Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  A book seeking to derive its storytelling impetus from figures in a forty-year-old photograph—and all that flows outward from their histories—would have been impossible to do without many other interviews: with historians and social scientists and informal observers of the South, with ex–movement people (both black and white), with old cops and state troopers, with clergymen, with lawmakers and public officials, with civil rights lawyers and journalists who were on the scary soil back then, with journalists who are on the deceptively quieter ground now, as the struggle for justice continues in a new century. If most of the legal, political, and judicial battles of racism have long since been won in Mississippi, the human battles of race, its immense social conflicts, are still being waged. That is a sadness and unfairness hardly unique to Mississippi.

  The second way of gathering information was from documents and other primary materials, whether stored in personal files or—more commonly—in public archives and repositories: national, state, local. These ranged from public libraries and courthouses in the towns where the lawmen once lived to repositories and archives far from Mississippi—such as the extensive civil rights collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library on the University of Wisconsin campus, or the even more vast civil rights collection at the Library of Congress in Washington (LOC). At the LOC, on microfilm, are the papers of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and of other organizations relevant to race and civil rights. Further afield, papers of the VEP (Voter Education Project) and the SRC (Southern Regional Council) are at the Woodruff Library on the campus of Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta. The Archives of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta has many papers, some of which are also on microfilm at the LOC and elsewhere. I made use of a good civil rights collection at the Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, UCLA, and more so at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. The biggest private cache of papers came from an old civil rights attorney in the Justice Department, John M. Rosenberg, now in eastern Kentucky, still fighting on the side of the oppressed. Rosenberg worked in Mississippi in the sixties, largely in Greenwood and Leflore County, fortunately for my project. He has hundreds of pages of documents in his possession relating to Leflore and Greenwood and the Delta, and he generously made them available: affidavits; government-compiled statistical reports; histories of the Delta; copies of lawsuits by the federal government against officials in Mississippi; news clips.

  Oral histories in various libraries and archives—at Howard University in Washington, D.C.; the University of Memphis; the University of Southern Mississippi; the University of Mississippi; Tulane University; and elsewhere—were extremely useful. At Tulane, the Dent Collection (its formal name is the Mississippi Civil Rights Oral History Project) contains audiotaped oral histories that are especially relevant to the story of Greenwood; the tapes are not transcribed. A quasi-public civil rights archive in Jackson—the Freedom Information Service Archives—has been maintained all these years by Jan Hillegas, an old movement person, mostly at her own expense. She made copies of things for me free of charge, and I am grateful. Just to have her clippings file from the major news outlets of the day, in and out of Mississippi, felt like a gift bequeathed from heaven. Regarding U.S. government documents: As noted in several places in the text, previously classified papers from the Justice Department and the FBI were obtained through the Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA). In some cases, I had to wait many months, but the wait was worth it, no matter that the material came with blank pages or pages heavily blacked out. As for the declassified files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, they were officially opened in Jackson on March 17, 1998, after much litigation on the part of plaintiffs and civil liberties groups. I had nothing to do with their opening; I was just a beneficiary of timing and luck that the closed society was, against its will, unlatching itself—somewhat. In those files, as I pointed out in the text, are 300,000 personal names and 87,000 separate indexed names (although not 87,000 individuals, because each variation on the same name constitutes an entry), seven of which are the names of my sheriffs, with a long paper trail.

  The third way I gathered material was from the literature, published and unpublished, on civil rights in Mississippi and in the South: in books, monographs, theses, and dissertations; in newspaper, magazine, and journal articles; in the transcripts of government hearings. While I am now familiar with much of this literature, I hardly know it all. I doubt any one researcher could ever know it all—it is galactic. As I go along, I will cite some of the core works I consulted for specific sections and chapters.

  These notes are not meant to be all-inclusive or line-by-line citations. Rather, they are a bibliographical guide to identifying the key sites and the key people interviewed. If a book and its author appear by name in the text, I do not, in most cases, repeat them in these notes. When I do repeat that book here, with the full citation, it’s because I wish to signal the work’s importance to my overall research.

  In another way, these notes are an opportunity to be grateful publicly for having been allowed in. I was the researcher at the door, the stranger at the door, and the door opened, in most cases. In a less important way, these notes are also an opportunity to tell a story or include an anecdote or add a postscript that I couldn’t fit into the text itself.

  All of the events and facts and stories in this book are true, to the best of my ability to know them and to report them. In Part Three, in the chapter “Sometimes Trashy, Sometimes Luminous,” the reader will have noted that I changed the names of two people. The names I used are Buddy Harris and Ariel Jeffords. I did so for reasons of privacy and at the request of the two people in question. These people, who appear only briefly, are relevant to the telling, but their real names aren’t crucial to know, or so I have judged. All other names are the real ones. Finally, there is a small number of sources—about a dozen people—with whom I spoke between 1996 and 2003 who agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity. Thus their names do not appear anywhere in the text and do not appear in these notes. At the end of this essay is an alphabetical list of the names of everyone else to whom I spoke who was helpful on the project, whether in the form of a substantive telephone conversation or a long sit-down at their home or office. Often, I interviewed people multiple times. This is self-evidently true for the major characters in the story—John Ed Cothran, John Cothran, Tommy and Ty Ferrell, and Joe Meredith. I remain grateful for their willingness to let me keep coming back as the years piled up.

