The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  He mentioned in his resume his favorable war record, his happy home life, and that he was on the Membership Committee of the Greenwood Citizens’ Council (it later booted him out for his overly zestful recruitment techniques). Other skills that he felt qualified him for the job were “expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun — and — RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION!”

  The letter was found many years later in Coleman’s papers after the governor’s death. The Sovereignty Commission sent Beckwith a form letter saying that it would consider his application. It is not generally known whether he was ever called upon to help out.

  6

  The Association

  Gloster Current knew he had his man. E.J. Stringer and Aaron Henry had told him that Medgar Evers had what it took for the job. Right away he could see it too. Medgar Evers was not afraid. Besides, he had the most important qualification to be the first field secretary of the NAACP for Mississippi: he was available.

  They met for the first time on October 29, 1954. Medgar drove to Stringer’s hometown of Columbus for an airport interview with Current, who was NAACP director of branches. After the Brown decision in May, Thurgood Marshall had suggested the NAACP increase its field staff to monitor compliance and gather affidavits for further school desegregation suits. Mississippi was a hard position to fill. It was essentially a suicide mission.

  Gloster Current was a tall, dark-skinned man with a prominent nose and a dour countenance. He was an abstemious Methodist preacher, which somehow contradicted his previous claim to fame as the leader of a Detroit swing band called Gloster Current’s Nightingales. Current had joined the NAACP youth council back in the thirties and later assumed the leadership of the Detroit branch. In 1946 he had been hired as the director of branches by the legendary NAACP leader, Walter White.

  Although almost all its foot soldiers were black, the NAACP was an integrated organization. In fact it had been founded by whites in 1909. By the beginning of World War II the association had some eighty-five thousand members. About 10 percent were whites, most of them occupying executive roles. There were nearly five hundred branches.

  Policy was directed from the NAACP’s national office in New York, where a dozen or so salaried executives worked. They were all Negroes, including the secretary, who ran the operation. The president of the NAACP was traditionally a white man.

  The NAACP’s weakness was its inability to attract working-class Negroes. It had a reputation as an elitist, bourgeois organization. All policy came from the New York office, which dictated goals and strategies to the branches. The branches were semiautonomous units that elected state leaders and met in state conferences.

  The NAACP strategy was simple and focused: change the laws and then change society. In a world with so many injustices the organization narrowed its mission to attacking legalized racism in the forms of Jim Crow laws and school discrimination and promoting voting rights and new laws, such as antilynching legislation, to protect the lives of black people. The organization lobbied state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. The independent legal section fought in the courts. Every case was carefully selected to build a precedent. The association was opportunistic, and it was capable of sacrificing short-term gains for long-term goals. The NAACP never advocated violence — or even civil disobedience. It was, above all, a “respectable” organization. But this did not prevent NAACP branches, particularly in the South, from being labeled radical and subversive.

  During the early years, when the NAACP had a near monopoly on black activism, it was directed by Walter White, an amazing, tireless crusader. White set the standard for NAACP endurance by working eighteen-hour days, often risking his own life to investigate hate crimes. What made White all the more remarkable was the way he looked.

  With his blue eyes and fair skin and silky straight hair he could easily have slipped into the white world — “passed” — and abandoned his Negro identity. Instead Walter White, the son of an Atlanta postman, used his white skin to infiltrate southern towns to investigate lynchings.

  Under White the NAACP grew strong and influential. He demanded and got complete loyalty from his New York lieutenants, and they in turn required the same from the field staff. Working for the association was more than a job; it was expected to be a way of life.

  Gloster Current recognized that Evers was NAACP material. In his recommendation to Roy Wilkins, who had succeeded White as executive director, Current described him as “qualified, courageous, and impressive.” The association offered Evers the job for forty-five hundred dollars a year, as well as a secretarial job for Myrlie. They would have to move to the capital, Jackson.

