The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  “Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television… about the new free nations in Africa, and knows that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

  “…Then he looks about his home community and what does he see…? He sees a city where Negro citizens are refused admittance to the City Auditorium and the Coliseum; his children refused a ticket to a good movie in a downtown theater…. He sees a city of over 150,000, of which forty percent is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, fireman, clerk, stenographer, or supervisor employed in a city department….

  “What does the Negro want? He wants to get rid of racial segregation in Mississippi life because he knows it has not been good for him nor for the State….

  “Jackson can change if it wills to do so…. We believe there are white Mississippians who want to go forward on the race question. Their religion tells them there is something wrong with the old system. Their sense of justice and fair play send them the same message.

  “But whether Jackson and the state choose change or not, the years of change are upon us….History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.”

  Medgar Evers may have lacked the fire and poetry of Martin Luther King, but rarely has a better case been made for desegregation. King appealed to the heart; Evers went for the mind and the soul. He knew how to appeal to the sympathy of whites, and he knew he needed to win at least some of them to his cause. By his own example he could show whites that a black man could be reasonable, and educated, and well spoken. To a white supremacist, Medgar Evers, at that moment, must have seemed like the most dangerous man in Mississippi.

  Even the Hederman newspapers couldn’t completely ignore the speech, but the Jackson Daily News brushed it aside with a couple of columns and a glib headline: “Mix Drive Talked Up.”

  On Tuesday morning, May 28, the heat was building on the asphalt of Capitol Street. Three black Tougaloo students, all members of the Youth Council, walked into Woolworth’s and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter.

  Nervous waitresses turned off the lights and stopped serving. Ann Moody, Pearlena Lewis, and Memphis Norman sat impassively on the stools as word spread through town and a crowd of white men assembled around them.

  It started with a few insults and grew into something unspeakable. Raucous teenagers dumped ketchup and mustard on the heads of the demonstrators. Then an ex-policeman named Benny Oliver grabbed Memphis Norman and threw him to the floor. He was stomped and kicked in the head while white cops stood by and watched.

  When word of the sit-in reached NAACP headquarters, Medgar Evers wanted to ride over to Woolworth’s, but John Salter talked him out of it. Salter went, along with some others, and waded into an ugly, surreal scene. Reporters and photographers and TV crews hovered around the counter while the mob threw food and screamed and slapped at the demonstrators. Norman had been hauled away unconscious, under arrest for disorderly conduct. Joan Trumpauer, the white student activist at Tougaloo, took his place and others came to join her. Salter sat down with them. A radio reporter was calling out the blows like a sports announcer at a ball game. Bam! Someone hit Salter on the side of the head, nearly knocking him off the stool. Crack! Another blow from behind. Someone threw a mixture of water and pepper into Salter’s eyes.

  Medgar Evers later told Salter that FBI agents were in the store that day. They took notes but made no move to stop the violence. Police broke up the mob only when they started to smash the merchandise.

  Many pictures were taken of this scene. One in particular captured the moment and went out over the wires to newspapers around the country. It shows John Salter hunched over the stainless steel counter covered with blood and ketchup and globs of mustard, his blond crew cut dusted with salt and sugar. Behind him a teenager in a checked shirt reaches to pour a canister of sugar over Trumpauer’s neatly coiled hair and down the back of her summer dress. Ann Moody, covered with slop, stares down at her hands, holding back tears. The mob is literally on top of them, leering boys laughing and dragging on cigarettes. There are no police visible in the frame. There is one older man clearly seen at the edge of the mob: Red Hydrick seems to be pushing his way to the front with a hungry, excited grin on his face.

  By the end of the day, the mayor was ready to talk. Every network was carrying the sit-in footage, and Thompson seemed anxious to end the bad publicity. He offered to hire a Negro patrolman and a school crossing guard and a fireman, and he would support the gradual desegregation of public facilities — even schools — in Jackson.

