Devils Walking

by Stanley Nelson

  IN 1977, AFTER GRADUATING with a journalism degree from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, I worked at the Hammond Daily Star in southeastern Louisiana. Over the course of a few weeks, I did a series on a Klan group in Denham Springs thirty miles to the west near Baton Rouge. Klan leader Bill Wilkinson insisted the interview take place at midnight at his klavern hall outside Denham Springs. I was twenty-three years old and scared. When I knocked on the door, I heard a deep voice shout, “Enter!” At the top of the stairs were two behemoths. As I identified myself, Wilkinson appeared and invited me to his office on the second floor. His desk was filled with racist pamphlets, and at times he seemed to be trying to recruit me. The previous year he had stood outside President Jimmy Carter’s home church in Plains, Georgia, to protest the president’s recent suggestion that Southern Baptist churches be integrated. My interview with Wilkinson didn’t amount to much. Years later, I was surprised to learn that he might have been an FBI informant at the time I interviewed him. And I was shocked when the British Daily Mail reported in the spring of 2015 that Wilkinson was living in his own $3 million resort in Belize.

  Investigating half-century-old cases is not easy. To chase down old Klansmen and aging witnesses, and to find new ones, takes more than tenacity and skill. Something has to drive you. In 2008, I received a note from a female reader in Natchez. “Thank you, thank you,” she wrote. “If all of the wicked hate crimes could be taken out of the secret places and stand in the light, this country could be healed! . . . One man can and does make a difference. Know that there are many of us who join you in your crusade for justice, if only by reading, weeping and praying.”

  I made a copy of the letter, folded it, and put it in my wallet. It’s still there.

  AT TIMES WHILE investigating this story, I found personal connections. The mother of James “Red” Lee, the man who hosted the SDG fish fry in 1965 and helped perfect the bomb that maimed George Metcalfe, taught me sixth-grade music. In the mid-1970s, some high school friends and I hauled hay for J. D. Richardson, the owner of the Morville Lounge, who had recently completed his prison term. We unloaded the hay in the old lounge—once the home of pimps, prostitutes, and gamblers—before it was swept away by a Mississippi River flood. At that time, I didn’t know who Richardson was.

  Over the course of the years, I have read and heard and seen things I’ll never forget.

  I remember Wharlest Jackson’s widow, Exerlena, sitting in a restaurant in Vidalia, recalling the “beautiful life” that ended when she heard the explosion that killed her husband. She died in 2009 at age seventy-two.

  Who can not be haunted by Ben Chester White’s final words, “Oh, Lord, what did I do to deserve this?” Or bomb survivor George Metcalfe’s question about white people: “Why do they hate us so?”

  I think about Earl Hodges, a troubled man who was trying to rebuild his relationship with his sons. A Klan member, he objected when his klavern wanted to whip a man for things he didn’t do. The Klan also feared that Hodges would reveal KKK secrets to authorities, specifically about the Dee and Moore murders. These factors cost Hodges his life.

  When I talk to Rosa Williams about her grandfather Frank Morris, I hear the voice of a twelve-year-old. When I talk to Wharlest Jackson Jr., the sound I hear is of a little boy longing for the arms of his father.

  I will never lose sight of Julia Dobbins’s anguished smile when she told stories about her mother, in the days and years after Joseph Edwards disappeared, asking almost everyone she saw, “Have you heard from Joe? What about Joe?”

  The greatest message of hope comes from Franklin County, Mississippi, where Thomas Moore went to church with former White Knight Charles Edwards, the man who was part of the wrecking crew that killed Thomas’s little brother. Edwards asked for forgiveness, and Thomas Moore forgave him.

  There were men of great courage and honor who walked these Klan killing fields in the 1960s. FBI agents John Pfeifer and Billy Bob Williams faced death every day. These two men, who died while I was writing this book, gave me so much of their time and insight for one simple reason: They wanted these old cases solved. I will never understand why the bureau ignored them during its most recent investigations, and I am troubled by the silence of civil rights groups concerning the government’s poor execution of its promises in 2007 to reinvestigate.

