AFTER MIDNIGHT on September 14, less than two hours after the Doyle bombing, stink bombs were hurled into Mayor Nosser’s grocery stores. The missiles broke windows and delivered a sulphuric payload that damaged the floors. That same night, a brick was thrown through a window at Orreck Metcalfe’s Chevrolet-Cadillac dealership, clearing the way for a jar of acid, which landed on a new Cadillac. While investigating the matter, Chief Robinson was greeted on the scene by three Klansmen—the Nosser brothers and Ed Fuller. Robinson asked Joe Nosser who was responsible. Without hesitation Nosser answered, “Jack Seale.” But he had no proof.18 By now, the Sligo unit was blaming every instance of Klan violence on the newly formed UKA unit, and the UKA was blaming the Sligo bunch.
Everyone in the city of 24,000, populated almost evenly by blacks and whites, knew things were getting out of hand. Ten days after Nosser and Metcalfe’s businesses were targeted, the mayor met with McDaniel, whose UKA office was so scenically positioned between the Mississippi River and the heart of downtown that no tourist could miss it. Nosser wondered what could be done to calm the tensions.19 The next evening at 9:18 p.m., however, an explosion rattled windows in Natchez and Vidalia and shook the Mississippi River Bridge. This time the target was Nosser’s home at 207 Linten Avenue. In an upscale neighborhood accented by live oaks and beautiful Victorian homes, the street was anchored on the north end by the Ritz Theatre. Five minutes prior to the blast, Nosser and his wife had been outside watering flowers. His daughter and her friend had crossed the lawn just before her parents went inside. The blast blew out all of the windows on the front of the house, cracked the brick foundation, and split the plaster in the living room. Next door, windows were blown out of the home of Rawdon and Kathie Blankenstein. Their three sleeping children, ages two, three, and five, were covered with glass.20
Robinson, who was patrolling at the time, raced to the scene, where he found a crowd of neighbors on the front lawn and a visibly upset mayor. After his two detectives arrived at 9:35 p.m., two more blasts were heard across town. On Pine Street, the homes of two black men were damaged, although less severely than Nosser’s. One of the victims was Willie Washington, a contractor who had been targeted by the Klan during the summer when a Molotov cocktail was thrown on his lawn. But Robinson soon realized these bombs were not gasoline based. Soil samples taken from the scenes failed to reveal any residue that would identify the type of explosives employed, but other evidence showed that the bomb thrown in Nosser’s yard was a plastic explosive, likely set off by a timing device. Investigators believed that the bombers had waited until authorities arrived at Nosser’s home before delivering the second bomb at the other location. The obvious motives for the bombings were Nosser’s criticism of “white radicals” in the von Hoffman article and his hiring of Washington to perform construction work.21 That night, the chief placed ten shotgun-toting, uniformed patrolmen at locations throughout the city.22
Nosser met with McDaniel again to plead for an end to the violence. On September 27, in an article in the Natchez Democrat, Nosser claimed that he had been misquoted in the Chicago Sun-Times and clarified that the racial troubles in Natchez were caused not just by white radicals but also by some of the “colored,” noting that a fraction of each was at fault. He urged citizens of the town “to stand up for law and order at a time when it appears that radical elements are threatening not only the properties but the lives of the people who live here.” He warned, “If this situation continues, we may be confronted by the intervention of federal forces,” and Natchez “will become a ghost town.”23 The next day, in a letter printed on the front page of the Democrat, McDaniel claimed the UKA had nothing to do with the bombings and other violence and didn’t condone any of it. He tried to persuade a skeptical public that his group demanded law and order as much as the average citizen.24
* * *
AFTER MEETING longtime resident agent Clarence Prospere, FBI agent Billy Bob Williams had visited the Natchez Police Station to meet Robinson. On the wall of the chief’s desk were four Marine Corps Division patches. As Robinson stood to shake his hand, Williams said, “Semper Fi.” They hit it off instantly.25
Williams soon learned that Robinson’s two most trusted employees were the department’s detectives, lieutenants Charlie Bahin and Frank Rickard. Bahin had served as police chief years earlier, had worked as chief deputy for the sheriff’s office, and had been an officer for the MHSP. Easygoing, Bahin roamed the night, stopping in black and white lounges for a beer to find out what was going on. Oftentimes, his mere presence kept the troublemakers at bay. Equally important, he reported daily to the chief what he learned on his nightly rounds.26
Born to a German mother in Coblenz and an American father who had served as part of the U.S. occupational force following World War I, Rickard possessed a loyalty to Robinson that knew no bounds. While Bahin frequented the bars in order to monitor the pulse of the city, Rickard personally enjoyed the nightlife. During the day, he helped Robinson administer the police department. The two became so close that when Robinson went through a divorce in later years, he slept on Rickard’s couch.27 Rickard was renowned in Natchez for his physical strength and was the subject of gossip because of his alleged contacts with the New Orleans underworld. Williams once watched him drive roofing nails with the edge of his bare fist. On the streets, Rickard was said to have enough karate skills to kill somebody.28 He delighted at intimidating the most hardcore Klansmen. Even Jack Seale, a muscular and powerful man feared by his KKK brothers, was afraid of Rickard.
