The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  20

  White Knights

  In late 1965 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to make a big show out of investigating the Ku Klux Klan. The usual suspects from various Klans across the South were called to Washington. Subpoenas went out to dozens of reputed White Knights from Pascagoula to Petal, Mississippi, including Sam Bowers, Gordon Lackey, and Byron De La Beckwith.

  The White Knights were questioned in January 1966. None said anything useful to the committee. Sam Bowers was so adamant that he pled the Fifth Amendment when asked his name. Beckwith appeared relaxed. He was polite, willingly providing the personal information the committee requested. But he held up the U.S. Constitution when the committee asked him if he even knew Gordon Lackey.

  “Sir, I respectfully decline to answer that question and invoke as a defense the privilege granted to me by the Fifth, First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” Beckwith said.

  Did Lackey recruit him into the White Knights?

  “Sir, I respectfully decline…” On and on it went.

  Did Beckwith, on March 5, 1965, throw eleven quart beer bottles filled with gasoline and stuffed with lit rags at the house of Laura McGhee of Greenwood?

  Same answer.

  On August 8, 1965, did he attend a state klonvocation held off Eldon Road in Jackson? At that same time was he appointed a kleagle in the White Knights?

  Same answer.

  A congressional investigator asked these questions. Then, oddly, Chairman Edwin Willis broke in. “The chair announces that it is the committee’s view that it would not be proper to go into matters in which this witness might have been involved as a principal, but which have not been finally resolved.”

  Beckwith said, “I certainly appreciate that courtesy, thank you sir.”

  Willis looked at the witness. “The chair was referring to criminal matters and I must say to the witness that we appreciate his expression, but we have taken that attitude because of our own determination of the propriety of our inquiry. The witness is excused.”

  Beckwith left the table.

  The only criminal matter before Beckwith at the moment was the still-open case of Medgar Evers’s murder.

  If the HUAC hearings were meant to have a chilling effect on Klan violence in Mississippi, it didn’t work. While the hearings were still going on, a gang of White Knights firebombed the home of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights leader in Hattiesburg. When he ran through the flames firing his shotgun to protect his family, Dahmer gulped fire and burned his lungs. He died a few hours later.

  Here was another ghost in Mississippi, another man for Charles Evers to bury. Evers went to Hattiesburg the next night to lead a march and a prayer service for Dahmer on the steps of the Forrest County Courthouse. He couldn’t let this act go unanswered, let the Klan think they were afraid. Evers told the three hundred demonstrators that this killing should make them all go out and pay their poll tax. He called for a boycott of Hattiesburg businesses.

  The FBI was all over the Dahmer case within hours, and it didn’t take long to compile a list of suspects. By the end of March fourteen Klansmen, including Sam Bowers, were arrested on federal warrants and charged with the now-familiar charge of conspiracy to deprive a man of his civil rights by killing him. They were all released on bond. (Bowers was tried four times in 1968 and 1969 on both federal and state charges. Each time the jury failed to reach a verdict.)

  By now the Ku Klux Klan was shot through with FBI informants. While investigations focused on Sam Bowers and his immediate circle, the bureau was also keeping an eye on Beckwith and his Klan buddies in Greenwood.

  The Evers murder case was still open, and the FBI kept tabs on the Hinds County district attorney’s investigation.

  An FBI memo dated June 19, 1966, reported that Bill Waller had advised the bureau that there had been no new developments in the case against Beckwith. The indictment was still outstanding, but Waller had said he wouldn’t pursue a prosecution unless additional evidence came to his attention.

  Less than one month later, the FBI office in Jackson received an intriguing new piece of potential evidence: a “reliable” informant reported to his FBI contact that Gordon Lackey had bragged about how he and Beckwith had murdered Medgar Evers. The informant said that the conversation had taken place sometime before Beckwith’s first trial. The informant, Lackey, and one other man had been drinking at a lakeside clubhouse when Lackey allegedly told them this story:

  Lackey and Beckwith had made two or three reconnaissance trips to Evers’s neighborhood in Jackson before the night of the killing. Lackey and Beckwith had been hiding in some bushes when Evers came home late one night. According to the informant, Lackey boasted, “They got the wrong man. Beckwith did not do the shooting.”

