The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Over the years Myrlie would have to endure the smirks and casual little jokes their friends would make. “How’s the little Mau Mau?” they would ask. Unfazed, Medgar would reply, “Burning Spear is just fine.”

  By now, Myrlie Evers realized that her life with Medgar was not going to be at all ordinary.

  5

  Black Monday

  Something was bothering E. J. Stringer. It was weighing on his mind as he rose to speak to a group of black professionals at the American Legion Hall in Mound Bayou. This was Stringer’s first speech in his new role as president of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP. A lot of members in the audience were, like himself, veterans of World War II. Stringer was thinking about education. He was a graduate of Alcorn College, but he had been compelled to leave the state to get his degree in dentistry. Yet in Mississippi’s white universities, where no black man had ever studied, there were German, Japanese, and Italian students. The white schools of Mississippi were good enough for our former enemies, but not for the black veterans who fought them to keep America free. The thought, Stringer recalls, irritated him. So he asked a question of his audience that night: “Is there anyone here who will help us to integrate the university system of Mississippi?”

  When the speech was over, Medgar Evers stepped up to E. J. Stringer and told him that he was willing.

  On Monday, January 11,1954, Evers look his first step into the arena. On that day he filed an application to the University of Mississippi Law

  School. Thurgood Marshall, who was then director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, agreed to act as Evers’s attorney.

  The Jackson Daily News picked up the story after E. J. Stringer made the formal announcement. The headline read, “Mound Bayou Man Files Application at ‘U’ Law School.”

  It shouldn’t have been such big news. After all, eight southern states had already quietly accepted a few Negroes at the university level, and legal trends were running in the direction of desegregation. The NAACP had, since the late 1940s, been winning a series of lower court decisions on the issue.

  Mississippi, of course, was different from other places. There were signs that the state would not yield an inch.

  Myrlie Evers was furious. She knew what this meant, that there would be years of harassment, danger, not to mention poverty. How would they afford law school? Besides, she was pregnant again.

  Medgar said he was doing it for her, for the children. She didn’t see it that way. They were still arguing about it when the family visited Medgar’s parents in Decatur.

  Myrlie adored Mama Jessie. She was such a decent, loving, lighthearted woman. Myrlie loved Daddy Jim too, but he was harder to get close to. She thought he was like a diamond in the rough. He could be stern, somber, thoughtful, but he just lit up when he saw his only grandson, Darrell. Daddy Jim would rub his rough old face against that baby’s skin, chuckling and clucking while Darrell ran his little legs all over the old man’s chest.

  Jim Evers was completely bald then, and very thin. His heavy-lidded eyes were tired in a deep way. But he was still the law in that household. When he spoke, everyone heard him.

  As always the Evers family did their talking at the dinner table. Medgar told his parents he was applying to Ole Miss law school. Myrlie told them she was pregnant again. And suddenly the delightful reunion turned into a pandemonium of tears and angry words and people stomping away from the table.

  Jessie was terrified for her son and worried about his children. Medgar laid out his reasons for his decision. His father listened without a word and then spoke to him as if he were a child.

  “Your first duty is to your family,” Jim Evers said in a voice like a slow roll of thunder.

  Medgar jumped up and left the table. He was twenty-eight years old, and he still couldn’t dispute his father. But he would not be treated as anything other than a man. Not by anyone.

  Myrlie Evers remembers that nobody could understand what was driving Medgar. She thinks even he didn’t realize how far he would have to go, or why.

  Only a few months later Jessie phoned her sons to tell them Jim Evers was dying. Charles, who was teaching school and coaching football and running a funeral business in Philadelphia, carried him to the closest hospital, in Union. Medgar jumped in his car to meet them. What he found was appalling. The nurses had put the old man on a cot in the damp hospital basement. There was nothing Charles or Medgar could say, no kind of hell they could raise, that would get that man upstairs where the whites were treated.

  The brothers took shifts staying with their father. Medgar was with him the night he died. Jim Evers was suffering a hemorrhage, and Medgar was standing over him, waiting for the end, when he heard a terrible commotion outside the hospital. A nurse came down and asked for Medgar’s help. She led him to a frightened black patient with a bleeding leg. There had been a shooting, and a white lynch mob was roiling outside, hoping to string up the wounded man. There was nothing Medgar could do. Eventually the mob gave up. But Medgar’s father died in that hospital basement listening to the sound of white men muttering “nigger.”

  Charles drove down from Philadelphia with his own hearse and took Jim Evers’s body away from the hospital. Then he dressed his father for the funeral.

  The state Board of Higher Learning went through the motions of considering Medgar Evers’s application to the University of Mississippi Law School. Evers was even called in for a personal interview with the state attorney general and soon-to-be-governor, James P. Coleman.

  Coleman grilled Evers about his motives for applying, why he wanted to be a lawyer, and why he wouldn’t apply for a grant to attend an out-of-state school. Medgar answered the questions calmly, including the last one: Where would he live and dine if he were accepted at Ole Miss?

