Devils Walking
Page 8
On November 10, MHSP investigators, Louisiana state troopers, local officials, and FBI agents arrived at Parker’s Landing to search the Parker property for the frame that had held the engine block found in the river. Shortly after the search began, a Jeep frame was located near the caretaker’s house. Despite exhaustive efforts, however, officials were unable to find a paper trail connecting the motor and frame, nor could they directly connect them to Ernest Parker.36
On January 5, 1965, District Attorney Lenox Forman indicated that he was unwilling to move forward with the probe. He said that the case might “have been greatly prejudiced” because Seale and Edwards had “put out the story” that they had been “brutally mistreated” by the MHSP after their arrests. Forman told the MHSP and the FBI that if they obtained new evidence, a new grand jury slated to convene in August would investigate. In the meantime, the charges against the two Klansmen were dropped.37
THE DEE-MOORE killings alarmed Klan leaders. The Bunkley unit had taken action without getting the permission of White Knights leadership, particularly that of Gilbert, whose job as head of the KBI was to approve and supervise such projects. Even Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard, did not learn of the murders until after they occurred. Bowers early on had discovered that, although he had devoted Klan followers in southwest Mississippi, he couldn’t control the violent men who dominated the membership there. In fact, he involved himself little in White Knight activity in southwest Mississippi, concentrating instead on Jackson and the eastern parts of the state.
By June of 1964, there was also a growing rift between Natchez Klan leaders and members of the Sligo White Knights. The Sligo klavern was responsible for the attempted murder in April of twenty-five-year-old African American Richard Joe Butler, a shooting that drew statewide publicity. Butler had worked for Haywood Benton Drane Sr. (no relation to Blackie Drane), a prominent rancher who had served in the Mississippi House of Representatives and as president of the Adams County School Board. Drane and his wife Louisa lived twenty-one miles southeast of Natchez on Deerfield Plantation in the Kingston community.38 The southern portion of the county had been settled in the 1770s by slaveholding religious immigrants from New Jersey at a time when the British held possession of Natchez. The White Knights klavern organized there in 1964 was named after the 2,500-acre Sligo Plantation, once owned by Judge George Armstrong Sr., a wealthy Texas oilman, rancher, industrialist, and white supremacist.39
Armstrong’s opinions had become widely publicized when he tried, in 1949, to bail out Jefferson College, five miles east of Natchez. The military school, attended briefly by Jefferson Davis, had been founded following the formation of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 and named after President Thomas Jefferson. After the World War II years drained the college’s finances, the trustees asked Armstrong for help. He was eager to lend a hand in a big way. He proposed donating 26,000 acres of his Adams County land and one-half of his foundation’s mineral rights from rich oil-producing fields, a financial windfall that would support the school for eternity. But there was a catch: he demanded the trustees adopt a policy excluding Jews and blacks from attending.40
Armstrong had long been “opposed to mixing races in our schools for it will inevitably lead to conflict, to mongrelization and the deterioration of the Anglo-Saxon race.” He believed that as a white man and as one of “God’s chosen people,” he was “superior by blood” to every other race on the planet. After the offer became the subject of negative national headlines, the trustees declined the gift, but Armstrong’s name, which still adorns the Natchez public library, was from then on revered in the Klan world.41
Fifteen years after the Jefferson College debacle, on Sunday, April 5, 1964, Butler walked into the Dranes’ barn, preparing to feed the livestock. Four or five armed, hooded men jumped him with sawed-off and long-barreled shotguns. As he was being led away, Butler broke and ran, shouting for help from Mrs. Drane as the Klansmen opened fire. Butler was hit in the right arm and leg. Despite the danger, Mrs. Drane ran to Butler’s aid as the Klansmen fled. She transported the bleeding man to Jefferson Davis Hospital, where her husband was a patient.42
