The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  It was not until they began to run into difficulties securing bonds for young people they had caused to be arrested and until they themselves [Moses and other leaders] became involved with some hoodlums, law enforcement officers and voter registrars which landed them either in jail or gave them severe beatings; did they ask for NAACP assistance publicly and cooperatively.

  NAACP lawyer Jack Young represented them, “frequently at the expense of the association.”

  Evers sounded like a true Mississippian; he didn’t much care for outside interference. By mid-October, Evers reported, SNCC was a “skeleton operation” in Jackson. Most of the leaders who had been arrested were now out on heavy bonds.

  But even Roy Wilkins recognized the problem. In 1960 he had told Farmer, who had left the NAACP to join CORE, “You’re going to be riding a mustang pony, while I’m riding a dinosaur.” Now the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE were scooping up a whole generation of students by offering them something the NAACP would not: action. The movement train was pulling out of the station, and once again Medgar Evers had to decide whether to try to stop it or jump on board.

  10

  Ole Miss

  If there was one symbol of Mississippi’s white heritage and a concentration of its oligarchic impulses, it was the University of Mississippi at Oxford, affectionately known as Ole Miss. The rolling green lawns, the stately columned mansions, and Greek Revival buildings were artifacts from the mythical antebellum South. The school mascot was a character called “Colonel Reb.” The Confederate battle flag was the school symbol.

  The sorority and fraternity systems at Ole Miss were actually redundant. The social status of students was established at birth through the complex blood ties and relationships of families: girls were born Tri Delts or not, and boys Sigma Chis, or not, and one hardly needed rush week to draw the distinction. This was white Mississippi society distilled. It was this ossified, tight-knit, lily-white world that became the object of James Meredith’s obsession in the spring of 1961.

  Meredith was a junior at Jackson State. He was an air force veteran, a short, wiry man with a smooth moon face that made him seem years younger than he was. At college in Jackson, Meredith studied history and political science. He surrounded himself with a loyal coterie of friends, an “underground” made up of fellow veterans, intellectuals, and others with a militant interest in civil rights. They sought the perfect gesture, the first opening in which to place the wedge between the white man and his power.

  On January 21,1961, the day after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, Meredith wrote to the registrar at Ole Miss asking for application forms. Then he contacted Medgar Evers.

  Although Meredith admired Evers, he had never had much use for the cautious, moderate NAACP. He knew, however, that he would need the legal and financial clout of the old association if he ever expected to see the inside of Ole Miss.

  Quietly, behind the scenes, Medgar Evers shepherded James Meredith through the maze of the NAACP bureaucracy. Evers steered Meredith to Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense and Educational Fund. When Marshall (who would soon be appointed to the federal bench) wanted more information from Meredith about his qualifications, Evers put the call through from his own home.

  Marshall, already famous for his bluntness, wanted proof that Meredith’s record was as good as he claimed it was. Meredith, who would prove to be as stubborn as the lawyer, hung up on him. Nobody questioned his integrity. He refused to speak to Marshall again.

  Meredith credits Medgar Evers for saving the whole enterprise. Evers soothed both men. He convinced Meredith that producing documentation was good legal strategy, and, more important, he convinced Marshall that Meredith was not as flaky as he seemed. It was Evers’s sheer force of will and persuasiveness that enabled Meredith to proceed with the lawsuit. Evers knew that Meredith was hotheaded, stubborn, arrogant, and maybe a little crazy. But Evers also instinctively knew that Meredith could take the pressure and the abuse and the threats that were ahead of him. That counted more than anything else.

  It took eighteen months of court battles, but finally a federal judge ordered Ole Miss to admit James Meredith. Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, chose to ignore the court order, saying it usurped the rights reserved for the slates.

  On September 20, 1962, James Meredith made his first attempt to register on the Ole Miss campus. Ross Barnett and a screaming mob of four thousand segregationists turned him away.

