Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  And yet in the town without pity, newspaperman Thatcher Walt suddenly became suspect. When a cross was burned on the courthouse lawn, the editor—a native Mississippian—said that it was a stupid act. Even more important: After the out-of-town owners of the Leflore Theater decided to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to admit blacks, Walt and his wife, Thelma, and their small children crossed a picket line of hooting thugs. He’d already decided to get out of Greenwood and take a newspaper job in Laurel, Mississippi. The family emerged from the darkness of the movie and walked past the thugs and went home and immediately started receiving threatening phone calls, some of which they were certain came from the police. They were afraid to sleep in their bedroom and so four Walts slept on a Hide-A-Bed in the living room. Soon someone called the editor’s wife and told her that her husband’s body would be found in the Tallahatchie. Terrified, the family left for Clarksdale, where a relative lived. When they returned a few days later, someone fired a bullet through their front picture window. Mrs. Walt borrowed a shotgun and sat in the dark of her living room. The editor went back to his job at the Commonwealth, only to learn he’d been fired by the publisher and that the paper in Laurel didn’t want him, either. There weren’t going to be any more newspaper jobs in Mississippi for Walt. The family left the state and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he took a job at the Jacksonville Journal, before turning eventually to other work. He died in 1998. “I guess you could say this was my husband’s attitude,” Thelma Walt said on the phone when all this was suddenly brought up again. “Sort of ‘Give a little, and you’ll save a lot. Let’s go on and comply and it’ll be easier to live with them.’ But in Greenwood, that was being the enemy.”

  In the movement, certain stories took on the power of instant myth. They were sustenance against the fear. You can find the following story in James Forman’s beautifully written and righteously angry The Making of Black Revolutionaries, in a chapter called “Terror in the Delta.” A SNCC voter registration worker named Sam Block is relating the incident. When the incident happened, Block wasn’t yet a legendary figure in Mississippi and in the Greenwood campaign for civil rights. He was just an incalculably brave twenty-two-year-old: lean, deep-voiced, sinewy, 110 pounds dripping wet. This particular incident occurred when Block was canvassing the streets of south Greenwood almost entirely alone. He’d been the first SNCC worker to come to the county, in June 1962, delivered there by the charismatic Bob Moses in Amzie Moore’s ’49 Packard, all of them singing, “This land is your land / this land is my land.” Over the next two years, Sam Block was going to come within an inch of losing his life more times than can be known. Some of his escapes seem to have been arranged by divine inspiration. This particular event occurred in mid-August of 1962, about six weeks before James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. The report of it burned through the movement like a grass fire.

  We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, “Nigger, where you from?” I told him, “Well, I’m a native Mississippian.” He said “Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? I don’t know where you from.” I said, “Well, around, some counties.” He said, “Well, I know that, I know you ain’t from here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy.” I said, “Well, you know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?” He got angry. He spat in my face and he walked away. So he came back and turned around and told me, “I don’t want to see you in town any more. The best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and get out and don’t never come back no more.” I said, “Well, sheriff, if you don’t want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, cause I’m here to stay, I came here to do a job and this is my intention, I’m going to do this job.”

  That didn’t sound like John Ed Cothran, at least as John Ed could be discerned through the time-bends of an old man deep in his eighties, reading his Bible and tending his garden in the somnolent town where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.

  But it’s a fact that in the streets of 1962 Greenwood a lone black had faced down the county sheriff and lived to tell. Some called it the Wyatt Earp story. Later, Block would say he’d done the facing down deliberately—he knew nobody talked to a Mississippi sheriff that way, least of all a black man. As Block remembered a few years ago in California—about forty years after it had happened, and only a few months before he died—he’d been ready to give up his life that day on the slim chance that he might win, and for what that winning could do for the incipient Greenwood movement. That was always part of the story’s myth—he’d gambled so large and won. “That he wasn’t murdered on the spot is something of a miracle,” Howard Zinn wrote two years after it happened in his 1964 book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, one of the many valuable histories in which you can find a version of the incident. The story is in Clayborne Carson’s 1981 In Struggle. It’s in John Dittmer’s 1994 Local People. It’s in Charles M. Payne’s 1995 I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. These are all important and closely documented books. In each it’s “the sheriff.”

