It didn’t take long for the bureau’s investigation to hit a dead end. In Ferriday, Mayor Davis knew his police department couldn’t solve the crime, as did Assistant District Attorney Halcomb. The sheriff’s office didn’t express the slightest interest in the case. Agents interviewed DeLaughter at the sheriff’s office in Vidalia. He said Morris had never caused him any trouble, had never said one off-color word to his wife, and that he had no idea who committed the arson. He said his wife’s only contact with Morris had been getting “the family shoes repaired.” They had done business with Morris since 1957. During his visit to the hospital, DeLaughter claimed he didn’t press Morris to identify the arsonists because he “was in great pain.” The sheriff’s office, he said, wasn’t investigating because the crime happened in Ferriday’s jurisdiction.63
Distraught and frightened over the arson, Morris’s father, Sullivan, and stepmother, Ethel, sought haven with family members in California for an extended period.64 Local blacks were harassed with telephone calls from white men who warned, “You’re next.” At least two black men—one a teacher, the other a funeral home employee—left town. In February 1965, Adams County sheriff Odell Anders, testifying before the Civil Rights Commission hearings in Jackson, Mississippi, wondered what evil possessed the men who committed Morris to flames: “I don’t know what kind of a man it takes to do that. I don’t know what beats in him.”65 In April, the FBI received a letter from Ferriday. The writer wondered if Morris’s killers were going to get away with murder even though “the police were part of the gang that permitted this terrible thing to happen. Your office is our only hope so don’t fail us.” The letter was signed: “The Colored people of Concordia Parish.”66
1965
8
“WHY DO THEY HATE US SO?”
OVER A PERIOD OF MONTHS, Red Glover tracked Natchez NAACP president George Metcalfe, a forklift driver in the shipping department at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company plant where both men worked. As a tire builder, Glover earned $2.70 an hour at the sprawling facility near downtown Natchez. To the west of the plant entrance, at the top of the hill on Gayoso Street, was the site of Concord, a fabled Spanish mansion that had been destroyed by fire six decades earlier. In the late 1790s, it had been the home of Manuel Gayoso, the last Spanish governor in Natchez. Gayoso had puffed on Havana cigars and sipped wine while entertaining guests at Concord. On the grounds, he had negotiated a treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. He was remembered as a diplomat among the Europeans and the Native Americans, but not even he could have negotiated a peace between Glover and his fellow Klansmen at Armstrong and the civil rights movement George Metcalfe was directing in Natchez.1
Since beginning the Silver Dollar Group (SDG) at the Vidalia motel coffee shop, Glover had recruited others into his underground Klan within a Klan. Only he knew every member. Only he knew the crimes the various members had committed for the cause of segregation. FBI agents early on tagged Glover a psychopath. He was moody, temperamental, paranoid, a loner. John Pfeifer, an agent who interviewed Glover several times, believed he “got a tremendous shot of paranoid schizophrenia” early in life. “I mean he would not trust anybody.”2
At 170 pounds and under six feet, Glover was not a big man. He was balding with red hair, freckles, and a ruddy complexion. Some men called him “Red,” while many called him “Jack,” derived from his middle name, Jackson. Born in the east Texas county of St. Augustine in 1922, he grew up on a struggling farmstead during the Great Depression, quitting school after the seventh grade. St. Augustine was an old frontier crossroads, the home of revolutionists like Sam Houston (the president of the Republic of Texas) and the hideout of frontier gamblers, criminals, and misfits. When Glover was ten, his mother, Maggie, moved the children (three girls and two boys) to Mississippi, where she had family ties.3 Glover’s relationship with his father, Warren, is unclear. Glover claimed that his dad had committed suicide during his childhood, but Armstrong Tire personnel records indicate that his father was living in Summit, Mississippi, in the 1940s and in Texas in the 1950s.4