  Five days later, after another round in the courts, Meredith tried again, this time at a registry office in Jackson. He was accompanied by the head of the U.S. Marshals and by John Doar of the Justice Department. The NAACP had by now taken a backseat to the government lawyers who were handling the case.

  Again there was an ugly crowd of hecklers shouting, “Nigger, go home!” Meredith was hustled through the mob and up to the registry door, where the governor stood to block him. Barnett scrutinized the men and then deadpanned, for the benefit of Doar and the other bystanders, “Which one of you is James Meredith?”

  Meredith grinned, but Doar was less amused, particularly as Barnett read a statement concluding, “I do hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.” Then the governor paused and smiled at Meredith. “But I do so politely,” he added.

  “Thank you,” Doar said dryly. “We leave politely.”

  For the next week the governor haggled with the attorney general and even President Kennedy over Meredith’s admission. At one point Barnett agreed to let him in if the U.S. marshals would pull guns on the governor to make it look like he was putting up a fight.

  By Saturday, September 29, the Kennedys thought they had a deal: the marshals would sneak Meredith onto the campus without making a show of it. There would be no incident.

  The big Ole Miss-Kentucky football game was scheduled for that afternoon. The university wisely decided to move the game to the stadium in Jackson rather than draw huge crowds to the already volatile Oxford campus. When Ross Barnett made his appearance in the stands, the band struck up “Dixie,” and the crowd cheered wildly. Rebel flags were waving alongside banners declaring “Go Get ’em Ross.” A huge rebel yell issued from the crowd as Barnett took his seat. They all sang the college fight song with new vigor: “Never, never, never! We will not yield an inch.”

  Ross Barnett changed his mind again.

  President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and signed an executive order authorizing the armed forces to enforce the law in the state. On Sunday morning Barnett again told the Kennedys he would quietly allow Meredith onto the campus. He then called on four of his closest allies to fly to Oxford and act as his personal representatives, with a mission to “protect the citizens of Mississippi.” They included the speaker of the Mississippi House, a state senator, a state representative from the lower Delta named C. B. “Buddie” Newman, and Judge Russel Moore. Barnett failed to mention that he had already cut a deal with the government.

  Meanwhile it was becoming clear that the situation was not in the hands of the governor or his envoys. Another figure had come to town, and he was organizing his own brand of resistance.

  General Edwin Walker was already a familiar figure in Mississippi. He was one of the most rabid anticommunist radicals in the country. Ironically Walker had been in command of the 101st Airborne when Eisenhower had sent in troops to carry out the Supreme Court desegregation order at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. After that Walker had been posted to Germany, where he was forced to resign after he was discovered indoctrinating U.S. troops with right-wing John Birch Society literature.

  When it was announced that James Meredith would be enrolled at Ole Miss by court order, Walker sprang to action from his Dallas, Texas, home. He went on the radio calling for ten thousand volunteers to go to Oxford to rally behind Governor Barnett. He told his followers to bring knapsacks and skillets to Ole Miss. It could be a long siege.

  Byron De La Beckwith was a big fan of General Walker, and by Sun
day afternoon, September 30, he was on his way to Oxford with a pickup truck full of weapons. Just outside Greenwood, Beckwith was stopped by some “friendly police.” They said they expected he would be coming, and, with some difficulty, they convinced him to turn back.

  Hundreds of like-minded citizens from all over Dixie did not turn back. By nightfall the Ole Miss campus was swarming with hard, armed men with a mind to fight the last battle of the Civil War. General Edwin Walker was among them, leading the charge.

  James Meredith arrived from Memphis by small plane just before dark. With an escort of armed marshals and John Doar by his side, he slipped onto the Ole Miss campus without incident and was taken to his dorm room at Baxter Hall. A contingent of armed guards was posted there, with orders to shoot to protect him.

  They were never necessary. The action was taking place on the other side of campus in front of the elegant, Greek-columned Lyceum building, where the registrar was located. By 7 p.m., two thousand drunk students were taunting some 170 marshals who had taken positions around the building. As more outsiders joined the angry white mob, the marshals finally fired tear gas. At that point the Mississippi Highway Patrol withdrew, and so did the hapless envoys whom Ross Barnett had sent to keep the peace.