  Medgar said he planned to live where everybody else lived: in a campus dormitory. “I’m very hygienic. I bathe every day. And I assure you that this brown won’t rub off.”

  Three days after Myrlie gave birth to a daughter, Reena, Medgar was notified that his application was rejected. There was a problem with his letters of reference. The board had ruled that his recommendations had to come from the county where he resided, not the county where he was born. It was too late to reapply for the fall term. He could try again next year.

  But by the time that decision was made, the stakes had changed in the segregation game.

  On Monday, May 17, 1954, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, read the court’s decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” He gave the southern states until October to come up with a plan to integrate.

  The race-obsessed government of Mississippi had been monitoring the Supreme Court for years, watching for early warning signs that the unthinkable integration of schools would become the law. Anticipating that the battle would probably be lost, the legislature had tried to find ways around the inevitable decision. As early as 1952 the state was officially studying the disparity between black and white education, and by 1953 the legislature appropriated thirty million dollars to “equalize” Negro schools. The idea was to approach the Plessy v. Ferguson standard of “separate but equal” facilities that had been established in 1896. In this dirt-poor state segregation had a high price tag. It would get higher.

  In Mound Bayou that night Medgar and Myrlie Evers twisted the dial on the radio, tuning in every crackling news report on the decision. Medgar was hopeful but guarded. It was obvious that the whites of Mississippi wouldn’t give up without a fight.

  By the end of the day the South was already sending up howls of protest. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge dismissed the decision as “a mere scrap of paper.” Integration of schools, he said, would lead to “mongrelization.” Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina raved that the decision would end
“civilization in the South as we have known it.” On May 27, Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, the blustering cornpone plutocrat from Sunflower County, delivered his assessment on the floor of the Senate. It was the essence of white supremacist delusion: “Segregation is not discrimination,” he purred. “Segregation promotes racial harmony. . . . There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race.”

  The Supreme Court decision blindsided most southern states, but not Mississippi. While the governors and senators sputtered and strained, Mississippi’s segregationists were getting organized.

  Within a few weeks the ideologues of legal racism had prepared their arguments. Among their heroes was a dapper, bespectacled judge from Brookhaven named Thomas P. Brady. The judge was no backwoods demagogue. He had attended the tony Lawrenceville prep school in New Jersey; he graduated from Yale and studied law at Ole Miss. The classical education had not made much of a humanist of him; Brady used his broad knowledge to lash together a pseudoscientific justification for white supremacy.

  One night in June 1954 Judge Brady became the prophet and voice of Mississippi’s white resistance when he spoke at the Sons of the American Revolution Hall in Greenwood, Mississippi.

  A rapt Byron De La Beckwith sat in the audience, soaking in every word. Some say he was never the same again.

  Brady’s speech was such a hit that he felt compelled to expand on it and publish it few weeks later. The booklet’s title was Black Monday, which is what segregationists call May 17, 1954, the day, Brady wrote, when “the declaration of socialist doctrine was officially proclaimed throughout this nation.”

  These were the times of Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts and the great Red Scare. These were the years of the Rosenbergs and the Russian bomb and the cold war. Superpatriotic, elaborately Christian white men and women were banding together to stave off the frightening postwar social upheaval. They were convinced that godless communists lurked behind every social movement, from unionism to ecumenicism. Every group that made them uncomfortable was conveniently identified as a “communist front,” and the NAACP was near the top of that list. To the radical right in the fifties integration was just another form of communism forced on the American people. Any concessions would signal a victory to the forces of atheism and collectivism and would lead not only to the destruction of the white race but also to the imminent invasion of the American homeland. As judge Brady put it, “The great threat to this nation is that of creeping Socialism and Communism. The interracial angle is but a tool, a means to an end, in the overall effort to socialize and communize our government.”

  In most states the radical rightists stood on the sidelines and heckled the government for not doing enough to combat the communist threat. In Mississippi they were the government.

  This was the climate in which the Supreme Court offered its mandate to end segregation in schools “with all due speed,” and in this atmosphere Judge Brady delivered his humdinger of a speech.

  He began with a treatise on the origins of man: At the dawn of history there were three “species of man”: “Homo Caucasius” — the “Great White Race”; “Homo Mongoloideus” — the “yellow man”; and “Homo Africanus” — the Negro. While the first two races made strides in developing civilizations, he said, “the negroid man, like the modern lizard, evolved not.”

  He hammered away at the greatest fear of a self-respecting white supremacist: race mixing, mongrelization, and the defilement of white women. Mongrelization, he pointed out, had caused the destruction of past civilizations: “Whenever and wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock … his blood has been infused with the blood of the negro, the white man, his intellect and culture have died.”

  He said Africans should have been grateful for the opportunity to be slaves. He compared them to well-broken horses, beasts of burden.

