Devils Walking
Page 18
In Ferriday, two white nuns arrived to help Father Thompson prepare for the opening of the church youth center. When the Klan threatened a white Catholic in Ferriday with arson for housing the sisters, Thompson moved them to the rectory. Four CORE workers came by the church to introduce themselves to the priest, who had become famous within CORE when he was featured in Ramparts magazine in 1963. On the day of their arrival, sheriff’s deputies and Ferriday police began to follow their every move.11
In the meantime, the Sentinel announced that CORE had opened a base of operations in Ferriday. The paper complained that the outsiders were already creating trouble “where none has existed before and cannot possibly give any intelligent and lasting assistance to Ferriday’s race relations.” Furthermore, the paper charged CORE workers with creating “discord and distrust between white and colored people everywhere they have worked.”12 But it was obvious to any objective observer that there had been trouble in Ferriday for a long time.
Michael Clurman, a twenty-one-year-old white CORE worker from New York, was attacked twice in three weeks. The first beating came when two black men emerged from Frank DeLaughter’s patrol car and assaulted Clurman and a colleague. DeLaughter often used others to do his dirty work. Shortly afterward, Clurman’s parents called their congressman, who, in turn, contacted the U.S. Department of Justice. By mid-month, an attempt was made to burn the home where CORE workers were staying, while on July 19, Clurman and Mel Atcheson of Iowa, who was also white, were attacked by one of DeLaughter’s thugs. Atcheson was beaten and kicked in the face but, as CORE workers were taught, didn’t fight back. Clurman ran. When the activists attempted to hail two deputies passing in their patrol cars, neither would stop. By the end of the month, assistant attorney general for civil rights John Doar wrote the congressman who had inquired about the matter: “On the basis of present information the prospect of a successful federal criminal prosecution is not bright. Evidence is lacking that the assailants acted under the color of the law or that they were involved in a conspiracy to deprive citizens of civil rights.” In a phone call to Clurman’s parents, Doar warned, “Get your son out of there. That’s outlaw country.”13
After the beating of Atcheson, black CORE worker Archie Hunter of Harlem was in a fury that local blacks who had witnessed the crime didn’t help the CORE workers. “We come halfway across the country and you stand right here in the middle of your community and don’t help us?” Hunter roared.14 His admonition made a difference. Under CORE’s direction, the Ferriday Freedom Movement (FFM) was born on July 27. In its first newsletter, FFM reported that the organization was born to change “police brutality, years of inactivity, years of fear of retaliation from elements of the white community, years of being told we are inferior, years of being exploited, years of being murdered, and years of bondage. Now, today, we bear the burden of having to rectify all of the things that our forefathers tolerated, because we will not tolerate them.”15
The newsletter also reported that DeLaughter had arrested four black teens for allegedly cursing a white woman, noting he took them to the Ferriday jail and beat all four. One was knocked down, according to the newsletter. “Who told you to lay on the floor?” DeLaughter shouted. When the youth stood up, DeLaughter struck him again: “Who told you to get up?” The newsletter reported that another teen was jabbed with a cattle prod, and one victim was sentenced to thirty days in the city jail without facing his accuser.16 A short time later, Louisiana CORE field director Ronnie Moore joined 150 youth for a march to town hall. Other marches against police brutality would follow. Soon the Ferriday library was integrated and blacks were accepted into the trade school.
