Spies of Mississippi (4 page)

“At all costs.” Ross Barnett used that phrase to describe the lengths to which he would go in his efforts to preserve segregation in his native state.
Delivering his inaugural address on a cold, gray day in January 1960, the new governor struck a tone of determination and defiance.

“You know and I know,” he reassured his fellow white citizens, “that we will maintain segregation in Mississippi at all costs.” The small-town boy who dreamed of growing up to become an important man had realized his greatest ambition. Barnett would relish the architectural excesses of the governor’s mansion (he would install gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms). He would take pride in the State Capitol Building, with its 16 different kinds of marble and its bronze statue of former governor and U.S. senator Theodore Bilbo, an openly racist and corrupt powermonger who proudly referred to himself as the Man.

Now Ross Barnett was the new man—and his rise to power proved that classic race baiting could still win elections in the Magnolia State.

After settling in to his office, Barnett received regular status reports, investigative memos, and personal briefings on the Commission and attended regular meetings of its governing board. The new governor expected the spies to wage a real clandestine war against the civil rights movement. But how? He had no set of directions for building a secret police force and no owner’s manual for running a covert spy network. He was just a hardworking and successful farmer-turned-lawyer from the farming hamlet of Standing Pine.

One of ten sons of a Confederate Civil War veteran, Barnett had grown up vying for attention and developed an obsessive dream of wearing fine suits, making important speeches, and being in the limelight. He had worked his way through law school, built a successful law practice, and become president of the Mississippi Bar Association. Finally he rose to power as a classic white supremacist who once proclaimed, “God is the ultimate segregationist. He made the white man white and the Negro black and never intended them to mix.”

But behind his back, people did not always give Barnett the respect he longed for. He was often mocked as a chronic bumbler, and his actions frequently added to the snickers. Speaking at a breakfast meeting with Jewish community leaders at a local synagogue, he thanked the members of B’nai Brith for joining him in “fine Christian fellowship.” He once injured himself on an airport tarmac by stepping into the whirling propeller blade of his own campaign airplane. He would become the only governor to name two Miss Americas honorary colonels in the Mississippi National Guard. Barnett liked to say, “I love mockingbirds, Miss Americas, and Mississippi.”

Barnett’s antics hid his raw intelligence, ambition, and persistence in his quest for power. He knew how to charm his friends and disarm his enemies with his courtly demeanor, down-home storytelling, quick wit, and lowbrow humor. He also knew how power worked and applied that knowledge to transforming the Commission. With the support of the state legislature, he doubled the Commission’s budget and increased its staff. He fired an investigator who had chafed at Barnett’s campaign claim of the Commission’s foot-dragging, which had sent a clear message that the “moderate” course of the Coleman years was over. Barnett also stacked the Commission board with political allies who shared his views on race. Through his first year in office, Barnett and his allies took several steps to transform the agency into a more effective weapon of information war.

Step 1: Enlist Powerful Allies

In a controversial move, Barnett pressed state officials to allow the Commission to funnel taxpayer dollars directly into the coffers of the White Citizens’ Council. The Commission funding would begin at $5,000 a month for a speakers’ program and total more than $200,000 over a number of years—more than $1.8 million in today’s currency. And with the added legitimacy of public funding, the Council would position itself as a quasi-official arm of state government as it pushed its way into other state agencies, acquired confidential government information, collaborated with law enforcement, and demanded more and more power.

Step 2: Know Your Enemies

The Commission added a new director of investigations and a number of new agents to its roster while increasing its use of private detective agencies and “special” freelance operatives. The typical investigator was a former FBI agent or state police investigator with surveillance experience and a commitment to segregation. Under Barnett, the agents’ investigative tactics became more aggressive and their reports increasingly mean-spirited, reflecting their personal opposition to integration and their disdain for their adversaries.

Step 3: Dehumanize the Opposition

The revitalized team immediately launched an extensive “subversive hunt,” investigating private citizens for criticizing state officials, belonging to liberal organizations, or supporting unpopular causes. A report issued in March 1961 noted that investigations were being launched against people who were merely speaking out, people whose “utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion of future racial attitudes.”

