The Ghosts of Mississippi (17 page)

Inside the funeral home Clarie Collins Harvey prepared the body of Medgar Evers for its last journey on a slow train through the South, to the nation’s capital. Harvey and Mary Cox, an insurance agent, took the casket to the train station in Meridian and rode with it to Washington. Clarie remembers the crowds that gathered at every station along the way, silent black folks lining the tracks, some of them weeping. There was no sign or funeral bunting on the train, no announcement beforehand. Somehow they knew it was Medgar Evers, and so they came.

The next day, Tuesday, Salter and King learned that they were being indicted for “inciting to riot.” It was on their minds as they drove back to Tougaloo along North West Street, as usual.

It was about 11:30 a.m. and the lunchtime traffic was just starting. John Salter caught a glimpse of the white boy driving a car that ran the stop sign just ahead of them. That car plowed into the southbound lane, causing another driver to swerve and hit Salter and King head-on.

Salter woke up in a blood-drenched haze. There was a jagged hole in the passenger side windshield. Ed King was slumped by the door, blood gushing from his face.

In the emergency room Salter saw a contingent of Jackson plainclothesmen taking a good look at him as he lay helpless and drugged on the gurney. One was the man who had slammed him with the car door a week earlier.

Salter and King drifted in and out of consciousness all week. On Wednesday Jeanette King brought a copy of the Jackson
Daily News
to the hospital, and Salter learned that his dreams for another Birmingham were over.

The paper was full of news of “easing tensions.” Five Negro leaders from Jackson had met with Mayor Thompson, who had offered a compromise to end the demonstrations. He would hire Negro policemen for Negro areas, have Negro school crossing guards, upgrade salaries for municipal workers, and continue meetings with Negro leaders. It was essentially the same package Medgar Evers and the local NAACP had already rejected. It did not include public accommodations integration or school integration or a biracial committee. But it was being sold to the folks as a great victory. The deal was voted on in a mass meeting and accepted. Charles Evers backed the compromise. The next big push would be a voter registration drive.

John Salter sighed. His head was pounding, and rain was falling on the streets outside his hospital room, cooling the city at last. The Jackson Movement ended for him that day. Within weeks he would leave the state to take a job as a field representative for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, based in New Orleans.

That afternoon Medgar Evers was buried in Arlington Cemetery, a long way from home.

Myrlie and Charles and Reena and Darrell flew to Washington for the burial ceremony. Medgar had wanted to be buried in Jackson, and Myrlie wanted that too, but the NAACP had other ideas. There would be a big ceremony and speeches at the national cemetery. Medgar would be working for the NAACP even in his grave.

Five hundred people met the funeral train at Union Station and accompanied the body to the funeral home. Twenty-five thousand more came to view the body.

Myrlie and Charles followed the hearse to Arlington.

Charles Evers could hardly stand it. He could barely drag himself out of the limousine when it reached the grave. This was the brother he had kept warm all those years, whose side of the bed he would heat up with his own body each night before they went to sleep. And now they were going to lower that brother into a cold, dark grave, and it just about tore Charles’s heart out. He could never stand for Medgar to be cold.

Hundreds of people gathered on the green slopes of Arlington National Cemetery as Medgar Evers was lowered into his grave. The crowd was filled with senators and congressmen, grim-faced officials from the Justice Department and the president’s cabinet. While Kennedy did not attend, he had invited Charles and Myrlie and the children to visit him at the White House after the funeral.

Charles remembers looking out over the gravesite and the rolling lawns with the great monuments of Washington in the distance, and feeling a memory surface from deep in the past.

“Well, Bilbo,” he thought to himself. “We finally made it to Washington.”

Medgar Evers was given a full military burial, with a six-man honor guard and a three-gun salute. After a bugler sounded taps, a soldier handed Myrlie the American flag that had draped Medgar’s casket.

Two days later, she and her family flew home alone.

