Regarding the history of lynching in the South and of the general mind-set of white male Southerners in postwar America, leading up to civil rights, I consulted: Dittmer’s Local People; Cash’s The Mind of the South; Lewis M. Killian’s White Southerners (New York: Random House, 1970); Numan V. Bartley’s The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Dewey W. Grantham’s The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Meredith’s Three Years; Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta (as with Branch’s chapter on Ole Miss in Parting the Waters, Whitfield’s lynching chapter, titled “The Ideology of Lynching,” is essential reading); Neil R. McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Leon F. Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002); James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms Publishing, 2000); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck’s A Festival of Violence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). For James Meredith’s life in the unfathomable years after Oxford, my principal sources were newspapers in Jackson, Cincinnati, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere; John Ed Bradley’s 1992 Meredith profile in Esquire; Henry Hampton’s 1987 PBS documentary series, Eyes on the Prize. Also at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, I made use of an excellent vertical file on Meredith. My portrait of the man who took the picture, Charles Moore, derives both from original reporting and from a first-rate biographical essay that accompanies Moore’s civil rights photo anthology, Powerful Days. The essay, in that long-overdue celebration of a documentarian whose work hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves, is by former Life correspondent Michael Durham, who knew and worked with Moore when they were both at risk in the South in the sixties.
As for interviews for this chapter, in addition to those whose names are in the text, I need mention these five for their overview insights about Mississippi: Charles Eagles, Neil McMillen, Bill Minor, Charles Sallis, David Sansing. Minor is a journalist; the others are historians of America but specialists in and even advocates, until they die, for the complexities of Mississippi. Finally, this note: One of the first lawmen in Mississippi I interviewed was Gwin Cole. He’d worked as an investigator for the highway patrol and was there at Oxford in his Raymond Chandler fedora and Telly Savalas bulk. He showed me a picture of himself, on page 186 of a chamber-of-commerce sort of tome called Mississippi: Portrait of an American State. We were sitting in a booth in a restaurant in Clinton, Mississippi. The old retired trooper lit up with a memory: “There was a fellow up there in a tree with a carbine that we never could get to. We couldn’t find him that night. He’d let loose on the Lyceum building: zattattatatatat. All that smoke and gas from that damn riot. I was three months getting that stuff out of my car.”
Part Three: Hopes of the Sons
SOMETIMES TRASHY, SOMETIMES LUMINOUS
This chapter is the product of my own interviewing.
Of the people in this book, I feel I have come to know John Cothran the best. After I had been talking to him for three years, and after I knew his parents pretty well, too, I wrote to John’s father: “Yesterday, Sunday, while you were in Moorhead with John Ed and Maudine, I was in Horn Lake with Johnny. We visited two hours. I brought him up to date. He said casually, without making a big deal of it, that his friend from work, Charles Hawkins, a black man, was coming over for a barbecue. They were having T-bones. I had met this Mr. Hawkins at the store myself. But that is a down-through-the-generations kind of parable, isn’t it? Thick steaks in the backyard with a buddy from work who happens to be black. John is a terribly fascinating person for me—much screw-up in his life, no money, many mistakes. And yet a story like that.”
THE DISTANCE FROM NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI, TO SANTA TERESA, NEW MEXICO
As with Greenwood, the literature on Natchez is extensive, but, again, that literature is often folded into larger treatments. Although I was bent primarily on achieving a narrative in the story of three generations of Ferrells—from Billy to Tommy to Ty—I recognized that that narrative had to be built in some way on the lush external history of the alluring river town in the southwest corner of the state. Professor Dittmer’s Local People was important. A much more vertical and specific treatment is Jack E. Davis’s Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). Professor Davis made manuscript pages of his book available before publication, for which I remain grateful. A long series of newspaper articles on the civil rights legacy of Natchez, in 1998, by journalist Stephanie Saul of Newsday, was helpful, and so was a scholarly historical piece by William Banks Taylor, “Southern Yankees: Wealth, High Society, and Political Economy in the Late Antebellum Natchez Region,” in the Journal of Mississippi History, Summer 1997. The Sov-Com files are overflowing on Natchez and on Billy Ferrell. Billy’s 1997 oral history with the