During the 1950s, Hodges injured his back several times while working in the garage, resulting in numerous trips to doctors and hospitals. He had begun to drink heavily, and by 1957, he was running around with women, often married women. At times his erratic behavior frightened Neva and, although he never hit her, he threatened to do so on several occasions. Soon the marriage—and the business—fell apart. In 1961, Neva divorced Hodges and moved back to Lincoln County. Hodges moved in with his father Zeb in a three-room shotgun house along the railroad tracks, just two hundred yards from the garage.27
Three years later, Hodges joined the White Knights klavern in Bunkley, led by Exalted Cyclops Clyde Seale. There was another White Knights unit in Franklin County, led by Clyde Wentworth, but everyone knew that Seale ran the Klan in that county. Along with Ernest Parker, Seale and his sons James Ford and Jack had taken part in the killing of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. (All four were SDG members.) Although the MHSP had arrested James Ford Seale and klavern member Charles Marcus Edwards for the murders during the fall of 1964, District Attorney Lennox Forman quickly dropped the charges. Seale’s right-hand man in the Bunkley Klan, Archie Prather, had a son, Marcus Shelton Prather, who also was a member.
No one questioned Clyde Seale’s leadership until he targeted Meadville Ford dealer Bill Scarborough. Seale believed Scarborough had given $1,000 to Klansman Charles Marshall for a list of the names of Klan members. Seale wanted Scarborough whipped, and there was talk of killing Marshall. In due time, a Klan smut sheet, prepared on Seale’s orders, accused Scarborough of having an affair with the black maid he had hired to care for his children following the death of his wife years earlier. Hodges knew there was not a bit of truth to either allegation against Scarborough, and he opposed the project.28 Others were against it, too, and soon there was a split. Seale was furious that Hodges challenged his authority and feared he might drink too much and talk. Maybe Hodges would tell his brother-in-law, Dan Vernon, a highway patrolman who had worked on the MHSP task force investigating the Klan. Hodges had expressed a desire to mend his ways.29 Did that mean he planned to confess his personal sins as well as those of the Bunkley klavern, which in addition to committing the Dee-Moore murders had perpetrated at least nine beatings in two years, some administered at an abandoned farmhouse equipped with a homemade stockade? Mostly, Hodges wanted to be a better man. Those who knew him best later painted him as deeply troubled, maybe even fearful for his life during his final days.
IN LATE JULY, Hodges stayed briefly at the veterans’ hospital in Vicksburg, trying to dry out, but soon was home and drinking again. On August 5, timber contractor Rax Marshall saw Hodges at the old Bude sawmill. Hodges sobbed, lamenting that he had been unable to see his sons.30 On August 8, Hodges’s married girlfriend, Johnnie Lee Cothren, told him that Clyde Seale had been staking out Marion King’s dry cleaners in Meadville. King had been warned that unless she fired her black employees, her business would be burned. “Stay away from that no-good son of a bitch,” Hodges barked.31
On August 12, Cothren drove into town to buy Hodges a half pint of whiskey from Doll Green, a black bootlegger in Meadville. Two white men in a white car followed her into town and back. She noticed the passenger wearing a straw hat like the one Clyde Seale was known to wear.32 The next day, Hodges appeared at the doorstep of preacher W. H. Davis. He apologized for being drunk and told Davis he would do anything “to break the drinking habit.” Davis felt Hodges was deeply troubled.33 That night, at Hodges’s request, Cothren called his brother Bill and asked him to send money so Hodges could return to the hospital to dry out. At 8:30 p.m., Johnnie Lee brought Hodges some supper while his father was away. From inside, she observed the white car pass by the house three times.34
Mid-morning on Saturday, August 14, Hodges arrived in his pickup at his friend J. C. Emfinger’s house. He was broke and in need of a drink. They drove to Doll Green’s, bought a half pint, and returned to J. C.’s, where J. C.’s wife, Lanette, fed Hodges some chicken noodle soup and crackers. Lanette found Hodges “shaky and sick.” He slept for a few hours.35
