The Ghosts of Mississippi (9 page)

On a breezy March day in 1961 nine students from Tougaloo College filed into a whites-only public library and sat down to read. Naturally the cops showed up and told the students to leave. The chief of detectives suggested that they use the “colored” library. The students kept their eyes on their open books and didn’t move.

They were duly arrested, charged with failing to disperse when ordered, and taken to jail. They were released on bond the next day. That morning about sixty students from Jackson State marched down Lynch Street, heading toward the city jail to protest the arrests. The first civil rights march in Jackson was broken up by cops with billy clubs and police dogs and tear gas.

Two days later on March 29 the nine students were set to be tried in municipal court. The seats reserved for Negroes in the courtroom filled up early, and about one hundred black spectators were directed to stand in a parking lot across Pascagoula Street. Newspaper accounts say that about one hundred whites were gathered on the other side of the courthouse. The trial was set for 4 p.m.

Medgar Evers arrived at about 3:35. He dropped off some colleagues and parked his car in the commercial lot. As he was walking toward the courthouse, he passed the Jackson Police Department headquarters. He saw three policemen in the window, and he didn’t recognize any of them; at least one of them recognized Medgar Evers.

“There he is,” said the cop, loud, as Evers walked by. “We ought to kill him.” Medgar Evers later told the FBI that he “just smiled” at the policemen and walked over to meet his friends.

When the students arrived for their trial, a few in the Negro crowd started to applaud. Without warning, a police captain yelled “Move ’em out!” and some twenty-five cops waded in, swinging clubs.

Although the police had tried to chase off the white spectators, seventy or so stayed behind. One of them was a big-time bootlegger and locally famous racist named G. W. “Red” Hydrick. The stout little man broke through the lines to practice some freelance crowd control. He chased down a black photographer and beat him with his pistol butt. Then he spotted Medgar Evers walking by.

All Evers saw was a white man in a dark suit and hat who snuck up behind him and pistol-whipped him in the back of the head with a blue-steel .38. The blow staggered Evers, but he didn’t fall. As he walked away, two uniformed cops ran up to him, and one shouted, “Get going, boy.”

Medgar assured them that he was going. But as he passed by, both officers clubbed him from behind, aiming for the kidneys. Evers was whisked off the street by two friends who recognized him.

After a doctor examined him and found that he wasn’t seriously injured, Medgar Evers started gathering up witnesses to sign affidavits of police brutality. He made his own statement to the FBI that night.

In the subsequent FBI reports the group of Negroes standing outside the courthouse is consistently referred to as a “mob.” Apparently no action was taken against the police. But a few weeks later, the new U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, Burke Marshall, made a specific request for an immediate FBI investigation of the incident.

Marshall told reporters, “I have Evers’s story. I’m trying to find out if it’s true. If it is, it’s a disgrace.”

Marshall added diplomatically, “I may say, though, that I’ve been told by local authorities that the instructions to the police were not to use force.”

It was not much, but at least it was something. The investigation never led to any charges, but the fact that the Justice Department waded into the fray signaled a real change in policy. The difference now, of course, was that John F. Kennedy had been inaugurated president that January.

Kennedy’s brother Robert was the new attorney general. Although Robert Kennedy later admitted, “I won’t say I stayed awake nights worrying about civil rights,” he and his brother soon came to take the Negro cause very seriously.

The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department that the Kennedys inherited didn’t have much bite, but it did have some good attorneys. One of them was named John Doar.

Doar was a slow-talking, long-legged trial lawyer from Wisconsin. His father was a trial lawyer too, and the two of them used to ride the circuit from small town to small town. It taught Doar how to do his own investigating, and it taught him something about how small-town courthouses work.

In 1960 a classmate from Princeton recruited Doar to join him at the Justice Department, as first assistant secretary in the Civil Rights Division. The division was trying to enforce the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, two weak laws that made it possible for the Justice Department to bring suit against counties where registrars discriminated against Negro voters. Doar stayed with the Justice Department when Robert Kennedy came into office.

