The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  The U.S. attorney was dumbfounded. The judge seemed livid.

  “You were arrested under most suspicious circumstances,” the judge lectured Beckwith. “You have literally walked through the valley of the shadow of death.”

  Beckwith delighted in his victory. He immediately announced his intention to run for office again in Mississippi. Maybe try for Congress this time. There was just the little matter of the Louisiana state charges against him that were still pending.

  That fall New Orleans elected Harry Connick, Sr., as its new district attorney. Connick brought in his law partner, Bill Wessel, as his first assistant. Wessel was a reform-minded lawyer. He had worked on civil rights cases in Mississippi. He wanted to send out a message that the new D.A. wasn’t going to conduct business as usual. He searched through the stacks of pending cases from the departing Jim Garrison’s docket and found the one he was looking for.

  Louisiana has strange laws, a melange of British common law and Napoleonic Code from the state’s origins as a French colony. Although the laws have been changing, back in the 1970s a person could be tried by a five-member jury for certain misdemeanors. Beckwith, who was still charged only with illegally transporting dynamite into Louisiana without a permit, qualified for the small jury.

  Beckwith was put on trial in May 1975. This time, despite the loud protests of the defense, the jury consisted of five black women.

  The second trial was much like the first one. The prosecution was allowed to use crucial testimony from the federal trial, including the hearing to suppress evidence obtained in the search of Beckwith’s car. It was, all in all, not a favorable situation for the defense.

  Again Beckwith took the stand. He narrated his version of events on the day before his arrest in September 1973. It was a now-familiar performance. Beckwith argued with his own lawyer, he interrupted and asked questions, and he sparred with the prosecutor on cross-examination, leading the judge to admonish him again and again. He offered to sell his china to Wessel or anyone in the gallery who might be interested. He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

  The outcome was rather different this time around. It took the jury thirty-five minutes to find him guilty. He was given the maximum sentence of five years in prison. Beckwith was allowed to remain free on bond while his lawyers filed an appeal.

  A few years earlier Beckwith had bought a dilapidated old house deep in the woods of Holmes County, near a hamlet called Cruger just south of Greenwood. He returned there to await his appeal. The old Melton place, as it was called, had no heat or electricity or running water. The roof leaked when it rained, and a family of skunks resided in the foundation. In good weather Beckwith slept outside or under a mosquito net on the veranda. What it had was privacy and good hunting for his son. Beckwith took up reading as his main hobby, and by most accounts his fanatic philosophies grew more and more elaborate.

  Sometimes FBI agents would hazard a trip down the rutted dirt road to drop in on Beckwith, if only to remind him that they were still watching. Mostly he kept to himself. The press was not welcome.

  A reporter and photographer from the New Orleans Times-Picayune managed an audience with Beckwith before he began serving his sentence. They found him at Ricks Motors tractor dealership, where he Beckwith was working. While the photographer, Jim Miller, snapped away in the fluorescent office light, Beckwith quietly terrorized the writer. He was describing how he could tell the differences between a black man and a Chinese man by cutting off their heads, boiling them down to the bone, and comparing the skulls side by side.

  “You can do the same thing with a white man’s skull,” Miller remembered him saying. “But I wouldn’t want to cut the head off a white man, unless he made me real mad.”

  According to Miller the shaken reporter tossed his notebook in the trash as they left the building. The story never ran.

  Beckwith kept busy while he waited out his appeal. In the spring of 1977 he traveled to Washington, D.C., to stay with Pauline Mackey, a friend from the ultra-right wing Liberty Lobby organization. He was trying to sell some sort of oil filters to the Pentagon through the office of his hero and distant relative, Senator James O. Eastland.

  While he was there, Beckwith’s appeal was denied. But since he was out of the state, he missed his appointment to report to prison.

  Late one night in May a dozen or so armed officers appeared at Mackey’s house and rousted Beckwith from his bed. Among them was Ben Windstein, who carried a fugitive warrant from the state of Louisiana.

