A new breed of moderate progressive leaders was coming up in the South: Jimmy Carter in Georgia, Reubin Askew in Florida. There were new slogans to go along with the new mood. Dixie started calling itself the Sunbelt, while the city of Atlanta declared it was “Too Busy to Hate.”
One sweltering June night in 1975, twenty-five hundred people squeezed up against the stage at the annual Medgar Evers Homecoming celebration in Natchez. Charles Evers had a surprise in store for the crowd.
“Well we’ve come a long way!” he shouted into the microphone.
“Tell it, Mayor!”
“We’ve come a lot farther than some of you know . . .”
“Tell us about it…”
The homecoming had started in 1973, when Governor Waller set aside June 12 as a day to honor Medgar Evers. It had since become a tradition, both as a celebration of Medgar’s life and as a gauge of Charles’s political clout. Charles still wielded considerable power in Mississippi, and in early June every year celebrities, ministers, and white politicians flocked to his side.
Ten thousand people had come to the barbecue in Fayette that afternoon in 1975. That evening Evers filled the auditorium in nearby Natchez for a B. B. King concert and a round of speeches. Evers read telegrams from Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Governor Bill Waller. He introduced NFL quarterback Joe Namath to the crowd.
“We’ve got some other guests here tonight, and y’all don’t know they’re here,” Evers crooned into the mike. “But you know ’em! It’s E. L. McDaniel, grand dragon of the Klan in Mississippi!”
The crowd was oohing and aahing as McDaniel nervously made his way toward the stage.
“It took a lot of guts for him to come out here tonight, so let’s give him a welcome!” Evers shouted.
The mostly black crowd cheered and clapped.
“And we’ve got another one, even worse!” Evers said. “Lane, where you at?”
Lane Murray joined McDaniel and Evers onstage. They clasped hands, and Evers put his arms around them both for the cameras. He said, “If anyone wants to get elected governor, they’ve got to come by us!”
There were hoots and hollers, and then everyone, even the Klansmen, sang “We Shall Overcome.”
“Never no more will Mississippi have the image she has had in the past!” Evers shouted.
This bizarre tableau was stirring to some; to others it seemed just another cynical cabaret event in the long line of Evers’s productions. In any case it was a high point in Evers’s career. He was, in fact, standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at harder times ahead.
A few days later he was tried in federal court for criminal tax evasion. The IRS accused him of concealing more than $52,000 in income between 1968 and 1970, much of it looted from his 1968 congressional campaign. Evers denied the charges, and his case ended in a mistrial. Never an agency to give up, the IRS pursued a civil suit against Evers and more or less hounded him for the next two decades.
Throughout the seventies Evers’s behavior placed him increasingly at odds with the new black political mainstream. He openly embraced Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (and reaped generous federal grants for Fayette projects). He praised George Wallace. He voted against Jimmy Carter at the 1976 Democratic convention.
Evers became a full-blown pariah in 1978 when he made a play for the U.S. Senate seat vacancy left by a retiring Jim Eastland. He ran as an independent, brought in Muhammad Ali to campaign for him, and siphoned off 133,646 votes from the Democratic candidate, Maurice Danton. That threw the election to Thad Cochran and gave Mississippi its first Republican senator since Reconstruction.
People started grumbling out loud that Evers was in the Republicans’ pocket. Owen Brooks, a black leader and director of the Delta Ministry, wrote a scathing open letter to Evers, calling him “the black prince of political opportunism.”
“Your behind-the-door closed meetings with some of the worst racist elements in this state are part of your sordid history,” Brooks wrote. “Eastland was too much for black folks to have to swallow, so for a price you will run the interference for Cochran by splitting up the black vote.” Naturally Evers endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. He was also tried for tax evasion again that year for the old debt plus charges of unreported income from his Fayette operations. Charles by now owned a lion’s share of the land and businesses in town: along with the Medgar Evers Shopping Center there was Sheila’s Restaurant and Lounge, Carolyn’s Grocery, Eunice’s Washeteria, and the Evers Motel, Restaurant and Lounge. But his base of support was eroding. He ran Fayette more like a king than a mayor, and people were starting to resent him.
As the town judge he was accused of throwing his enemies in jail without trial. Charles responded by saying that “when you break the law, there are no such things as civil rights.”
In 1981 Evers was unseated as mayor by Kennie Middleton, a young black attorney. Middleton’s campaign slogan was “We’ve seen what this town can do for one man, now let’s see what one man can do for this town.”
There had never been any love lost between Myrlie Evers and her brother-in-law. In fact by the time Charles lost his seat as mayor, they were barely speaking to each other. He had ignored her and her children over the years, never visited them in California, and never helped them when they were in need. He still hadn’t forgiven her for marrying his brother; she never forgave him for pushing her away.
After she moved to Claremont, it never occurred to her that she should do anything except go back to college, start a career, support her children. It was a family tradition. She came from a line of capable, educated women, teachers who taught her to value learning. An education was the one thing nobody could take away from you.