Even before he saw the rifle in the newspaper, Thorn McIntyre wondered whether Byron De La Beckwith might be the killer. There was a rumor going around Greenwood that Delay had been involved somehow. Then McIntyre saw the Enfield rifle on the front page of the Jackson
Daily News,
and his stomach seized up. He was almost sure that was Beckwith’s gun. But he had to be certain. So he called the number they gave in the paper and asked some questions about the markings on the Enfield. The sergeant who answered the phone told him the rifle had the inscription “Eddystone” and the numbers 9-18 on top of the barrel. Now Thorn was in a genuine fix.

Innes Thornton McIntyre III was a solid citizen. Around Greenwood they said he came from a good family, and that meant a lot. In the spring of 1963 he was twenty-five years old, a handsome veteran with a lovely wife and two small children. He’d had two years of college at Mississippi State and now managed Greenbriar, the family’s cotton plantation, a few miles outside Greenwood.

McIntyre was a typical man of his time and place: he loved sports, he collected guns, he went to church, he was a patriot and a segregationist. A bumper sticker seen in the South summed up how he felt about his heritage: “Born in the USA by Chance; Born a Southerner by the Grace of God.” Being a southerner meant being genteel, showing respect and good manners. It meant feeling a separateness from the rest of the country, a distinction to be proud of. But Thorn considered himself a regular person. Growing up he had been more concerned with dates and football than politics. In 1963 the integration problem was on most people’s minds, but it wasn’t the most pressing issue in their lives. For white people like Thorn it was more important to put food on the table and pay the bills than to stay up nights worrying about the “Negro question.”

Thorn McIntyre had grown up around black folks, and he felt, like many white men of his generation, that he had a “special bond” with the servants and laborers on his place, many of whom had worked for his family for years. There was a personal connection, even though blacks and whites occupied separate worlds. There were rules: you didn’t cross over into their world, and they didn’t cross over into yours. As long as you respected that, everyone got along just fine. Thorn, like everyone else in his white world, was worried that this cherished “relationship,” this hallmark of the “southern way of life,” was threatened by the outside agitators coming in to stir things up. He was opposed to it. But there was a point beyond which he would not go.

Delay Beckwith was different. In Thorn’s estimation he was more than willing to cross that line, and he was capable of anything.

In Greenwood in those days everybody knew everybody. So naturally McIntyre and Beckwith were acquaintances. Like every other white man in Beckwith’s line of sight, McIntyre had been pestered with anti-integrationist literature, and Beckwith would use every conversation as an excuse to talk politics.

The only thing Beckwith cared about as much as segregation was guns, and in that he and McIntyre had something in common. Both men loved guns and loved to trade them.

In 1959 McIntyre ordered an old Enfield rifle from a catalog. When Beckwith laid eyes on it, according to McIntyre, he simply had to have it. He kept pestering Mclntrye, suggesting all kinds of trades, until one day in January 1960 Thorn finally caved in and traded with him, just to get rid of him. That was the kind of salesman Beckwith was: persistent. He would just wear you down until he got his way.

Beckwith got the barrel and action of the old Enfield, and Thorn kept the original wooden stock. Beckwith gave him a new .244 Remington rifle barrel and another old Enfield action with a rusty barrel.

Three and a half years later there Thorn was: a decent man caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. The reward money didn’t interest him, even though there was now $22,000 up for grabs. If he turned Beckwith in, some people would think he was a rat and a traitor. On the other hand, that rifle could be traced to McIntyre, and he didn’t want to be accused of murder. And as much as he hated the idea of integration, shooting a man in the back in his driveway was not the way to go. McIntyre suspected that his life was never going to be the same as he picked up the phone and made another call to the Jackson Police Department.

McIntyre’s call was one of dozens that came in during the days following the murder. There were more leads than the police could check out in a month, but they ran down dozens of them. Some seemed promising, such as the White Top cab that Medgar Evers’s neighbors had seen cruising around on the night of the murder. It turned out to have been delivering a telegram.

