The Deepest South of All

by Richard Grant

  Having won a historic victory in Natchez, Charles Evers and the Deacons took the campaign into the rest of southwest Mississippi. “The rest of the civil rights folks didn’t like him, but Charles Evers was a great leader,” said Stokes. “We’d be the security when he spoke in Fayette, in Woodville. If white people would spit on us, we’d get them out of the crowd and give them a good whupping. It was just beautiful. For the black folks out in the country, to see a black man give a white man a good whupping was a revelation. It helped them get over their fear.”

  Stokes said that the Deacons were fortunate that they never had to kill anyone. “The Klan got scared was the main reason. We would keep them guessing, keep them worrying. They never tried to confront us.” Then he remembered that someone did get killed, another black man, Aaron Liberty, a part-time police officer in Woodville. “He was a Tom who would take news back to the whites, and he was harassing James Williams, a loyal man. One of my loyal Deacons killed him.” Court records show that Leon Chambers was sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder, but Stokes said that a Deacon named Gable McDonald did the killing. After the case went to the US Supreme Court, charges were dropped against Leon Chambers, and McDonald, who confessed to the murder and later recanted his confession, was never prosecuted.

  * * *

  After 1965 there was no more violence from the mainstream Klan chapters, which were dissolving in acrimony and thoroughly penetrated by FBI informants. Only the Silver Dollar Group continued terrorist activities. Its leader, Red Glover, was furious that George Metcalfe had survived the car bombing, and he was stunned by the courage, determination, and victory of the civil rights activists, which did not fit his racial stereotypes at all. The first revenge target was a young activist and Deacon for Defense named David Whatley, who was attempting to become the first black student in the white high school in Ferriday, Louisiana. In January 1966, an explosion at his home in Ferriday failed to detonate a bundle of dynamite, and Whatley escaped with his life.

  Glover admitted two new members into the Silver Dollar Group after they murdered Ben Chester White, a gentle, timid sixty-seven-year-old farmhand who was not involved in civil rights and always deferential to whites. His last words before he was riddled with bullets were “Oh, Lord, what did I do to deserve this?” Martin Luther King was marching to Jackson, Mississippi, at the time, and Claude Fuller, one of the gunmen, hoped that such a brutal murder of a completely innocent man would shock King into coming to Natchez, where the Klan could assassinate him. But King stayed away.

  The following year, a massive explosion killed Wharlest Jackson, the former treasurer of the NAACP, who had just received a promotion at the Armstrong tire company, into a job traditionally held by white men. He was driving home from work in his truck. Pieces of his body flew for hundreds of yards. Red Glover was the FBI’s prime suspect, but they lacked eyewitnesses and a convincing trail of evidence, so he wasn’t prosecuted. The Silver Dollar Group became compromised by informants and ceased its activities in 1967. The fifty-two members included a core of fifteen murder suspects. Only one of them was ever convicted, decades later towards the end of his life. The rest walked free.

  James Stokes, who ran a service station during the civil rights struggle, then a car dealership, became an associate minister at the Zion Hill #1 Baptist Church. I had read that the Deacons for Defense disbanded in 1967, but he said that wasn’t true: “We never disbanded. We had a meeting on Thursday last week.”

  * * *

  Memories of the civil rights era were vivid and powerful in the black community, and sometimes traumatic. James Stokes, and the other surviving Deacons, were often approached in public and thanked for their courage and achievements. In the white community, it was the complete opposite. The struggles, marches, and violence of the civil rights era were poorly understood and largely forgotten. I asked Regina Charboneau if she had heard anything about Klan violence or civil rights protesters getting hauled off to Parchman when she was growing up. “Absolutely not,” she said. “My mother was pro–civil rights, but she kept us completely sheltered from the whole thing.”