  IN 1967, AN AGING Klansman decided to speak frankly with two FBI agents about the state of race relations. Justice for blacks, he said, was decades away. White people in the Natchez area, the Klansman reported, claimed not to “condone violence against Negroes,” yet “this has been an accepted fact of life in the South.” Generations would pass, he thought, “before this fact [would] drastically change.”18 Maybe change has arrived. Almost a half century later in 2015, Natchez and Adams County voters elected an African American sheriff over two white candidates, including the incumbent, making the victor the first black man to hold the office since Reconstruction.

  The cases I have discussed in this book were cases that should have been investigated by local officials. For the past fifty years, every law enforcement official or lawyer—male or female, black or white—in every town, parish, or county where these murders occurred took an oath to enforce the law. Yet the vast majority didn’t lift a finger to solve these crimes. In most of these murders, the federal government had no jurisdiction, but without the FBI and Department of Justice nothing would have been done.

  Every community and every citizen bears the ultimate responsibility of justice, including me and including you. After half a century, who is to blame for the failure of justice in cases like these?

  We all are.

  AFTERWORD

  AS I WRITE THIS, only a week has passed since three of my undergraduate students made a startling discovery in a rural Georgia county that holds secrets about a 1948 racially motivated murder that went unpunished.

  Along with a dozen classmates, these students—a New Yorker, a San Franciscan, and an Atlantan—had been taking my Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases class at Emory University in Atlanta, where they studied the life, death, and times of Isaiah Nixon. Mr. Nixon, an African American farmer, was shot dead at age twenty-eight in front of his wife and children because he voted in the Democratic Party primary in 1948.

  First by phone, then in person in our classroom, the students had interviewed Mr. Nixon’s daughter, who recalled in vivid and brutal detail watching two white men fire multiple shots into her father’s body while her mother screamed, “Fall, Isaiah! Fall!” The students had found information on the now-deceased brothers who killed Mr. Nixon, on the long-dead sheriff (an uncle of the brothers) who may have protected the killers, on the all-white primary that Georgia fought to preserve even after the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down, on the all-white jury system that Georgia managed to continue after the high court barred it, on the roles of the NAACP and the black press in helping the Nixon family, and on the white supremacist demagoguery that Gene and Herman Talmadge—father and son, both governors, both U.S. senators—spewed to turn the state’s citizens against one another.

  The students also had learned that my inspiration for this project and the course was Stanley Nelson, the extraordinary editor of the Concordia Sentinel, the weekly newspaper (circulation 4,700) in Ferriday, Louisiana. The students had met Stanley at the beginning of the fall 2015 semester and couldn’t get enough of him. They surrounded him, peppered him with questions about his work, and came away star-struck and pumped to model his methods in taking on the Isaiah Nixon case.

  As editor, Stanley headed up a three-person newsroom. He ran the news coverage; wrote the local history column; covered the drainage commission, the police jury, and politicians; chased down press releases; typed up local crime reports; and spent the rest of his time knocking on doors just to see what was happening behind them. He was able to crack difficult cold cases only by working most nights and weekends.

  I had had the privilege of working closely with Stanley for several years whil
e he investigated the unsolved, unpunished, racially motivated murders of Frank Morris, Wharlest Jackson, and Joe Edwards on both sides of the Mississippi River, in the Ferriday-Vidalia-Natchez area. Week after week, sometimes six or seven times a week, Stanley—holding some revealing document—would open our telephone conversations by saying, “I think I found something. Tell me what you think.”

  I was so impressed that I joined LSU journalism professor Jay Shelledy in nominating Stanley for a Pulitzer Prize. You can count the number of weekly newspapers that have become finalists for a Pulitzer Prize on one hand; the number that have won would not take more than a couple of fingers. Stanley was chosen as a finalist, one of the three best entries in the United States in local reporting in 2011. The prize went to the Chicago Sun-Times for a project by a team of three reporters—a team as large as Stanley’s entire newsroom!