  Except it wasn’t the sheriff of Greenwood—it was the bullying deputy. Sam Block himself is responsible for the years of mix-up. He confirmed that it was Smitty. Until he and I talked—and we’d first talked of it on the phone before I went to California expressly to ask him about it once again and show him photographs—Block said he never knew Big Smitty wasn’t the county sheriff. He said, “That’s what we called him, Sheriff Smitty. I didn’t know he was the deputy sheriff. That distinction didn’t even matter to me.”

  One can follow the telling and retelling of the Wyatt Earp story as it appears in books through the years. The primary source is almost always Block’s own first-person account as published in Forman’s 1972 book, Black Revolutionaries. Some authors drew details from an old New York Post piece—James Wechsler, a columnist, had interviewed Block in the summer of 1963 and had moved the story along with more color. In Seth Cagin and Philip Dray’s 1998 book, We Are Not Afraid, the supposed villain is named: “On the courthouse steps, when Sheriff John Ed Cothron approached Block in a menacing fashion, Block stood his ground. Cothron asked where he was from. ‘I’m a native Mississippian,’ Block said.” The account went on from there, with the misspelling of the surname of the man who’d been sheriff of Greenwood. (It should be said here, however, that sometimes even the Commonwealth, John Ed’s hometown paper, would goof and spell his name “Cothron.”)

  The incident appears in Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s lyrical book From the Mississippi Delta, published in 1997. She is a Greenwood native who worked in the movement and made it out of the Delta and earned her doctorate and became a theater professor at the University of Southern California—but, like almost everybody else, she got the story wrong in terms of who did the spitting and who said “I know you ain’t from here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy.” Ida Mae Holland named the spitter: “Leflore County sheriff John Ed Cothron.”

  (In at least one latter-day published source, Sam Block made it quite clear about whom he was talking. In a lengthy 1987 interview titled “Never Turn Back,” published in the journal Southern Exposure, Block said: “We were standing in front of the courthouse, and Sheriff Smith came and spit in my face. He said, ‘Nigger,’ and he took his pistol out, and he shook his pistol in my face.” A few lines down: “ ‘Sheriff, if you don’t want to see me around here the next day, the next hour, the next minute, or the next second, the best thing for you to do is to pack your bags and leave because I am going to be here.’ Big Smitty just dropped his hand and his gun in amazement.”)

  In Los Angeles several years ago, Sam Block, who had diabetes and other ailments, looked at a photograph of Big Smitty. “I’m three hundred percent sure,” he said. The old SNCC worker, still lean as a string, looked at another picture of John Ed Cothran, taken from the front. Block said, “Truthfully, I can’t even remember this guy’s face.”
As he talked, he dabbed at his eye with a handkerchief folded into a small square. “I’m not looking for glory,” he said. “I did it for what has been accomplished.” He meant the work he’d done in the movement. His eye was watering and he dabbed almost daintily at it. He apologized and said it was the residue of an old beating. Two Mississippi highway patrolmen had done it. They’d pulled their pistols on him in a jail cell in Columbus, Mississippi, and ordered him to run. Block said, “No, sir, I am not going to run.” One of them said, “Yes, nigger, you are going to run.” They hit him with the butt of a pistol and dislodged his eye. In California, Sam Block, Delta native, so far from home, with one good eye, kept telling stories. And then he shook hands and said goodbye. Five months later, he was dead. He was sixty. There was his obituary in a newspaper. He’d been trying to get a company going that would manufacture tire sealant.

  On the day that he remembered about John Ed and Big Smitty and all the others, Block said that he longed to go back to the place that had been brutal to him. It was home. Simple as that, he said. “Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it” is how Faulkner explained the strange pull of Mississippi. And Eudora Welty said: “… the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.” There were things he still wanted and needed to do in Mississippi, Sam Block had said on that day in Los Angeles, less than half a year before he died, dabbing at his watering eye.