  Then Regina told me about a dinner party she had attended in New York City in the 1980s. The conversation turned to civil rights and Mississippi. Regina announced to the table that it had been entirely peaceful in Natchez with no drama or conflict whatsoever, which is what she’d always heard from her family and the white community. After dinner, a former FBI agent and family friend took her aside and had a talk with her. Only then did Regina learn for the first time about the Klan murders and atrocities, the Klan infiltration of local law enforcement agencies, the protest marches, the boycott, and the Deacons for Defense.

  In early 2015, as Natchez planned its tricentennial celebrations, Darrell White, the director of the African American museum, was invited to a meeting and asked how the black community would like to participate. “Black folks aren’t interested,” he said. “There’s too much pain in those three hundred years, too many open wounds.” They asked for an example and he cited the Parchman episode, when James Stokes’s wife and daughter and at least 150 other would-be marchers were hauled off in buses and abused in the state penitentiary.

  The committee members thought he was making the whole thing up. One prominent white citizen said, “No one in this town was ever sent to the penitentiary for walking down the sidewalk.” Darrell White came back with a two-inch stack of the city arrest records, and three people who had gone through the ordeal. When they told the white mayor and the tricentennial commission what had happened, it came as a genuine shock, because white Natchez, with a few quiet exceptions, had erased the entire episode from its collective memory banks, just as it had erased the memory of the Forks of the Road slave market until Ser Boxley started his campaign. For a small, gossipy town obsessed with its past, Natchez could perform extraordinary feats of amnesia.

  Hyde Carby, a young white lawyer, and a grandson of Miss Bettye Jenkins, took on the task of writing an apology from the city of Natchez to the victims of the Parchman Ordeal, as it became known. For inspiration, he read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and listened to the Drive-By Truckers singing about the duality of pride and shame they felt as white Southerners. “I knew we had one chance to do this right, and it had to be as direct and unequivocal as possible,” Carby said to me when I met him.

  He wrote an extremely moving, eloquent apology that made no excuses. When the white mayor, Butch Brown, read it out in City Hall to the survivors of the ordeal, tears came rolling down their faces. “They never believed it would happen,” said Darrell White. “Why would they? An apology like that has almost never happened in Mississippi before, and rarely in the rest of the country.”

  Now the city, led by the new mayor, Darryl Grennell, was erecting a monument to honor the survivors of the Parchman Ordeal, and others who were arrested for attempting to march. The “Proud to Take a Stand” monument, a black granite wall with the names of all the 439 people who were wrongfully arrested, will stand in the grounds of the city auditorium. “It’s the first monument in Natchez that addresses a very traumatic, difficult, but ultimately victorious era in our history,” said Mayor Grennell. “No tour of civil rights history in the Deep South will be complete without a visit to this site.”

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  The hand that wielded a sword against the Bambara, a wretched hoe in Thomas Foster’s fields, and in all probability a long rawhide whip as Foster’s driver, now carries a leatherbound subscription book through the streets of Baltimore. This is the first stage of Ibrahima’s fundraising tour with the American Colonization Society, and despite the best efforts of the local representatives, it is not going well. His costume is attracting less attention than usual, and money accumulates with disheartening slowness.

  Baltimore is so profitably invested in the slave trade that the idea of donating money to buy people out of slavery seems wrongheaded, perhaps. Or maybe the plight of an old semi-freed slave in a Mooris
h costume is simply of no interest for most people in this business-minded city. After a week of soliciting, Ibrahima has only $420, and that includes everything he raised in Washington from the nation’s ruling elite. It is less than half the purchase price for one of his sons, and he has thirteen children and grandchildren in bondage to Thomas Foster.

  Ibrahima gives up on Baltimore and goes to Philadelphia, where the Society has many well-connected supporters. One of them assures him that raising $1,000 will be easy. Ibrahima is soon invited to the mayor’s office, where he signs autographs for an audience and impresses a newspaperman with his fluent right-to-left Arabic script. On the Fourth of July, he delivers a speech at the Sixth Presbyterian Church on Spruce Street, and the minister gives him the proceeds of the collection plate.

