The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  “Sit down!” Evers said.

  To Shoemaker’s amazement the hard, angry crowd instantly melted. People sank down in their chairs, and Medgar Evers quietly continued the meeting.

  On Thursday, June 6, Salter was served with an injunction — City of Jackson v. John Salter Jr. et al. — naming Medgar Evers, Dick Gregory, Dave Dennis, and a slew of others and preventing them from sponsoring, encouraging, or engaging in any picketing, demonstrations, or anything else that annoyed the city fathers. Jack Young and the other NAACP lawyers drew up a proper legal response, but no mass defiance was planned, just a few pickets every day.

  John Salter reluctantly decided to send his wife and infant daughter back to her parents in Minnesota. It was too dangerous for them to stay in Jackson. Carloads of white boys prowled the roads between the city and Tougaloo. Someone had loosened the lug nuts on Salter’s car. It felt to John like it was only a matter of time.

  More than three thousand people crammed into the Masonic Temple auditorium on the night of Friday, June 7. Riot police lined Lynch Street. It was a big night for the faltering movement. Lena Horne was there to give a speech and a performance; Dick Gregory had left his son’s graveside to be there for Medgar Evers.

  Ruby Hurley introduced Lena Horne to the crowd. While Ruby was speaking, Medgar handed her a note to ask some white men in the audience to quit smoking, since the fire codes prohibited it. When she made the announcement, people turned and looked at the white strangers. Instead of putting out the cigarettes, they got up and left.

  Gloster Current, NAACP director of branches, saw the white men in the audience, sitting over by the right side of the auditorium. Current thought he had seen one of the men earlier that day. That afternoon he had been typing in the upstairs NAACP office where background material was made available to the press. He noticed two white men looking around. When Lillian Louie, the secretary, asked them what they wanted, they left.

  Henry Kirksey, who worked for the Mississippi Teachers’ Association in another office in the building, had seen the men in the stairwell. One, a short, dark-haired man, was acting out something to his friend. He was crouching down, pretending to fire a pistol. Kirksey would later say the man looked a lot like Byron De La Beckwith. John Salter thought that Beckwith was one of the white men in the audience that night, and so did Ruby Hurley.

  Dick Gregory remembers that the auditorium was hot and crowded. There was a bad feeling in the air, and a fear. He thought someone might try to bomb the place. Anything could happen.

  “You people here in the state of Mississippi carry the key,” Gregory said. “When you finish freeing yourselves, you’ll free the North. When you shake the vicious beast — the white man — off your backs, even the Indians will run off the reservations.”

  Gregory got a dozen standing ovations that night. As he picked up momentum, he tried to lighten the atmosphere a little. That was his job — to name what people feared and make them laugh about it.

  Gregory joked about his attraction to white women. It was the white man’s fault, he declared. “You can’t advertise Bufferins without a blonde. So, I need a blonde to help me get rid of my headaches.”

  Roars of laughter.

  “The white man thinks he knows us! He doesn’t. He can’t! . . . What this foolish white man doesn’t know is that for all that time, we’ve been sitting there in the back of the bus studying him, watching him and knowing him better than he knows himself.”

  Gregory saw some white faces in the crowd. “I know you policemen are down there at the press tables taking notes and pretending to be reporters,” he said. “Well write this. Go downtown and tell your white daddy to get the barbed wire ready, ’cause we’re coming tomorrow!” The crowd reacted with great waves of applause and shouts and stomping ovations.

  There were many speakers that night. Gene Young, a nine-year-old boy who was small for his age, stood on a packing crate to reach the microphone. He told the crowd how he had been a prisoner in the stockades and a policeman had twisted his arm in its socket because the boy wouldn’t call him “sir.” He was willing to do it all again, he said.

  “Let’s march!” Gene shouted, poking his little fist to the sky. One of the NAACP staffers gently ushered him off the stage.

  No marches were announced that night. The people of Jackson didn’t know it yet, but a decision had been made in New York. No more bail money. No more demonstrations.