  After the shot was fired, Beckwith and Lackey started to run out of the bushes, but they saw someone coming and dropped back. Eventually they split up; Beckwith ran to his car and Lackey hid in the bushes until it was safe to move. Beckwith picked him up “some distance from the area.” Lackey told the informant that he was late getting back to the National Guard camp where he had been training and had almost gotten caught.

  The Jackson FBI office forwarded this information to Washington in a memo dated July 13, 1966. The memo noted that Gordon Lackey had been questioned about the Evers murder in June 1963, and that he had said he was at Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on the night of June 11, 1963. Lackey’s alibi was supported by two National Guard buddies from Greenwood who both said they had been out drinking with Lackey on the night of the shooting and had not been near Jackson.

  J. Edgar Hoover quickly replied with a memo instructing Roy Moore, the SAC, or special agent in charge, of the Jackson office, to personally interview the informant and to do everything possible to convince him to testify in the Evers murder case. Moore replied on July 21, 1966, that the informant refused to come forward because he “loved life.” He had said there was not enough money in the world to make him testify. The SAC suggested to Hoover that the only thing they could do was to urge the informant to introduce Beckwith to another person who would be willing to testify, hoping that Beckwith would brag to him about the killing.

  The FBI never passed any of this information to the Hinds County district attorney.

  In early 1967, Byron De La Beckwith moved from Greenwood to an apartment in Jackson to launch his latest venture. His ex-wife, Willie, had by then moved back to Tennessee. Beckwith’s only employment was as a salesman for The Southern Review, the White Knights’ unofficial organ, edited by Elmore Greaves. For this he earned five hundred dollars per month.

  Beckwith had meanwhile decided it was time to get into politics. On Valentine’s Day he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor of Mississippi.

  In those days Mississippi was essentially a one-party state, and the Democratic primary was the only important election. The November race against the Republican candidate was just a formality.

  Beckwith took to the campaign trail, apparently unconcerned about the indictment still hanging over him. He was walking around the Hinds County Courthouse one day when he spotted one of the Jackson detectives who had tried to send him to the gas chamber for killing Medgar Evers.

  “Fred Sanders!” he called across the hall. Beckwith ran up to Sanders like an old friend, grabbed his hand and pumped it.

  “What are you doing?” Sanders asked.

  “I’m running for lieutenant governor of the fine state of Mississippi,” Beckwith said cheerfully. He hoped for Sanders’s support, he said, “because, suh, you of all people know that Byron De La Beckwith is a straight-shooter!”

  Sanders just looked at him with amazement. The detective later learned that “He’s a Straight-Shooter” was Beckwith’s unofficial campaign slogan. It made Sanders wish he had been able to build a stronger case against the guy.

  A month before the August primaries the Review published an interview with candidate Be
ckwith. He said that among his “chief qualifications” for the job was that he was “conscious of a diabolical international conspiracy against states’ rights and racial integrity.” Although Beckwith professed interests other than segregation, such as an unspecified “Highway Casualty Reduction Program,” the subject inevitably turned to race. He urged all “sane” Negroes to reject revolutionaries such as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Evers and to accept benevolent white rule in the interest of their own material well-being and “safety.”

  It was during this campaign that Delmar Dennis met Beckwith for a second time. Sam Bowers had told Dennis to take care of Beckwith when he showed up in the area and introduce him to some other Klansmen.

  Dennis recalled how Beckwith seemed to enjoy campaigning. He wore a white suit and white bucks; he kissed babies and hugged grandmothers. Beckwith scared the bejesus out of Delmar. The man had the remorseless eyes of a reptile.

  In the primary Beckwith came in fifth in a field of six, with thirty- five thousand votes. For years he would boast that he did not finish last. After his political defeat Beckwith moved back to Greenwood, to a rented room in an old couple’s house in an unfashionable part of town.