In the late 1930s, Glover went to work for the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. He told his stepson he helped construct the Clear Springs Recreation Area in Franklin County, Mississippi, but records at the tire plant indicate that he worked in Louisiana as well, building roads and bridges. Later, he was employed as an ironworker and steelworker throughout the South. He was divorced by the time he was twenty-two. In 1943, he was drafted into the Navy and recruited into the Seabees, a construction and demolition force that built roads, airstrips, and bases, sometimes under enemy fire. While in New Guinea in the South Pacific, Glover shot himself in the left knee after accidentally striking the cap of a .45 caliber shell while making an ornament chain to hang around his neck. The Navy said the injury was Glover’s fault but agreed to pay him a monthly disability stipend of $15.75 for the rest of his life.5
In December 1945, a few days after returning home to Natchez and about a year after his divorce, Glover married Polly Burts Watts, the widow of his best friend, who had been killed in combat in Germany. Glover reared the couple’s child as his own. In 1948, Glover began work at the Armstrong tire plant, but in 1950 he reentered the Navy and served in Korea. He served as a shipfitter and pipefitter, while qualifying as a marksman on the rifle range. Glover’s experience in the military, like his childhood, was a mystery to his family. He never talked about it, other than telling his stepson that he read encyclopedias and the Bible to educate himself and that, although he had sailed the seas, he couldn’t swim.6 An FBI informant said Glover occasionally looked at old photos of himself taken in the Pacific Islands during World War II. The images showed Glover in his Navy uniform as he cut off the head and genitals of a dead Japanese soldier. He was arrested once while in the military for indecent exposure.7
After Korea, Glover returned to Armstrong and briefly tried dairy farming. He attended church for a while, but that didn’t last long either. In March 1963, he secured a Veterans’ Administration loan totaling $11,855.66 and bought a house in Vidalia at 113 Lee Avenue. Stories circulated that Glover was mentally unstable. Many of his new neighbors in Vidalia had heard his tirades about “the niggers” bringing down America and about the growing civil rights movement, which he believed was fueled by communists.8
One of Glover’s SDG recruits was Earcel “Preacher” Boyd Sr., an Armstrong employee and part-time preacher who would don a white Klan robe for a meeting on Saturday night and then preach in a black church occasionally on Sunday morning. One day while visiting the Boyd home in a subdivision along the Ferriday-Vidalia highway, Glover led Boyd and sons Sonny and Leland to his car. In the trunk were rifles, automatic weapons, and machine guns. Glover picked up one of the rifles and dry fired it. The Boyd brothers were not frightened of Klansmen or their weaponry. They had grown up with both. Often military fighter jets rocketed over the Boyd home, traveling faster than the speed of sound. The sonic booms that followed rattled the windows in the Boyd home, causing Earcel’s wife, Marjorie, to scream in terror. She feared that Boyd’s explosives—cast iron–shelled bombs the size of baseballs filled with black powder—would detonate in the attic where they were stored.
Glover often clowned with the teens, wrestling with them and teasing them. The brothers and their mother did, however, fear him at times. Once while Glover was visiting, the phone rang. It was for Glover. As he talked on the phone, the Boyd family watched his demeanor suddenly change from clownish to demonlike. He often experienced such transformations. None who saw them ever forgot the rage in his eyes.9
By the end of 1964, Glover was restless and impatient. He had led Klan wrecking crews in northeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi on projects ranging from beatings to arson, and he was linked to Joseph Edwards’s disappearance. But Glover could clearly see that the established Klans were achieving nothing in the war to preserve segregation. Civil rights groups and the FBI would not go away. Glover believed that
it was time to go after the locals most responsible for pushing civil rights, and George Metcalfe was number one on the list. As FBI internal documents reveal, Glover was convinced Metcalfe “was a hard core active communist,” and he was “consumed with the passion to kill Metcalfe.”10
THE ARMSTRONG TIRE plant where Glover and Metcalfe worked had been built in 1939. The complex included seven buildings, all constructed with reinforced concrete, including the 198,000-square-foot main factory. Raw rubber pellets were rolled from conveyors to vats, where they were mixed with chemicals, heated, blended with fabric and steel-encased beading, and shaped in engraved molds. The process was synchronized through several stations and required vast amounts of machinery. For the employees, it was hot, noisy work.
