The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Like so many white boys in the South, Delmar Dennis grew up hearing the stories about the “good” Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction and how it saved the southern way of life from the evil Yankees. At his father’s knee he learned about the “second Klan” organized in the early twentieth century to fight back against the waves of immigrants and Catholics who seemed to be overrunning the country.

  In the spring of 1964 Dennis was a twenty-four-year-old Baptist preacher with a wife and two children. He had what he felt was a healthy interest in politics. He believed in God, country, and a segregated Mississippi. The Klan was still a shadowy, romantic outfit to him. And so, when a friend from the local Masonic Temple asked Delmar if he wanted to come to a real-life Klan meeting, he was curious.

  Three dozen men sat on folding chairs in an old army barracks outside Meridian. The meeting started when three robed Klansmen came in and led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. The new men were sworn to secrecy, then one of the Klansmen gave a lecture explaining what the Klan was all about. It was pro-American and anti-Satan — a fine Christian organization sworn to destroy communism and uphold segregation and the U.S. Constitution.

  Nothing wrong with that, Dennis thought. All it took to join was a ten-dollar bill. Everyone seemed to be signing up. Delmar’s friend nudged him. “C’mon. Let’s do it.” He even loaned Dennis the ten dollars.

  And so Delmar Dennis was sworn in as a citizen of the Invisible Empire, a White Knight of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. After the oath was over, the robed leader said, “All right, all you old members sit down.”

  Only Delmar and three strangers were left standing. His friend grinned up at him.

  The kleagle at the front of the room took off his mask and looked Delmar Dennis in the eye. “I want you to know,” said Edgar Ray Killen, a rawboned man nicknamed “The Preacher,” “that you ain’t joined no Boy Scout group.”

  Even though he suspected it was a bad outfit, Delmar agreed to go to a meeting of the local Klan unit, or klavern. It was held at night down a lonely dirt road near the little town of Chunky. There were ten Klansmen in full white robes. The “exalted cyclops,” or klavern leader, was there with news from the imperial wizard. He had ordered a “number four” on Michael Schwerner, the CORE/COFO organizer in Meridian. What that meant, Dennis learned, was that the young, bearded New Yorker the local Klan boys called “Goatee” was marked for assassination.

  On the night of June 16, 1964, a group of White Knights raided a church meeting in the Longdale community in Neshoba County, where COFO had arranged to set up a freedom school that summer. Several people were ambushed on the road and savagely beaten. Later that night the Mount Zion Methodist Church was burned to the ground.

  The next Sunday, June 21, Mickey Schwerner and two other civil rights workers named James Chaney and Andy Goodman drove from Meridian to Longdale to visit the church and talk to the injured parishioners. On their way back to Meridian Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled over their station wagon and arrested Chaney, the driver, for speeding. All three young men were taken to the Neshoba County jail in Philadelphia, where they were locked up and fed a hearty home-cooked supper by the jailer’s wife. At about 10:00 p.m. Price returned and released the three after Chaney paid a twenty-dollar fine. He told them to get out of the county. For some reason they never made a phone call.

  Deputy Price followed them out of town in his cruiser, letting them gain some distance. Then, trailed by two carloads of Klansmen, he took off after them again. At the end of a wild chase down the backroads of Neshoba County, the station wagon finally came to a stop. Price threw the boys into his patrol car, drove them down a deserted dirt road and handed them over to the Klan. Mickey Schwerner was the first to die. He told his killer, “I know just how you feel,” right before the man pulled the trigger and shot him in the heart. Goodman was next. James Chaney, who was black, struggled to get away, but he didn’t get far.

  When Schwerner did not phone the COFO office at the usual time, the duty staffer alerted headquarters in Jackson that Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner might be in trouble. By Monday morning the three missing civil rights workers had become a national news story. Pressure was brought to bear in Washington and in Jackson. Everyone seemed to want this case solved quickly, from J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon Johnson to Mississippi’s commissioner of public safety.

  At the same time white Mississippians started speculating out loud that the disappearances were probably a hoax, a publicity stunt. Governor Paul Johnson suggested that the boys might be hiding in Cuba, for all he knew.

  On Tuesday afternoon, June 23, Choctaws living on a reservation north of Philadelphia reported seeing a torched car mired in the Bogue Chitto swamp. The FBI pulled it out of the muck. It was the missing station wagon, but Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were not in it.

  The next day three buses full of sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station arrived to drag the snake-infested bog. They found nothing. Meanwhile federal investigators poured into the state to look for what were now assumed to be the killers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

  Later that week a letter, dated June 24, arrived at Governor Paul Johnson’s office. It began,

  Dear Wonderful Friends,

  Hooray, Hooray for our Mississippi and all like states that destroy the “Enemy,” saboteurs, that invade your state to destroy all you have. . . .When the stinking, Odious, nauseous “nigger-lovers” come there this summer . . . give them “what is coming to them”!!!!

  Why doesn’t LBJ, nauseous, sickening as he is .. . investigate the “nigger” murders of innocent white victims that have taken place? Doesn’t he realize we white citizens will fight for our lives, will fight to the hilt to protect our rights, our homes.

