The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Lawsuits were simmering in the courts, including one to desegregate the county bus line and another to desegregate the public schools. The plaintiffs in the latter case included Reena and Darrell Kenyatta Evers, Medgar and Myrlie’s two older children. (A third child, James Van Dyke Evers, had arrived in 1960.)

  In February of 1962 Medgar Evers made his separate peace with the idealistic outsiders from CORE and SNCC who were treading on NAACP territory. Evers saw the need to coordinate all local, state, and national civil rights organizations operating in Mississippi. He joined in talks to set up an alliance called The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Despite Evers’s support, the national NAACP refused to join COFO. Aaron Henry took the titular post of president, but the project was driven by its director, Bob Moses, and assistant director, Dave Dennis.

  By then Medgar Evers and Dave Dennis had become close friends. They would slip off together to a little steak restaurant on the outskirts of Jackson to have a drink — Medgar was careful about who saw him relaxing — and talk. Mostly they talked about sports and women while they tried to slough off the tension of their work. But inevitably the conversation would come around to the movement. At this time Medgar was still struggling with his impulse to confront the system the way the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE took it on, while keeping his loyalty to the NAACP. The support he gave Dennis was mainly under the table.

  When James Meredith cracked Ole Miss, the confrontation gained new momentum. After troops were sent to Oxford, a thousand new members joined the Citizens’ Council in Jackson alone. About the same time, the Negroes of Jackson staged their first successful boycott of the segregated Mississippi State Fair.

  The atmosphere of tension and hope spilled over into the Seventeenth Annual State Conference of Mississippi Branches of the NAACP in November 1962. It was a big event in Jackson, full of national staffers and celebrities. Roy Wilkins gave a speech, and Dick Gregory entertained the crowd.

  Dick Gregory had grown up broke and hungry in a St. Louis slum. By 1962 he was a famous nightclub comedian who rode into the big time on a wave of race jokes. He was the Negro’s answer to Lenny Bruce, but without the bitter edge. Gregory could disarm the whites in his audience and make them laugh with him.

  “Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people.’ ”

  “I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people.’ ”

  By the end of 1962 Gregory had been on The Jack Paar Show and on The David Susskind Show, he had cut a comedy album, and he was a Playboy Club regular. Because of the nature of his material and his high profile, he was increasingly drawn into the civil rights movement. He met Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King, Jr., and he performed at fundraisers and rallies. But he never really got emotionally involved in the movement until Medgar Evers asked him to come to Jackson, Mississippi.

  It was a one-night gig, and he was eager to get it over with. Gregory didn’t like being in Mississippi; there was such an outrageous atmosphere of hostility and fear. He had to admit he held the same prejudice so many northern blacks did against their hayseed brethren down in Mississippi, the ones who’d been left behind in the great move north, the ones Gregory called “verb-busters” for the way they mangled the language. He came down to Mississippi out of a sense of duty, but he was already thinking about the flight home when an old man took the stage.

  Gregory later recalled in his autobiography, Nigger, how the seventy-eight-year-old man was telling the crowd about his years in jail, where he had done time for killing a Negro who had been sent to burn his house down. The old man had been trying to register voters. “I didn’t mind going to jail for freedom,” the man said, but he had never spent a night apart from his wife. When he finally got out of jail, his wife had died. It tore Dick Gregory up. He gave Medgar Evers a train ticket and some money for the old man to visit his son in California. Something had turned over in his heart. He was involved now.

  That night Gregory heard the story of Clyde Kennard for the first time, and Evers introduced him to Kennard’s mother, Leona Smith. Evers sent him more information about the case when Gregory got back to Chicago, and Gregory began to push to get Kennard out of jail. He got the story into the national press, including the news that Kennard was dying of cancer. (The bad publicity finally convinced Governor Ross Barnett to pardon Kennard in the spring of 1963. Kennard died in a Chicago hospital on July 14, 1963, three weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday.)

  By the fall of 1962 black folks across the Delta were organizing to resist white supremacy in ways that were unthinkable half a decade earlier. Aaron Henry, the state NAACP president, was leading a boycott of white-owned shops in Clarksdale. A full-blown movement had sprouted in Greenwood, where a hundred blacks at a time were lining up at the courthouse to attempt to register to vote.

  In Jackson, home of fifty thousand Negro citizens, there was scant activity. Conservative ministers and business leaders were reluctant to challenge the system. Medgar Evers spent most of his time in other parts of Mississippi, where black communities were more receptive to the civil rights message.

  But as the 1962 Christmas season approached, student activists started talking about another boycott. A strategy meeting was held in John Salter’s home where it was decided that blacks would boycott all 150 Capitol Street businesses, not just a few big stores or specific products. They printed five thousand leaflets outlining their demands: equality in hiring and promoting employees; the end of segregated drinking fountains, rest rooms, and seating; the use of courtesy titles — Mrs., Miss, and Mr. — for all races; and service on a first-come, first-served basis.

  The organizations that signed the leaflet were the North Jackson Youth Council; the Tougaloo chapter of the NAACP; SNCC, represented on campus by Joan Trumpauer; and CORE, represented by Dave Dennis. In the future they would call themselves the Jackson Movement.

