The Ghosts of Mississippi (38 page)

The reason he had come back was Bob Moses. They had met at a symposium to refute the premises of the movie
Mississippi Burning
in 1988. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty-four years. Before long they knew they had to somehow finish what they had started with Freedom Summer. Annie Devine, the tireless old COFO activist, was there, and she lit into Dennis for abandoning Mississippi. She told him that he and Moses were like men who had fathered a child and then left it without any support. That stung, because they knew it was true.

Moses had returned from a self-imposed exile in Africa, where he had worked for the Ministry of Education in Tanzania in the 1970s. Now he was quietly revolutionizing the teaching of math in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had earned his doctorate. With the help of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Moses had set up the Algebra Project, a holistic approach to teaching children who sorely needed a grounding in math. When Moses told him about it, Dennis got excited about the possibilities of expanding the Algebra Project to the Mississippi Delta. Now he was coordinating the project full-time in Mississippi and across the South. He had no intention of attending Beckwith’s trial, if it ever happened, or of getting involved in Mississippi politics again, and neither did Moses. That part of their lives had ended.

Dick Gregory also was staying away from the Beckwith scene. He had returned to the state from time to time as a paid inspirational speaker and supporter of various causes. He had left show business back in the seventies to promote nutrition and fasting. He was a purveyor of vitamin powders and radical diets. Recently he had been waging a campaign against drug abuse. Gregory was constantly on the road, and he answered his phone calls in hotel rooms with the words “God Bless You!” He had become an oddity on the fringe of politics, a casualty of an old war.

Ed King still bore the scars of the car wreck that had almost killed him the week Medgar Evers was murdered. He faithfully attended the functions and fund-raisers for civil rights causes in Jackson. But his lawsuit to limit access to the Sovereignty Commission files had distanced him from some of his former allies, and he was involved in other, less than progressive causes, such as Operation Rescue, the antiabortion project. King would tell anyone who asked him that he thought the Beckwith case was a sham and a smoke screen to cover up the real problems in Mississippi such as crime and poverty and indifference.

John Salter was now chairman of the Indian Studies department at the University of North Dakota. He had remained true to his social causes after leaving Mississippi and had spent many years working with the poor and disfranchised before settling in Grand Forks. He still considered himself an activist and maintained his considerable network of contacts across the country. He had written a thoroughly researched and well-received book on the Jackson Movement, and he was a thoughtful and helpful interview subject for any writer who was interested in the era.

He was surprised that DeLaughter had never called to ask him about the case. He could have told him that Beckwith had not been in the church the night Evers was killed, because Salter had been there the whole time and would have seen him. But Salter might have a credibility problem in a court of law. He now taught a university course on the UFO phenomenon. He had written articles about it and had appeared on television recounting his personal experiences as someone who had been abducted many times by friendly visitors from space.

Salter and King had had a falling-out over the UFO business. They were no longer speaking.

The room where the Mississippi Supreme Court hears cases is shaped like an egg. Justices sit at a long, semicircular desk, spectators are arranged in three ascending rows on the opposite side, and a podium stands in the middle, where the yolk would be.

On October 15, 1992, every last seat in the spectator gallery was filled. It was the biggest crowd yet for any of the proceedings in the Beckwith case. Curious lawyers, family members, old Klansmen, and black city council members sat side by side. A passel of community activists and NAACP leaders showed up. The message, in case the justices missed it, was: You are being watched.

For the first time Beckwith skipped a court appearance. It was not the custom for a defendant to appear in these chambers, no matter how badly he might want to be there.

Myrlie Evers was not expected either. But for the first time since Beckwith had been indicted, she came to court. Heads turned and people murmured as she walked into the hall. Klansmen squinted and strained to get a better look at her.

She wore a dark gold suit and a cheetah-print scarf. She sat in the front row of the gallery, right behind the prosecutors. She had a notebook and pen in her hands.

