In the spring of 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis, then twenty-two and as popular as Elvis Presley, returned home to Ferriday for a performance at the white high school. He had made an appearance on American Bandstand in March but by June was getting plastered by the press for marrying his thirteen-year-old first cousin once removed.18 In late January 1959, the parish’s White Citizens’ Council sent $3,053.67 to support Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’s white supremacy–based states’ rights campaign.19 A week later, a council rally drew four hundred people in Vidalia to hear state senator Willie Rainach (of Claiborne Parish), who led Louisiana’s well-organized resistance to desegregation. Rainach pointed out that black voter registration was 7 percent in Concordia Parish, while in the three predominantly black parishes to the north there were no registered African American voters.20
By the end of 1959, with his political machine well greased, Cross got more votes than his six opponents combined and won his fourth term. Immediately, he launched a “thank-you” tour to celebrate what would rank as the biggest victory of his career. Dressed in a pinstriped suit and a derby hat, he accessorized with a cane and the family’s pet Pekinese on a leash. To purposely antagonize the preachers who fought him in every election, he jokingly dubbed himself “Rev. Foxworth with the Christian Youth Administration.” A photograph that appeared on the front page of the Concordia Sentinel on December 11, 1959, captured the moment, explaining that Cross was now without question “The Kingpin of Concordia Parish.”21
BY 1960, FERRIDAY was the largest town in the parish, with a population of 4,563.22 The town council under Mayor L. W. “Woodie” Davis made efforts to modernize city services. He was first elected in 1948, shortly after returning from World War II with a Purple Heart. When he took office, the town had $700 in the bank and $1,100 in unpaid bills. Horses and cows freely roamed, and raw sewage ran in the ditches. White roughnecks, pulpwood haulers, sawmill workers, and transients stayed in the King Hotel. Hookers, who earned their living there, resided in its small, dingy rooms. The town’s recent growth had helped spark an increase in crime, and both the white and black bars and nightclubs in town were notoriously savage; the owners maintained order with fists and clubs. Davis built a communications tower and bought two-way radios for the police department, which consisted of one rundown patrol car and two men. A building to house the volunteer fire department’s aging equipment was constructed. There was a jail on the bottom floor of the firehouse, and an apartment on the top floor housed the jailer and his wife, who was responsible for cooking for the prisoners.23
Davis had few choices in lawmen. Robert “Bob” Warren served on the town council before being named police chief in 1954 at the age of forty.24 His officers came and went as often as the drunks in Ferriday. They were untrained and ill-suited for true law enforcement. In the spring of 1956, Ferriday’s town council hired Frank Edward DeLaughter as a fireman and jailer at a salary of $250 a month.25 Born on the Fourth of July in Brookhaven, Mississippi, during the Great Flood of 1927, DeLaughter had quit East Lincoln High School in the ninth grade.26 In 1949, he married Lula Mae Cowart in Natchez, where the couple initially lived and where DeLaughter worked as a firefighter beginning in 1950.27 After he was hired in Ferriday, they moved into the jailer’s apartment above the fire station. Davis, who had recommended DeLaughter for the job, would later say that hiring him was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.28