As in Adams County across the river in Mississippi, a drive to register more black voters began in Ferriday. The Klan responded with another smut sheet, criticizing civic groups for not standing up for segregation and claiming the mayor had been tricked by the communists from “Bucktown” for allowing blacks to march. Klansmen also claimed that new federal programs, such as Head Start, were being used to buy “Nigger Dolls and Red Wagons for the colored children.”17
ONE OF THE LEADERS of the FFM was twenty-five-year-old Robert “Buck” Lewis Jr., who was motivated to action after black homes and businesses were bombed during the summer and fall of 1965. The discrimination that most offended Lewis was having to say “yes sir” and “no sir” to white men his age or younger. He could walk into the front door of a town café to order a hamburger for his white boss, but if Lewis wanted a meal for himself, he had to go through the back entrance. At the Arcade Theater, the change from the dollar he handed over to pay the twenty-five-cent admission fee for a segregated balcony seat was sometimes thrown on the floor by the white woman who sold tickets.18 When blacks picketed the segregated theater, Deputy Junior Harp assaulted twenty-eight-year-old Roy Twitty, chairman of CORE’s branch office in Tucson, Arizona.19
Throughout the year, blacks faced daily threats of violence in retaliation against civil rights activities. The SDG bombed the home of Thomas Hart and threw an explosive at the home of the Rev. A. T. White. By year’s end, CORE reported fourteen acts of violence against Ferriday blacks, including two instances of shots being fired into homes, two arsons, and five bombings or bombing attempts. These incidents included the firebombing of activist Lucky McCraney’s gas station. William Piercefield was shot multiple times and killed after barricading himself in his Ferriday house with two of his children in July. The sheriff’s office told the Sentinel that Piercefield had argued with his family and retrieved a .22 caliber rifle before locking himself inside his home. Police claimed he refused to come out even when teargas was thrown inside. After exchanging gunfire for more than three hours, police kicked in the door and shot Piercefield in what they claimed was self-defense. Piercefield was even blamed for the shooting injury of his son, despite the fact that police fired more than one hundred rounds into the home.20
During the summer, African Americans gathered for a meeting at the blacks-only Sevier High School in Ferriday to discuss fighting back. It was a watershed moment for civil rights in the town. Lewis and others emerged from the meeting ready to take a stand, even though informants for the sheriff’s office and town police had reported some of those plans. Lewis not only became the first president of the FFM, he also was elected president of the reactivated NAACP. His actions quickly drew the wrath of the sheriff’s office and the Klan. At 9:30 p.m. on the night of November 21, Lewis heard a truck stop and a door open outside his Ferriday home. An explosion suddenly splintered part of the front porch and shattered windows throughout the house. He saw a man jump a ditch and run out of sight. While his neighbors worked to extinguish the flames, Lewis led his wife and five children safely out of the house. He grabbed his shotgun during the confusion but couldn’t find the shells. When Ferriday police arrived, Lewis was standing on the porch with the unloaded weapon in his hand. As police rushed him, a neighbor took the gun from Lewis, who was arrested and transported to city jail, where a crowd of white people, including children, had amassed. Lewis was charged with aggravated battery, placed again in a cruiser, and transported by Ferriday officers to the parish jail in Vidalia.21
On his arrival at the courthouse, Lewis looked out the car window to see several deputies, including Frank DeLaughter, Bill Ogden, and Junior Harp, waiting for him. Lewis knew there were few things worse than jail time for a black man in Concordia Parish. “It was a dreaded thing,” he would recall in the years to follow. At the courthouse door, Harp raised his voice: “We’re going to teach that smart nigger a lesson he won’t ever forget.” DeLaughter glared. But Louisiana state trooper Marion Barnette, who had arrived at the same time as Lewis, rushed to the door. Someone had called Louisiana governor John McKeithen, who had contacted the state police.22
“You can’t touch him,” Barnette told the deputies. “And don’t go in his cell.” Upstairs, Barnette had Lewis strip and then instructed the jailer, “Write down that there are no bruises on this man’s
body. And don’t allow anyone to go into his cell.”23
