Mississippi: A Closed Society

Listen to a remarkable historical account – Mississippi: State of Siege!
by Charlie Leck

Yesterday I recommended to you (and I do again today) the extraordinary American Radio Works documentary about Mississippi’s incredible fight to remain segregated during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Most of the material in the story that follows is derived from that documentary. The web site is filled with historical documentation of that era in Mississippi.

Eddie McDaniel was a truck driver. A white man who lived in Mississippi, he thought his state was a pretty good place to call home. In 1963, he was pretty fed up, however, by the federal government and its attempts to force “something down our throats.”

“We were already integrated,” McDaniel explained. “We had black maids in our homes.” These maids, McDaniel went on to explain, “even used our bathrooms, the same bathrooms we used!”

In 1963, Mr. McDaniel was invited by the United Klans of America to come to Louisiana for a chat. The conversation was inspirational. Mr. McDaniel returned to Mississippi to get the Klan organized to put a stop to the integration the federal government was forcing on Mississippi.

Eddie McDaniel did an effective job and new klansmen were recruited and local klans grew stronger in every one of Mississippi’s counties.

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

On the night of 11 June 1963, an extremely well-known, black civil rights worker, Medgar Evers, was murdered in the front yard of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the Hines County KKK. He was cleared by a jury of his piers – 12 white folks from the city of Jackson and the area surrounding it.

A few nights earlier, Evers had spoken on Jackson’s major radio station about the racial atmosphere in Mississippi and had encouraged fellow black citizens of the state to register to vote. Evers’ appearance on the station had been forced by the Federal Communications Commission so that the opinions of other guests who had been given air time could be balanced.

The station’s telephone never stopped ringing while Evers was on the air. There are recordings of what they said.

“…better get his black ass off or I’m gonna come up there and take him off!”

“What are you people gonna do? Let blacks take over Mississippi.”

De la Beckwith waited in the dark night, hidden in some shrubbery. The 37 year old white man fired a high-power rifle and Medgar Evers didn’t stand a chance. He died a short time later in an ambulance.

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

Over the next one year period the KKK was responsible for many beatings, whippings and murders.

The American Radio Workshop tells this story in a remarkable documentary that it now features on its web site [click here to go to it]. None of the southern states fought integrations any more fiercely than Mississippi did. They pulled out all the stops – legal and illegal – to maintain their white schools, white public toilets, white drinking fountains, white cafes and restaurants and white waiting rooms at the railroad station.

Mississippi tried with all its might to stop the integration of its schools. The formation of White Citizens Councils in nearly every community was the major front of its effort. The Councils urged people to stick together against integration. It spread propaganda about the importance of integration among all the white children of the state. It contended that black children were unequal and incapable of succeeding in white schools.

The message of the Council was one of resistance. Stand firm! Don’t allow it. The violence of the summer of ’64 was too much, however. Mississippi’s business community broke and spoke up and against the violence. It proclaimed that theirs was not a state unto itself. The Mississippi Chamber of Commerce issued a statement calling for obedience to the law.

But the beginning of the end had really come to Mississippi in the autumn of ’62, when, after a ruling by the Federal Appeals Court, President John Kennedy had forced the enrollment of the first black student at Ole’ Miss (the University of Mississippi). Segregationists had fought wildly against it, but the might of the U.S. and its forces turned the tide. James Meredith became the first black to enroll in the Mississippi University.

The John F. Kennedy Library presents a remarkable account of the violent forced enrollment of Meredith as the first white student in the school’s history. It’s sad that two people had to die and dozens and dozens were injured for what we today consider a quite ordinary event, but this was Mississippi, a state like no other.

On the day after Meredith’s enrollment, the university town of Oxford seemed to return to normal, but on the American Radio Works documentary you can hear White Citizens Council member, William Simmons, deliver the historic assessment. He described standing in his home, looking out at Oxford and watching the white citizens strolling by as if nothing really historic had happened. He spoke to his wife.

“These people have just been deprived of the power of self government and they don’t even know it.”

The constitutional question was the essential one, however. May a government deprive someone of an education based on the color of his skin?

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

The next two years in Mississippi were hot ones.

It was on the night of 16 June 1964 that the Klan went on up to the Mount Zion Methodist Church and burned it down. Michael Schwerner, a civil rights worker from New York City, had set up a Freedom School in the church. The klansmen didn’t like that. And, they hated Schwerner. They knew he’d have to come running to find out what happened at the church.

On Sunday, 21 June, he did. He brought a couple of companions along with him. One was James Chaney, a local, young black kid who was working with Schwerner out of Meridian, Mississippi. The other was a young man who had just arrived in Mississippi to help with the Voter Registration Project, Andrew Goodman. This kid was also from New York City. He lived with his parents on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan.

They went out to Longdale and chatted with a handful of the members of the church. Schwerner expressed his sympathies and his feeling of guilt that it might have been his Freedom School that motivated the arsonists.

