Spies of Mississippi (6 page)

In a telling footnote, six weeks later Commission investigator Tom Scarborough went to Attala County to continue the investigation into Meredith’s parents. Scarborough reported that Cap and Roxie had refused an appeal from Sheriff Wasson to go with him to Jackson to persuade their son to drop out of Ole Miss or—short of that—to speak out against his enrollment in the newspapers. The elder Merediths wanted nothing to do with the controversy, insisting that James rarely visited them and never discussed his role at Ole Miss.

Still, the agent couldn’t resist reporting his personal conclusion: “It is my opinion that both mama and papa Meredith are not opposed to what their now-famous son had done and is doing. To the contrary they are proud of what James Meredith has done by entering the University of Mississippi and bringing about riots, strife, turmoil, and even death.”

The gunman lifts the thirty-ought-six, high-powered Enfield hunting rifle to his shoulder and places a squinting eye to its six-power telescopic sight.
Evers pulls his blue 1962 Oldsmobile into the driveway of the ranch-style house at 2332 Guyness Street. He opens the car door and steps out. He holds a stack of T-shirts emblazed with the slogan “Jim Crow Must Go.” The events of the next hour will change history.

On that fateful night, Evers was returning home from an evening of NAACP functions. He had updated his colleagues on the protest demonstrations shaking the state’s capital and had watched President Kennedy make a televised address, announcing plans to push new civil rights legislation in Congress and urging citizens to embrace tolerance and understanding over prejudice and hatred.

For his part, Evers had been prodding his NAACP colleagues to move beyond their courtroom arguments and economic boycotts to embrace the new, direct-action protests employed by student activists. His embrace of those tactics had led to a series of student marches and sit-ins in Jackson that spring, which had spurred more than 700 arrests and had generated intense media coverage. Once dubbed a “quiet integrationist” by the
New York Times,
Evers was now being called a dangerous radical by the segregationist press at home. His high profile was also prompting hate mail, death threats, and attempts on his life. In a two-week period in late May and early June 1963, a Molotov cocktail had been thrown into his carport and a speeding car had nearly run him down outside his office in Jackson.

Despite the dangers, Evers pressed forward. The principle of doing the right thing in the face of hardship had been impressed upon him by his parents during his childhood in the mill town of Decatur, Mississippi, in the 1920s and 1930s. The hardships of life in a small, segregated town had included the day-to-day indignities of second-class citizenship and the hoots and howls of gangs of white hooligans, who roamed the streets on weekends and tossed firecrackers at black children. Evers dropped out of school in the 11th grade to join the army and fight in World War II. On the battlefields of Europe he waged war on the Nazis—the ultimate white supremacists—and learned that the defense of freedom carried the risk of death. Off the battlefields in Europe, he dated a white woman and discovered that racial segregation was not a universal reality. After returning home to Decatur, he tried to register to vote, only to be roughed up by a white mob. He vowed to make a difference.

Evers finished high school and earned a degree in business administration at Alcorn A & M College. Setting out to prove that an African American could succeed in the Deep South, Evers took a job selling insurance for the black-owned Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Realizing the futility of pedaling life-insurance policies to poor black dirt farmers who could barely afford food and shelter for their families, he put away the insurance policies and began handing out application forms for the NAACP. In the early 1950s, he started writing reports for the organization, chronicling the deplorable state of Negro schools and the prevalence of Klan violence. In 1954 he was named the organization’s first Mississippi field secretary. In that role, he logged thousands of miles driving the state’s two-lane highways and two-rut dirt roads as he investigated lynchings, voter intimidation, and police brutality.

Naturally, Evers had long been a subject of keen interest to the Commission. In the field secretary’s first years on the job, special operative T1 launched a basic background check on him, and agent Van Landingham tracked his movements. Van Landingham seriously underestimated the quiet and introspective activist. He filed a report that predicted Evers would fail to connect with grassroots activists because “he is a weak character and a coward” afraid to put himself “at forefront or in a position that would place him in danger of bodily harm.” Before long the opinionated investigator was compiling extensive, 6- to 12-page memos on Evers’s relentless activism as he built a dossier under the subject heading “Medgar Evers: Integration Agitator.” The file included Evers’s military records, college transcripts, car registration, and the birth certificates of his children.