  The mayor’s concessions were announced at a jubilant rally that evening. Later that night, however, Mayor Thompson went on the radio to deny that he had ever made such statements. All he had offered, he claimed, was to hire a few policemen and crossing guards, and not right away.

  Medgar Evers got a message that night, too. The children were asleep in their beds, and Myrlie was waiting up for Medgar, reading a book. Just after midnight someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the house. A sheet of flames engulfed the carport.

  Myrlie ran outside and turned a garden hose on the fire that was still burning near the gas tank of her car. When the police arrived, they sniffed around the carport for a while and picked up a broken brown bottle. One of the cops told Myrlie that the fire was probably just a prank.

  A neighbor had called Medgar at NAACP headquarters, and he raced up in his car while police were questioning his wife. The reason he was late, he told Myrlie with a guilty smile, was that he had called a reporter with the story before leaving the office.

  Heidi, the German shepherd, had been out in the carport waiting for Medgar when the firebomb hit. She disappeared for hours, then finally wandered home, wild-eyed and jumpy. She was never right again after that night.

  12

  The Last Warning

  On Thursday, May 30, 1963, a group of students at Lanier High School started singing freedom songs on the school lawn. It was a spontaneous protest; nothing had been planned. Before long dozens of children poured out of their classrooms and started singing with them. The Jackson police surrounded the school and eventually drove the students back into the building with dogs and clubs. Some parents who came to take their children home also were beaten.

  Charles Diggs, the black congressman from Detroit who was a longtime advocate for civil rights in Mississippi, sent an urgent telegram to President Kennedy. Diggs protested the police violence at Lanier High School and implored the president to send federal troops to Jackson to avoid a disaster.

  “As bad as Birmingham was,” the congressman wired, “will it take the death or maiming of someone before you realize that Mississippi is even worse?”

  Lee C. White, a White House counsel, responded for the President. All he would say was that the Justice Department was following the situation closely.

  That afternoon John Salter noticed an odd sight downtown. There was a Shriners convention in Jackson that day, and white men wearing red fezzes were wandering around the city streets.

  He didn’t think much of it. Salter and a group of teachers and clergy were on their way to demonstrate at the federal building in Jackson, thinking that they might be safe on U.S. property. They were wrong. Police arrested them all.

  Salter had a new friend and ally with him that day. Ed King was a rare bird: a young white Methodist minister and a native-born Mississippian who had joined the Tougaloo staff as chaplain a few months earlier. King had studied at Millsaps College and later at Boston University and was already a veteran of the civil rights struggle. He had been arrested for demonstrating in Montgomery. Now he was fully committed to the Jackson Movement.

  On Friday afternoon six hundred high school students gathered at the Farish Street Baptist Church, emptied their pockets of anything sharp that might be considered a dangerous weapon, and grabbed hold of little American flags. Medgar Evers and John Salter gave them encouraging speeches, and then the
y marched, two by two, out of the church, singing freedom songs.

  The slow march turned right, heading toward Capitol Street, into the late spring heat, and ran straight into a phalanx of blue-helmeted riot cops. Behind the riot police were rows and rows of county sheriffs and state cops. When the children reached them, the cops shouted “Run!” and when some of them did, the police fired shots over their heads. The cops pounced on the others, ripping the flags from their hands and throwing them in the dust.

  Evers and Salter stood on the sidewalk watching. Salter saw Medgar’s face darken, the deep lines grow deeper.

  The police arrested everyone on the street. They manhandled the children back through the ranks of officers and threw them into hot, stinking trucks that were used to haul garbage. The children were then carted off, still singing, to the state fairgrounds animal stockades that had been specially prepared for demonstrators.

  That night Roy Wilkins came down from New York and spoke to fifteen hundred people jammed into the Masonic Temple auditorium. This was not the usual middle-class NAACP crowd. There were black folks from every part of town. Their children were getting arrested, and now they were involved. Wilkins, who was usually a wooden, boring speaker, caught fire that night. He compared Mississippi to Hitler’s Germany, and he had the people rocking. But Wilkins never mentioned more demonstrations. The students, who had planned to remain in the stockades — like the demonstrators in Birmingham — were being quietly bailed out by NAACP lawyers.