Detectives came up with more helpful information when they canvassed the neighborhood. The weekend before the murder Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Pittman, owners of the local grocery store, had seen a well-dressed white man nosing around the vacant lot they had for sale. He was of average height and drove a white, late-model Valiant or Dodge with a long aerial in the back. They wouldn’t have thought much of it except that he had been wearing sunglasses after dark.

Two cabdrivers at the Trailways bus station in Jackson said that a white man had been asking for directions to Medgar Evers’s house, but they couldn’t help him. They said he had a local accent and told them he needed to find out where Evers lived in the next couple of days. They described him as tall, in his early forties, and wearing dark pants and shirt and a brown hat.

This seemed very promising, although there was also a report of a man fitting the same description arriving about that time on a bus from Shreveport, Louisiana. The man, according to witnesses, seemed like a “nut” because he had accused a ticket agent and the bus driver of being communists.

While the police combed the city for leads, the local FBI office was running down its list of the usual suspects. Informants called in tips. One said that Red Hydrick, the bootlegger, had something to do with the murder. Another said a former policeman had been involved. Someone spotted a blue pickup truck with a rifle in the gun rack in Joe’s Drive In parking lot before the murder. The same truck also had been seen at a civil rights demonstration in Jackson on May 28. The FBI shared much of this information with the Jackson police. What the FBI did not tell the police was that they were closing in on the real suspect.

The FBI hadn’t done much for Medgar Evers when he was alive. Now that he was dead, J. Edgar Hoover mobilized hundreds of agents in forty-eight field divisions to help find his killer.

They started with the obvious: who owned the rifle and scope? Unfortunately the .30/06 rifle was more than forty years old, and nearly two million Enfields had been made at the end of World War I. They had been sold as surplus, and they were a popular collector’s item throughout the country, a big mover at gun fairs. Records were hard to trace.

The Japanese-made Golden Hawk scope was more promising. There were only fifteen-thousand in the country, and they were sold through one importer in Chicago. He kept good records. Only five scopes had been shipped to Mississippi, one of them to Duck’s Tackle Shop in Grenada, about twenty miles north of Greenwood. The FBI traced each of the scopes, sometimes through several owners. They found all but the one that had been shipped to Grenada. FBI agents questioned the shop owner, John “Duck” Goza, three times before he finally said, “Wait a minute, I’ll tell you what I think you want to know.” He was almost sure that he had traded the scope to a Byron De La Beckwith from Greenwood, but he didn’t want to “get him in trouble.”

The two agents drove down to Greenwood to check Beckwith out. At dusk, while they were parked outside his house waiting for him to show, Beckwith drove up in his white Valiant.

Beckwith instantly recognized the FBI agents, who were dressed in coats and ties. He walked over and told them to get off his street. When they asked to talk to him, he said, “No comment.” When they asked him if he knew anything about the Golden Hawk scope, he said nothing and walked into his house.

Once they had a name, workers at the FBI lab in Washington were able to come up with a set of prints from Beckwith’s Marine Corps records. In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 22, they had a match with the latent print on the scope.

On Saturday afternoon Beckwith’s neighbors on George Street noticed a nondescript American car and some conspicuously overdressed white men hanging out in front of the old Yerger place. They were asking passersby where Beckwith might be found. One of the neighbors called Yerger Moorehead to tell him that the FBI was snooping around, and he in turn called Beckwith, who was working at the fertilizer company in Greenville that day.

Beckwith called Hardy Lott, the family lawyer, who was also city attorney for Greenwood, to ask for advice. They decided that Beckwith would turn himself in at Hardy’s office. Yerger negotiated with the FBI agents, saying that Beckwith wanted time to shave and change out of his field clothes before he met them.

At eleven o’clock Saturday night Beckwith was arrested in Lott’s office. He was charged under the 1957 Civil Rights Act for conspiring to injure, oppress, and intimidate Medgar Evers in the free exercise of his constitutional rights. The federal warrant charged Beckwith and “persons unknown” with this conspiracy, but no one else was arrested.

When Beckwith was taken into custody, he was wearing what would become his trademark outfit: a neat dark suit, a monogrammed shirt with French cuffs, a good tie, and a pocket square. He was, of course, going to behave like a gentleman. There was no need for handcuffs.