Often, in the late afternoon, Williams joined the detectives and the chief for a visit to one of the bars where Klansmen were known to hang out. On one occasion, as the lawmen entered a lounge, they encountered a group, led by Jack Seale, heading out. Rickard and Seale stood face to face. Like his Klan associates, Seale was wearing a white shirt and a red tie with the initials “KKK” running vertically down the length of the material. Rickard took the tie in his hand and examined it closely while talking loud enough for everyone to hear. “Look at this!” he proclaimed. “You know you have to be a big man, a tough son-of-a-bitch, to wear something like this and back it up.” Then Rickard raised the tie to his face and blew his nose on it. Seale trembled with anger, stepped aside, and left the bar.29
Such encounters were not rare. Although Rickard intimidated Seale in the Natchez bar, there was no doubt that Seale and his comrades were in control of the night. With the violence escalating, Williams realized that there was no mechanism in place that could realistically stop it. With civil rights workers, local businesses, private citizens, and even the mayor under attack, he feared that Natchez and southwest Mississippi would soon be soaked in blood. He had been called out to bombing scenes in McComb and had visited the sites of Klan attacks in Wilkinson and Franklin Counties. He was familiar with the savage violence committed by Klansmen and hoodlums across the river in the lawless land of Concordia Parish. So intense was the situation that, with Prospere’s help, Williams had strung chicken wire beneath his rented home, which was on blocks, so the Klan couldn’t throw a bomb beneath it. He often thought of Roy Moore’s instructions to never back down to the Klan. One morning while driving to work, he decided it was time to do something. He detoured to Mississippi FBI headquarters in Jackson. There, he quickly made his way to Moore’s office. “We’re losing the battle down there,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. We’ve got to get a handle on it.”30
Williams watched as Moore quietly studied the situation in his mind. Soon, he snapped to and began writing names on a list. He called in his secretary. “Find these people and send them teletype transfers to get down here as fast as they can and to come prepared to stay awhile.” Williams hadn’t realized that Moore had such power. Moore picked up the phone, called headquarters in Washington, and reported that he had sent out orders to have twenty-five agents transferred to work in southwest Mississippi. He contacted the MHSP and made arrangements to pair each agent with a patrolman. Because the
FBI didn’t have jurisdiction in many of the cases of violence, it was going to beef up its assistance to the MHSP. Moore looked at Williams and said, “We’re fixing to declare war on the Klan down there.”31
Within days, the FBI opened its first office in Natchez in a bank building downtown. The office was soundproofed. In addition to fourteen special agents, eleven uniformed and fourteen plainclothes Mississippi state troopers were working out of the office.32 In the meantime, to help nudge witnesses forward, the mayor and aldermen offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who could help solve the crimes, a move similar to the action taken by the business community in McComb. Government leaders called for the public to report crimes to the authorities and make a stand. Failure to do so would be nearly as bad as committing the criminal acts. The town couldn’t survive without tourism and industry, but no one would visit Natchez under the current dangerous conditions because “we do not know when, or where or whom the terrorists will strike next.”33
SOON THE COORDINATED effort paid off. Within days, nine Klansmen were charged in three separate cases—those involving the beating and attempted murder of two civil rights workers in 1963, the attempted murder of Richard Joe Butler in April 1964, and the murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore in May 1964. The first arrests came on October 22, when the MHSP booked five Klansmen for two separate attacks on civil rights workers Bruce Payne, a twenty-one-year-old white Yale political science major, and George Green, thirty, a black Tougaloo College student in Jackson who was working on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The two had visited Natchez in October 1963 as part of the Freedom Ballot campaign orchestrated to prove that black Mississippians could and would vote if given the opportunity.34
