The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  He and his wife, Isabella, intend visiting some of the Northern Capitals of the United States.

  I take pleasure in recommending him to the kind and friendly offices of all in whose company he may fall.

  H.Clay

  What Henry Clay has forgotten or decided to ignore, along with President Adams, the American Colonization Society, and possibly Ibrahima himself, is the terms of the agreement that the administration struck with Thomas Foster. It stated that Prince “should only enjoy liberty in his native country” and be transported there directly. Until Ibrahima and Isabella reach African soil, according to the agreement, they are still Foster’s property.

  Adams and Clay have already broken the agreement by allowing Ibrahima to remain in Washington as a free man and a public figure. This is precisely what Thomas Foster was determined to prevent—Prince gallivanting as a free Negro on American soil and stirring up trouble. Now, with his letter of recommendation, Clay has committed an even more flagrant breach of the agreement. When Thomas Foster hears about it, during Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign, he boils with rage and looks around for targets on which to unleash his vengeance.

  | 17 |

  During my rounds in Natchez, I would sometimes stop in to see William Terrell, the genial editor and publisher of the Bluff City Post, the local African American newspaper. It was a one-man operation with a ramshackle office on the edge of downtown. There was a front counter where Terrell accepted notices and advertisements, and decades of photographs and memorabilia stuck to the walls. He was a fine conversationalist and would talk to me about local news and politics, opinions in the black community, and African American history. One morning I asked him about the Deacons for Defense. I had been intrigued by the group ever since hearing about them on Jeremy Houston’s tour.

  The idea of black people arming themselves in clandestine paramilitary groups, and threatening to kill white people, ran so counter to the usual civil rights narrative of nonviolent protest and moral appeals to the American conscience. Yet it had proved extremely effective, not just in Natchez, but in other towns in the Deep South where the power of the Ku Klux Klan was a major obstacle to racial progress.

  “The Klan had the bully mentality, and the Deacons understood that,” said Terrell. “The best way to deal with a bully is to stand to up him, and if he’s armed, you better be armed, too. Easy to say that now, but it took a whole lot of courage for a black man down here in 1965, when the Klan was killing and torturing and bombing, and law enforcement was full of Klan and Klan sympathizers.”

  I asked him if it might be possible to interview any of the surviving Deacons.

  “Hmm. The ones that are left are getting up in years. They took a vow of silence, to never talk about the Deacons to outsiders, but maybe enough time has passed now. I’ll put the word out, but I can’t make any promises.”

  Two days later my phone rang with an unrecognized number. I had met the caller briefly at Holy Family, a predominantly African American Catholic church. “You’re interested in talking with one of the Deacons for Defense?” He gave me the name and number of James Stokes, who had been one of the leaders and organizers. I called Mr. Stokes immediately. He had trouble understanding my British accent, so I affected a white Mississippi drawl, which he understood perfectly. He said his health wasn’t too good, and it was difficult for him to leave the house, so we agreed to meet there the following morning.

  His small brick house was right around the corner from where the author Richard Wright had lived as a boy with his grandparents. The neighborhood was still struggling and poor. Harsh sunlight reflected off the broken glass in the weeds. A twelve-year-old circled on a bicycle, curious to see a white man in the neighborhood. I knocked on the front door. No response. I called his phone. No answer. I thumped on the door with a fist, then a flat palm, while shouting “Hello?” and feeling a sudden stab of dread that he might have died in the night.

  The front door opened and a frail old man appeared. He was wearing a white shirt and gray slacks, with two or three days of white stubble on his dark skin. He wasn’t expecting me. He seemed to have no memory of our telephone conversation the day before. Politeness got me through the door—his more than mine.

  He sat down in a wheelchair and gestured for me to sit on the couch. A television was going loudly in another room. There were plastic flowers on the coffee table, porcelain leopards above the fireplace. A strip of flypaper hung down from the ceiling, covered with dead flies. “I thank God for every day I’m still here,” he said. “I got both my knees operated on. It’s cut down on my speed and standing time.”