Van Landingham also chronicled Evers’s attacks on the Commission. In a report on an NAACP meeting, he noted, “Evers spoke regarding the State Sovereignty Commission and mentioned my name as receiving reports from Negro informants all over the state.”

In fact, the Commission’s confidential informants had tracked the field secretary’s movements for years. And working in tandem with the Jackson City Police, they were closely monitoring his actions that spring of 1963, as picket lines and sit-ins disrupted the daily flow of events in the state’s capital.

In May 1963 Commission agents intercepted a letter that Evers wrote to supporters and placed it in his investigative file. “The NAACP is determined to put an end to all forms of radical segregation in Jackson,” Evers wrote. “To accomplish this we shall use all lawful means of protests—picketing, marches, mass mailings, litigation, and whatever other lawful means we deem necessary.”

At another point Evers directly challenged the white power structure by going over the heads of all state officials to appeal to ordinary citizens: “We believe that 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 sends them the same message. But whether Jackson and the state choose to change or not, the years of change are upon us.”

Things never would be the same after June 12, 1963. Just after midnight, Evers stepped out of the car with the bundle of “Jim Crow Must Go” T-shirts and walked up his driveway with his door key in hand. His wife, Myrlie, was watching television in the bedroom with their three children nestled on the bed with her. As Medgar Evers walked toward the front door, the gunman in the shadows squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out, breaking the silence. The bullet ripped through Evers’s back below his right shoulder blade, through a window, and through a wall inside the house. As Evers crawled to his front porch with blood pouring from his body and his keys still in hand, Myrlie ran out, horrified. Their children had taken cover under the bed as their parents had taught them to do at the sound of gunshots. They ran out a few minutes later to see their father lying in a pool of blood. Myrlie rushed back inside and called the police. Her husband was rushed to the hospital but died 50 minutes later.

The next morning Jackson City Police scoured the crime scene. Detective Sergeant O. M. Luke found the thirty-ought-six rifle in a honeysuckle vine less than 400 feet from Evers’s driveway. Jackson Police Captain Ralph Hargrove photographed the scene and took the rifle back to his office to examine. As he meticulously dusted the rifle for prints, a single index finger print on the scope “practically jumped up.” Hargrove sent the print to the FBI, which matched it with a print in a military file belonging to Byron De La Beckwith, a founding member of the White Citizens’ Council and a Klansman from Greenville. It turned out that De La Beckwith also drove a white Plymouth Valiant, the same color and make of car seen prowling Evers’s neighborhood the day of the murder.

De La Beckwith was not completely unknown to the Commission. Deep in its secret files was a letter he had written in 1957 to then-governor Coleman asking for a job with the segregation watchdogs. In the letter, De La Beckwith listed his qualifications: “Expert with a pistol, good with a rifle and fair with a shotgun—and—RABID ON THE SUBJECT OF SEGREGATION! I therefore request that you select me, among many, as one who will tear the mask from the face of the NAACP and forever rid this fair land of the DISEASE OF INTEGRATION with which it is plagued with.” He wasn’t hired.

As the civil rights community mourned, tragedy struck again. An outcry was building in the North over the worsening condition of Clyde Kennard, still serving a seven-year sentence at Parchman on trumped-up charges of being an accomplice to theft of five bags of chicken feed. With cancer ravishing Kennard’s body, Barnett finally granted him clemency to avoid the public relations nightmare of allowing a political prisoner to die in custody. Two months after returning to Chicago, on the Fourth of July of 1963, Clyde Kennard died of cancer. Ironically, Evers had spoken out on Kennard’s behalf for years and had even been held in comtempt of court for decrying Kennard’s sentence. Now both men were gone.

Amid the gloom, the state came under intense pressure to bring Evers’s killer to justice. In late June, De La Beckwith was arrested and charged with murder. Under police questioning, De La Beckwith claimed that his rifle had been stolen before the shooting. He also claimed that he was playing cards with friends on the night of the murder. Two of those friends turned out to be police officers, and they backed up his alibi in court. During the high-profile trial, the defendant—clad in a linen suit, monogrammed shirt, and French cuffs—appeared cocky and unrepentant. During breaks in the proceedings, he strutted around the courtroom, offered cigars to the prosecutor, chatted cotton prices with farmers in the gallery, and whispered racist quotes to reporters. As the White Citizens’ Council raised funds for his defense, De La Beckwith became a poster boy for racial hatred. In the end, the all-white jury could not agree upon a verdict, and a mistrial was declared.

