The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Black spectators, including Aaron Henry, shifted angrily in their seats. So it was going to be like this after all. Another kangaroo court, a whitewash, a quick acquittal. Another Emmett Till.

  But Waller had a strategy going. He assumed certain things: that white men of goodwill would have a hard time sympathizing with the victim; that they might find Beckwith sympathetic — particularly if he didn’t testify, and Waller had no way of knowing whether he would; that they were segregationists. But just as he did, they could set all those things aside and follow the law. His questions were designed to put himself squarely in their corner, lead them through the facts, and show them that they could do the right thing together.

  He asked practical questions: Had they contributed to Beckwith’s defense fund? Would rendering an unpopular verdict affect their relationship with their customers?

  And he dug deeper, putting himself inside the skin of his potential jurors, seeing how it fit. “The deceased worked in a way obnoxious and emotionally repulsive to you as a businessman and me as a lawyer — can you put this out of your mind and judge this case like any other case?” he asked.

  Ed King sat in the balcony and watched with growing disgust. It seemed to him that Medgar was on trial, not Beckwith. He would refer to this proceeding as “Medgar’s trial” for the rest of his days.

  Meanwhile Waller kept on hammering on his theme: “I’m a little upset myself right now with all these nigras in the courtroom — does that bother you?”

  The strategy seemed to pay off. When Waller put the big question — Is it a crime to kill a nigger? — to one venireman, the man sat quiet.

  “What did he say?” asked Judge Hendrick.

  “Nothing, Judge,” said Bill Waller. “He’s trying to make up his mind.” The man was sent home.

  This went on for four days, both sides picking through the minds of the jurors, looking for an advantage. Of the first twelve men to come up, the prosecution dismissed eleven.

  The normally stoic judge took to fidgeting with a ring on his finger. The three defense attorneys cradled their chins in their hands as they scrutinized each juror.

  Beckwith seemed thoroughly at ease. Wearing a dark blue suit with a red tie-and-sock combination, he lounged in his chair at the defense table. Spectators noted that he looked more like a prince awaiting coronation than an innocent chump on trial for his life. He casually draped one arm across his chair and the other on the defense table, chin raised and black wire-frame glasses balanced on his nose. During breaks he smoked a cigar while he chatted with his guards.

  He was elated by the appearance — apparently a surprise — of his long-estranged wife, Willie. She was a big woman with dark hair and an unpleasant expression on her face. She wore a modest knit suit, two big strands of faux pearls, and pale gloves. In later appearances she sometimes wore a little fur stole over her shoulders.

  The first time Beckwith saw her in court, he rushed over and kissed her. She sat behind him throughout the trial.

  There were other regulars as well. Reverend R. L. T. Smith sat in the same front-row seat every day. Judge Russel Moore, the Citizens’ Councils stalwart who had once conspired to arrest Medgar Evers and Roy Wilkins, was a constant fixture in the spectator pews.

  Jury selection wore on into night sessions. Finally both sides agreed on twelve jurors and one alternate who represented a cross section of white Jackson. Among them were two electricians, two business executives, an engineer, a plumber, a bakery manager, and assorted salesmen.

  Opening statements were heard on Friday, January 31. This time the courtroom was packed with spectators, and a line curled around the hallway with the overflow crowd.

  John Fox sat with Bill Waller at the prosecution table. Like Waller he was an old-family Mississippian. He could trace his roots through seven generations, back to a Revolutionary War veteran who had migrated from South Carolina. The family still owned a farm outside Jackson that had belonged to the Indians before the first Fox ancestor bought the land and planted crops. But while Fox could out-Mississippi any witness he interviewed, he was nobody’s redneck. He was raised in Oxford, where his father was a professor and registrar at the University of Mississippi Law School. Fox went straight through Ole Miss, undergraduate and law school. After a stint in the army he went into practice with his friend Bill Waller in 1958. Now in his thirties, Fox still looked like a college boy, or maybe a member of the Kingston Trio, in his white shirt and thin tie and crew cut, which made his perfectly round ears stick out like apricot halves.