That same morning, Hodges’s ex-wife visited Rosia Roland Davis and his wife Frances, her best friends in Eddiceton, who lived diagonally across the road from Hodges. (Davis had once ordered Hodges out of his home when he arrived intoxicated.) While there, Neva called her attorney. She was considering legal action to force the sale of the garage.36 Later on, Clyde Seale arrived at Davis’s farm nearby along the Homochitto River to help Davis work on his camp. The two were close friends. Davis would later tell the FBI that shortly after noon he spotted Seale’s imported gray English Ford parked in the cornfield just west of Middle Fork Creek. Beside Seale’s car was a solid white, late-model car that Davis told agents he didn’t recognize. The FBI would never identify the owner of that car.37
That afternoon, Hodges and Emfinger drove to the Adams County line to a bar. At dusk, Link Cameron, an African American man, watched four or five cars proceeding north on Bunkley Road heading for US 84 west of Meadville. He recognized some of the vehicles and immediately assumed it was the Seale-Prather Bunkley Klan group going to a meeting. Cameron told the FBI that he recognized James Ford Seale’s pickup and Charles Edwards’s Chevrolet.38
At 8:30 p.m., Emfinger and Hodges returned to Emfinger’s home. Hodges got into his pickup and fell asleep. A few minutes later, Emfinger’s wife heard a commotion outside and observed that Hodges had backed his truck into a ditch.39 Seventy-five yards away, Emfinger’s brother Ed sat down to supper with guest Warren Newman, who operated a furniture store in Bude, and Lucius C. DeLaughter, Newman’s employee. While the men were eating steak, peas, and okra, Hodges knocked on the door and asked for help with his truck. They fixed Hodges a plate of food and decided to pull the pickup out of the ditch the next day.40
At some point after 9:30 p.m., Newman, DeLaughter, and Ed Emfinger squeezed into Newman’s pickup to take Hodges home. DeLaughter told the bureau they arrived at Hodges’s house around ten. Newman gave Hodges a half pint of whiskey and left with DeLaughter and Ed Emfinger. Newman told the FBI he was home in bed by 10:30 p.m.41 Thirty minutes later, Cameron observed some of the cars he had seen earlier in the evening returning home on the Bunkley Road. He recognized Clyde Seale’s gray car and the pickup of Mark Shelton Prather traveling at high speed.42 At 11:50 p.m., eighteen-year-old Thomas Scott, driving home from a night out, crossed the railroad track behind the Hodgeses’ house and saw what appeared to be a white-faced calf lying in the distance.43
Six hours later, at daybreak on August 15, Bill Campbell, a black man who had often helped an inebriated Hodges get inside his home, drove by and thought he saw Hodges lying in the backyard. He walked over and found Hodges lying face up with his right forearm in the air. There was blood on his face. Campbell raced to one of the neighbors, William Watson, for help.44 Watson placed a bedspread over Hodges’s body.45 He then called Sheriff Wayne Hutto, a suspected Klansman who had helped Clyde Seale cover up the Dee-Moore murders. By 8 a.m., more than fifty people had arrived. Some walked through the house and others throughout the yard, contaminating the crime scene. Hodges’s father had been away that night sitting up with an ill man and was still gone.46
Hutto found blood in the road and on the grass. Hodges’s khaki trousers, soaked in blood, were discovered fifty yards from the house at the edge of the blacktop. They appeared to have been cut from his body. Blood was found throughout the three-room house, which featured a hallway on the left side running from the front door to the back with rooms to the right. The living room, which was the front room, was where Hodges slept. His father’s room was in the middle, and the kitchen at the back. An electric fan was running beside Hodges’s bed. At some point, he had walked down the hall to the kitchen, leaving bloody handprints along the walls and on the refrigerator. There was no bathroom in the house, no running water. The outhouse was out back. Hodges’s blood was on the rope and bucket used to retrieve water from the well, which was also bloodstained.