  Beckwith spent the next three years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. He served his time in a solitary cell, often just off death row, where guards could keep him away from the general population. It was well known that the man who was supposed to have shot Medgar Evers was a prisoner at Angola. He would not have lasted long in the yard. So he took his meals in his cell, and he exercised in the corridor while the guards watched.

  Beckwith was by then an experienced prisoner. He made the best of a bad situation. He was allowed a radio, reading matter, and limitless access to the commissary. To fight the drabness of prison life he managed to customize his jail togs: he cut the sleeves and sewed them with mattress buttons to give himself French cuffs. He continued his regimen of compulsive reading and letter writing.

  One of his correspondents was the new, self-proclaimed leader of the Identity Movement. Richard Butler was a disciple of Wesley Swift, whose tapes had proved so inspirational to the Klan and who had died in 1970. Butler would soon establish a white separatist compound near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to be headquarters for his own group, the Aryan Nations.

  Beckwith wrote Butler a long letter in March 1978, which was promptly printed in Butler’s newspaper, The Tribal Chronicle, organ of the Identity Movement. Beckwith’s reason for writing was to complain loudly that he had been booted out of the Masons for being a convicted felon. He wanted fellow travelers to answer a question for him: was Jesus Christ a Mason? It seemed to be an important point to him in his appeal to the lodge.

  Never one to pass up the chance to talk about himself, Beckwith provided some background about his life and his legal troubles. “In 1963 I was accused of murdering Mississippi’s mightiest NAACP nigger Leader named Medgar Evers…. I got two hung juries,” he wrote. “In 1973 I was accused of coming to New Orleans, La., to put a bomb in the lap of a top Jew of the ADL or B’nai B’rith. In 1974 I was tried and found totally innocent…. In 1975 I was retried before an all nigger jury made up of 5 nigger women and in 5 minutes I was a convict!”

  Just in case some of the readers might miss his affiliations, he rolled out his Klan pedigree: “I was carried to Washington, D.C. (in 1966) as one of the top super secret (accused) White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi….We (thanks be to Yahweh) came home with honor and our scalps, too! Now a White Knight looks at all other KKK groups as Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts or John Birchers at the most — I think — I really don’t know. Ha! But I mix and mingle with all KKK groups.”

  Beckwith then sent out a plea for donations: “I am really hurt and need help running into thousands of dollars.”

  Richard Butler printed a flamboyant reply: “My very being is racked with vexation that our manhood has sunk so low that an abomination of Justice such as your case reveals, could exist. I salute you, a great Warrior for Christ.”

  The rest of the front page was devoted to inspirational quotes from Adolf Hitler and an all-purpose slogan: “Get rid of the Jews and all of your troubles are ended!”

  After three uneventful years in Angola Beckwith was released in 1980, with two years scratched from his sentence for good behavior. Broke and jobless, he returned to Mississippi to live in a trailer on the old Melton property.

  21

  Homecoming

  Ben Chester White was a sixty-seven-year-old farmhand who never got involved in politics and went out of his way not to upset the white man. His luck simply ran out one hot spring night in 1966 when he had the misfortune of entering
the dim consciousnesses of Claude Fuller, Ernest Avants, and James Lloyd Jones when they had a mind to “kill them a nigger.” Anyone would do. At least that was the testimony of Jones at his murder trial a few months later.

  In spite of his confession the all-white jury couldn’t agree on a verdict for Jones. He was never tried again. Charges against Fuller, the alleged ringleader in the killing, were dropped. Avants was tried and acquitted.

  Lane C. Murray first met Charles Evers at the end of Jones’s trial. Evers was leading a big civil rights demonstration around the courthouse in Natchez after the Jones jury had hung up. Murray and E. L. McDaniel, both ranking members of the United Klans of America (UKA), showed up to heckle them.

  The UKA was an interstate Klan group that had evolved alongside the White Knights, although the UKA was far less secretive. McDaniel, a former White Knight, was the UKA grand dragon for Mississippi. Murray was his right-hand man.

  Evers knew most of the Klansmen in this part of the state, and he knew all about Murray. When Evers would lead a march in Natchez, Murray would be out in his sound truck, blaring his favorite tune from the Klan hit parade: “Move Them Niggers North.”

