The Ghosts of Mississippi (25 page)

Willie later told a nephew that she was convinced that her husband shot Medgar Evers. She was in the hospital drying out after a binge on the night Evers was killed, so she didn’t know for sure. Beckwith never confessed it to her, but she felt it in the way he acted and the spooky things he would say. Once Little Delay and some other teenage boys were caught stealing and butchering a pig to barbecue. Beckwith was furious. “If you’re going to kill something, kill something important,” she remembered him saying.

That summer Beckwith rode around with his friends in the Greenwood police force. He carried a pistol and billy club while they patrolled the Negro neighborhoods. He sometimes stood with the mob of whites who harassed patrons of the newly integrated LeFlore Theater. Beckwith trained his flashlight in the faces of patrons as they left the movie.

If one thing aggravated the Klan even more than the invasion of summer volunteers it was the recent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The new law made segregation illegal in all public places — restaurants, bathrooms, theaters, hotels — even if they were private property. President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law on July 2. It was the package that President Kennedy had proposed the night Medgar Evers was murdered.

Soon after, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, Gloster Current, and a few other NAACP officials made a quick tour of central Mississippi to test the new law. Most establishments offered little resistance, but one landmark in Jackson, the Robert E. Lee Hotel, closed its doors forever rather than integrate. A sign hung on the door read, “Closed in Despair.”

The NAACP group also took a side trip to Neshoba County to keep up the pressure to find the missing workers. They had a tense meeting with Rayford Jones, the county attorney, in the Philadelphia courthouse. No one had forgotten that this was the town that hounded Charles Evers out a few years back when he tried to register voters. A mob of hectoring white men gathered in the courthouse square while the meeting degenerated into a shouting match.

“Are Negroes allowed to vote in Neshoba County?” Evers demanded.

“Now Charlie,” Jones said. “You know damn well niggers can vote here!”

When the NAACP men objected to that kind of language, Jones just looked at them in astonishment. “Well, if you aren’t niggers, what are you?” he asked.

The group walked out. Deputy Cecil Price spotted Evers leaving and shouted, “Get out of town!” while the mob closed in behind him. Charles was ready to go for Price, but Current and Henry wrestled him into the car and raced back to Meridian. Current was sure they were about to be lynched.

The NAACP soon issued a report charging that Mississippi was a virtual police state that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. “Negroes are still in slavery in the state,” the report said. Among other recommendations it called for the federal government to take over the administration of the state.

Dick Gregory returned to Mississippi to see what he could do to find the missing COFO workers. He brought twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and made it known he would pay anyone who had information about the crime.

The FBI also was flashing money around, big time, in the streets of Philadelphia and Meridian. Once the FBI decided to jump onto the bandwagon, the fight against the Klan became a growth industry. For the first time since World War II the FBI opened an office in Jackson. J. Edgar Hoover himself came down to cut the ribbon. By the end of the summer the FBI presence in Mississippi had increased from a handful to hundreds of agents.

Late in July an informant told the FBI where they should look for the bodies. The man was paid thirty thousand dollars for the tip. His name has never been revealed.

On August 4 the FBI got a warrant to dig up the new earthen dam on Olen Burrage’s farm, a few miles southwest of Philadelphia. By nightfall they found the three bodies buried under fifteen feet of Mississippi clay.

Mickey Schwerner’s family wanted to bury him next to James Chaney in Meridian, but that proved impossible. Even the dead were segregated in Mississippi.

It was a powerfully hot evening when James Chaney was buried in a Negro cemetery in his hometown. Later, at the memorial service, the mourners sang “We Shall Overcome,” and the cameras rested on the face of Ben Chaney, the eleven-year-old boy who had idolized his big brother. Sheets of tears ran down his cheeks, and his face was the face of utter, uncomprehending human grief.

Dave Dennis got up to say a few words of eulogy. Dennis had been Mickey Schwerner’s supervisor. He had approved the freedom school in Longdale, and he was supposed to have visited the Mount Zion Church with Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner the day they were murdered. A case of bronchitis had kept him in Jackson.

Dave Dennis planned to talk about nonviolence. The head office of CORE wanted him to encourage people to keep cool and calm. But when he looked down at the face of Ben Chaney, something hard and bitter inside him cracked open. He couldn’t lie to that boy. His eyes were glazed, almost wild. The cords in his neck bulged, and his already thin voice choked into a dry wail.