  The letter asked the governor why he was letting those “nigger-lover college students” into the state at all. It suggested “they ought to be publicly stoned, to say the least, ‘strung up & quartered’ as any other enemy of the people.” The letter was signed “a group of northerners who love you!”

  If anyone had looked closely at the penmanship of the handwritten inserts crawling along the margins of the page and then compared it to samples of Byron De La Beckwith’s hand, they may have found a marked similarity. But apparently nobody did this.

  The governor simply filed the letter away in a folder marked “Klan,” where it stayed, unread, for two decades.

  With the specter of a third trial hanging over him, Beckwith kept a reasonably low profile all summer. He was still living in the Rebel Court Trailer Park with Willie and their teenage son. On that front things were going from bad to worse. The couple still drank too much, and when they drank they fought. Pistols were fired, and the police came. During their drunken brawls Willie would sometimes call Delay a murderer. “Did you kill him?” she would scream.

  He’d scream back, “He’s DEAD, ain’t he?”

  Willie later told a nephew that she was convinced that her husband shot Medgar Evers. She was in the hospital drying out after a binge on the night Evers was killed, so she didn’t know for sure. Beckwith never confessed it to her, but she felt it in the way he acted and the spooky things he would say. Once Little Delay and some other teenage boys were caught stealing and butchering a pig to barbecue. Beckwith was furious. “If you’re going to kill something, kill something important,” she remembered him saying.

  That summer Beckwith rode around with his friends in the Greenwood police force. He carried a pistol and billy club while they patrolled the Negro neighborhoods. He sometimes stood with the mob of whites who harassed patrons of the newly integrated LeFlore Theater. Beckwith trained his flashlight in the faces of patrons as they left the movie.

  If one thing aggravated the Klan even more than the invasion of summer volunteers it was the recent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The new law made segregation illegal in all public places — restaurants, bathrooms, theaters, hotels — even if they were private property. President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law
on July 2. It was the package that President Kennedy had proposed the night Medgar Evers was murdered.

  Soon after, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, Gloster Current, and a few other NAACP officials made a quick tour of central Mississippi to test the new law. Most establishments offered little resistance, but one landmark in Jackson, the Robert E. Lee Hotel, closed its doors forever rather than integrate. A sign hung on the door read, “Closed in Despair.”

  The NAACP group also took a side trip to Neshoba County to keep up the pressure to find the missing workers. They had a tense meeting with Rayford Jones, the county attorney, in the Philadelphia courthouse. No one had forgotten that this was the town that hounded Charles Evers out a few years back when he tried to register voters. A mob of hectoring white men gathered in the courthouse square while the meeting degenerated into a shouting match.

  “Are Negroes allowed to vote in Neshoba County?” Evers demanded.

  “Now Charlie,” Jones said. “You know damn well niggers can vote here!”

  When the NAACP men objected to that kind of language, Jones just looked at them in astonishment. “Well, if you aren’t niggers, what are you?” he asked.

  The group walked out. Deputy Cecil Price spotted Evers leaving and shouted, “Get out of town!” while the mob closed in behind him. Charles was ready to go for Price, but Current and Henry wrestled him into the car and raced back to Meridian. Current was sure they were about to be lynched.

  The NAACP soon issued a report charging that Mississippi was a virtual police state that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. “Negroes are still in slavery in the state,” the report said. Among other recommendations it called for the federal government to take over the administration of the state.

  Dick Gregory returned to Mississippi to see what he could do to find the missing COFO workers. He brought twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and made it known he would pay anyone who had information about the crime.

  The FBI also was flashing money around, big time, in the streets of Philadelphia and Meridian. Once the FBI decided to jump onto the bandwagon, the fight against the Klan became a growth industry. For the first time since World War II the FBI opened an office in Jackson. J. Edgar Hoover himself came down to cut the ribbon. By the end of the summer the FBI presence in Mississippi had increased from a handful to hundreds of agents.

  Late in July an informant told the FBI where they should look for the bodies. The man was paid thirty thousand dollars for the tip. His name has never been revealed.

  On August 4 the FBI got a warrant to dig up the new earthen dam on Olen Burrage’s farm, a few miles southwest of Philadelphia. By nightfall they found the three bodies buried under fifteen feet of Mississippi clay.

  Mickey Schwerner’s family wanted to bury him next to James Chaney in Meridian, but that proved impossible. Even the dead were segregated in Mississippi.

  It was a powerfully hot evening when James Chaney was buried in a Negro cemetery in his hometown. Later, at the memorial service, the mourners sang “We Shall Overcome,” and the cameras rested on the face of Ben Chaney, the eleven-year-old boy who had idolized his big brother. Sheets of tears ran down his cheeks, and his face was the face of utter, uncomprehending human grief.

  Dave Dennis got up to say a few words of eulogy. Dennis had been Mickey Schwerner’s supervisor. He had approved the freedom school in Longdale, and he was supposed to have visited the Mount Zion Church with Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner the day they were murdered. A case of bronchitis had kept him in Jackson.

