Devils Walking
Page 16
Rubble of Morris’s shoe shop.
(Photo by August Thompson/Concordia Sentinel)
George Metcalfe’s car following the bombing in 1965.
(FBI file photo)
Wharlest Jackson, a Korean War veteran and treasurer of the Natchez NAACP, was the Silver Dollar Group’s final target. Jackson was killed when a bomb planted beneath the frame of his pickup exploded in 1967.
(Photo courtesy Denise Ford)
Jackson’s pickup following the bombing in 1967.
(FBI photo)
Blasting cap leg wire used in the bombing of Jackson’s car.
(FBI photo)
OTHER
Curt Hewitt was manager of the mob-run Morville Lounge.
(Concordia Sentinel)
E. L. McDaniel, photographed here for his application to be a cab driver in Natchez in 1958, became the grand dragon of the United Klans of America in Mississippi in 1964. By 1966, he was an FBI informant. (FBI file photo)
Silver dollar given to Klansman Earcel Boyd by Silver Dollar Group leader Red Glover.
(Photo by Pete Nicks, Cold Case Truth & Justice Project, Center for Investigative Reporting)
Earcel Boyd preached in black churches while a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the Silver Dollar Group. (Photo by Leland Boyd/Concordia Sentinel)
Ernest Avants in 1964, following his arrest in the beating of two civil rights workers. In 1967 he was one of three men booked and exonerated in the murder of Ben Chester White in Adams County, Mississippi. He was convicted of the murder in federal court in 2003.
(House Un-American Activities Committee file photo)
Father August Thompson prayed with Frank Morris before Morris died four days after the shoe-shop arson. He also photographed Morris on his deathbed.
(Concordia Sentinel)
Louisiana probation officer James Goss’s complaint that Joseph Edwards allegedly had forced a kiss on a female Shamrock Motel employee led to Edwards’s disappearance.
(Concordia Sentinel)
L. C. Murray was one of three Silver Dollar Group Klansmen still living in 2015.
(FBI file photo)
Concordia Sentinel editor Stanley Nelson interviews Klansman Arthur Leonard Spencer in 2010. Spencer, who was implicated in the Frank Morris arson, died in 2013.
(Photo by David Paperny, Cold Case Truth & Justice Project, Center for Investigative Reporting)
9
“CRIPPLED JOHNNY” AND THE ALCOHOLIC MECHANIC
IN THE EVER-CHANGING world of Klan allegiances, the UKA was growing nationally and in 1965 added Louisiana Original Knight and Mississippi White Knight klaverns to its membership list. In May, the UKA in Mississippi convened at the Eola Hotel in Natchez. Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton expressed concern that some members were reluctant to attend the state convention—known in Klanspeak as a Klonvocation—because they didn’t want anyone to know they were Klansmen. Shelton also instructed members to refrain from drinking in public. At the convention, he narrated the film Birth of a Nation, calling it the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”1
E. L. McDaniel, who had been appointed by Shelton as Mississippi UKA grand dragon in August 1964, was elected by the membership to the position at the convention. Other Natchez men also were elected to state positions, including Paul Foster, the Exalted Cyclops of the Natchez UKA klavern, and Charles Davidson, John Dawson, and Jack Seale.2 Davidson had been booked in the shooting of Richard Joe Butler in southern Adams County in the spring of 1964, and Seale had been arrested for assaulting civil rights workers and implicated in the murders of Dee and Moore. Charges against both Klansmen were dropped.
McDaniel announced at the meeting that he was forming a women’s auxiliary group. As he recruited in Mississippi in 1964 and 1965, the UKA, which unlike other Klans loved the spotlight, capitalized on the notoriety of the White Knights, a Mississippi-only organization, as the UKA pushed a political and nonviolent agenda. At its peak there were 6,000 White Knights in eighty-two counties. By 1967, membership was down to 400. In Louisiana, the Original Knights counted forty-two klaverns at its height and at least 1,000 members, the bulk in northern Louisiana and the southeastern toe of the state. But membership dwindled to 250 by 1967.3 UKA membership, however, rose to almost 17,000 by 1967, with seventy klaverns and 750 members in Mississippi (many former White Knights) and thirty klaverns and 700 members in Louisiana. North Carolina was the biggest UKA state in America with 192 klaverns and 7,500 members.4
These figures, compiled by the U.S. House of Representatives House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), may or may not be accurate, as Klan leaders always inflated their numbers. Although UKA rallies drew hundreds, sometimes thousands, the majority in attendance were spectators. Wherever he traveled, McDaniel was always available to the press, and he fired off letters to the editor and press releases to newspapers throughout Mississippi. While blacks boycotted Natchez stores in the wake of the Metcalfe bombing, McDaniel attacked public officials and anyone who was anti-Klan.