  And an old hard-to-know man—still strong, hearing-impaired, with a soft blurry blue tattoo—was in a little brick house with bluish-gray trim in the Delta town where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.

  He had a bad cough that day. He seemed more agitated and distracted than in the previous visit. He pinched his fourth finger and thumb together and said, “Been takin’ these durn pills, ’bout this big, but they’re not doing any durn good. Delta crud. Got it in my throat. Went to the doctor man and he gave me a little white one and a big red one.” He took a cigarette pack out of his pocket. “Cancer sticks,” he said. “Aggin’ my cough on. Stopped for a week but then started up again.” That morning, at 5 A.M., he had read St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians in the New Testament.

  Maudine said, in a lowered voice, when he’d gone to another room: “Part of what’s been giving him this sickness is worrying about all that brush to be cleared out back. Eats at him. He’s been going out every morning. He’ll work four hours and come in and tilt back in his rocker. But that’s it.”

  It was unseasonably warm for February. After dinner, he went out into the yard in shirtsleeves. “How long is it after the scout comes before the rest comes, John Ed?” his wife said. She meant the purple martins. “ ’Bout two days,” he said.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “Central America,” he said. It was plain they couldn’t wait for spring.

  He went into a story: “Only time I ever fired a piece at a body. Nigger raped a white woman. Cold, at night. He had her out in a cornfield. He raised up and started running. He made for a canebrake. After a while, he came out, hands up. He got sent to Parchman for life. Potts, Leroy Potts. Yep, that was his name, ol’ Leroy Potts. Sent me a letter not long before I left office. He was trying to get out on parole. Asking me if I could help him in any way. It was the nicest letter you ever read, but I reckon I couldn’t help him.”

  He talked of arresting fifty-eight blacks in Itta Bena—June 18, 1963. “One night there was this big upset out at Itta Bena, and my deputy, Ed Weber, called me, he was the town marshal out there, and he said, ‘You’d better get out here,’ and by the time I did they’d busted windows and been throwin’ bricks and every damn thing. So I brought me a school bus out from town and loaded ’em up and took them into the courthouse, and there was this little Jewish lawyer from the Department of Justice and he said he wanted to talk to them. And I said, ‘Now look here, you shore as hell are not gonna do that, not at this hour. Hell, no.’ Hell, must’ve been midnight. I said, ‘Mister, I don’t care what you want to do and I’m not trying to be horsey with you, but it’s goin’ to have to wait till in the mornin’.”

  Maudine said, “Is that the ones went to Parchman, Jack?” Her husband said, “Some of ’em. A lot went to the county farm.”

  He went to his bedroom and brought out his old sheriff’s star. It was tarnished and small. “Sheriff of Leflore County” it said. “Got my gun back there,” he said. “Think I’ll polish up my star and put on my gun and play sheriff.”

  Big Smitty came up in the conversation. “Big front on him,” John Ed said. “Been dead a while.”

  And then, on his own, he brought up the spitting story, and how he’d come across it in a book, and how he’d seen his name staring at him right there in cold print. His niece, over in Sidon, Mississippi, had gotten the book first, he said. His sister Mary Nelle had showed him the same book and asked him if he’d done that. “Made me sick enough to go in there and vomit,” he said. “And ain’t true, ain’t none of it true. I never did that to nobody. I never treated people like that.” There was great distress in his voice.

  “Isn’t it the filthiest thing?” Maudine said.

  “I don’t like to be low-rated,” her husband said.

  “Filthy,” Maudine said again.

  “And it’s a damned lie,” John Ed said.

  “But it did happen,” I said. “Only it was your deputy, Big Smitty.”

  This is how he responded: “Never heard tell of it. Never knew anything about it. You sure Big Smitty done that? Wish old Big Smitty was here right in this livin’ room so’s I could ask him. But he’s shore enough dead, ain’t he?”

