Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  For the origin and history of the office of sheriff in America and in Mississippi, I consulted: Robert B. Highsaw, Guidebook of the County Sheriff (Oxford: Bureau of Public Administration, University of Mississippi Press, 1948); Robert B. Highsaw and Charles N. Fortenberry, The Government and Administration of Mississippi (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954); Henry C. Pepper, Sheriff’s Handbook (Atlanta: School of Business Administration, University of Georgia, 1953); Walter H. Anderson, A Treatise on the Law of Sheriffs, Coroners, and Constables (Buffalo: Dennis & Co., 1941); The Brookings Institution, State and County Government in Mississippi (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1932). Critic Benjamin Schwarz’s quote about sheriffs was in the Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1998. Mark Strand’s quote on Hopper is taken from his Hopper (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994), as are the other Strand quotes on Hopper that appear elsewhere in the book. John Szarkowski’s statement about Eudora Welty’s photographs was made March 23, 1992, and accompanies an exhibit of Welty’s work on permanent display at the college library on the campus of Millsaps College in Jackson.

  The bound transcripts of the February 1965 hearings of the United States Commission on Civil Rights are in the USCCR headquarters in Washington, along with bound volumes of various reports published later in the year, including the one titled Law Enforcement: A Report on Equal Protection in the South. (The commission also produced a forty-minute film on the hearings.) As noted, Ira Harkey’s personal papers are in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library in Madison, a treasure trove on Harkey himself, on Grimsley, on Pascagoula, and on the Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit. Regarding declassified documents from the FBI and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice obtained through the provisions of the Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts: On December 8, 1999, the DOJ released to me a preliminary batch of papers on Grimsley and the JCCEU. On October 6, 1999, and again on February 29, 2000, the FBI in Washington released several hundred pages on Grimsley and the JCCEU. On June 21, 2000, the special agent in charge of the Jackson FBI released further pages. All of this material, with its many redactions and page omissions, is in my possession.

  Finally, four books were of great importance to me not just for understanding the man in the center of this chapter but for a way of thinking about the whole narrative: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964); Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Vintage, 1966); and David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986).

  JOHN HENRY, JIMMY, BOB

  Key interviews for John Henry Spencer were John Burt, Sonny Clanton, Rev. Jim Vance, and Annie Lois Spencer. The Sov-Com documents relating to Taylor Ford are dated April 25, 1961, and May 2, 1961.

  For Jimmy Middleton: Jim Scott Middleton, the sheriff’s son, was the most important. In addition, six Claiborne County African-Americans—who either worked for Middleton directly or knew him before, during, or after the time he was sheriff—were helpful: Rev. James Dorsey, Hezekiah Ellis, James Gray, Nathan Jones, Elonzo McClorine, and John L. Moore. In addition, the following four people shed light on Claiborne County: Emma Crisler and David, Emilye, and Patty Crosby. Emilye, the daughter of David and Patty, is a history professor at the State University of New York, Geneseo. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the civil rights movement in her home county, and that work is astute. There were also several important telephone conversations with her in 1999 about Claiborne County, and I am indebted as well to a piece that she wrote about her hometown in the journal Southern Exposure: “White Only on Main Street” (Winter 1996). Crosby’s dissertation is “Common Courtesy: The Civil Rights Movement in Claiborne County, Mississippi,” Indiana University, 1995. David and Patty still live in Port Gibson and fight the liberal cause in a town that has grudgingly come to terms with life after apartheid. The dates of the three Sov-Com documents relating to Middleton quoted or referred to in the text are, in order: January 30, 1961; September 18, 1961; and June 27, 1960.