While she went to school and reared her children, she still made appearances for the NAACP. She also took paid speaking engagements when she could get them, and she collaborated on a book about her life with Medgar titled For Us, the Living. All of this related to the central project of her life: to keep Medgar Evers alive in memory. She admitted that everything she did during those years was based on what she thought he would have wanted her to do. He was in her head every day.
Myrlie graduated from Pomona College in 1968 with a BA in sociology, and went to work as director of planning and development for The Claremont Colleges. It was a big job, but it was not enough. Medgar had never gotten a chance to run for office; Myrlie ran instead. In 1970 the painfully shy woman from Vicksburg became the Democratic candidate for a congressional seat from southern California.
The campaign almost broke her, but she kept on. Charles refused to give her any money and wouldn’t help with the campaign. But his ex-wife, Nan, slipped Myrlie five hundred dollars to pay the household bills in the last month of the race. She lost in the heavily Republican district but got 38 percent of the vote.
The children eventually adjusted to the shock of leaving Mississippi. After the family moved to California, Darrell slowly came out of his grief. The boy named for Jomo Kenyatta grew up in white schools, with white friends, listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Like his father he was an athlete, a star football player, a runner. He always wondered whether if he’d had a father around — someone to work with him and train him — he might have played professional ball. Instead he focused on art, where he found his other talent. He was always searching, never sure where he was going.
Darrell had a dream when he was a child, even before his father’s death. He must have been seven or eight, and he dreamed he was at the United Nations, and all the delegates were screaming at each other in different languages. He couldn’t be heard himself, because he was just a kid. Then he saw another young boy walk up to the podium, and slowly the voices stopped and the room fell quiet. The boy radiated a beautiful light. He said, “Why can’t you just love one another?” Everyone started crying.
Darrell never forgot the dream and always wondered whether the boy in the dream was him or someone else he had to find.
Walter was almost fifteen years older than Myrlie. He was a handsome six-foot-four longshoreman and union activist who had an idea to market playing cards with the images of civil rights leaders. He needed Myrlie’s permission to use Medgar’s likeness, so he looked her up. Although she gave her consent, the project never got off the ground.
Myrlie didn’t see Williams again until a couple of years later, when she was serving on Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley’s task force on gang violence. One day she spoke to a group of gang members, and Walter was there. He was a childhood friend of Bradley’s and active in the community. After the speech he asked her for her phone number. She gave it to him to get rid of him; she was still not interested in dating.
But Williams eased his way into her life. He became a friend. He would drive through a pounding rainstorm from Los Angeles to Claremont just to cook dinner for the kids when Myrlie was having one of her difficult days. He was there to hold her when she felt as if she couldn’t go on.
Although he is a modest man and would be pained to admit it, Walter Williams had a lot in common with Medgar Evers. He loved the outdoors; he loved to hunt. He was soft-spoken and strong, and he had spent his whole adult life fighting the bosses and the unions to open up jobs for minorities in the port of Los Angeles. At least three of his friends had been killed in the struggle, and he had gone to work every day of his life prepared for a fight. Like Medgar he had chosen a public, political life, and he had many friends.
Walter had been married three times, and he had five children of his own. By now he knew who he was and what he wanted. He was not intimidated by Medgar Evers’s ghost or Myrlie’s devotion to his memory. If her life would be a shrine to Medgar Evers, Walter Williams was willing to be a part of it. She called him her “best friend,” her “rock of Gibraltar.” He was, she said, the wind beneath her wings.
When they were finally married in 1976, Darrell and Van gave Myrlie away, and Reena, then twenty-one, served as her maid of honor. Myrlie said that she felt Medgar’s presence in the room, as if he was telling her “this is right.” Walter didn’t mind that she kept Evers as her professional name — he encouraged it. (She later changed it to Evers-Williams.)
Myrlie was still hearing Medgar’s voice in her head, pushing her to achieve. She became a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She moved on to a high-powered job with a public relations firm and later Atlantic Richfield, where she was vice president for advertising and publicity. The honors and awards for her political work and social activism piled up in her cabinets and filled her walls. And yet she still felt as though she had some unfinished business in Mississippi. All her achievements were dedicated to one man’s memory, and she never gave up hope that someday his killer would pay for what he had done to Medgar, to her, and to their children.
In 1987 Myrlie ran for Los Angeles City Council. She lost the race but not her taste for politics. Mayor Bradley appointed her to the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.
This was a big job. She was one of five people in charge of the infrastructure of Los Angeles. They supervised six thousand employees and administered half a billion dollars in contracts. She loved the work and the leverage her position gave her to promote her social causes.
The children were grown now. Darrell was an artist. Reena was married, had children, and worked for an airline. Van was developing a reputation as a professional photographer.
Myrlie had long ago stopped attending Charles’s homecomings in Mississippi. But every year, as the anniversary of Medgar’s death approached, she sank into a sadness, deepened by a sense of incompleteness, of unfinished business.