  Tonight it was Evers’s turn to harass Murray. “We gon’ make sure this case is tried again,” Evers bellowed. “And this time old Lane C. Murray ain’t going to be sitting at the lawyers’ table like some big dee-fence attorney or somethin’.”

  Murray looked over at Evers and gave him the finger.

  By now Evers had moved his base of operations from Jackson to the tiny town of Fayette, not far from Alcorn in the river lowlands. He opened the Medgar Evers Shopping Center, then organized crippling boycotts of white-owned businesses in the surrounding counties. This further enraged the Klan.

  Murray and McDaniel would sometimes show up on Main Street in Fayette in their robes to taunt Evers and try to scare the people. Evers and his security crew would meet the Klansmen in the dusty street, and everyone would be posturing, growling, and shouting, calling one another “nigger” and “peckerwood.”

  Then one day Evers started talking to the Klansmen, really talking, and they listened. He told them they weren’t enemies, that it was the rich man who kept them both down, poor whites and blacks, kept them fighting each other. Something clicked, and they started talking some more.

  Evers said, “Lane, you got to look back to those sharecropper days, and even today, the rich folks, their priority is to make that money. They made it off the blacks, and they make it off the whites. A poor black family and a poor white family could never get ahead. They’d sell you a mule, and if it died before you paid for it, you’d be paying for two.” Murray will tell you that Evers helped put him on the right road. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually he quit the Klan, and so did McDaniel.

  Murray found his calling in state politics. He found work as a behind-the-scenes political operative, vote-getter, and general campaign organizer. For a while in the seventies he, Evers, and McDaniel, along with some other characters from the state’s colorful recent history, teamed up to promote a “redneck-blackneck” coalition to form a voting block of the state’s working poor.

  By the end of the 1960s Charles Evers was the runningest politician in the state of Mississippi. In 1968, when Congressman John Bell Williams became governor of Mississippi, he left a vacant seat in the Third District, which included the capital city. Evers ran and beat six white men in the Democratic primary. He lost the runoff to Charles Griffin by a two-to-one margin, but even that meant that forty-three thousand people — most of them new black voters — were willing to come out for a black candidate. After the returns were in, Evers bounded over to Griffin’s campaign headquarters to congratulate him and call for unity. The startled politician accepted his outstretched hand. The white crowd applauded. Evers’s political career was launched.

  Evers was an old-fashioned Mississippi rogue politician in the Bilbo tradition — ruthless, charismatic, more than a little shady, and almost comically Machiavellian. Evers called himself an independent Democrat for most of his career, but he was always a Republican at heart. The eldest son of James Evers hated the welfare state, and that’s what the Democrats represented to him. They gave you handouts and kept you weak. At least the Republicans let a man stand on his own legs. The racism of white liberals, Evers figured, was just more subtle than the racism of the old rascals. It was easier to deal with something if you could see it and fight it in the daylight.

  For a while he was the black Democratic standard-bearer in the state. He helped lead the breakaway Mississippi Freedom Democrats in a successful challenge to the state delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. The all-white, pro-Wallace delegates were thrown out and replaced with the new, integrated “loyalist” group.

  Evers was elected mayor of Fayette in 1969. It was another benchmark in a decade of firsts. He became the first black mayor of a racially mixed town since Reconstruction.

  Next he set his sights on the Governor’s Mansion. It was the beginning of the end of his rising stardom. He began to squander his power. Even though he could depend on the backing of the loyalist Democrats, Evers decided to sit out the all-important primaries and run for governor as an independent in November 1971.

  Worse, he encouraged blacks to vote for Jimmy Swan in the Democratic primary. Swan was a redneck populist country singer whose political views put him in the same class as Byron De La Beckwith. Evers explained his reasoning to the press: if Swan won the primary, Evers would be running against such an outrageous racist that even conservative white Democrats would have to vote for him in the election. It was the only way to win.

  Liberal whites were outraged.