  Medgar Evers gave the final, wrap-up speech. Myrlie sat in the audience in her cauldron of emotions — pride, excitement, love, and fear. Mainly she felt fear when the list of events and fund-raisers was finished and he began to speak from his heart.

  “Freedom has never been free,” he told the crowd. “… I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”

  After the meeting, Dick Gregory talked to Medgar Evers. He was scared for him. He could feel it in the air, he could see it in the faces of the police — they knew something was going to happen. Now that his son was dead, Gregory no longer thought it was his turn to die. He just hugged Medgar and said, “I probably won’t be seeing you no more.”

  Dick Gregory left Jackson the next day.

  There was a rare party after the mass meeting at the Masonic Temple. Myrlie thought it was wonderful just to have a drink and talk; it seemed almost normal. Medgar seemed unusually attentive. The children were being minded by a friend, so Myrlie and Medgar didn’t leave until two in the morning. They left in separate cars, dropping off friends along the way.

  Medgar and his group discussed the white strangers they had seen in the audience that night. And then someone mentioned that he had seen the white men follow them when they left the temple.

  Medgar stepped on the gas and got home just as Myrlie and the kids drove up. She wondered why he had driven so fast.

  Dave Dennis was living in the Maple Street apartments in Jackson, where Medgar and Myrlie had first lived. He was organizing the mean little town of Canton in the spring of 1963. It was rough up there, just twenty miles north of Jackson. The whole town was run by the Citizen’s Council, and there were some bad cops and worse deputies. It was getting so that Dennis’s white station wagon was recognized and stopped every night.

  On Saturday, June 8, Dennis asked Medgar Evers if they could switch cars for the day. Maybe he wouldn’t be recognized in Canton for a change.

  That night Dennis went to a meeting up in Madison County, and on the way back to Jackson two or three carloads of white men pulled alongside and stopped him. They forced him out of the car. They said they knew who he was, and they asked him where he was going, called him nigger this and nigger that. Dennis thought, This is it, and he got ready for the worst. But it was cotton-chopping time in Madison County, and two big truckloads of field hands out working late came churning down the road. The rednecks had to move their cars and Dennis took the opportunity to jump back into his and fly back to Jackson as fast as Medgar’s car would go. Medgar had a fast car.

  When Dennis met Evers at the mass meeting in Jackson that night, he joked about it. “A man could get killed driving your car!” he said. Medgar laughed. He told Dennis a cop had tried to run him down that afternoon when he stepped out of Dennis’s car. He said, “Why don’t you come back to the house and have a drink?” But Dave Dennis was tired, and he wanted to get some sleep.

  Everyone could see that Medgar Evers was exhausted. He was making himself sick. So that Sunday Myrlie made him stay home most of the day. Later she remembered some of the things he had said to her that day. She wanted him to buy a new suit. They argued about it in a playful way. Where would he get the money? When she pressed him, he got serious. “Myrlie, I won’t be needing a suit,” he said.

  Medgar worried that night that his life insurance wasn’t up to date. He needed to borrow some money to pay the premium. Myrlie persuaded him to wait for his next paycheck.

  Medgar spent most of the day at home, a
nd ate Sunday dinner with the family. He played with the children. He took a nap and was starting to feel better.

  Later that night Medgar phoned his brother, Charles, in Chicago. They called each other often, at least twice a month. Medgar was worried about Charlie. He knew that he was having trouble with the Chicago mob.

  Charles Evers was a rich man now, the owner of three taverns, including the Club Mississippi on the South Side and a twenty-four-unit apartment house at Sixty-second and Normal, where he lived with his family. He had arrived broke, but Charles Evers knew how to make money every way there is to make it.

  He started using some of his old business skills. He worked as a washroom attendant. He took a day job as a science teacher in a public school. But his energy went into building up the nightclubs, a prostitution ring, a jukebox business, and a numbers racket. That’s where he was running into some trouble with the Mafia, who felt that all jukeboxes and numbers games should be in their control.