Sheriff Anders and the MHSP investigated the shooting. Butler told investigators that a month earlier, two carloads of white men had followed him. The MHSP learned that the Sligo klavern believed Butler was having an affair with the niece of two of its most violent Klansmen, brothers Ed and Claude Fuller. Claude was known to regularly encourage attacks against African Americans,43 and Ed was widely regarded as a hoodlum. By the end of 1964, Ed was Blackie Drane’s right-hand man in Concordia Parish, where he developed a savage reputation for using brass knuckles and ax handles against the “drunk and helpless.”44
A short time before Butler was shot, a cross had been burned in front of the home of his step-grandfather, who identified the man lighting the cross as Marvin McKinney. Marvin and his brother, J. L. “Big Mac” McKinney, were Sligo Klansmen.45 Marvin McKinney believed black male civil rights workers intended to “plant a baby in every white girl in Mississippi.”46
A man Butler identified as one of the attackers, twenty-six-year-old Billy Woods of the Sligo group, was arrested on April 7, 1964. Leaders in the Morgantown White Knights klavern in Natchez were furious that Sligo Klansmen had acted without authorization. Gilbert told the FBI that Natchez Klan leaders believed Marvin McKinney and Billy Woods were the shooters, but no one could prove it. A short time after his arrest, Woods was freed on $1,000 bond. Six months later, Ed Fuller and William Bryant Davidson were charged with assault and intent to kill Butler. Charges against all three were dropped after Butler, fearing for his life, fled the county.47
AFTER DEE AND MOORE were killed, Bowers agreed to place Marvin McKinney on trial for violating his Klan oath of secrecy by talking publicly about the Butler shooting. On June 13, the dozen Klansmen chosen as jurors were unable to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. On June 22, a second trial was held at the Morgantown klavern headquarters in Natchez, with Bowers serving as judge and jury. The proceedings drew 150 White Knights from across the state. Fifteen came from Wilkinson County, led by Constable Bud Jeter, one of the suspects in the February shooting death of Clifton Walker in Woodville. Clyde Seale and his sons James Ford and Jack were also in attendance, along with three dozen Franklin County White Knights. Grand Dragon Julius Harper, the former sheriff of Mississippi’s Copiah County, served as McKinney’s defense counsel.48
Bowers acquitted McKinney. Many Klansmen in southwest Mississippi were renegades. Bowers knew they couldn’t be controlled but admired their willingness to act. Yet the Sligo Klansmen were despised by their Natchez peers, and a split within the White Knights, only weeks after its formation, was already beginning. That same June, thirty-three-year-old Ernest Avants, a suspect in the February beating of black businessman Archie Curtis of Natchez, shot up the Morgantown klavern building with a pistol. Avants, a loyal follower of Bowers, was furious over the dissension within the Klan.49 A short time later, the owner of the building kicked the Klan out. From that point on, meetings were held in homes or camps, in cafés or beer joints, along riverbanks or levee tops, in deserted parking lots, deep woods, or cow pastures. This incident so upset Klansmen that many left the KKK for good, while others turned to the United Klans of America.
FBI AGENTS
FBI agent Paul Lancaster taped two interviews with Frank Morris four days before Morris’s death in 1964.
(Concordia Sentinel)
FBI agent John Pfeifer’s investigations in Concordia Parish led to the federal convictions of Sheriff Noah Cross and Deputy Frank DeLaughter in connection with the Morville Lounge, operated by the Carlos Marcello mob.
(Concordia Sentinel)
FBI agent Billy Bob Williams, who followed KKK members for eighteen months in Natchez, got into a fistfight with Silver Dollar Group Klansman Jack Seale in 1966. (Concordia Sentinel)
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Ferriday police chief Bob Warren in the 1970s. (Concor
dia Sentinel)
Noah Cross in Ferriday, circa 1940. His long tenure as Concordia Parish sheriff began in 1941.
(Photo courtesy Glen B. McGlothin Jr.)
Natchez police chief J. T. Robinson (seated) with detectives Charlie Bahin (center) and Frank Rickard (left). All three worked behind the scenes to help the FBI.
