In Wilkinson County, where Clifton Walker had been murdered in an ambush, 93 percent of the voters favored the Republican. In Franklin County, where Dee and Moore were kidnapped before their murders, Goldwater got 96 percent of the vote. In Natchez and Adams County, where a dozen men had been beaten during the winter of 1964, Richard Joe Butler shot, and the mayor and others targeted by Klansmen, 84 percent of the 6,993 registered voters went for Goldwater. Across the river in Concordia Parish, where Klan wrecking crews roamed the nights and Joseph Edwards had vanished, Goldwater received 83 percent of 4,831 votes cast.52
7
“THE COLORED PEOPLE OF CONCORDIA PARISH”
AT THE END OF 1964, the FBI’s attention shifted from southwest Mississippi to Ferriday. Although Concordia is in Louisiana, the parish’s association with Natchez predates 1716, when the French built a fort and trading post atop the bluff. Before then, the Natchez Indians and their Native American forebears had harvested wildlife and cypress from Concordia’s vast forests for generations. The English and, in turn, the Spanish, based in Natchez from 1763 to 1798, grazed their livestock on the rich grassland of Concordia and fished its lakes and rivers. By the time of the Civil War, Natchez planters, who had amassed great wealth thanks to cotton, buttered their biscuits and built their mansions with the income derived from the rich Concordia bottomland worked by some thirteen thousand enslaved Africans, who also built the levees, nursed the masters’ children, and emptied the chamber pots. Most white families were under the thumb of the Natchez planters, too, serving as plantation overseers and managers. For decades, Natchez considered Concordia its hired hand. While the communities are as one in many ways, they do have separate identities. Concordia has secrets that will never be revealed. Natchez lives in eternal fear of its secrets being exposed.
On the morning of December 23, 1964, New York Times reporter John Herbers sipped coffee at the Eola Hotel in downtown Natchez before driving to Ferriday. He had learned a few days earlier about the fiery death of a black shoe-shop owner. It had come at a time when Klan violence in southwest Mississippi and much of the state had become eerily quiet.1 The beefed-up presence of the FBI and the MHSP statewide had made a difference. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had placed a moratorium on violence in late fall of 1964 and urged their members to lie low. The UKA in Mississippi, through its grand dragon E. L. McDaniel, headquartered in downtown Natchez, issued letter after letter to newspapers condemning the violence and attacking the communist-backed civil rights “agitators” for dividing the white and black populations, which, McDaniel claimed, had for generations lived in perfect harmony. The biggest Klan-related news had come early in December, when twenty-one White Knights were arrested for the June 1964 murders of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.
Herbers spent years writing about racial issues for the United Press in its Jackson, Mississippi, bureau before joining the Times. He had covered racial murders for a decade—from the 1955 Emmett Till trial to the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing to the Neshoba case. Klan leaders knew him. Herbers considered Sam Bowers, head of the White Knights, a menacing and paranoid man, while he thought that UKA leader Robert Shelton, whose Klansmen had bombed the Birmingham church, was in some ways a savvy public relations man who was at ease with the press. Whereas Bowers avoided attention, Shelton loved it. Only McDaniel, Shelton’s top man in Mississippi, drew more headlines. Herbers knew Ferriday and Natchez as “the scariest places” in the South.2 FBI agent Billy Bob Williams recalled that Concordia was so infamous as a killing ground that the bureau called it “a maggot-infested mess.”3
In Ferriday, Herbers found the community tense and shocked by the murder of a respected town citizen, whose shop looked like a scene from Gone with the Wind. Herbers wrote, “Frank Morris’s (leather) sewing machines are exposed to the sky and remain upright in the blackened ruins of the building, a stark reminder of the man who repaired the shoes of everyone in town, white and Negro.” Morris “was a man of varied interests and it is possible he could have acquired enemies in the course of his business. However, the crime has aroused suspicions because it occurred in an area of racial tensions and because it fit the pattern of terror that has been carried out only a few miles away in southern Mississippi.” The journalist reported that Ferriday, a town of 4,500, was the “business center for Concordia Parish, which lies flat and black below the river levee. It has cotton and cattle land, bayous, dense forests and a large but silent Negro population . . . Natchez, a city of 24,000, has hills, antebellum homes and factories. Many who work in Natchez live in Concordia Parish, mostly in the parish seat of Vidalia.”4
WHEN WHITES IN Ferriday told FBI investigators they thought race relations were harmonious prior to Morris’s murder, they were either ignorant, lying, or naïve. A year earlier, the writer John Howard Griffin had spent a few days in Ferriday with Father August Thompson, the black priest at St. Charles Catholic Church. In 1962, Griffin had published a book called Black like Me, an account of his six-week journey by bus through the Deep South. Although he was a white man, he had artificially darkened his skin, successfully passed himself off as black, and suffered a daily dose of racism and hatred.