University of Southern Mississippi was extremely useful. On August 31, 2000, Billy’s FBI file (with its frustrating blackouts) was released to me through the provisions of FOIPA. The papers of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP at the LOC have oceans of material on Natchez, including first-rate “background reports” on the town that had been prepared for the voter registration activists who went to work there in the sixties. Various reports by the United States Commission on Civil Rights relating to Adams County and Natchez were helpful, as they were elsewhere in this book, especially Chapter 2 of “Law Enforcement: A Report on Equal Protection in the South.” I also profited from a publication entitled The Present-Day Ku Klux Klan Movement, a 1967 report stemming from 1966 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this HUAC report are overviews of Natchez, its background, its Klan history. The transcripts of the HUAC hearings themselves, “Activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S.,” which are available in the LOC, produced a trove of Natchez material, just as they produced much Greenwood material. The hearings were held in Washington, D.C., on January 4–7 and 11–14, 1966. E. L. McDaniel’s 1977 oral history with the University of Southern Mississippi was an important document. Jan Hillegas made available a document entitled “Adams County People Associated with Right-Wing Activities.” Anthony Walton’s Mississippi: An American Journey (New York: Knopf, 1996) has eloquent Natchez passages. Lastly, the archives of the Natchez Democrat were invaluable. The following people among those I interviewed shed particular light on the Ferrells or on Natchez, past and present: Lou Baroni, Tony Byrne, Thomas Boo Campbell, Alma Carpenter, Arlen Coyle, Bob Dearing, George Greene, Rev. D. W. Howard, Rev. Leon Howard, Jim Ingram, Dorie Ladner, Mark LeFrancis, Lewis Lord, Mamie Lee Mazique, E. L. McDaniel, Jerry McDaniel, Jerry Mitchell, Bruce Payne, Elizabeth Proby, J. T. Robinson, Don Simonton, Premo Stallone, William H. Terrell, Judge Mary Lee Toles.
IN THE FAMILY OF MEREDITH: LOVING WHAT IS THEIRS
This chapter is the product of my own interviewing, although, as should be obvious from the text, I am indebted to John Ed Bradley’s December 1992 Esquire profile of James Meredith.
CONFEDERATE SHADOWS: GOOD SON
This chapter is the product of my own interviewing.
Epilogue: Hope and History Rhyming
James and Joe Meredith’s interview with CNN, concerning Joe’s graduation from Ole Miss, was on April 28, 2002. The story on James Meredith in the Commercial Appeal during the forthieth anniversary weekend was on September 29, 2002.
Interviews
Ronnie Agnew, Lou Baroni, Richard Barrett, Sherry Bernhard, Albert B. Britton, Jr., Sam Block, Larry Brinkley, Don Broadus, Anne Brooks, John Burt, Tony Byrne, Thomas Boo Campbell, Will Campbell, Alma Carpenter, Lindsay Carter, Sonny
Clanton, Gwin Cole, Alice Cothran, Billy Cothran, John Cothran, John Ed Cothran, Maudine Cothran, MacArthur Cotton, Arlen Coyle, Emma Crisler, Sara Criss, David Crosby, Emilye Crosby, Patty Crosby, Bettie Dahmer, Ellie Dahmer, Vernon Dahmer, Jr., Charles Davis, Hiram Davis, Bob Dearing, Bill Dillon, John Dittmer, Nell Dogan, Rev. James Dorsey, Brad Dye, Charles Eagles, Chip Edmonson, Hezekiah Ellis, Frank Ely, Gray Evans, Francis Farmer, Christina Ferrell, Hazel Ferrell, William T. Ferrell, William T. Ferrell, Jr., William T. Ferrell III, Bill Ferris, Tyler Fletcher, Kelly Flynn, James Forman, Jim Frazier, J. D. Gardner, Sara Gillespie, Jim Gilliland, Susan Glisson, Vondaris Gordon, Rich Gorham, Bud Gray, James Gray, Jimmy Green, George Greene, Tony Greer, Lawrence Guyot, Dale Harkey, Ira B. Harkey, Jr., Evans Harrington, Barclay Harris, Bob Helfrich, Mary Katharine Hemphill, John Herbers, Regina Hines, Rev. D. W. Howard, Rev. Leon Howard, Dave Ingebretsen, Jim Ingram, Woodrow Jackson, Pat James, Cynthia Jardon, Rev. Aaron Johnson, June Johnson, Nathan Jones, David Jordan, Tim Kalich, Tim Kierstead, Nick Kip, Gordon Lackey, Dorie Ladner, Leon Lambert, Tanya Lambert, Ginger Lancaster, Joe Lee III, Mark LeFrancis, Boyce Little, Lewis Lord, Ella Jean Lucas, Tom Lyons, Jack Maples, Chuck Mayfield, Mamie Lee Mazique, Elonzo McClorine, E. L. McDaniel, Jerry McDaniel, Harry McDonald, Bud McGee, Kathleen McIlwain, Sally McInniss, Carolyn McLean, Joan McLemore, Leslie McLemore, Neil McMillen, Ed Meek, James Meredith, John Meredith, Joseph Meredith, Scott Merriner, Scott Middleton, Robert Miller, Bill Minor, Jerry Mitchell, Charles Moore, John L. Moore, Mike Moore, Willie Morris, Audine Stutts Nix, Willie Oubre, Bruce Payne, Wazir Peacock, Jim Peckham, Susan Plunk, Noel Polk, Pete Pope, Elizabeth Proby, Donald Quave, Bessie Randall, B. J. Ray, J. T. Robinson, John Rosenberg, Charles Sallis, Bob Salveson, David Sansing, Dub Shoemaker, Bill Simmons, Don Simonton, Bill Smith, Jerry Smith, Sonny Speight, Annie Lois Spencer, Premo Stallone, Jim Stephens, Alton Strider, William H. Terrell, Mary Lee Toles, Jimmy Travis, Rev. Jim Vance, Thelma Walt, Gene Walters, Hugh Stephen Whitaker, Ronnie White, John W. Whitten, Robert Wilson, William Winter, Ernest C. Withers, Tyrone Yates.