  Medgar usually didn’t want to hear about his brother’s businesses, and Charles kept him in the dark as much as he could. He knew Medgar didn’t approve. But Medgar knew there was a turf battle brewing in Chicago. Charles tried to reassure him.

  “These damn dagos are trying to take over, but I’m goin’ to lay with ’em.”

  Medgar said, “Charles, you be careful now. They’ll kill you.”

  “No, you be careful about those damn Klukkers down there. They are much more detrimental than these dagos up here. I got my hoods, too.” Charles knew about the threats against Medgar and how some fool had thrown a Molotov cocktail at the house. He was planning to carry his brother out of there for a long vacation. Neither man had taken time off in years. Charles had bought a brand-new shiny black Cadillac, and they were going to drive as far south as they could, then somehow get to Brazil, where they had bought some land. Forty acres. Just like in their dreams, when they were kids.

  Charles had it all planned out. They would leave in early July, for Medgar’s birthday, spend a month relaxing, and be back in Chicago in time for the NAACP convention.

  There was a little pause in the conversation.

  “Charles, I worry about y’all,” Medgar said.

  “Don’t worry about me. I won’t be here!” said Charles, trying to lighten it up. “You just be careful. Don’t go in the woods, some ol’ redneck down there may lay around there and shoot your brains out.”

  “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of that.”

  “Lope, I’ll see ya in July.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Wha’dya mean, you hope so?”

  “If I’m not too busy.”

  It was the way he said it that bothered Charles.

  “You want me to come down there?”

  “Nope, I’m all right. I’ll be all right.”

  “Okay, I’ll check you later.”

  Both men were crying when they hung up. Charles almost called back to tell him to come up to Chicago for a few days, but he knew Medgar would never leave.

  On Monday it got even hotter.

  There was another angry meeting at the Masonic Temple that evening, and John Salter suggested inviting the SCLC into Jackson to pick up the pieces of the direct-action movement. He recalls that the NAACP staffers shouted him down. Medgar Evers sat tight and silent.

  As it turns out, Medgar had received a phone call from Dr. Felix Dunn, the Gulfport NAACP president. Dunn had learned through a white lawyer he knew that the Ku Klux Klan had Medgar on a hit list. There would be an assassination attempt, soon. He should put some guards around his house.

  On Tuesday, June 11, the police presence around the Masonic Temple had vaporized. Only a handful of riot cops guarded Capitol Street. But surveillance seemed to be at an all-time peak.

  That afternoon John Salter and Steve Rutledge, another white NAACP worker from Tougaloo, drove a group of students wearing NAACP T-shirts downtown to walk around Capitol Street. Police cars trailed behind wherever they went. Finally Salter parked on Farish Street and walked back to the unmarked car that pulled in, as expected, right behind him. He wanted to know why he was being followed so closely. Suddenly the detective’s door swung open, hitting Salter and nearly knocking him off his feet.

  When Salter went to the Masonic Temple to report the incident, he found Medgar Evers in the almost-empty auditorium. Medgar said the same thing had happened to him the Saturday before: a police car had nearly hit him as he crossed the street. He said he was being followed too.

  At 3:45 p.m. Medgar called the FBI to report the incident with the Jackson police car. He told the FBI that between 4 and 5 p.m. the previous Saturday, he had been walking down Lynch Street, crossing Franklin, when a police car had shot out at him, causing him to jump back on the curb. The cops inside had laughed. He gave the FBI man the police car license number.

  He told them something else. Today he was being followed everywhere he went by a police car. The FBI man said he would pass the information on to the Justice Department.

  Medgar called home three times that day, just to tell Myrlie he loved her and to chat with the children. Once he called to talk about the scene on television that afternoon. Governor George Wallace had stepped aside to allow the registration of two black students at the University of Alabama.