On October 30, during the NAACP-led economic boycott of white businesses, one hundred robed UKA members from Mississippi and Louisiana, accompanied by three UKA Klansmen waving Rebel flags and mounted on horses, assembled at the end of Main Street in Natchez and marched ten blocks to the courthouse. McDaniel used the assembly to warn Mayor John Nosser not to give in to the demands of blacks. That night, Shelton was the keynote speaker at a rally in Liberty Park attended by 150 to 160 robed Klansmen and an estimated 4,000 spectators. HUAC investigators at the rally handed out subpoenas to several Klansmen to testify at hearings scheduled for 1966.5
Among those subpoenaed was McDaniel. In December 1965, he took advantage of a state law that allowed anyone to sign an affidavit and have a person arrested. His affidavit called for the apprehension of Natchez police chief J. T. Robinson, who had ignored McDaniel’s demand that he arrest civil rights leaders for violating a state anti-boycott law. Wire services sent the story out nationally. Sheriff Odell Anders made the arrest, but the matter went no further. In the meantime, the SDG began to attack other Klansmen. Although SDG men may have kept their membership in the UKA, White Knights, or Original Knights—mostly to keep up with what was going on within those groups—the majority remained convinced that words and political campaigns would not stop integration. For them, a secretive underground war was the only answer.
ON SUNDAY, August 15, 1965, the Beatles were on their way to becoming—as John Lennon would later comment—more popular than Jesus Christ. In New York City, the band opened its U.S. tour before a sold-out crowd (almost 57,000) at Shea Stadium. The event made headlines across the world. What happened that same day 1,134 miles away in Fayette, Mississippi, however, barely made a ripple anywhere. Located twenty-four miles north of Natchez, Fayette was founded in 1825 and named after French general Marquis de Lafayette, who fought under the command of George Washington during the Revolutionary War. In 1905, the town had built a Confederate war memorial across Main Street from the courthouse.6
At 1 p.m. that Sunday, gunshots pierced the heavy summer heat at the Fayette Ice House, located a block north of the courthouse on US 61, the town’s main street. A crowd soon gathered near the body of the local shoeshine man, sixty-five-year-old Johnny Queen, whose blood, mixed with melting ice water, flowed down the street. His stiffening hand held a .32 caliber silver-plated pistol, known as an “owl head” because the head of an owl was engraved on the handle. Queen’s killer, off-duty Adams County constable Jasper Burchfield, stood at the edge of the ice house deck (called the porch by town citizens) where Queen’s body lay. With him were his sister, mother, and father, and a family friend. A short time later, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy Robert Pritchard arrived on the scene and collected Queen’s and Burchfield’s revolvers. Pritchard was considered a decent man in both the black and white communities. His wife, Cecilia, was sheriff, having been elected in 1963 because her husband, who had been the sheriff, couldn’t succeed himself under Mississipp
i law.7
Ninety minutes later, the parish coroner, under the sheriff’s direction, convened an inquest. Five white men were randomly chosen. No witnesses testified. Pritchard presented the evidence. The panel was shown Queen’s pistol and soon reported that Queen died from four gunshot wounds fired from Burchfield’s .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. It reported that Burchfield had killed Queen in self-defense.8
The next day the justice of the peace held a hearing. Two black ice house employees and Burchfield’s father, mother, and sister testified. Pritchard reported that after Burchfield arrived, Queen used “vulgar language” in the presence of the constable’s mother and sister, who were seated in his car. Burchfield asked Queen to quit cursing. Queen said he could say what he wanted. Gunshots followed. The justice of the peace ruled the killing justifiable homicide.9
After receiving a call from Sheriff Cecilia Pritchard, FBI agent Billy Bob Williams drove to Fayette from Natchez to investigate. He found no evidence that this was a Klan killing and was certain the bureau had no federal jurisdiction. Additionally, he found no evidence that Burchfield as a constable had violated the “color of the law” federal statute—Section 242 of Title 18—because he was not performing an official duty when the shooting occurred. Williams also thought the Pritchards to be honest and reliable law enforcement people.10