  Prologue: Nothing Is Ever Escaped

  The precede, opposite the photograph, is from my first conversation with James Meredith, in May 1997.

  Emmett Till. His story seems to override everything in Mississippi connected with race, and that quickly became apparent, which is why I’ve stood many times—waiting, imagining, wondering—in front of a building that may soon flutter away with the wind, unless the preservationists begin to act. So many myths are connected with that grocery and with the myth of Till. For instance, how exactly did Roy Bryant, who was out of town, and his brother-in-law, Big Milam, find out about the alleged wolf whistle and reputed inappropriate talk? There has long been a belief that Bryant heard the story from one or several of the black youth who were with Emmett outside the store that evening. In other words, the naivecum-cocky Chicagoan was Judased by one of his own—willingly or inadvertently; in either case, a chilling thought.

  In my own brief retelling of the story, I consulted journalistic accounts from Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans dailies, from the Greenwood Commonwealth, and from the New York Times. Jet magazine had good coverage of both the murder and the trial. Stephen J. Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Clenora Hudson-Weems’s Emmett Till: Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Mov
ement (Troy, Mich.: Bedford Publishers, 1994); and Juan Williams’s Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–65 (New York: Viking Press, 1987) were very helpful. David A. Shostak’s “Crosby Smith: Forgotten Witness to a Mississippi Nightmare,” in Negro History Bulletin, vol. 38 (December 1974), was important. Murray Kempton’s courtroom dispatch, filed for the New York Post on September 22, 1955, is collected in America Comes of Middle Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).

  Bill Minor, a still-active Mississippi journalist, eighty and counting, of whom I will speak at greater length in my acknowledgments, covered the trial for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and remembered for me the courtroom atmosphere. Because there are no extant trial transcripts, or at least none anyone can locate, a master’s thesis done at Florida State University, in 1963, by Hugh Stephen Whitaker has become an important document. Whitaker had access to the transcripts before they were lost or deliberately destroyed, and he used portions of them throughout his work, which is titled “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case.” Whitaker graciously duplicated and sent to me all 205 pages of his work. In addition, Whitaker’s 1965 Florida State doctoral dissertation, “A New Day: The Effects of Negro Enfranchisement in Selected Mississippi Counties,” was a helpful document, though not specifically for the Till case. Another thesis, done at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1996 by Charles R. Ealy, Jr., was helpful: “The Emmett Till Case: A Comparative Analysis of Newspaper Coverage.” My interview with eighty-year-old John C. Whitten, Jr., was in December 1999 in his office. Across the street, in the Sumner courthouse, the circuit clerk showed me the big red bound books under the counter, and there, in blue ink, on page 45 of a volume entitled “General Docket and Fees and Subpoenas No. 4, State Cases, 2nd District, Tallahatchie County, Circuit Court, September 1955,” were all the names of history in a case styled State of Mississippi v. J. W. Milam & Roy Bryant. John Ed Cothran’s name was penned there, as a subpoenaed witness for the plaintiff. Seeing the name made the myth of Till more goose-bumping—although not nearly as goose-bumping as a letter that was sent to me after I had published an article about the murder and the trial in the Washington Post. The Post piece forms the basis for the prologue and the start of the epilogue of this book. That piece ran on February 27, 2000, which is the day that John Herbers, whom I will acknowledge at greater length later in these pages, sent me that letter. Herbers is the distinguished and retired New York Timesman whom I mention in Part Two, now living quietly in suburban Maryland, but who, in 1955, was a shoe-leather reporter for United Press International, always on call, based for the wire service on his home ground of Mississippi. He was sent to cover the Till case, a big break and something that Herbers instantly understood, though he had no idea of what the case would truly become. Here is what Herbers wrote in his letter dated February 27, 2000, forty-five years after he experienced the trial with his own eyes.

  UP sent me, a virtual beginner, from Jackson to cover it alone while the big papers were staffing it with their stars, INS [International News Service] with their famous trial reporter, James Kilgallen I think his name was, who had covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, and AP with two or more experienced reporters.… We had a telephone installed in the hallway of the first floor, the closest they would let us have to the courtroom. As the trial got underway and became a big story both nationally and abroad, the demand for last-minute developments increased dramatically. The wires would move five or six new leads every cycle. With every new development, I would have to leave the courtroom, run downstairs and phone it to Atlanta while the locals who could not get in the courtroom crowded round me to hear what I was dictating, then run back upstairs to the courtroom and get a fill on what I had missed from a reporter not under deadline pressure. In addition to that I was besieged by Atlanta with queries from around the globe—Paris and Tokyo and multiple American papers I remember quite well—saying something like their competition had an angle more sensational than we did and demanding we match it.… I did not know anyone there who thought the verdict would be any different than it was. The white attitudes we had surveyed before the trial told the story. I dropped by the Greenwood Morning Star (long since set) where I had had my first newspaper job to ask the publisher’s opinion. He thought too much was being made of Till’s tender age. “He may have been only 14 but I’m told he had a dong on him like this,” elevating his forearm and dismissing any suggestion that the lynching was wrong.… I doubt Milam and Bryant could have continued to live in the Delta if they had not resorted to murder. Anyway by the end of the trial I had developed impressive leg muscles from running up and down the stairs. Exhausted and angry after the clean-up reporting I drank a beer, got in my car and headed for Jackson. A little ways out of Sumner I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wouldn’t stop. All I could do was cry and I did for many miles.