  That same year, with thirty-five years of newspaper reporting and editing behind me, I embarked on creating the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project (coldcases.emory.edu) at Emory University. Most, maybe all, of the perpetrators of the horrific cases in Georgia were long since dead, so I had no expectations that our students’ work would lead to criminal prosecutions. But the historian’s role continues long after the prosecutor’s ends. My mission was to teach history animated by primary evidence; instead of focusing on the who-done-it, we would focus on why. We would apply Stanley’s zeal, assiduous pursuit, and fair-minded thinking to an instructional setting where students would dig out primary documents to reveal truths that conventional southern history had ignored. What could be nobler than bringing Stanley’s doggedness, his persistence, and his ethics to students willing to immerse themselves in the history of the Jim Crow South, students who would come away better understanding who we are today—and who we still could be—by understanding who we were?

  All this was on my mind as I drove the students three hours south of Atlanta to Mt. Vernon, Georgia, parked outside the Montgomery County courthouse, and watched as they entered the court clerk’s office. They showed great courtesy and deference (Stanley Nelson trademarks) as they met the clerk and requested materials from the 1948 trial that ended in the acquittal of the two men who admitted killing Mr. Nixon. They climbed ladders, stood on filing cabinets, and handed down small boxes containing fragile court documents and large, awkward, bound volumes of old broadsheet newspapers.

  Their most important discovery was still ahead, twenty-five miles out of town, off a dirt road, in the African American cemetery where Isaiah Nixon was said to have been buried in an unmarked plot in 1948. The Nixon children, too young at the time of the killing to recall later where he was buried, as well as others interested in the Isaiah Nixon story, had looked for a headstone without success for nearly seven decades. A group had installed a memorial bench where they thought he might be buried. We were there mostly to pay our respects and to capture the atmosphere.

  Our silence was broken when one of the students said, in a voice that carried over the flat terrain, “I found it.” On her hands and knees, brushing away tree branches and leaves and digging her finger into muddy crevices that formed the letters of his name, the student indeed had discovered Isaiah Nixon’s gravesite.

  In her simple declaration, I heard an echo of Stanley’s always-understated way of introducing big news: “I think I found something. Tell me what you think.” It is in such ways that Stanley Nelson’s mighty and essential work lives on.

  —Hank Klibanoff

  November 29, 2015

  Atlanta, Georgia

  APPENDIX

  Biographies

  SILVER DOLLAR GROUP MURDER VICTIMS

  Clifton Walker, Woodville, Mississippi, February 28, 1964

  Thirty-seven-year-old International Paper employee Clifton Walker was returning home from work when he was gunned down in the middle of the night on Poor House Road near Woodville, Mississippi. His body was discovered stretched across the front seat of his car. Evidence indicated Walker was reaching for his gun stored in the glove compartment when he was caught in a crossfire. The sister-in-law of Douglas Byrd, the top Mississippi Original Knights leader in 1963 before he became a White Knight in 1964, told MHSP investigators that Walker made a pass at her in late 1963, an allegation that would have become widely known in Klan circles, especially at IP, where Tommie Lee Jones, Thore L. Torgersen, and James L. Scarborough were among Walker’s coworkers. All three were members of Red Glover’s wrecking crews in 1963 and 1964. Klan informant E. D. Morace implicated Glover, Jones, Tor­gersen, and James Frederick “Red” Lee in the Walker shooting, but for reasons unclear, the FBI never followed that lead.

  Henry Hezekiah Dee, Davis Island, Mississippi, May 2, 1964

  Charles Moore, Davis Island, Mississippi, May 2, 1964

  Dee and Moore, both nineteen, were kidnapped by Klansmen in Meadville, Mississippi, in the middle of the day, taken to the Homochitto National Forest, and beaten with bean sticks. Later, they were bound, tossed into the trunk of Ernest Parker’s car, driven by Parker and brothers Jack and James Ford Seale to an old channel of the Mississippi River, and drowned. The Bunkley klavern of White Knights, led by the Seales’ father, Clyde, believed Dee was a gun-running black militant. Moore had by coincidence joined Dee on the highway to hitch a ride home when James Ford Seale abducted the two young men. Murder charges were filed against Seale and Charles Edwards in 1964 but later dropped. In 2007, Edwards, who was implicated in the beatings but not in the drownings, was granted immunity and testified against Seale, who was convicted and later died in federal prison. The Dee-Moore murders were the only cases in which an SDG member was convicted.