He visited Ferriday in September 1963 (as a white man) to do a piece on Thompson. He also kept a diary, a narrative on the political and social climate of Ferriday and the necessity of having to conceal from the Klan and the police that he was a guest of a black priest. Griffin’s stories were published in the Christmas 1963 issue of Ramparts magazine, a publication the New York Times described as “the most freewheeling thing on most American newsstands.” Griffin’s visit coincided with the September 15 Birmingham bombing, as white people in Ferriday were growing more and more concerned over the civil rights movement, especially school integration, voting rights, and growing rumors of a black revolution.5
Visiting downtown for a haircut, Griffin listened to the conversation of middle-aged and elderly men who condemned blacks “for seeking their rights.” A young man said, “We’re going to see the niggers don’t get the vote.” At a gas station, a white man told Griffin he “was trying to get Negroes fired from jobs held around town—to teach them a lesson. He ranted against Kennedy, said he wouldn’t be surprised if someone assassinated the President if he ever dared come into that area.” (Kennedy was assassinated two months later in Dallas, Texas.) A service station attendant told Griffin blacks were getting uppity and hoarding guns and ammunition. He predicted violence. “When it comes March, it gets windy around here. Well, if the niggers haven’t cut out all this ungodly crap about their rights by then, there’s about fifty of us going to meet here some night, each of us take five-gallon cans of gasoline. And we’ll put on masks and go right down through niggertown and burn the whole place out.”6
Griffin described the black section of Ferriday, which was divided by the main drag—Highway 65—on which Morris’s shop was located. The business strip was a mixture of black-owned and white-owned businesses, while the interior of the neighborhood was “a clutter of grey-weathered houses and dust-powdered chinaberry and cottonwood trees. The humid air carried the fragrance of fields into town.” All of Ferriday, Griffin wrote, was a “place of blindness, ignorance, anguish.”7
When Griffin told Father Thompson about the threatening comments, the priest smiled: “Well, of course, we just might have something to say about that. Do they think Negroes here are just going to set there and let themselves be massacred?”8 In fact, Thompson knew that in the churches and homes of African Americans in Ferriday there was ongoing talk of the changes in the wind. Blacks were ready to claim their rights as Americans and as human beings. They had been governed by two partnering entities throughout their existence in the South: the master and overseer prior to the Civil War, and the Ku Klux Klan and police afterward. If blacks were going to be massacred in Concordia Parish as a result of gaining the right to vote, it wouldn’t be the first time.
