The jury stayed out two days, once sending a message that it was deadlocked, before the foreman returned a verdict on October 20 of not guilty for seven defendants, including Sheriff Rainey, deadlock on three, and guilty for Deputy Sheriff Price, Imperial Wizard Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, and four others. Authorities declared the seven convictions to be the first by any Mississippi jury against Klansmen for race crimes.
Judge Cox released the convicted men pending appeal. Violence continued. In November, bombs damaged the parsonage next to Saint Paul’s Church in Laurel (where opera singer Leontyne Price had belonged as a child) and the home of the Beth Israel rabbi in Jackson. On December 20, a constable who spot-checked a parked car in the small town of Collins came upon Imperial Wizard Bowers and a twenty-one-year-old unknown named Thomas Tarrants, with a .45-caliber machine gun. Tarrants, a solo bomber for the White Knights, disappeared upon release, and Bowers headed to trial for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, where Delmar Dennis would testify. FBI agents renewed investigative pressure, and a supplementary confession of Billy Roy Pitts—the Klansman who had dropped his pistol on the Dahmer property—brought one of four shocks in the demise of White Knights terror in 1968. Pitts verified the identity of the Pontiac driver as Charles Wilson, president of the Laurel Jaycees, owner of an investment firm and a company that manufactured artificial limbs. Shortly after Wilson received Laurel’s Distinguished Service Award in January of 1968, his arrest made stunning news for Mississippi: a prominent citizen charged as the alleged shotgunner on a Klan murder squad.
Also in January, a Forrest County grand jury indicted eleven Dahmer suspects on state arson and murder charges, and all-white juries later handed down murder convictions at three trials. The defendants, including Charles Wilson, received life sentences that were upheld on appeal—another first for Mississippi. Feelings about the trials ran so high in Hattiesburg that local prosecutor James Dukes and his brother, an FBI agent, walked to a downtown Klan hangout and “called out” threatening Klansmen to fight or show chicken in front of a noontime street crowd. This was their crest. In May of 1968, a jury deadlocked 11-1 for conviction of Sam Bowers, after defense witnesses accused the FBI of supplying state witness Billy Roy Pitts with Hollywood starlets. Bowers survived a second mistrial, 10-2, then another. Local headlines turned against the prosecution witnesses: “Pitts ‘Sings Again’ in Dahmer Slaying.” Hung juries became the rule. One defense lawyer claimed that FBI agent Martin had secretly poisoned Dahmer at the hospital on orders from LBJ.
White Knights terror centered upon Meridian, in apparent retaliation for convictions there in the triple murder. Klansmen burned a store run by FBI informant Wallace Miller in February of 1968, arsoned two black churches, and in May bombed the largest Meridian synagogue. On June 28, 1968, police and FBI agents surprised two Klan bombers at the home of a prominent Jewish target in Meridian. A shootout gravely wounded Thomas Tarrants, the young Klan bomber who had been arrested with Sam Bowers, and killed his companion of more than one previous mission, Kathy Ainsworth. An investigation convinced authorities that Ainsworth, an elementary school teacher in Jackson, had hidden a Klan life from her family, and the death of a respectable female on a White Knights murder team was a third shock for Mississippi. The fourth would remain a secret until 1970, when reporter Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times disclosed that Jewish groups, working through FBI agents, had paid $30,000 for a precise warning before the bomb attempt in Meridian—to Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts, who was free on appeal of his own conviction in the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders.
Klan bombers and prosecutors collapsed, leaving behind a five-year toll by FBI reckoning of nine murders connected to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, plus seventy-five church burnings and at least three hundred bombings and assaults. Trials died out in the Dahmer case after a federal jury deadlocked on ten conspiracy defendants in 1969. Charles Wilson served a year at Parchman Penitentiary before receiving a series of gubernatorial leaves in 1970-71, then a grant of work-release to his home in 1972 from Governor William Waller, who had defended him in one of his trials. Waller commuted Wilson’s life sentence to time served in 1976. The two others sentenced to life in the Dahmer case were paroled in 1978.