The investigative files increasingly referred to the opposition as agitators, subversives, beatniks, do-gooders, and Communists. The communist tag was the most potent weapon even though it had been several years since the fall from grace of U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose finger-pointing ruined reputations, wrecked careers, and led to his expulsion from the Senate. In Mississippi, a person accused of being a communist was prejudged a supporter of the Soviet Union at a time when that totalitarian, nuclear-armed nation was aligning its allies against the United States.

Step 4: Control the Media

Barnett named his former campaign publicist Erle Johnston the Commission’s public relations director. The former newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher had solid ties to journalists in the Mississippi press. He also knew how the national media worked and had connections at national news services in Washington, D.C., and TV networks in New York. Johnston was the perfect choice to work both sides of the story. He would adeptly paint the Commission as a benign public relations operation representing the positive side of race relations in the state. Behind the scenes, he would fine-tune the propaganda bible, emphasizing the soft sell of segregation. “This is a selling job and it cannot be done by waving red flags or using emotional approaches,” he advised. “Facts, situations, and an appeal for understanding will be more effective in gaining support for the South.”

Johnston expanded the propaganda package to include carefully crafted speeches, articles by black segregationists, and a 27-minute film entitled
The Message of Mississippi,
which “showed in scenes and interviews the racial harmony that exists among the vast majorities of each race.”

Step 5: Set Moral Standards

The revitalized team launched a campaign to remove “subversive” books from the shelves of schools and public libraries. The Commission’s education and information unit listed books that contained sections on desegregation or labor organizations as unacceptable and suggested replacing them with books that advocated segregation and white supremacy. At dozens of colleges and high schools, it presented programs detailing the evils of communism and loaned books, films, and speeches on racial separation and white supremacy to young readers.

Federal judge John Minor Wisdom coined a phrase for the political climate in Mississippi. Wisdom said that segregationist policy was crafted and defended in the “
eerie atmosphere of never never land.” A swipe at the segregationist cries of “Never,” the remark also referred to James M. Barrie’s classic children’s novel
Peter Pan
, where children are led into a bizarre fantasy world—an alternate reality. The comparison to Mississippi was apropos. The deep racial divide, widespread poverty, and isolation kept Mississippi in a sort of social time warp. Mississippi had no major cosmopolitan center like Atlanta, New Orleans, or Memphis, where large newspapers carried competing points of view and major universities debated new ideas. When commercial airliners circled to land at the Jackson airport, pilots playfully instructed passengers to fasten their seat belts and set their watches back 50 years.

The fundamentals of segregation only began to describe the complicated world that Mississippians—approximately 55 percent white and 45 percent black—had to navigate at the time. A black woman was allowed to shop in a white-owned department store but could not try on clothes because the dressing rooms were reserved for whites only. A black child could be admitted into a public hospital but could not play with white children in the waiting area of the pediatrics ward. Black men and women were expected to respect white people at all times but were not to be addressed as Mr., Mrs., or Miss by whites. Both whites and blacks loved to attend the big event of the year: the Mississippi State Fair. It lasted for two weeks each summer—one week for white patrons and one week for “colored” patrons. These complex lines had to be understood and adhered to or very carefully sidestepped.

As the civil rights crusaders pressed for change, the white power structure pulled back hard to maintain the lines of demarcation. And with Barnett in the governor’s office, the state moved toward an even stronger form of white resistance, doling out punishment to anyone who was found to be crossing the color line.

The harsher tactics also played a role in the continuing saga of Clyde Kennard, the military veteran who had been denied admission to all-white Mississippi Southern College. Kennard, who had been framed by the police for possession of liquor, soon found himself in another run-in with the law. This chapter in the saga began when the Forrest County Cooperative warehouse was burglarized. The day before, 19-year-old Johnny Lee Roberts had been loading trucks and had purposely left a door to the warehouse unlocked. The next morning, Roberts reentered the building and stole five bags of chicken feed worth $25. In short order, police grilled and arrested Roberts. Under pressure to confess, Roberts claimed that his friend, Clyde Kennard, had put him up to it.

Police searched Kennard’s farm and came back with a couple of empty feed bags. Kennard was charged as an accomplice to burglary—a felony. On the witness stand, Roberts gave a meandering, hard-to-follow account of the robbery that confused even the district attorney. Still, it took an all-white jury only ten minutes to hand down guilty verdicts. Roberts got a suspended sentence, and the co-op rehired him. Kennard, by contrast, was sentenced to the maximum penalty—seven years of hard labor at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

How bad was Parchman? The prison farm, constructed after the Civil War as a direct response to the abolition of slavery, was originally designed to instill young, wayward black men with the discipline that the whips of slave owners could no longer administer.