DeLaughter sometimes rode in the patrol car with the lone police officer on duty. On many occasions, he assisted in making arrests and occasionally did so alone. Sometimes he would be the first to respond to a call. Such was the case in March 1959 when DeLaughter killed African American John Henry Keary, who died in an alley off the town’s main north-south route in the black section of town. The parish coroner said Keary made several advances on DeLaughter, despite being ordered to stop. Witnesses indicated that Keary at one point “grabbed the [patrol] car and raised the front end completely from the ground . . . When called on by the officer to desist, he advanced on DeLaughter several times.” Keary was hit in the groin, leg, and finally through the heart. The coroner ruled that DeLaughter’s actions were “unavoidable and in the line of duty.” Unaddressed in the article was whether DeLaughter had used undue force in a confrontation with an unarmed man.29
In 2011, Charles Johnson, a black retired school-bus driver who was fourteen in 1959, told the Concordia Sentinel that he had witnessed the fatal encounter but was never asked about it. Prior to DeLaughter’s arrival, Johnson said, Keary had punched a white man. That blow ended the argument, and no one else had been involved. Johnson watched DeLaughter move to the back of the patrol car as Keary lifted its front end almost off the ground and then put it down, certainly an intimidating display of strength. Although Keary then walked in DeLaughter’s direction, Johnson said Keary kept his hands at the side, never surged toward the officer, and took slow steps. Despite two shots in the gut, Keary continued to move toward DeLaughter, who again instructed him to halt. His third shot failed to stop Keary, but the fourth brought him down. For a lifetime, Johnson wondered why DeLaughter had shot and killed an unarmed man.30
During DeLaughter’s early years in Ferriday, most whites were concerned about the growing civil rights movement and feared segregation would end. W. E. Person, a respected cattleman, veteran of both world wars, and Citizens’ Council member, wanted to represent Concordia in the Louisiana Senate. In his campaign announcement five months after the shooting death of John Keary, Person pledged that if elected he would work to protect “segregation in our schools and to maintain our Southern way of life.” He further warned, “The proven price of racial integration is the enormous skeleton of dead empires.” Person was victorious.31
DeLAUGHTER WAS promoted to the police force in 1960.32 In the spring of 1962, an event occurred that confirmed Mayor Davis’s growing apprehension about him. Three black men were arrested for breaking into a general store outside Ferriday and stealing a package of undershirts. One of the men, twenty-nine-year-old Curtis Harris, later wrote the U.S. attorney in Shreveport that five Concordia policemen had attempted to beat a confession out of him.33 Harris had served time in federal prison for a 1960 post office burglary. After his arrest in 1962, he was placed in a cellblock at the parish jail on the top floor of the courthouse in Vidalia. Later that night, he was taken downstairs to the sheriff’s office, where deputies and two Ferriday policemen forced him to lie face down on a table. Harris was beaten with a strap by five officers, identified as sheriff’s deputies Roy George Barlow, Bill Ogden, and Ike Cowan Jr., and Ferriday policemen DeLaughter and William Howell Harp Jr. (called “Junior”). Harp had been named Ferriday jailer when DeLaughter was promoted to full-time policeman.34
Harris’s thirty-six-year-old uncle, Wilber Lee Henderson, was also arrested and later gave a statement to the FBI. The officers, he said,
made me get on a table and lay on my stomach with my clothes on. Ike, Jr., Barlow and a fifth man in the room, Mr. Harp . . . carrying a revolver in his belt holster, held me down. Then Frank DeLaughter started whipping me with a leather strap about 18 inches to 24 inches long, 3 inches wide and about 1/4 inch thick. This strap was fastened to a wooden handle about 1 1/2 inches in diameter and about 9 inches long. When DeLaughter got tired of whipping me, Ike, Jr., whipped me then Bill Ogden and then Barlow whipped me in that order. In all, they whipped me for about one-half hour. They whipped me on my seat, the backs of my legs and the back of my hands, wrists and lower arms. The whipping caused me to bleed and there was blood on my undershirt and shorts. There was swelling and I couldn’t set down for two days.