Evers studied the seven justices carefully as they entered wearing their flowing black robes and took their seats. Fred Banks, the one African-American justice, had recused himself because he had known and admired Medgar Evers, and so had one white justice, without giving a reason. There was one woman on the court, Lenore Prather, who wore her hair in a stiff honey-blond froth and seemed perfectly in place among the elderly men who radiated whiteness and grim decorum. Evers’s heart sank. They were all nearly Beckwith’s age. Looking at them she saw the face of the Old South. Then she saw something else in the stern, dyspeptic expressions and wattled necks emerging from robes like black, folded wings, and she suppressed an inappropriate giggle. Arranged in a patient semicircle in front of her the justices looked like vultures surrounding a fresh kill.

“Only God can make you do the right thing,” she thought to herself as the hearing began.

Merrida Coxwell wore a European-cut suit, and his trademark long hair flowed over his collar. His skin was so taut you could bounce a quarter off his cheeks.

He had so much to say and only fifteen minutes to say it in. He began by pointing out that the delay in his client’s prosecution had been the longest he could find on record in Mississippi or anywhere else. He outlined how this delay had prejudiced Beckwith. His strongest argument was not the twenty-eight-year lapse between the first trial and the current proceedings, but the fact that Beckwith’s indictment had been open and on the books from 1964 until the nolle prosequi in 1969. Coxwell argued that Beckwith could have been retried at any time during those five years, while his lawyers were alive and well, memories were fresh, and witnesses available. But he hadn’t been.

DeLaughter rose to respond. There was no statute of limitations on murder, he said, and a murder case that has been dismissed can be retried in good faith, as in the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of murdering his family. He challenged Coxwell’s claim that the delay between 1964 and 1969 prejudiced Beckwith’s case because Coxwell could show no evidence that the open indictment had been a hardship for Beckwith. DeLaughter also pointed out that Beckwith could have had another trial if he had asked for one. According to the law in those days, the burden was on the defendant to demand action.

The justices asked each side a few questions, and then it was over. The decision would be announced later.

Among the lawyers in the audience the smart money was on the defense. Most of them felt that the case would be dismissed.

After the hearing was over Myrlie Evers faced the mob of cameras and tape recorders in the foyer. “I cannot deal with the idea that Medgar may be assassinated all over again in the courts,” she said. “I have no tolerance for people who say that it has been so long and, for that reason, this case should be dropped.”

Little Delay, the defendant’s forty-five-year-old son, edged into the crowd of reporters, straining to hear what Evers was saying. “Do people criticize when the German war criminals are pursued for those injustices they did to people? Why is this different?” she asked.

A few feet away Little Delay began holding forth to his own crowd of journalists. “Both families have suffered,” he said. “I would like to hear the truth as much as she would like to hear the truth. We are just going about it in different ways.”

Evers continued, finding her stride. She spoke with the extraordinary eloquence that she could sometimes muster in interviews, so that it was hard to believe she wasn’t reading a prepared statement. A trial, she hoped, would open the door to more investigations and prosecutions of other unpunished crimes of the past. “We have to settle these dastardly acts of old,” she said. “If we don’t, we will live with ghosts that will haunt us forever.”

Evers soon flew back to Oregon to wait for the decision. She hadn’t been home for a long time. Her husband, Walter Williams, was in Los Angeles for some medical tests. The houseplants were somehow all right, the ivy and the Christmas cactus and the two gardenia plants that she had nursed from tiny sprouts, that weren’t supposed to live in that climate, had somehow survived a month of neglect. The cactus was blooming.

She learned from her neighbors that the house alarm had gone off twice in her absence — both times in the early-morning hours. The police had come and found nothing.

The police had been on alert ever since someone had planted a bomb in Myrlie’s mailbox a few months earlier. It was a crude bomb, and luckily the heat had melted its detonation device. If it hadn’t, the bomb could have blown her hand off, or perhaps her head, when she opened the box. No one had claimed responsibility for the package. The FBI wasn’t sure whether the bomb had been put there because of the Beckwith case or simply because Evers and Walter Williams were the only black people in the neighborhood. This was no consolation as she bolted the doors.