“I’m sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men!” Dave Dennis shouted. “… I’ve got ven
geance
in my heart tonight, and I ask you to feel angry with me. The white men who murdered James Chaney are never going to be punished…. We’ve got to stand up! If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us … if you take it and don’t do something about it, then God damn your souls!”

He was hoarse, actually screaming his final words: “Don’t bow down anymore! We want our freedom now!”

This moment, rarely remembered in the history books, was perhaps the precise juncture in time when the civil rights movement turned the corner into a dark and uncharted territory. It foreshadowed the atomization of COFO and SNCC and the end of the black-white coalition. So much goodwill had been spent and hope squandered. A new kind of child was being born, and it would travel the road to black power and black separatism and beyond, although it would be years before anyone would know its name. Not Charles Evers, or Roy Wilkins, or even Martin Luther King could change its course.

COFO recorded hundreds of acts of violence against black Mississippians and civil rights workers that summer. For two solid months the spotlight of media attention was trained on the state, and gradually the bayous and back roads began to yield their secrets and their ghosts.

It was shocking, for instance, to anyone except black Mississippians that as soon as the authorities started dragging the rivers and swamps for the two white New Yorkers and their local colleague, they stumbled on other bodies. A back channel of the Mississippi River gave up dismembered pieces of an Alcorn student named Charles Moore and his friend Henry Dee. It turned out the two men had been kidnapped and beaten to death by some Natchez Klansmen. Their disappearance would have probably gone unnoticed under different circumstances—just two more local boys gone missing, never to be found. Before the end of the summer another body surfaced in the Big Black River. All that remained was the torso of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old black boy wearing a CORE T-shirt.

By the end of the summer the FBI had recruited several informants in the Klan, and they put together a roster of White Knights. Sooner or later most of the members got a house call.

When FBI agents Tom Van Riper and John Martin knocked on Delmar Dennis’s door in September, 1964, Dennis said, “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.”

The FBI men convinced Delmar Dennis that not only could he save his own neck from conspiracy charges, but he also could serve God and his country by going undercover for the FBI. For his services he would get one hundred dollars per week in expense money.

Delmar agreed to do it. Before long, based on information provided by Dennis and others, the FBI knew who was behind the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. They just had to keep their informants alive long enough to get the case to court in Mississippi.

The first batch of twenty-one indictments came down in early December 1964. The Justice Department had no faith in the local courts, so the crimes were handled under the U.S. Code. Murder is not a federal charge unless it takes place on government property, so the accused killers were charged with conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights, a federal crime. The stiffest sentence available was ten years in prison, but it was better than nothing. Lawrence Rainey, the sheriff of Neshoba County, his deputy Cecil Price, and the Klan kleagle, or recruiter, Edgar Ray Killen, were among the first group of defendants. Sam Bowers, the Klan’s imperial wizard, was not. It would be three years before the case came to trial.

After the FBI agents had their talk with Dennis, he had gone right out and paid his dues to rejoin the White Knights. Dennis had an amazing memory, and without using a tape recorder he was able to recall, almost to the word, what was discussed at meetings.

Since Dennis was a smart, presentable, respectable person, he stood out from the usual rabble that the Klan attracts. Sam Bowers spotted his talent right away. Only two months after the minister went undercover, Bowers named Dennis province titan for his sector of Mississippi. He reported directly to the imperial wizard. He was hot-wired right into the center of the White Knights.

During the three years Delmar Dennis spied on the Klan, he was able to give the FBI a clear picture of the White Knights’ inner workings. He knew their leaders and their heroes. He even got Byron De La Beckwith’s autograph. The occasion was a statewide Klan meeting and “kleagle school” on the banks of the Pearl River near Byram, south of Jackson, in August 1965.

Fifty to seventy-five Klansmen had gathered that day at L. E. Matthews’s fishing camp, but nobody was talking about fish. There were seminars on how to make bombs and the best ways to blow up churches.

After dark Beckwith, a big Klan hero, gave a motivational speech. He stood on the back of a flatbed truck while the headlights of parked pickups lit the makeshift arena. As Delmar Dennis remembered it, Beckwith encouraged the group to kill their enemies “from the President on down.” Dennis also heard him say this: “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.” Dennis knew that Beckwith was talking about Medgar Evers, and he reasoned that so did everybody else standing in that field in the hot Mississippi night.

