The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  So many murders had gone unresolved. Myrlie Evers herself was talking about setting up a Nuremberg-type commission to investigate old civil rights atrocities and hunt down the criminals, just as the Jews had pursued the Nazis after the war.

  A few weeks after the Beckwith verdict the Mississippi legislature, which was still overwhelmingly white, voted funding to reopen the Dahmer case. “Those people who were killed back during that time are just as dead today as the day they died,” said Dahmer’s son, Dennis, who, like Darrell Evers, was forty. “And those individuals who did it are just as guilty today as they were the day they did it.”

  Along with the reopening of old civil rights cases, the Sovereignty Commission papers were on the verge of being released in some form to the public. The upheaval of memory and retribution and the exorcism of the ghosts of Mississippi were not over yet.

  Whether you call the trial of Byron De La Beckwith a miracle or a travesty, it is hard to argue against the symmetry of the event. The story of Medgar Evers had come full circle. There was a balancing of the books. People who were hoping to hear the word “guilty” describe a peculiar physical sensation when the verdict was read. For a moment the components of the universe seemed to click into place, like an engine that suddenly catches and comes to life. For an instant the world took on a clarity and logic. The cops, the prosecutors, and the state itself, awash as they were in public and private sins, achieved a brief and shining moment of grace.

  After the courtroom doors swung shut, the reporters and news crews caught their flights to Atlanta and New York, and another edition of the Clarion-Ledger was put to bed, what remained was still Mississippi, haunted ground: a place at war with its own history and destined to repeat its past, like a soul being reborn again and again until it gets it right.

  Epilogue: 2013

  Myrlie Evers-Williams delivered her first public address on the evening of June 12, 1963, only hours after her husband, Medgar Evers, had been shot down in their driveway of their home. That night, a few hundred people who were meeting in the Pearl Street Baptist Church listened in stunned silence as a shy and heartbroken widow told them that Medgar’s death should not be in vain. Nearly fifty years later, on a cold January afternoon in 2013, she took the stage on the west end of the US Capitol and spoke to hundreds of thousands of people packed into the National Mall — and millions more in a digital audience — who had gathered to witness Barack Obama’s second inauguration. Myrlie was the first woman, and the first layperson, chosen to deliver an inaugural invocation. Dressed in an overcoat and wrapped in a silvery silk scarf, she spoke in a voice rounded with authority, seasoned by years of trials and loss and triumph. The nation’s first African-American president stood behind her, head bowed in prayer.

  “One hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and fifty years after the March on Washington,” she said, “we celebrate the spirit of our ancestors, which has allowed us to move from a nation of unborn hopes and history of disenfranchised votes, to today’s expression of a more perfect union.”

  The symbolism of Myrlie Evers-Williams’ presence at the podium was lost on no-one. She provided a living bridge between the civil rights champions and martyrs of the past, “the Moses generation” that had made the astonishing career of Barack Obama possible. She spoke of the heroes resting alongside her late husband in Arlington Cemetery, just across the Potomac, and of “a great cloud of witnesses, unseen by the naked eye, but all around us, thankful that their living was not in vain.”

  It was hard not to speculate where Medgar Evers might have been on this day, had he lived. Would he have been seated among honored guests, as a congressman or senator? Or maybe a justice of the Supreme Court? We’ll never know how far he might have gone. But while Medgar’s potential was cut short in June, 1963, Myrlie’s was just emerging.

  In the aftermath of her sudden widowhood Myrlie Evers had raised three children alone, finished her education, made a run for Congress, and became a successful businesswoman and public servant. The spirit that had brought her so far, and had moved her to push for the retrial of Medgar’s assassin, continued to serve her after Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted of murder in 1994.

