The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Once he was settled, Beckwith couldn’t seem to resist calling attention to himself. He mounted a campaign to be pardoned by the governor of Louisiana (he was turned down). He and Thelma had their picture taken at cross-burning ceremonies. He even allowed himself to be interviewed by an “inquiring photographer” from the local newspaper. The reporter asked, “What stance do you believe the U.S. should take in the future to combat terrorism?”

  “The best thing I know that we could do is to drop a bomb on Israel,” Beckwith replied. “That would stop terrorism.”

  Beckwith kept up ties in Mississippi. He took Thelma to Greenwood and introduced her to Gordon Lackey and other close friends. By now Beckwith’s only child, Little Delay, had been in and out of the marines, a new family tradition, and had married. He and his wife, Marianne, had two children, including yet another namesake: Byron De La Beckwith VIII. Like his father Little Delay was a traveling salesman, flogging retreads and used tires in northern Mississippi. He was short and blocky; he favored spiky cowboy boots and wore his hair in a buzz cut. His father was always welcome in his home, and so was Thelma. Little Delay never talked about his mother, Willie, who had by this time changed her name.

  The elder Beckwith’s health started to fail him during these years. He suffered from high blood pressure and had surgery to replace a blocked renal artery. As the eighties wore on, he seemed increasingly determined to take his place in the pantheon of patriotic heroes. He contacted writers to ghost his autobiography. He considered running for office and continued to fight to clear his felony record. Mainly he wanted to be able to own guns again.

  Beckwith showed up at a big political rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi, right before the 1987 primaries, in which Bill Waller was making another run for governor. While Waller and other candidates glad-handed over the smoking barrels of barbecued chicken, Beckwith caught the ex-prosecutor’s eye and flagged him over. He wanted to introduce him to Thelma. A stunned Waller graciously shook hands.

  Later Beckwith told reporters, “Mr. Waller tried to put me in the gas chamber twice. I told Mr. Waller back then I had a sinus condition and that smelly gas would upset my sinuses.”

  The meeting made front-page news in Jackson. Before long people were wondering out loud whether Beckwith should be tried again for Evers’s murder.

  Myrlie Evers was contacted in Los Angeles. She told the Clarion-Ledger that she wanted the case reopened, that she “had never given up hope.”

  A Jackson civil rights attorney asked the Hinds County district attorney, Ed Peters, to reopen the case. Peters said too much time had passed; it couldn’t be done.

  In the old days that would have been the end of the discussion. The call for a new trial would have died out as it had in the past. But the old days in Mississippi were over. Or so it seemed.

  22

  Mississippi Turning

  The case against Byron De La Beckwith was brought back not because of any one event, but by a confluence of many events in a slow tide of change. That slow, exasperating, but undeniable change led to what social scientists term a “new political reality.” In this new reality Mike Espy would, in 1986, be elected Mississippi’s first black congressman in this century, with 52 percent of the vote in his Delta district, including 12 percent of the white vote. By the end of the 1980s blacks, who accounted for 35 percent of the population of Mississippi, would make up nearly a third of its registered voters. There would be more than six hundred black elected officials, the highest number in any stale.

  In 1987 a handsome thirty-nine-year-old Harvard lawyer from Ackerman, Mississippi, named Ray Mabus was elected governor. He ran as a reformist and won with 90 percent of the black vote and 40 percent of the white vote. Mabus was fond of saying, without irony, that “the civil rights revolution freed us all.” Mabus called for a new state constitution, computers for every school, and catfish farms in the Delta. He swore, with a fervor that reminded his critics of Scarlett O’Hara, that “Mississippi would never be last again.”

  Those critics predicted, correctly, that Mabus and his reforms were doomed to crash on the rocks of the immovable and unreconstructed state legislature. But for a time Mississippi, never a place for half measures, was giddy with change. Although true Mississippians would never admit that they cared what anyone in New York thought, it was significant that Mabus and his young white cronies were featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine with the headline, “The Yuppies of Mississippi: How They Took Over the Statehouse.”