His body rested between the well and the house, his feet in the garden patch. His nose was broken, one of his eyes was almost protruding from the socket, his mouth was bloody, and his body was bruised and cut all over. Although Hutto told the FBI he had no suspects, he believed that Rosia Davis, the neighbor who had spent part of Saturday with Clyde Seale, had knowledge of the crime.47
The coroner found that Hodges’s injuries had been inflicted around 10:30 p.m. on August 14 and that Hodges had died around midnight.48 MHSP investigator Donald Butler reported to the FBI that Hodges was one of two or three men who caused the split in the Bunkley Klan and that Clyde Seale feared Hodges would inform on the group.49 There was no indication that he had. There were rumors—most of them put out by the Klan—that a jealous husband killed Hodges. There was also a Klan rumor that Hodges had a black girlfriend. But Zeb Hodges said Earl’s refusal to go on a Klan project against an innocent person had drawn the wrath of Clyde Seale. More than once Zeb had heard his son say he was “fed up with that old bastard giving orders.”50
For weeks, Franklin County was abuzz with news of Earl Hodges’s demise. A grand jury looked into the matter eight days after the homicide but took no action. There was an outrage against the Klan that hadn’t been expressed a year earlier when black teens Dee and Moore were killed. In 1966, the HUAC questioned Clyde Seale, James Ford Seale, Jack Seale, and Charles Edwards about the Dee-Moore killings and the Seales about Hodges’s murder. They all cited the Fifth Amendment and refused to talk.51
IN 1971, MEADVILLE ATTORNEY Max Graves asked for a meeting with District Attorney Ed Benoist to discuss a topic that had the potential to blow the lid off of both murder cases. Graves represented Warren Newman, who had driven Hodges home on the night of the murder. Newman faced charges of timber theft and was looking for a deal. He offered to tell what he had learned about Hodges’s death. Benoist, Graves, and Sheriff Kirby Shell, who had been Hutto’s deputy in 1965, sat down with Newman.
Newman related that he and the Emfinger brothers, all three Hodges’s closest friends, had set up a meeting with Clyde Seale to resolve his differences with Hodges. The meeting took place in the vicinity of Hodges’s home, maybe out in the yard, maybe in a nearby abandoned house, maybe at Rosia Davis’s camp construction site. The Emfingers and Eugene Robert “Bob” Storey stood with Hodges that night. Newman was not present. At least seven men were with Clyde Seale, including Ernest Avants. Hodges’s friends wanted to make peace, while Seales’s men wanted to teach him a lesson by whipping him. The meeting quickly turned into a brawl.
At the courthouse in Meadville in 1971, Newman related that Ernest Avants had indicated that the intent was to beat Hodges but not kill him. The main participants in the brawl were Clyde Seale and Avants against Hodges and Bob Storey. Clyde Seale used a two-by-four board embedded with nails to deliver the final blow.52 In 1968, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson reported that he had learned from an unidentified source that Hodges was “tied to a saw-horse and beaten . . . with a leather strap with tacks in it.”53
In 2007, when James Ford Seale was tried in federal court for the murders of Dee and Moore, Graves presented a sheet of paper with the scribbled notes, several notations unreadable, of the late Ed Benoist. James Ford Seale’s name does not appear on the list of participants in the Hodges beating, but Graves remembered Newman mentioning his presence at the fight. Because Newman was not at the brawl and had heard the details from the other participants, Benoist in 1971 considered his information hearsay, although the known participants were still alive. There was another problem: All involved, including those defending Hodges, directly or indirectly contributed to his death. Who would want to prosecute the men who had defended Hodges? Graves said in 2013 that the purpose of the meeting was for Hodges to assure the Seale-Prather group that he was not going to sell them out. But Hodges apparently made no assurances and was ready for a showdown.54
Until his death in 1987, Bob Storey, who had been twenty-eight at the time of the incident, was haunted by the melee and Hodges’s murder. In 1967, the FBI found him in the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield. He had slit both of his wrists while on a drinking bender. Storey said rumors that he was partly responsible for Hodges’s death were untrue because on the night of the beating, he was at his mother’s home in Bude “sleeping off a drunk.” A comment he had made at the crime scene the morning after—that it looked as if someone had hit Hodges in the face “with the blade of a hatchet”—had been misconstrued, Storey said. He said he had been recruited into the White Knights five to six months prior to Hodges’s death and that he had quickly grown tired of the group because all Klansmen wanted to do was find a black man to whip.55