  Once he started talking about the old days, he gained strength and energy. He was born in 1928. His father was a sharecropper on a plantation outside Natchez. Generations of his ancestors had worked the same land as slaves. “My mother raised thirteen head of children. The more children you had, the better your farm was.” You had more mouths to feed, but you could farm more productively once the children were old enough to work.

  When he was growing up in the 1930s, his family had no idea that the Great Depression was going on. It was just the same hard times and bitter racism as usual. He remembered a group of police officers and sheriff’s deputies cutting off a man’s penis and dragging him up and down the road for running a social club. “They was all Klan. They hated black folks like you wouldn’t even believe. They cut off another man’s penis and stuck it in his mouth. They would whip people with barbed wire.” At seventeen he joined the US Army and went to Europe towards the end of World War II.

  “I could sing pretty good, and I was assigned to the regimental choir. I enjoyed my stay in the army. I went to Rome, Naples, and Salzburg, Austria. I ate the best of foods and slept in the best of motels. It was an honor for me. I give the credit to the old, unlearned people who said, ‘Whatever you do, stick close to God.’ ”

  I asked if he saw any combat.

  “No, I never did, but the Klan didn’t know that and I wasn’t about to tell them. They thought all the Deacons were combat veterans and sharpshooters, and that’s exactly what we wanted them to think. The truth is that about forty percent of us were from the army. The rest were older men who could care less about living or dying and knew how to shoot from hunting. Most of us had been to jail. I wasn’t afraid of anything, probably didn’t have the sense.”

  “Why had so many gone to jail?”

  “Ninety-nine percent of the people who were picked up on a Saturday night were black. The police and the judge were unlearned. They didn’t know anything about the law. It was to get money out of you. You had to pay a fine. If you had a good-looking girlfriend or wife, the police department had men who would proposition her, so you could get out that way. After we organized the Deacons, a lot of that stuff ceased.”

  The main reason why they organized the Deacons for Defense and Justice was to protect civil rights workers and protesters and prevent more people from getting killed and maimed by the Klan. Natchez in 1965 was seething with violence and tension. Some senior FBI officials thought it was more likely than anywhere else in the country to explode into a full-blown race war. I asked James Stokes about this.

  “We were ready to go to war. We had plenty of guns and ammunition, two-way radios, hand grenades. We spread the message that if any more blacks were killed, we would kill two whites to catch up.”

  * * *

  When the Ku Klux Klan reorganized in western Mississippi and eastern Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s, it succeeded in forming what some historians call a “Klan nation.” The rule of law was so corrupted by Klan infiltration and intimidation that the whole region operated as a kind of rogue state outside the US Constitution.

  Within this Klan nation, the most diabolical element was a secretive underground cell called the Silver Dollar Group, headquartered in Vidalia, Louisiana, right across the river from Natchez. Most of its members worked in the Natchez factories. They carried a silver dollar minted in the year of their birt
h and gave up their Klan robes for civilian clothes. They were frustrated with what they saw as a lack of aggression among the other local Klan chapters, even though Klansmen were burning down churches, beating civil rights workers, abducting suspected NAACP members and stripping them naked, whipping them like slaves, and forcing them to drink bottles of castor oil, a strong laxative. That wasn’t enough for the Silver Dollar Group, which is credited with dozens of savage beatings and five murders in 1964 alone. They burned one man alive and killed another in a hail of bullets at a highway ambush. Two teenage boys were whipped and drowned in the Mississippi River.

  Their territory covered several counties on both sides of the river, and nowhere else in the American South during the 1960s was there such a concentration of Klan atrocities. In August 1965, George Metcalfe, the leader of the NAACP in Natchez, was car-bombed. Investigators are certain that Red Glover, the leader of the Silver Dollar Group and an ex-navy explosives expert, was behind the crime, but he was never convicted. George Metcalfe survived with severe injuries, and the streets of black Natchez erupted in fury at the bombing. Hundreds of angry young men hurled bricks and bottles at police cars and threatened white motorists. Some were armed with pistols and rifles. James Stokes was in the thick of things, trying to stop white motorists from getting hurt, and trying to keep the white police from attacking the rioters.

