Through savvy marketing, Simmons’s Klan peaked in the 1920s. A handful of its members and leaders garnered national attention for murdering white men who challenged the organization but little press for the black men they slaughtered. While this uncontrollable violent element had also defined the Reconstruction Klan, something new emerged in Simmons’s Klan. He and his associates grew rich as millions of members paid initiation fees and dues and bought Klan robes. Jealous and ambitious men wanted their jobs.51
Confrontations over violence and money were also debilitating during the era of the third major Klan movement in the late 1950s and 1960s. In Louisiana and Mississippi in late 1963, the leaders of the Original Knights were challenged over money and over reluctance to unleash the violent acts desired by the most vocal element of the growing membership. Since its inception in late 1960, the Original Knights had spread like wildfire from northwestern Louisiana to Bogalusa and New Orleans in the state’s southeastern toe. It was well organized in Concordia Parish in 1962 when McDaniel became the first Mississippi member of the Louisiana organization. The symbolic leader of the Original Knights was an aging Roy K. Davis, a preacher from Dallas, Texas, who based this group’s organizational structure on Simmons’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, of which Davis had been a member. When he resurrected the Knights in 1960, he adopted Simmons’s constitution and organizational structure, and this new Klan was known as both the Original Knights and the Old Originals. Although Davis served as the paid imperial wizard of the Original Knights, he had little to do with day-to-day operations. J. D. Swenson and Royal Young were the true leaders.52
As the chief recruiter, Swenson had traveled Louisiana organizing klaverns, individual Klan units that typically required a membership of fifty to be chartered, each having its own Exalted Cyclops. A new member went through a “naturalization” ceremony before taking an oath in which he swore to keep Klan secrets. Afterward, the new Klansman purchased a robe for $10, paid $10 as an initiation fee, and paid $1 per month in dues.53
With more than forty klaverns in Louisiana by late 1962, Swenson directed the Original Knights’ eastward momentum into Mississippi. In early 1963, E. L. McDaniel was tapped to help Swenson recruit and organize in the Magnolia State, while another Mississippi man, Douglas Byrd, was appointed grand dragon of the newly formed Mississippi Realm of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Swenson was now intent on making the Old Originals a true national organization, just as Simmons had done decades earlier. It became Royal Young’s job to organize the growth. In his fifties, Young was a locomotive engineer for the Louisiana Central Railroad in Bossier City, located across the Red River from Shreveport. He was experienced in union work with the railroad, and his organizational skills drew Swenson to make Young his right-hand man.54 Young had to troubleshoot growing dissension from local Klan leaders who, by late 1963, questioned how Swenson and Young were spending Klan money. Young was also instructed to reorganize the Klan by assigning duties for newly created state offices and to set up a national structure.55
Among the state officers appointed by Swenson was forty-year-old Robert Fuller of Monroe. The owner of a sanitation service and septic tank business, Fuller was named head of the Klan Bureau of Investigation (KBI). Violent projects by secretive hit squads known as “wrecking crews” required the approval of the KBI chief. Fuller was greatly feared and admired in Klan circles. In 1960, he had shot five of his black employees, killing four and critically injuring one, in what he called a dispute over money. He told authorities that the men attacked him outside his home with knives and linoleum hooks and that in self-defense he took his double-barreled twelve-gauge from his truck and shot all five men with seven rounds, having to reload three times. Although he was charged in the shooting, a grand jury chose not to indict him in 1961.56
McDaniel, Byrd, and new recruit Ernest Gilbert, of Brookhaven, quickly established klaverns throughout southwest Mississippi. They then turned on Swenson and Young, accusing them of lining their pockets with the Mississippi money collected for robes and membership. Unrest in Louisiana resulted in a number of klaverns withholding payment of their membership dues.57