  This secretly pleased members of the rising young white professional class, who were increasingly embarrassed by Mississippi’s backward, racist image. Lawyers and legislative aides, who congregated nightly at the George Street pub or an upscale fern bar called 400 East Capitol Street to sip their chardonnay and complain about the Yankees who thought they still went barefoot in Jackson, were pleased by the PR potential of the new Mississippi. The state was still hovering around last place in per capita income and first in teenage pregnancy, but its backward image was fading.

  Margaret Walker Alexander, the author and scholar who had been the Everses’ neighbor on Guynes Street, gave a memorable speech at the beginning of the eighties: “I believe that despite the terrible racist image Mississippi had in the past, despite her historic reputation for political demagoguery, despite racial violence and especially lynching, despite all the statistics about being on the bottom, Mississippi … offers a better life for most black people than any other state.”

  The real changes were subtle; the cosmetic changes were dramatic. In 1987 Miss Mississippi was a black woman. In 1988 the city of Vicksburg elected a black mayor. Pollsters noted a sharp difference in attitude between the older and younger generations. For instance, 80 percent of whites under thirty favored integration, as opposed to fewer than 50 percent of whites over sixty.

  At its core Mississippi was still a segregated society, with separate schools and churches and neighborhoods, just like most of the rest of America. But now blacks and whites could at least eat lunch together, work side by side, and live in armistice, if not peace.

  Myrlie Evers returned to Mississippi in the summer of 1989 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders in Neshoba County. She usually felt sick to her stomach whenever she came back. This time she felt merely suspicious. And hopeful. She was astonished by the young white politicians who stood up to condemn the killings of the past. During a ceremony at Mount Zion church Governor Mabus recited the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the anthem of African-Americans.

  Myrlie marveled. She didn’t think Medgar Evers could have done it better. She remembered that Medgar used to tell her how Mississippi would one day be the best place to live, and she hadn’t believed it. Now she began to wonder if she might live to see the day his prophecy would come true.

  The climate of hope in the late eighties coincided with an upwelling of memory and regret. The twenty-fifth anniversary of so much sorrow brought on a period of self-examination. At the same time the Clarion-Ledger started publishing extracts of dozens of secret files from the Sovereignty Commission, which brought the names Medgar Evers and Byron De La Beckwith out of the past and onto the front page.

  When the state legislature voted to abolish the Sovereignty Commission in 1977, the politicians wanted to destroy all the agency’s records. When they couldn’t get away with that, they settled on keeping them sealed for fifty years. The ACLU and a number of other plaintiffs, including John Salter, who was a professor of Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota, and Ed King, who was teaching in Jackson, sued to open the files. The presiding federal judge, none other than Harold Cox, threw out the case. After years of appeals and depositions the case landed with a more reasonable U.S. justice, William Barbour. In 1984 Barbour allowed the ACLU plaintiffs to read and copy the files for purposes of research. They were barred from revealing the contents. Naturally the contents of the files started leaking to the press.


  Former governor Paul Johnson died the next year and his papers were donated to the University of Southern Mississippi. The papers, ordered by a local judge to be opened to the public, contained copies of hundreds of Sovereignty Commission files from his years as governor in the mid-sixties.

  It looked for a while as if the whole fetid heap of scandal and dirty tricks and character assassination that had been the business of the Sovereignty Commission was about to be dumped, in all it’s vileness, right into the laps of Mississippi’s citizens. Then Salter and King broke away from the ACLU suit and appealed to restrict access to the files. They had read through the eight filing cabinets full of press clippings, informers’ reports, and other raw intelligence, and they had concluded that most of it was a pack of lies that would only hurt the people mentioned if the files were made public. There were reports of drug use and sexual perversion, family secrets and financial information — most of it uncorroborated or invented — that had been used to pressure and discredit antisegregationists. Salter and King wanted the victims of these investigations to decide whether to release these reports and asked that the files be opened under guidelines similar to those set forth in the Freedom of Information Act.