  Working the streets and coffeehouses with his subscription book, he finds himself in competition with other supplicants, including a man with a written claim that Indians cut out his tongue. Philadelphia is a pleasant city, clean and orderly, but its inhabitants are far less generous than he was promised. Six weeks in the City of Brotherly Love produces only $350.

  Reaching Boston in August, he secures meetings with the editors of six different newspapers. He wants to win them over to his cause and also clear away any suspicions about his identity. The story of a captured prince returning home to Africa and soliciting donations has spawned a few imitators and impostors. A brazen college student assumed the name Abdullah Mohammed and traveled the Northeast claiming that he was kidnapped by pirates in Syria. He fooled a state governor and a professor of Eastern literature and enjoyed many free meals and places to stay before his ruse was unmasked. The self-styled “Almourad Ali” managed to collect $1,500 in the Northeastern states for his passage home to Turkey. Then it was discovered that his one and only home was in Albany, New York, where he was in trouble with the police.

  Ibrahima has no trouble convincing the Boston editors that he is the genuine article, and they are impressed by his princely bearing and intelligence. They give him plenty of sympathetic newspaper coverage, with appeals to the generosity of their readers, but Ibrahima is struck down with fever on the day of his first appearance and unable to get out of bed. When he recovers, he makes an alteration to his costume. He discards the scimitar as unnecessary, replaces the white turban with a green fez, and ties a broad red sash around his waist. Walking up and down State Street with a long blue cape over his arm, he attracts considerable attention, including the raucous mockery of children.

  Boston’s Negro leaders, despite their opposition to the Society’s mission of sending black Americans to Liberia, are delighted to meet an African prince. They throw him a parade and a banquet with hundreds of guests. Speaker after speaker praises Ibrahima, bemoans the cruelty of his fate, implores God’s help in purchasing the freedom of his offspring, and vows that Southern slavery must be destroyed, with violence if necessary. Ibrahima applauds these fiery abolitionist speeches along with everyone else.

  He has no idea that detailed descriptions of the banquet, the antislavery speeches, and his applause will reach Natchez. Nor does he know that Thomas Foster has been opening and reading all the letters Ibrahima has written, with the Society’s help, to his children and grandchildren. Or that Cyrus Griffin, the disabled attorney, published an article that included a withering quote from Ibrahima about Natchez planters: “You no pray often enough—you greedy after money.”

  Thomas Foster is already furious with President Adams and Henry Clay for not sending Prince directly to Africa as promised. He’s furious with Prince for gallivanting around the Northeast like a free man and promising liberty to his children and grandchildren. Then comes news of this radical Negro abolitionist banquet, and another letter from Prince, telling his children that the fundraising tour will now be extended to Providence, Hartford, New York, and points beyond, with no mention of a departure date for Africa. Prince also mentions a possible visit to Natchez, in which case Foster vows to re-enslave him.

  A large portion of Foster’s ire is directed at “Colonel” Andrew Marschalk, the rotund, many-chinned, blowhard newspaper editor who initiated the campaign for Ibrahima’s freedom and promised Foster that his agreement would be honored. To preserve his own reputation and deflect Foster’s wrath, Marschalk now reverses his support of Ibrahima.

  He writes a 5,000-word handbill painting Ibrahima as a radical abolitionist who wants slaves to rise up and murder their masters, and he accuses the Adams-Clay administration of enabling and supporting this bloody agenda. And so Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, who has been a prince, a slave, a show-business novelty act, and a costumed beggar, now becomes a tool in the 1828 presidential election campaign, in which proslavery Andrew Jackson is challenging antislavery John Quincy Adams.

  Marschalk publishes 1,500 copies of his incendiary handbill, and it is widely copied and distributed by Jackson supporters in Mississippi and Louisiana. It begins by describing “a shameless violation of a written contract of Messrs. Adams and Clay with Mr. Thomas Foster of this state” and goes on to characterize Ibrahima as the “travelling emancipator” of the “emancipating Administration.” Repeating some of the overheated rhetoric from the Boston banquet, Marschalk warns that it “will excite the Negroes in the southern states to rise and massacree [sic] their masters.”

