Devils Walking

by Stanley Nelson

  Moore welcomed the twenty-nine-year-old Williams, also a Marine, with a handshake. Williams was the second agent to report at headquarters. The son of sharecroppers in New Mexico, Williams had started his bureau career in San Diego and after eighteen months there had gotten orders to go to Mississippi.43 He had never been there before. Moore gave Williams a brief overview of what had transpired over the past weeks. Outspoken and confident, Williams thought he would have some input on where he was assigned, but Moore began talking “about this sleepy little town called Natchez with Spanish moss hanging on the trees and beautiful antebellum homes.” Remembering the meeting later, Williams said, “It became apparent that’s where he wanted me to go.”44 Moore, Joseph Sullivan, and other top FBI officials knew the war against the Klan in the area would be brutal. Assistant attorney general for civil rights John Doar found southwest Mississippi’s “law enforcement problems were the worst,” while “Natchez and its environs had been an intimidation trouble spot for years.”45

  Moore told Williams about the three different Klan groups, and while he didn’t sugarcoat the job, he didn’t give Williams many details. Williams was to become a part of the community and help local authorities by passing on FBI intelligence when appropriate. After a two-hour conversation, Moore looked at his watch and told Williams he should be in Natchez by 6 p.m. He told Williams to report to Natchez resident agent Clarence Prospere, “an old-timer who had grown up in Natchez.”46 Prospere’s one-man operation was headquartered in his kitchen. One of the most experienced bureau agents in Mississippi, Prospere had days earlier refused to share information with the Justice Department task force sent by Kennedy to investigate the Klan. John Doar thought Prospere “very uncooperative . . . He stated that in many matters the FBI considered the Justice Department attorneys ‘outsiders.’”47

  A North Carolina native, Prospere’s father had served as the superintendent of Jefferson College early in the twentieth century. The young Prospere and his brother had been cadets there from 1926 to 1933.48 Before World War II, Prospere became an FBI agent. He served in New York City, Long Island, Niagara Falls, Tennessee, and New Orleans before returning home to Natchez to complete his bureau career just as the civil unrest erupted. Williams recalled Prospere as a big, gregarious man with a graying flattop. He had a deep southern drawl, didn’t curse, and was set in his ways.49 Agents called him “Pross,” while some locals knew him as “Toots.” One former Adams County sheriff recalled Prospere as “an old [J. Edgar] Hoover guy, old school.”50 Prospere was constantly fidgeting with his pipe, often relighting the tobacco while talking. In 2008, he responded politely to a call from the Concordia Sentinel seeking comments about the FBI and the cold cases that had been reopened. “No, sir,” the ninety-four-year-old former agent said. “I don’t get into the FBI’s business.”

  Prospere’s initial refusal to cooperate with Kennedy’s task force in the summer of 1964 was symbolic of the uneasiness between the FBI and the Justice Department. What Doar didn’t know was that Prospere had already developed crucial information on the White Knights. Prospere learned that three Natchez police officers, including a captain, a Natchez fireman, and a deputy sheriff, had been among the first to join the White Knights in February.51

  Before joining Prospere in Natchez, Williams stood at the door of the FBI office in Jackson as Roy Moore wished him good luck and gave him final instructions. A half century later, Williams remembered them clearly: “You go down there and do whatever you think is right and I’ll back you 100 percent. You use your judgment on what it looks like needs to be done. But I don’t ever want to hear of you backing down to the Klan. And if you ever draw your gun, use it.”52

  AS THE WHITE KNIGHTS violence accelerated in Mississippi, Robert Shelton’s Alabama-based UKA continued to move west. Shelton’s recruiters had first entered Louisiana in late 1963 but didn’t make much headway until Original Knights dissension boiled over, resulting in the creation of the White Knights in Mississippi. While Sam Bowers operated the White Knights like a military dictatorship, Shelton’s UKA was taking a different approach following the breakout of violence in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early months of 1964. UKA’s strategy in the Magnolia State was to paint itself as a nonviolent political organization and hope that its involvement in past atrocities, such as the Birmingham bombing, would be forgotten. Although the nonviolent image never stuck, the UKA moved through the 1960s as the predominant Klan group in the United States. On May 16, Shelton spoke at a membership rally at the fairgrounds in McComb, where he attacked the “communist-led” federal government’s attack on the “southern way of life.”53 In the days ahead, McComb, soon to become a UKA stronghold, was labeled the bombing capital of the South. Following a series of bombings and arsons, a number of white men were arrested and convicted. Civil rights leaders howled when the men received probation, and Judge W. H. Watkins, showing sympathy for the defendants, blamed the activists for inciting the violence.