WHEN RECONSTRUCTION ended, so did federal
government oversight of southern elections. During the congressional referendum of 1878, the purge of black power in Louisiana initiated by the Knights of the White Camellia a decade earlier and carried on by the White League was taken up by a group of men known as the “Bulldozers,” yet another name for the Klan. They intended to “bulldoze” black men from office and strip them of their vote and power. Concordia and neighboring Tensas Parishes were targeted.9
Men who had been rich planters and slaveholders prior to the war only to fall afterward into poverty and be governed by their former slaves found the situation incomprehensible. In Natchez, John Roy Lynch, born into slavery in Vidalia, served as justice of the peace during Reconstruction. Educated and bright, he would later serve in Congress after becoming the first African American elected as speaker of the house in the Mississippi legislature. When an elderly black man filed a complaint against a white man who had cursed and threatened him, Lynch issued a warrant for the white man’s arrest. In court, Lynch asked the accused how he pled to the charges. The man appeared shocked: “Why, do you mean to tell me that it is a crime for a white man to curse a nigger?” The man obviously sided with the infamous opinion of Supreme Court judge Robert B. Taney, who in the 1857 Dred Scott case opined that a black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In Natchez court, Lynch showed the white man the statute. “Well, I be damned!” the man answered.10 As historian Eric Foner has written, “The reaction against Reconstruction was so extreme because the extent of political and social change was so unprecedented.”11
Other whites shared the disbelief of the white defendant in Lynch’s court. They thought that men like Lynch were nothing less than “uppity niggers.” In Natchez in the 1930s, Charlie Davenport, a former slave, recalled a moment during Reconstruction when a small group of black men integrated a performance held at Memorial Hall, a public building in Natchez. Once the black men seated themselves in front of the auditorium, the whites left in silence. That night the Klan came calling, and every black man seen in the theater disappeared, just as Joseph Edwards would in 1964. Davenport told his interviewer that Klansmen were “devils a-walkin’ de earth a-seekin’ what dey could devour.”12
For several days in 1878 in Concordia and Tensas Parishes, well-organized companies of white planters, businessmen, and former Confederate officers, acting with military precision, hunted down black politicians as well as those who supported them. The New York Times reported that on October 12, “a party of armed white men” attempting to capture a black preacher and political leader named Alfred Fairfax rushed into his home “late at night, and at once began to shoot at the five colored men found there. Fairfax and his brother escaped. The three other men were severely wounded. The women fled in terror. One of the wounded men died after a few days of suffering. He was shot down by Capt. Peck, who emptied his revolver into his prostrate body.” Although Peck was killed in a crossfire of bullets from his own men, it was Fairfax who was accused of killing him.13
Newspapers in Louisiana and the Natchez Democrat in Mississippi published accounts of the shooting, labeling the bloodshed the result of “a Negro insurrection” to which leading white citizens had heroically responded. The white community seems to have believed these lies. A U.S. Senate committee investigating the violence and allegations of election fraud learned during hearings in New Orleans in January 1879 that at least twenty-five black men were massacred, although some claimed as many as one hundred were slaughtered. Some were killed in front of their wives and children, some hung, at least one decapitated. Blacks hid in the swamps and the woods for days. Vidalia quickly filled with black refugees from the countryside arriving, one black man recalled, “in droves, women and children.”14
Yet, in the years to follow, local whites remembered the massacre as little more than an unpleasant necessity for a return of good government. Robert Dabney Calhoun, a noted lawyer in Vidalia, expressed the sentiments of many whites in his 1932 history of the parish when he explained that the election of 1878 had been a time when “substantial citizens were forced to engage in election manipulations and to make political dickers and alliances from force of necessity, and not from choice, which would be reprehensible today. They fought fire with fire, as best they could, while they prayed for the dawning of the new day of white supremacy.” He suggested, too, that black politicians were little more than “illiterate dishonest and sweating black men,” who “perfumed our Legislative Halls with an overpowering odor.”15