(Concordia Sentinel)
Noah Cross wept “freely,” reported the Concordia Sentinel, when taking the oath for his eighth term in July 1972, a few months before going to federal prison.
(Concordia Sentinel)
Vidalia police chief J. L. “Bud” Spinks.
(Concordia Sentinel)
Noah Cross (right) with Frank DeLaughter a short time after their release from federal prison in the 1970s. (Concordia Sentinel)
MURDER SUSPECTS
Raleigh J. “Red” Glover, head of the Silver Dollar Group
(FBI file photo)
Kenneth Norman Head
(Concordia Sentinel)
Homer T. “Buck” Horton
(FBI file photo)
Elden “Junkman” Hester
(FBI surveillance photo)
Tommie Lee Jones
(FBI file photo)
E. D. Morace
(FBI file photo)
Ernest B. Parker
(House Un-American Activities Committee file photo)
Coonie Poissot
(FBI file photo)
James L. Scarborough
(FBI file photo)
Sonny Taylor
(Photo courtesy Cherris J. Nichols)
James Ford Seale
(FBI file photo)
Myron Wayne “Jack” Seale
(House Un-American Activities Committee file photo)
5
A GREAT STORM GATHERING
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON pressured the FBI to make the Neshoba case its top priority and to stop the Klan violence, but bureau agents in the field knew how tall the order was. Black males had gained the vote during Reconstruction but had been denied it in the South through various means during the Jim Crow era. In the 1950s, after almost a century, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the segregation of public schools, and Congress passed two civil rights acts. The first, in 1957, created the Civil Rights Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. It was the duty of division lawyers to find a means to enforce the act and the one that followed, in 1960, which gave the Justice Department a potentially effective avenue to secure the ballot for blacks: the authority to inspect and photograph voter registration records. The federal mandates were supposed to prevent white public officials, such as the county registrar of voters, the sheriff, or the police chief, from discriminating against African Americans who attempted to register to vote, and to investigate anyone, private citizen or public official, who threatened, intimidated, or used coercion in any manner to do so. From 1960 to 1963, the Justice Department uncovered numerous ploys used by southern registrars that had prevented generations of blacks from voting. As the cases of discrimination came to light, police officers and their white civilian allies increased the levels of intimidation and violence, especially in Mississippi.1
On June 5, 1964, a month after the murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore, Attorney General Robert Kennedy established a nine-lawyer unit from the Civil Rights Division to investigate the terrorist acts in southwest Mississippi. The division was also supposed to determine the numeric and arms strength of the Klan and ascertain the level of its infiltration into law enforcement.2 In a May 3 “Imperial Executive Order,” White Knights imperial wizard Sam Bowers had advised that “within a very few days, the enemy will launch his final push for victory here in Mississippi.” He predicted Freedom Summer would result in “massive street demonstrations” between blacks and whites, creating “civil chaos and anarchy.” White resistance to “communist authorities” within the federal government could result in the siege of Mississippi by a declaration of martial law. He urged white Mississippians to prepare their fists and guns.3
His followers thought Bowers prophetic when on June 17 Joseph Alsop wrote in the Washington Post, “A great storm is gathering—and may break very soon indeed—in the State of Mississippi and some other regions of the South.” Civil rights organizations were transporting several hundred black and white students from the North to register blacks to vote. The Post quoted one black student as saying that African Americans might start “killing the white people in Mississippi very soon.” Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, editorialized that Freedom Summer would be a “massive, daring, probably bloody assault on the racial powers of Mississippi” and that for “the first time, active self-defense and actual retaliation (by Negroes), though not officially advocated, are being openly discussed.”4
On June 21, James Chaney, a local black resident, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, northern white men, went missing in Neshoba County. As part of the Freedom Summer effort, the three were investigating the burning of a black church, which had been designated by the Congress of Racial Equality as the site for a freedom school. Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price reported that he had booked the three for speeding and released them from jail before midnight.