  For Bob Waller, his two living deputies, Willie Oubre and Gene Walters, were core interviews. (Walters, a gregarious and longtime Forrest County sheriff, who served after Waller, was hugely knowledgable on the history of Hattiesburg cops; he has his own small museum of law enforcement behind his house, including a whip from Parchman penitentiary made out of “a bull’s dick,” or so Walters said, with a gleam.) Others who either remembered Waller or were able to help with the flavor of Hattiesburg were Chip Edmonson, Francis Farmer, Sara Gillespie, Bud Gray, Sally McInniss, Robert Miller, and Bill Smith. Gray is an aged and gigantic and esteemed highway patrolman who held many head jobs in state law enforcement and also in Forrest County. He was at Oxford during the Meredith troubles. He pulled from an old yellowed envelope an even more yellowed newspaper clip from the New York Times. The clip was preserved in cellophane. Trooper Bud Gray’s picture was on page 1 of the Times, September 27, 1962: a brush with immortality. “They came from all over the state to go up there, those sheriffs,” he said, wrapping the paper back into its cellophane. “And when they got up there, they just laid under the shade. I don’t know what they thought they was doing, going up there. Didn’t do nothin’.” Two Forrest County residents and professors at the University of Southern Mississippi—Neil McMillen, history; Noel Polk, literature—were helpful in numerous ways, although not specifically on Sheriff Bob Waller. I’m indebted to their scholarly writings and also to their hospitable conversation. (I will cite their work elsewhere.)

  THE MAN WITH HIS BACK TURNED

  The literature on Greenwood, Mississippi, is extensive—but you have to know where to look, since the Greenwood story is almost always tucked into larger stories of Mississippi during the struggle over civil rights. The following works, whether scholarly or popular, were important to my understanding of Greenwood and of the Greenwood movement and/or of the character of the Mississippi Delta itself: V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1950); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Touchstone Books, 1988); Branch, Pillar of Fire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965); James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965); James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Tony Dunbar, Delta Time: A Journey Through Mississippi (New York: Pantheon, 1990); Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Putnam, 1977); Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Arrival of Negroes in Southern Politics (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Townsend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls (New York: Norton, 1998); Dittmer, Local People; Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro.

  Of dozens of other secondary sources I consulted for the chapter, I wish to cite three that were very important: The first is Mississippi Black Paper: Fifty-seven Negro and White Citizens’ Testimony of Police Brutality, the Breakdown of Law and Order, and the Corruption of Justice in Mississippi, with a foreword by Reinhold Niebuhr and an introduction by Hodding Carter III (New York: Random House, 1965); second, Joseph Sinsheimer’s interview with Sam Block in the journal Southern Exposure, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1987), entitled “Never Turn
Back: An Interview with Sam Block”; third, a long-playing audio recording entitled Story of Greenwood, Mississippi, Folkways Record FD5593. A twenty-three-minute black-and-white documentary, “The Streets of Greenwood,” produced in 1963 by movement people Jack Willis, John Reavis, Jr., and Jack Wardenberg, was also helpful in terms of evoking the mood of that time and place. Crudely made, and all the better for it, the film intercuts interviews and SNCC personnel with footage of demonstrations in front of the courthouse. Greenwood cops, with their World War II helmets and riot sticks, are putting people into the back seats of squad cars. John Ed Cothran manages to stay out of the camera’s eye, as was his way, but he is surely there. Regarding archival documents, the SNCC papers have the richest Greenwood material, although they are only slightly ahead of John Rosenberg’s private cache of old government documents. As I said above, almost all of these documents in Rosenberg’s personal files concern Greenwood and Leflore County: affidavits, statistical portraits, lawsuit testimony, maps, pamphlets, field reports, sworn statements, newspaper clippings.