In 1879, the New York Times reported that no “attempt has been made to indict the men who tried to murder Fairfax, or to punish any of the members of the armed companies who maltreated and assassinated the blacks.” While black leaders were economically ruined and displaced like hundreds of other blacks, the Klansmen who destroyed their lives lived on, unpunished and unrepentant, their evil deeds buried with them in their coffins. Some of their children and grandchildren were running things when Frank Morris opened his shoe shop in Ferriday in the late 1930s.16
HERBERS REPORTED in 1964 in the Times that whites in Ferriday genuinely feared a black uprising. Several editions of the Klan’s propaganda sheet, “The Fiery Cross,” had been distributed at the time of the arson, most accusing and identifying white women of having affairs with named black men. Herbers interviewed a number of people, black and white, but no one would acknowledge knowing anything about Morris’s murder. Herbers recounted the story told by everyone in town: During the early morning hours of December 10, 1964, Morris was awakened in the backroom of his shop by a noise and “found two white men pouring gasoline about. When he tried to flee . . . one of the men forced him back inside with a shotgun. The fire followed.”17
While Herbers reported that the FBI showed “considerable interest in the case,” local and state authorities refused to acknowledge the fire was anything more than an accident.18
“Don’t call it arson,” said Mayor Woodie Davis, who made a genuine effort to keep a lid on the violence. “That has not been determined.”19
Louisiana governor John McKeithen said he would “be shocked if it is foul play. While I disagree with the civil rights law, we don’t resort to murder and mayhem in any attempt to circumvent.”20
“How can he say no foul play?” an unidentified white man asked Herbers about the governor’s remark. “Everyone around here knows better than that.”21
Other newspapers carried wire service stories about the Morris arson. The Associated Press reported that the police and fire departments in Ferriday refused to comment on orders of the mayor, while a “man at the Concordia Parish sheriff’s office in nearby Vidalia . . . said Sheriff Noah W. Cross was ‘out in the woods hunting’ and not available.” Herbers reported that, like Morris’s killing, a number of crimes in southwest Mississippi had been committed against blacks “who apparently had no enemies and were not involved in the civil rights movement.” Herbers was the first to report that Joseph Edwards had vanished in July. He asked Concordia assistant district attorney Roy Halcomb about Morris. Halcomb expressed remorse in a very mixed way: “My ten-year-old daughter prayed for that nigger every night.”22
FRANK MORRIS was born in 1914. His parents were not married, and a year later, his mother, Charlotte, died. That same year, his father, Sullivan, who operated a shoe shop in Natchez, married Ethel Bacon, the owner and operator of Ethel’s Café. Reared by his grandmother, Morris grew up working in his father’s shoe shop, where he learned the trade, and he attended Broomfield, the local black school. He learned about business from his father and stepmother, both entrepreneurs.23
By the late 1930s, Morris was in business for himself in Ferriday. He quickly became known for quality work and good service, and he learned how to successfully cater to both blacks and whites. To achieve longevity as a black businessman with an interracial customer base had never been done in Concordia Parish or in most areas of the South. In the context of the parish’s savage racial history, Morris’s longtime success was nothing short of
amazing. By the 1950s, his shop was thriving. “Open Every Day and Half the Night” was a slogan he used in his weekly ad in the Concordia Sentinel. On one side of the shop, he repaired shoes, boots, saddles, and bridles, while on the other side he sold hats, dyed purses, tap shoes, inexpensive jewelry, and clothing. He considered himself a “shoe builder” and occasionally purchased new equipment. Many local black boys got their first paying jobs working in Morris’s shop, where he taught them to treat all people well. Others recalled that Morris was charitable and patriotic, often buying war bonds during World War II. “I’m buying some hats for the boys,” he was often heard to say.24
In Ferriday, Morris was known as a jolly man. Honk your car horn and wave when you passed his shop, and Morris would sprint to the front door, wave, and shout a greeting. He always laughed and joked. A white girl whose parents operated a grocery store across the street from the shoe shop in the 1950s spent hours watching Morris cut leather and hammer soles onto shoes. He often greeted her with a bag of plank cookies.25 When Morris’s granddaughter, Rosa, was baptized at the age of ten, Morris, her Aunt Polly, who was blind, and others surrounded her. Just as the pastor prepared to immerse Rosa, Morris yelled out, “Everybody stand back so Polly can see!” Laughter filled the sanctuary.26
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