Evers spent that first night in her own bed with an array of items on the nightstand: a heavy flashlight, a pipe, an aerosol can of anti-spider spray (good to spray in somebody’s face), and the gun that she knew how to use and would use without hesitation.

Her injured back was acting up again, and she was worried about Walter and frazzled by all the waiting, feeling absolutely helpless while the supreme court took its time deliberating. It could be days or months before they handed down a decision. She was so weary it hurt to breathe.

There wasn’t a columnist in Mississippi who thought the state supreme court would allow the Beckwith case to proceed. Every pundit seemed to have just had lunch with one of the justices, and they knew for a fact that the case would be dismissed over the speedy trial issue.

Then, on December 16, the court punted. In a 4-3 decision, they decided not to decide until after the trial. “While Beckwith’s indictment, arrest and anticipated trial may raise serious and troubling constitutional questions, he clearly has no constitutional or statutory right” to appeal before trial, the majority ruling said.

At the same time the court reversed an earlier decision and recommended that Beckwith be granted bond unless the circuit judge could prove he was a danger to the community.

Myrlie Evers expressed relief that the way had been cleared for a trial. “It’s been a long, emotional roller coaster,” she told the
Clarion-Ledger.
The ruling softened the realization that Beckwith might soon walk out of jail. If that happened, DeLaughter told the press, he doubted that Beckwith would ever return to Mississippi to stand trial.

Meanwhile Coxwell and Kitchens appealed the state supreme court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to get the case dismissed before trial.

One day before Christmas Eve, 1992, Beckwith was released from the Hinds County jail on $100,000 bond. John Branton had died that fall, and Beckwith needed another source for his bond. A “stranger” had appeared out of nowhere and handed Little Delay a check for $12,000 to secure the bond.

“The Lord works miracles,” the son whooped.

A couple of white supremacists claimed credit for the deed, but the donor was — of all people — a Jewish lawyer from Jackson named Harry Rosenthal. He said he couldn’t stand to see Beckwith’s rights violated. As much as this irked Beckwith, he took the money anyway.

Judge Hilburn ordered Beckwith to remain in the state of Mississippi and to report periodically to the court. By nightfall a deputy sheriff had driven him north to Aberdeen and dropped him off at his son’s double-wide mobile home out in the country, where he was installed in the second bedroom.

Beckwith’s wife, Thelma, was still in Tennessee and not happy about it. “He hasn’t called me!” she told Beverly Kraft of the Jackson paper, hinting at some previously unknown family rift. “Let him stay with his son. I’m going to die and I hope I die quickly!”

While Thelma kept her vigil on Signal Mountain, the Beckwith clan planned a quiet Christmas Eve in Aberdeen. The phone, however, would not stop ringing. One eager young reporter from the
Clarion-Ledger
named James Overstreet wanted an interview. Little Delay asked if he was willing to pay for it.

Overstreet called back and said no, the paper didn’t pay for interviews. But by the way, he asked, where do you live?

“On Darracott Road, but you don’t need to know because you are not invited,” Little Delay replied.

The reporter tried to explain this to his bosses, but Overstreet’s editors apparently told him to get that interview anyway. So he did what most reporters do if they are hungry enough. He went up and knocked on the door.

First he had to get through the gate. It was locked and chained. He said, later, at his trial, that a helpful neighbor had pointed to a hole in the fence and told him to go through. Nobody was home when he got to the trailer. He was walking back down the driveway when Little Delay and his father pulled up in a pickup.

“I asked him, ‘Just what in the hell are you doing on my property and who are you?’ ” the younger Beckwith recalled at Overstreet’s trespassing trial a month later. “I threatened to whip his young bee-hind!”

The father and son made a citizen’s arrest of the shaken reporter. The younger Beckwith told their captive that he had three options: “Break and run, get in the vehicle with me or I was gonna put him in my vehicle.”