The Ghosts of Mississippi (12 page)

John and Eldri Salter spent Christmas Day with the Everses, and Myrlie cooked them all dinner. It was a grim, rainy afternoon and the mood was no better. Medgar showed Salter the collection of guns he kept in the house and the German shepherd named Heidi who patrolled the backyard. They agreed that the beast was stirring in the state. A change was coming, and everyone knew the price.

“The white man won’t change easily,” Salter remembers Medgar saying. “Some of these people are going to fight hard. And more of our people could get killed.”

Salter watched Myrlie listening quietly. He knew that she knew whose life was on the line.

COFO divided Mississippi into regions for each civil rights group to conquer. SNCC intensified its voter registration campaign in the Delta. In retaliation, the white leaders of LeFlore County decided to cut off surplus federal food aid, which was used to help the desperately poor part-time field hands and their families through the winter. People were literally starving in Greenwood.

SNCC organized a drive to distribute food and supplies and medicine to the Negroes of LeFlore County. Dick Gregory chartered a plane to fly fourteen thousand pounds of food from Chicago to Memphis, Tennessee, and then truck it down to Greenwood. The more food that was handed out, the more status SNCC gained among the people.

On Wednesday, February 20, 1963, six hundred people lined up in Greenwood for their rations. Two days later fifty Negroes silently lined up at the courthouse to register. That week several houses in the black part of Greenwood were torched.

On the night of February 28 Bob Moses and two other SNCC workers named Randolph Blackwell and James Travis drove out of town for a meeting in Greenville. A white Buick without license plates and carrying three white men followed them. About seven miles out of Greenwood the Buick pulled up beside them on the dark highway and sprayed the SNCC car with bullets.

Travis, who was driving, was hit in the neck and shoulder. Moses grabbed the wheel and stomped on the brakes as the car swerved off the road. Jimmy Travis survived, but only after a copper-jacketed slug was removed millimeters from his spinal cord.

Rather than run, Moses and the SNCC leadership called for an intensified campaign in Greenwood — more canvassers, more marches. The whites struck back. The SNCC office was destroyed by a firebomb. Sam Block and three others were showered with glass when someone fired a shotgun into their car.

That March John Salter and a group from Jackson drove to Greenwood with Medgar Evers. A mass rally was being held in the church now used as SNCC headquarters. Fifteen hundred people packed the church; three hundred more stood outside while police cruisers circled.

Evers was called to the stage to say a few words. The Greenwood campaign had moved him deeply. He saw what was possible when people overcame their fear and marched. If the movement could draw this kind of crowd in a redneck Delta backwater like Greenwood, think of what could be accomplished in the capital city.

Salter thinks it was a turning point for Evers. He could feel it in the words he spoke that night: “It’s very good to see the number of persons out here tonight, and certainly this indicates that we’re ready for freedom and ready to march for it. . . . We’re going to go back to Jackson and fight for freedom as you’re fighting for it here in Greenwood.. . . When we get this unity, ladies and gentlemen, nothing can stop us.”

Dick Gregory was spending more and more time in Mississippi. He had an affinity for SNCC, and since the group was organizing in Greenwood, that is where Dick Gregory went. He waged a personal war with the police, defying them to arrest him, taunting them back when they taunted him.

“Nigger,” he would hear a cop mutter.

“Yo’ mother’s a nigger!” Gregory would reply.

The cop would just gape at the pudgy black man in the big, audacious cowboy hat. The police took it from him, because word must have gotten out not to arrest Dick Gregory and make a martyr out of him. He couldn’t get himself arrested. So he marched, and he watched while the cops beat on old ladies and young kids. The whites in Greenwood had no idea what to do with a black man who didn’t fear them.

That wasn’t the case in Alabama.

Gregory went from Greenwood to Birmingham that spring to join Martin Luther King’s massive civil rights demonstrations. King had been arrested, and Dick Gregory was promptly thrown in jail as soon as he marched. It was in the Birmingham jail, he later said, that he received the first truly professional beating of his life.