At the maximum security penitentiary, Kennard worked from sunup to sundown on the prison cotton farm. He urged his mother not to visit—“just make believe I’m back in the army.” He spent Sundays writing letters for illiterate prisoners.

The NAACP worked without success to overturn Kennard’s conviction but did manage to publicize his plight. Then, after two years of hard time, Kennard doubled over with stomach pain. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Doctors operated immediately, but the cancer had spread too far. The doctors recommended that Kennard be released, given “the extremely poor prognosis in this rather young patient.” But Governor Barnett, determined to send a message to any would-be integrationists, refused to grant clemency. Barnett ordered that the dying man be returned to prison, where he was sent back into the cotton fields.

With Kennard’s condition worsening, an outcry built up in the northern black press. Black comedian Dick Gregory, who had gained celebrity status entertaining white and black nightclub audiences and appearing on national TV, charged that the military veteran, college student, and chicken farmer had been framed, railroaded into prison, abused, neglected, and left for dead.

—May 24, 1961—

The jittery road warriors sat in the red, silver, and white double-decker bus racing down Highway 80 in Alabama en route to Jackson, Mississippi.
The freedom riders had to accept the fact that attacks on the bus were possible, even likely, despite the extraordinary police and military protection deployed to prevent violence. As the bus raced past the Alabama countryside, eight National Guardsmen with grim faces and bayonet-tipped rifles stood sentinel over the passengers, including ten newsmen and more than a dozen freedom riders. Sixteen police cars formed an escort, helicopters hovered overhead, and an L19 reconnaissance aircraft kept watch from higher above. As the bus reached the borderline sign reading “Welcome to the Magnolia State,” one rider quipped, “I’m going out of America, into a foreign country.” Freedom Ride coordinator Diane Nash had to take a deep breath. After all, she had resisted calls to abandon the ride to Jackson, insisting that the movement could not succeed if the mere threat of mob violence could stop nonviolent protest.

As the caravan raced forward, Mississippi National Guardsmen fanned out along a wooded stretch of the route. They had been alerted to a tip that Klansmen planned to dynamite the bus shortly after it crossed the state line. Driving through stop signs and traffic lights, the convoy finally reached the city limits of Jackson and rolled to its destination: the interstate bus terminal. The time had come for the long-awaited showdown between the young activists and the Jackson City Police.

The protesters bounded off the bus and walked quickly toward the terminal. The black riders headed to the “whites only” waiting room, and the two white riders headed to the room marked “Negroes only.” Jackson police issued two warnings and began making arrests. The police ran the protesters through a gauntlet of officers to waiting paddy wagons and shuttled them off to the local lockup. The first Freedom Ride to Mississippi of summer 1961 had been carried out in perfect choreography. Federal officials, state officials, freedom riders, and police breathed a sigh of relief. Violence had been avoided. At that time, none of them knew that waves of additional buses with hundreds of new riders would soon be en route to Jackson to repeat the process again, and again, and again.

Three weeks earlier, freedom riders had boarded buses in Washington, D.C., determined to expose segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, and water fountains in bus and train stations. The U.S. Supreme Court had barred segregation in interstate travel in 1960, but the ruling was being ignored south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As the freedom riders moved into the Deep South, white mobs were waiting with insults, threats, bottles, and rocks. Then, outside Anniston, Alabama, an angry mob firebombed a bus and beat the fleeing riders with chains and baseball bats. In Birmingham, a club-wielding mob attacked a bus just two blocks from the police station, with police nowhere in sight to keep the peace.

In light of the violence, protest organizers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) prepared to call a halt to the rides. Then, U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy brokered a deal with officials in Alabama and Mississippi. The state officials promised to provide protection for the riders if local police could arrest protesters for breach of peace. That’s when a group of young activists from the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) volunteered to make the trip to Jackson. The daring mission was undertaken by a new style of activist personified by Diane Nash, who was younger, more insistent, and seemingly fearless in the face of danger. Convinced that postponing defeat meant empowering the opposition, the freedom riders set out down a dangerous road. The eyes of the nation and the world—stunned by the news accounts of the Alabama attacks and shocked that young students would put their lives on the line—were focused on the drama. All eyes were on Mississippi.