  FBI and MHSP intelligence from McComb also revealed surprising news: E. L. McDaniel of Natchez, who had been banished by the Original Knights in late December 1963 only to help form the White Knights, had become Shelton’s top UKA leader in Mississippi. By way of money and deception, McDaniel had managed to obtain the White Knights position of province investigator for southwest Mississippi, which included the responsibility of delivering justice involving internal Klan matters.54 During the spring of 1964, while handling his investigative duties, however, McDaniel began looking at the UKA as a new vehicle for his ambition. Meanwhile, he dug deeply into the White Knights coffers, causing great dissension among the members until Bowers set a limit on McDaniel’s spending. All the while, McDaniel was secretly recruiting for Shelton in Mississippi and had surreptitiously administered UKA oaths to several of the men arrested in the McComb bombings.55

  In early August, twenty-five Adams County Klansmen, including McDaniel, met at a Natchez bowling alley, where they voted to defect from the White Knights and organize into a UKA klavern under the cover of the Adams County Civic and Betterment Association. Later that month, Shelton announced his appointment of McDaniel as the first grand dragon of the Mississippi Realm of the United Klans of America. With Shelton’s blessings, McDaniel opened a UKA office in downtown Natchez on the corner of Canal and Main. On the night of August 29, Shelton led a UKA rally in the city’s Liberty Park. A twenty-foot-tall cross was raised and burned in the center of the baseball field before approximately one thousand spectators.56

  Now a state Klan leader, McDaniel stretched his influence across the Mississippi into Concordia Parish, where he had first become a Klansman in 1962. One of his recruits, Frank DeLaughter, soon put his family to work for the UKA. DeLaughter’s sister, Mildred DeLaughter Garner, owner of a beer joint known as Cario’s Drive-In on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway and a UKA member herself, took out an ad during the summer in the Concordia Sentinel. The ad proclaimed: “All KKK are welcome and invited to this establishment as our special guest [sic]. You are always welcome whether recognized or not.” UKA applications were kept in the bar. When Delbert Matthews, a local white teen, drove one of Garner’s female black employees to work, Garner put the barrel of a .38 caliber pistol between his eyes and commanded, “Don’t ever do that again.” When Matthews explained that the woman needed a ride to work, Garner warned, “Let her walk!”57

  6

  A DECLARATION OF WAR

  CIVIL RIGHTS WORKERS opened more than three dozen freedom schools in Mississippi in 1964 with the purpose of teaching young blacks how to become socially, economically, and politically involved in their communities, particularly through activism. Klansmen monitored every move made by those involved. Keeping the peace in towns polarized by racial disharmony was an impossible job. In Natchez, Mayor John Nosser and Police Chief J. T. Robinson were caught in the middle of the growing tensions. The Klan and the civil rights groups both despised the two men, and each thought the town officials favored the other cause. To make matt
ers worse, Nosser and Robinson didn’t like each other.