As always Delmar Dennis reported what he had heard to his FBI handler, Tom Van Riper. Even though the agent knew Beckwith was still under indictment for the Evers murder, he and his superiors decided not to share the information with Bill Waller. As Van Riper saw it, Delmar Dennis was much too valuable an informant to risk blowing his cover on a state trial. At the time nothing was more important than the case the FBI had labeled MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”

In late 1965 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to make a big show out of investigating the Ku Klux Klan. The usual suspects from various Klans across the South were called to Washington. Subpoenas went out to dozens of reputed White Knights from Pascagoula to Petal, Mississippi, including Sam Bowers, Gordon Lackey, and Byron De La Beckwith.

The White Knights were questioned in January 1966. None said anything useful to the committee. Sam Bowers was so adamant that he pled the Fifth Amendment when asked his name. Beckwith appeared relaxed. He was polite, willingly providing the personal information the committee requested. But he held up the U.S. Constitution when the committee asked him if he even knew Gordon Lackey.

“Sir, I respectfully decline to answer that question and invoke as a defense the privilege granted to me by the Fifth, First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” Beckwith said.

Did Lackey recruit him into the White Knights?

“Sir, I respectfully decline…” On and on it went.

Did Beckwith, on March 5, 1965, throw eleven quart beer bottles filled with gasoline and stuffed with lit rags at the house of Laura McGhee of Greenwood?

Same answer.

On August 8, 1965, did he attend a state klonvocation held off Eldon Road in Jackson? At that same time was he appointed a kleagle in the White Knights?

Same answer.

A congressional investigator asked these questions. Then, oddly, Chairman Edwin Willis broke in. “The chair announces that it is the committee’s view that it would not be proper to go into matters in which this witness might have been involved as a principal, but which have not been finally resolved.”

Beckwith said, “I certainly appreciate that courtesy, thank you sir.”

Willis looked at the witness. “The chair was referring to criminal matters and I must say to the witness that we appreciate his expression, but we have taken that attitude because of our own determination of the propriety of our inquiry. The witness is excused.”

Beckwith left the table.

The only criminal matter before Beckwith at the moment was the still-open case of Medgar Evers’s murder.

If the HUAC hearings were meant to have a chilling effect on Klan violence in Mississippi, it didn’t work. While the hearings were still going on, a gang of White Knights firebombed the home of Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights leader in Hattiesburg. When he ran through the flames firing his shotgun to protect his family, Dahmer gulped fire and burned his lungs. He died a few hours later.

Here was another ghost in Mississippi, another man for Charles Evers to bury. Evers went to Hattiesburg the next night to lead a march and a prayer service for Dahmer on the steps of the Forrest County Courthouse. He couldn’t let this act go unanswered, let the Klan think they were afraid. Evers told the three hundred demonstrators that this killing should make them all go out and pay their poll tax. He called for a boycott of Hattiesburg businesses.

The FBI was all over the Dahmer case within hours, and it didn’t take long to compile a list of suspects. By the end of March fourteen Klansmen, including Sam Bowers, were arrested on federal warrants and charged with the now-familiar charge of conspiracy to deprive a man of his civil rights by killing him. They were all released on bond. (Bowers was tried four times in 1968 and 1969 on both federal and state charges.  Each time the jury failed to reach a verdict.)

By now the Ku Klux Klan was shot through with FBI informants. While investigations focused on Sam Bowers and his immediate circle, the bureau was also keeping an eye on Beckwith and his Klan buddies in Greenwood.

The Evers murder case was still open, and the FBI kept tabs on the Hinds County district attorney’s investigation.

An FBI memo dated June 19, 1966, reported that Bill Waller had advised the bureau that there had been no new developments in the case against Beckwith. The indictment was still outstanding, but Waller had said he wouldn’t pursue a prosecution unless additional evidence came to his attention.