Governor Barnett, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, the Jackson City Police, and the Sovereignty Commission were waiting with a plan. From their point of view, the best course was to avert violence—along with the negative, worldwide press coverage it would spawn. The police planned to break up white crowds before they became mobs, to arrest protesters without brutality, and to charge them with simple breach of peace instead of violation of segregation laws. In all likelihood, the local courts would issue suspended sentences and modest fines, and the freed students would return home with the northern reporters close behind.

Behind the scenes, the Commission agents would create files on the freedom riders, including their names, addresses, organizational ties, and mug shots. The investigators would run background checks in the riders’ home states in search of information that could be used to discredit the movement as “subversive and Communist.” The files would be shared with law enforcement agencies in other southern states and used to identify repeat offenders. If all went according to plan, the Commission’s propaganda machine would churn out the story that Mississippi whites had not resorted to violence and Mississippi blacks had not joined the protests, thus proving that segregation was key to peaceful race relations.

Not surprisingly, all did not go according to their plan. Two weeks into the saga, the first wave of riders was taken to court for an arraignment hearing. Judge James Spencer found the students guilty and issued $200 fines and 60-day suspended sentences. At that point, the young and idealistic riders rewrote the script. Determined to keep the spotlight on segregation by “filling the jails to overflowing,” the riders refused to admit their guilt or to pay their fines. The white riders were returned to the relatively modern Jackson City Jail, while black prisoners went to the grim Hinds County Jail. And with dozens of students boarding Jackson-bound buses and trains, the goal of filling the jails looked attainable.

A month into the stalemate, the state introduced its response to jail overcrowding. Groups of prisoners were herded from their cells and loaded on gray vans with metal seats and barred windows. The vans drove out of town and into the country. The landscape moved from green hills to vast, flat stretches of green and white cotton fields and creepy cypress swamps. Some 140 miles into the trip, the riders looked through the barred windows and glimpsed a frightening scene. Prison inmates in black-and-white-striped garb chopped cotton in the fields under the gaze of guards on horseback with rifles draped over their arms. In the distance stood the barbed-wire fences and looming guard towers of the maximum security penitentiary at Parchman. The van crawled through the gate and into the inner core of the prison, stopping at the maximum-security unit that housed death row inmates, solitary confinement cells, and the electric chair.

The students were marched down grim walkways to even darker cell blocks. The men were led to cells adjacent to other inmates; the women were taken to an isolated unit. All were issued prison clothes, a Bible, an aluminum cup, and a toothbrush. For the first two days, the inmates lived in fear of being beaten by the guards—or “screws”—until it became clear that their national media status was assuring them hands-off treatment.

Confined to the maximum-security unit with only their Bibles to read, the riders passed the time singing freedom songs. The warden and guards—concerned that the soulful melodies and defiant lyrics could inspire other inmates to join in—repeatedly ordered the singers to stop. When the singing continued, the guards began taking away items of clothing, toothbrushes, and mattresses.

CORE organizer James Farmer recalled one singer’s response: “He said: ‘Come take my mattress. I’ll keep my soul.’ And everybody started singing, ‘Ain’t gunna let no body turn me ’round, turn me ’round, turn me ’round.’”

One night the guards introduced a new tactic by removing screens from the cell-block windows. Swarms of mosquitoes flowed into the cells. And worse was on the way: “A guard came in and said, ‘Look at all them bugs. We’re gunna have to spray,’” recalled freedom rider David Frankhauser. “Shortly thereafter, we heard what sounded like a large diesel truck pull up outside the cell block. And what looked like a fire hose was passed in through one of the high windows. As the engine fired up outside, we were hit with a powerful spray of DDT. Being trapped in our cells, with no protection, our bodies, and every inch of the cells, were drenched with the eye-stinging, skin-burning insecticide.”

Five weeks into the summer stalemate, more than 150 freedom riders had been arrested and convicted, and waves of additional buses were en route to Jackson. Northern newspaper accounts of alleged abuses at Parchman prompted demands that independent delegations be allowed to inspect conditions and interview the prisoners. Mississippi officials needed a bold new story to change the headlines.