  The phone threats were increasing at the Evers house. Medgar had become more concerned about an ambush after the fire-bombing. He would stand out in front of the carport and stare at the vacant lot across the street. He told Myrlie he was going to see if he could get that brush cleared.

  On a hot Saturday morning, the first day of June, John Salter drove Medgar, Roy Wilkins, and a Jackson woman named Helen Wilcher down to Capitol Street. They carried hand-printed placards in paper bags and took them out when they arrived in front of Woolworth’s. Wilkins’s sign said, “Don’t buy on Capitol Street.” Medgar Evers’s said, “End brutality in Jackson — NAACP.”

  As soon as they arrived, they were arrested. The news crews were on hand, and a picture of the arrest shows Evers in a puckered summer suit, white shirt, and thin dark tie. He glares at a policeman who is about to take the sign from him. He seems to be containing himself from fighting back. In the foreground, a white hand holds a cattle prod.

  They were out on bond before they saw the inside of a cell. John Salter was preparing to march with two hundred more demonstrators when Evers and Wilkins arrived back at the Masonic Temple.

  Wilkins, Salter remembers, looked at them silently, then said, “No more marches. Not today, anyway, and probably not for a while.” Medgar said nothing. Ed King and Salter pleaded with Wilkins to relent, and he did. “Well, go ahead and have it,” he said.

  Once again the marchers were run down and thrown into garbage trucks. Some were clubbed. In all some seven hundred demonstrators, mostly children, were jailed in the stockades.

  That night Martin Luther King, Jr., was on the phone to his adviser, Stanley Levison, in New York. We know this because the FBI was taping the call. King gleefully reported that the NAACP chairman had finally gotten himself arrested. “We’ve finally baptized brother Wilkins!” he said.

  Dick Gregory had just been released after five days in the Birmingham jail. He was in San Francisco to do his show at the hungry i when he heard about the demonstrations in Jackson. He called Medgar Evers to see if he could help. He felt he owed Medgar, since it was Evers who had first brought him to Mississippi, introduced him to Clyde Kennard, and changed his life.

  As Gregory was getting ready to fly south, he had a premonition that someone was about to die. He thought it would be him, that he would be gunned down in Mississippi. So he checked to make sure his will was valid. And then he headed for Jackson.

  Dick Gregory flew all night and got to Jackson late. He was asleep at a minister’s house when Medgar Evers called him. “Greg, you better call home,” Evers said.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Your son’s sick.”

  “Medgar?”

  “I’m sorry, Greg. Your son’s dead.”

  Richard Gregory, Jr., had died sleeping in his crib. The baby wasn’t three months old. Gregory canceled his appearance and flew home to Chicago. He told Medgar he’d be back as soon as he could.

  In Chicago he was getting calls from Greenwood. Mean white voices told him they were glad his son was dead, that it served him right.

  Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were waiting in the wings, hesitant to join the fight in Mississippi and risk the wrath of the NAACP. In Jackson the political lines had been drawn: the direct-action group, comprised of Salter, Ed King, Dave Dennis, and the youth leaders, versus the NAACP leadership and a timid group of ministers who had yet to join in any demonstration. The old guard was winning.

  Gloster Current recalls that the decision to stop the direct-action campaign in Jackson was a simple one. The bail money had run out. Demonstrations and arrests were just too expensive. Besides they were not really the NAACP’s style. And the last thing the NAACP wanted was some outsider like Martin Luther King, Jr., coming in, stirring things up, and getting people killed, and then picking up and leaving the NAACP to clean up the mess.

  Medgar Evers was caught in the middle. He was even thinking about quitting. He had been offered a job in Los Angeles. Maybe he could take it and get out. Or he could join forces with King and start a real movement in Jackson.