  By 1967 there were as many as 260,000 blacks on the voter rolls in Mississippi, about 29 percent of all voters. In 1964 the figure had been less than 5 percent. The change was a result of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that eliminated the poll tax and literacy tests.

  In 1967 108 black candidates ran for office statewide, although only 22 of these won their elections. Robert G. Clark from Holmes County became the first black in the state legislature since the 1890s. That same year Bill Waller, whose main claim to fame was his prosecution of Beckwith, made an unsuccessful bid for governor.

  That fall, Delmar Dennis ended his long career as an informant to testify at the trial of the accused killers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. More than three years had gone by since the bodies of the civil rights workers had been found in Olen Burrage’s dam. Now Sam Bowers and sixteen codefendants sat in the federal courthouse in Meridian on federal conspiracy charges. Dennis was only one of several Klansmen and informants who testified against the plotters. But Dennis’s testimony was the key to tying Sam Bowers to the killings.

  After a ten-day trial, seven men were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Olen Burrage. The jury was deadlocked over three other verdicts, and it found seven defendants guilty as charged, including Alton Wayne Roberts, a Meridian klansman who had pulled the trigger on Goodman and Schwerner; Cecil Price, the deputy who had set them up; and Imperial Wizard Sam Holloway Bowers.

  Price and Bowers were sentenced to ten years each; Roberts was given six. They were set free on bond during their appeals.

  Beckwith remained loyal to his friends. He even sent out a fundraising letter for their defense.

  “Five years ago I found myself completely uprooted from the normal pursuits of life and transplanted in the Hinds County Jail under an artificially concocted Federal charge of conspiracy…” he wrote. “I was also charged with murder…. Today in Mississippi, there are over forty patriotic, white, Christian soldiers now standing before local state or Federal Court of injustice on charges as trumped-up as was mine.”

  The point of the letter was a plea for help for “those who fight your battles for you.” Beckwith urged supporters to send money to a defense fund administered by L. E. Matthews, who FBI sources said was the Klansman slated to take over for Bowers when he went to prison.

  In March of 1969 a new Hinds County district attorney named Jack Travis quietly dropped the murder indictment against Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith’s bond was refunded, and the case passed into a legal limbo known as nolle prosequi, which means “a discontinued prosecution by the authorized attorney for the state.” Under nolle prosequi, in cases where a statute of limitations has not run out, the defendant can be reindicted and reprosecuted. And there is no statute of limitations on murder.

  As the 1960s wore on and the various cases against Sam Bowers and his White Knights worked through the courts, the Mississippi Klan made a tactical error. They started blowing up Jewish targets. It was the outcome of a shifting ideology within the hard-core Klan, and it coincided with the growth of “Swiftism” and the Christian Identity Movement.

  Sam Bowers was a “Swiftian.” Byron De La Beckwith was introduced to Wesley Swift’s virulent anti-Semitism when a friend gave him a set of Swift’s taped lectures shortly after his mistrials. Swift had founded the California-based Church of Jesus Christ, Christian, which would later be known as the Aryan Nations, to promote the Identity Movement.

  There are many forms of Identity “faith,” but basically its followers believe that Caucasians are God’s chosen people — the true Israelites. Jews, along with blacks and other nonwhites are the “mud-people,” mongrels, not even humans, the offspring of Cain, who was born from the seed of Satan. The Jewish impostors, out of jealousy, want to destroy the white race. The blacks are merely their pawns.

  Swift taught that white men were destined to be God’s enforcers, using “weapons of war to destroy the powers of darkness and the forces of evil” — namely, the Jews. Gradually the White Knights lost interest in most black targets and set their sights on the small but influential Jewish community in Mississippi.

  Since early 1967 a spate of bombings had plagued Jackson. It had started with the dynamiting of a real estate company that sold houses to blacks in white neighborhoods. It progressed to more potentially deadly, and more specific, targets. First it was the new synagogue on Old Canton Road, then it was the rabbi’s house. He and his wife were sleeping when the bomb went off and were nearly killed.