  Among some liberals and left-wingers in Mississippi, Salter and King went from being regarded as civil rights heroes to being cast out as pariahs overnight. “What were they trying to hide?” asked ex-state senator Henry Kirksey, the perennial protest candidate for public office. The rift further weakened Mississippi’s already fractious and quarrelsome left-wing coalition.

  Meanwhile the news business in Mississippi had gone through a sea change. The oldest Jackson TV station, WLBT, had been shut down by the FCC for bias during the civil rights years. It had been taken over by a community board of directors, including Aaron Henry and other black leaders.

  The Clarion-Ledger had been inherited by a new generation of Hedermans. The morning daily, which was once called the “Klan-Ledger” for good reason, actually won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 (for a series on education) under Rea Hederman, who went on to be the publisher of the New York Review of Books.

  That same year the Gannett chain bought the Clarion-Ledger, ending a regional monopoly on newspapers in Mississippi. By this time the state could no longer claim to be a hermetically sealed backwater, the closed society of the recent past. More and more native sons and daughters were going to colleges outside the state and coming back with new attitudes. The Sunbelt boom had drawn in Yankee businesses and foreign notions. And all anyone had to do to see another view of the world was to switch on the television.

  Oddly the Clarion-Ledger became more cautious and superficial once it was owned by outsiders. Gannett did, however, bring in a black managing editor named Bennie Ivory and increased minority hirings. And the paper hit hard on a few selected stories, most notably ones connected with the civil rights movement of the sixties. Critics say it was safer to dwell in the past than to deal with the present predicament of corrupt public officials and intractable poverty. In any case the new, improved Clarion-Ledger led the charge to dredge up some old, unpunished civil rights murders, including that of Medgar Evers.

  At the head of the pack was a dogged thirty-year-old reporter named Jerry Mitchell. It was the sober, red-haired Mitchell who kicked open the doors to Mississippi’s moldering basement of nightmares.

  It began with the imbroglio churning around the release of the film Mississippi Burning in January 1989. The movie, based on the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner murders, managed to offend almost everyone who’d had anything to do with the Neshoba County case or Freedom Summer, except for a few retired FBI agents who liked being portrayed as idealistic good guys.

  Civil rights activists said that the script downplayed the role of blacks in the struggle and whitewashed the FBI’s basic indifference to racial violence. Nobody was about to forget how the agents stood by and took notes while cops and Klansmen beat demonstrators to the ground. That wasn’t in the movie. Nor were the COINTELPRO operations used to spy on black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X and to harass and intimidate others.

  Conservative whites lambasted the movie for what they said was an exaggerated depiction of Klan violence and southern racism. Ordinary citizens shrugged and said it was just another black eye for Mississippi.

  The Clarion-Ledger covered the controversy, and when the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders came around that June, it sent a team of reporters, including Mitchell, to track down as many participants in the case as they could find. The coverage reminded everybody that only a few of the original conspirators had been sent to federal prison and none had faced state murder charges. The newspaper duly published an editorial calling for a reopening of the case.

  Before long Mitchell got a tip that some secret Sovereignty Commission papers had been accidentally misfiled in federal court. That led to a story, cowritten with another reporter, about how a Sovereignty Commission spy had infiltrated CORE headquarters during Freedom Summer and copied some stolen documents.

  Other leaks followed, until one source gave Mitchell about seven hundred pages of key documents. Despite the wrath of Judge Barbour and an FBI investigation, the Clarion-Ledger went ahead with a lengthy series on the Sovereignty Commission papers.

  Among the leaked files was a thick folder titled “Medgar Evers: Race Agitator.” It confirmed that Evers had been kept under surveillance for years by the Sovereignty Commission and state and local police.

  There were huge gaps in the Evers file, but one very important document found its way into Mitchell’s hands: the report that Sovereignty Commission investigator Andy Hopkins had prepared on the background of potential jurors in the second Beckwith trial.

