The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  Ed Peters had to pay back the money he took. He was also disbarred and stripped of his law license, but because of a federal immunity deal he never did time in prison. So far, no state charges have been filed against him.

  DeLaughter was released in April 2011 after serving 13 months of his term. He now works as a property manager in New Orleans.

  Benny Bennett took a brief star turn playing himself in the movie Ghosts of Mississippi. His deadpan delivery as an investigator on the Beckwith case inspired William H. Macy, who played Charlie Crisco, to write a part for him in a television movie called The Con. Nevertheless, Benny decided to keep his day job in the DA’s office, and later went to work as an investigator for the Mississippi Gaming Commission. Charlie Crisco retired from law enforcement shortly after Beckwith was convicted, and spent the rest of his life painting landscapes and playing as much golf as was humanly possible. He died in 2011. Cynthia Speetjens, who had long ago left the DA’s office to open a private practice, delivered his eulogy.

  Gordon Lackey, the Klansman who often bragged to his friends that he was the real triggerman in the plot to kill Medgar Evers, died in 2007. He was never indicted for any crime.

  Byron De La Beckwith appealed his conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but without success. Despite his prediction that he would somehow live forever, Beckwith collapsed in his prison cell and was taken to a hospital in Jackson, where he died from apparent heart failure on January 21, 2001. Beckwith, who could never stop talking to save his own life, has finally gone silent, his deluded dreams of glory all but forgotten.

  It’s Myrlie Evers-Williams who has had the final word.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, thanks to Myrlie Evers-Williams, Bobby DeLaughter, and Charles Evers, who made this book possible.

  Thanks to Bill Phillips, my editor at Little, Brown, and his colleagues Jordan Pavlin, Steve Schneider, and David Coen, who all went the distance; Kris Dahl and Gordon Kato at ICM; and David Hirshey, Mark Warren, and Will Blythe at Esquire.

  I owe special thanks to Joe and Cynthia Speetjens, my friends and tour guides in Mississippi; Joseph Dumas, Michelle Hudson, and Clarence Hunter for their invaluable assistance; Alex and Pat Malouf for their gracious hospitality; Ed Peters, Benny Bennett, Charlie Crisco, Doc Thaggard, and the Hinds County District Attorney’s staff; Henry Brinston, Merrida Coxwell, Darrell Evers, Kim McGeoy, Erle Johnston, John R. Salter, Jr., and Ben Windstein.

  I offer my gratitude to the following people for their time and assistance: Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, Reuben Anderson, Sam Baily, Thelma Beckwith, Alvin Binder, Fred Blackwell, Liz Blankenship, Dr. Albert Britton, C. C. Bryant, Sara Bullard, Betty Carter, Ben Chaney, Kenneth Dean, Morris Dees, Dave Dennis, Delmar Dennis, Jack Ditto, John Doar, Barbara Dunn, John Emmerich, John Evans, John Fox, Elmore Greaves, Dick Gregory, Clarie Collins Harvey, Constance Slaughter Harvey, Aaron Henry, Breland Hilburn, Jerry Himelstein, Jim Ingram, Jerry Dell Jefferson, Elizabeth Evers Jordan, Vernon Jordan, Bern and Franke Keating, Ed King, Morris Kinsey, Bill Kirksey, Henry Kirksey, William Kunstler, Gordon Lackey, Ken Lawrence, Chokwe Lumumba, Governor Ray Mabus, Robert Malouf, William McIlhany, Thorn McIntyre, James Meredith, Bill Minor, Jerry Mitchell, Thomas Moore, Lane C. Murray, C. B. Needham, Jack Nelson, Mike Riley, Rena Roach, Joe Roy, Fred Sanders, Gordon Saucier, R. L. T. Smith, Jr., Dr. E. J. Stringer, Grace Sweet, Nolan Tate, Jr., Hon. Bennie Thompson, Charles Tisdale, Bill Waller, Hollis Watkins, Thompson B. Webb, Danny Welch, James Wells, William Wessel, Walter Williams, Allan Wood, Aurelia Young, the able staffs of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Eudora Welty Library, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the dozens of others who offered their help, including those who asked not to be mentioned by name.

  For their support, encouragement, and love: Joseph and Josephine Vollers, F. W. “Boo” Campbell, Judy and Mert Martin, Joe and Annette Vollers, Chuck Vollers, Mary Motley Kalergis (fearless reader), Gordon Baptiste, David Petzal, and Peter Herbst. Thanks also to Beverly Willis, Renee Askins, Tom Rush, Mark and Delia Owens, Cheryl Bentsen, and of course, thanks to my husband, Bill Campbell, who put up with hardship and neglect for three years and kept his sense of humor.

  Thanks to Robert James Vollers, who made so much of this possible, and to Don Kohler, and all those we’ve lost along the way.

  Thanks to all the brave men and women of Mississippi and most of all to Medgar Evers, who lives on.