  Part One: Deeds of the Fathers

  DYING BILLY

  There are two extended portraits of Billy Ferrell—this one, and the one folded into Ty Ferrell’s story in Part Three. An oral history—conducted by interviewer Vincent Clark, of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi, on August 1 and August 12, 1997—was very helpful. In addition to members of Billy’s extended family, and in addition to those whose names appear in the text, key interviews for understanding him and/or Natchez, past and present, were Tony Byrne, Premo Stallone, Alma Carpenter, Bob Dearing, Thomas Boo Campbell, Mamie Lee Mazique, Jerry McDaniel, Rev. Leon Howard, Rev. D. W. Howard, Justice Court Judge Mary Lee Toles, Lou Baroni, Don Simonton, and Cynthia Jardon. (Some of these appear by name and voice in the second portrait of Billy, in Part Three; some of their names will be repeated there.) Three old Mississippi highway patrolmen were helpful: Gwin Cole, J. D. Gardner, and Sonny Speight. The Teletype of July 5, 1961, to authorities in Jackson about nosy visiting collegians from New York, was found, as I note in the text, in the Sovereignty Commission Files, and the Teletype should be read in conjunction with a second document, written by a Sov-Com investigator, A. L. Hopkins, on July 18, 1961. Adams County Criminal Case Report 7074, eleven pages long, on the shootout at Lake Mary, including the closure order on the death of DeWayne Sampson Russell by County Judge Robert A. Bonds, was found in the files of the Adams County sheriff. As for Billy Ferrell’s name on alleged Klan lists, see Archives and Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi—Box 13, Folder 7, Baroni Collection, under “Segregationist Material.” (The citation in the finder guide is “List of Natchez individuals suspected of belonging to Klan.”) In the Paul B. Johnson files at the University of Southern Mississippi, in the William D. McCain Library and Archives, there are several FBI lists of law enforcement officials suspected of belonging to the Klan. Billy’s name is not on these. But in this same file is an undated list of names of cops and others, county by county, said to be in the Klan. This undated list of “Members” of the “Adams County Klavern” is placed after a 9/23/65 FBI list. Toward the bottom of the first column are the words “Ferrell, FNU.”

  LOST BOY

  The portrait is drawn almost entirely from my own interviewing, essentially with members of Jim Garrison’s family in Oxford, and with those who either worked with him at the fast-food restaurant in Corinth or knew him there. In addition to those whose names appear in the text, Larry Brinkley was especially helpful. His friend Jim’s obituary ran July 9, 1986, in the Oxford Eagle.

  GRIMSLEY

  The most important sources for the portrait appear in the text. Their memories and voices were crucial, since Grimsley was long dead, as was Jim Garrison. However, in Grimsley’s case, as opposed to Garrison’s, there was a large paper trail. In addition to those who are in the text, Don Broadus, Frank Ely, Regina Hines, Jack Maples, Harry McDonald, and Robert A. Wilson were important sources for understanding either Grimsley or his saltwater town at the bottom of the state. Wilson is a retired FBI agent who was once a resident agent on the Gulf Coas
t, and who, as a private investigator, helped protect newspaperman Ira Harkey when Harkey felt his life was in jeopardy from Grimsley’s henchmen. (He didn’t really know Grimsley so much as he knew everything about him, in an investigative sense.) Wilson still lives on the Gulf Coast.

  As for the redoubtable Harkey: I first came on Ira B. Harkey, Jr.’s The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman (Jacksonville, Ill.: Harris-Wolfe Publishers, 1967) in the endnotes of John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). The former work was crucial, and so was a weekend of hospitality and talk in Kerrville, Texas, in April 1998, with Harkey himself. (Harkey had some personal papers, which he provided, but he quickly directed me to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; see below.) As I have suggested in the text itself, the latter work, Local People, was a biblical talisman for me throughout the entire project, helping me to grasp the story of civil rights in Mississippi in an almost geographical way: from Pascagoula in the south to Oxford in the north to points and regions in between. I spoke to Dittmer a couple of times on the phone during the project—he lived outside of Greencastle, Indiana, retired from the faculty of DePauw University—and am grateful for his direction and insights. Years ago, in Mississippi, Dittmer taught history at historic Tougaloo College in Jackson.