In 1950, the company brought in Iowa native Pete Mitchell as factory manager. Mitchell had traveled the world for Armstrong, helping launch a new plant in Spain in 1933. He had trekked through Africa in the 1940s in search of wild crude rubber. In Natchez, Mitchell inherited a plant beleaguered by poor leadership and low morale. His first priority was to improve labor relations, and he also issued warnings to troublemakers: Disrupt production and face termination. He met often with the Rubber Workers’ Union, listened to grievances, and had on call the dean of the Tulane Law School to act as an arbitrator if needed. During meetings, union officials attempted to intimidate him by whittling with their long-bladed pocketknives. Mitchell made fun of their bullying by reaching for his small penknife and cutting paper.11
By 1963, Mitchell had doubled the plant’s production, with 1,100 workers producing twelve thousand tires and tubes daily for Sears. The annual payroll was $7 million. Blacks were assigned to the lower-paying janitorial and shipping jobs, but they, too, were union members. Armstrong policy was to establish a climate conducive to good race relations, which the company knew was required by new civil rights legislation. However, the growing nest of Klansmen at Armstrong made the job difficult at best. They wanted blacks perpetually barred from holding traditional “white” jobs, and they opposed the integration of bathrooms, break rooms, and the cafeteria. Mitchell found the plant, like Natchez, rife with rumors and gossip; he once noted that he had “never worked in such a small city nor been any place where people would repeat what they heard with no effort to verify it.” Rumors about Metcalfe abounded. Glover often remarked that he had seen white girls sitting in Metcalfe’s lap at the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) house in Natchez. Metcalfe was often harassed at the plant and received threatening phone calls at home, and in early 1965, someone fired into his house.12
METCALFE WAS BORN in 1912 in Franklin, Louisiana, located between Lafayette and Morgan City near the Gulf. A slim, quiet man, serious in mind and nature, Metcalfe could also be jovial. By 1940, he and his wife, Adell, then twenty-seven, were living in Natchez, where he drove a truck for a sawmill and she worked as a waitress.13 In 1954, Metcalfe was selling burial insurance when he met Wharlest Jackson, a Florida native, Korean War veteran, and father of five who had just moved to Natchez from Chicago. That same year, the two men got jobs at the Armstrong plant. They became best friends.14
Metcalfe had worked with COFO during Freedom Summer and by early 1965 was ready to relaunch the local NAACP chapter, which had been dormant for years. On March 3, the first meeting was held, with Charles Evers on hand to help reorganize the chapter. The brother of slain Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, Charles had left Chicago after his brother’s murder in 1963 and had taken over his job. Charles Evers was often at odds with the NAACP national leadership. At the Natchez meeting, the fifty-three-year-old Metcalfe was elected president, and Jackson, thirty-five, was voted in as secretary. Jackson’s wife, Exerlena, was named head of the political action committee.15
Four days later, on March 7, the now-famous march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery was intercepted by Alabama state troopers, who savagely beat participants. Photographers and television cameras captured images of the brutality, and it was vividly described by journalists. The event, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, shocked Americans. On March 15, President Lyndon Johnson lobbied Congress to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation that would ban literacy tests, give the federal government a more definitive means to oversee elections, and allow blacks a legal avenue for challenging the local election process. Despite strong opposition, Johnson pushed the legislation through. He signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. Following a series of meetings the previous spring, the Natchez NAACP chapter had put together a list of demands to be placed before the city administration, and before the end of August, Metcalfe filed a desegregation lawsuit against the city of Natchez. His personal life, however, was in disarray, and his wife left him.16
AT SDG MEETINGS along the Homochitto River in Meadville, Mississippi, and at the Clear Springs Recreation Park nearby, Glover mentioned that something needed to be done about Metcalfe. Once, he said Metcalfe’s home should be torched. After Glover decided on a plan to silence Metcalfe, he alone considered the best way to carry out the hit. He initially planned to lure him outside the plant, where two Klansmen would kidnap him at gunpoint, transport him to a remote location, and kill him. But the plot fizzled when Glover was unable to get Metcalfe outside.17
