The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  For instance, the prosecution again called Herbert Speight, one of the cabdrivers who had identified Beckwith as the man who asked him for directions to Evers’s house days before the murder. At the second go-around Speight suddenly couldn’t be positive the man was Beckwith. He now said on the stand that he “couldn’t swear to it.”

  “Have you been threatened in any way?” Waller asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Since you testified before, have you been assaulted?”

  The defense successfully objected to this line of questioning. Later, during noon recess, Waller told reporters that Speight “got the hell beat out of him” and had received threats since his first testimony.

  That afternoon Lee Swilley, the other cabbie, took the stand and more or less stuck to his story. In cross-examination Hardy Lott asked him whether he told a coworker that he wasn’t going to testify because he was not going to lie. He denied it. Lott asked him if he was mad because he wasn’t paid for his testimony. He denied that too. The defense later produced that coworker, Sam Warren, as a new witness. Warren swore that Swilley, who was working at the time at the state mental hospital, had told Warren that he wasn’t going to “tell ’nary ’nother lie.”

  Another new twist in this second trial was the defense’s attempt to discredit a key witness who could place Beckwith near the crime scene on the night of the murder. Hardy Lott produced three witnesses to dispute Barbara Ann Holder’s testimony that she saw a white Valiant at Joe’s Drive In at 11:45 p.m. on June 11. John Turner, the owner of a redneck nightclub, the Club Kathryn, testified that Holder was definitely at his establishment, just up Delta Drive from Joe’s, at the time she said she was at the drive-in. He remembered the date, he said, because he was raided by the police and arrested that night for selling beer after hours. The raid was at 12:10 a.m. Turner said Barbara Holder was there and she had been there all night. Two of his employees backed up his story.

  Martha Jean O’Brien, the young carhop, also testified that she couldn’t remember seeing Holder at Joe’s Drive In on the night of June 11.

  If things were looking bad for Bill Waller after this testimony, they got worse when the defense called a surprise witness named James Hobby. He was a thirty-seven-year-old truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, who had been living in Jackson in June 1963. Hobby testified that he owned a 1960 white Valiant and had been at Joe’s Drive In between 12:10 and 12:30 a.m. the morning of Medgar Evers’s murder. Hobby, who was the same height and build as Beckwith, said that he had gone to the rest room at Joe’s and then ordered a cup of coffee. He had been on his way to work, he said. He also said that he had been in the neighborhood in his Valiant that weekend, watching drag races.

  To Waller’s relief Beckwith again took the stand on the eighth day of the trial. This time Beckwith chose a more casual look: a striped sports jacket and gray tie. He fidgeted in his chair and pulled at his face, but he calmly answered Hardy Lott’s questions, disputing each of the state’s witnesses in turn. For the first time he gave an account of what he was doing on the night of the murder. He said he had dinner at about 7:00 p.m. in Greenwood, and then he went home to his house on George Street. It was so hot he couldn’t get to sleep.

  “I got up, put on my clothes and drove around some,” he said. “I thought I’d get a bottle of beer.”

  Waller’s cross-examination went about the same as before. This time he felt that Beckwith did a better job for himself. Somebody obviously had told him to shut his mouth. He didn’t run on as much as the first time. Still there were moments.

  Waller produced another letter that Beckwith had written during his first trial — even though he knew all his mail could be used against him. “We shall soon engage the enemy in mortal combat…. We will surely win… combat will always bring a few casualties,” the letter read. Waller asked Beckwith what he meant by “mortal combat.”

  “What it means to you, it wouldn’t mean to me,” Beckwith snapped. Waller combed through Beckwith’s story about finding his Enfield missing right before Evers’s murder. “Did you or did you not report it missing?” he asked.

  “I don’t have any recollection of reporting it or not reporting it.”

  Waller hadn’t been able to make this point in the first trial.