  It was a raucous, mudslinging campaign. Swan cruised the back roads in his Cadillac, with American and Confederate banners flapping in the slipstream and a country band in tow. Evers stumped in cities and backwater settlements, his entourage of protection men, advance men, soul singers, and reporters leapfrogging across the state.

  One scalding-hot afternoon the show pulled up in Decatur, Evers’s hometown. Two hundred nervous blacks gathered in the town square, the white man’s part of town, where they had once been forbidden to drive a car. Now, while a few dozen local whites stood across the street, watching silently, they came out to hear their own Charlie Evers make a political speech. Evers spoke on the courthouse steps, the same spot where he had heard Bilbo speak forty years earlier, and he reminded folks of how it had been.

  “Medgar an’ I watched him spit that ole racist fire,” he said to the transfixed crowd. “…But look out, Bilbo, we comin’ at you!”

  Evers looked over the familiar faces in the crowd.

  “Yeah, Decatur! I’m your prodigal son! This black man went off to Chicago, but when Medgar died, I said it’s time to come back and change all this ol’ hate, all that racism got to change it into love.”

  The people cried, “Amen.”

  Evers’s campaign slogan was “Don’t vote for a black man, don’t vote for a white man. Vote for the best man. Evers for governor!”

  In 1971 Mississippi had 671,000 registered white voters and 268,000 registered blacks. Of the seven candidates in the Democratic primary, Swan came in third with an astonishing 129,000 votes. More astonishing, he carried Evers’s mostly black Jefferson County.

  In the runoff primary, the contest was between an old-time politico named Charles Sullivan and Bill Waller, the man who had prosecuted Beckwith. Waller was campaigning as a reformer, champion of the common man and foe of the Capitol Street gang. “This time, let’s take on the machine!” was his rallying cry. It was somewhat ironic that he had the backing of James Eastland and Ross Barnett, who arguably were the machine.

  People say that Evers’s baiting of Sullivan cost Sullivan the race. It was Evers against Waller in the November election.

  Evers reportedly asked Swan to throw the Klan vote his way. It was the first test of the redneck-blackneck coalition.

  Eve
rs never expected to win, but he was thrashed, receiving only 172,762 votes to Waller’s 601,222. Fifty blacks were elected across Mississippi, although most of them were in low-level positions.

  Still, Evers put a positive spin on the election. In a gracious concession speech he declared, “Whites and blacks are going to look at each other differently now, as citizens. I’ve proved that a black man can run for office in Mississippi without getting shot, without getting killed.”

  Although the power and money still rested in the hands of white Mississippians, things were certainly changing. The Ku Klux Klan had been more or less emasculated by the FBI, and its leaders had been bought off or imprisoned.

  Bill Waller’s administration was a turning point in Mississippi politics. He appointed blacks to positions in the state government for the first time in this century. He also engineered the demise of the Sovereignty Commission by simply cutting off its funding.

  But white racism persisted in a more elusive form. Ever since Congress had passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, whites had looked for ways to hold on to their power. In the old days they had used poll taxes, literacy tests, harassment, and murder to keep blacks away from the polls. Once the federal government had stepped in, making all these practices illegal and invoking federal oversight of state and local elections, the white majority had embarked on a state-sanctioned program of “massive resistance.”

  Like a virus that mutates to elude every medicine, white racism adapted to the times and worked around each new law passed to overcome it. Voting districts were merged and gerrymandered to prevent black majorities; qualifications for elected officials were stiffened. Private all-white academies sprouted like mushrooms on the outskirts of towns across Mississippi, drawing students from the underfunded public schools.

  White conservatives learned the value of stealth. Racist rhetoric had no place in campaigns anymore. The militants came out only when needed, to quietly terrorize the countryside, to steal elections if necessary. Pressure was exerted beneath a surface of conciliation. The face of racism had changed from a grimace to a friendly smile. The xenophobic cabal of big-time planters and moneymen who ran the state was slowly supplanted by a new generation of businessmen, a more urban, less traditional set who favored expansion and industry. By the seventies segregation and hatred had become unfashionable and very bad for business.