to get back to the Ole Miss Motel in downtown Oxford to use the telephone. Harrington drove the reporter to his room and then came back in toward University Bridge. He abandoned his car somewhere on University Avenue and heard highway patrolmen telling kids to go ahead and smash windows with chunks of construction brick. He saw students whom he knew with rocks, bricks, bottles. He saw a long line of state trooper cars. Troopers were leaning out the windows to yell, “Kill the bastard.” He moved on toward the central campus. Along with several other professors—James Silver was one—he tried to speak sense to anyone he recognized as a student. The Right Reverend Duncan Gray, Jr., pastor of the local Episcopal church, was attempting the same. That July, Gray had presided at Faulkner’s funeral, intoning the final prayers at graveside in the town cemetery. He read from Walt Whitman: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Gray had been on the campus since about 6 P.M. Now he stood up on the Confederate monument, on the eastern edge of the Circle, about a hundred yards east of the Lyceum. He tried to calm the barbaric yawp. An arm yanked him down. Evans Harrington, twenty feet back in the crowd, thought: I’ve got to do something. He thought again, They’ll break my jaw. He thought again, If I don’t do it, I’ll never forgive myself. He thought again, You’re already doing something. Just by thinking this way. I’ve got to keep doing it. I’ve got to figure a way to do something and not get killed and at the same time not renege on my honor. Someone began to punch the clergyman. Professor Harrington was one of those who stepped in. Remembering, four decades later: “A big old wide football type is trying to shield him. He’s cradling Duncan Gray. He’s yelling, ‘He’s a preacher. Don’t hurt this man! He’s a preacher.’ And the aggressor says, ‘Didn’t you hear what he said last night on TV? He said that that nigger sonofabitch should get registered.’ And the big old wide football type cries, ‘I know, I know, I hate that nigger too, we oughta string him up, but this is a preacher, don’t let’s hurt this preacher.’ ” Gray escaped serious injury, as did Harrington. Within days of the riot, the assistant professor of English, a native Mississippian, along with other faculty members, would sign a document pointing to his university’s lies and cover-ups and after-deceptions. (“… we have evidence that the attempt of men in prominent positions to place all the blame for the riot on the United States marshals is not only unfair and reprehensible, but is almost completely false.”) That night deeply and instantly politicized Harrington. He continued teaching at Ole Miss for decades, loving it whole, seeing it whole. That could be said of Duncan Gray as well. The son of an Episcopal bishop, he was later himself named bishop of the Mississippi Episcopal Diocese, and after that he served as president of Sewanee University in Tennessee. But he kept on loving and defending what was good about Mississippi, even as he kept on being appalled by its history.

  A little while before Kennedy spoke to the country on national TV, State Senator George M. Yarbrough—Barnett’s representative at the scene—had ordered the highway patrol and other uniformed officers to withdraw. The marshals were under furious attack, trying to rely mainly on tear gas. An enraged Bobby Kennedy demanded the troopers’ re
turn. Some did return, too late, with no wish to maintain order. Some got caught in the waves of tear gas. They withdrew again, and those who didn’t stood by and egged on the rioters. Many sat in their patrol cars and watched the destruction. The governor was in his mansion 175 miles away.

  Within an hour of the president’s address, the sniper fire had begun. A bullet caught a marshal in the neck. The Lyceum corridors became lined with wounded or exhausted marshals. Charles Moore, who was inside the Lyceum, got pictures of the marshals slumped against the walls in their gas masks, and these images would be published in the next issue of Life. Moore was all over the campus that afternoon and night, risking his life. At some point, a false report got out that the mob had located Meredith’s whereabouts and was storming the dormitory to string him up. At another point, a bulldozer with the vertical scoop sticking up as a shield began plowing toward the line of marshals. A tear-gas canister knocked the driver from the machine, but the machine, with a life of its own, kept moving, hit a tree, spun around. A marshal jumped atop it and steered it away.

  Some units of the federalized Mississippi National Guard arrived—it was close to 11 P.M. They were led by Captain Murry Faulkner, a relative of William Faulkner. After a series of logistical blunders and confused commands, the first Army units arrived from Memphis. “It was like a western movie, where the cavalry arrives in the nick of time,” Walter Lord wrote in The Past That Would Not Die. It was past 2 A.M. By dawn, Monday, things were calm—and then more destruction broke out in the streets of Oxford, including brick throwing by the sheriff of Pascagoula.