Sam Bowers and Alton Wayne Roberts surrendered with the five others convicted in the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner case, and served six years before receiving mandatory parole in 1976. Bowers returned to Laurel as a reclusive theologian of racial purity. “When a priest sees the heretic,” he said in a rare 1994 interview, “he can do only one thing: he eliminates him.” Upon the conviction that year of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, three decades after Beckwith’s previous mistrial in 1964, Ellie Dahmer petitioned Forrest County prosecutors to reopen cases against Bowers and other indictees who were either mistried or never yet tried for Vernon Dahmer’s murder.
IN 1976, Bob Moses returned from Africa after a decade in exile. After his last SNCC meeting in February of 1965, as Bob Parris, he had drifted from Mississippi into Alabama following the marches from Selma to Montgomery, when Martin Luther King had brought Abraham Heschel down to stay with him at Sully Jackson’s madhouse in Selma, with James Bevel sleeping in a bathtub and James Forman under the dining room table, and the rabbi surviving a garlanded march beside King, saying, “I felt like I was praying with my feet.” Sometimes movement friends came across Parris on rural farms, drinking corn whiskey out of a fruit jar, thinking about the war in Southeast Asia. He attended the first organized protest on April 17, 1965. “Use Mississippi not as a moral lightning rod,” he told a crowd of fifteen thousand at the Washington monument, “but if you use it at all, use it as your looking glass.” Likening Vietnam to Mississippi, he held up a news photo announcing the capture of a Communist rebel in Vietnam. “Now I looked at that picture,” he told a May rally in Berkeley, “and what I saw was a little colored boy standing against a wire fence with a big huge white Marine with a gun in his back. But what I knew was that the people in this country saw a Communist rebel. And that we travel in different realities.”
Parris sought out Al Lowenstein. Although relations between them were still strained from Freedom Summer, and movement radicals increasingly scorned Lowenstein as a red-baiting white liberal, the two men shared a feeling of helplessness about the war, as they had two years earlier about Mississippi. Lowenstein brought Parris to a summer conference of anti-war activists in New York. Where Lowenstein saw the root of the Vietnam conflict as a national hatred for Communist China, and advocated a reappraisal of foreign policy, Parris held to the language of nonviolence. Over the summer of 1965, he approached a number of national religious leaders who supported the civil rights movement, only to be told that black people should not jeopardize hard-earned gains by speaking out on Vietnam. Parris received such advice as an affront. “I got angry,” he recalled twenty years later. “Well, I didn’t rant and rave.”
On August 9, 1965, three days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Parris led a march on the U.S. Capitol to “declare peace” in Vietnam. Uniformed American Nazis splattered red paint on him, pacifist Dave Dellinger, and radical professor Staughton Lynd, who had supervised the Freedom Schools in Mississippi. Then Parris accepted an invitation to Ghana for a conference of African nations, and stayed on through the autumn. The following spring, Parris helped organize a conference in New Orleans called “Roots,” on the meaning of African heritage. He could not bring himself to visit the Dahmers in Hattiesburg after the firebombing, but he did go to see Amzie Moore in the Delta. Moore had become an official in the federal War on Poverty. His house buzzed with movement people working in Head Start. The MFDP was running candidates that summer, and the new SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, proclaimed a doctrine of black power on a march through Mississippi. Parris, feeling invisible, decided it was safe to become Moses again. His marriage collapsed, partly over his obsession with Vietnam, just before he received a military induction notice.
At thirty-one,
beyond legal draft age, Moses interpreted the order as punishment for his statements against the war. He fled underground to Canada in August of 1966, speaking French, living under the assumed name Robinson through a hard winter into 1967. He worked odd jobs as a janitor, telephone salesman, and night watchman. Eventually, he obtained a Canadian identity card and found refuge with a West Indian family, adopted by the children as “Uncle Bob” Williams. By early 1968, still fearing capture, Moses applied for a Canadian passport under which he might reach safer exile in Africa, by way of England. As he waited, news bulletins announced that the FBI was screening Canadian passport files for the fugitive assassin of Martin Luther King. An “Eric Galt”—then a “George Sneyd”—was said to be arranging a Canadian identity for escape, possibly to Rhodesia. Moses panicked, fearing that the manhunt would expose his fraudulent passport papers. He stayed in hiding well after James Earl Ray was arrested in London.