  He was part of a group of armed men who coalesced in the melee as a kind of security force. If the police started shooting, they decided, they would start shooting police officers. Like many working-class blacks in Natchez, they rejected the principle of nonviolence preached by the middle-class civil rights leaders. A new chant was forged in the streets that horrified those leaders: “We’re going to kill for our freedom!”

  With George Metcalfe in hospital, leadership of the local NAACP was taken over by Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights icon Medgar Evers. Charles was living in Chicago at the time of his brother’s murder, working as a hustler, bootlegger, numbers runner, and, in his words, a “cathouse proprietor.” He came back home to Mississippi and led the struggle in Natchez in his brother’s honor. Coming from the streets, he instantly recognized the power of violent threat and used it as a bargaining chip while paying lip service to the nonviolent principles of the civil rights movement.

  The day after the car bombing, a mass meeting was held in the black community and a list of demands was drawn up. It called for the immediate desegregation of all public facilities and institutions, more black police officers, a black representative on the school board, equal protection for blacks under the law, jobs for blacks at white-owned businesses, and a public denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan. They also demanded that city employees address them with the proper Southern courtesy titles, Mr., Mrs., and Miss., instead of uncle, auntie, hoss, and boy. City officials rejected all the demands and called in the National Guard. Evers ramped up the boycott of white-owned stores. The Klan held a series of marches and rallies, burned crosses in city parks, and intimidated civil rights protesters.

  Against this background, on September 10, 1965, James Stokes and a group of like-minded men gathered in the back of James Jackson’s barbershop for the first meeting of the Natchez Deacons for Defense and Justice. They borrowed the concept and the name from the Deacons chapters in Louisiana, founded in the previous year, but they insisted on being independent because they didn’t want to pay the $100 joining fee. James Jackson, the barber, led the meeting, which was filmed by a documentary filmmaker named Ed Pincus, who was in Natchez documenting the civil rights struggle. The resulting film, Black Natchez, is still widely available.

  “I’m not doing this because I dislike white people,” said Jackson in his barbershop. “I love white people… but when people is killing me off… the Ku Klux Klan—that’s who I’m against completely.… It’s time for us to do something.”

  “You may have to come into hand-to-hand combat with some of them white cats,” said another man. “You may have to shoot somebody. It’s as simple as that, man.…You know about the Klans. No one have to tell you about them. So you got to know the risk that you’re taking.”

  They swore each other to secrecy, but apparently felt comfortable with Pincus filming it. They vowed to never tell their families that they were Deacons or to reveal anything under police interrogation. The most feared and despised police officer in the area was a Klansman named Frank DeLaughter, known by African Americans as Big Frank DeLaw. He stood six feet four and weighed 285 pounds. He handcuffed his black suspects to a chair, peppered them with racial obscenities, then went to work with a cattle prod, a fire hose, a leather strap, a torture device for snapping thumbs, and a derringer. These were the horrors that flew to mind when the Deacons talked about police interrogations.

  “So if he puts his gun beside my head and say, ‘I’m going to blow your damn brains out,’ well, shit… just let him blow it out,” said James Jackson.

  They discussed the necessity for beating up “Uncle Toms” who were breaking the boycott of white-owned stores. “Flat out beat him with your bare hands. Okay? It’s not but thirty-five dollars for fighting and disturbing the peace. You give him a good whupping, then we pay the thirty-five dollars.” Another says, “And when I get him on the ground, I’ll stomp him. And while he’s down there, I’ll tell him what it’s for.”