  Myrlie was not thrilled. Not only was this a dangerous job, but it meant the end of Medgar’s career at Magnolia Mutual. But there was no way to dissuade Medgar, and at least the job got them out of Mound Bayou.

  Medgar accepted the offer on November 27. He was expected to begin work on December 15. On November 29, Medgar’s new immediate boss, Ruby Hurley, the regional director who was then based in Birmingham, wrote him a curt letter. She realized he was not being paid yet, but she needed a detailed report on the state of affairs in Mississippi, including documentation of intimidation by the Citizens’ Councils. She had to have it in two weeks, in time for a regional meeting in Columbus.

  The pattern of demanding the impossible, yesterday, had begun. So had Myrlie Evers’s simmering resentment. She knew already she had met her most powerful rival.

  Within two weeks Evers’s first official report was ready. It sizzled with the enthusiasm of a fresh recruit. He wrote about Mississippi’s “progress” in 1954, due to the “phenomenal . . . unequaled leadership” of the NAACP, as well as Dr. Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership.

  It was encouraging to Evers that black leaders had defied Governor Hugh White at a state-sponsored meeting called to demonstrate Negro support for voluntary segregation.

  “On that momentous day, July 30, 1954, 99 out of 100 Negro leaders before the Governor of Mississippi and his Legal Educational Advisory Committee . . . told him in no uncertain terms that they would have no part in any scheme to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on segregation in the Public Schools,” Evers wrote. The bad news was that the governor then decided to back a plan to abolish public education instead of desegregating schools.

  The report outlined the ominous rise of the Citizens’ Councils, which Evers called “the up-town Ku Klux Klan.” By the end of 1954, according to T. R. M. Howard’s estimates, councils had been organized in thirty- five of eighty-two counties. The objective of the councils, Evers wrote, was to “keep the Negro in his place” by keeping him out of white schools, keeping the ballot out of his reach, and keeping him dependent on the white man’s dollar.

  Since the time of Evers’s application to Ole Miss, public universities had begun requiring recommendations from five alumni. In addition, an amendment had been passed in the November state elections allowing circuit clerks the authority to reject anyone who registered to vote if he or she could not interpret the U.S. Constitution.

  Meanwhile the Citizens’ Councils plotted to keep Negroes in low- paying jobs and to organize economic reprisals against troublemakers.

  In his report Evers told the story of one black farmer who had owed five thousand dollars on his house and 120 acres to a bank in Hollandale. The president of the bank called him in and told him his note was due and that it would not be renewed. “We are not going to renew notes for any of you niggers in the Negro Council or the NAACP. We are going to use peaceful means but if that won’t work, we shall use other means,” the bank president said.

  White employers who extended credit, called “scrip,” to their workers or sharecroppers to get medical or dental attention refused to give credit for Dr. Howard or E.J. Stringer or any other practitioner associated with the NAACP or the Regional Council. The intimidation extended to the local draft board. Dr. Howard, who was forty-seven years old, rece
ived a notice telling him that he might be reclassified as 1-A.

  Evers concluded his presentation with a number of recommendations. The most important one was that the national NAACP set up a cash fund to loan money to Negroes who were under pressure from the banks. To a limited degree the association accepted his recommendations and made some funds available.

  Evers’s first job for the national office would be to collect signed affidavits attesting to intimidation by the Citizens’ Councils. But first he was flown to New York City on New Year’s Day, 1955, and put through an intensive training course in NAACP history and procedures, everything from how to take a deposition to how to dress.

  Medgar and Myrlie moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Jackson. Myrlie’s grandmother came to live with them to watch the babies while Myrlie worked as Medgar’s secretary at the NAACP office.

  The organized backlash against integration in Mississippi grew stronger with each passing month. In April 1955 Ruby Hurley and Medgar Evers traveled together through the Delta on a fact-finding mission. Hurley was a tall, elegant single woman with a taste for good clothes and fine Scotch. She smoked long cigarettes. She was utterly fearless and totally devoted to the NAACP. Whenever there was a crisis in Mississippi or anywhere in the Deep South, Hurley would wade right into it. She and Medgar Evers would drive this route again and again during the long, bloody months that followed.