Commission publicity director Erle Johnston had headed north in an effort to persuade skeptical audiences that all was returning to normal in Jackson. In late June, he told a gathering at the Rotary Club in Pocatello, Idaho, that the “self-styled” freedom riders had “failed” to reveal a dark side to southern segregation. To the contrary, Johnston claimed, riders had “brought many representatives of the news media into Mississippi who were able to learn firsthand how the two races work and live in harmony.” Looking his audience in the eye, the public relations man claimed that the riders had inadvertently “done the state a service.”

At about that time, Commission investigator Andy Hopkins began corresponding with R. J. Strickland, chief investigator of the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee. The two were members of a coalition of southern law enforcement investigators who shared information and tactics for fighting “subversion.” Strickland supplied Hopkins—a graduate of the FBI training academy—with a four-page document entitled “Fair Play for Cuba.” It contained the names of 202 people who had allegedly flown to Havana, Cuba, four months earlier. Two names on the list—compiled from flight manifests at Miami International Airport—were those of freedom riders arrested in Jackson. Was their visit to Cuba—an island nation off the coast of Florida and a communist ally of the Soviet Union—proof of a link between the civil rights movement and international communism? Was this the bombshell the state needed to change the headlines?

On June 29, Brigadier General T. B. Birdsong—director of public safety and founder of the Mississippi Highway Patrol—called a press conference at which he promised to remove any guesswork from the assembled journalists’ reporting by disclosing conclusive proof of a major communist role in planning and directing the Freedom Rides. He revealed that unnamed sources had provided unnamed state investigators with a verified list of 202 names of students who had attended a “Fair Play for Cuba” seminar in Havana the previous February. Birdsong named Kathleen Pleune of Chicago and David Wahlstorm of Madison, Wisconsin, as participants in the Cuban seminar. Both had been arrested as freedom riders in Jackson. “They’re pawns in the hands of the Communists,” Birdsong charged. He then went on to make a series of allegations that went far beyond the known facts. He claimed that the students had attended an intensive workshop on civil disobedience tactics conducted by nine agents of the Soviet Union in Cuba. He stated that the workshop had provided detailed instruction on carrying out “sit-ins and walk-ins and freedom rides”—and that the Russian instructors had “inspired and directed” the entire Freedom Ride movement.

CORE immediately branded the allegations ridiculous and the press conference an unfounded “smear tactic.” An attorney for one of the students telegraphed Birdsong with a demand for proof that Soviet agents had led a workshop on freedom riding during the Cuban trip. Birdsong backed off. The subsequent reporting made the story relatively clear: The students had gone to Cuba with a leftist group seeking to improve Cuban-American relations, but there were no civil disobedience training sessions led by Soviet agents, and there was no tactical advice on freedom riding. The state’s bid to regain the propaganda edge fizzled as the northern press lost interest. And more freedom riders kept coming.

Just a week later an even more insidious piece of propaganda hit the newsstands. This one came from black newsman and Commission collaborator Percy Greene. Greene’s
Jackson Advocate
ran an eight-column headline above his feature story daring Reverend Martin Luther King to join a Freedom Ride to Jackson. The piece predicted that King would be arrested and would face potentially deadly consequences at Parchman. On July 6, 1961, the inflammatory article was gleefully covered by the segregationist
Jackson Daily News
, which claimed that King had steered clear of the Freedom Rides because he was too busy “caddillacking around the country making speeches and taking bows.”

Despite the public relations diatribes, the freedom riders continued to arrive at the depots, the police continued to make arrests, the judges continued to issue fines, and the guards kept ordering prisoners to stop singing. The scorecard of arrests and convictions that ran regularly in the
Jackson Daily News
was no longer a power statement of the state’s ability to punish the “invaders.” Now it was a reminder of the persistence of the protesters and the outside media attention it spawned.

As events unfolded in Jackson, Washington was applying quiet but persistent power. U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue a regulation specifically barring interstate bus and rail companies from allowing segregation at their stations. Now the companies that ran the bus and train lines were subject to serious fines for allowing segregation to continue. As of September 1, 1961, the “whites only” and “Negroes only” signs at bus and rail depots gradually began to come down. The freedom riders had won a major victory, although it would take more time to fully enforce the anti-segregation law.