  One recruit was put off by this talk: “I don’t know if I can whup anybody as bad as you say. Stomping them and all that.” That was okay. Delivering beatings to Uncle Toms wasn’t mandatory.

  Half a century later, in James Stokes’s living room, I asked how many members there had been. He refused to tell me. He had broken his vow of silence, but he wouldn’t break his vow to never reveal the number of members. I thought back to James Jackson, the militant barber, at that initial meeting: “Like, we know all the Klans, just about, right? The point is that they don’t know who is a Deacon. That’s the advantage, man. Like they may know two or three Deacons, but they don’t know who else over there is a Deacon.”

  The Deacons were always armed, and they brandished their weapons openly. I asked Stokes how they got away with this. He smiled. “We organized a hunting club with badges and insignia and registered it with the city. That was our cover. There was a clause in our charter that we were authorized to carry guns. We were hunting alright, and once the Klan found out we were hunting them, they weren’t visible like they used to be.”

  The Deacons would send men to spy on Klan meetings out in the country, Stokes said. They patrolled the black neighborhoods of Natchez, questioning white interlopers. They escorted and protected civil rights workers and enforced the boycott against white stores by stopping Uncle Toms who shopped there, throwing away their groceries, and sometimes “whupping on them a little.” During marches and demonstrations, they wore their weapons openly and occasionally drew them and surrounded white troublemakers.

  In September 1965, the city fathers got a court order passed, outlawing marches and picketing without a permit. Over the first weekend of October, nearly six hundred African Americans gathered in churches, intending to defy the order and march. Among them were James Stokes’s wife and daughter. When they came out of the churches, they were all arrested, and three busloads were sent to Parchman, Mississippi’s notorious state penitentiary. Most of them were in their late teens and early twenties. The youngest was a thirteen-year-old girl.

  They were taken to the maximum security unit. The men were forced to strip naked. Women and girls were stripped of their coats and sweaters, but allowed to keep on their dresses and undergarments. As a kind of sniggering, sadistic joke, all the prisoners were forced to drink a large dose of laxatives and crammed into cells with only one toilet and hardly any toilet paper. The mattresses had been removed from the metal bunk beds, and there were no blankets. The cells were so cold that the prisoners were forced to lie on top of each other and huddle together to keep warm, but the laxatives and the lack of toilet paper—you can imagine their shame
and misery, with the white guards pointing at them and cracking jokes: “Look at the monkeys in this cage.”

  They were kept for three to six days. Fire hoses were turned on them. None of them were charged with any crime, but James Stokes’s wife, and many others, never recovered from the trauma of the experience. “She died from the affliction of some of that treatment,” he said. Then he stared at the wall for a while.

  In November 1965, Stokes was invited to go on a fundraising tour of California by Clifton Boxley, who was not yet Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-CM Boxley. “Going from Mississippi to California was like coming out of a dark room into the light,” said Stokes. Speaking at churches and colleges, he requested contributions for radio equipment, uniforms, and cars, and kept quiet about the guns. He brought thousands of dollars home, which the Deacons spent mostly on pistols, .303 semiautomatics, and ammunition. “We’d get them in pawnshops,” he said. “Those .303s would stop a car in a minute.”

  The nonviolent moderate black leadership was eclipsed in Natchez by Charles Evers and the Deacons. “To us, nonviolence was a sign of weakness and submission to the white man,” said Stokes. “Nonviolence was letting the Klan whip on us, and police officers have our wives and girlfriends. It was our guns that changed everything. They were our protectors, and we kept them clean and oiled.”

  Nearly every other civil rights campaign in Mississippi ended in failure, requiring the federal government to step in, but on December 3, 1965, the city government and the white elite in Natchez, feeling economic pain from the boycott, agreed to nearly all of the demands. The schools and hospitals and all city facilities would be integrated. More blacks would be hired by the city, and by white merchants. Improvements would be made to black neighborhoods. The white establishment did not agree to the courtesy titles, but promised to fire whites who used racially demeaning language.