  Among his more memorable observations was this: “The loveliest and the purest of God’s creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman and her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl.”

  Naturally Judge Brady called to memory the outrages of the War Between the States and the humiliation of Radical Reconstruction. He warned Washington against pursuing its plans to force integration on the South: “Pour a little coal oil of political expediency and hope of racial amalgamation upon the flickering blaze which you have created and you will start a conflagration in the South which all of Neptune’s mighty ocean cannot quench.”

  As soon as Brady published his speech in booklet form, Beckwith took to the streets of Greenwood to sell copies. His missionary zeal was ignited. The enemy had been identified. The troika of communism, atheism, and integration were now linked in Beckwith’s mind as the root of evil. As he once put it, his “race, color and creed innards got out of sorts.”

  Robert Patterson was another Deltan inspired by Black Monday. Patterson was a beefy red-haired cotton planter from Sunflower County and a local celebrity of sorts. Before he joined the army, he had been a college football star and captain of his Mississippi State team in 1942. He had always held some radical conservative views, and he had quietly contributed anti-Semitic articles to fringe publications. But after he read Black Monday, he decided to devote himself to the cause of fighting integration.

  One night in July Patterson and thirteen other prominent white men got together in an Indianola living room and set up a new organization called the Citizens’ Council. A week later a hundred men attended an open meeting at city hall. Within four years there would be 80,000 paid members in Mississippi and 300,000 in councils across the South.

  It was the end, for a while, of the white southern liberal. Any opposition to segregation was labeled traitorous. The Citizens’ Councils controlled the local, and in some cases state, elections. Their common enemy was the NAACP, the “communist front group” that had brought the lawsuit that threatened the southern way of life.

  As soon as Beckwith heard about the Citizens’ Councils he signed right up. He was a big joiner. On a business resume he compiled thirty years later, Beckwith listed all of his affiliations, starting with the Boy Scouts. Along with his church groups, there was the 4-H Club, Knights of Pythias, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Masons, Knights Templar, Shriners, LeFlore County Hunting and Fishing Association, Greenwood Historical Society, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Sons of the American Revolution (he held state offices in that one), the NRA, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, and the Moose Lodge of Greenwood.

  Yet Byron De La Beckwith would never admit that he had joined the Ku Klux Klan. In later years, after his name was linked with various hate crimes around the South, Beckwith would issue a standard non-denial when asked outright if he was a member: “I’ve been accused of it.” He often added that he found the group to be a wholesome outfit.

  Back in the fifties there was not much of a Klan in Mississippi. There wasn’t any reason to have one. The state government was so radically segregationist, and the Citizens’ Councils, often called the white-collar Klan, were so firmly in control of business, that a Ku Klux Klan would have seemed redundant.

  There was a group across the border in Louisiana called the Original Knights of the KKK, and some scattered members of old, traditional outfits like the Knights of the White Camellia in southern Mississippi. People joined out of family tradition more than anything else. It was a racist’s low-rent fraternity, with costumes and funny titles. All that would change after John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to Oxford in 1962 to integrate Ole Miss. But back in the halcyon fifties, a racist could be fairly secure without organized vigilante groups. The violence was ad hoc and applied as necessary.

  By 1956 the State of Mississippi had organized itself to battle integration by creating the Sovereignty Commission. It had a broad mandate and a long leash. Nowhere in its charter were the words integration or segregation mentioned. The code words were encroa
chment and sovereignty.

  The law that the state legislature passed in establishing the commission read, in part, “It shall be the duty of the Commission to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi . . . from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof; and to resist the usurpation of the rights and powers reserved to this state.”

  The original purpose of the Sovereignty Commission was to serve as a big PR agency, to educate the nation about the benefits of the southern system, and to lobby against outside interference. It quickly became much more than that. An investigative department was established, headed by L. C. Hicks, the former head of the Mississippi Highway Patrol (which had its own intelligence unit). A former FBI agent named Zack Van Landingham was hired to do the “investigations.” A two-year appropriation of $250,000 was set aside for the commission, some of which was quietly diverted to the Citizens’ Councils. People quickly caught on to the true nature of the Sovereignty Commission. It was Mississippi’s state spy agency.

  Now here was an organization Byron De La Beckwith could get behind. He wrote to Governor Coleman on May 16, 1956, asking for a job as an investigator to help in “uncovering plots by the NAACP to intergrate [sic] our beloved State.”

  The letter was written in a distinctive style that would be recognized by prosecutors and FBI agents in the years to come. Beckwith outlined his current obsession: “To me [ the fight for segregation ] is a life or death struggle and NOTHING ELSE IS MORE IMPORTANT AT THIS TIME! I. . . will tear the mask from the face of the NAACP and forever rid this fair land of the DISEASE OF INTEGRATion with which it is plagued with.”

  He wrote that it would be a sin to squander his talents selling tobacco when his “useful energy may be expended in acquiring the information needed to thwart efforts of the power mad integration mongers.”