Devils Walking
Page 6
After the beating, James stumbled into the yard of a white couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Flaherty, who called Sheriff Cross to report that James and Watkins had been abducted on the side of the road and beaten.21 The next day, Watkins’s mother was warned to get her son out of Concordia Parish. He boarded a train in Brookhaven, Mississippi, bound for Chicago. There, in 1967, he was shown photographs of the suspects. He recognized only one—a photo of the unmasked man who pretended his car was broken down. That man was Red Glover.22
For years afterward, Glover manifested sadistic glee in recalling the beatings. He once told another Klansman that one of the victims asked for a drink afterward to cool his body. Instead, Glover scooped up a cupful of salt water from the abandoned oil well pit and poured it over the man’s bleeding wounds. Every time he told the story, Glover bowled over laughing.23
The FBI wasn’t surprised the sheriff’s office showed little interest in the case. Sheriff Cross said his investigation into the beating yielded no conclusions. Additionally, he said there were no investigative files. When asked by agents if he thought the Klan had committed the beatings, he said certainly not: “There is not now nor never has there been a Klan group in Concordia Parish.”24
At the time of the attempted abduction of James White and the beatings of Richard James and Robert Watkins, Cross had begun his sixth term in office, having been reelected under a cloud of suspicion in December 1963. Cross was reported the winner with an eleven-vote lead over two other candidates. The second-place finisher was James Hartwell Love Jr., the son of Cross’s old nemesis, Hartwell Love, who had defeated Cross in 1948. Love Jr. filed suit, alleging that Cross and his deputies, employees, and agents, along with the clerk of court, had stolen the election to avoid a runoff. Specifically, Love charged that Cross, with the clerk’s consent, “opened various of the envelopes containing absentee ballots which had been legally cast and changed those ballots” to votes for Cross.25 However, the Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeal upheld a district court ruling that in part found that even if four of the absentee votes allegedly marked for Love had been changed to favor Cross, the incumbent sheriff still would have won by a three-vote margin.26
ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI River in Adams County, Odell Anders had become the new sheriff in January, replacing Billy Ferrell. In Mississippi, sheriffs could not serve consecutive terms, and often the new sheriff had little to no law enforcement experience, as was true of the forty-year-old Anders, who had received the Klan vote. A Democrat, Anders defeated his Republican opponent, George Gunter of Natchez, by 226 votes out of 5,284 cast. A nineteen-year Natchez resident who had been an FBI agent for twenty-one years, Gunter reminded voters that Anders had no experience. Anders labeled Gunter a crony of President Kennedy, who was despised by many whites for his pro–civil rights agenda. In his campaign ads in the Natchez Democrat, Anders asked voters if they wanted to elect a man like Gunter who was “trained in guerilla warfare, supervised and directed by the Federal government.” On November 6, 1963, Anders was elected. Sixteen days later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Ironically, the Klansmen who delivered Anders his victory immediately became the biggest problem he would face during his four-year term.27 After Anders took office in January, Klansmen of the newly formed White Knights began terrorizing Adams County. By mid-February, Anders had taken statements from four black men who had been abducted in three separate attacks at gunpoint, taken to remote locations, and beaten with straps and whips. A white man also had been attacked.28
The metamorphosis of the Original Knights in Mississippi into the White Knights was completed by February 1964. Although the Old Originals’ banished leaders, E. L. McDaniel, Douglas Byrd, and Ernest Gilbert, had led the revolt, Sam Bowers hijacked the movement. The slim thirty-nine-year-old, who had never been married, was the grandson of a four-term Mississippi congressman. Bowers spent part of his youth in New Orleans. Growing up, he was considered intelligent, a competent writer who loved erector sets and “anything mechanical.” He and his business partner and occasional roommate, Robert Harry Larson of Chicago, met at the University of Southern California School of Engineering in Los Angeles. By 1964, they were operating Sambo Amusement Company in Laurel, Mississippi, distributing coin-operated pinball and cigarette machines. Larson managed the company, while Bowers maintained the machines. Bowers’s mother, who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, was disappointed that he didn’t become a lawyer and believed her son was misunderstood because he was so fanatically opposed to communism. She longed for the days before the civil rights movement when “our niggers had all they wanted. They were happy. We took care of ’em. Now the common people and trash from the North have come down here and got our niggers all dissatisfied.”29