  A couple of months later—the sixth visit to Moorhead in a year’s time—I asked him directly: “Why did you allow a man like Big Smitty to work for you, knowing how he treated black people?” Everyone in Greenwood knew what Big Smitty was. John Ed said that he’d known Wardine Smith all through the fifties, when Smitty was a town cop, and that he, John Ed, had been responsible for bringing him into the sheriff’s department and then getting him to stay on after John Ed had won the top job from the voters. “Didn’t know about it. Woulda fired him in a minute if I knowed any of those things,” he answered.

  In California, the blurred picture had started to become clearer. It was as if the letters “JEC” weren’t so faintly blue on a white background. Sam Block had clarified important things—and so had Wazir Peacock. In the movement, he was Willie Peacock. He was one of the earliest to work in Greenwood, arriving there not long after Block did. Willie Peacock, a Delta native like Sam, had graduated from Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1962, and had planned to enroll in a black medical school in Nashville. But the movement had intervened. On the phone, Peacock said he had converted to Islam in 1966. He said he’d left SNCC in disillusionment. Both he and Block had left in anger and disillusionment, he said. Too much of the movement, at least in Mississippi, was being lifted out of the hands of local people.

  On the phone, Peacock said of John Ed Cothran, whom he remembered straightaway: “It’s true you couldn’t pick up hateful feelings from him necessarily.… His position was, ‘I’m not going to step out and help you, but I’m not going to stand around calling you hateful names, either.’ ” Peacock said he could recall going out to the Cothran farm to get bail bonds signed. I tried to say something about how brave they were, and Peacock said: “Well, it’s true the only protection we had was from a higher power. And if we didn’t survive, then we had to believe that someone else would pick it up and take it along.” He said, “We were born out of time almost. We just couldn’t accept what we saw. We’d lived it growing up. But we just couldn’t accept it anymore.”

  In Oakland a few weeks later, a thickset man in his late fifties, in a wool sweater, with a hoarse whisper, whose work was teaching the mentally disabled, sat at his kitchen table with photog
raphs spread out before him. In a corner of his apartment, there was an altar. “Avenue F and—what is that, down from Taft?” Peacock said, trying to remember a Greenwood address. He, too, seemed so far from home and longing for it. “I tried to hate,” he said. “It was never in me. That was the popular thing to do, hate them.… There was an acting out, that’s for sure: ‘If you don’t want me in your life, okay, I don’t want you in mine.’ At some place way down, they knew we were human. They were fighting nature. It made them do inhuman things to other human beings. We used to say in the black community, ‘In order to keep me in the ditch, you have to be in the ditch with me. You treat me ugly, you have to become ugly.’ ”

  He looked at the photographs on the table. One was the picture from Life and another was of Emmett Till’s unrecognizable face. The shot had been taken from Till’s coffin and published in Jet magazine. Peacock had said on the phone that they were “all of the Emmett Till generation—Sam, myself, all of us, any of us, really, who grew up in Mississippi back then. That’s why we went to work for freedom.” Peacock, who’s from Tallahatchie County, where the Till trial was held, was looking at a picture of a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan’s mutilated face from Jet in 1955, and anger was rising. A religious man, a convert to Islam, seemed to be changing his mind about some things, taking a harder view, not least of the sheriff with his cohorts in Life who’s got his back turned—maybe taking a harder view about any white person who’d had his back turned.

  He said: “I do have a sympathy …[But] he kept his hands clean. ‘Hate’ wouldn’t be the word. My thing with people like him is this: There’s a viciousness about this kind of person and you can never forget it. Smitty is all the way out there. He’s easy to understand. This guy, you don’t see everything. This man was not dumb. He was smart enough to know that one day the federal government was going to turn everything around. He had a healthy respect for us, me and Sam. He knew what time it was, that if something happened to us, somebody else would be coming. He didn’t like us there. He didn’t have to show his hand, either.”