Acknowledgments
I have said at the end of other books that there is a real sense in which each one is only a record of those who have believed in it. Above, I have tried to name as many individuals as I can who were crucial in helping me gather material for a particular section. Here I would like to speak of those friends and family and colleagues who were there with their belief and support in a transcending way.
My spouse and two sons—Ceil, Matt, John—once again, they put up with the years of anxiety. Only occasionally would they ask about it. Usually, they just let the book-in-progress be, and in that silence I could hear the eloquence of their love and their trust that it would one day get done.
My former associates at the Washington Post—I worked happily on staff for twenty-three years and was always allowed to go off on book projects. On this project, I went off and didn’t return. So, again, I wish to pay particular and final respect to these Post people: Ben Bradlee, Donald Graham, Leonard Downie, Robert Kaiser, Mary Hadar, David Von Drehle, Deborah Heard, Bobbye Pratt, Pam Kendrick, Robin Groom.
I want to thank friends and associates, old and new: Lysa Bennett, Carol Boston, Douglas Brinkley, Shelby Coffey, Greg Djanikian, Bill Gildea, Wil Haygood, Richard and Lisa Howarth, Howard Kohn, Denny May, Howell Raines, Elaine Rubin, Wendy Steiner, Kevin Willey, Mike Woyahn; my wonderful agent, Kathy Robbins, and her equally wonderful right arm at the Robbins Office, Inc., David Halpern; the Washington Theological Union, in Washington, D.C., a place of peace and justice that provided a book-writing office for three years—and, in particular there, Jim Coriden, Vincent Cushing, Rita Gibbons, Joe LaGressa, Dan McClellan.
There were Mississippi mentors, whether in Mississippi or not, and above all there were two: John Herbers and Bill Minor. They are brothers in a reporting fraternity that is as nearly select now as the brotherhood of ex-presidents: uncommonly courageous men who were present, writing it down in newspapers, from the dawn of the civil rights movement onward. Not only that, but both Herbers and Minor, who are also brothers in their generosity, have accomplished that nearly impossible thing: growing old gracefully in the hard and often dirty business of journalism. It’s nearly inconceivable that I could have finished the project without their friendship and counsel. I want to single out two others, the first being the premier investigative journalist in the state, the second being a superb professor of American history at Ole Miss: Jerry Mitchell and Charles Eagles. Finally, there is David Halberstam, author of something like eighteen books, whose first reporting job out of college, almost five decades ago, was in West Point, Mississippi. He went on to fame for his work as a New York Times reporter in Vietnam and other places—but I think much of his life as a chronicler of our culture must have been formed as a kid from New York City who’d wound up in Mississippi. He remains a personal inspiration.
At Alfred A. Knopf I am grateful to Sonny Mehta, Carole Devine Carson, Iris Weinstein, Ida Giragossian, Paul Bogaards, Michelle Somers, and Ellen Feldman, but above all to my editor, Jonathan Segal. For Jon and myself, it’s four books, twenty-three years, and counting. I have run out of ways to thank him for his friendship, his belief, his wit, his spare bedroom, his credit card at our favorite Manhattan restaurant, his astounding way with both a pencil and an idea. It has been a privilege.
Sons of Mississippi Page 48