  Both sides blamed the other for starting the bloodshed. A trooper was hit in the chest with a tear gas canister and nearly killed. A marshal was shot in the throat and lay bleeding for hours because the crowd wouldn’t let an ambulance through. The only reinforcements to arrive all night were a group of local guardsmen led by the writer William Faulkner’s cousin. He was injured in the fight.

  Although they begged to use their side arms, the marshals were not authorized to use deadly force. All they could do was fire tear gas and swing billy clubs against a mob with shotguns, pistols, sniper rifles, and, in one case, a rampaging bulldozer used as a tank. Dozens of rioters were arrested and hurled into a makeshift jail in the Lyceum basement. During the night one bystander and a French reporter were killed by .38 bullets.

  In the early morning hours the first contingent of army MPs swept the campus. By dawn it was over.

  At 8 a.m. Meredith, under heavy guard, walked across the once-lovely campus, now strewn with burned-out vehicles and stinking of tear gas, to register at the university. With his bodyguards he made it in time for his first class, a lesson in colonial American history. Walker was arrested at a roadblock as he was heading out of town.

  Although it is said that an organized, violent Klan was not present in Mississippi until early 1964, the retaliation that followed Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss showed a pattern indicating that someone was directing a terror campaign in the state. Whoever it was knew the targets, what they owned, and where they lived.

  According to Medgar Evers’s field report from that period, on the night of October 2, a Molotov cocktail was pitched at Dr. Gilbert Mason’s medical clinic in Biloxi. That same night, in a nearby coastal city, another firebomb was thrown into the office of a gas station owned by Dr. Felix Dunn, president of the Gulfport NAACP branch. Evers surmised that the same people were responsible for both bombings. Whoever it was knew quite a bit about both men and their real estate. On October 3, the home of a prominent NAACP leader in Columbus, Mississippi, 250 miles north of Gulfport, was similarly bombed. The next night, in central Leake County, someone fired shots into the houses of Negroes who had signed petitions to integrate the public schools.

  At Ole Miss, Meredith was accompanied by U.S. marshals wherever he went. There were no other serious incidents, just some bottle throwing at the dorm and kids calling him names. Some white students started talking to Meredith. A few even joined him at the lunch table. He was getting a lot of mail. Much of it was supportive, but some of it wasn’t. One letter contained a simple piece of verse:

  Roses are red, violets are blue;

  I’ve killed one nigger and might as well make it two.

  11

  The Jackson Movement

  The friendly old white man at the gas station on the Louisiana line wanted to share the latest Kennedy joke with his customer. “How can Kennedy expect to get a man on the moon,” he asked, chuckling, “when he can’t even get a busload of niggers across Mississippi?” John Salter just shook his head. Around him a thick mist rose from the swamps. He wondered what he was getting himself into.

  Just after midnight, on the first day of September 1961, Salter and his wife, Eldri, crossed the Mississippi River bridge into Vicksburg and headed for Jackson. With his light eyes, blond crew cut, and square jaw, Salter looked more like an Anglo football coach than a half-Indian social activist and union organizer who was soon to become one of Mississippi’s most famous “outside agitators.”

  The Salters, who were in their twenties, were on their way from Arizona to Tougaloo College, just north of Jackson, where John had been hired to teach sociology. He was attracted to Tougaloo because it was a sanctuary of reason and racial tolerance in the roughest part of the South. Tougaloo was a black, private Christian school, now with a handful of white students from the North and an integrated, somewhat international teaching staff. When the Freedom Riders had come through that summer, they’d bunked at Tougaloo.

  Among the first peculiar things Salter noticed about his new job was that his otherwise friendly students avoided him on the streets of Jackson because he looked white. The races had no contact at all. He was astonished at the total segregation of the city and the fear of the people, who could seem as despondent as whipped dogs.