  Marschalk is denounced as a shameless liar and troublemaker by the planter elite in Natchez, but downriver his handbill is taken seriously. In Louisiana, a newspaper editor describes Ibrahima as “a cruel and vindictive African tyrant, crafty, deceitful, proud, and ambitious” and repeats the claim that he is a “travelling emancipator” who has been plotting with John Quincy Adams to destroy slavery. The editor uses block capitals to emphasize the monstrousness of the conspiracy: COADJUTORS OF THE HOUSE OF TIMBO… TIMBO AND QUINCY! QUINCY AND TIMBO!

  In the November election, Andrew Jackson carries Mississippi and Louisiana easily, helped a little by Marschalk’s handbill, and beats Adams to become president-elect. Ibrahima continues his fundraising tour into 1829, but wisely decides to depart for Liberia before Jackson is inaugurated in March. In early February, he and Isabella make their way to Norfolk, Virginia, where the Society has chartered a ship to Liberia.

  Despite raising $3,500 on his fundraising tour, neither Ibrahima nor the Society’s agents are able to free any of his children or grandchildren because angry old Thomas Foster is now refusing to sell them at any price. Ibrahima’s sons strike back at Foster, or so it appears, by sabotaging his cotton crop. Most of it is rejected by the buyer because the white fibers are so entangled with sticks, leaves, husks, and other debris.

  | 19 |

  Racial divisiveness, inherited from slavery and Jim Crow, was the ongoing curse of Natchez. The schools were divided, and the town was divided over the schools. The vast majority of white children went to fairly successful private schools, even if it bankrupted their parents to send them there. The vast majority of black children went to the public schools, which were rated F by the Mississippi Department of Education. Most African Americans resented the obvious racism of this separate and unequal school system, which put their children at an unfair disadvantage. They blamed whites for abandoning the public schools in the wake of court-ordered integration, and for not caring about the education of black children. Most whites, on the other hand, blamed black administrators and black social problems for ruining the once-thriving public schools.

  The business community was divided. There was a white Chamber of Commerce and a black equivalent. The head of the white chamber, Debbie Hudson, had tried repeatedly to persuade her African American counterparts to amalgamate, but they weren’t interested. There was too much history in the way. The African American mayor, Darryl Grennell, had campaigned on a platform of overcoming racial divisiveness to promote economic development. “We need to stop thinking about black and white and focus on the color green,” he said in his speeches. His landslide victory indicated that most people in Natchez agreed with him and were wil
ling to work together, but changing old habits and mindsets was proving difficult, especially in the political arena.

  Grennell’s attempts to bridge the racial divide were being torpedoed by Phillip West, the head of the school board, and Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, a powerful alderwoman. Both were African Americans who had grown up in the 1960s and built their political careers on fighting for the black community against white racism and discrimination. They did not take kindly to Darryl Grennell’s victory, and Arceneaux-Mathis went after him on his first day in office.

  One of the incoming mayor’s prerogatives has always been to pick the city attorney. Grennell chose a white man for the job, and Arceneaux-Mathis led the majority-black board of aldermen in voting down the mayor’s pick for the first time in history. She nominated an African American attorney instead and told the local newspaper there could be no better choice. Unless skin color was the only consideration, this was obviously untrue. Her nominee had been city attorney when Natchez lost a judgment for failing to respond to a $1.8 million lawsuit by a court-ordered deadline—a clear case of ineptitude that had cost the city a lot of money. After a public outcry against her nominee, Grennell got his pick, casting the tiebreaker following a 3–3 vote.

  Natchez has an unusually weak mayoral role in its city government, and this was also hampering Grennell’s efforts. The mayor has no vote unless it’s to break a tie on the board of aldermen (the term alderpersons has not caught on down here). Grennell had four African Americans on his board, and two whites, and most of the voting ran 4–2, relegating him to the sidelines. People had started talking about “Mayor Arceneaux” because Joyce was calling the shots, and she seemed to have it in for Darryl.