Under $2,000 bond (equivalent to $15,000 in 2015)—a staggering sum for most parish residents to raise in the 1960s—Lewis sat in the parish jail for sixteen days and seventeen nights before he was able to make bail. Because no local bondsman would underwrite his release, Lewis obtained the services from New Orleans. As was typical for black prisoners, his release didn’t come until after dark. Lewis had received news to delay his trip home so that the newly formed Deacons for Defense and Justice in Ferriday—formed to defend black neighborhoods from Klan attacks—could ensure his safe return. Word had gone out that Glover and his men would be waiting. Lewis hopped into the bondsman’s black Cadillac. They crossed the Mississippi River Bridge, visible from the courthouse, and entered Natchez. After waiting a short time, the bondsman returned to Vidalia and dropped Lewis off at the home of his mother-in-law. Minutes later, five Deacons arrived in a canary yellow 1965 Pontiac Tempest. The car belonged to the brother of Antonne Duncan, who was in the driver’s seat. Across town at the railroad tracks, Duncan gunned the Pontiac as headlights from a number of cars flashed on. Traveling at one hundred miles per hour, Duncan watched the pursuing “line of headlights” in the rearview mirror. Because of construction along the Ferriday-Vidalia highway, the car was in a constant zigzag motion. Duncan guided the Pontiac and Lewis safely home, eluding the pursuing Klansmen a few miles outside Vidalia.24
ANYONE INVOLVED in civil rights work in Ferriday was targeted, twenty-year-old David Whatley told the New York Times in an article about Lewis’s arrest. “When we demonstrate, [law enforcement officers] take pictures of the people, and if you’ve got a job, they show the picture to the men you work for and when you go to work the next day you’re out of a job.”25
By late 1965, Whatley and his family were accustomed to sleeping lightly and standing on guard throughout the nighttime hours. Whatley’s grandmother, Alberta Whatley, was one of the few people in Ferriday who would house CORE workers. Klansmen shot holes in her house, shot out outside lights, and threw Molotov cocktails on three occasions. A leader in CORE and the FFM, David Whatley was also one of the youngest members of the Deacons for Defense.26
The October 14 edition of the FFM newsletter announced that the group would soon file a court motion to integrate the white high school in town, and it did so in late November. The Concordia Parish School Board submitted a desegregation plan on December 15 to Federal Judge Ben. C. Dawkins Jr. in Monroe. The plan called for incremental desegregation in the 1966–67 school year and full integration by the following school term. The plan also allowed parents to transfer their first-, second-, eleventh-, or twelfth-grade students to the school of their choice for the spring semester of 1966.27 Following meetings at black churches during the late fall and early winter of 1965, several black children expressed an interest in integrating the white schools. But the white employers of the children’s parents indicated that those parents would be fired if they moved forward. Whatley, who knew the white Ferriday High School had finer facilities, modern textbooks, and better-educated teachers, decided he was willing to be the first student to test the integration waters.28
That decision soon drew a Klan response. During the early morning hours of January 30, 1966, a Monday, nine people were inside Whatley’s grandmother’s home, including his extended family, two children, and a civil rights worker. One of his cousins who had been assigned guard duty had fallen asleep. In the past, when Klansmen circled the block where Whatley’s home was located at 310 South Fifth Street, the family would illuminate the yard with floodlights, show themselves, and the Klansmen would flee. Beginning in the latter part of 1965, the Deacons for Defense had members hiding at points throughout the black neighborhoods and had encountered Klansmen from time to time. There had been little gunfire, but Klansmen were fearful of an ambush.29
Suddenly, during the night, Whatley heard an explosion. A witness saw a man running from the scene. Outside, Whatley found that a detonator—a blasting cap used in oil fields—had ignited, but two sticks of explosives attached to it had not. Had the explosive sticks detonated, there would have been extensive damage to the home. The FBI would later learn that the bombers were Sonny Taylor and James Frederick “Red” Lee, the two men Glover had assigned to perfect the bomb used against Metcalfe five months earlier. Since both Metcalfe and Whatley had survived, it became obvious to Glover that more experimentation with explosives was needed.30