  Almost immediately John Salter was sucked into Mississippi’s racial politics. It was as natural as breathing air.

  One of the students in his American government class was Colia Liddell, president of the NAACP’s North Jackson Youth Council. She asked him to speak to the group, and before long he had signed up as its adult adviser.

  The first time Salter met Medgar Evers was at the annual NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Jackson that fall. John and Eldri felt the stares as they walked up to the Masonic Temple that night. Besides the cops taking down tag numbers, they were the only non-black people there. Evers greeted them at the door like old friends. He knew them by name; Colia had told him they were coming. Salter was taken by Medgar’s ease and warmth and passion. They agreed to meet again.

  The Salters listened as each NAACP chapter reported in with a litany of beatings, and harassment, and economic disaster. But no story haunted them as much as the one Medgar Evers told about his friend Clyde Kennard, a black Mississippian who was dying in prison for the crime of wanting to go to college.

  The case was probably the most frustrating and tragic fight of Medgar Evers’s career. It was particularly painful because Kennard was so much like Evers. They were the same age, they came from the same kind of hardworking rural family, and neither of them was intimidated by the sound of a white man saying no. Evers knew that but for the grace of God, he could have been in Kennard’s place.

  Like Evers, Kennard was an army veteran who had served in World War II.

  After Kennard left the service, he continued his college education at the University of Chicago. Then his stepfather got sick, and Kennard dropped out of school to return to Mississippi to take over the family farm for his mother.

  The closest college was the all-white state school, Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg. That was where Kennard wanted to finish his degree. Three times he tried to enroll. On the morning of his last rejection in September 1959, Kennard was arrested on campus by local constables for reckless driving and illegal possession of whiskey. Kennard was a Baptist who didn’t drink. Even Zack Van Landingham, the Sovereignty Commission investigator assigned to the case, thought Kennard had been framed. He also discovered an aborted plot to plant dynamite in Kennard’s car.

  None of this mattered to the judge. Kennard was convicted and fined six hundred dollars. The local Citizens’ Council was out to ruin him. The bank foreclosed on his farm (a Jackson businessman and later the NAACP bought the mortgage for his m
other). Then he was arrested on another outlandish charge: a well-known local thief accused Kennard of hiring him to steal chicken feed. Although the burglar was released, Kennard was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor at Parchman.

  Soon after Kennard reported to the prison farm, he complained of stomach pains. The condition was left undiagnosed and untreated for months before a doctor found the massive cancer in his colon. Even then he was sent back to work in the fields. He was thirty-three years old.

  When Medgar Evers tried to tell the nicely dressed crowd at the Freedom Fund dinner about the efforts to get Kennard of out of prison, the words would not come to him, and his eyes filled with tears. It was the only time anyone could remember seeing Evers break down in public. Twice he started the speech, and twice his voice failed him. Aaron Henry offered to take over, but Evers forced his way through to the end of his talk, and by then everyone in the hall was weeping for Clyde Kennard, and perhaps for Medgar Evers, and perhaps, too, for themselves.

  That December Medgar Evers and the Jackson NAACP led a modest, mainly symbolic consumer boycott of Capitol Street, the white shopping district where black clerks were never hired and black shoppers could not try on the clothes they bought.

  The merchants refused to negotiate. The boycott was ineffective, and it received no local publicity. News coverage in Mississippi was outrageously biased because the media were almost totally controlled by members of the Citizens’ Councils. The two TV stations in Jackson were cheerleaders for white supremacy. They sometimes blacked out national broadcasts that offered an alternative viewpoint. They even censored network news segments that dealt with civil rights demonstrations and boycotts. Fred Beard, the general manager of WLBT, the NBC affiliate, was a prominent member of the Jackson Citizens’ Council. Members of the Hederman family, who owned the state’s two biggest newspapers, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, were notorious segregationists. Only a handful of regional newspapers, most notably Hodding Carter’s Greenville Democrat-Times, offered reasonably balanced coverage of the biggest story of the day.