The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Roy Wilkins was outraged. Evers was ordered to resign. He could serve only one cause, and it had to be the NAACP. Evers agreed to abandon the SCLC.

  Evers privately fretted about Wilkins’s refusal to cooperate with other civil rights groups, but he had made his choice. He followed instructions from New York and used his influence to keep the SCLC from setting up an office in Jackson.

  The NAACP strategy remained unchanged: avoid violent confrontations while slowly challenging segregation in the courts. But the NAACP needed test cases to bring to court. In early March 1958 Medgar Evers decided, on his own, to test the law forbidding segregation on interstate transport. On his way home from an NAACP conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, he switched buses in Meridian, Mississippi.

  C. B. Needham, one of Evers’s friends in Decatur, knew that Medgar was planning to ride in the front of the bus. He offered to come along, at least follow in a car, but Evers insisted on going alone.

  When it came time to board, he took a seat in the front row. The white bus driver told him to move to the back of the bus. He politely declined. The driver called in the cops, who took Evers to the police station for questioning. They told him he was going to destroy the good race relations in Meridian. They let him go with a warning a few minutes later.

  Evers got back on the bus and took the same seat. This time the bus driver pulled out of the station without a word. A few miles down the road to Jackson a white cabdriver in a black ’55 Ford flagged down the bus. The driver opened the door for the cabbie who stormed on board and slugged Medgar Evers with a roundhouse right that made half of Evers’s face go numb. Medgar didn’t strike back. He just sat there and took it. The bus driver broke it up, and the bus went on to Jackson. Medgar never gave up his seat.

  Evers’s plan was to file a lawsuit against the bus company to challenge the state’s bus segregation laws. But the NAACP preferred not to involve staffers in test cases, and for a number of reasons the complaint was never pursued.

  In early 1958 Ebony magazine ran an “as told to” feature article on Medgar Evers titled “Why I Live in Mississippi.” There were pictures of Medgar at work, fishing, and playing with his children. The article recounted the landmarks of Medgar’s life: the speech by Bilbo that Medgar and Charles had witnessed as boys in Decatur, the lynching of Mr. Tingle, the showdown at the Decatur Courthouse on primary day. It told the story of Medgar’s impossible love for his state, “the land that produced Bilbo and exterminated Emmett Till,” that could still, in his mind, be the best place in America. What the article revealed about Medgar Evers was his utterly middle-class optimism and his belief in the American system.

  But what readers, particularly his white enemies, remember about the article was his admission that he was an admirer of Jomo Kenyatta and had once considered starting a Mississippi Mau Mau. No matter that Evers explained why he had turned against violence. “It didn’t take much reading of the Bible,” Evers said, “to convince me that two wrongs would not make the situation any different, and that I couldn’t hate the white man and at the same time hope to convert him.”

  That fall the Citizens’ Councils newsletter reprinted parts of the Ebony article, accompanied by a cartoon with the caption “The Mau-Mau’s are Coming.” A brief article described Medgar Evers’s supposed dream of a Mississippi Mau Mau “roaming the Delta in search of blood.” They managed to quote him correctly in one instance. Medgar Evers did say, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a white man lick me.”

  The longer Evers survived, the bolder he became. In early 1958 the Mississippi legislature passed a bill to authorize an investigation of the NAACP. Evers said that he welcomed the probe. “In fact, we’d gloat at the opportunity. . . . We condemn other countries that deny freedom of the ballot, [but] we here in Mississippi, in the so called American way of life, are denied the right to vote.”

  Gloating in front of white men was not a posture Mississippi Negroes lived to tell about, but Evers defied them over and over again. It was as if by his own brazen example he could give some courage to his people.

  Still things hadn’t improved for the NAACP in Mississippi. Evers put seventy-eight thousand miles on his Oldsmobile in 1958 trying to drum up new members and new voters. The numbers were slipping in both areas.