  Like foreign correspondents in hostile territory, Evers and Hurley discreetly met with Negroes in the Delta and recorded their statements: Fit Simmons once hauled wood for a sawmill owned by a member of the local Citizens’ Council. The sawmill owner had threatened to repossess Simmons’s truck if he didn’t quit the NAACP and remove his name from the voter rolls. The truck driver still owed $800 on a $2,200 note. Simmons did what he was told, but the white man took his truck anyway. There were other incidents: Just before Hurley and Evers arrived, the windshields of ten cars had been smashed outside an NAACP branch meeting. About that time, a white woman had told some Negroes that “the Yazoo river was muddy now, but it would be muddier than that when some of their bodies were thrown in.” Tensions had been building in the small town of Belzoni since 1953, when a group of local black businessmen filed a complaint with the Justice Department that Sheriff Ike Shelton was preventing Negroes from voting in Humphreys County.

  A voter had to pay two dollars a year for the right to register; blacks were forced to pay for two years to qualify. But when they showed up to vote, their receipts were torn up in front of them. The money was never refunded. No black had managed to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, but there were still about four hundred Negroes on the register.

  Evers and Hurley dropped in on Gus Courts, who ran a small grocery store and owned a bus that transported laborers to the cotton fields. He told them some frightening stories.

  Courts had been the first president of the new Belzoni branch of the NAACP, chartered on February 8, 1954, with a membership of sixty- four. That summer a branch of the Citizens’ Councils was founded in a town just a few miles west of Belzoni. Courts found himself at ground zero of the white backlash. The newly organized planters and local businessmen lined their sights on the nearest NAACP fledgling branch.

  Belzoni, with about four thousand residents, a third of them white, was virtually run by the newly formed Citizens’ Council. Its first target was Courts. He was a big man who talked slow and thought fast, though, like most Delta blacks of his generation, he could barely read and write. Soon after the NAACP chapter was formed, Courts was called into the local bank for a meeting. The bank president wanted to see the NAACP books. When Courts refused, he was told that if he wanted to keep his credit, he’d better resign from the NAACP.

  “We will tie up your bus and tie up your store,” the man said. “We will run you out of town.” Before long the wholesaler who sold him groceries cut off his supplies. His landlord evicted him from his store. And he started getting death threats.

  In August 1954 Gloster Current had received a sad, painfully typed letter, special delivery, from Gus Courts: “This is to nofie you. that thay have fosted me under preasher to resine as preaident of Belzoni branch NAACP.

  “And thay are so putting preasher on other members of the branch Thay say we cant oprate hear.

  “Any mail sent to me pleas send in A plain Envelope and leave NAACP of. I have a reason for this.

  “Yours truely Gus Courts.”

  The grocer managed to find another location for his store, across the street in a building owned by another NAACP member. But the harassment didn’t end. And Courts didn’t give up. When the man who took over Courts’s position at the local NAACP branch left town, Gus Courts resumed his job as president.

  Courts told Evers and Hurley that the planters were pressuring sharecroppers to boycott NAACP-connected businesses and, more serious, were forcing the ones who were registered to vote to tear up their poll tax receipts or face eviction. By then the number of qualified black voters in Humphreys County had dropped from four hundred to about ninety-one. All Ruby Hurley and Medgar Evers could do was write down the details and report back to New York, hoping to secure some financial relief for the people of Belzoni.

  Reverend George Lee also ran a grocery store, just like his friend Gus Courts. The fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was active in the NAACP, and he was having the same financial problems as Courts. He also had been told to take his name off the voting rolls.

  On Saturday afternoon. May 7, 1955, Courts stopped by Lee’s store. Lee told him a white man at the courthouse warned him to take his name off the list.