By then Birmingham had cornered America’s attention. The media ate it up. It was an allegorical pageant, a classic conflict of good versus evil, the easiest kind of symbolism for the nation to absorb. The saintly, nonviolent Dr. King battling the forces of evil represented by Eugene “Bull” Connor and his dogs. The TV cameras were rolling when the dogs were set loose on the peaceful marchers and the fire department opened up its power hoses on women and children, hurtling them into brick walls and down slick sidewalks. Charles Moore of
Life
magazine was there to capture every contortion and grimace on film.

The images from Birmingham probably turned the tide of public opinion against the segregationist South. King was anointed leader of the civil rights movement.

This was very disturbing to Roy Wilkins, particularly when UPI reported that Martin Luther King was considering a similar campaign in Mississippi. Not only was Wilkins jealous of King, but he and Gloster Current worried about the aftermath of massive demonstrations. What would happen to the people of Birmingham and Jackson and Greenwood once the outsiders got their headlines and packed up and moved on?

By now Medgar Evers had more or less committed himself to the idea of direct action. He quietly encouraged Martin Luther King to come to Jackson. Meanwhile the national leadership of the NAACP scrambled to keep King out of Mississippi.

The boycott of Capitol Street in Jackson had continued into the spring of 1963. The whites would not negotiate. When they could raise the bail money, the Youth Council kept up its pickets. In April Roy Wilkins ponied up five hundred dollars for the group and in a letter assured Salter that “we stand ready to assist in any way until success has been achieved.” Salter was encouraged but baffled. He suspected that Wilkins’s sudden interest had something to do with Birmingham.

By mid-May the Jackson Movement had gained momentum, and it was ready to throw down the gauntlet. A letter was sent to the governor and the mayor demanding an end to all racial discrimination in Jackson’s stores, parks, public facilities, and schools. It put the Capitol Street gang on notice that they were about to have another Birmingham on their hands. Unless negotiations brought results, the letter promised to “step up and broaden our selective buying campaign.” To accomplish the end of segregation, the letter said, “we shall use all lawful means of protest — picketing, marches, mass meetings, litigation, and whatever other means we deem necessary.”

The letter was signed by John Salter, Doris Allison, and Medgar Evers.

On May 13 Mayor Thompson went on television to respond that he would never negotiate. Salter, Allison, and a number of other leaders and students piled into Evers’s office in the Masonic Temple and listened, slack jawed with disbelief, to the mayor’s unctuous speech.

Thompson looked straight into the camera and said that Jackson was a place where the races lived “side by side in peace and harmony.” Where the Negroes had “twenty-four-hour police protection.” Where there were “no slums.”

Speaking directly to his Negro citizens, he said, “You live in a city where you can work, where you can make a comfortable living. You are treated, no matter what anybody else tells you, with dignity, courtesy and respect. Ah, what a wonderful thing it is to live in this city. . . ! Refuse to pay any attention to any of these outside agitators who are interested only in getting money out of you, using you for their own selfish purposes.”

Evers decided to demand equal time. For one thing he wanted the people to know that he was no outside agitator. He was a Mississippian.

Medgar Evers appealed to the station WLBT and the Federal Communications Commission to get equal time to reply to Allen Thompson’s televised speech. The TV station, which was about to lose its broadcasting license because of biased coverage, gave in without a fight.

Evers raced back from an out-of-town trip and arrived at the studio just in time to prerecord his speech on May 20.

Dave Dennis remembers feeling uneasy. Before this moment, Medgar Evers had just been a name in the newspapers. Very few white people could recognize him. The televised reply put Medgar too far out in front. It focused the attention, and the danger, on one man instead of spreading it around to many.

But someone from Mississippi had to reply to the mayor’s charge that the demonstrations and boycotts were being led by “outside agitators.” And so Medgar Evers began his speech with the words, “I speak as a native Mississippian.”