  Dave Dennis planned to talk about nonviolence. The head office of CORE wanted him to encourage people to keep cool and calm. But when he looked down at the face of Ben Chaney, something hard and bitter inside him cracked open. He couldn’t lie to that boy. His eyes were glazed, almost wild. The cords in his neck bulged, and his already thin voice choked into a dry wail.

  “I’m sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men!” Dave Dennis shouted. “… I’ve got vengeance in my heart tonight, and I ask you to feel angry with me. The white men who murdered James Chaney are never going to be punished…. We’ve got to stand up! If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us … if you take it and don’t do something about it, then God damn your souls!”

  He was hoarse, actually screaming his final words: “Don’t bow down anymore! We want our freedom now!”

  This moment, rarely remembered in the history books, was perhaps the precise juncture in time when the civil rights movement turned the corner into a dark and uncharted territory. It foreshadowed the atomization of COFO and SNCC and the end of the black-white coalition. So much goodwill had been spent and hope squandered. A new kind of child was being born, and it would travel the road to black power and black separatism and beyond, although it would be years before anyone would know its name. Not Charles Evers, or Roy Wilkins, or even Martin Luther King could change its course.

  COFO recorded hundreds of acts of violence against black Mississippians and civil rights workers that summer. For two solid months the spotlight of media attention was trained on the state, and gradually the bayous and back roads began to yield their secrets and their ghosts.

  It was shocking, for instance, to anyone except black Mississippians that as soon as the authorities started dragging the rivers and swamps for the two white New Yorkers and their local colleague, they stumbled on other bodies. A back channel of the Mississippi River gave up dismembered pieces of an Alcorn student named Charles Moore and his friend Henry Dee. It turned out the two men had been kidnapped and beaten to death by some Natchez Klansmen. Their disappearance would have probably gone unnoticed under different circumstances—just two more local boys gone missing, never to be found. Before the end of the summer another body surfaced in the Big Black River. All that remained was the torso of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old black boy wearing a CORE T-shirt.

  By the end of the summer the FBI had recruited several informants in the Klan, and they put together a roster of White Knights. Sooner or later most of the members got a house call.

  When FBI agents Tom Van Riper and John Martin knocked on Delmar Dennis’s door in September, 1964, Dennis said, “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  The FBI men convinced Delmar Dennis that not only could he save his own neck from conspiracy charges, but he also could serve God and his country by going undercover for the FBI. For his services he would get one hundred dollars per week in expense money.

  Delmar agreed to do it. Before long, based on information provided by Dennis and others, the FBI knew who was behind the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. They just had to keep their informants alive long enough to get the case to court in Mississippi.

  The first batch of twenty-one indictments came down in early December 1964. The Justice Department had no faith in the local courts, so the crimes were handled under the U.S. Code. Murder is not a federal charge unless it takes place on government property, so the accused killers were charged with conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights, a federal crime. The stiffest sentence available was ten years in prison, but it was better than nothing. Lawrence Rainey, the sheriff of Neshoba County, his deputy Cecil Price, and the Klan kleagle, or recruiter, Edgar Ray Killen, were among the first group of defendants. Sam Bowers, the Klan’s imperial wizard, was not. It would be three years before the case came to trial.

  After the FBI agents had their talk with Dennis, he had gone right out and paid his dues to rejoin the White Knights. Dennis had an amazing memory, and without using a tape recorder he was able to recall, almost to the word, what was discussed at meetings.

  Since Dennis was a smart, presentable, respectable person, he stood out from the usual rabble that the Klan attracts. Sam Bowers spotted his talent right away. Only two months after the minister went undercover, Bowers named Dennis province titan for his sector of Mississippi. He reported directly to the imperial wizard. He was hot-w
ired right into the center of the White Knights.

  During the three years Delmar Dennis spied on the Klan, he was able to give the FBI a clear picture of the White Knights’ inner workings. He knew their leaders and their heroes. He even got Byron De La Beckwith’s autograph. The occasion was a statewide Klan meeting and “kleagle school” on the banks of the Pearl River near Byram, south of Jackson, in August 1965.

  Fifty to seventy-five Klansmen had gathered that day at L. E. Matthews’s fishing camp, but nobody was talking about fish. There were seminars on how to make bombs and the best ways to blow up churches.

  After dark Beckwith, a big Klan hero, gave a motivational speech. He stood on the back of a flatbed truck while the headlights of parked pickups lit the makeshift arena. As Delmar Dennis remembered it, Beckwith encouraged the group to kill their enemies “from the President on down.” Dennis also heard him say this: “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.” Dennis knew that Beckwith was talking about Medgar Evers, and he reasoned that so did everybody else standing in that field in the hot Mississippi night.

  As always Delmar Dennis reported what he had heard to his FBI handler, Tom Van Riper. Even though the agent knew Beckwith was still under indictment for the Evers murder, he and his superiors decided not to share the information with Bill Waller. As Van Riper saw it, Delmar Dennis was much too valuable an informant to risk blowing his cover on a state trial. At the time nothing was more important than the case the FBI had labeled MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”