The new attorney general walked into Doar’s office one day early in 1961 and told him that the president wanted to do something about civil rights — now. Doar persuaded Robert Kennedy to pursue a voting rights case in Macon County, Alabama, before Judge Frank Johnson. They tried the case in the spring of 1961 and quickly produced a groundbreaking victory for black voters.

One thing Doar had learned by then was that the FBI had to be poked and prodded into doing the legwork to prepare voter discrimination cases. Doar would compose long lists of specific questions for the agents to ask. One questionnaire was two hundred pages long. It was clear that J. Edgar Hoover and his men were not on the civil rights bandwagon. Because of that Doar ended up doing a lot of his own investigating, which is how he met Medgar Evers.

The next voting rights target, Doar decided, would be the southern counties of Mississippi. As it turned out, a number of affidavits from that region were already in the department’s files. They had been generated over the years by the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi.

When John Doar and his associate George Owen showed up at Medgar Evers’s door in Jackson, Medgar invited them in for coffee. Doar liked Evers instantly. Here was a levelheaded man, not a whiner or a screamer, someone with great conviction and dignity.

Medgar Evers took out a map of Mississippi and showed the two white men from Washington where they needed to go. He gave them contacts. He called ahead when he could. With Evers’s help Doar began preparing the first federal voting rights cases in Mississippi.

It would turn out to be a long, painful process, nothing like Alabama. Part of the problem was a deal that was already being made in Washington. By then Jim Eastland had achieved a lumbering seniority in the Senate, and with it the chairmanship of the key Judiciary Committee. He was in a prime position to block any of the appointments President Kennedy wanted to make. He had the power to deal, and he used it.

Kennedy was keen on making Thurgood Marshall a federal judge. Eastland knew that, and he had his price. One day early in the administration, the story goes, Eastland bumped into Robert Kennedy in the Senate hallway and said to him, “Tell your brother if he’ll give me Harold Cox, I’ll give him the nigger.”

In the end Kennedy got Thurgood Marshall on the bench, along with nine other black judges. Cox was the cup of hemlock he had to swallow.

On paper William Harold Cox seemed harmless enough. He had been Jim Eastland’s college roommate. He had no judicial record to speak of and no blatant alliances with white supremacist groups. Despite Roy Wilkins’s warning that Cox was a disastrous choice, Kennedy appointed him to the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. It was there that Cox ran head-on into John Doar. The two men sparred from the outset. Over the years Cox would refuse to schedule Doar’s cases, and Doar would try to have Cox censured for his outrageous behavior on the bench. In open court the judge called a group of black plaintiffs “a bunch of niggers . . . acting like a bunch of chimpanzees.” He called Doar “stupid.” Predictably, many of the Justice Department’s cases were beached in Cox’s courtroom.

As the Justice Department began its slow, painstaking, churning advance into civil rights litigation, a mass movement sprang up around the department’s young lawyers and pushed them in directions they hadn’t planned to go. In the spring of 1961 the energy of Doar’s division was diverted when a group of protesters from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to test court orders desegregating interstate transportation facilities (two years after Medgar Evers’s solo attempt). They called themselves the Freedom Riders.

The plan, conceived by the CORE director, James Farmer, was for two groups of experienced black and while nonviolent protesters to ride interstate buses across the South. The route would take them from Washington, D.C., through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and end up in New Orleans on May 17, the anniversary of
Brown v. Board of Education.

The SCLC gave the Freedom Riders full support, and even the NAACP’s Wilkins gave his quiet blessing to the enterprise. But one man who did not seem happy to see the Freedom Riders come through Mississippi was Medgar Evers.

Mississippi was sacred ground for the NAACP. The association would not tolerate the sort of membership raiding that might take place if the CORE people established a beachhead in the state.

Evers took five weeks to answer a letter from Farmer requesting support in the form of housing and food for the Freedom Riders when they reached Jackson. When he did respond, Evers’s tone was icy: “As much as we would like to help, we feel that CORE’S coming into Jackson at this time . . . will not have the effect intended and possibly hamper some of the efforts already in progress. … It would perhaps be better for you to bypass Mississippi and proceed to your destination.”