During this crisis, the Klan was jolted on June 11, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, proclaiming that a legal issue over equal rights had now become a moral one. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. praised Kennedy’s proposal. Nine days later, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a resolution by a 64 to 11 vote, trashing Kennedy’s plan as simply a vindictive means for the federal government to maintain authority over the states. The Concordia Sentinel and other southern newspapers printed U.S. senator Richard Russell’s (Georgia) spin on Kennedy’s stance: “The fact that every citizen has the same right to own and operate a swimming pool or dining hall constitutes equality.” But, Russell maintained, “Federal power to force the owner of a dining hall or swimming pool to unwillingly accept those of a different race as guests creates a new and special right for negroes in derogation of the property rights of all our people to own and control the fruits of their labor and ingenuity.”58
In klaverns in Louisiana and Mississippi, Klansmen advocated violence, and the dissension grew from a growl to a roar. Some called Young an incompetent leader because he would not allow revolting Klansmen to burn crosses during the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign of 1963. Concordia Parish native Shelby Jackson, a segregationist and the state superintendent of education then seeking the governor’s post, drew the support of Louisiana KKK members. At the core of the discontent, however, were two things: Certain men wanted the power that Swenson and Young held, and the money that came with it. Other Klansmen, having lost all faith that local and state politicians could hold off integration, concluded that violence was the only remaining option. Young told a congressional committee in 1965 that what was happening could be summed up in two words: “Power purge.”59
News accounts made it clear that neither the civil rights movement nor southern resistance was going away. When Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Mississippi White Citizens’ Council, was charged and jailed for the June 12, 1963, murder of Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, public officials and Klansmen rallied to his aid. Four months later, on September 15, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls, three of whom were fourteen and the youngest only eleven. Members of the United Klans of America (UKA), led by Robert Shelton and headquartered in Alabama, would later be implicated in the murders. During the summer, the Ruston klavern of Original Knights broke away and quietly joined Shelton’s UKA. Dissident Original Knights members organized emergency meetings throughout northeastern Louisiana to plot the ouster of Young and Swenson.60 To counter the growing rebellion, Young organized a meeting with the opposition faction in the Caldwell Parish town of Columbia on the Ouachita River, not far from the home of John McKeithen, who would be elected governor in March 1964. Complaints were raised, especially over finances.61 IRS records cited during congressional hearings in 1966 revealed that Swenson was paid $16,944 from 1962 to early 1964 by the Louisiana Rifle Association, a front organization for the Original Knights. Swenson’s Klan pay was $10,690 in 1963 alone; Young pocketed $8,500.
On December 26, a few days after the Caldwell Parish meeting, Young met with Louisiana Klan officers at his home, where he expressed fear that the Original Knights units in Mississippi would be lost to Byrd and McDaniel. Young traveled to Natchez to meet with the two, but he and Byrd spent the evening arguing. At one point, Young stood and started preaching, which drew Gilbert’s ire. “Sit down!” Gilbert shouted, and “go to hell!”62
Three days later, Young banished McDaniel, Byrd, and Gilbert from the Mississippi Realm of the Original Knights, as well as three leaders from the Louisiana Realm.63 In a desperate final move, on January 11, 1964, Young reserved the Shamrock Motel restaurant banquet room in Vidalia to meet with two dozen Mississippi Original Knights representing six klaverns.
Among the Mississippians attending were E. L. Caston, the former sheriff of Amite County, and his former chief deputy, Daniel Jones, who had recently been elected sheriff. Jones would soon become the chief suspect in the murder of African American Louis Allen, a logger gunned down in Liberty twenty days after the Shamrock meeting. Caston and Jones promised Young their support in maintaining the Original Knights in Mississippi and voiced their opposition to those revolting to form the White Knights.64
But the Original Knights were done in Mississippi. Neither McDaniel, Byrd, nor Gilbert was given the top post in the White Knights. Despite the fact that the Louisiana-Mississippi Original Knights relationship was severed, the connection between the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Natchez Klan remained intact, linked by E. L. McDaniel and Deputy Frank DeLaughter.