  Evers’s friend Vernon Jordan had quit the NAACP in April. He had called Medgar in Jackson with the news, telling him that he had taken a big job with better pay at the Southern Regional Council. Ruby Hurley, he said, was furious and refused to talk to him.

  Medgar told Vernon that he was happy for him. Evers said that he knew it was the right decision and that he should do the same. “But I can’t leave,” he told his friend. “This is my place, and this is what I’ve got to do and where I’ve got to be.” They promised to keep in touch.

  What Medgar Evers eventually wanted to do was go to law school, get his degree, and then run for Congress. But right now he couldn’t leave Mississippi; he couldn’t leave the NAACP. He might as well try to quit his own family, abandon his own heart.

  On Monday, June 3, students showed up for demonstrations and were told by NAACP national staff to go home. It was a cooling-off period, they said. Small groups of pickets were still being brought down to Woolworth’s, but the big street marches were over.

  That afternoon Mayor Allen Thompson told the press that the crisis was over. He said he would begin taking applications for Negro policemen and school crossing guards.

  Medgar Evers implored the national press to stick around, telling them that the Jackson Movement was still rolling. But they left for bigger stories. A showdown was building between the Kennedys and the governor of Alabama. The local newspapers were crowing the demise of the movement.

  On Wednesday, June 5, nine demonstrators were arrested on Capitol Street. Their crime was walking on the sidewalk while wearing NAACP T-shirts and holding American flags.

  About this time a young reporter from the New York Amsterdam News named Sara Slack got an interview with Medgar Evers. She had been trailing him for days, but there had never been time to talk. One afternoon he invited her to drive down to Capitol Street with him. Three teenage demonstrators huddled in the back of his Oldsmobile, below the window line, so they wouldn’t be arrested before they got there. He watched them take the gold points off their American flags so they wouldn’t be charged with carrying dangerous weapons.

  On the drive downtown Medgar pointed out the sights to Slack, like a tour guide in purgatory: There’s City Hall and the Governor’s Mansion. See those white men walking over there? That’s the secretary and treasurer of the Citizens’ Councils.

  Medgar dropped off the boys, who were prompt
ly arrested. As he drove away to report the arrests to the children’s parents, a police car pulled up beside the Olds. The passenger rolled down his window. Evers did the same.

  “Hello, Medgar. How ya’ doin?” said police chief James L. Ray.

  Evers said hello. The two men exchanged pleasant words and drove off to different parts of the city.

  Medgar asked Sara Slack if she had noticed the red eyes and weary faces of the cops on Capitol Street. “It’s a wonderful thing,” he said, chuckling. “We’re keeping these cops as busy as hell.”

  Slack asked Medgar about his heroes, and he told her that the two men who had most influenced him were Jomo Kenyatta and Dr. T. R. M. Howard. But it was World War II that shaped him. When he came back from France at the end of the war, he saw his own country with new eyes. “I knew if I didn’t fight for what we are entitled to,” he told her, “I’d be less than a man.”

  W. C. “Dub” Shoemaker was a young reporter for the Jackson Daily News, and the Negro movement was part of his beat. During the days of demonstrations, Shoemaker attended every NAACP mass meeting that was open to the press. Sometimes he went alone. Sometimes he went with a new undercover detective named Jim Black, who was gathering information for an injunction against the leaders of the movement.

  Shoemaker happened to be by himself at a meeting at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on West Street where one firebrand preacher was, in Dub’s opinion, stirring up the crowd. Some unfavorable news broadcast had aired that night, and the preacher was shouting about the unfair press coverage. Before long the crowd was on its feet, yelling, “Get ’em, get ’em!” Dub suddenly felt conspicuously white and definitely in the wrong line of work, and he started glancing at the door. Suddenly Medgar Evers stood up, grabbed the preacher by the shoulders, and tossed the man away from the microphone.