Then-governor Ross Barnett and other political leaders had long insisted that black citizens were so satisfied with state government that they had no desire to vote and that blacks were intellectually incapable of understanding the election process. Several carloads of white students from Yale and Stanford came to the South to take part in a mock election with black candidates held in conjunction with the regular statewide election for governor and lieutenant governor in Mississippi. Civil rights groups knew some of the activists would likely be arrested and beaten by police and Klansmen, but they also knew such events would give the movement publicity and make the nation aware of conditions in Mississippi. Public outrage might push Congress to act, while at the same time blacks might be encouraged to risk the dangers and register to vote. But in Mississippi and Louisiana, the statewide elections only served to ferment more white support for segregation. In Louisiana, Governor-elect John McKeithen, a North Louisiana lawyer who subsequently would become a moderate on racial issues, defeated former New Orleans mayor deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison. Morrison was politically connected to President John Kennedy, who would be assassinated a few days later. About his victory, McKeithen said, the “people have illustrated for the entire nation that the people of a sovereign state are not going to allow the NAACP to come in and elect a governor.”35
In late October 1963, Payne, Green, and Nick Bosanquet arrived in Natchez, where they met with black male and female leaders, white Catholic women, and Father William Morrissey, a white activist who was pastor of Holy Family Catholic Church, which served a black congregation. Morrissey was the first white person to hold office in the Mississippi NAACP. The next morning, Natchez police arrested Green on trumped-up traffic charges. Robinson later acknowledged at a Civil Rights Commission hearing in Jackson that he had Green arrested in order to “see who he was.” Like most law enforcement personnel, Robinson resented the presence of activists because it complicated his work.36 FBI agent Williams believed that many civil rights workers didn’t realize, or care, how gravely they endangered the lives of local blacks who would remain in a community after the activists left.37
Payne and Green stayed at the rooming house of future Natchez NAACP president George Metcalfe, an employee at the Armstrong Tire Plant. (He would be seriously injured in a Klan bombing in 1965.) When driving by Metcalfe’s house, Klansmen and other whites shouted obscenities at the activists. On the afternoon of October 31, 1963, as Payne, along with Green and veteran black activist Ella Baker, departed Natchez for Jackson, he observed two cars following him. When Payne stopped for gas at a station in Port Gibson, the Klansmen attacked. Three of the four attackers slugged and kicked Payne several times, but because he adhered to Dr. Martin Luther King’s pledge of nonviolence, he didn’t fight back. All the while, a dozen local black and white witnesses said and did nothing. After this incident, Payne was interviewed about the attack, and the story made national news. One goal set by the activists had been reached.38
Among the four men arrested a year later was thirty-two-year-old Ernest Avants. After leading the attack, Avants had told Payne and Green, “Don’t come back to Adams County and show your tail any more.”39 Neither Payne nor Green was intimidated. They were back in Natchez two days later. When leaving town, they soon realized they were once again being pursued, this time by just one car, at speeds in excess of one hundred miles per hour. Green, who was driving a rental, was forced to pull over near Fayette, twenty-four miles north of Natchez. Hemmed in, the two men watched as Avants, now clearly identifiable to both, trotted to the driver’s side of the vehicle and aimed his revolver at Green’s head. Before Avants could open the door, Green hit the gas. As they sped away, their car was riddled with bullets, but they eluded their attackers.40
Of the three men booked in this attack, Avants and Jack Seale were charged for assault and battery with intent to shoot and murder. Those involved in the first attack were booked with assault and battery with intent to kill. On October 23, 1964, the day after the arrests, Sheriff Odell Anders, with MHSP and FBI officers present, seized from Seale’s home on 172 Booker Road in the Morgantown subdivision in Natchez a shotgun, two high-powered rifles, a bayonet, a set of handcuffs, a hunting knife, and twelve boxes of shotgun, rifle, and pistol ammunition.41
