In 1959, when Billy Ferrell campaigned for sheriff the first time, the median annual income of blacks in Adams County was $2,000. More than one-third of black housing in the city was deemed “inadequate for human shelter.” This is from a report filed in the mid-sixties by the United States Commission on Civil Rights, when commissioners came to Mississippi from Washington to conduct ineffectual but well-meaning hearings.
The city famed even in Europe for its gracious and extant old nineteenth-century pre–Civil War Southern ways is also the white-trash Mississippi town where the revival of the Klan began in the sixties and then spread throughout the state. The rebirth began in the second half of Sheriff Billy Ferrell’s first term, largely in response to the shame and embarrassment suffered over a black man who’d forced his way into a white institution of higher learning on October 1, 1962. By then, the factories of Natchez were providing jobs to unlettered workers from backwoods logging communities who were eager to drive a couple of hours each way every day for hourly wages. After Meredith at Ole Miss, Natchez’s factories—International Paper, Johns Manville, Armstrong Tire & Rubber—became potent breeding grounds for Klan membership, and so, too, the local police and sheriff’s departments. There is little question that the police force and sheriff’s department had current or former Klan among its ranks, at least according to investigative reports by the federal government later in the decade. These cops were identified as being either current or former members of Klan Klaverns in and around the time of Meredith at Ole Miss, and afterward, too, and, in a few cases, apparently, there were cops in the county who were in the Klan even before Meredith. But Meredith at Ole Miss was the catalyst for a Klan resurgence across all of Mississippi, and the resurgence began in the beautiful, bluff-hanging city of Natchez. Nobody knows for sure how many Natchez Klansmen were walking around in the heat of the mid-sixties night, with and without sheets. In 1965, The Reporter magazine, after an investigation, wrote: “With some four hundred local Klansmen, Natchez has possibly the highest per capita Klan population anywhere in the South.” The House Un-American Activities Committee, in hearings in Washington in early 1966, published long lists of Natchez residents reputed to be currently or formerly in the Klan. It released a list of over seventy names of employees at International Paper—just one manufacturing plant—who were either present or recently resigned members of either the White Knights of the KKK or the United Klans of America.
The Grand Dragon of the UKA, realm of Mississippi, lived right in town—local boy, former truck driver, former Johns Manville factory worker. He wasn’t hiding a thing. His name was E. L. McDaniel. They called him “Eddie.” He had a big office on the second floor of 114 Main. The curvy building, with its Art Deco frosted glass, is still there, only now there’s a Santa’s Station on the premises. The building is down a little way from the Pig Out Inn. You go a block in the other direction and you’re at the Natchez Museum of Afro-American History and Culture. In Mississippi, everything changes, and nothing changes.
Eddie McDaniel and Billy Ferrell grew up together, although they weren’t especially close. Two of the Dragon’s younger brothers—not identified as Klan members in government documents—worked as deputies for Billy and, later, for Tommy Ferrell, when Tommy took over the top job. One of these brothers, Jerry McDaniel, served as Tommy’s chief criminal deputy for many years, until his retirement in the late nineties. The other brother, Bill McDaniel, remained on Sheriff Tommy Ferrell’s payroll.
I went one summer night to Jerry McDaniel’s house and saw the retired chief deputy grit his jaw and fold his huge hands across the dining room table and bead me with suddenly hard eyes as he said: “Only one thing in my life I ever swore to was a badge. No secret organization nowhere, no time, nohow. You got that? My brother was my brother. I loved him. I didn’t necessarily agree with him. It’s wrong to tar somebody with a brush if you don’t have any proof. McDaniel brothers have been living with that crap for their whole lives.” He paused. “My brother Eddie was just like a lot of other frustrated white Mississippi men of his time.”
Jerry McDaniel, who retired as a cop in 1997 after a twenty-one-year career at the sheriff’s department, lives in an attractive brick rambler on the edge of town. He said that he’d gone to work officially for Billy in 1976, but for a good while before that, when he was a city fireman, he’d worked as a special deputy to Billy. After 1988, when Tommy took over, Jerry rose to chief deputy. He gave me one of his cards. On the top it said, “William T. ‘Tommy’ Ferrell, Jr., SHERIFF.” And right below: “JERRY MCDANIEL. Chief Criminal Deputy.” He seemed to be enjoying his life in retirement. He and his wife liked taking motor trips up to Branson, Missouri, where Eddie McDaniel was spending most of his time. Jerry and his wife would hook up a motor home alongside his big brother’s in Branson and get in a good family visit. According to Jerry, Eddie thought of himself as a friend of Sheriff Tommy Ferrell. Until the moment I brought up the KKK, the evening at Jerry’s had gone fine. I slid into the subject by saying, “I’d like to ask you a question or two about race.” He’d said, “I don’t like that subject, go ahead.” But by the time I said goodbye, maybe forty-five minutes later, everything was fine again. “Come back,” he said at the door, standing there with one arm around his wife, as so many Mississippians seem to say at the door.