Less than one month later, the FBI office in Jackson received an intriguing new piece of potential evidence: a “reliable” informant reported to his FBI contact that Gordon Lackey had bragged about how he and Beckwith had murdered Medgar Evers. The informant said that the conversation had taken place sometime before Beckwith’s first trial. The informant, Lackey, and one other man had been drinking at a lakeside clubhouse when Lackey allegedly told them this story:

Lackey and Beckwith had made two or three reconnaissance trips to Evers’s neighborhood in Jackson before the night of the killing. Lackey and Beckwith had been hiding in some bushes when Evers came home late one night. According to the informant, Lackey boasted, “They got the wrong man. Beckwith did not do the shooting.”

After the shot was fired, Beckwith and Lackey started to run out of the bushes, but they saw someone coming and dropped back. Eventually they split up; Beckwith ran to his car and Lackey hid in the bushes until it was safe to move. Beckwith picked him up “some distance from the area.” Lackey told the informant that he was late getting back to the National Guard camp where he had been training and had almost gotten caught.

The Jackson FBI office forwarded this information to Washington in a memo dated July 13, 1966. The memo noted that Gordon Lackey had been questioned about the Evers murder in June 1963, and that he had said he was at Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on the night of June 11, 1963. Lackey’s alibi was supported by two National Guard buddies from Greenwood who both said they had been out drinking with Lackey on the night of the shooting and had not been near Jackson.

J. Edgar Hoover quickly replied with a memo instructing Roy Moore, the SAC, or special agent in charge, of the Jackson office, to personally interview the informant and to do everything possible to convince him to testify in the Evers murder case. Moore replied on July 21, 1966, that the informant refused to come forward because he “loved life.” He had said there was not enough money in the world to make him testify. The SAC suggested to Hoover that the only thing they could do was to urge the informant to introduce Beckwith to another person who would be willing to testify, hoping that Beckwith would brag to him about the killing.

The FBI never passed any of this information to the Hinds County district attorney.

In early 1967, Byron De La Beckwith moved from Greenwood to an apartment in Jackson to launch his latest venture. His ex-wife, Willie, had by then moved back to Tennessee. Beckwith’s only employment was as a salesman for
The Southern Review
, the White Knights’ unofficial organ, edited by Elmore Greaves. For this he earned five hundred dollars per month.

Beckwith had meanwhile decided it was time to get into politics. On Valentine’s Day he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor of Mississippi.

In those days Mississippi was essentially a one-party state, and the Democratic primary was the only important election. The November race against the Republican candidate was just a formality.

Beckwith took to the campaign trail, apparently unconcerned about the indictment still hanging over him. He was walking around the Hinds County Courthouse one day when he spotted one of the Jackson detectives who had tried to send him to the gas chamber for killing Medgar Evers.

“Fred Sanders!” he called across the hall. Beckwith ran up to Sanders like an old friend, grabbed his hand and pumped it.

“What are you doing?” Sanders asked.

“I’m running for lieutenant governor of the fine state of Mississippi,” Beckwith said cheerfully. He hoped for Sanders’s support, he said, “because, suh, you of all people know that Byron De La Beckwith is a straight-shooter!”

Sanders just looked at him with amazement. The detective later learned that “He’s a Straight-Shooter” was Beckwith’s unofficial campaign slogan. It made Sanders wish he had been able to build a stronger case against the guy.

A month before the August primaries the Review published an interview with candidate Beckwith. He said that among his “chief qualifications” for the job was that he was “conscious of a diabolical international conspiracy against states’ rights and racial integrity.” Although Beckwith professed interests other than segregation, such as an unspecified “Highway Casualty Reduction Program,” the subject inevitably turned to race. He urged all “sane” Negroes to reject revolutionaries such as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Evers and to accept benevolent white rule in the interest of their own material well-being and “safety.”

It was during this campaign that Delmar Dennis met Beckwith for a second time. Sam Bowers had told Dennis to take care of Beckwith when he showed up in the area and introduce him to some other Klansmen.

Dennis recalled how Beckwith seemed to enjoy campaigning. He wore a white suit and white bucks; he kissed babies and hugged grandmothers. Beckwith scared the bejesus out of Delmar. The man had the remorseless eyes of a reptile.

In the primary Beckwith came in fifth in a field of six, with thirty- five thousand votes. For years he would boast that he did not finish last. After his political defeat Beckwith moved back to Greenwood, to a rented room in an old couple’s house in an unfashionable part of town.