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1: GHOSTS OF THE OLD SOUTH

  I met Byron De La Beckwith in his cell in the Hinds County Detention Center on August 1, 1992. We had been corresponding since January 1991, when I had begun my research into this case as an assignment for Esquire (“The Haunting of the New South,” Esquire, July 1991, 58). I persistently asked Beckwith for a formal interview. He would do this only for money; his fee was five thousand dollars. I refused to pay him and continued to refuse after I began work on this book. He did, on occasion, volunteer to answer specific questions in writing, and I have used this material at times in this book, particularly his memories of his early life in California.

  Sometimes his letters were cordial, even witty (he would sign them “De La in de dungeon”); often they were vaguely ominous. For instance, he wrote me a postcard on March 1, 1991, after I first refused to pay for an interview: “Dear young woman — … You don’t look like one but you sure are. By their fruits we do know thee.” A year later, after further attempts to cash in on the book I was by then writing: “Of course, what you are doing for a living does not pay that well — nor for long. Ooops.” He underlined the word “living” and drew an arrow to the phrase “nor for long,” writing next to it, “Notice. No sarcasm intended here.”

  Beckwith’s lawyers were trying to keep reporters away from him, and he was not expecting me to visit him in jail. In fact for several minutes after we were introduced, he did not seem to realize who I was, even though he had seen my picture and knew my name. Finally he turned to me in his cell and said, “Now, where did you say you were from?” I fully expected him to throw me out, but he didn’t. In fact he laughed, as if it were a terrific practical joke. “Careful, Delay,” one of his friends said. “She’s got a photographic memory, and this is all gonna end up in her book.” Beckwith announced to his friends that he didn’t care if I wrote about our meeting. They nodded agreement. As far as I was concerned, that put everything on the record.

  After about an hour Beckwith finally lost his temper and evicted me. I was not able to use a tape recorder or even take notes, and although I do not normally have a “photographic memory,” in this case I did remember, precisely, everything that was said, and how it looked.

  CHAPTER 2: DECATUR

  I first interviewed Charles Evers in August 1991. I interviewed him a dozen or more times during the three years I spent researching this book. Much of the Evers family history comes from these conversations, as well as from interviews with Elizabeth Evers Jordan, Medgar and Charles’s sister; C. B. Needham, a childhood friend who still lives in Decatur; and Myrlie Evers. The best printed sources are For Us, the Living by Myrlie Evers with William Peters (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967); Evers by Charles Evers with Grace Halsell (New York: World Publishing, 1971); and “Why I Live in Mississippi” by Medgar Evers as told to Francis H. Mitchell, Ebony, November 1958, 65-70. Many stories of Medgar’s and Charles’s childhoods were first recorded in Evers, including the death of Eddie Grimm and Charles’s early business ventures.

  CHAPTER 3: THE VETERAN

  Two books cover Byron De La Beckwith’s early years: Portrait of a Racist: A Revelatory Biography of Byron De La Beckwith, Written by His Own Nephew by Reed Massengill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994) and Glory in Conflict: A Saga of Byron De La Beckwith by R. W. Scott (Camden, Ark.: Camark Press, 1991). The latter is Beckwith’s “authorized biography,” a self-published paperback that he hawked from his jail cell to raise money. Some information, such as that regarding Beckwith’s father’s
letters and Beckwith’s relationship with his guardian, originated here.

  The quotation about 19th Century Greenwood is from Southern Belle by Mary Craig Sinclair (New York: Crown, 1957) 11-13.

  I relied on Line of Departure: Tarawa by Martin Russ (New York: Doubleday, 1975) for much of the information on Beckwith’s combat experience in World War II.

  I found other nuggets of Beckwith’s family history in court records in Colusa, California, clips from the Colusa Sun, and the genealogical collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, which includes the Southworth and Yerger family histories.

  See also “The Colonel’s Grandson,” Newsweek, July 8, 1963, 22-23. Beckwith’s musings on the “dusky races” comes from a BBC television interview conducted in the summer of 1991.

  Information on Beckwith’s childhood and early adulthood comes from interviews with dozens of his relatives and acquaintances in Greenwood. Many asked not to be identified as sources.

  CHAPTER 4: BRAVE NEW WORLD

  I first interviewed Myrlie Evers at her office in Los Angeles on February 6, 1991, while I was on assignment for Esquire. I had several formal, taped interviews with Evers during the course of my research for this book, including one long session at her home in Oregon on September 11, 1992, and dozens of telephone conversations. Details about Medgar and Myrlie Evers’s childhoods and their life together are compiled from these interviews, as well as from her memoir, For Us, the Living, and various published sources.

  Details of Charles Evers’s military exploits come from interviews with him and appear in Evers. The story of the Evers brothers’ attempt to vote in 1946 has been retold many times. This version comes from interviews with Charles Evers, C. B. Needham, and Medgar Evers’s 1958 article in Ebony.

  I interviewed Thomas Moore in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on September 25, 1992. The history of Mound Bayou is in Hodding Carter’s Lower Mississippi (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942).

  An excellent study of American apartheid is Neil R. McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

  CHAPTER 5: BLACK MONDAY

  I interviewed E. J. Stringer by phone on June 8, 1992. The passage about Medgar Evers’s relationship with his father and information about his father’s death are based on interviews with Charles Evers and Myrlie Evers and on accounts in For Us, the Living and Ebony.