In the height of the troubles, Eddie McDaniel, who’d also once been a city fireman, had a nameplate on the desk of his inner office at 114 Main that said GRAND DRAGON. There was a sign on the outer door: NO PROFANITY BEYOND THIS DOOR. The Dragon was known to have a black kid of fifteen whom he watched out for and had sweep up the place for him during the day. The Dragon wrote letters to the editor of the Natchez Democrat like this: “Be it known, as of this wonderful day of Our Lord, October 2, 1964, that we in the United Klan of America have no knowledge what-so-ever of the violence which has plagued our State.” He’d sign them, “For God and Country, E. L. McDaniel, Grand Dragon, Realm of Mississippi.” On his Klan letterhead, he wrote to the governor, Paul B. Johnson: “Dear Governor: I am writing requesting an audience with you which I believe will be of great importance not only to you and the United Klans of America, Inc., but to the entire citizenry of Mississippi. If at all possible, I would like to have this audience set on a Saturday morning due to the fact that I work five days per week. An immediate reply is requested.” It was signed, “For God and Country, E. L. McDaniel, Grand Dragon, Realm of Mississippi.”
Natchez is that elegant civilization of well-bred people at a curve in the river where you could awaken on sweet mornings in the sixties to find hate literature stuffed inside your screen doors or inside your mailbox or stuck onto a stick out on the lawn. The dispatches were from the Mississippi White Caps, just one more terrorist organization spawned during the civil rights period. (HUAC, in its 1966 hearings, identified at least four Klan terrorist groups operating in Natchez—but there must have been many more than that, if you counted in all the splinter and sympathizing groups.) The typical literature from the White Caps would close with statements like this: “All the crooks and mongrelizers who have not been mentioned in this paper need not feel left out—there are only twenty-four hours in a day. We will get you next if you do not correct your ways. Some who read this will wonder why we did not sign our names. The reason is that if we were known, we could not continue to get such information you have just read. We will tell you this much: WE ARE THE HUSBANDS, BROTHERS, FATHERS, COUSINS, NEPHEWS, AND EVEN GRANDFATHERS OF THE CITIZENS OF THIS COMMUNITY.” Back then, the town had signs at the outskirts that said THE OLD SOUTH STILL LIVES IN NATCHEZ. Yes, it did. Nine men met one night in a service station garage to form the APWR—Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. This was May 1963, in the last eight months of Billy Ferrell’s “first administration,” as Billy was fond of describing it years later. The president of the APWR wrote to the Democrat explaining what was going on in the civil rights troubles. It was the agitators who “took God Almighty out of everything.
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In Natchez, civil rights organizations such as SNCC and CORE would put out their Monday-morning recaps of recent violence: “Five-gallon can of gasoline, a bomb-like apparatus, found under Blue Moon bar here. Bar belongs to Jake Fisher, whose brother’s bar was found bombed in Louisiana over the weekend.”
The now-declassified files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission are full of letters from its director and other officials to the law enforcers of Adams County—such as this one, addressed to “Honorable Wm. T. Ferrell, Sheriff and Tax Collector, Natchez, Mississippi.” It was written on June 13, 1961, in the second summer of Billy’s first reign: “Dear Sheriff: Please furnish this commission with information on A. C. Curtis, male, colored, of 66 Brenham Avenue, Natchez, Mississippi, owner of Curtis Funeral System at 106 E. Franklin Street, Natchez, Mississippi, as to any information you may have regarding this subject’s activity with the NAACP, if any, or other subversive organizations.” Two weeks later (June 30, 1961), this letter from the Sov-Com: “Dear Sheriff: Please furnish this commission with information on George F. West, male, colored, of 409 No. Pine Street, Natchez, Mississippi, as to whether or not this subject has paid 1959 and 1960 poll tax; also, if he has any criminal record with your department. Any general information you can supply on this subject’s activities with subversive organizations, if any, will be appreciated.” The sheriff of Natchez or his functionary always replied. Billy closed one such letter that summer, on June 6, 1961: “Assuring you of the complete disposal of the entire facilities of this department at all times in matters of mutual interest, I remain, Sincerely yours, Wm. T. Ferrell, Sheriff.” He signed it with that elegant penmanship of his, learned in Catholic grammar school. Four months later, a Sov-Com operative journeyed to Natchez to check personally on the racial situation and then wrote in his report: “Deputy Robinson stated that he and Sheriff Ferrell were keeping a close watch on any activity that might come from the NAACP, or any subversive organizations, and they would enforce the law to the letter, should the NAACP or the voters registration school cause trouble in Adams County.” The field agent came to the county on October 10, 1961—which was almost exactly a year before the head lawman came back to Natchez from the troubles at Ole Miss and walked into a church bazaar where his wife presented him with a picture of himself swinging a bat in the latest issue of Life magazine.