However, the FBI had identified Burchfield as a White Knight in 1964. Two agents visited him in the Fenwick community of Adams County in February 1965, six months prior to the Queen killing. They found Burchfield, an employee of the International Paper Company who had been elected constable in 1963, critical of what he called the “Nigger situation.” He alleged that the “Jews” were controlling the American dollar, felt that Governor Paul Johnson was “through in Mississippi,” and complained that Natchez mayor John Nosser was “trying to burn the candle at both ends and be nice to everybody.” (Klansmen hated Nosser because they felt he was taking the side of blacks on the civil rights issue.) Burchfield denied any knowledge of who had bombed Nosser’s home. He also alluded to charges being dropped against several Klansmen arrested during the fall of 1964 for the attempted murder of Richard Joe Butler, the attack on civil rights workers in Fayette and Port Gibson, and the murders of Dee and Moore. If he had been in the position of those Klansmen, Burchfield said, he would have sued the FBI and Mississippi officials.11
As early as February 1964, an FBI mole had infiltrated the White Knights during its formation in Natchez. The informant (who provided typed reports) said Burchfield was the leader of the White Knights group in Fenwick. He also reported that Burchfield was a close friend of Sheriff Anders.12 An Adams County deputy had named Burchfield as a suspect in the whipping of Natchez funeral home director Archie Curtis in February 1964. That same year, the FBI notified Governor Johnson that Burchfield was one of scores of law enforcement officials in the Klan, and later informants reported that Burchfield had quit the Klan shortly after his election as constable. When interviewed in 2012 by the Concordia Sentinel and National Public Radio (NPR), Burchfield denied he had ever been in the Klan, denied having attended Klan meetings, and denied having ever known anyone who was in the Klan.13
A native of Itta Bena, Mississippi, Burchfield moved to Natchez after marriage. In 1950–51, he served in the Korean War as a machine gunner, an experience he considered the worst in his life. On the day he shot and killed Johnny Queen, Burchfield and his passengers were traveling to Itta Bena. As he neared Fayette, his car’s radiator overheated. He stopped at the Fayette Ice House to buy a sack of ice to place in front of the radiator to keep it cool until it could be repaired. He parked parallel to the ice house, and the passenger doors were inches away from the ice house porch, which was four feet above ground level. On the porch, Burchfield observed a handicapped black man.14
Johnny Queen was a town fixture. Everybody knew him. He loved to play checkers behind Ball’s Drug Store a short distance from the ice house. He had lost the use of both legs in a fall from the roof of a house during his childhood, and his legs were dead weight. Using his upper body strength, Queen stretched his arms and then dragged his legs forward. Many called him “Crippled Johnny.” At some point as a young man, when shining shoes became his career, he built two small wooden boxes to store brushes, shoe polish, and supplies. Placing his hands atop each box enabled him to haul his supplies as he pulled himself about town. Young boys thought of him as a musician; as he shined shoes, he made his polishing rag go “pop, pop, pop, pop, pop” to a beat. But because his deformity made his appearance so odd, many children were afraid of him.15
Queen was an unpleasant, confrontational man. He drank too much, cursed in front of children, and often carried a knife or a pistol in one of his boxes, but he never physically harmed anyone. Say something he perceived as threatening, and he would immediately tell you where to go. He wanted everyone to know that neither his blackness nor his disability made him less of a man. Queen was a lot like Burchfield—opinionated, some said aggressive at times—and under no circumstances would he ever back down from a fight.16
After parking that Sunday, Burchfield got out of the Buick, leaving his pistol behind in the middle of the front seat. He placed his order with two black ice house employees who were on the porch along with Queen. Black teens often sat there during the hot summer months to catch a rush of cool air emerging from inside the building where ice was manufactured in blocks or crushed and packaged. Two teens on the scene that day heard Burchfield tell Queen to stop cursing in front of his wife and sister. One heard Queen reply, “I can say shit whenever I get ready.”17