  Beckwith’s troika of lawyers — Hardy Lott, his partner Stanny Sanders, and Hugh Cunningham — were older, more established attorneys. Physically they were almost interchangeable: fleshy-faced white men in advanced middle age with similar cases of male-pattern baldness.

  Ross Barnett, who by law could not succeed himself, had turned over the governorship to Paul Johnson earlier that month. He had resumed an active partnership in Cunningham’s law firm, and he made frequent appearances at the defense table. Barnett developed a habit of wandering into the courtroom almost every morning of the trial. More than once the former governor shook Beckwith’s hand and clapped him on the back in full view of the jurors.

  The bailiff called the court to order, and Waller began to lay out his case for the jury. “Our witnesses will show in ten ways that Byron De La Beckwith is guilty of this crime,” he said.

  The first state witness was B. D. Harrell, the officer who had taken the call about a shooting on Guynes Street.

  The next witness was Myrlie Evers.

  Myrlie chose a royal blue dress and black gloves for her court appearance. As the bailiff led her to the stand, Myrlie’s eyes flicked over the courtroom, looking for Beckwith. She had dreaded this moment and wondered how she would react when she saw him. When she took her seat and her eyes came to rest on him, she felt nothing at all. She was utterly composed.

  Byron De La Beckwith sat at the defense table, watching impassively. From time to time he squirmed in his chair to scan the crowd of spectators for familiar faces. Sometimes he scrawled furiously on a yellow legal pad.

  Bill Waller began his questioning by asking her name.

  “Mrs. Medgar Evers,” she said.

  “Your first name, please?”

  “Myrlie — M-Y-R-L-I-E.”

  Waller was walking a minefield here. He needed her testimony. She had to describe the crime scene, how she had heard the shot and found her husband in the pool of blood. With luck the jury would sympathize with the well-dressed, well-spoken widow. But the whole thing could backfire if Myrlie balked at being called by her first name, which every white person in the courthouse knew was the way you were supposed to address a Negro.

  The prosecutor and the widow had argued over the issue of courtroom decorum for months. Myrlie refused to address anyone as sir, not even the judge. And she assured Waller that she would not answer any questions in which she was addressed as “Myrlie” instead of “Mrs. Evers.”

  Waller could just see it blowing up in his face. He was going to play along, but what about Hardy Lott? What if he called her Myrlie and she refused to answer? Would the court haul her off for contempt? And even if that didn’t happen, what would the jury think of such an uppity attitude? The whole case could be wrecked over a piece of foolishness.

  Waller proceeded with caution. He solved his own problem by not using her name at all when prefacing his questions. Evers calmly answered questions about her husband: when they were married, where he went to school. Then Waller led her to the day of the murder.

  She testified that she had spoken to her husband on the phone three times that day, the last time around 5:30 p.m. In a clear, strong voice she described how the children had heard the car pull into the driveway, and then the shot.

  “After that there was complete silence,” she said.

  “What did you do?”

  “The moment I heard the blast I ran to the door. … I turned on the light and opened the doo
r at the same time and I saw my husband where he had fallen.” She described the keys in his hand, the blood on the ground.

  “I believe that’s all,” said Waller.

  The prosecutor sat down, and Hardy Lott walked to the lectern. “After you heard this loud blast,” he asked, “did you hear any more shots?”

  “I heard another shot after I had gotten to my husband.”

  Bill Waller relaxed. Lott was going along; he wouldn’t use her name at all. Maybe Lott wanted her testimony in cross-examination more than he needed to alienate the jury against her by provoking a scene. It could be his only chance to bring up Medgar Evers’s career as an integrationist and to establish other motives for the killing.

  Myrlie didn’t remember hearing any shots after the second blast. Then Lott asked her whether she had accused anyone at the scene of killing her husband. She said she had not.