When he reached Tanzania that summer, Moses turned in his false passport to the Tanzanian government, which granted him tacit asylum under his own name. He married Janet Jemmott, a SNCC worker he had met during Freedom Summer, and they had four children while teaching math and English, respectively, in a Tanzanian village school. Moses avoided the family he had left behind. Some among them feared he was dead until he sent home an African cane when he learned of his father’s death in 1970. Had he contacted his father, Moses told himself, the FBI would have harassed the older man. Joe Rauh, locating Moses by rumor, sent a letter to him in care of the American embassy in Tanzania. Before he died, Rauh wrote, he wanted to convince Moses that he had never betrayed him or the MFDP in Atlantic City. Moses did not reply. He worried that Rauh’s letter might alert the embassy.
After the Vietnam War ended, the Moses-Jemmott family returned to the United States and settled under the Jimmy Carter draft amnesty in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Janet Jemmott went to medical school and became a pediatrician. Moses taught high school and went back to graduate school at Harvard. He seemed disconnected from his past, even fearful of it. Some friends counted him among the many “movement casualties,” haunted or damaged to varying degrees. He avoided SNCC reunions at which some of the survivors came to terms. Diane Nash told her peers at one of them how, to her own amazement, the late 1960s had swept away her belief in nonviolence. “I felt that way for a few years until I noticed that I hadn’t killed anybody,” she said. “I hadn’t been to the rifle range. I hadn’t blown up anything, and truly, I had done very little….” Nash had disengaged under cover of words, perhaps the better to raise children as a single mother.
In 1982, Moses returned to Mississippi for the first time in sixteen years, to attend Amzie Moore’s funeral. He made a brief speech. He began to give interviews, and sometimes he asked for documents about himself as though discovering another person. He developed a new way of teaching algebra that blended in Freedom School methods. By the 1990s, his Algebra Project operated in school districts across the country. Moses spent more and more time in Mississippi, having recovered his past. Mastering first-year algebra is an equivalent of the right to vote in the 1960s, he said. It provides hope in the modern world.
IN SELMA, Martin Luther King confronted furies ahead. In order to win the vote, movement spirits in many small places would have to lift politics into history. Beyond the vote lay Vietnam, which would spoil the celebrations of freedoms that had been set in train over the past two years. King’s inner course was fixed downward toward the sanitation workers of Memphis. It was his course, but it was getting lonely. Neither King nor the movement could turn America into a mass meeting, but for three more years they could look to a distant one, at Canaan’s edge.
Acknowledgments
MY EDITOR, Alice Mayhew, has inspired, nurtured, and driven this project for fifteen years of her remarkable career. I am grateful to her foremost among the many people at Simon & Schuster who helped produce this book. Most of them made contributions out of an author’s sight, but I want to thank by name those standing closest through the whirlwind of production: Roger Labrie, Lydia Buechler, and Fred Chase, along with Kerri Kennedy, Victoria Meyer, Emily Remes, Liz Stein, and Lisa Weisman. Natalie Goldstein diligently tracked down photographs for this book as well as the previous one. I thank Carolyn Reidy for the warm support of the company, and for her formative suggestion that we had enough material to publish a second volume.
My family and I appreciate two generous foundations, Lyndhurst of Chattanooga and MacArthur of Chicago, for grants that allowed me to broaden my research and helped to sustain us. The Ford Foundation provided a research grant in 1993-94, which made possible the excellent library and computer work of Susanne Trowbridge. Jennifer Bard, Frank Drumwright, and Tracy Wallace offered short-term research assistance, as did my mother, Jane Branch. Jonah Edelman conducted a skillful research mission in Los Angeles.