  The banner headline across the front page of the Clarion-Ledger on October 1, 1989, read “State Checked Possible Jurors in Evers Slaying.” The files showed that at the very least the Sovereignty Commission had tried to subvert the efforts of another state agency, the district attorney’s office. At worst the report pointed to possible criminal jury tampering.

  Mitchell called Myrlie Evers at her office in Los Angeles to get her comments on the story. Evers remembers the moment clearly. It was as if a little light turned on inside her, and it caused a shudder of recognition. Could this be it?

  She told Mitchell what she had said many times before, that she wanted the case reopened if evidence was available to get a conviction. But this time it felt different. She said she would be coming to Jackson before the end of the year to see what could be done.

  The district attorney’s office was lodged on the fifth floor of the Hinds County Courthouse in a maze of cubicles and hallways that, before renovations, had been part of the county jail. In the old days condemned prisoners had been hanged on the fifth floor. In fact when a visitor stepped up to Clara Mayfield’s desk, just left of the elevator, to ask for an appointment with the district attorney, Ed Peters, the floor often emitted a queasy creak where the trapdoor to the gallows had been imperfectly covered.

  This was, however, one of the few grim notes in a surprisingly sunny and lighthearted office. Despite the rumors circulating about the goings-on in the district attorney’s office, most of them focused on the D.A. himself, anyone who wasn’t a stranger could wander freely through the hallways. Even a stranger might think she’d walked into a friendly faculty lounge instead of a death-belt prosecutor’s headquarters.

  Peters was tall and lanky, with wavy white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Although he looked and sounded a lot like Andy Griffith, Peters was the most feared prosecutor in the state. In private conversation he was a soft-spoken, avuncular, pleasant man. In the courtroom he was a wolverine. His scathing cross-examinations of witnesses were so relentless that any defendant took the stand at his or her own peril.

  In the fall of 1989 Peters had been the district attorney of Hinds and Yazoo Counties for seventeen consecutive years. He would be up for reelection for his sixth term in 1991.

  Peter
s inspired extreme reactions; you loved him or hated him. After so many years in office he had many enemies. The talk around town was that he was a ruthless machine politician with his sights set on higher office, maybe the Governor’s Mansion. People who knew him disputed this.

  Peters was forty-nine years old. He had married well. He was already rich, and he didn’t seem to want to be anything other than what he was. He already held down one of the most powerful jobs in the state, since Hinds County includes Jackson, the capital, where the governor and the state legislators dwell at least part of the year. That gives the district attorney jurisdiction to indict, or not indict, every state politician who might get caught in behavioral or financial indiscretions.

  There were a lot of indiscretions. The peccadilloes of elected officials offered a limitless supply of entertainment in the capital. They were open secrets, fuel for conversation among people who loved to talk. People whispered about the prominent politician who was supposedly shot by his wife during an argument over his mistress. Or the former governor who allegedly solicited male prostitutes on Farish Street. (The prostitute who snitched on him reportedly said, “I didn’t know he was the governor! I thought he was just another legislator.”)

  Peters’s office concentrated on violent felonies and avoided political prosecutions, leaving that to the state attorney general and U.S. Justice Department. His office was staffed with talented prosecutors who won their cases and made do with few resources. This conviction record helped win him elections, but it had not quieted his enemies. In the Byzantine world of Mississippi politics and rampant rumor, Peters had figured into just about every conspiracy theory of corruption and influence peddling making the rounds.

  Depending on who was talking, Peters was either a power-hungry government stooge or a dope-smoking racketeer who sold protection to Mafia-types and who used the Jackson Police Department and the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize his critics. This was the view — usually whispered and sometimes printed — of some of Peters’s political rivals as well as a cabal of activist black leaders. It is interesting to note that the local klansmen and their sympathizers were equally certain that Peters was controlled by international communist banker Jews and their pawns, the FBI. They were particularly unhappy about Peters’s prosecution of a bunch of partying brownshirts who got into a shooting match with a black gunman during a racist picnic in Jackson one summer.