  “You didn’t say to anyone, ‘You shot my husband’?” he asked.

  “No, I did not.”

  Lott was trying to bring out what some witnesses had heard on the night of the murder, when Myrlie was hysterical and shouting at a group of white boys who came to gawk at the crime scene. She yelled some things she could no longer remember.

  Lott wanted to show the jury that there could be more than one suspect in Medgar Evers’s murder.

  The lawyer asked Myrlie whether her husband had received death threats, and she said that he had. She then testified that Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary and that he was active in the integration movement.

  “Was he — he was the first person as a matter of fact who attempted integration of the University of Mississippi.”

  Myrlie opened her mouth to answer yes. It was something she was proud of. But Waller wasn’t going to allow Hardy Lott to get into this if he could help it.

  “Your Honor,” he barked. “We don’t see that this has any bearing on this!”

  “I sustain the objection to that,” the judge said.

  Lott tried a different approach.

  “Now, at the time your husband was shot he had filed and had pending in Jackson a suit to integrate the white public schools of this city .. . ?”

  Waller jumped up again.

  “Your Honor, we can’t see that this is material on cross-examination of this woman. She is a housewife. She wasn’t in the movement. It has nothing to do with this slaying at the time, in the middle of the night at his home.”

  This time Judge Hendrick allowed the question.

  Lott resumed: “My question was, if it wasn’t a fact that at the time your husband was killed he had pending a lawsuit filed by him on behalf of his children to integrate the white schools of Jackson, Mississippi?”

  “My husband was not the only plaintiff. There were other plaintiffs in the case.”

  “But he was a plaintiff in it?”

  “He was one of the plaintiffs.”

  “You were another?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “It was brought on behalf of all the colored children in Jackson to integrate the schools here?”

  “We were not the only plaintiffs.”

  “There were others. Is that suit still pending?”

  “To my knowledge, it is.”

  “Now I believe one of your children who you stated was present that night is Thomas Kenyatta Evers?”

  “No, that is not correct.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Darrell.” She spelled it out. “D-A-R-R-E-L-L K-E-N-Y-A-T-T-A Evers — E-V-E-R-S.”

  “I see. He was named after Kenyatta . . .”

  “Your Honor, we object to this! This is a deliberate attempt to poison the minds of the jury about some child’s name!”

  “I sustain the objection,” the judge said.

  Lott gave up. “No further questions.”

  As Myrlie stood to leave the witness box, she felt somehow disappointed. She was just getting warmed up, and it was over. She had made it through without losing her temper or breaking down. Medgar would have been proud of her. It was the last she would see of the inside of the courtroom for the rest of the trial. Witnesses could not listen to testimony, and to the relief of the defense the grieving widow could not take a front-row seat for the jury to see. If Waller hadn’t called her, Lott might well have, just to keep her out of court.

  The next witness was Houston Wells, the Everses’ next-door neighbor, who had fired his pistol to scare off the assassin. Wells owned a furniture company, and he was a good friend of Medgar Evers. Bill Waller wasn’t going to tiptoe around this witness. He was a good ol’ boy again.

  “You are Houston Wells?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Where do you live, Houston?”

  It was established that Wells was a neighbor and that he heard the shot that killed Evers, his daughter screamed, and some two minutes later he fired a .38 pistol in the air before running next door. He told the court that his brother James drove over to help, it took James about five minutes to get there, and that James fired a shotgun just as Medgar was being carried to the hospital.

  “Well, I believe just as I was leaving another shot was fired.”

  “You know who fired that shot?”

  “My brother.”

  “You all are not trigger happy are you, Houston?”

  “No, we were aware it had to be somebody … in that area . . .”

  Waller had one last question. He wanted the jury to hear just what Houston Wells found when he saw his friend lying, gasping in his own blood.

  “Did you see the wife of Medgar Evers?”

  “Yes, sir. . . . She was coming out the door and was screaming. . . . And the children were screaming. She was screaming and the children were screaming. She was just a wreck.”