On October 26, a phone company survey team working along the riverbank at Natchez discovered twenty-four pounds of dynamite. Authorities suspected an unknown quantity had been thrown into the river.42 An MHSP informant had reported that Natchez Klansman Ernest Parker had been using his personal plane to fly in explosives to his landing strip on Davis Island, where he and brothers Jack and James Ford Seale had murdered Dee and Moore the previous May.43 Also on October 26, the FBI and MHSP announced the arrests of Ed Fuller and fellow Sligo Klansman William Bryant Davidson, twenty-seven, in connection with the April shooting of Richard Joe Butler. Billy Woods, another Sligo Klansman, had been arrested in April. Fuller’s release from jail was secured on a $2,000 property bond signed by Mayor Nosser’s sons, Joe and John.44
On October 29, Sheriff Anders and Police Chief Robinson jointly announced that the sale of whiskey and all gambling activities would be prohibited, effective at midnight. The two men told the Natchez Democrat that they were acting on orders of Gov. Paul Johnson, who indicated that if the two lawmen didn’t want to do it, the Mississippi National Guard would. Though illegal, gambling in the backrooms of bars had long been tolerated, as had the sale of whiskey. In Natchez, a bar owner could pay a black market tax to the city to obtain a license to sell hard liquor. The paper reported that the FBI and the MHSP believed the ban on gambling and alcohol would reduce the violence and help solve the bombings and other crimes. Immediately, MHSP patrolmen fanned out across the county and informed individual bar owners of the ban.45 Many citizens claimed they were illegally pulled over by patrolmen. In the weeks ahead, there was an outcry by public officials.
Sen. Bill Jones of Brookhaven berated an MHSP investigator for “mistreatment of the public” and alleged that Klan suspects and one black man had been roughed up.46 Former Adams County sheriff Billy Ferrell sent a telegram to Governor Johnson: “Have we been placed under Marshall [sic] Law? Twenty patrol cars make it appear that way. Agree that something needs to be done about
bombings, etc., but illegal search and harassment of decent citizens upon hwys. at night by over eager officers not the answer.”47 Mayor Nosser complained that twenty-five to thirty families were “hurting” because of the ban on whiskey sales. Sheriff Anders alleged that since the shutdown as many as eight package liquor stores had opened across the river in Vidalia. Dozens of men identified by law enforcement as hoodlums, such as Ed Fuller, had moved across the river, where Concordia’s prostitution and gambling business was not only thriving but growing.48
On November 1, the Natchez Democrat ran a front-page article on the Adams County Civic and Betterment Association’s resolution attacking the MHSP. The article didn’t mention that the newly formed group was a front for the UKA. John Dawson, an ordained Baptist minister and IP employee, said by informants to be the man behind the UKA and McDaniel, claimed that the MSHP had created a “police state” by conducting unlawful arrests and searches. He asked for donations to help those defendants recently arrested in Natchez. Foster blamed the turmoil on the “communist-front” civil rights groups.49
Five days later, James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards were charged in the May 2 murders of Dee and Moore. In the days after his arrest, Seale had been praised in Klan circles. Bob Doyle, the schoolteacher whose family had survived a bombing in Vidalia in early September, had once thought Seale “a swell fellow until the Klan made a kook out of him . . . I saw him on the street all duded up like a cowboy, he assured me he didn’t do it, and then at a Klan meeting that night he was treated as a hero.”50
ON NOVEMBER 3, the nation elected Lyndon Johnson, the former vice president who had ascended to the presidency following the assassination of Kennedy a year earlier. Johnson, the Democrat, garnered 61 percent of the vote. The man who had pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress and was preparing to push through a voting rights act, Johnson was soundly rejected in southwest Mississippi and Concordia Parish. There were a number of issues discussed during the campaign, but civil rights was without question the number-one issue locally. Five southern states supported Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate, who condemned racism during the campaign. While he got 56 percent of the Louisiana vote, Mississippi cast 87 percent for Goldwater in a solid stance against civil rights.51 One reason the Council of Federated Organizations had targeted Mississippi for Freedom Summer was that only 6.2 percent of the state’s eligible black voters were registered, the lowest percentage in the nation.
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