  Salter spoke to Medgar Evers about setting up some pickets on Capitol Street. It would mean getting bail money together, and Evers agreed to try to raise some from the national NAACP.

  At the last minute the NAACP turned them down. Desperate, Salter turned to a New York civil rights lawyer named William Kunstler, whose daughter attended Tougaloo. Kunstler agreed to help and found donors, including an arm of the SCLC, to pledge a total of three thousand dollars for bail.

  On December 12, 1962, Salter and the others drove to Capitol Street and managed to walk up and down in front of Woolworth’s one time before they were hauled off by the Jackson police. Salter counted at least fifty cops and a hundred white spectators. It took two days to bail everyone out, but the publicity payoff was worth it to Salter. The TV crews played into the demonstrators’ hands. On the evening news, they clearly showed the picket signs calling for a boycott.

  Mayor Allen Thompson was outraged. The former college Greek professor was a hard-core segregationist, and he was in no mood to bargain. He threatened to sue the pickets for a million dollars. He offered to line Capitol Street with a thousand police to prevent more picketing. And he further vowed to remain calm.

  The boycott attracted an avalanche of hate mail and hate calls to the Salter home on the Tougaloo campus. Just before Christmas someone fired a shot into the house, barely missing their sleeping infant daughter.

  Medgar continued to give the movement his quiet support. He helped raise property bonds outside the auspices of the NAACP, and he and John Salter became friends.

  Evers fascinated Salter, who was drawn to his calm and his kindness and something else. There was a quality in Evers’s eyes, a wild calculation that reminded Salter of a lone wolf or a coyote. He was regal and untamable.

  John and Eldri Salter spent Christmas Day with the Everses, and Myrlie cooked them all dinner. It was a grim, rainy afternoon and the mood was no better. Medgar showed Salter the collection of guns he kept in the house and the German shepherd named Heidi who patrolled the backyard. They agreed th
at the beast was stirring in the state. A change was coming, and everyone knew the price.

  “The white man won’t change easily,” Salter remembers Medgar saying. “Some of these people are going to fight hard. And more of our people could get killed.”

  Salter watched Myrlie listening quietly. He knew that she knew whose life was on the line.

  COFO divided Mississippi into regions for each civil rights group to conquer. SNCC intensified its voter registration campaign in the Delta. In retaliation, the white leaders of LeFlore County decided to cut off surplus federal food aid, which was used to help the desperately poor part-time field hands and their families through the winter. People were literally starving in Greenwood.

  SNCC organized a drive to distribute food and supplies and medicine to the Negroes of LeFlore County. Dick Gregory chartered a plane to fly fourteen thousand pounds of food from Chicago to Memphis, Tennessee, and then truck it down to Greenwood. The more food that was handed out, the more status SNCC gained among the people.

  On Wednesday, February 20, 1963, six hundred people lined up in Greenwood for their rations. Two days later fifty Negroes silently lined up at the courthouse to register. That week several houses in the black part of Greenwood were torched.

  On the night of February 28 Bob Moses and two other SNCC workers named Randolph Blackwell and James Travis drove out of town for a meeting in Greenville. A white Buick without license plates and carrying three white men followed them. About seven miles out of Greenwood the Buick pulled up beside them on the dark highway and sprayed the SNCC car with bullets.

  Travis, who was driving, was hit in the neck and shoulder. Moses grabbed the wheel and stomped on the brakes as the car swerved off the road. Jimmy Travis survived, but only after a copper-jacketed slug was removed millimeters from his spinal cord.

  Rather than run, Moses and the SNCC leadership called for an intensified campaign in Greenwood — more canvassers, more marches. The whites struck back. The SNCC office was destroyed by a firebomb. Sam Block and three others were showered with glass when someone fired a shotgun into their car.

  That March John Salter and a group from Jackson drove to Greenwood with Medgar Evers. A mass rally was being held in the church now used as SNCC headquarters. Fifteen hundred people packed the church; three hundred more stood outside while police cruisers circled.

  Evers was called to the stage to say a few words. The Greenwood campaign had moved him deeply. He saw what was possible when people overcame their fear and marched. If the movement could draw this kind of crowd in a redneck Delta backwater like Greenwood, think of what could be accomplished in the capital city.

  Salter thinks it was a turning point for Evers. He could feel it in the words he spoke that night: “It’s very good to see the number of persons out here tonight, and certainly this indicates that we’re ready for freedom and ready to march for it. . . . We’re going to go back to Jackson and fight for freedom as you’re fighting for it here in Greenwood.. . . When we get this unity, ladies and gentlemen, nothing can stop us.”

  Dick Gregory was spending more and more time in Mississippi. He had an affinity for SNCC, and since the group was organizing in Greenwood, that is where Dick Gregory went. He waged a personal war with the police, defying them to arrest him, taunting them back when they taunted him.

  “Nigger,” he would hear a cop mutter.

  “Yo’ mother’s a nigger!” Gregory would reply.

  The cop would just gape at the pudgy black man in the big, audacious cowboy hat. The police took it from him, because word must have gotten out not to arrest Dick Gregory and make a martyr out of him. He couldn’t get himself arrested. So he marched, and he watched while the cops beat on old ladies and young kids. The whites in Greenwood had no idea what to do with a black man who didn’t fear them.