Only one man whose car was seen in the caravan leaving Bunkley shortly before Hodges was killed was alive in 2014. Charles Edwards, still living in Franklin County, was granted immunity in 2007 when he testified against James Ford Seale in federal court in Jackson. The FBI visited Hodges’s sister, Helen Vernon, in 2007 but never reinvestigated the homicide.56 Hodges’s nephew, Keith, recalled in 2013 that the murder had devastated his father—Earl’s brother Luther—who gathered his family and his shotgun for the drive from Texas to Eddiceton for the funeral in 1965. Luther talked to Earl’s neighbors and friends, but everyone was silent, most too afraid to say a word. Keith was shocked when his father sought the help of a fortuneteller in solving the homicide. “We were a close family,” Keith said of his uncle’s murder. “This gutted us.”57
10
OUTLAW COUNTRY
NEWS OF EARL HODGES’S beating by Klansmen in August may not have traveled much farther than Franklin County, Mississippi, but it struck the Klan community like lightning, scaring the daylights out of the average member while prompting paranoid KKK leaders to plug potential leaks. Although Red Glover spent much of 1965 planning to kill George Metcalfe, he was also directing other Klan violence. During January and February, the SDG torched two nightclubs in the Monterey-Lismore area of rural Concordia Parish for allegedly selling alcohol to minors and for gambling and prostitution. These arsons came despite the FBI’s presence in Ferriday, where the bureau was intensively investigating the Frank Morris case. Glover didn’t have a particular interest in the lounge arsons, but the Black River Klan often looked to him to carry out such projects, just as it had in 1964 with the beatings of three men and the attempted kidnapping of James White, Morris’s best friend.1
While the lawlessness intensified, the sheriff’s office seemed to be the head of or, at least, the coconspirator in much of it. In Ferriday, white Methodist minister Jerry Means could no longer remain silent. He was offended by the Klan smut sheets that accused white women and black men of having interracial affairs, naming them and intimidating some to leave the area. Means was the pastor of the Sevier Memorial United Methodist Church, whose members included Sheriff Noah Cross and a handful of Klansmen. The preacher spent a lot of time trying to “love the hate” out of Klansmen, knowing perfectly well what some were capable of doing. Although he didn’t believe his fiscally responsible Klan churchgoers would burn the parsonage, he was compelled to move his son’s crib away from the bedroom window.2
On February 4, 1965, the Concordia Sentinel ran a front-page letter to the editor in which Means, who also headed the Concordia Ministerial Alliance, repudiated the Klan and asked the general public to take a stand with him. “The only type of society which the KKK desires to preserve is a society of hatred and of the devil himself,” he wrote.3 Two weeks later, the newspaper ran a front-page story: “Law and Order Urged by Parish Civic Clubs.” In a joint resolution, the chambers of commerce in Ferriday and Vidalia, along with the Vidalia Lions Club and Ferriday Rotary Club, urged local and state law enforcement to apprehend and punish the arsonists. But the groups also made it clear they remained in total support of segregation.4
BY LATE SPRING, Father August Thompson was busy preparing for the opening of the St. Charles Catholic Church recreational center for black youth, while t
he Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) was lining up volunteers from the North to move to Ferriday during the summer. When Thompson was ordained in 1956, he was one of only fifty black Catholic priests in America. He was not shocked that he faced racism in his church, but he was deeply hurt when his request that the congregation seating be integrated for his first mass was denied.5
Thompson was born in 1926 in Baldwin, Louisiana. The second of nine children, he was educated in a segregated black school, where every morning the students altered the final words of the Pledge of Allegiance to “with liberty and justice for some.”6 By 1965, Thompson was in his third year of service at St. Charles. He had been a steadfast presence in the region’s underground civil rights movement, with black and white friends, many prominent in the movement, often visiting him in Ferriday. When CORE arrived in early July, FBI agent Don McGorty made twice-weekly visits after the Ferriday police, sheriff’s deputies, and the sheriff himself were spotted driving by the center several times a day.7 Despite the pleas of his friends, Thompson refused to carry a gun. If he died, whether as a result of his civil rights work or for some other reason, he wanted his mother to always remember that he “died loving.”8
For the summer of 1965, CORE had two major goals in the area: the integration of public places in Natchez and the organization of an active civil rights movement in Ferriday, a town known statewide for police brutality. CORE leaders called Ferriday the “cutting edge in the battle for civil rights in the South.”9 In Natchez, CORE workers publicized their first attempt to integrate Duncan Park, whose golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts, and baseball and softball fields were all off limits to blacks. The plan was thwarted when dozens of Klansmen toting baseball bats showed up. The next day, however, as FBI agents watched, the CORE group returned unannounced to the park with a number of local black activists and successfully made it inside.10
Devils Walking Page 17