On their way back to Meridian that afternoon, they were stopped by a Philadelphia police officer and all three ended up in the city’s jail, awaiting charges. Late that night they were given the keys to their station wagon and released from the jail.

I was on a train (The City of New Orleans) and, according to a journal I carried with me, we were stopped in the railroad station in Memphis, Tennessee. Some cars were being removed from the train and we jerked and bumped around for some long time before we pulled out again to continue on south into Mississippi. It was impossible to sleep.

I expect I was looking out the window, into the dark night, when the three young men realized a police car was bearing down on them at a very high speed, so they turned off the highway in hopes of losing the trailing car on some dark back roads. It was a mistake. On Cut Rock Road, the three youngsters were lined up on a bank across from the road’s ditch and they were shot and killed one by one.

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

The City of New Orleans was rolling down through Mississippi. It would arrive in the city of Canton at just after sunrise. The news of the disappearance of the three civil rights workers would spread like wildfire and would greet my arrival and that of the three men who traveled with me.

A dozen or so men were involved in the murder. No one went to prison until one man was finally convicted of manslaughter in 2005, more than 40 years after the murders. More than a dozen men, who had been implicated in two confessions, are still free.

It was only one of the killings of that year, but it was certainly the most highly publicized because two of the young men were white and from New York City. A number of black churches were burned to the ground that summer. However, reporters from around the world were now in the state and they drew more and more international attention. Mississippi was exposed.

In the summer of ’65 a new voting act was passed by Congress. Before that law only 7 percent of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote. By ’69, 40 percent were registered.

The White Citizens Council started building its own schools in 1965. They were private academies. The public schools became nearly all black. The schools turned out to be pretty inferior. Communities went broke trying to support two school systems. The White Citizen Council’s movement was fading and it quickly died.

The same Eddie McDaniel with whom we began this account – the KKK organizer in Mississippi – told the FBI in 1967 that it had likely been Klansmen from Ferriday and Natchez that, in 1964, murdered a black shop owner in Ferriday because of complaints that he had been flirting with white women. The FBI looked carefully into the charge and investigated the five men. One of them was a Sheriff’s Deputy in Concordia Parish.

The five men were all members of a so-called Silver Dollar Group, a special and highly militant group made up of Klan members from three other Klan organizations. McDaniel explained that the purpose of the group was to fight desegregation with violence if necessary. In this case, as in so many other murders of black Mississippi citizens, no charges were ever brought.

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

It would seem, as the 60s came to an end, that Mississippi had changed and the violence should have been over and the KKK a relic of history. This was not the case. In his history of the KKK in Mississippi, Michael Newton explains that the brutality went on.

“Old-style racist violence persisted in the ‘new’ Mississippi,” he wrote in that book [The Klu Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History].

Rainey Pool found that out the hard way. He was a one-armed sharecropper just trying to make a living. On 12 April 1970, a mob of whites confronted Mr. Pool outside a bar in the town of Louise. They beat him near to death and then dumped him into the Sunflower River. He drowned and the police found his corpse two days later. The police arrested four suspects and one of them confessed. A judge dismissed the indictments against the four on the grounds that the confession was improperly obtained.

“One month later, on 14 May, Jackson police and highway patrolmen fired on unarmed students at all-black Jackson State College, killing two and wounding twelve more. Highway patrol inspector Lloyd ‘Goon’ Jones called for ambulances on his radio and announced that ‘We got some niggers dyin’.” [Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History, p. 183]

“Stand up and be counted!
Show the world you’re a man!
Stand up and be counted!
Go with the Ku Klux Klan!”

And, we can remember the emergence of David Duke as a viable political candidate in nearby Louisiana. He organized the National Socialist White People’s Party. He was arrested twice in 1972 for manufacturing firebombs. He was an avid promoter of the KKK and a major reformist of its operations. Duke welcomed Catholics and also women. He peddled Nazi literature among them. Duke ran for Governor of his state in 1975. He drew strong campaign support and financing from white Mississippi.

Newton points out and documents KKK activities in Mississippi that lasted throughout the 70s and well into the 80s and even the 90s.

Mississippi stubbornly clung to its status as a closed and segregated society. Its white academies persist into today even though most communities cannot afford them. My return to Canton in 2008 showed me a Mississippi community that is as effectively closed and segregated today as it was in 1964. Of course there are superficial changes. The “colored only waiting room” at the railroad station was gone and so were the “colored only drinking fountains.” Yet, the total separation of black and white cultures persist. The black neighborhoods through which we drove looked as down-trodden in 2008 as they did in 1964 and they were definitely completely separated from the homes and neighborhoods of the community’s white citizens.

There were plenty of yards in which we saw the Confederate flag flying proudly and the black folks of Canton were still as surprised and suspicious to see us exploring their neighborhoods as they were by our arrival in 1964.

Indeed, Mississippi remains Mississippi!

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Another web site that might interest you: The Mississippi Truth Project (it tries to “bring to light racially motivated crimes and injustices committed in Mississippi between 1945 and 1975.”)

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