When he joined the Original Knights in 1963, Bowers became famous for his tirades, his lack of humor, and his fascination with guns and explosives. His father, who had reared him, and his brother both disowned Bowers when he became a Klansman. In early February 1964, two hundred Original Knight defectors transformed themselves into White Knights at a meeting in Brookhaven. While Bowers muscled out Byrd for the top position of imperial wizard, Gilbert was voted head of the Klan Bureau of Investigation and became the officer who spearheaded wrecking-crew projects. McDaniel was named the province investigator for southwest Mississippi.30
Four White Knight units were established in Adams County. One was located in the Morgantown subdivision on the north end of Natchez, where a building was adapted for use as a meetinghouse by all four klaverns. A second klavern was organized in Cloverdale, five miles south of downtown Natchez near the IP plant. A third, in the southern Adams County community of Kingston, was called the Sligo unit, after an old plantation. The fourth klavern was in Fenwick along US 84 in north-central Adams County. Each klavern elected an Exalted Cyclops and subordinate officers. Violent men who had lashed out at Original Knights leaders Young and Swenson for not giving the green light to wrecking-crew projects now felt empowered to pounce like their brothers in Concordia Parish.31
On Friday, February 7, four days after the failed kidnapping attempt of James White, Alfred Whitley was stopped at a roadblock after midnight. He had just gotten off work at Armstrong Tire, where he had worked as a janitor for eighteen years. Armed, hooded men yanked Whitley from his car, then blindfolded and bound him. They took him to the Homochitto National Forest, stripped him, beat him with bullwhips, and forced him to drink three ounces of castor oil, a laxative that causes excessive diarrhea.32 The men cursed Whitley, accused him of being the “leading nigger in the NAACP,” and repeatedly ordered him to identify the “white leader” of the organization. Whitley didn’t know what they were talking about. In addition to the humiliation and physical pain they inflicted on Whitley, the Klansmen stole his wallet, which held forty-five dollars in cash and a sixty-three-dollar payroll check. They also took his pocketknife and car keys.33 Sheriff Anders, who had been in office only a month when the beating occurred, said his office questioned the main suspect, Catfish Smith, and twenty-five to forty employees at the tire plant but developed no relevant information. However, Anders made a suspect decision in the days ahead: he destroyed the records on the case to ensure that “innocent people” would not be incriminated.34
On February 8, a white man, Roy J. Beason, was abducted and beaten by Klansmen in southern Adams County for allegedly having an affair with a black woman. Two days earlier, two officers with the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol (MHSP) had charged Beason, who cleaned septic tanks for a living, with drunk driving. Sitting in the front seat with Beason when he was arrested was a black woman. According to white custom, the black woman should have been sitting in the backseat. A Klansman was in the car with the troopers.35
On February 15, James C. Winston, an African American cafeteria worker at International Paper, was walking home at 8:45 p.m. when three masked white men forced him at gunpoint into a car. They made him lie on the rear floorboard and covered his face with a hood. His assailants rifled t
hrough his wallet, stealing the two dollars inside and taking his Social Security card. He was driven to the community of Sibley near the Mississippi River. En route, he was asked if he was in the NAACP, which at that time was dormant in Natchez, and was ordered to identify some of the leading blacks in the community. When asked if he would send his children (he had none) to school with white children, he answered that he supposed he would—not the answer the Klansmen wanted to hear. Once the car stopped, the men stripped Winston, forced him to lie on the ground, and cursed him and called him derogatory names. They beat him on the back and stomach with a bullwhip and abandoned him in the woods. After midnight, he located the home of a black man who gave him sanctuary, clothed him, and arranged for him to get back to town.36
Days earlier, the International Paper Company had integrated its restrooms, drinking fountains, and payroll line; in the weeks to follow, however, black workers, for their own safety, continued to segregate. Everyone sensed the growing tensions. Scores of Klansmen from Louisiana and Mississippi worked at the paper mill and at Armstrong Tire Company. In fear, blacks and whites armed themselves.37