Fred Blackwell, the young photographer for the Jackson
Daily News
, had gotten a tip that there would be an arrest in the Evers case. He was waiting at the police station. Fred was surprised that Beckwith was all dressed up, like a real dandy, and that he did not seem at all upset about being charged with murder.

The FBI agents turned Beckwith over to the Jackson police, who planned to file state murder charges. He spent what was left of the night at the city jail.

On Sunday the police put together a lineup. Both cabdrivers were brought in to identify the man who had been asking for directions to Evers’s house. Only one, Herbert Speight, was positive the man was Beckwith.

The Pittmans also were shown the six-man lineup. Mr. Pittman picked out Beckwith as the man he had seen prowling around the vacant lot, but he said he couldn’t be absolutely positive.

Detectives Luke and Turner tried to get Beckwith to talk to them about the case. Beckwith would gab about the weather and the baseball scores and gun collecting, but he had nothing to say about the murder. When they asked him to take a lie detector test, he said he had “no statement to make at this time.” When they tried to bait him into talking about segregation, he told them that Mississippi could use a Ku Klux Klan, that it could do a lot of good. But that was all he would say.

Monday’s
Clarion-Ledger
carried a banner headline that read: “Californian Charged with Murder of Evers.” The paper pointed out that Beckwith had not been born in Mississippi.

On Monday the federal charges against Beckwith were “deferred” while state murder charges were filed. After a preliminary hearing on Tuesday the judge ordered Beckwith held without bail, pending an indictment from the grand jury. Hinds County district attorney Bill Waller said that he would ask for the death penalty.

After Beckwith’s picture appeared in the newspapers, the Jackson police got several calls from people who thought they had seen him snooping around the Masonic Temple on June 7, the night Lena Horne and Dick Gregory had spoken. Lillian Louie, the NAACP office secretary, said that she had seen Beckwith at the meeting and a few days later, on June 11, had seen him in the office. But Louie could not pick him out from a photo lineup.

The police identified two other white men who resembled Beckwith and had been seen at the Masonic Temple on June 7 and June 11. One was a strange man from Michigan who had been hanging around asking questions. The other was an undercover cop.

They still couldn’t definitely place Beckwith in Evers’s vicinity.

Bill Waller was thirty-seven years old and ambitious. He was a sixth- generation Mississippian from a big landowning family near Oxford, William Faulkner’s hometown.

Bill Waller was not a tall man, but he was powerfully built, with a large head and a peculiar hairline. His straight dark hair came down low at his forehead and jutted sharply back at the temple. It emphasized his heavy, low-slung face, which was often set in an expression that explained, somehow, why the Waller family inevitably chose bulldogs as pets.

Waller had followed a conventional career path that could lead to the Governor’s Mansion and beyond: Ole Miss law school, military service (he had been in army intelligence during the Korean War), a law practice in the capital city. In 1960 Waller was elected Hinds County D A. It was a part-time job, but he brought in his law partner, John Fox, to help him out. They kept their private practice going, which was perfectly legal at the time, while they prosecuted all the felonies in four counties.

In the summer of 1963 Bill Waller was not exactly a household name in Mississippi. Before long, everyone who read the paper or watched the TV news knew him. But name recognition can sometimes backfire. Bill Waller and John Fox claim that it never entered their minds, but vigorously prosecuting a controversial race murder case, even against a man like Beckwith, was not going to win them friends among the Citizens’ Councils clique, which still had a powerful influence in Mississippi.

To be honest, people were shocked that there had been an arrest in the Evers case. And so many white men had walked away from killing a Negro that nobody really thought that Beckwith would ever be tried, much less convicted. Charles Evers and Myrlie Evers made hopeful, cautious statements to the press. Aaron Henry was typically blunt: “I don’t think they will indict him.” He speculated that Beckwith would get off on “the lunacy angle” and might get a suspended sentence. Henry predicted large demonstrations in Jackson and across the country if that happened.