The second plan involved two participants, James Horace “Sonny” Taylor, a logger from Harrisonburg in Catahoula Parish, and James “Red” Lee, an Armstrong Tire employee who lived in the Concordia Parish community of Lismore. Glover, Taylor, and Lee spent days watching Metcalfe’s every move, observing where he parked his car and spying on his approach to the plant gate. Glover’s idea was for Taylor and Lee to assassinate Metcalfe under cover of darkness with Lee’s Winchester twelve-gauge pump shotgun as Metcalfe walked toward the plant. A third man, described by an informant as fifty years old and heavy, was enlisted to pick up Lee’s shotgun after the shooting; Lee and Taylor didn’t want to chance being stopped on the highway afterward with the murder weapon inside their car. At ten o’clock on the night of the planned assassination, the third man backed out. Lee and Taylor, however, moved forward. As Metcalfe began his walk to the plant gate, Taylor covered Metcalfe with Lee’s shotgun, loaded with buckshot. At the last second, however, because of the uncertainty about disposing of the murder weapon, Taylor didn’t fire.18
After the two plans failed, Glover chose a much more grandiose mission, one that would be carried out in the light of day for all of Natchez to see. He assigned Lee and Taylor to perfect a bombing device that could be planted in Metcalfe’s car. Glover gave Taylor a tightly sealed grease can that contained two red cans of blasting (black) powder and eighteen white cans filled with powerful C-4 explosives (likely primer cord), which could be safely molded, like clay, into a brick shape. Taylor, who lived in the hills outside Harrisonburg, hid the material there, possibly in a cave not far from his home.19
In early summer, Glover instructed Lee to host a fish fry for SDG members. Always careful to limit meetings to only a few, Glover’s decision to intermix all of his hardcore members—those who had dirty hands—was outwardly a means to gather socially and at the same time to experiment with explosives. Glover also was making a master move by purposely implicating everyone there in his ultimate plan to kill Metcalfe.
With his wife and three children, Lee lived in a rented two-story house along the Black River in Lismore. The area had a dark history. A century earlier, Lismore had been the site of a plantation owned by a prominent physician and slaveholder. One of the doctor’s slaves was Mary Reynolds, who, as a teenager, was freed by Federal troops following the fall of Vicksburg in 1863. Mary had watched slaves whipped by an overseer named Solomon and had suffered a savage beating by a white man that left her unable to bear children and physically scarred for life. Even as a child, she knew that her master was raping his female property. When a woman called Aunt Cheney was caught running away, Solomon unleashed the hounds, who caught her and gnawed away her breasts. After getting her freedom, Mary worked
hard at farming, housekeeping, and tending white people’s children, living in poverty until her death in the late 1930s (about the time Frank Morris opened his shoe shop twenty miles east of Lismore in Ferriday).20
Born in Orange, Texas (between Beaumont and Lake Charles, Louisiana), Lee was ten years Glover’s junior and also had red hair. While his father preached at the Evangeline Baptist Church a few miles from Lismore, his mother was a high school music teacher in a neighboring parish. Lee despised blacks as much as Glover did. Once, as a patient at Jefferson Davis Hospital in Natchez after it was integrated in 1964, Lee awoke in his hospital bed and was so shocked to see a black patient in the bed beside him that he thought he was dreaming. Once reality set in, Lee called his wife. When she arrived to pick him up, he was standing at the hospital’s entrance in his boxer shorts.21
Late on the morning of June 26, 1965, the first guests arrived at the Lee residence, including three of the SDG members’ wives, who helped prepare the food. The remaining Klansmen came at intervals throughout the day, most arriving in early afternoon, when lunch was served. Several left early, but most stayed until dark.22 Coming from Mississippi were brothers Jack and James Ford Seale, Ernest Finley, L. C. Murray, Thore L. Torgersen, and Ernest Parker. Parker brought the fish, a mess of big bass, caught in the same water where the Seales and Parker had drowned Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore the previous summer. Murray, a suspect in the bombing of Mayor John Nosser’s home, served as field secretary to UKA grand dragon E. L. McDaniel, also a suspect in that case.23 Finley had been an early recruit of Glover’s and had actively helped organize the SDG in Mississippi. When he died three months after the fish fry, mourners at his funeral noticed a silver dollar on a chain in the center of a wreath.24 Torgersen had been involved in Glover’s wrecking crew projects in Concordia during the previous year. (Unbeknownst to Glover, Torgersen had given his silver dollar to a waitress at the Shamrock coffee shop.)25
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