  A group of Jewish businessmen, led by a Jackson lawyer named Alvin Binder, decided to put an end to these outrages. With the help of Adolph “Bee” Botnick, head of the regional Anti-Defamation League (ADL) based in New Orleans, the Jewish group worked out a shadowy arrangement with the FBI. They supplied money to pay informants to put a stop to the bombings. And they, particularly Binder, developed their own paid sources.

  With the heat on in Jackson, the Klan started targeting other cities. On May 26, 1968, two young Klansmen named Tommy Tarrants and Danny Joe Hawkins planted a huge dynamite bomb in a doorway of the Temple Beth Israel synagogue in Meridian. The explosion shook houses three miles away, but, incredibly, no one was hurt.

  Two of the most valuable informants the FBI and the Jewish group developed were brothers from Meridian, Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts. They were able to supply amazingly detailed information, since they were trusted White Knights. Wayne Roberts was, at the time, appealing his conviction for depriving Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of their civil rights by murdering them. He was such a Klan hero that he was beyond suspicion. But in fact his conviction motivated him to cooperate with the FBI, and so did the seventy-five thousand dollars raised by the Mississippi Jewish community.

  It’s not easy to catch a bomber in the act. Timing is everything. The Robertses’ FBI handlers, acting with the Meridian police, told the brothers to set up the time and place of the next bombing. That way the law could be waiting.

  On June 29, 1968, Raymond Roberts called his contact at the Meridian police department: Tommy Tarrants was going to bomb the house of a prominent Meridian Jew named Meyer Davidson. Just after midnight Tarrants finished the final procedures to arm a bomb attached to twenty-nine sticks of dynamite. He set the timer for 2 a.m.

  At 12:45 a green Buick without its headlights on cruised quietly up Davidson’s street and parked fifty feet away from his driveway. Davidson and his family were not home. Instead dozens of Meridian policemen and FBI agents were positioned around the house, waiting.

  Tarrants carried the bomb in one arm and a Browning automatic in his right hand. Depending on who’s telling the story, when he reached the driveway, either the cops shouted “Halt! Police!,” Tarrants fired twice with his handgun, and the cops opened up —
or the cops simply opened up without warning. The result was the same.

  Tarrants was shot and captured after a fierce gunfight. His companion, a young schoolteacher and secret Klanswoman named Kathy Ainsworth, was killed by a bullet as she sat in the getaway car.

  Three days later Byron De La Beckwith was on the road, carrying messages from Sam Bowers to other White Knights. The word was to lay low. There was a traitor among them.

  The Meridian shootout marked the end of the Klan’s reign of terror in Mississippi. The bombings stopped and the remnants of the White Knights drifted apart, retired, or started serving jail sentences.

  Beckwith had been continuously monitored by the FBI since his mistrials. His name appeared from time to time in intelligence reports that certain agents in the Jackson FBI office shared with Al Binder and other Jewish leaders in the region. Beckwith seemed to be a minor actor in the Klan drama of the late sixties. According to informants, he was mainly a messenger and recruiter who traveled across the South visiting fellow fanatics. Beckwith had a big mouth and a reputation as a loose cannon. The FBI believed that although he had access to Sam Bowers’s inner circle, he was not trusted.

  When Sam Bowers finally went to prison for the Neshoba County murders in February 1970, the Mississippi Klan seemed moribund. A few radicals were, however, still on the loose and willing to strike. L. E. Matthews and Danny Joe Hawkins were among them. These were Beckwith’s friends.

  After a long period of quiet, word began to percolate through the paid informants still active in the vestiges of the White Knights that another job was being planned. This time the bomber would be Byron De La Beckwith. The target was Bee Botnick, the New Orleans ADL leader, to avenge the ambush of Tarrants and Ainsworth.

  The FBI still had at least one informant deep within the Klan. He was a respectable sign painter and printer named Gordon Clark, who was very close to Matthews and Beckwith. He was so close, in fact, that he traveled down to New Orleans with Beckwith to help scope out the target.