1964
3
ABDUCTIONS, WHIPPINGS, AND MURDER
IT WAS COLD and raining in Louisiana on Monday, February 3, 1964. It was dark around 8 p.m., when a battered red pickup eased onto the gravel driveway in James White’s backyard, nine miles west of Ferriday in Concordia Parish. Eleven members of White’s family were inside his home, including his wife, mother, father, sister, and six of his seven children.1
The forty-four-year-old White raised pheasants and quail on his small farm and sold men’s apparel in black communities in the area. Like his best friend Frank Morris, he was among a handful of black men in the parish who owned property. In the 1940s, White had been a member of the NAACP before quitting in frustration when he learned that Sheriff Noah Cross had a spy in the organization who reported on every meeting.2 White knew that because he owned land and a business, some local white men considered him uppity. But he didn’t care. He was physically a large man, fearless but not reckless. He backed down from no man, white or black, who threatened him or his family.3
During the previous weeks, his property had been fired upon in the night on seventeen occasions by unknown assailants passing by on the Monterey-Stacy Road that ran along the west side of his home. White had no idea who was responsible for the drive-by shootings but was well aware the Ku Klux Klan had a local unit that represented the communities of Monterey, Lismore, Acme, and Eva. This unit was commonly called the Black River Klan because those communities bordered Black River and a horseshoe bend of the old river channel known as Black River Lake.
On the night of the third, White heard someone calling him from outside the house. A male voice he didn’t recognize said he wanted to look at White’s birds. It was not unusual. Potential buyers often stopped by at night to view or purchase the pheasants penned on the front corner of his property. He put on his raincoat, grabbed an umbrella, and ventured out into the cold. Outside, he saw a man standing in front of the pheasant pen situated between the house and the highway, illuminated by a lone street light. The man wore a cap, the bill pulled down so low it covered his eyes, and a military-style jacket with its collar pulled up shielding his cheeks. Puffing on a cigarette, he appeared nervous and stuttered when he told White he wanted to buy two hens and a male pheasant.4
Before White could answer, the man suddenly pulled a revolver with a six-inch barrel from his waist and barked, “Get in the truck!” Near the back corner of the house, by the old red pickup parked in the driveway, another man, holding a shotgun, arose from a crouched position. When the man with the pistol poked the barrel into White’s stomach, White decided to make a stand rather than be forced into the truck. He shouted for help, pointing his umbrella at his attacker as if it were a gun. Startled and trembling, White’s assailant took a few steps back.5 In a flash, White’s wife handed him a loaded shotgun while the man with the pistol stumbled over the fence that paralleled the highway, firing wildly in White’s direction. As the red pickup pulled onto the road, White returned fire. He was certain he had hit one of the men.6
The following day, White reported the attack to the sheriff’s office. A short time later, deputies Frank DeLaughter and Bill Ogden arrived. White had used a washtub to cover and preserve a perfect shoe print in the mud left by the man with the pistol. DeLaughter snickered and walked over the spot. Sheriff Cross came by later, told White he knew who the culprits were, and promised to bring them by later for White to identify. Cross never returned. White reported the incident and the other shootings—including one that occurred two weeks later—to the district attorney. Nothing was done.7
White never knew that four men in his yard that night became suspects in many of the major Klan-related crimes in Concordia Parish and in Natchez and Adams County, Mississippi, over the next three years, including the murder by arson of Frank Morris. The FBI would learn in 1967 that the “wrecking crew” that had set out to abduct and beat White was led by Raleigh Jackson Glover, who commonly went by the nickname “Red,” though some called him “Jack.”8 Also present that night was Tommie Lee Jones of Natchez, the man White saw rise from the corner of the house with a shotgun. Jones had pulled both triggers of his double-barreled weapon only to hear two clicks. He had forgotten to load it. Seconds later, when the red pickup was pulling away, White shot Jones in the face. Original Knights leaders in Louisiana contacted Brookhaven Klansman Ernest Gilbert, who made arrangements for Jones to receive medical care from the Lincoln County health officer, a drug-addicted alcoholic who had lost his medical practice months earlier.9 Other Klansmen involved were Jones’s best friend, Thore L. “Tog” Torgersen, also of Natchez, and James Lee Scarborough of Ferriday. Like Jones, they were employees of International Paper Company (IP) in Natchez. Scarborough would soon rise to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of the Ferriday-Clayton Klan unit.10