By 1967 there were as many as 260,000 blacks on the voter rolls in Mississippi, about 29 percent of all voters. In 1964 the figure had been less than 5 percent. The change was a result of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that eliminated the poll tax and literacy tests.

In 1967 108 black candidates ran for office statewide, although only 22 of these won their elections. Robert G. Clark from Holmes County became the first black in the state legislature since the 1890s. That same year Bill Waller, whose main claim to fame was his prosecution of Beckwith, made an unsuccessful bid for governor.

That fall, Delmar Dennis ended his long career as an informant to testify at the trial of the accused killers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. More than three years had gone by since the bodies of the civil rights workers had been found in Olen Burrage’s dam. Now Sam Bowers and sixteen codefendants sat in the federal courthouse in Meridian on federal conspiracy charges. Dennis was only one of several Klansmen and informants who testified against the plotters. But Dennis’s testimony was the key to tying Sam Bowers to the killings.

After a ten-day trial, seven men were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Olen Burrage. The jury was deadlocked over three other verdicts, and it found seven defendants guilty as charged, including Alton Wayne Roberts, a Meridian klansman who had pulled the trigger on Goodman and Schwerner; Cecil Price, the deputy who had set them up; and Imperial Wizard Sam Holloway Bowers.

Price and Bowers were sentenced to ten years each; Roberts was given six. They were set free on bond during their appeals.

Beckwith remained loyal to his friends. He even sent out a fundraising letter for their defense.

“Five years ago I found myself completely uprooted from the normal pursuits of life and transplanted in the Hinds County Jail under an artificially concocted Federal charge of conspiracy…” he wrote. “I was also charged with murder…. Today in Mississippi, there are over forty patriotic, white, Christian soldiers now standing before local state or Federal Court of injustice on charges as trumped-up as was mine.”

The point of the letter was a plea for help for “those who fight your battles for you.” Beckwith urged supporters to send money to a defense fund administered by L. E. Matthews, who FBI sources said was the Klansman slated to take over for Bowers when he went to prison.

In March of 1969 a new Hinds County district attorney named Jack Travis quietly dropped the murder indictment against Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith’s bond was refunded, and the case passed into a legal limbo known as nolle prosequi, which means “a discontinued prosecution by the authorized attorney for the state.” Under nolle prosequi, in cases where a statute of limitations has not run out, the defendant can be reindicted and reprosecuted. And there is no statute of limitations on murder.

As the 1960s wore on and the various cases against Sam Bowers and his White Knights worked through the courts, the Mississippi Klan made a tactical error. They started blowing up Jewish targets. It was the outcome of a shifting ideology within the hard-core Klan, and it coincided with the growth of “Swiftism” and the Christian Identity Movement.

Sam Bowers was a “Swiftian.” Byron De La Beckwith was introduced to Wesley Swift’s virulent anti-Semitism when a friend gave him a set of Swift’s taped lectures shortly after his mistrials. Swift had founded the California-based Church of Jesus Christ, Christian, which would later be known as the Aryan Nations, to promote the Identity Movement.

There are many forms of Identity “faith,” but basically its followers believe that Caucasians are God’s chosen people — the true Israelites. Jews, along with blacks and other nonwhites are the “mud-people,” mongrels, not even humans, the offspring of Cain, who was born from the seed of Satan. The Jewish impostors, out of jealousy, want to destroy the white race. The blacks are merely their pawns.

Swift taught that white men were destined to be God’s enforcers, using “weapons of war to destroy the powers of darkness and the forces of evil” — namely, the Jews. Gradually the White Knights lost interest in most black targets and set their sights on the small but influential Jewish community in Mississippi.

Since early 1967 a spate of bombings had plagued Jackson. It had started with the dynamiting of a real estate company that sold houses to blacks in white neighborhoods. It progressed to more potentially deadly, and more specific, targets. First it was the new synagogue on Old Canton Road, then it was the rabbi’s house. He and his wife were sleeping when the bomb went off and were nearly killed.

A group of Jewish businessmen, led by a Jackson lawyer named Alvin Binder, decided to put an end to these outrages. With the help of Adolph “Bee” Botnick, head of the regional Anti-Defamation League (ADL) based in New Orleans, the Jewish group worked out a shadowy arrangement with the FBI. They supplied money to pay informants to put a stop to the bombings. And they, particularly Binder, developed their own paid sources.