  After the trial, Myrlie Evers had come under increasing pressure to run for the chairmanship of the NAACP. The grand old organization was $4 million in debt and rudderless under its present leadership. As Myrlie described it in her 1999 autobiography, Watch Me Fly, even though she served on its board, she still harbored mixed feelings about the NAACP, which she always blamed for failing to support and protect Medgar. But her second husband, Walter Williams, implored her to run. She said that she did it for him, even though he was in the end stages of prostate cancer. To honor Walt, she ran under the name Myrlie Evers-Williams and kept it from then on. When she won the chair at a hotly contested board election in New York City, she told the emotional crowd, “This is the second time in just over a year that I’ve been able to put my fists up and say, ‘Yay!’ I have said Medgar died for the NAACP. I will live for the NAACP.”

  Her victory ushered in a new era of solvency and relevance at the NAACP. When she turned the reins over to Julian Bond in 1998, the books showed a surplus of $2 million, and some of the old luster had been restored to the organization. That year she established the Medgar Evers Institute, a nonprofit that, according its description “links together business, government and communities to further human rights and equality.”

  Sadly, Walt Williams was not able to share in Myrlie’s triumph. He died two days after her election in 1995. She made it home to Oregon just in time to curl up next to him as he drew his last breaths. Six years later she was struck with another tragedy, when her eldest son Darrell died from colon cancer.

  Despite the kind of personal calamities that only Job could fathom, Myrlie Evers-Williams remains an influential voice for civil rights everywhere, and the guardian of her first husband’s legacy. In 2006 she published, with the scholar Manning Marable, The Autobiography of Medgar Evers, the definitive collection of Evers’s correspondence, speeches and other writings. When she took the podium at Obama’s second inauguration, she was a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi, the place where she and Medgar had met so many years ago.

  In her role as an icon of the civil rights era, Myrlie Evers-Williams has always been careful to point out that while the country has come a long way since the days of Jim Crow, there is still far to go. The pendulum swings back and forth: The tenets of the Voting Rights Act are under attack fifty years after its passage; an African-American has the most important job in America, but the black jobless rate is still twice that of whites. Every gain has to be defended with constant vigilance. This is history’s unmistakable lesson.

  A lot had to change in Mississippi for Medgar Evers’s killer to be brought to trial in 1994, and a lot has changed since then, both in the lives of the key players and in the political and social climate that gave the story its context. But one thing that remains the same is the quiet urgency of justice. What began in a courtroom in Jackson reverberated across the country, inspiring journalists, federal investigators and local prosecutors to re-examine dozens of cold cases.

  Only weeks after the Beckwith trial ended, the Mississippi state legislature voted to fund a new investigation into the arson-murder of Vernon Dahmer, the civil rights leader from Hattiesburg who was killed by the Klan in 1966. Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard, had already been tried four times for the murder, but each time the jury hung up on a conviction. Dahmer’s family was eager to try to case again in state court, but the new investigation foundered for a couple of years until a new witness named Bob Stringer contacted the Dahmer family and agreed to give evidence against Bowers. In the mid-1960’s Stringer had been a 19-year-old acolyte of Bowers, working as his office boy and throwing copies of a White Knights broadsheet in peoples’ driveways. Although he didn’t participate in the attack, Stringer listened to Bowers pla
nning the murder at a local diner, recalling that he told the Klansmen gathered there that “something had to be done about that Dahmer nigger.”

  Stringer had held his silence for nearly thirty years, and he might never have come forward except his participation in a twelve-step program called for him to own up to his wrongs and to make amends. The trial in Hattiesburg in August 1998 bore some eerie similarities to Beckwith’s trial in Jackson. Once again, the courtroom was jammed with ex-Klansmen and assorted white supremacists who stared intently at the jury, composed of six whites, five blacks and one Asian-American.

  This time around there were no hold-outs, and no mistrial. It took the jury four hours to find Bowers guilty. Even though he had served federal time for his role in the 1964 slayings of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, this was the first time Bowers had actually been convicted of murder. The 73-year-old was sentenced to life in prison. He served eight years of his sentence before dying of a heart attack in Parchman state prison in 2006.