  It was a tense time across the South, but the red spotlight was now on Alabama. The Kennedys feared another performance like the one at Oxford the previous fall. To their relief George Wallace kept his word. He postured and huffed and strutted and declared the federal government unconstitutional. Then he backed down and allowed the students to enter the university without bloodshed.

  President Kennedy seized the moment and lashed together a speech for broadcast that night. It was one of the best of his career.

  The speech aired in Mississippi at 7 p.m. Myrlie gathered the children around the TV set. Kennedy described the “moral crisis” of race relations. He called for changes in the law and in “all of our daily lives.” And he outlined a new civil rights bill he had in mind to break down the legal barriers between the races.

  Myrlie was elated. She couldn’t wait to talk about it with Medgar when he got home.

  A lot of people say they saw Medgar Evers that night. Henry Lamb, one of Medgar’s childhood friends from Forest, Mississippi, was in Jackson to attend a convention of Negro Elks. He says he had dinner with Medgar at a restaurant in Jackson. Others remember Medgar stopping by the Elks Lodge later for a drink and a talk with his old friends. There was a poker game going on, but Medgar didn’t stay long. Gloster Current, a Methodist minister, was in town, and Medgar couldn’t very well bring him there. And there was the mass meeting, usually at a different place but at the same time every night.

  People remember that Medgar Evers came late to the mass meeting at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church. The enthusiasm for the movement had waned, and the church wasn’t full. Some NAACP staffers from New York and Memphis talked about voter registration in Jackson. There was a discussion of T-shirt sales. John Salter saw Medgar on his way out. Medgar seemed so tired.

  Salter drove home to Tougaloo after the meeting ended at about eleven o’clock. When he got back to his empty house, he took out the .44/40 rifle that Medgar Evers had loaned him and set it by the bed before he fell into an uneasy sleep.

  Clarie Harvey’s family owned the biggest Negro funeral home in Jackson. She was a prominent person, and her income did not depend on the white man’s business, so it was possible for her to keep a high profile in the civil rights movement. She and some other women had formed a support group for the Freedom Riders, and now she was backing the Jackson Movement as best she could. She met Medgar in the church vestibule and was shocked by the look on his face. It was just awful, taut like a death mask. He smiled when he saw her and offered her a ride home. She said thanks, but she didn’t need one. She had her bodyguards with her.

  Medgar Evers didn’t have any bodyguards. But he did have James Wells, who had come by to check on him
.

  Wells had been fishing that day, but he stopped at the meeting on his way home. He had a bad feeling. Evers was gathering up a group of students to drive them home. Wells told him to get on back to his family; Wells would lake care of the students. Medgar said no, he had to go see his lawyer later anyway. So James Wells drove home.

  At about 11:30 p.m. Medgar pulled up to Jack and Aurelia Young’s house, hoping to find something to eat. He knew Aurelia Young had a crowd staying with her, and she always kept a pot of something on the stove. He didn’t want Myrlie to have to get up and cook for him when he got home.

  Jack was the only black lawyer in Jackson, and he spent most of his time working for the NAACP. He had put himself through law school while working as a postman. Aurelia was a gifted composer who taught music at Jackson State. They were close friends of the Everses.

  Aurelia was on the phone when Medgar came to the door. She was talking to Jack. He was telling her they needed some more mimeograph paper at the law office. They were preparing a brief to respond to the injunction against demonstrations in Jackson. Was that Medgar? Great. He could bring it.

  Medgar didn’t stop to eat. He went back to the Masonic Temple to get the paper. Gloster Current, who was visiting the Youngs, offered to go with him. When they got to the temple, Gloster looked up at the clock. It was ten minutes to midnight.

  Evers got the paper, then drove his boss back to the Youngs’s house. Current picked up his rental car to drive the supplies to the law office.

  Medgar dropped him at the door and shook his hand, holding it for a long time. Gloster was leaving town the next morning for an NAACP conference.

  “Mississippi will never be the same,” he told Gloster. “It will never be the same.” He let go at last and said, “I’m tired. I want to get home to my family.”