  That wasn’t the case in Alabama.

  Gregory went from Greenwood to Birmingham that spring to join Martin Luther King’s massive civil rights demonstrations. King had been arrested, and Dick Gregory was promptly thrown in jail as soon as he marched. It was in the Birmingham jail, he later said, that he received the first truly professional beating of his life.

  By then Birmingham had cornered America’s attention. The media ate it up. It was an allegorical pageant, a classic conflict of good versus evil, the easiest kind of symbolism for the nation to absorb. The saintly, nonviolent Dr. King battling the forces of evil represented by Eugene “Bull” Connor and his dogs. The TV cameras were rolling when the dogs were set loose on the peaceful marchers and the fire department opened up its power hoses on women and children, hurtling them into brick walls and down slick sidewalks. Charles Moore of Life magazine was there to capture every contortion and grimace on film.

  The images from Birmingham probably turned the tide of public opinion against the segregationist South. King was anointed leader of the civil rights movement.

  This was very disturbing to Roy Wilkins, particularly when UPI reported that Martin Luther King was considering a similar campaign in Mississippi. Not only was Wilkins jealous of King, but he and Gloster Current worried about the aftermath of massive demonstrations. What would happen to the people of Birmingham and Jackson and Greenwood once the outsiders got their headlines and packed up and moved on?

  By now Medgar Evers had more or less committed himself to the idea of direct action. He quietly encouraged Martin Luther King to come to Jackson. Meanwhile the national leadership of the NAACP scrambled to keep King out of Mississippi.

  The boycott of Capitol Street in Jackson had continued into the spring of 1963. The whites would not negotiate. When they could raise the bail money, the Youth Council kept up its pickets. In April Roy Wilkins ponied up five hundred dollars for the group and in a letter assured Salter that “we stand ready to assist in any way until success has been achieved.” Salter was encouraged but baffled. He suspected that Wilkins’s sudden interest had something to do with Birmingham.

  By mid-May the Jackson Movement had gained momentum, and it was ready to throw down the gauntlet. A letter was sent to the governor and the mayor demanding an end to all racial discrimination in Jackson’s stores, parks, public facilities, and schools. It put the Capitol Street gang on notice that they were about to have another Birmingham on their hands. Unless negotiations brought results, the letter promised to “step up and broaden our selective buying campaign.” To accomplish the end of segregation, the letter said, “we shall use all lawful means of protest — picketing, marches, mass meetings, litigation, and whatever other means we deem necessary.”

  The letter was signed by John Salter, Doris Allison, and Medgar Evers.

  On May 13 Mayor Thompson went on television to respond that he would never negotiate. Salter, Allison, and a number of other leaders and students piled into Evers’s office in the Masonic Temple and listened, slack jawed with disbelief, to the mayor’s unctuous speech.

  Thompson looked straight into the camera and said that Jackson was a place where the races lived “side by side in peace and harmony.” Where the Negroes had “twenty-four-hour police protection.” Where there were “no slums.”

  Speaking directly to his Negro citizens, he said, “You live in a city where you can work, where you can make a comfortable living. You are treated, no matter what anybody else tells you, with dignity, courtesy and respect. Ah, what a wonderful thing it is to live in this city. . . ! Refuse to pay any attention to any of these outside agitators who are interested only in getting money out of you, using you for their own selfish purposes.”

  Evers decided to demand equal time. For one thing he wanted the people to know that he was no outside agitator. He was a Mississippian.

  Medgar Evers appealed to the station WLBT and the Federal Communications Commission to get equal time to reply to Allen Thompson’s televised speech. The TV station, which was about to lose its broadcasting license because of biased coverage, gave in without a fight.

  Evers raced back from an out-of-town trip and arr
ived at the studio just in time to prerecord his speech on May 20.

  Dave Dennis remembers feeling uneasy. Before this moment, Medgar Evers had just been a name in the newspapers. Very few white people could recognize him. The televised reply put Medgar too far out in front. It focused the attention, and the danger, on one man instead of spreading it around to many.

  But someone from Mississippi had to reply to the mayor’s charge that the demonstrations and boycotts were being led by “outside agitators.” And so Medgar Evers began his speech with the words, “I speak as a native Mississippian.”

  Although many hands went into writing and revising the speech, it was pure Medgar: reasonable, forceful, and relentlessly logical. It must have rattled white Mississippians. Most of them knew Negroes only as farmhands and domestic workers. Here was a well-spoken, smart black man, a college graduate with a Yankee accent. And in a state where it was still the custom for a black to step off the sidewalk to let a white pass, here was a Negro talking back to the mayor of the capital city. Disputing him.

  “Now, the mayor says that if the so-called outside agitators would leave us alone everything would be all right,” Evers said. “This has always been the position of those who would deny Negro citizens their constitutional rights….Never in history has the South, as a region, without outside pressure, granted the Negro his citizenship rights.”

  Evers moved lightly into the new world order: the winds of change that were sweeping Africa stirred hardly a breeze in his own home state.