  As for breathing sources: The wheel to make it all turn was John Ed, of course, but the smaller wheel within the bigger wheel was those who have known him in one capacity or another through the decades, directly or indirectly, in his family or out of it. Many of their names and voices appear in the text. The following, not in the text, were also important to an understanding either of Cothran or of Greenwood, past and present: Sara Criss, Lawrence Guyot, Jim Frazier, Rev. Aaron Johnson, June Johnson, Tim Kalich, Boyce Little, Gordon Lackey, Bud McGee, John Rosenberg, and Bob Salveson. Each was helpful in unexpected ways, and it is my regret that I couldn’t find a way to tell some of their own stories within the text itself. For instance, William Bud McGee was one of fifty-eight blacks arrested by Sheriff Cothran in Itta Bena, right outside Greenwood, on June 18, 1963. Itta Bena is visible from U.S. 82 as a dust of trees and water tower. McGee lived on West Henry Street in Greenwood when he offered to show me around Itta Bena, which is where he’d been assigned during the movement. He took me through an impoverished little black section known locally as Balance Due—unconscious poetic expression for the cultural and spiritual dunning blacks have always suffered in Mississippi. McGee was a gospel deejay and a tax accountant; he’d once been a pin boy at the Greenwood bowling lanes—that is, before he came under the wing of organizer Sam Block. When I met him, so many years later, he had a kind of heh-heh, caving-in-on-himself chuckle. He was close to sixty and had lived in Leflore County all his life. After visiting Itta Bena, we drove out to the county work farm on the other side of Greenwood. He started laughing and recalled: “You’d say to the Shot, who’s watching you with the gun, ‘Gotta go to the bathroom here, Shot. Bumblebee here, Shot.’ Shot says, ‘You bigger than they are, boy. Finish your business.’ Sometimes you have a good Shot, sometimes bad. You stay too long in the bushes, Shot would say, ‘You better bring something back on a stick, boy.’ ” Gordon Lackey, from the list above, is a white man, and he was also helpful in forming indelible pictures of sixties Greenwood. In old AP wire stories, Gordon Mims Lackey had been identified as an alleged “kleagle,” or organizer of the Mississippi White Knights of the KKK. In 1966, he was subpoenaed to come to Washington as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He took the Fifth on all questions related to alleged Klan activities or involvement. When I contacted him, he lived in a redbrick rancher on the “other side,” on East Barton Avenue. He had me in, put on the coffee. He sat on a stool in his breakfast nook. He was coughing and hacking and wheezing. All he was back then, he said, was “politically active.” His best Greenwood friend for many years had been Byron De La Beckwith, convicted slayer of Medgar Evers. I had old FBI reports in my possession in which Lackey allegedly had told a source for the Jackson bureau of the FBI that he, Lackey, had been involved in the shooting of Evers. All bull, Lackey told me, his voice growing menacing. He leaned close to my face, dragging on his cigarette, swilling black coffee, coughing. “I never asked Delay if he killed that damn nigger. And he never told me, neither.” I asked him about John Ed. He broke into a grin. The sun was out suddenly. “Can’t say too much bad about him as a lawman. Sorta kept outta sight. Buzzard arrested me one time for speeding when I was just a young punk. He called my damn daddy on me.”

  Some specifics: The war-diary tally of violence against SNCC was in a SNCC press release, March 20, 1964. Mayor Sampson’s “nigger civic league” quote was in the New York Times on April 6, 1963. (The piece was by Claude Sitton, one of the most esteemed civil rights reporters in the country.) Newsweek’s “theater of war” piece was on April 8, 1963, by Karl Fleming (another heroic and early-on-the-scene civil rights reporter). Mayor Sampson’s public statement about “agitators” was on March 29, 1963. The quote about Chief Lary is in Rev. William Wallace’s oral history at the Moorland-Spingarn Oral History Collection, Howard University. The KKK Hate Sheet regarding Martin Luther King, Jr., is in the Race Relations Collection, “A Delta Discussion—Issue 2 of a Series,” J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi. Paul Klein’s affidavit is in Belfrage’s Freedom Summer, among other books. For more on Mac Cotton’s trial lasting five minutes and John Ed’s refusal to answer questions, see Cotton’s affidavit in Mississippi Black Paper. The information on Cotton suffering drip from his penis and a guard shouting, “You goddamn niggers shut up …,” comes from “Statement from Hollis Watkins in Parchman State Penitentiary,” SNCC files. (This statement is titled, inaccurately, “Report: Greenville, Mississippi,” dated October 5, 1963.) The dates of newspaperman Thatcher Walt’s editorials quoted here are August 17, 1962, and March 2, 1963, both in the Greenwood Commonwealth. Sam Block and “the sheriff” and the spitting episode was in James Wechsler’s New York Post column on March 19, 1963. John Ed’s quote in Newsweek, “white people around here feel pretty mad” about Emmett Till’s murder, ran on September 12, 1955. His supposed “disagreeing” with Clarence Strider appeared in Jet, September 15, 1955.