As soon as the Freedom Ride began, it turned into a bloody fiasco. The worst incidents occurred in Alabama, where buses were attacked by mobs of Klansmen and burned. As each group of Freedom Riders was hospitalized or arrested, CORE sent another group to take its place. The next stop was Mississippi.

Robert Kennedy was desperate to halt the bloodshed, and he was forced into the awkward position of challenging Democrats in the South. He made another deal with Eastland to avoid more violence: Eastland would “allow” the Freedom Riders safe passage into Mississippi as long as they could be arrested in Jackson for “inflaming public opinion.”

The first group of riders were arrested by Jackson police as soon as they walked through the bus terminal. So were the next group. Wave after wave of Freedom Riders kept coming. By the end of the summer two hundred or more had been arrested. The jails were full, so the riders were sent to the notorious Parchman State Penitentiary up in the Delta. Some of the convicted activists remained there for months.

Court costs and bail money depleted the CORE reserves. Roy Wilkins grudgingly gave CORE a thousand dollars—just enough to charter more buses.

There were so many cases that the city of Jackson hired a special prosecutor to deal with them. His name was Alvin Binder, an ambitious lawyer and, coincidentally, a member of Mississippi’s small Jewish community.

Being a Jew did not automatically translate into being a political liberal, or even a moderate, in Mississippi. Binder was a staunch segregationist from Clarksdale. He allowed himself, for a while, to be used by the Sovereignty Commission as an out-of-state speaker promoting Mississippi-style race relations. He quit after he was inadvertently sent to a Ku Klux Klan meeting. He became more disillusioned soon after he began prosecuting the Freedom Riders. After one swift conviction Binder noticed a group of jurors emerge, smiling, from the mayor’s office. Binder quietly resigned.

Meanwhile Medgar Evers was becoming a civil rights celebrity. By now the mere mention of Mississippi would send a shiver of dread down the spine of an outsider, and Medgar Evers’s name had become attached to the danger and the glamour the state represented. He was the man the reporters called when Mack Charles Parker was lynched, when Roman Duckworth was dragged from a bus and shot, when Herbert Lee was gunned down. The newspaper reports, the
Ebony
article, and Evers’s increasing visibility on the television news added to his legend. The NAACP often sent Medgar to branches in other states to lecture on the situation in Mississippi. People would listen, awestruck, to news from the front line.

In the spring of 1961 Medgar attended the annual NAACP conference, held that year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was his seventh national meeting.

The meeting was the first for a newly hired field secretary from Atlanta named Vernon Jordan. He was just one year out of Howard University Law School and dazzled by Medgar Evers, the star among the field secretaries. Evers took to the new recruit. Jordan remembers him as a mentor, a big brother who guided him through the tangled internal politics of the NAACP.

Jordan says that he and Evers “bonded” that summer at a retreat for the southeastern regional NAACP at Beaufort, South Carolina. It was like a summer camp for activists, held in a big wooden house and dormitory run by a Quaker group. Jordan, whose mother was a famous caterer in Atlanta, mainly remembers how bad the food was and how little of it they got to eat.

There would be meetings and workshops all day, then dinner at about four o’clock. Nothing else was scheduled for the rest of the evening. Jordan persuaded Evers and Ruby Hurley, their boss, to drive into Beaufort to look for something to eat.

Every Negro restaurant in the area was closed. This presented a problem: NAACP staffers were forbidden to trade at segregated establishments. They cruised downtown Beaufort looking for a place to eat, and all they could find was a white truck stop. Jordan remembers the big neon sign flashing STEAKS, CHOPS, FISH!

He pulled into the back.

“Where are you going?” Ruby Hurley asked.

“Right in here, Miss Hurley,” Jordan said.

“You cannot go in this place! It violates NAACP policy!”

Jordan snatched the car keys and headed for the kitchen door. He explained the situation to the cook, who was of course black, and placed his order. While he was waiting, Medgar Evers came to the door.