  The most helpful books about the rise of the Citizens’ Councils are The South Strikes Back by Hodding Carter III (New York: Doubleday, 1959) and The Citizens’ Councils: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction by Neil R. McMillen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). See also My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South by Howell Raines (New York: Penguin, 1983). Quotations are taken from Black Monday by Tom Brady (Winona: Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, 1955).

  CHAPTER 6: THE ASSOCIATION

  The Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP Papers) are housed in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, and selections are available on microfilm. Since they are being reorganized, I have omitted box and section numbers.

  I interviewed Gloster Current by telephone on March 15, 1993. Other sources for NAACP history include An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944); A Man Called White by Walter White (New York: Viking, 1948; reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969); and Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins by Roy Wilkins with Tom Mathews (New York: Viking, 1982).

  The negotiations for Medgar Evers’s employment are found in the NAACP Papers in letters from Current to Wilkins (November 19, 1954) and from Ruby Hurley to Evers (November 29, 1954). Evers’s report is contained in an undated draft and incorporated in “Report on Mississippi Situation,” Current to Wilkins (December 13, 1954). The description of Hurley comes from Myrlie Evers and Vernon Jordan, who was once the NAACP’s Georgia field secretary. The descriptions of Reverend George Lee’s murder come from eyewitness accounts compiled in the NAACP papers from May 1955. The flap involving Hurley, Current, Wilkins, and Evers is documented in the branch files from this month.

  CHAPTER 7: THE STIRRING

  The murder of Emmett Till is one of the most written about lynchings in the South. The trial testimony was covered by major newspapers, including the New York Times. The best sources are A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till by Stephen J. Whitfield (New York: Free Press, 1988) and “Approved Killing in Mississippi” by William Bradford Huie, Look, January 24, 1956. Charles Evers’s and Myrlie Evers’s recollections are included in this chapter.

  The shooting of Gus Courts is documented in the NAACP Papers from 1955 and in Standing Fast.

  The NAACP membership statistics are in the NAACP Papers in a letter from Current to Evers (September 26, 1956). The account of Medgar Evers’s insurrection at the NAACP convention appears in Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench by Michael D. Davis and Hunter R. Clark (New York: Citadel Press, 1994), 201-202.

  CHAPTER 8: THE SPY AGENCY

  As of this writing, the Sovereignty Commission’s secret files are locked in the basement of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, awaiting a final disposition of the long court case to release them to the public (see Chapter 22). Since the suit was first brought in 1977, bits and pieces of the files have been leaked to the media. In 1989 a cache of Sovereignty Commission file copies that were included in the papers of the late Governor Paul Johnson were ruled unrestricted by a Mississippi judge and are available at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. Later that year a few thousand additional pages wound up in the hands of the Clarion-Ledger. About a year after I began working on this book, I was able to get my own set of “secret” files. The information in this chapter is drawn directly from the files and was checked against primary sources as often as possible. For instance, I interviewed Elmore Greaves in Jackson on November 18, 1992, and he confirmed his involvement in the scheme to arrest Evers and Wilkins.

  Former Sovereignty Commission director Erle Johnston wrote a book on the subject: Mississippi’s Defiant Years: 1953-1973 (Forest, Miss.: Lake Harbor, 1990).

  John Dittmer refers to the Sovereignty Commission papers in his invaluable study Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

  The details of Beckwith’s divorces from his first wife are documented in justice court records in LeFlore County (Mary Louise Williams Beckwith v Byron De La Beckwith, nos. 12,795, 12,882 [1960], 13,565 [1962]). Reed Massengill’s Portrait of a Racist probes this relationship at length and is an important source of Beckwith history and arcana, including the psychiatrist’s analysis.

  CHAPTER 9: THE FREEDOM RIDERS

  The account of Medgar Evers’s assault outside the Hinds County Courthouse comes from documents in his FBI file obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. This incident is recounted in file no. 44-1250, the result of a limited investigation requested by John Doar on March 29, 1961. G. W. “Red” Hydrick’s arrest is covered in the Jackson State-Times, March 30,1961. Burke Marshall’s statement was quoted in the Pittsburgh Courier, April 8, 1961. I interviewed Doar at his law offices in New York on April 21, 1992.

  The story about James Eastland’s deal for Harold Cox has often been repeated. This version comes from Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), as does Kennedy’s comment on civil rights.

  Evers’s opposition to the Freedom Riders in Mississippi and Wilkins’s statement to James Farmer are from Freedom Bound, A History of America’s Civil Right’s Movement by Robert Weisbrodt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 55-56. Other information comes from interviews with Alvin Binder in Jackson, 1992 and 1993, and Vernon Jordan in Washington, D.C., October 1992 and May 1993.

  CHAPTER 10: OLE MISS

  The Ole Miss riots are well documented, an
d I used multiple sources and eyewitness accounts for this chapter. James Meredith tells his story in Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966). I interviewed Meredith in Jackson on January 15, 1992. Beckwith’s attempt to participate is recounted in Glory in Conflict.