  Photographs generally proved a fine catalyst for triggering John Ed Cothran’s memory. That memory, as it edged toward ninety, could be startlingly precise, and also deliberately or undeliberately foggy, obscuring, misdirecting, and withholding. I didn’t show him the copy of Life right away, although I had it in the car the first time I drove up. Eventually, I brought to his home reproduced copies of various photographs of John Ed relating to his days as a Greenwood lawman. We’d peer at them together, and stories would unlodge. I had collected numerous pictures from newspapers and magazines regarding the Emmett Till case and his role in it. (The first time I met him, he asked me if I could get him a “copy of that Jet book,” with his picture in it.) The first time I showed him the picture in Life, he squinted at it and said, “Guess that’s shore enough me, standing there with my back turned looking at Billy Ferrell.” He asked what the white armband was for—I told him for identification. “Guess I forgot that part.” He asked how I had found out the names. I told him that Ferrell, at our first meeting in 1997, had provided the names, and had shown me an old letter he’d sent to a Southern historian, who was doing his own research and had asked for the names. There was a slow curve of a smile from Cothran. “Didn’t even know they took my picture that day. Don’t even think I saw the durn photographer.” He seemed to have forgotten that the image had appeared in Life. He seemed to think it was out of a newspaper.

  Part Two: Filling Up the Frame

  AMERICAN HAUNTING

  The following are the core works I consulted for my own retelling of what happened when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss: Branch’s Parting the Waters (his chapter “The Fall of Ole Miss” makes for brilliant, condensed reading); Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society; Walter Lord’s The Past That Would Not Die (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); David G. Sansing’s The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); William Doyle’s An American Insurrection (New York: Doubleday, 2001); James Meredith’s T
hree Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Constance Baker Motley’s Equal Justice Under Law (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998); Victor Navasky’s Kennedy Justice (New York: Atheneum, 1977); Nadine Cohodas’s The Band Played Dixie (New York: Free Press, 1997); Russell H. Barrett’s Integration at Ole Miss (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965); Carl Brauer’s John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 (New York: Bantam, 1975); Frederick S. Calhoun’s The Lawmen: United States Marshals and Their Deputies, 1789–1980 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); and Will D. Campbell’s And Also with You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma (Franklin, Tenn.: Providence House, 1997).

  A documentary film, U.S. Marshals: The Real Story, by Andrew Solt Productions, Los Angeles, was extremely helpful, especially hour one of the series, “Mission in Mississippi.” It contains much newsreel and documentary footage. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has 8-millimeter footage and audiotapes, as well as the papers of Ross Barnett and a good vertical file on the University of Mississippi. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, in Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, has audiotapes of conversations between JFK and Barnett, and RFK and Barnett. In the archives at Ole Miss, I consulted written transcripts as well as audio recordings under Presidential Recordings Transcripts, “Integration of the University of Mississippi.” Navasky’s Kennedy Justice makes expert, storytelling use of transcripts between RFK and Barnett, and I compared these to the actual declassified transcripts from the U.S. Marshals’ Service that were obtained by Ole Miss professor of history Charles Eagles under the provisions of FOIPA. Also among the declassified papers released to Professor Eagles were voluminous shift reports, daily and weekly, filed by the men who guarded Meredith during his enrollment and in the months after, while he attended classes.