  The sixty-five-year-old Nosser had months earlier been narrowly reelected for a second term as mayor. Of Lebanese descent, he had settled in Natchez in 1939 and over a quarter century had become one of the town’s most successful businessmen. He owned two Jitney Jungle grocery stores and a 15-tenant shopping center (known as Nosser City) that had been built in 1956 for $500,000.1 Because he spoke broken English instead of with a local accent, the garden club was never comfortable when he stood at the podium at antebellum pageants and at balls held during the tourist season. Known to be temperamental, he once kicked Robinson out of his office when the police chief told the mayor that Nosser’s two sons had joined the Klan.2

  At thirty-seven, Robinson, unlike most police officers in the region, had experience and training in law enforcement. Elected chief in 1962, he had served more than a decade on the Natchez police force and had worked as chief criminal deputy for the previous sheriff. Robinson’s father and four of his brothers were experienced lawmen as well.3 An ex-Marine, the chief stood six feet, two inches tall; he was thin but tough. As a young man, he had been considered a good boxer and fought many competitive bouts at the city auditorium. When in uniform, Robinson wore a white shirt with his badge pinned to the pocket and carried in his holster a Smith and Wesson Centennial, a small five-shot hammerless revolver.4 Many who knew the chief considered him a fair man who used comedic flair to break up tense moments. He was known for his one-liners.5

  Several things divided the mayor and the chief. Because the chief was elected rather than appointed, Robinson answered to the voters, not the mayor. In fact, the mayor and the city council had little control over the 40-member police department, which was under civil service protection. This situation was also a problem for Robinson because he had no authority to hire or fire. Although the mayor had made it known that he wanted to remove the police department from civil service, Robinson didn’t want the mayor meddling in his business. There were reasons for that, too.

  Early in 1964, Robinson realized he had moles in his department who were leaking police business to the Klan, particularly to the Sligo White Knights unit at Kingston. He soon found the primary source, Captain J. G. Wisner, who was also informing the mayor on internal affairs within the police department. Robinson knew Wisner was a close friend of two of Nosser’s sons, George and Joe, and Ed Fuller, the Exalted Cyclops of the Sligo unit, of which the Nosser brothers were members.6 Fuller’s brother, Claude, was also a member. At International Paper Company where he worked, Claude Fuller was known as one of the most venomous racists in the county. In two years, Claude Fuller would lead a Klan wrecking crew of three in the brutal murder of a sixty-five-year-old black man by the name of Ben Chester White.

  Ed Fuller had been identified by the MHSP as a suspect in the February murder of Clifton Walker in Woodville and the attempted murder of Richard Joe Butler in Kingston in April. When the Nosser brothers joined the renegade Sligo unit, no one was more enraged than UKA grand dragon E. L. McDaniel, who wanted the klavern dissolved because its leaders refused to follow Klan leadership. For this and other reasons, McDaniel was a political enemy of Nosser’s.7

  Nosser and Robinson at first had been reluctant to publicly attack the Klan. Nosser claimed that, although illegal, the Klan was a “patriotic” organization, and he had delivered a speech at a KKK rally.8 Robinson acknowledged at a Civil Rights Commission hearing in 1965 that he had been the principal speaker at a meeting of the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR). He also had attended the UKA rally in Liberty Park in Natchez when its local office was opened. The event “impressed me,” Robinson said. “I couldn’t see anything that might would make you think they were anything but upstanding people.” Robinson testified that being a member in the APWR would not keep someone from being a part of his police force, while being a Klansman probably would. But membership in the NAACP, he said, which he considered a subversive organization, would definitely bar employment.9

  THE CIVIL STRIFE between the Klan and the civil rights community, as well as the contention between the mayor and the police chief, was revealed in an electrifying article published in early September in the Chicago Sun-Times. Written by the colorful reporter Nicholas von Hoffman, the story was headlined, “Anti-Antebellum Natchez: How Things Do Change.” Widely circulated throughout town, the lede read, “Somebody has taken all the charm out of once-genteel Natchez.” In the story, von Hoffman pointed out that while the Klan was allowed to meet at Liberty Park on August 29 to preach about “segregation, communism and the need for more Christianity,” blacks were not allowed to use the same public park for a civil rights rally. Among those turned away was Robert Moses, head of the Mississippi Summer Project, who had been at work in the state for years and had been beaten in Amite County in 1961 when attempting to register blacks to vote. Von Hoffman, who had been followed by Natchez police during his visit, received an apology from the mayor, who was quoted: “I have no control over the chief of police.” A chamber of commerce receptionist told von Hoffman, “I don’t know what to say to you. We like for people to take pictures of the lovely homes, but we’ve had too much tension here.” And a police officer warned him, “Be careful. This isn’t like any other town in Mississippi.”10