  Waller had been making an effort to stay out of Beckwith’s reach. He didn’t want to be ambushed with any cigars. But as Waller closed in to show Beckwith a picture of the car the state said was used by the killer, Beckwith patted him on the shoulder. Waller jumped back as if he had been stuck with a cattle prod. Beckwith grinned, saying, “I’ll say anything you want me to about that car, Mr. Waller.”

  Hardy Lott and his team had a more direct closing argument this time: the theme was that Beckwith had been framed. He was the victim of a plot to make it look like he had killed Evers. Someone must have planted that gun in the bushes. And besides how could you hear the testimony of three fine alibi witnesses and not have a reasonable doubt?

  The jury began deliberation just after noon on April 15. More than two hundred spectators remained in the courtroom, waiting. Beckwith sat with his lawyers, chatting softly.

  Again the jury had four choices: innocent, guilty as charged, guilty as charged with life sentence as punishment, guilty as charged but with no agreement on punishment.

  By midday of the seventeenth, they reported they were deadlocked. Judge Hendrick declared another mistrial. This time the vote was eight to four in favor of acquittal.

  Bill Waller could have asked for a third trial date. The law would allow it, but another trial seemed pointless. Waller felt he had presented the best case he could. He had made the most of the evidence he had, but he apparently needed more to get a conviction. So when Judge Hendrick set bond for Beckwith at ten thousand dollars, the D.A. did not object.

  Beckwith would remain on bond until the judge ordered a new trial or until the court voided his indictment. That could take months, even years.

  When Byron De La Beckwith made bail that afternoon, he was not technically a free man. He was still an accused killer, and he could be hauled back into court at any time.

  Beckwith slipped out the back of the courthouse sprawled on the backseat of Sheriff Fred Pickett’s car while the huddle of newsmen waited out front. An hour later, when Beckwith’s small police convoy coasted out of the hills and down into the Delta along Highway 49, Beckwith spotted a sign that read “Welcome Home DeLa.” Another homemade banner hung from an overpass just south of Greenwood with the same slogan. Some people waved Confederate flags as he passed. At a brief meeting with reporters at the LeFlore County Courthouse that afternoon, a joyful Beckwith remarked that the sight of the signs “brought tears to my eyes.” He had been in jail for ten months.

  That night Delay and his wife, Willie, ate a steak dinner, on the house, at the Hotel LeFlore, where Beckwith’s supporters had been lodging his family during Beckwith’s imprisonment.

  Hardy Lott had told the press that Beckwith would not be making any statements, but that was of course not the case. The next day he discussed his plans with a UPI reporter.

  “I’m not bitter against anyone,” he said. “The Beckwith family does not hold bitterness. We have been inconvenienced and aggravated but we have only been hurt financially.”

  Willie added, “This thing has about wiped us out.”

  The couple discussed their relationship.

  “I’m as happy today as the day I married Delay,” Willie cooed. Beckwith said they were even happier than that, because “all the pleasant moments we have had have been multiplied by this incident in our lives.” (They divorced again, for the third and last time, the next year.) Meanwhile Delay was eager to get back to work, to get back to “normal.” He was going to take a couple of weeks on the Gulf Coast to do some fishing and relax.

  His fertilizer job was waiting for him. He was given a new company station wagon. The little Beckwith family moved into a mobile home at the Rebel Court Trailer Park in Gr
eenwood.

  Beckwith’s friend and admirer Gordon Lackey lived just across the street. Lackey was very tall and skinny, with Elvis-black hair and eyes the color of pond water. He was in his late twenties, married, and he worked in his parents’ cafe when he wasn’t fixing and selling motorcycles or flying crop dusters over the cotton fields. Lackey used to keep a chimpanzee in the cafe, with a sign around the ape’s neck saying, “I am a man.” That was Lackey’s sense of humor. According to government reports and most other sources (except Lackey himself, who always denied it), his other job was as a kleagle, or recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan. In fact Lackey, who had been in and out of college over the years, was said to have written the White Knights’ constitution.