Although numerous murders and attacks against black men in southwest Mississippi and Concordia Parish, Louisiana, had occurred since February, it was the Neshoba case that enraged the nation. Dee, Moore, and Clifton Walker had been dead for weeks. But they were ordinary black men, uninvolved with civil rights and without outside advocates, whereas the Neshoba case concerned civil rights workers, two of them white. As the case became major national news, the FBI brought in Joseph Sullivan to manage the investigation. An agent since 1941 and a bureau legend, Sullivan had served as a troubleshooter for the FBI and in 1963 had been named major case inspector. He would inspire Justice Department lawyers in 1965 when he stood in the midst of Klansmen in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and dressed down white police for failing to keep them from harassing black demonstrators. In June 1964, Sullivan informed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that “Mississippi was badly undermanned, and that Washington was out of touch with the resident agents in Mississippi, and that the agents there were too close to local Mississippi officials.”5
On July 2, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Southern leaders fumed, and Klansmen vowed revenge. U.S. senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana vilified the legislation, even as he claimed that he had “the kindest feeling toward the good colored people of this nation, and particularly the good colored people of my state . . . What I object to is this bill forces people to mingle or mix with company they do not choose.” Many southern leaders likened the legislation to a second invasion by carpetbaggers.6
The Meridian Star reported in a front-page article that local congressman Arthur Winstead thought the stories about the missing civil rights workers were all hoaxes.7 In Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Neshoba Democrat’s publisher speculated that the three young men had purposely dropped out of the area for publicity to raise money for their cause.8 In the Concordia Sentinel, a front-page columnist opined that the missing students might be safe and sound in their communist Cuba hideout.9
Southern whites complained that the northern news media were purposely portraying the South in a bad light. “To white Southerners,” wrote historian Adam Fairclough in a chronicle of the times, “the appearance of those ‘outside agitators’ acted as a red flag to a bull.” White supremacy had survived since Reconstruction “because southern whites had persuaded northern whites not to interfere with the South’s ‘Negro problem.’”10 Don Whitehead, in his 1970 book on the Neshoba case, reported that it was “a time of crisis for Mississippi. Emotionally, the state was on edge. The daily predictions of violence and bloodshed . . . were used by the Far Right extremists to support their claims that civil rights leaders were deliberately trying to force a federal occupation of the state.”11
Yet Congressman Charles L. Weltner of Atlanta, an original opponent of the legislati
on who changed his stance and supported it, urged fellow southerners to do the same and to “move on to the unfinished task of building a new South. We must not remain forever bound to another lost cause.” Florence Mars, a Philadelphia native whose family helped settle Neshoba County, believed society would “act against its own best interest to protect itself from the truth.” She wrote in her 1977 book that many white women at the time realized the missing students were likely dead and that the FBI was the only entity standing between the thugs and the decent people.12 Hoover announced on July 10 that he was increasing the bureau’s strength in Mississippi to 153 agents, with the bulk assigned to the Neshoba case. A Mississippi division office was reopened in Jackson.13
TWO DAYS AFTER Hoover’s announcement, shortly after midnight on July 12, 1964, the manager of the Dixie Lane Bowling Alley on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway closed up and went east toward Vidalia for a drink at Blackie Drane’s lounge. He was heading west toward home when a white, unmarked Oldsmobile passed him, a red light flashing on its dashboard. The late-model (possibly 1964) Olds had two rear antennae on the trunk and appeared to be a police car.14 He watched the Oldsmobile pass a two-toned, white-over-green 1958 Buick and pull it over to the shoulder across the highway from the bowling alley. As he drove by, he saw a large white man sitting in the driver’s seat of the Oldsmobile. The right front door was open. One or two white men were standing next to the driver’s door of the Buick. A man wearing a green shirt, possibly plaid, was the lone occupant. The witness couldn’t tell whether the occupant of the Buick was white or black.15