  Myrlie wished that just once she and her husband could go out and have a good time and not end up in a debate over “the race issue.” Medgar was a Mason and an Elk and a member of the American Legion, and these organizations threw a lot of formal dinner parties and banquets. Like any salesman, Medgar would use these occasions to push his product. Only Medgar Evers’s product was freedom.

  Evers never missed an opportunity to take an open mike and make a pitch for the NAACP or ask people to vote and get involved. Sometimes Myrlie would sit in her good dress in front of her half-eaten plate of party food and cringe when Medgar stood up to speak. Immediately the heckling would start: “C’mon, man! We came here to party.” He would finish what he had to say as if there was no problem at all. Sometimes, on the ride home, Myrlie couldn’t hold her tongue anymore.

  “Why?” she would moan. “Why can’t you ever relax? Why does it always have to be you who makes the speeches and does the work?” Medgar would get mad. “You don’t understand,” he would snap. “If I don’t do it, who will?”

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  The Spy Agency

  The Sovereignty Commission kept track of Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary in a file labeled “Medgar Evers — Race Agitator.” At first all the novice spy outfit did was clip newspaper articles about the NAACP. But in late November 1958 Governor Coleman suggested having a closer look at Evers. He ordered the commission to conduct “spot checks” day and night on Evers, “to determine whether he is violating any law.” The Sovereignty Commission was particularly irritated by Evers’s verbal attacks on the new Negro schoolhouses popping up throughout the state in a slick response to the Supreme Court order to integrate.

  L. C. Hicks, the commission’s chief investigator, asked state and local police to check out Evers. On December 2, 1958, Hicks submitted his first intelligence report. He got the Evers’s home address right, but he described Evers as five foot five, 160 pounds, and thirty-eight years old. Medgar was nearly six feet tall and thirty-four years old.

  The brief memo mentioned that Evers had at one time lived around Philadelphia, Mississippi, “and his actions were such that he left on somebody’s request.” It seems the cops had confused Medgar with Charles, who had moved to Chicago.

  Over the months and years that followed, Medgar Evers’s file grew thicker. Percy Greene, publisher of the black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, eagerly supplied what information he could: where Evers had gone to school, how he had gotten his ideas about integration during his army days.

  Greene, who was once a leading black Democrat and voting rights activist, had turned against the NAACP after the Brown decision in 1954. He did not believe that integration would benefit the black community. He and Medgar Evers had become bitter enemies, and he was an easy mark for the Sovereignty Commission, which recruited him to inform on Evers and other NAACP leaders. He was paid in subscriptions to the Advocate for school libraries, seed money for anti-NAACP organizations, all-expenses-paid trips for speaking engagements, and just outright payoffs of cash. There were other, less prominent spies on the commission’s payroll.

  By January 1959 Zack Van Landingham, the former FBI agent who had been hired to conduct Sovereignty Commission investigations, was starting to get better information on Evers, including his military record, post office information, and employment records. For the first time a confidential source was mentioned, known only as T-1.

  That March the Hinds County district attorney helpfully supplied the transcript of supposedly secret grand jury testimony by Medgar Evers involving a school desegregation case. The memo from Van Landingham to the commission director notes that D.A. Louis Nichols furnished the transcripts to both William Simmons, head o
f the Citizens’ Councils, and Governor Coleman.

  The Sovereignty Commission was, in fact, the link between the state government and the supposedly private segregation groups. For years it funneled money — as much as fifty thousand dollars a year — to support the Citizens’ Councils. The files from April and May 1959 reveal how the Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens’ Councils sometimes cooperated and shared information and other times battled each other for control of the state’s segregation policy.

  On April 13,1959, Van Landingham notified Governor Coleman that an informant had tipped him off to an impending visit by Roy Wilkins to Jackson on May 17, the fifth anniversary of the Brown decision. At that time Evers and Wilkins planned to map out a desegregation suit targeting Hinds County schools.

  The next entry in the file was written on May 18. It reads like a Keystone Kops script, with the Mississippi attorney general grappling with the Jackson police after stumbling across a right-wing plot by the Capitol Street crowd to have Wilkins and Medgar Evers arrested.