  The mayor said blacks and whites were afraid because of the ongoing violence, and he blamed the town’s problems on “white radicals” and a “well-armed underground.” Orrick Metcalfe, a banker and car dealer, indicated Natchez was nearing a state of chaos. Metcalfe expressed sympathy for Nosser, whose “primary administrative headache” was “a police chief responsible to voters.” Metcalfe said the mayor’s “hands are tied,” while the police department was “terrible, just terrible.” Von Hoffman also discovered that the police department and city hall were not well thought of in “the slum-ridden Negro quarters down by the big river.” He quoted twenty-year-old activist Jesse Barnard, who noted the failed effort made to hold the civil rights rally: “They smother everything here.”11

  Across the river in Vidalia, at 11:40 p.m. on Sunday, September 13, there was an explosion on Cedar Street at the home of Bob and Tammy Doyle and their five children. Northern born and Catholic, Doyle was a schoolteacher who had served in previous years as night editor for the Natchez Democrat. He was outspoken against the Klan. In 1963, he had made friends with Father August Thompson, a black Catholic priest who had arrived there a year earlier. Thompson pastored St. Charles Catholic Church in Ferriday, which served Concordia Parish’s black population. He was in the process of building a community center for African American youth. During the months preceding the bombing, the priest had been a guest for supper many times in the Doyles’ home, and the two men had become close friends. The Vidalia Police Department building was visible from the Doyle home, and officers often drove by when Thompson was a guest. Also conspicuous from time to time were Klansmen, who parked on the street and glared at Doyle. Soon, the community ostracized the family. Doyle was dropped as a parish teacher at the public school before the Catholic school in Natchez gave him a job. As racial tensions mounted on both sides of the river, Doyle often expressed his belief that “every man has a right to a voice in his own destiny.”12

  The bomb exploded twenty feet from the Doyle home near the bedroom of one of his sons. No one was hurt, and damage was minimal. Despite his reporting background, Doyle couldn’t get the Concordia Sentinel or the Natchez Democrat to publish a story.13 But the bombing did get coverage in the Miss-Lou Observer, a new weekly published by lawyer Forrest A. Johnson and his partner Wilhelm Winkler, a retired Army officer. The paper took a hardline stance against the Klan, challenged McDaniel, and reported Klan violence. For this, Johnson’s name was smeared in Klan publications and his life threatened. His and Winkler’s efforts were heralded in the months ahead by national journalist Drew Pearson, whose weekly column, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was published in more than six hundred newspapers, including the Natc
hez Democrat, despite Klan protests that the column be dropped. Shortly before the Observer folded, Winkler published an open letter to House Un-American Activities Committee chairman Edwin E. Willis of Louisiana. Winkler reported that by late 1965, the Klan’s campaign against the Observer was so effective that the publication had dropped from twenty-four pages weekly to four, and revenue had spiraled from $1,200 weekly to less than $15. “I’m a redneck, born in Mississippi,” Johnson told Pearson. “But people whom I have known for twenty years don’t speak to me on the street anymore.”14

  Bob Doyle immediately notified local police and the FBI about the bombing of his home. Although he refused to investigate, Vidalia police chief Bud Spinks was furious that Doyle had contacted the bureau. “If you don’t like the people around here,” he said, “why don’t you leave?”15 Nine months later, Doyle’s story appeared in the June 1965 issue of Good Housekeeping in an article entitled “My Problem? How Much Should a Family Buckle Under?” Written after Doyle and his family had relocated to Colorado, the story was modified to protect their identity.16 A short time after the story’s publication, a lawyer with the HUAC investigating the Klan contacted Doyle, who said that he had found himself unemployable in Vidalia and that his children had been suffering too much to continue living there. Prior to the move, however, he had served as co-chair in the fifth congressional district for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign. Doyle believed that he had been the only white man in a ninety-mile radius of Vidalia with an LBJ sticker on his car.17