Within an hour of Winston’s beating, at 12:45 a.m. on February 16, Archie Curtis, a black businessman who operated a funeral home in Natchez and often used his hearse to transport rural sick people to the hospital, responded to an emergency call. A man claimed his white friend’s wife was in immediate need of medical care and needed a ride. At the end of Palestine Road in rural Adams County, five men wearing white hoods abducted Curtis and his employee Willie Jackson and forced them at gunpoint into a 1958 Ford Galaxy.38
At a nearby Humble Oil Company well site, the men forced Curtis to remove his pants and Jackson to strip entirely. The men blindfolded them, made them lie on the ground, and beat them with bullwhips and a razor strop. Curtis was the obvious target. His attackers repeatedly tried to force him to admit that he was in the NAACP, which was months away from being reactivated. A leader in the black community of Natchez since the 1950s, Curtis had been a registered voter since 1956. The circuit clerk for Adams County had described Curtis in a letter to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which spied on civil rights groups, as having “a reputation in this community as being a rather smartalec [sic] negro . . . in my opinion he would be the type Negro to take part” in a “subversive” organization. By white standards in Mississippi in 1964, the NAACP was subversive.39 Almost a half century after the beating, when the Concordia Sentinel approached his widow for comments on a story on the attack, Mary Curtis asked that no story be written. “I am a widow,” she said, “and those people still live here.” The newspaper obliged.40
Overwhelmed by the violence, Sheriff Anders asked for help. Although informants said Anders had joined the White Knights, others indicated Anders had attended at least one meeting simply as a law officer gathering intelligence on the Klan. Hours after the Curtis beating, the sheriff contacted the MHSP and the FBI and told them “something was up.” He drove to Jackson and asked Gov. Paul Johnson for assistance. The governor sent two MHSP investigators to look into the whippings and beatings and to determine if any MHSP patrolmen were involved in the Klan. Three patrolmen were identified as Klansmen. Two were fired.41
No suspects were ever identified in the beatings of Roy Beason and James Winston. Only one victim, Alfred Whitley, could identify a suspect—Catfish Smith, a white coworker at Armstrong Tire. Three men were considered the prime suspects in the beatings of Curtis and Jackson. The first was Jack Seale, one of E. L. McDaniel’s best friends and head of security in the White Knights. The second was Douglas Byrd, who had previously served as Grand Dragon of the Mississippi Realm of the Original Knights before becoming a White Knights leader. The third, Jasper Burchfield, a thirty-five-year-old IP worker, was an Adams County constable in Fenwick, not far from where Curtis and Jackson had been abducted and beaten.42
After consulting with city police and the sheriff’s office, the MHSP added two names to the suspect list. One was Tiny Lewis, who operated the Barbecue Pit on the northern end of Natchez, a known Klan hangout where early discussions of the formation of the White Knights were held. Another suspect was Ernest Avants, a violent Klansman who once compared White Knights leader Sam Bowers to Jesus Christ. “In the City of Natchez,” MHSP investigators reported, “there appears to be a break down in racial harmony. It is felt that this is the culmination of several things,” including politics and the integration of restrooms, cafeterias, and other areas of the International Paper Company and Armstrong Rubber Company.43
IN 1964, ITS FOURTEENTH year of operation, IP’s rayon pulp mill in Natchez was the largest industrial employer in the region. The mill had 1,800 workers, produced 1,000 tons of pulp daily, and kept log trucks rolling in more than a dozen parishes and counties on both sides of the Mississippi River.44 While thousands of employees working at the Natchez mills rode in groups to work, few carpools were interracial. But for a number of years, Clifton Walker had ridden in a carpool with one other black man and three white men.45 They met at Woodville, located south of Natchez in Wilkinson County, which anchors the southwestern corner of Mississippi. The county was named after an American traitor, James Wilkinson, who when a commanding general in the U.S. Army was on the payroll of Spain as a spy. Wilkinson oversaw the construction of Fort Adams, twenty miles west of Woodville; the Mississippi River fort was named after President John Adams when the Mississippi Territory was created in 1798.46