  On the afternoon of May 17, Van Landingham and Joe Patterson, the state’s attorney general, decided to drive over to the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street to have a firsthand look at the crowd that had gathered to hear the NAACP leaders speak. They found the street jammed with out-of-county cars and a few Jackson patrolmen jotting down all the tag numbers. Before long Meady Pierce, chief of detectives, who apparently worked closely with the Sovereignty Commission, pulled the state men aside and said, “You know what some damn fools have done? They have gone and gotten out warrants for Roy Wilkins and Medgar Evers.”

  Van Landingham, Patterson, and Pierce drove down to police headquarters to talk it over with the chief of police. It seems that an active Citizens’ Council member named Elmore Greaves had, the day before, sworn out a complaint against Evers and Wilkins for defying a state “breach of the peace” law that forbade advocating integration. Everyone in the room agreed that a move like that would be a disaster from a PR point of view. They knew that the law was unconstitutional, the arrests would never stick, and the incident would gain the NAACP a million dollars’ worth of publicity, while making the authorities in Mississippi look like morons.

  The chief thought that the warrant would be ignored, until he got a call that morning from the D.A. saying that he was under so much pressure he had ordered the warrant to be served. The pressure was coming from top-ranking officials in the Citizens’ Councils.

  Patterson got on the phone and tried to reach anyone he could, including a relative of Elmore Greaves, to get the warrant withdrawn. Greaves, through this intermediary, informed the state official that there was no way he would withdraw it. He said the Citizens’ Councils had decided that the governor was afraid of Medgar Evers and Roy Wilkins, “and they were going on their own to secure their arrest.” Greaves said that the arrests had been planned for weeks and a lot of people had been in on the decision, including a judge named Russel Moore.

  Eventually the attorney general contacted the governor, and he managed to call off the warrants. Wilkins and Evers were able to speak without being arrested.

  A rift was growing between the Sovereignty Commission, the governor, and Citizens’ Councils extremists. The split would only be mended, temporarily, when Governor Coleman’s “moderate” handpicked successor was defeated that summer in the Democratic primary by the Citizens’ Councils’ choice for governor, Ross Barnett. At that point the councils effectively ran the state government.

  The files show that the Citizens’ Councils thought that the state was too soft on the NAACP and that it was afraid to challenge Medgar Evers. Council leaders, with the cooperation of law enforcement and the judiciary, executed a plan to show Medgar Evers the inside of a jail, despite the wishes of the governor.

  The Citizens’ Councils used a fanatic front man, Greaves, to carry out its actions. Elmore Greaves was soon to become, if he wasn’t already, a close colleague of Byron De La Beckwith.

  Beckwith had grown more radical and more outspoken over the years. After hearing the famous Black Monday speech in Greenwood, he had started sending colorful letters to the editors of local newspapers, to his congressman and senators, and to anyone else who might listen to his pro-segregation screeds.

  A classic example appeared in the Jackson Daily News in March 1956. Beckwith was outraged at the liberal attitudes shown by clergy in his beloved Episcopal Church. “Let’s get the race mixers out of the Episcopal Church, for it is rapidly becoming the ‘Devil’s Workshop.’ ” In his mind the NAACP was Satan’s agency: “These men, disguised in the robes of the clergy, deliberately and maliciously defy the laws of God and drag the sacred name of Jesus Christ through the mud in the attempt to crucify the white race on the black cross of the NAACP.”

  Beckwith was pleased with his letter-writing campaign and the attention it brought him. He even tried to lobby President Eisenhower in the cause of segregation. One day he walked into the local office of his congressman, Frank Smith, and gave him a letter to deliver to Eisenhower. The letter was so vicious, so sloppy, and so ignorant that Smith refused to forward it to anyone. It was eventually printed verbatim in the Greenwood Morning Star. Part of it reads, “We have had an overdose of the NAACP and all its affiliates and their fiendish associates. Arise with us to unite and destroy the madmen who sow the seeds of mongrelization.”