  “I’ve got a funny feeling,” George told Gus.

  “You’re not afraid, are you?” Court asked.

  “No, I’m not afraid.”

  Around midnight that same night Alex Hudson was sitting on the porch of a house on Church Street, in the black section of Belzoni. He was talking to his girlfriend, Angie Wellsby, when he noticed a black Buick pass slowly by the house, followed by a two-tone Ford or Mercury convertible. The second car, with the top up on a clear, warm night, was gaining speed, trying to catch up with the Buick. Then Hudson heard what he thought was a loud backfire. He looked up and saw the convertible pull next to the Buick. He saw the muzzle flash as a second shot rang out. The Buick veered off the road and crashed into the house of a neighbor, Catherine Blair.

  Blair heard the first shot and got out of bed to look out the window at whoever was fighting. It was Saturday night, after all, so she figured the neighbors were at it again. From the window she saw the convertible and some white men in it. Then there was a flash and an explosion. Moments later Reverend George Lee’s Buick crashed through her bedroom wall, knocking her house off its foundation and crushing the bed where she had slept.

  George Lee crawled out of the wreckage and collapsed, blood gushing from a ragged hole where his lower jaw used to be. The neighbors who crowded around loaded him into a passing cab, but he died before he reached Humphreys County Memorial Hospital.

  Dr. A. H. McCoy, the new NAACP state president, arrived in Belzoni the next day, in time to be present for the coroner’s inquest into Lee’s death. Every member of the coroner’s jury belonged to the local Citizens’ Council. Although McCoy and two black physicians brought in by Lee’s widow examined the body and found powder burns on the minister’s face and lead pellets in his head, the jury ruled the death accidental.

  McCoy sat in astonishment as the white men discussed their theories of how it could have happened.

  “A scantling could have punched him in the jaw and killed him where he crashed into the house,” said one.

  “He could have died from shock.”

  “The noise which sounded like a gun could have been tire blowouts.”

  The lead pellets in Lee’s mangled jaw, they decided, must be fragments from his dental fillings.

  When McCoy, who was a dentist, pointed out that lead is not used in fillings, one of the jurors remarked, “We will have
to find the dentist who filled his teeth to see if he used lead, if it is proved that this is lead.”

  The newspapers were already calling the death an “odd incident,” but police found a bullet in the tire of Lee’s wrecked car, and they were toying with a new theory. Reverend Lee, said Sheriff Ike Shelton, might well have been shot “by a jealous nigger.” Police hinted at rumors, which no black in Belzoni had ever heard or believed, that there was “another woman” involved.

  Back in New York Roy Wilkins and Gloster Current were reading about Lee’s death in the newspapers and placing increasingly angry calls to Jackson and Birmingham.

  On the night Lee was murdered, Medgar Evers was traveling in southern Mississippi, trying to drum up NAACP members in rural communities where there were no phones and no electricity. It would be days before Evers checked in at a prearranged contact point and found himself in the middle of the first crisis of his career in the NAACP.

  When he finally heard the news, Evers raced back to Jackson, where he met Ruby Hurley. She hadn’t heard about the killing until Monday morning, when she arrived back in Birmingham from a conference in Florida. Their job now was to get the facts, report to New York, and alert the press.

  By the time Evers and Hurley arrived in Belzoni to investigate the shooting, a number of the terrified witnesses had scattered or gone into hiding. Alex Hudson had fled to a relative’s house in East St. Louis. Neither official questioned anyone until Lee’s funeral on Thursday, May 12.

  As a bureaucracy the national NAACP organization could rival the most ossified federal agency. Wilkins and Current applied an almost religious devotion to decorum, chain of command, and centralized decision making. Blood and teeth could be splattered from Belzoni to Birmingham, but no steps would be taken until a neatly typed report appeared on Wilkins’s desk in Manhattan.