  Throughout, James Meredith slept well—so he wrote in Three Years in Mississippi. He dismissed the riot in a couple of sentences, as if it was removed from him entirely, as if he was talking from behind a screen, on the other side of a wall, which in a way he was. “The first thing I did [on getting into Baxter Hall late that afternoon] was make my bed. When the trouble started, I could not see or hear very much of it. Most of the events occurred at the other end of the campus, and I did not look out the window. I think I read a newspaper and went to bed around ten o’clock. I was awakened several times in the night by the noise and shooting outside, but it was not near the hall, and I had no way of knowing what was going on. Some of the students in my dormitory banged their doors for a while and threw some bottles in the halls, but I slept pretty well all night.” Shortly before eight o’clock on Monday morning, October 1, 1962, Meredith and his protectors walked through the rubble and past the burnt-out vehicles to the Lyceum, where the enrollee held a handkerchief to his nose and became officially an Ole Miss student. As he wrote later, “I wore a dark suit with a blood red tie.… I was like a soldier on that day and my clothes were my flag.” His bodyguards escorted him to his first class, in Colonial American history. He was a few minutes late and was asked to take a seat at the back. In the days following, Washington and Mississippi worked overtime, each to blame the other. Congressman John Bell Williams, a silver-tongued Mississippi racist, said: “The bestiality, cruelty, and savagery of Justice Department employees under the direction of Robert Kennedy … were acts beyond the comprehension of normal minds.”

  And the seven of Moore’s photograph? The caption writers in Life had it right, or mostly right: “[W]hen the riot broke out, all local and state cops made themselves scarce.” Their absence at the center of destruction was not by their design. It was by irony’s design.

  John Ed Cothran and his deputy Big Smitty had left for home on Thursday evening, a couple of hours after Moore took the shot. John Ed had departed the campus on the orders of the lieutenant governor, who, John Ed says, told him personally to get out of town. (When I asked if Big Smitty had wanted to stay, there was that curving ooze of smile from Cothran.) John Henry Spencer and Jimmy Middleton and Bob Waller had also left on Thursday. They waited at their homes for word from Billy Ferrell. By the time word came, it was too late for them to have any kind of central role. Jim Garrison, who lived in Oxford, was on the campus during the riot—but to what extent he participated in violence, or tried to help stop it, I cannot say. I’ve never found his name in FBI documents relating to that night. As I’ve already recounted, his kid sister, Patricia, remembered that his face looked terribly blistered the day after the riot. “He was in it,” she said. When I pushed for more, she said, “I don’t know any more. Jimmy’d never talk about that.” By definition, riots are chaotic things, the more so when they occur at night. Unless someone has been caught red-handed in a crime, it is very hard to know the nature of his or her involvement.

  James Ira Grimsley’s name can be found in many documents—but again I cannot say with any reliability whether he committed serious crimes. I doubt he did, only because he and his wrecking crew got there so late. The FBI and Justice Department documents that pertain to Grimsley’s actions are sketchy in detail, and are not to be trusted anyway, since most of them consist of statements by Grimsley henchmen. Ira Harkey’s newspaper, the Chronicle, ran a front-page story on the day following Meredith’s registration: “Sheriff Tells of Riots” was the main headline. “Tried Calming Mob, Grimsley Relates” was the secondary headline. The story opened with a perfectly straight face: “Sheriff James Ira Grimsley said he withdrew Jackson County deputies from Oxford Monday when it became apparent their efforts were futile.… Grimsley said he left here with thirty-five deputized men on a chartered bus.… He said they picked up twenty men in George and Perry Counties and deputized them. ‘We turned down about thirty others because we felt they were hotheads who would endanger our mission,’ Grimsley said. Grimsley said they spent four hours in Oxford in a vain attempt to quell a mob which attacked Army vehicles bringing in troops.” The day before, October 1, the headline in the Chronicle was “Meredith Enrolls—2 Die.” Six paragraphs in, there was this: “Grimsley said the men who went to Oxford were hand-picked from about 650 persons who volunteered their services Sunday. Grimsley said earlier he was waiting to be called either by Lt. Gov. Paul Johnson or Billy Farrell [sic], president of Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association.”