GLOVER, A BALDING forty-three-year-old former Navy Seabee, had served in World War II and the Korean conflict. He had more recently served as Exalted Cyclops of the Vidalia Klan and had helped organize the Black River Klan, as well as the Harrisonburg and Sicily Island units in neighboring Catahoula Parish. Glover had aligned himself with Murray Martin of Winnsboro, the new leader of the Louisiana Original Knights who had helped engineer the revolt against the leadership of John Swenson and Royal Young. Like Glover, Martin was an advocate of violent resistance to civil rights and was furious over plans for Freedom Summer, designed to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. In part because it was known that White had belonged to the NAACP, the Klan had falsely labeled him a Black Muslim, one of several Black Nationalist organizations that advocated black power. Strengthening this belief was the fact that White sported a goatee, a type of facial hair that the Klan associated with radicalism.11
An employee of Armstrong Tire Company in Natchez, Glover had a reputation as a fanatic on the race issue.12 Klan informants later filled the ears of FBI agents with stories concerning his hatred of blacks. The “sight of a Negro infuriates Glover,” said one.13 Another said that Glover would like nothing more than “to pump some caps on any Negro.” He lived in Vidalia on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River during the Klan’s most violent years—from 1962 to 1967. In 1962, Glover told newly elected Natchez police chief J. T. Robinson that he had shot and wounded a black man, alleging that the man had attacked him with a Pepsi bottle. Robinson interviewed the victim, who agreed to come by the police station to fill out a complaint once he was released from the hospital. Instead, he disappeared.14
Glover had been bent on demonizing blacks and pondering ways to physically assault them since at least his teenage years.15 An acquaintance told the FBI that during the 1930s Glover’s family was “run out of Natchez” because one of his sisters was “running around” with black men. Shamed and humiliated, Glover was shunned by the white community. Hardened by the ostracism, he developed a reputation as a hothead and a “cocky braggart.” At times, he frequented the strip of bars and bawdy houses owned by Blackie Drane and others on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway. One night in the 1940s, Robinson, not yet a policeman, was drinking beer with friends in one of those lounges. Across the room Glover, smoking a cigar, suddenly jumped onto a table. Switching the lit end
of the cigar “so that the fire was inside his mouth,” Glover “chewed up the cigar, fire and all,” and dared any man in the room to a fight. No one accepted the challenge.16
In 1967, the FBI investigated the attack on James White. Shown photographs of the suspects, White was unable to identify any of them.17 The case went cold. His attack had been followed by the beatings of at least seven men in Concordia Parish and across the Mississippi River in Adams County during the month of February 1964. The second Concordia attack had happened on February 13, ten days after the attempted abduction of White. African Americans Richard James and Robert Watkins were rounding a sharp curve on a gravel road near Branche’s store on Workinger Bayou, six miles from White’s home, when they saw a 1955 or 1956 Ford, white over blue, parked in the road with the hood up. A balding white man with red hair and a ruddy complexion was standing by the driver’s side. The two men pulled abreast of the man, who said he needed help to start his vehicle. Watkins emerged from the passenger side of James’s car. As he prepared to look under the hood, the white man suddenly pulled a pistol.18
“This is a holdup,” he said. Suddenly, five or six hooded men rushed out of the bushes on the side of the road, some carrying sawed-off shotguns. As they surrounded James and Watkins, the unmasked white man warned, “If you want to live, don’t yell!” James and Watkins were taken to an abandoned oil-well site, forced to strip, and beaten severely. Watkins appeared to be the main target. His supposed offense remains unclear. A few days before the beating, he had called a white woman to report that her husband’s cows had wandered onto another man’s property. Klansmen likely made something more provocative out of the call and decided to attack Watkins in order to emphasize that a black man should never converse with a white woman on the phone or in person.19 A Klan sheet circulated in the area at that time alluded to a white woman in Ferriday allegedly dating a black man. That man, a schoolteacher, left town.20
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