  Shortly after the Dahmer trial, Sam Bowers was back in the news again. The Clarion-Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell published portions of an interview Bowers had done for posterity with the Mississippi state archives. Its contents were supposed to be sealed until after Bowers’s death, but somebody leaked the interview to Mitchell. In it he said of the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney murders: “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man.” The man he was talking about was Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, a part-time Baptist minister and Klan recruiter, long believed to have orchestrated the murders. He had escaped a federal conviction in 1967 with a mistrial after one of the all-white jurors said she could never convict a preacher.

  Bowers’s statement was enough for the state to reopen the investigation, but it would take six years until a grand jury finally indicted Killen. When he was tried by the state in 2005, there were three blacks on the jury, and a feeling throughout Neshoba County that it was time to put the stigma of “Mississippi Burning” behind them. Transcripts of the 1967 trail were read in court, and one of Killen’s fellow Klansmen testified against him. The 80-year-old Killen was seated in a wheelchair and tethered to an oxygen tank when he heard the long-delayed verdict: Guilty on three counts of manslaughter. It wasn’t murder, but it was something. The supposedly frail Klansman was released on an appeal bond for medical reasons, but he batted at cameramen with a surprisingly strong right arm as he was wheeled out of the courtroom. A few days later Killen was spotted at a gas station, filling up his pickup, and the bond was revoked. He is currently serving a 30 year sentence for his crimes.

  The prosecutions in Mississippi gave hope to law enforcement in other states that long-dormant cases could be reopened and won. Doug Jones, who was U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Alabama during the second Clinton administration, was inspired to have another look at Birmingham’s most shameful crime: The Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that left four Sunday schoolgirls dead. Although several plotters had been implicated, only one, Robert Chambliss, ever paid for the crime. He was convicted of murder in 1977, fourteen years after the bombing. By 1996, Chambliss was dead, but two other prime suspects were still alive: Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry. Jones reinvestigated the case and, using new witnesses and old surveillance audiotapes to obtain fresh murder indictments against both Klansmen. In an unusual move, Jones tried Blanton and Cherry in state court after he had left the US Attorney’s office. Blanton was convicted in 2001, and Cherry in 2002.

  The last surviving killer of Ben Chester White, a humble farmhand who was murdered by the Klan in Mississippi, was finally convicted in federal court in 2003. Back in 1966 Ernest Avants had been tried and acquitted in state court in Natchez, Mississippi, even though he had admitted to an FBI agent that he’d blown White’s head off with a shotgun. He’d told the agent he couldn’t be convicted because White was already dead when he shot him. But the Justice Department finally caught up with Avants when prosecutors learned that White’s shooting took place on federal land. He died in prison a year after his second trial.

  Journalists rather than law enforcement provided most of the impetus – and much of the new evidence – to bring another unpunished atrocity to trial. In the summer of 1964 while searchers were combing Mississippi for any sign of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, the bodies of two young black men named Charles Moore and Henry Dee were discovered in a murky backwater of the Mississippi River. It turned out that a group of Klansmen led by a part-time crop duster named James Ford Seale had abducted the two and driven them deep into the woods, where they were beaten savagely. The Klansmen had gotten it in their heads that Moore and Dee were black militants out to start a race war in the Delta. The two were actually just friends, a college student and a lumberyard worker, neither of them involved in politics. Moore and Dee were half dead when Seale and other accomplices hauled them down to the river, chained them to heavy weights and dumped them from a boat to drown. A few days later Seale and fellow Klansman Charles Edwards were arrested by the FBI then turned over to local authorities, who promptly released them on bond. They were never tried.

  In 2000, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published excerpts from old investigation files indicating that the kidnappings took place in the Homochitto National Forest — making the crime subject to federal statutes. The case, however, went nowhere, and James Ford Seale was soon reported to have died. But in 2005 Moore’s brother, Thomas, and a documentary filmmaker named David Ridgen travelled to Seale’s hometown where they were surprised to discover that the 69-year-old Klansman was alive and hiding in plain sight. Ridgen and Moore continued to investigate, and new evidence they tracked down contributed to Seale’s federal indictment in 2007. A now-repentant Charles Edwards, fortified with immunity, testified against Seale in U.S. district court. The jury convicted him of kidnapping and conspiracy, and he was given three life sentences. Seale died in a federal penitentiary in 2011.