This volume rests on the source foundation begun for Parting the Waters. I acknowledge those people and institutions again here, without repeating all the names. Among the employees of the libraries and archives cited in the notes for this volume, I am especially indebted to the following: Linda Evans, Archie Motley, Ralph Pugh, and Corey Seeman of the Chicago Historical Society; Ginger Cain and Ellen Nemhauser of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta; Kelly Baker, Kirk E. Cromer, Armaria Fleming, Emil Moschella, Helen Ann Near, and Robert Opher of the FBI’s Records Management Division in Washington; Robert Colasacco and Sharon Laist of the Ford Foundation Archives in New York; Keven Proffitt of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati; Helen Ritter of the American Jewish Committee in New York; Claudia Anderson, Michael Gillette, Regina Greenwell, Linda Hanson, Tina Houston, Mary Knill, and Harry Middleton of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin; Susan D’Entremont of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; Iris Bethea, Bruce Keys, Cynthia Lewis, and Diana Ware of the King Library and Archives in Atlanta; Philip Runkel of the Marquette University Archives in Milwaukee; Dan Den Bleyker of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson; Judy Edelhoff, Mary Roonan, and Steven D. Tilly of the National Archives in Washington; Richard Shrader and John White of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Martin Harris, Pat Priest, Worth McDonald, and Barry Sherman of the Peabody Awards Film Collection at the University of Georgia in Athens; Kristin Gleeson of the Presbyterian Office of History in Philadelphia; Diana Edwards, Page Edwards, and David Nolan of the St. Augustine Historical Society; Howard Dodson, James Turner, Berlina Robinson, and Mary Yearwood of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; Clayborne Carson of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University; Kathy Borkowski and Harold Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.
Among the authors whose pioneering works inform these pages, I owe a special debt to Steven Barboza, Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, David Colburn, David Garrow, Peter Goldman, and Elizabeth Sutherland. Of the firsthand memoirs, I found special value in those by Charles Fager and Paul Good, along with the book of childhood recollection by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West.
Pillar of Fire relies heavily on interviews with those who made, observed, and studied this history. I am grateful to them for sharing their time and knowledge. For advice and encouragement beyond the contributions cited in the notes, I extend thanks to the following people: Ikhlas Bilal, David Chalmers, Jack Chatfield, Connie Curry, Jonathan Demme, Jed Dietz, Lawrence Elswit, Michael V. Gannon, Charles Guggenheim, Lawrence and Monica Guyot, Henry Hampton, Lawrence Hanks, Abdul Karim Hasan, Gerald Horne, Pam Horowitz, Martha Hunt Huie, Ray Jenkins, Teresa Johanson, June Johnson, Vernon Jordan, Benjamin Karim, Stetson Kennedy, Shira Lander, Lawrence W. Lichty, Arthur Magida, Charles Marsh, Richard I. McKinney, Julia McMillan, Michael Middleton, Michael Miller, Peggy Obrecht, Gerald O’Grady, Becky Okrent, Bruce Perry, Anna Hamilton Phelan, Frank M. Reid, Ray Rickman, Phil Alden Robinson, Ed Saxon, Joel and Myrna Schwartz, Ronald Shaheed, Joe Sinsheimer, Jack Sisson, Frank and Sandy S
oracco, Henry Thomas, and Jerry Thornbery.
During nine years’ work on this volume, I have leaned heavily at times on a few special friends, including Harry Belafonte, Agieb Bilal, Julian Bond, Marian Wright Edelman, and Dan Okrent. Christy and I have watched our children, Macy and Franklin, pass from lower school to the brink of college. They have brought us joy that surpasses for me even the absorbing wonder of the King years.
Abbreviations Used in Source Notes
Notes
1. ISLAM IN LOS ANGELES
Muslims gathered: Sources for the April 27 conflict include specific documents and interviews cited, plus BTT, generally the Buice trial transcript, People of the State of California v. Robert Louis Buice, et al., Los Angeles County Superior Court Case No. 266717, copy supplied courtesy of Judge Earl Broady.
“chewing on men’s bones”: Elijah Muhammad recording, The Time of Judgment, Vol. 2, as transcribed in SAC, Chicago, to Director, FBI, Aug. 14, 1966, p. 12, FEM-NR.
“You are the man”: MS, Oct.-Nov. 1961, p. 6.
sweet potatoes and pork: Int. Nuri Salaam (Arthur Coleman), April 10, 1991.
case of childhood rickets: Int. Delores Jardan (Delores Stokes), Feb. 7, 1992.
counted cash donations: Testimony of William Rogers, p. 2207ff, BTT.
first night together as partners: Int. Stanley Kensic by Jonah Edelman, June 27, 1991; int. Frank Tomlinson, Oct. 15, 1991; BTT, p. 3ff.
words to Jingles: BTT, pp. 156-59, 1207, 1261.
“Your brother is in trouble”: Int. Clarence Jingles by Jonah Edelman, June 21, 1991.
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