Woodville, the county seat, was founded in 1811. The community was the childhood home of Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederate States of America, whose family moved to the outskirts of town in 1812.47 Clifton Walker was born in 1927, thirty-eight years after Davis’s death and a few miles from his boyhood home. Although Walker was the youngest of nine, his older siblings so admired him that they called him “Man.” In 1945, he married Ruby Phipps. Following his U.S. Army service in Korea, Walker secured a job in the woodyard at IP, which provided him, Ruby, and their five children a good living.48
There were many rumors circulating about Walker, including that he had a girlfriend. The most damning rumor, however, was that he flirted in a bold way with white women. Although the “Whites only” and “Colored only” restroom signs had been removed at IP, workers continued to segregate themselves when using the bathrooms, showers, and water fountains. Because of the growing anti-integration rhetoric at the plant and before the rash of whippings and beatings in Adams County and Concordia Parish, Walker had placed a pistol in the glove compartment of his car. For the past year, Ruby had watched her husband become increasingly agitated. In late December 1963, a Natchez doctor had prescribed medicine to calm his nerves.49
Twelve days after the beating of Archie Curtis and Willie Jackson, on February 28, Walker and his fellow carpool riders clocked out at IP an hour before midnight. All five men sipped whiskey from paper cups as they traveled south along US 61 from Natchez to their rendezvous point at a home near Nettles’ Truck Stop, six miles north of Woodville. The road cut through the Mississippi hilltops, which rise two hundred feet above the lowland on a thirty-five-mile stretch of scenic countryside. The narrow highway was framed by towering cliffs, their tops cleared by heavy equipment during construction of the highway three decades earlier. On moonlit nights, a glance to a connecting gravel county road revealed shadows from overhanging oaks, reminiscent of a lovers’ lane.50 Heading south, US 61 crosses the Homochitto River and the swamp, which mark the boundary between Adams and Wilkinson counties. Then there’s a steady climb into the Wilkinson County hills that peaks atop Doloroso Hill, offering a commanding view for miles.
Arriving at the rendezvous point at 11:45 p.m., the men said goodnight and climbed into their cars to drive their final stretches home. A mile south on US 61, Walker turned his cream-colored Impala left onto Poor House Road, the shortcut to his home a few miles away along State Highway 563. Three hundred yards down, the Impala came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road.51 Hi
s body was found the next day at 1 p.m., fourteen hours after Walker left his carpool. MHSP patrolman R. W. Palmertree, one of three patrolmen then under investigation for alleged Klan connections, claimed he was flagged down on US 61 near Nettles’ Truck Stop by Prentiss Mathis, a local resident who said he had driven by the car earlier but didn’t stop. Why Mathis waited until his second pass by the Impala before alerting authorities remains a mystery. All of the windows in the Impala, which was parked in the middle of the gravel road, were shattered, and the car’s body riddled with bullet holes.52
Wilkinson County’s newly elected sheriff, Charles T. Netterville, soon arrived at the scene. As the county’s top law enforcement officer, the investigation was his to conduct. Walker’s body was stretched across the front seat. Whatever he had witnessed once his car was stopped obviously had alerted him that he was in grave danger. He had pulled the key out of the ignition and unlocked the glove compartment, where his chrome-plated, four-inch barrel .38 Smith and Wesson was hidden. The Impala was in high gear, the keys hanging from the dash compartment lock, the drawer open.53 It appeared that Walker’s path had been blocked by another vehicle. Did Klansmen quickly surround his Impala? Knowing about the previous beatings, did Walker decide to make a stand like James White four weeks earlier? Did Klansmen abandon a kidnapping plan and open fire on Walker when they realized he was reaching for a gun in his glove compartment? Why else would they risk shooting one another in a crossfire?
Part of the steering wheel had been blown away, and several gunshot holes were seen inside the car’s body. Evidence indicated that a number of men with shotguns, standing two to three feet away, had opened fire on Walker from both sides of the vehicle. A full load of buckshot, fired from close range, entered just below his left ear, while another load, fired into the right side of his face from a distance of three to four feet, had blown away chunks of Walker’s mouth, chin, and neck. The bone damage to his face was so severe that it required great skill by the mortician to prepare the body for viewing. Walker’s son recalled looking inside the glass-topped casket and realizing that his father’s face resembled that of a mummy.54 Sheriff Netterville immediately requested assistance from the MHSP Identification Bureau, which ultimately thought that the homicide was connected to the Adams County beatings.55