  It’s clear from documents and other sources that Grimsley did get word from Ferrell, and that he did charter a bus, and that he apparently paid for the bus out of his own pocket, and that he and his deputized band left the courthouse square sometime around 8:30 P.M. Several of Grimsley’s regular deputies in the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department were aboard bus number 1241, which belonged to the Gulf Transport Company in Mobile, Alabama. The driver (his name is blacked out in the documents) claimed not to have seen anyone come aboard bearing weapons. That is contradicted by many other accounts. Everybody on board had some kind of weapon. One deputized man (the name is blacked out) told the FBI he had a .20-gauge Browning automatic shotgun “without plug,” but that he intended to use it only in self-defense. The sheriff was said to have left Pascagoula wearing two revolvers—a holster on each hip. A retired reporter for the Chronicle, Don Broadus, remembered that he went down to the courthouse square that Sunday evening to watch the bus depart Pascagoula. He was asked if Grimsley was drunk and armed, and he said he couldn’t be sure about the former but no question about the latter. On the way north, the caravan picked up more cars and defenders of Mississippi. The bus stopped near Escatawpa, Mississippi, and loaded up on extra rounds of ammunition. According to Grimsley’s account in the Chronicle on October 2: “We arrived at 2:30 A.M. and set up headquarters at a service station. No one was allowed to wander away from our group. When we got off the bus we saw about 150 young men gathered on a street corner. We went over to the group in an attempt to disperse them. We told them to go home because there was nothing to be gained by violence.” Some of the FBI documents indicate that the bus arrived at the outskirts of the university as late as 4 A.M. A retired highway patrolman named Frank Ely remembered in an interview four decades later that he and several other troopers stopped Grimsley’s bus at a roadblock. Grimsley was drunk and roaring in the aisles, this ex-trooper said. Ely remembered that he and other tr
oopers ordered the driver to turn the bus around. Ely said he was certain the sheriff and his vigilantes never got inside the campus gates. However, all the available evidence indicates that the bus didn’t head back south. It went into downtown Oxford. There, sometime after dawn, the head lawman of Pascagoula was photographed heaving a brick or a piece of concrete through a store window, or so a loyal former Jackson County sheriff’s deputy remembers, along with other Pascagoulians. (I have never been able to locate that photograph.)

  To quote again from Ira Harkey’s book The Smell of Burning Crosses: “Our sheriff, James Ira Grimsley, was a hard-drinking red-faced fat man with the colorful glibness found so often in near-illiterate Southern politicians. He had been to Oxford, he had told the press, sorteing from Pascagoula with thirty-five deputized local citizens, picking up twenty or so more on the bus ride north.… ‘I am proud of the men who went with me,’ he had told the Chronicle. ‘They were hand-picked for their sound judgment. They did exactly what I told them without question. They all said they are willing to go back if I ask them.’ ” From another part of Crosses: “They bragged that at Oxford they’d done more damage than any other outfit that went, burning cars, breaking windows, slugging people.” From another passage: “They boasted in Pascagoula saloons that none had outdone them in brick throwing and vehicle burning.”

  So what is the “truth”? Probably, it’s something like this: An alcoholic with a pair of six-shooters on his belt rode through the night to the north of his state, only to be denied his chances. Humiliated, lathered, the high sheriff returned to the Gulf Coast with his posse of ship welders and others to sponsor “a citizen’s emergency unit,” which by any other name was a Klan Klavern without robes. (In Michael Newton and Judy Ann Newton’s 1991 book, The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia, the JCCEU is identified as having been a “Klan affiliate” of the early sixties in Mississippi.) The members of this “unit” talked of returning to Oxford to kidnap and kill James Meredith, and perhaps they’d also burn down the offices of the local newspaper and string up the editor. None of it came to pass and maybe most of it was just the talk of cowards. The FBI came around to investigate, and then word got out that federal contracts at the shipyard might be canceled. The bloated ruffian with the star on his breast became the first casualty of a corrupt town’s miraculous conversion to righteous-thinking ways.