Ogden and Cowan told Henderson he would get a suspended sentence if he would confess. When he refused, Harp pointed his pistol at Henderson’s head and threatened to shoot him. “I was scared,” Henderson said. He confessed.35
All three defendants were forced by intimidation to plead guilty to theft of the undershirts. Harris said the officers told him that if he reported the beating
and ever returned to Ferriday, he would “leave in a pine box.” Harris and Henderson each got seven years. The third man, who confessed without incident and did not have a police record, got three years. In a chilling mockery of justice, only eleven days elapsed from the day of their arrests to their arrival at the state penitentiary in Angola. Although some of the prisoners upstairs in the jail saw Harris’s and Henderson’s injuries, none witnessed the beatings. All five police officers denied them when interviewed by the FBI. The U.S. attorney, following a two-month preliminary investigation, concluded that Harris and Henderson’s charges could not be substantiated.36
Having been questioned by the FBI for the first time in his career, DeLaughter never again beat prisoners outside the familiar comfort of the Ferriday jail. While the parish jail in the Vidalia courthouse was comprised of open cellblocks, the jail in Ferriday consisted of a series of small cages built side-by-side with no opening for the prisoner to see inside the adjoining cell. DeLaughter could beat a man senseless in a distant room and throw the victim into a cell where his injuries would remain unseen. Other prisoners might hear the screams of the victim but were not visual witnesses to the beating.37
After the mayor learned of the beatings, he fired DeLaughter. Noah Cross was more than happy to add him to his payroll as a deputy. DeLaughter would become the worst of three criminally prone deputies who were at ease operating in the violent underworld the sheriff cultivated. The others were Ike Cowan, a stocky, dark-haired man of average height, and Bill Ogden, one of the oldest line deputies, who was said to strut like a peacock when excited. They were two of the best-known gamblers in the parish. Ogden had operated a boat landing on nearby Lake St. John before becoming a cop and was DeLaughter’s shadow. The three deputies had little education and no training in law enforcement, and they were suspected by the FBI in a number of police brutality and color of law civil rights cases that came to light in the early 1960s.38
But by far the most feared and despised deputy employed by Cross in 1964 was DeLaughter, who once told a black preacher that after “you kill your first man the rest are easy.” In his late thirties at the time, he was six-foot-four and weighed 285 pounds. His stocky frame supported a beer belly and sloping shoulders; his hair was black and his face clean-shaven, with a receding chin. Men detained and beaten by this lawman recalled how he leaned over them, the stench of his cigarette breath and the salty beads of sweat rolling down his neck and dripping onto their faces. Handcuffed to a chair, they looked up into his blank brown eyes as he degraded them with obscenities and racial slurs. He often accused men of crimes they knew nothing about.39
To be in the custody of the deputy was unthinkable. Inside a back pocket of his military-style khaki pants, pulled high on the waist, was a blackjack. Hidden in a front pocket along with his deputy badge were metal thumb cuffs, used as a torture device. By placing his finger between the two cuffed joints and exerting pressure by twisting or pulling, DeLaughter could easily break a prisoner’s thumb. In another pocket, he carried a high-caliber derringer. The back of his hand was a taste of what was to come—his favorite tools for delivering a beating included a fire hose, a leather strap, and a cattle prod. His brutal interrogations were conducted in the middle of the night in the confines of a room at the Ferriday jail, where he sought to beat confessions out of his victims. Those in his custody were rarely charged—if at all—until hours after they were detained. Once freed, they sometimes found their wallets emptied of cash.40
When the civil rights movement reached Ferriday, DeLaughter explained the future of race relations to a local pastor: “Preacher . . . people in this town don’t want to see no niggers voting.”41 So feared was he and so firm his authority that African Americans called him “Big Frank DeLaw.”42 By 1964, DeLaughter, Ogden, and Cowan were Klansmen, partly because the sheriff wanted them to keep tabs on the anti-vice segment of the KKK population that threatened the criminal operations of the sheriff’s office. The man who swore DeLaughter into the Klan was a thirty-year-old truck driver from Natchez by the name of Edward “Eddie” Lennox McDaniel.
IN OCTOBER 1962, twenty-nine-year-old James Meredith became the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His enrollment followed a long court battle, ending with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Meredith’s favor. Mississippi’s segregationist governor Ross Barnett initially blocked Meredith’s admission in September. White students, segregationists, and Klansmen supported Barnett, and at protests they assailed federal troops, injuring many. Two people died during the riots, including a French journalist.