It’s unarguable, in the cold light of history and masses of declassified documents, that there was deep collusion between local law enforcers and the state spy agency located in Jackson, whose charter and mission were to disrupt the civil rights movement. The men who ran the Sov-Com were government employees, with offices in the state capitol building, a floor above the governor. Some were investigators; others were paper pushers who’d kiss their wives goodbye every morning and put on their fedoras and climb into their sedans and go downtown to turn in a day’s work, no less than their colleagues at the oil and gas commission or the swine and poultry commission. In the paranoid pitch of civil rights, the Sov-Com bureaucrats and field agents (who in some cases were ex–FBI men) were one more layer of supremacists with mellifluous speech and wonderful manners, doing what they could to guard the gates of the closed society. Theirs was a homegrown CIA op, with its Orwellian name: the Sovereignty Commission. The agency functioned, sometimes haplessly, sometimes perniciously, from 1956 to 1973 and then went out of business for good in 1977. Together with the Citizens’ Council and the Klan, it formed a triumvirate of repression. The difference was that the Sov-Com was funded by tax dollars. The governor sat on the board and served ex officio as chairman. The lieutenant governor was the vice chairman. The state attorney general and the speaker of the State House of Representatives and various legislators and noted lawyers held seats. There are 87,000 indexed names in the commission’s declassified files (although not 87,000 individuals; each variation on a name constitutes a separate entry). Altogether, 132,000 pages have been released. It’s not possible to know what was lost or destroyed before court orders and lawsuits opened up the files.
It was all collusion against blacks and the outside agitators, and the colluding included large numbers of FBI agents assigned to the state—this also is unarguable in the long view of history and documents. Instead of protecting the rights of blacks and others in the movement, the FBI often secretly plotted against them with local law enforcers. Bob Moses, leader of the movement in Mississippi, once said: “It’s for reasons like this that we believe the local FBI are sometimes in collusion with the local sheriffs and chiefs of police.” That was understatement. Moses was talking of a notorious civil rights murder in Amite County, which sits just to the southeast of Adams County. There’s long been a strongly held belief that the FBI leaked the identity of a black witness—which put an immediate death warrant on the black man’s life. Such things happened all over the South. There were certainly exceptions. But led by J. Edgar Hoover, whose contempt for movement people and their cause was widely known—chiefly because Hoover made little effort to hide his contempt—the FBI was generally slow to act whenever violations of black rights were reported. Often, the agency was openly hostile to any civil rights complaint, the more so if the investigating agents were Southerners. The September 15, 1963, bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham—in which four little girls were killed—brought national outrage, but no case cracking from the FBI. A Justice Department investigation later revealed that Hoover had secretly blocked efforts by the local Birmingham office to bring a case against the alleged bombers—no matter the urgings of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for prosecution.
The next year, during Freedom Summer, Hoover himself came to the Mississippi capital to open the largest field office in the country. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but their bodies had not yet been found. Hoover’s message was reassuring to whites in the state. The agency was their friend. He said that the Bureau was opening an office in Jackson because “criminal scum” would be coming in. He promised that “we most certainly do not and will not give protection to civil rights workers.… The FBI is not a police organization. It is purely an investigative organization.” Privately, he told the governor and business leaders and law enforcement officials that Klan violence must cease. Hoover was under pressure from the White House and Congress and his reputation was on the line. By the end of Freedom Summer, 153 agents were working out of the Jackson office.
In Natchez, there was an FBI agent and Mississippi native named George Gunter. He had grown up in town, knew Billy well, was a college football hero. It was natural that he should be assigned as a resident agent in Adams County. In March 1959, when the FBI presence in the state was still very small, the Sovereignty Commission asked Gunter to deliver names of Natchez teenagers who were scheduled to attend a youth march in Washington, D.C. From a Sov-Com document dated March 18, 1959: “Mr. Gunter has advised that he will confidentially inform [the commission] should he obtain any information of any Mississippi Negroes participating in this March. Mr. Gunter also advised on one H. Climans, who resides on an RFD route out of McComb, Mississippi, and who takes the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper. Undoubtedly, if this individual takes a Communist newspaper, he is in favor of integration.”
In the fifties, the Star movie theater had a shoulder-high white fence down the middle, Natchez whites on the left, Natchez blacks on the right, both watching a Saturday afternoon oater, the whites pegging ABC gum (already-been-chewed gum) at the blacks. Billy Ferrell was rising as a local lawman—serving under now-gone bigots and esteemed citizens named Audley B. Conner and W. I. Hebert and Billy Priester. (Priester was sheriff when Gunter promised to supply the Sov-Com with names of black kids.) Also in the fifties, another local boy, this one from Ferriday, Louisiana, just across the river, with a wild hair in him, used to wail and wallop his Saturday night honky-tonk piano at a juke joint called the Blue Cat Club. The Blue Cat was under the hill. It’s still going, only it’s call
ed the Blue Cat Lounge, and it’s come up top now, on the bluffs, to Franklin Street. But Jerry Lee Lewis doesn’t wail and wallop there anymore, and Billy Ferrell, who thought Jerry Lee Lewis was okay (if a little dee-caydent), is several years in his grave. Billy’s wife, Hazel, was about half kin of Jerry Lee anyway, and so this would have forgiven the decadence right off, because loyalty is such a core virtue in the South. The Blue Cat’s current incarnation has a fine juke box and cold beer at good prices, and also townies who sit on the stools only too happy to give a visitor guffawing directions to “Martin Lootin’ King Street.” (You said you already knew, and let it go at that.)
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