Certain that De La Beckwith was guilty, state prosecutors prepared for a retrial. The De La Beckwith defense team knew that its best hope was to seat another jury incapable of reaching a unanimous guilty verdict. Another hung jury would force the court to set De La Beckwith free. At that point defense attorney Stanney Sanders called Commission investigator Andy Hopkins with a highly unusual request. He asked Hopkins to screen 11 prospective jurors for the defense. Hopkins, an FBI-trained investigator, was uneasy. He questioned the ethics of intervening on behalf of the defense in the state prosecution of a high-profile murder case. He asked his Commission superiors for permission to intervene and got the go-ahead. The only caveat: Avoid direct, personal contact with prospective jurors.

Hopkins called the prospective jurors’ employers and associates and compiled a report on their work histories and affiliations, including their involvement in groups like the White Citizens’ Council. Next to one man’s name the agent scrawled “believed to be Jewish” (that prospective juror was dismissed), and next to others he wrote “fair and impartial” (those jurors were seated). In the end, the all-white, all-male, all-Protestant jury deadlocked, and De La Beckwith went free—to brag at Klan rallies of getting away with murder. Given his ability to postpone justice, he was tagged with the nickname Delay Beckwith.

Who:
President John F. Kennedy

What:
A sweeping civil rights bill under debate in Congress. The measure would outlaw segregation in public places, including schools, government buildings, parks, retail stores, restaurants, and theaters.

When:
Early 1963

Where:
Washington, D.C.

Why:
In Kennedy’s own words, “A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.”

As the President pressed members of Congress to support the groundbreaking legislation, southern Democrats and conservative Republicans dug in their heels and braced for a fight.
Key opponents of the bill also formed a well-financed and highly organized lobbying group to wage a political and public relations war against the Kennedy civil rights program. Few observers on the national political scene realized that the anti–civil rights lobbying campaign was—in large part—being funded and organized by a secretive state agency in far-off Mississippi. The Commission had gone national.

Public relations chief Erle Johnston had been promoted to director of the Commission and was demonstrating a knack for high-level political maneuvering. In summer of 1963, Johnston traveled to Washington, D.C., to take part in a hush-hush conference “to lay plans for an organized effort to defeat the new Kennedy civil rights program.” In the weeks to come, Johnston, Sovereignty Commission attorney John Satterfield, and several prominent conservative political leaders formed the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, a national lobbying organization dedicated to defeating the Kennedy bill. Operating from a plush suite of offices overlooking congressional staff buildings on Capitol Hill, the group pumped out speeches, press releases, and newspaper ads denouncing the bill, falsely claiming it would require employers to replace white workers with black workers, destroy the national budget, and lead to socialism. The campaign became the most costly lobbying effort of its day.

The lobbying program was funded primarily by the Commission, which had raised private donations in Mississippi and had tapped its own budget to jump-start the effort. In addition, it had taken in $209,010 in private donations (more than $1.8 million in today’s money) from a single, anonymous, out-of-state donor.

The secret benefactor was a wealthy white supremacist from New York named Wickliffe Preston Draper, who had funded social experiments aimed at breeding a white superrace and research into the prospects of resettling blacks in Africa. How frightening were Draper and his associates? Prior to World War II, Draper attended a conference in Berlin and befriended German interior minister Wilhelm Frick, who ended up being hanged for crimes against humanity after the war. At the conference, Draper’s travel companion and colleague Dr. Clarence Campbell sympathized with the Germans on the issue of race and ethnicity. “The differences between the Jew and the Aryan,” he said, “are as insurmountable as that between black and white.”

During the legislative battle over the Kennedy bill, Draper’s financial support was kept under wraps. As far as the segregationists were concerned, the public had no need to know that the anti–civil rights lobby was being bankrolled by a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer and that his money had been routed through a segregationist spy agency to the lobbying campaign. Then came the shocking assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Would this end the push for a new civil rights bill? The answer turned out to be no. Five days after the assassination, President Johnson urged a joint session of Congress to pay homage to the fallen leader by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The legislative battle raged on.