Although many hands went into writing and revising the speech, it was pure Medgar: reasonable, forceful, and relentlessly logical. It must have rattled white Mississippians. Most of them knew Negroes only as farmhands and domestic workers. Here was a well-spoken, smart black man, a college graduate with a Yankee accent. And in a state where it was still the custom for a black to step off the sidewalk to let a white pass, here was a Negro talking back to the mayor of the capital city. Disputing him.

“Now, the mayor says that if the so-called outside agitators would leave us alone everything would be all right,” Evers said. “This has always been the position of those who would deny Negro citizens their constitutional rights….Never in history has the South, as a region, without outside pressure, granted the Negro his citizenship rights.”

Evers moved lightly into the new world order: the winds of change that were sweeping Africa stirred hardly a breeze in his own home state.

“Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television… about the new free nations in Africa, and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

“…Then he looks about his home community and what does he see…? He sees a city where Negro citizens are refused admittance to the City Auditorium and the Coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater…. He sees a city of over 150,000, of which forty percent is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, fireman, clerk, stenographer, or supervisor employed in a city department….

“What does the Negro want? He wants to get rid of racial segregation in Mississippi life because he knows it has not been good for him nor for the State….

“Jackson can change if it wills to do so…. We believe there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play send them the same message.

“But whether Jackson and the state choose change or not, the years of change are upon us….History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.”

Medgar Evers may have lacked the fire and poetry of Martin Luther King, but rarely has a better case been made for desegregation. King appealed to the heart; Evers went for the mind and the soul. He knew how to appeal to the sympathy of whites, and he knew he needed to win at least some of them to his cause. By his own example he could show whites that a black man could be reasonable, and educated, and well spoken. To a white supremacist, Medgar Evers, at that moment, must have seemed like the most dangerous man in Mississippi.

Even the Hederman newspapers couldn’t completely ignore the speech, but the Jackson
Daily News
brushed it aside with a couple of columns and a glib headline: “Mix Drive Talked Up.”

On Tuesday morning, May 28, the heat was building on the asphalt of Capitol Street. Three black Tougaloo students, all members of the Youth Council, walked into Woolworth’s and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter.

Nervous waitresses turned off the lights and stopped serving. Ann Moody, Pearlena Lewis, and Memphis Norman sat impassively on the stools as word spread through town and a crowd of white men assembled around them.

It started with a few insults and grew into something unspeakable. Raucous teenagers dumped ketchup and mustard on the heads of the demonstrators. Then an ex-policeman named Benny Oliver grabbed Memphis Norman and threw him to the floor. He was stomped and kicked in the head while white cops stood by and watched.

When word of the sit-in reached NAACP headquarters, Medgar Evers wanted to ride over to Woolworth’s, but John Salter talked him out of it. Salter went, along with some others, and waded into an ugly, surreal scene. Reporters and photographers and TV crews hovered around the counter while the mob threw food and screamed and slapped at the demonstrators. Norman had been hauled away unconscious, under arrest for disorderly conduct. Joan Trumpauer, the white student activist at Tougaloo, took his place and others came to join her. Salter sat down with them. A radio reporter was calling out the blows like a sports announcer at a ball game. Bam! Someone hit Salter on the side of the head, nearly knocking him off the stool. Crack! Another blow from behind. Someone threw a mixture of water and pepper into Salter’s eyes.

Medgar Evers later told Salter that FBI agents were in the store that day. They took notes but made no move to stop the violence. Police broke up the mob only when they started to smash the merchandise.

Many pictures were taken of this scene. One in particular captured the moment and went out over the wires to newspapers around the country. It shows John Salter hunched over the stainless steel counter covered with blood and ketchup and globs of mustard, his blond crew cut dusted with salt and sugar. Behind him a teenager in a checked shirt reaches to pour a canister of sugar over Trumpauer’s neatly coiled hair and down the back of her summer dress. Ann Moody, covered with slop, stares down at her hands, holding back tears. The mob is literally on top of them, leering boys laughing and dragging on cigarettes. There are no police visible in the frame. There is one older man clearly seen at the edge of the mob: Red Hydrick seems to be pushing his way to the front with a hungry, excited grin on his face.