  “That’s all.”

  The next witness was Joe Alford, a Jackson patrolman who arrived at the scene some three minutes after the call came in at 12:45 a.m. that there had been a shooting on Guynes Street. He escorted Wells’s car, with Evers inside, to the hospital.

  Then came Dr. Forrest Bratley, a pathologist who performed the autopsy on Medgar Evers. He was called in at 2:15 a.m. He said the body was still warm. The cause of death: hemorrhage.

  In a matter-of-fact voice Dr. Bratley described Evers’s wounds. There were two. The smaller wound, he said, was in the back, some ten inches below the right shoulder blade and about six inches to the right of his spine. It was oval in shape and measured fourteen by nine millimeters, a little smaller than a dime. From that entry point he had tracked the path of the bullet through Evers’s body. It was a grisly education in the damage one shot from a military weapon could inflict in the blink of an eye, tearing up lung tissue and arteries and shattering bones before it exited the chest in a jagged gash roughly the shape of a half-dollar coin.

  The next witness was John Chamblee, a thirteen-year veteran of the Jackson police who had been a detective for eight of those years. He said he had investigated maybe twenty murders in the past decade. Jackson was a small, slow town back then. Chamblee was well-spoken but a little nervous. Bill Waller kept asking him to speak up and slow down as he described the crime scene in the early morning hours of June 12.

  When he and his partner arrived at the scene at 12:54 a.m., they found Myrlie Evers standing in the carport with a neighbor. Then they saw the blood. It was “a tremendous amount of blood,” Chamblee said. “In fact it looked like somebody had butchered a hog at that point.”

  The detective told the court that Myrlie Evers was nearly incoherent with shock. He described a crowd of about twenty-five people milling around on the lawn, but nobody had seen anything. So Detective Chamblee and his partner, Fred Sanders, started to look for physical evidence to piece together what had happened.

  At this point the prosecution entered into evidence a stack of black-and-white photos of the crime scene and the surrounding neighborhood, some of them aerial shots.

  After lunch Hardy Lott cross-examined Chamblee.
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  “Did you take in a boy, a young white man, that night for questioning about having shot Evers?” he asked.

  Chamblee told him that he and other officers “took several people in for questioning and collaboration [sic] of what had happened out there. But as far as a suspect, we didn’t take anybody in as a suspect, purely as a witness in the material.”

  Chamblee was asked whether he had heard Myrlie Evers accuse someone at the scene of shooting her husband. He had not.

  Fred Sanders also testified that afternoon. Waller handed the thirty-two-year-old detective a glass bottle containing fragments of a .30- caliber lead-tipped bullet. Sanders identified it as the bullet he had found on Medgar Evers’s kitchen counter. It was in pieces now because it had been dissected and tested by the FBI laboratory. It was, he said, over the strenuous objection of Hardy Lott, the same bullet that had killed Medgar Evers.

  Next up was Betty Coley, the woman who had been walking with Kenneth Adcock along Missouri Street when the shot was fired. She remembered how beautiful the moon had been that night. Bill Waller let her tell her story:

  “We were walking, as has been pointed out, toward my home. Just walking slowly, talking and we were very startled when we heard the sound of the bullet because we were positive that the shot had been fired at us. Kenneth grabbed me. We stood there for a second and Kenneth said, ‘The best thing we can do is just to walk on slowly like we’ve been walking and act as if nothing had happened.’ And that’s what we did. We walked on to the house.”

  Right after the shot was fired, Coley heard the sound of someone running. From what she could tell, the person had been heading in the direction of Joe’s Drive In.

  After a short break Hardy Lott took the witness.

  “You, of course, couldn’t tell, for example, whether that was a man or a woman running,” Lott said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Just somebody running in that field. And you naturally stayed there, or didn’t you, for a while, you and the young man, after that running over in there and you didn’t see anything.”

  “Not very long. But we were there. We didn’t walk away immediately.”