  Along with these successful prosecutions, there have been other, less fruitful attempts to retry old crimes. Emmett Till’s lynching, the case that galvanized the budding Civil Rights movement in 1955, was reopened in 2004 after several books and two documentary films brought renewed attention to the killing. The two admitted murderers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were dead. But Bryant’s widow, Carolyn, was still alive, and her possible role in the crime — other than accusing Till of getting fresh with her — had never been fully examined. And perhaps there were others still living who had helped the killers.

  In 2005, fifty years after Till’s death, his body was exhumed from a cemetery south of Chicago. There had never been an autopsy. The medical examiner found terrible injuries on the body, including a broken femur and two broken wrists, along with massive cranial trauma and bullet fragments. Old witnesses were interviewed and old FBI files scrutinized. This time the case was handled by the black district attorney in LeFlore County, Joyce Chiles. She convened a grand jury to consider indicting Carolyn Bryant, but in 2007, they determined there was insufficient evidence to try her.

  Even though the new Till investigation produced no prosecutions, it did finally spur the FBI and Congress to take official action. In 2006 the Justice Department inaugurated the Cold Case Initiative, which led the bureau to identify 112 unresolved civil rights era cases involving 125 victims. In 2007 Myrlie Evers-Williams testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, which directed the Justice Department and FBI to pursue these cases “expeditiously” in coordination with state and local authorities. It passed into law the following year. As of November 2012, the Justice Department had closed the files on all but 27 of those victims. Some cases were resolved through prosecutions; others because homicides could not be proved or all of the involved parties had died. Emmett Till’s name has been removed from the list, but others remain, including those of Mack Charles Parker,
Frank Morris, Wharlest Jackson, Clifton Walker, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.

  Fifty years on, the ghosts of Mississippi are still restless.

  One person who never gave up pursuing these cold cases is Jerry Mitchell, who played a role in reviving many prosecutions. Even after his reporting on the Beckwith murder trial earned him a national reputation, Mitchell continued working at the Clarion-Ledger, nudging and sometimes pushing the authorities to reinvestigate old crimes. Mitchell has won numerous awards for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation grant. He still writes a column for the Clarion-Ledger, is a member of The Civil Rights Cold Case Project with the Center For Investigative Reporting and is said to be writing a book.

  Other veterans of the struggle to bring Medgar Evers’s killer to justice have met varied fates.

  Charles Evers celebrated his ninetieth birthday on September 11, 2012. He continues to own his radio station in Jackson, and still freely speaks his mind. In 2011 he weighed into the controversy that erupted over a proposal to issue a Mississippi state license plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Myrlie Evers-Williams denounced the plan, but her former brother-in-law was characteristically blunt. “If there are folk who want the tag,” he told a radio talk show host, “to hell with ’em! Let ’em have it.”

  After the successful prosecution of Byron De La Beckwith, Bobby DeLaughter’s future seemed golden. He was portrayed by Alec Baldwin as the hero of the semi-factual 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi (which was, for the record, not actually based on this book, although the company did use the title). He wrote a book called Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Trial. Although DeLaughter lost his bid for a seat on the court of appeals, in 1999 the governor appointed him to replace a Hinds County judge who died of a heart attack. In 2001, another appointment elevated him to the Seventh Circuit Court where he presided over major felony cases and high-stakes civil litigation. Six years later, DeLaughter’s life turned in a Shakespearian tragedy, as he was enveloped by a corruption case that landed him in jail. His old friend and former boss Ed Peters was paid $1 million to influence DeLaughter in a multimillion dollar lawsuit being tried in his court. In his grand jury testimony, right before he offered up evidence against Bobby, the white-haired former district attorney characterized their relationship as “extremely close. Probably like a father, son.” He said that Bobby was unaware he was lining his pockets by selling that trust. Although Bobby never took any bribe money, he admitted lying to the FBI about how many contacts he’d had with Peters about the case. Rather than face a trial, DeLaughter entered a plea and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.