  Joseph Edwards, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, July 12, 1964

  Edwards, twenty-five, disappeared after leaving the Shamrock Motel in Vidalia around midnight. A short time later, a witness driving on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway watched an old-model Buick, later identified as Edwards’s, being pulled over by a white car with police antennae on the trunk and a flashing red light on the dash. FBI informant E. D. Morace implicated Red Glover, Kenneth Norman Head, and Homer Thomas “Buck” Horton in the murder of Edwards, while deputies Frank DeLaughter and Bill Ogden were implicated by other sources. Ogden told a preacher that after he and DeLaughter pulled Edwards over in front of the Dixie Lane Bowling Alley, Edwards jumped from his car and ran. Ogden, in his patrol car, and DeLaughter, on foot, chased Edwards up the Mississippi River levee, which paralleled the highway by the bowling alley. Ogden claimed Edwards got away. Another suspect was Vidalia police chief J. L. “Bud” Spinks. Louisiana probation officer James Goss was a suspect as well. He implicated Deputy Junior Harp, reporting that Harp’s car was similar to the white one described by the witness. In 2009, a confidential source informed the Concordia Sentinel that before his death in 2004, Ogden, while in a nursing home, repeatedly summoned attendants to his room and in terror shouted, “Don’t you see that little nigger boy? He’s got blood on him. He’s after me. I ran over him with my car.” Edwards’s body has never been found.

  Frank Morris, Ferriday, Louisiana, December 10, 1964

  Over three decades, the fifty-one-year-old Morris developed a loyal following of black and white customers at his shoe shop in Ferriday. In 1962, he had two run-ins with Junior Harp, the jailer at the Ferriday Police Department. Two FBI informants reported that Morris and Deputy Frank DeLaughter had intensely argued over payment involving a pair of cowboy boots hours before the arson. After midnight on December 10, 1964, Morris was awakened by breaking glass, and while confronting two men standing outside his shop—one holding a gasoline can and the other a shotgun—one threw a match inside the building, which erupted in flames. His body on fire, Morris nevertheless made his way out the back door and was quickly transported by two Ferriday police officers to the hospital. He died four days later. On his deathbed, Morris was interviewed by local authorities and the FBI. He is the only known Klan victim of the era to have physically described his attackers before his death. However, Mor
ris said a dozen times he didn’t know the men by name. After the fire, the Klan spread rumors that Morris had been allowing black men to use the back room of his shop to have sex with white women. In 1967, former Mississippi UKA grand dragon E. L. McDaniel implicated Tommie Lee Jones, Thore L. Torgersen, James Scarborough, and E. D. Morace in the arson. In 2010, the Concordia Sentinel found witnesses who said Coonie Poissot, who had died two decades earlier, and Arthur Leonard Spencer told them they had committed the arson but hadn’t expected anyone to be in the shop. Poissot, an informant by 1967, told the FBI he was with DeLaughter hours before the arson and heard DeLaughter say he planned to teach Morris a lesson for being uppity, but claimed to know nothing about the arson. The Sentinel reported its findings in January 2011, and a month later the Justice Department convened a state grand jury in Concordia Parish, but no action was taken before Spencer died in 2013.

  Earl Hodges, Eddiceton, Mississippi, August 15, 1965

  Once a popular and skilled mechanic in Eddiceton, Mississippi, Hodges descended into alcoholism and womanizing, habits that cost him his marriage and separated him from his two sons. He was a member of the White Knights klavern in Franklin County, Mississippi, led by Clyde Seale. Following the Dee-Moore murders, Hodges had grown to despise Seale and once opposed one of his wrecking crew projects. Hodges soon dropped out of the Klan and, in the days before his murder, confided to others, including a preacher, his desire to become a better man and to make his sons proud of him again. Because of Hodges’s opposition to the Klan and his heavy drinking, Seale and other Klansmen feared he would provide damning information to the FBI or to his brother-in-law, a member of the MHSP task force investigating the Klan. At a late-night meeting on August 15, 1965, Hodges, then forty-seven, was brutally beaten by Clyde Seale and Ernest Avants, who would take part in the Ben Chester White murder in 1966. Hodges’s body was found at daylight at the foot of the garden behind his father’s three-room shotgun house.