  In town Beckwith, who was once a considered a harmless, friendly eccentric, was becoming increasingly tedious and disruptive. He would dress in his white linen planter’s suits and, clutching a black Bible to his breast, preach the gospel of segregation to anyone he could collar. He sold copies of Black Monday on Howard Street during lunch hour. He cornered strollers and pressed them with anti-integration literature.

  Some people avoided attending meetings of the Sons of the American Revolution because of Beckwith’s endless hectoring on the race issue. His Sunday school classes became forums for his radical views. Every conversation would eventually turn to the subject of race, and soon the little man’s countenance would change: his face would turn red and blustery; veins would stand out on his forehead. Once he started on the subject, there was no turning him off.

  The rector of the Episcopal Church in Greenwood reproached Beckwith for standing at the door on Sundays with a clearly visible pistol in his belt “in case any niggers tried to integrate the church.” Beckwith later switched to a local Methodist congregation, which he felt was more suitably pro-segregation.

  Although this kind of obsessive behavior might have won Delay some admirers at the communal table at the Crystal Grill, where the “nigger problem” was the main topic of gossip, it isolated him from the saner members of his family and most of Greenwood. And as his political fanaticism increased, his life with his wife, Willie, deteriorated. From all accounts husband and wife drank a good deal, and when they got drunk, they got violent.

  In 1957 Beckwith began to complain of terrible headaches and numbness in his face and limbs. He quit smoking and tried to stop drinking, but his symptoms remained.

  About that time Willie checked into Greenwood LeFlore Hospital for the first of many visits to treat what had become acute alcoholism. She was a binge drinker, and she later said that it was the only way she felt she could escape her husband. She said that he had started hitting her shortly after Little Delay was born.

  Willie divorced Beckwith in October 1960. She cited as the reason the cruel and unusual treatment by her husband of fifteen years. In her complaint she claimed that their problems had intensified around 1955. She said that Beckwith cursed her, beat her with his fists, kicked her and knocked her down and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it.

  In the past year, she said, the violence had grown worse. He would slap her in public. She alleged that on June 21, 1960, Beckwith bound her hands and feet together and left her hog-tied on the floor all night. That was when she filed for divorce.

  The judge awarded her custody of Little Delay, then fifteen, and twenty-five d
ollars a week in support. As soon as they were divorced, Beckwith set out to win her back, and sure enough, Willie and Delay were remarried on Valentine’s Day, 1961. The beatings and brawls began almost immediately, according to her second divorce petition, filed in 1962. In it she complained that Beckwith had driven her near to a complete nervous breakdown. In one fight he broke her finger while trying to pull off her wedding ring. She’d had to take out a restraining order to keep him from attacking her.

  Beckwith answered this complaint with his own brief. In it he denied cursing his wife and said that he hit her only in self-defense. He accused her of being a violent drunk, “addicted to use of intoxicating liquor . . . of a mean and quarrelsome disposition.” He said that she had shot at him with a pistol and he had had to disarm her. He said that her repeated hospitalizations were caused by alcoholism.

  At the time Beckwith was making $255.88 per month from his sales job and his government disability pension. He said that he had inherited a “considerable” sum of money from an uncle’s estate (Will had died in 1961) and that he had shared it with Willie. In fact they had used the inheritance to buy a new house on Montgomery Street in Greenwood, which Beckwith had put in her name.

  On October 9, 1962, the judge granted Mary Louise Williams Beckwith her second divorce. Beckwith was ordered to pay costs. Once again he showered her with promises and apologies and flowers. They married for the third time three weeks later. Beckwith agreed to see a psychiatrist as part of the reconciliation. Willie and Delay drove together down to Jackson for the visit. Later, in the car outside the doctor’s office, Delay repeated what the psychiatrist had told him. The diagnosis, he said, was schizophrenia with paranoid tendencies.

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