  The White Knights were a fast-growing group. To celebrate Beckwith’s release from jail and demonstrate their widespread appeal, members had burned crosses in nearly half of the eighty-two counties in Mississippi on the same April night.

  White supremacists hadn’t been very organized in Mississippi until the trouble at Ole Miss. The first real modern Klan had crossed the border from Louisiana at Natchez back in 1962 or 1963. They called themselves the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were a nasty, violent group, but not much different from other Klans across the South. Like the others they held some public rallies and bickered among themselves over the usual things: money and power.

  In February of 1964, while Byron De La Beckwith was still in jail, a hard-nosed group of Klansmen broke away from the Originals to form a new, secret Klan. Their aim was to act instead of talk. They called themselves the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. There were two hundred to three hundred men at the first meeting. By the end of the year there were somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand Klansmen in the state.

  The imperial wizard of the new, secret Klan was a peculiar man from Laurel named Sam Bowers. Most rank-and-file Klansmen fit the stereotype of ignorant, sadistic, redneck laborers with a grudge against anyone who might be different. Bowers was an exception. He was the grandson of a four-term Mississippi congressman with a distinguished social pedigree. He had studied engineering at the University of Southern California and Tulane before joining the navy during World War II.

  Bowers was thin, sandy-haired, ferret-faced, smart, charismatic, and crazy. He was a religious fanatic with a swastika fetish who had been observed in his living room saluting his German shepherd dog with a stiff-armed “Heil Hitler.” He never seemed to date women. The wizard lived with his business partner in the back room of their vending machine enterprise, Sambo Amusements, across the street from the Masonite plant in Laurel.

  Sam Bowers was Beckwith’s sort of person, an archconservative soul mate. If they hadn’t known each other before the murder trials, there are people who will tell you they became close associates soon afterward. According to government sources, Byron De La Beckwith was officially sworn into the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi in a secret ceremony in Gordon Lackey’s living room in the summer of 1964.

  19

  The Long Summer

  After the trials had ended and the school year was over, Myrlie Evers moved with the children to southern California. She brought only her car, clothes, a few pieces of furniture, a Cable and Nelson piano, and a trunkload of letters and photographs and other mementos of her life with Medgar. She told friends that she chose the Los Angeles area because Medgar had once said that if he ever left Mississippi, that was where he would go.

  Althea Simmons, the West Coast NAACP field secretary, had found a nice little beige-and-pink stucco house in a quiet neighborhood in the suburb of Claremont, thirty miles east of Los Angeles. The three-bedroom ranch had a low-slung roof with an Oriental flare, a eucalyptus tree in the front, and a lanai in the back. There were six colleges in the town. The public schools were excellent. The NAACP bought the property for $26,500 out of proceeds from the Evers Trust Fund, which had grown to $60,000, and turned the deed over to Myrlie.

  The Everses were the only blacks in the neighborhood. In fact there were only five Negro families in the entire town of Claremont. Myrlie knew none of them, or anyone else in Claremont.

  But even before she arrived, Myrlie had received congenial handwritten notes from some of her new neighbors. An editorial in the Claremont Courier singled her out for a hearty welcome.

  The two older children enrolled at the previously all-white Mountain View Elementary School. Myrlie registered at Claremont College. She would get the degree that she had given up when she married Medgar Evers.

  Myrlie found it ironic that she was now surrounded by white people. A hatred still smoldered in her even though she knew it was wrong. That was not, she told herself, what Medgar would have wanted. So she quietly began to shed her bitterness.

  Just as Medgar would not abide her hatred, she knew he would not want her to grieve forever. He would want her to get on with her life. But that was something she could not yet do.

  Sometimes, when she could no longer take the pressure at home, she would drive out into the unfamiliar, dry desert air, up into the San Bernardino Mountains to a chaparral-covered ridge. She could see a long way from there. She could be alone and think about Medgar and cry without the children seeing her cry. Then she could go back down the mountain and start another day.