While the school board turned down Whatley’s admission at Ferriday High due to his age, Judge Dawkins admitted him. Crowds of white men gathered at the school during the first days of Whatley’s attendance. Outside his classroom windows, whites lined up and stared. Whatley heard “slurs, slanders, curses, swears, intimidation and threats” on a daily basis. His gym clothes were thrown in the toilet and his books knocked from his hands. This harassment went on for weeks until he was arrested by Ferriday police on a false charge of stealing. For two weeks he was held at the city jail without knowing his accuser’s identity. During his incarceration, representatives of the local draft board met with him, and a short time later he was drafted. Police Chief Bob Warren drove him to the bus station and warned him to get out of town. By the spring of 1967, Whatley was a first gunner on a machine gun reconnaissance unit in Vietnam and was injured in a land mine explosion. It took a year to recuperate. “I often thought,” Whatley told the Concordia Sentinel in 2010, “that I wasn’t good enough to attend Ferriday High School but I was good enough to go and fight for my country.” But he had opened the door for integration in Ferriday.31
IN OCTOBER 1965, Sheriff Noah Cross’s top political ally, Blackie Drane, accused William Cliff Davis, a white employee, of stealing an electric motor from a slot machine. An alcoholic and one of many transients who found temporary employment in the parish’s illegal gambling and prostitution trade, Davis was suspected of having sold the motor to buy booze. On October 20, Drane, DeLaughter, and Ed Fuller found Davis at the bar in the King Hotel. DeLaughter, who was drinking heavily, brought Davis to the Ferriday jail, handcuffed him, pushed him into a chair, and backhanded him. Fuller and Drane soon arrived. All three questioned Davis about the location of the motor, and all three slapped him several times before Fuller attacked Davis with a cattle prod. Fuller pushed the tip of the prod so deeply into Davis’s eye that it caused permanent damage. DeLaughter and Fuller beat Davis until the jailer demanded they leave. The three men transported Davis to Drane’s warehouse, where the assault continued.32
After Davis passed out for the second time, DeLaughter took the unconscious man to the parish jail. Davis’s face was swollen and covered with blood, one eye completely closed and the other almost closed. Bruises covered his body. Witnesses had seen DeLaughter apprehend Davis at the King Hotel, and witnesses had seen DeLaughter, Fuller, and Drane with Davis at the town jail. Worried that Davis might die, DeLaughter called the sheriff, who was sleeping at home. Cross told DeLaughter to get Davis out of the parish and made arrangements for him to be taken to the East Louisiana State Hospital Alcoholic Treatment Center in Jackson, Louisiana. A week later, Cross showed up at the facility, took Davis back to Concordia Parish, and delivered him to Drane.33
A headline—“Three Local Men to Be Arraigned”—appeared over a story on the front page of the November 11, 1965, issue of the Concordia Sentinel. The new publisher, Sam Hanna, who had bought the paper a few days earlier, wrote the article.34 A seasoned reporter for a Monroe, Louisiana, daily, Hanna had a reputation statewide for his comprehensive coverage of Louisiana politics and a hard-charging reporting style. Never before had Concordia citizens seen anyone report anything bad about Cross or the sheriff’s office. The article explained that DeLaughter, Drane, and Fuller had been indicted by the parish grand jury on charges of aggravated battery. How the matter got before the grand jury remains a mystery. No one remembers. No records exist. But by early 1966, the Sentinel reported in another front-page story that the case—delayed twice since
the indictment—appeared to be at a dead end. The headline read, “Witness Missing in Concordia Case,” and the article explained that Davis had disappeared.35
FERRIDAY-CLAYTON KLANSMEN followed the Davis matter with particular interest. Davis’s apprehension by DeLaughter at the King Hotel had been witnessed by O. C. “Coonie” Poissot, a transient like Davis, who had arrived in Ferriday in 1964 and had become a close friend of Douglas Nugent, a gambling competitor of Drane’s. Nugent operated the King Hotel and had served as Exalted Cyclops of the Ferriday-Clayton Klan in 1963. He recruited Poissot into the Klan. Poissot was a rowdy, tough-talking ex-con with a long rap sheet and had served time in the state penitentiary at Angola. While Ferriday and Clayton Klansmen frequented Nugent’s King Hotel, they rarely patronized any of Drane’s joints on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway. In February 1965, Poissot and one of Drane’s henchmen had helped DeLaughter steal illegal fishing seines and netting that had been confiscated by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department and stored at the agency’s Ferriday warehouse.36 Sheriff Cross and his deputies later used the booty to fill their freezers with fish. Drane and Fuller, however, didn’t like Poissot because of his association with their rival Nugent.