In Natchez, Eddie McDaniel felt alarmed over the growing civil rights movement and wanted to stop it. Invited to a meeting in Concordia Parish, McDaniel rode with a friend to Minorca, a mile south of Vidalia. Located behind the mainline Mississippi River levee along what is known as Old River, once the main channel of the Mississippi, the little fishing community was enshrouded in darkness. A dirt road sprinkled with pebbles followed the river to a well-lighted mobile home deep in the trees along the riverbank. A large room had been added on the back. McDaniel’s stomach grew queasy as he wondered just what he was getting himself into. As he listened to the muffled voices of men talking and laughing in the back room, a fully robed man emerged and shook McDaniel’s hand. He was J. A. Swenson, leader of the Louisiana Original Knights. They talked. The man wondered if McDaniel was interested in joining, whether he could keep secrets, and if he could be counted on to fight the communists who were trying to bring America to her knees and stir up trouble between the races. Every decent Christian, Swenson said, knew that white men were superior to all other races, especially the black race. Jesus demanded that he take a stand.43
Over the past years, McDaniel had traveled the country, moving on to something else if he didn’t get his way. Married twice, he was the oldest of seven children born to poor parents in Natchez during the Great Depression. In Natchez in 1959, the Johns Manville Company fired him after he broke into a milk machine and stole the contents. His supervisor found him a capable worker but one who continuously created unrest at the plant.44 In Los Angeles, McDaniel had abruptly resigned his job as a driver with the Los Angeles Transit Authority; after getting into a fight with a passenger, he walked off the bus, leaving his passengers stranded on the highway. He was dogged by financial problems, too, and in 1961 filed for bankruptcy, citing assets of $200 and debts of $4,522.36.45
As he considered Klan membership, he remembered his grandfather telling him out of the blue one day that the KKK was a good group and he should join it when the time was right.46 In Concordia Parish, the first public appearance of the local Klan and its support of Mississippi’s Barnett was made known on October 5, 1962, when the Sentinel ran a front-page photo of six unidentified, hooded Klansmen—five in white robes, one in a dark robe—surrounding a five-foot cross. The photo had been sent anonymously. In an open letter to the editor, the Klan commended Barnett for his “fight against integration” during the Meredith issue and apologized for the “lack of interest” shown by Louisiana politicians. In 1956, three years before he was elected governor, Barnett had led a rally for the White Citizens’ Council at the Ferriday Elementary School. In a second letter, addressed to Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis, the Concordia Klan expressed “disappointment by the lack of interest that you are showing during the grave situation in Mississippi in view of the fact that your campaign promise was to go to jail to prevent integration.”47
McDaniel told Swenson he wanted to join. Led to the back room, McDaniel saw three dozen robed Klansmen standing in silence. Their leader, known as the Exalted Cyclops, called them to order. The chaplain prayed, and the ritual began. McDaniel was asked if he was willing to follow Klan rules and submit to Klan authority. He was asked to swear to keep Klan secrets: “I will die rather than divulge the same. So help me God. Amen!” Once the ritual was complete, and McDaniel sworn in as a member, the Klansmen removed their hoods and disrobed. To his surprise, McDanie
l realized he knew half the men there. Some were his friends, yet he had had no clue any were Klansmen, a sign to him that this was truly an invisible empire. Afterward, McDaniel learned that he was the first man to be sworn into the Original Knights from the state of Mississippi in the 1960s.48
THE ORIGINAL KNIGHTS traced its origin to the country’s first Klan organization, known as the Reconstruction Klan, which emerged from the southern wasteland after the Civil War in 1865. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee, a godlike figure in the South who after the war served briefly as the Klan’s grand wizard, recognized one of the organization’s great flaws: Klan leaders could not control the violent actions of its members. This Reconstruction Klan and its later spawn arose when great political and social changes were underway in the country. During three specific periods—the 1860s–1870s, the 1910s–1920s, and the late 1950s–1960s—the Klan amassed substantial strength when white supremacy was challenged.49
During the early twentieth century, the second Klan movement produced the largest such organization in the history of the United States. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan claimed an estimated 4 million members, making it as big as other major national organizations. Its founder was a defrocked Methodist minister who was a powerful orator and devotee of fraternal organizations. An Alabama native, William Joseph Simmons idolized the Reconstruction Klan to which his father had belonged. Simmons based the launch of this second Klan in 1915 in part on the tenet that to be a true American was to be native born. The influx of immigrant Jews and Catholics from Europe in the years preceding World War I, the release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan silent movie Birth of a Nation, and the mob lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Atlanta, Georgia, wrongly accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, fanned the hysteria that helped Simmons launch his organization.50
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