  A few months after the second mistrial Bill Waller told a reporter from the NewYork Times that he would not attempt to try Byron De La Beckwith for a third time without new evidence. The case remained open but dormant. Gloster Current suggested, in a memo to Roy Wilkins, that the NAACP should “not let this go by the boards without some effort on our part to have this man put under peace bond to prevent him from doing further damage to the Negro cause.” But nothing was done. All the prosecutor could do was watch and wait for a new witness to come forward or for Beckwith to make a mistake.

  Every working day after Medgar’s murder, Charles Evers went to the NAACP office on Lynch Street and sat at his brother’s desk, trying to think what to do. The tempting old idea of a Mississippi Mau Mau still circulated in his brain from time to time. It was a guaranteed way to get the white man’s attention, and it fit Charles’s general strategy in dealing with them: always give back to the white man what he gives you. If he smiles, meet him with a smile. If he kills, meet him with a rifle. Charles went so far as to stockpile some weapons. He thought about knocking off the biggest white racists in every county in Mississippi. It was a long list. But when Charles sat at Medgar’s desk, sitting below a large framed portrait of his brother, something would tell him, “That’s not the way.”

  So instead of seeking revenge, Charles Evers carried on Medgar’s work. He drove around the state visiting NAACP branches. He encouraged voter registration. He schemed economic boycotts that would hurt the white man in his most sensitive place — his pocket. Charles put himself out front and took risks he shouldn’t have taken, such as driving alone at night and talking back to cops who were just looking for a reason to hurt him. He later said that he was hoping someone would try to put a bullet in him and that would be his excuse to take some of his enemies down with him. He had the survivor’s guilt.

  Charles Evers did not work well with the national NAACP staff. He was accustomed to being his own boss, and he could never tolerate a New Yorker telling him how to run Mississippi. Roy Wilkins and Gloster Current, with their nearly religious attachment to procedure, were driven to bemused distraction by their renegade field secretary. Still there was no way to get rid of him without causing a scene. Charles had name recognition and power in Mississippi.

  Charles also had cultivated a warm relationship with Robert Kennedy, who had stayed on as attorney general for Lyndon Johnson after John Kennedy’s assassination. The two men had met at Medgar’s funeral in Washington, and they formed a powerful, inexplicable bond. Bobby Kennedy called Charles often that summer, and when his brother was killed in November, Charles Evers went to his friend’s side. Charles backed Kennedy’s U.S. Senate campaign, e
ven when the NAACP endorsed Kennedy’s opponent.

  Charles Evers’s irascibility and essential conservatism surfaced frequently during his early days as field secretary. He clashed with other civil rights groups from the outset. Evers didn’t like the long-haired, scruffy college students who had taken over SNCC and were now dominating COFO. He was offended by a man who wore dungarees when he could afford better. The SNCC style of consensus leadership clashed with Evers’s authoritarian streak. And like the NAACP leaders, he didn’t want outsiders coming into the state and stirring up trouble they couldn’t handle. Charles knew what he was dealing with in Mississippi, and he knew what was going to happen when COFO announced a huge voter education project for the summer of 1964.

  Dave Dennis and Bob Moses also knew what it meant when COFO invited more than a thousand fresh-faced and eager white college kids to Mississippi. The object of Freedom Summer, as it came to be called, was more than literacy classes and registration drives. It was to get the attention of the whole country and to involve the federal government in the civil rights business. Folksingers and governors’ sons, white boys and white girls ready to change the world, preferably from the best schools and the most prominent families, would attract attention the way no black Mississippians could. The organizers knew some of them were going to get hurt or worse. But the strategy worked in a way that would haunt Dennis for the rest of his life.

  The state of Mississippi hired seven hundred extra highway patrolmen in anticipation of the summer “invasion.” Jackson’s mayor Allen Thompson responded with typical panic. He hired another hundred policemen. “This is it,” he said. “We are going to be ready for them…. They won’t have a chance.”