She thought maybe the time had come to put it all to rest on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination, at a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. She brought a special guest with her: her grandson, Reena’s eleven-year-old boy, Daniel Evers Everett.
There were a thousand people in the crowd, and Danny got up to make a speech. Myrlie was nervous for him. She had delicately suggested that he show her a copy of his speech, perhaps she could help him with it? He told her he didn’t need any help. She quickly realized he was not reading his speech at all.
“I don’t know that much about my grandfather because I wasn’t really there,” he said, then paused, as if remembering suddenly. “I wasn’t there at all.”
The crowd chuckled, and Danny grinned. He had them in his hands.
“If we didn’t have those like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers we wouldn’t be free today,” Danny said. “We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere we want to. We wouldn’t be able to do anything we want to.”
When he was through, Myrlie beamed at Danny. He was the image of his grandfather. Back in Los Angeles she would sometimes go out to his school and watch from the stands as he ran around the track. The long, lean strides and the way he held himself were so familiar. It was as if she were watching Medgar run.
Myrlie’s younger son, Van, who was twenty-eight years old, also accompanied her to Arlington. He had unfinished business too: Van had never visited his father’s grave. Later that day he followed his mother to the quiet, grassy spot where Medgar was buried. They stood there for a long time, and then Van started to cry. Myrlie wrapped her arms around him and rocked him against her, as she had when he was a child. She was thinking, No, it’s not over.
There were signs that Byron De La Beckwith intended to lead an obscure and quiet life after he got out of prison. First he went off to a “retreat,” rumored to be the Aryan Nations compound of his good friend Richard Butler, out in Idaho. Then he returned to Mississippi to reoccupy the Melton place in Cruger, the only home he had. It took a bulldozer to clear a path in the kudzu that had grown around the house. He kept to himself and seemed generally forgotten in his home state. Once in a while, usually on an anniversary of Evers’s death, one newspaper editor or another would wonder what ever happened to Beckwith and then would send a reporter out to find him.
That happened on the twentieth anniversary of Evers’s death, in June 1983. Jim Ewing from the Jackson Daily News got directions to the trailer in Cruger. Neighbors warned that Beckwith wanted to be left alone and that he was always armed, which, if true, would have been illegal, since he was a convicted felon. Ewing maneuvered his car down a rough dirt track through the tangled backwoods of Holmes County, past the posted signs, and up to the door of the “rural retreat.” Beckwith “politely, but firmly” refused to be interviewed. He said he would just be misquoted by the “Jewishly owned” press. The headline for Ewing’s story read “Byron De La Beckwith lives quietly in the Delta.”
Before he went to prison in 1977, Beckwith tried to get back together with his ex-wife, Willie. He wrote her long letters, telling her about his continuing interest in radical politics and begging her to remarry him. She was living a sober life in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, sensibly, turned him down.
Around the same time a close friend from the Liberty Lobby introduced him to Thelma Lindsay Neff, a retired nurse in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was ten years older than Beckwith, but they had a lot in common. They both believed in the Identity faith and the Jewish conspiracy. She was every bit as racist and outspoken as he was, and she was deeply committed to right-wing causes. The first thing Beckwith said to her was, “Honey, your phone’s tapped.” For her it was “love at first sight.”
Neff was a small, garrulous woman with wispy hair the color of old lace and hard blue eyes. She had been a local beauty queen in her heyday and had once dated the crusading Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.
She had been married and divorced, and she had a grown son living nearby. Her family had deep roots in this part of Tennessee, and her voice carried the flinty edge of her mountain home.
Once Beckwith got out of Angola in 1980, he began to court
Neff in earnest. They were married in June of 1983, and soon after Delay moved into Thelma’s little bungalow on Signal Mountain. He took over the breezeway as an office and hung a full-size Confederate battle flag over the front porch. He helped take care of the string of rental apartments on the property.
Thelma and Delay pursued their fanatic crusades as a couple now. To them the world was a dangerous, frightening place controlled by their enemies, the Jews — all communists — who sponsored one-world government and fluoridation, among other things. They believed, for instance, that the Holocaust was a hoax and that Jews kidnapped Christian children for human blood sacrifices.
They campaigned to get fluoride out of the water supply. The chemical, they said, was used as a form of mind control to make the people docile. They collected all their drinking water from a spring in Georgia. They tried to grow and can their own food, preparing for the race war they knew was coming. They were fixtures at local political meetings. Walden, the community where they lived on Signal Mountain, was essentially segregated. Beckwith compared the foggy, rustic hill to heaven. He joked that whenever any blacks or Jews tried to move in, their houses mysteriously burned down. “You know how niggers are careless with their cigarettes,” he said, chuckling.
Beckwith tried to start a business selling stoves and water filters. He ordered up new stationery, identifying himself as a “wholesaler.” His personal motto was printed at the bottom of every page: “On the White Right Christian Side of Every Issue.”
The Ghosts of Mississippi Page 29