According to Burchfield’s account, his mother, sitting in the backseat of the Buick, shouted, “That nigger’s got a gun.” Standing at the driver’s door, Burchfield shifted his weight as Queen, seven feet away on the ice house porch, fired. Afterward, witnesses saw a bullet hole, allegedly fired from Queen’s gun, in the house next door. Burchfield said he instinctively reached inside his car for his pistol, which the coroner identified as a “.38 state police special.” Burchfield told the FBI in 2009 it was a .357 magnum. In 2012, when interviewed by the Concordia Sentinel and NPR, Burchfield said he still had the pistol used in the shooting but declined to produce it.18
The MHSP reported in 1965 that Queen attempted to fire again, but the gun clicked. At that moment, Burchfield shot Queen, who rolled over and aimed at Burchfield, who fired three more times. In 2009, Burchfield told the FBI that he initially fired two shots into Queen’s waist. Afterward, Queen “slumped over,” and as he attempted to sit up and shoot again, Burchfield fired twice, delivering the fatal shots. During the 2012 interview, Burchfield pointed at his forehead and said his final shot hit Queen there: “That was the end of the show . . . that blood shot up out of him, over down on the concrete. I mean a pile of it . . . and he just kind of shrunk and I knew that was it . . . seen too many die over in that [Korean] war.”19
No witnesses were forthcoming in 1965 to refute Burchfield’s account of the shooting. Four witnesses who reportedly testified at the justice of the peace hearing that year—Burchfield’s mother, sister, and the two ice house employees—are now all dead. Only Burchfield and his sister, who was fourteen in 1965, were still alive in 2012. The sister refused to talk with the Sentinel and NPR, and referred the FBI to her lawyer when the bureau asked her to take a polygraph.20
The Sentinel and NPR found four men—three white and one black—who had come upon the scene immediately after the shooting. All saw the pistol in Queen’s hand. All reported that Burchfield was calm. “I got good nerve,” Burchfield recalled forty-seven years later, when he was in his eighties. However, he was initially hostile when NPR producer Amy Walters, accompanied by NPR investigative reporter Joe Shapiro and the editor of the Sentinel, showed up on his doorstep seeking an interview. When Burchfield came to the front door, I asked him about the day he shot Queen. He went ballistic and spewed profanity, just as he claimed Queen had done a half century earlier.21
“Yo
u ain’t gonna talk to me about no shit like that,” Burchfield fumed. He said it was no one’s concern but his own. “I mind my own goddam business.” When Walters said that they simply wanted his side of the story, Burchfield cooled down and talked for an hour. He told the same story he said he had told two FBI agents—“a man and girl”—in 2009, and he claimed to have also told the agents it “wasn’t none of their damn business.”22
There was no evidence to refute Burchfield’s claim of self-defense in 1965 or in recent times. The FBI closed the case in 2013, after spending little time investigating. But questions linger. What would have happened to Johnny Queen had he been the survivor of the shooting? As word spread that a black man had killed a white man, would Queen have survived the oncoming night?
A WEEK AFTER the Queen shooting, in the neighboring Franklin County community of Eddiceton, forty-seven-year-old Earl Hodges’s body was found in the backyard between his father’s shotgun house and the railroad track. According to a HUAC investigator, Hodges’s “body showed welts from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head. There was a hole in the top of his head. There was a split from the left side of his nose to his left eye which was deep enough so you could see the roof of his month.” One weapon believed used against Hodges was a three- to four-inch strap and a belt lined with tacks that “tore the flesh every time he was struck with it.”23 The coroner found the cause of death was a heart attack brought on by the beating. An alcoholic who suffered from liver disease, Hodges’s death was ruled a homicide, his injuries “inflicted by person or persons unknown.”24
Born and reared in Lincoln County, Hodges had served as commander of the American Legion post in Meadville in 1951 following military service in occupied Europe during World War II. Fun-loving and a great dancer, he caught the eyes of the girls and spent a lot of time on the dance floor at the Eola Hotel in Natchez.25 As a young man, he worked in automobile garages in Brookhaven and was sought out as a skilled mechanic. In 1946, he and his wife of ten years, Neva Short, built a garage and service station on US 84 in Eddiceton. Neva helped pump gas and kept the books; she also gave birth to two sons. The business thrived.26