The Ghosts of Mississippi (11 page)

The friendly old white man at the gas station on the Louisiana line wanted to share the latest Kennedy joke with his customer. “How can Kennedy expect to get a man on the moon,” he asked, chuckling, “when he can’t even get a busload of niggers across Mississippi?” John Salter just shook his head. Around him a thick mist rose from the swamps. He wondered what he was getting himself into.

Just after midnight, on the first day of September 1961, Salter and his wife, Eldri, crossed the Mississippi River bridge into Vicksburg and headed for Jackson. With his light eyes, blond crew cut, and square jaw, Salter looked more like an Anglo football coach than a half-Indian social activist and union organizer who was soon to become one of Mississippi’s most famous “outside agitators.”

The Salters, who were in their twenties, were on their way from Arizona to Tougaloo College, just north of Jackson, where John had been hired to teach sociology. He was attracted to Tougaloo because it was a sanctuary of reason and racial tolerance in the roughest part of the South. Tougaloo was a black, private Christian school, now with a handful of white students from the North and an integrated, somewhat international teaching staff. When the Freedom Riders had come through that summer, they’d bunked at Tougaloo.

Among the first peculiar things Salter noticed about his new job was that his otherwise friendly students avoided him on the streets of Jackson because he looked white. The races had no contact at all. He was astonished at the total segregation of the city and the fear of the people, who could seem as despondent as whipped dogs.

Almost immediately John Salter was sucked into Mississippi’s racial politics. It was as natural as breathing air.

One of the students in his American government class was Colia Liddell, president of the NAACP’s North Jackson Youth Council. She asked him to speak to the group, and before long he had signed up as its adult adviser.

The first time Salter met Medgar Evers was at the annual NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Jackson that fall. John and Eldri felt the stares as they walked up to the Masonic Temple that night. Besides the cops taking down tag numbers, they were the only non-black people there. Evers greeted them at the door like old friends. He knew them by name; Colia had told him they were coming. Salter was taken by Medgar’s ease and warmth and passion. They agreed to meet again.

The Salters listened as each NAACP chapter reported in with a litany of beatings, and harassment, and economic disaster. But no story haunted them as much as the one Medgar Evers told about his friend Clyde Kennard, a black Mississippian who was dying in prison for the crime of wanting to go to college.

The case was probably the most frustrating and tragic fight of Medgar Evers’s career. It was particularly painful because Kennard was so much like Evers. They were the same age, they came from the same kind of hardworking rural family, and neither of them was intimidated by the sound of a white man saying no. Evers knew that but for the grace of God, he could have been in Kennard’s place.

Like Evers, Kennard was an army veteran who had served in World War II.

After Kennard left the service, he continued his college education at the University of Chicago. Then his stepfather got sick, and Kennard dropped out of school to return to Mississippi to take over the family farm for his mother.

The closest college was the all-white state school, Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg. That was where Kennard wanted to finish his degree. Three times he tried to enroll. On the morning of his last rejection in September 1959, Kennard was arrested on campus by local constables for reckless driving and illegal possession of whiskey. Kennard was a Baptist who didn’t drink. Even Zack Van Landingham, the Sovereignty Commission investigator assigned to the case, thought Kennard had been framed. He also discovered an aborted plot to plant dynamite in Kennard’s car.

None of this mattered to the judge. Kennard was convicted and fined six hundred dollars. The local Citizens’ Council was out to ruin him. The bank foreclosed on his farm (a Jackson businessman and later the NAACP bought the mortgage for his mother). Then he was arrested on another outlandish charge: a well-known local thief accused Kennard of hiring him to steal chicken feed. Although the burglar was released, Kennard was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor at Parchman.

Soon after Kennard reported to the prison farm, he complained of stomach pains. The condition was left undiagnosed and untreated for months before a doctor found the massive cancer in his colon. Even then he was sent back to work in the fields. He was thirty-three years old.

When Medgar Evers tried to tell the nicely dressed crowd at the Freedom Fund dinner about the efforts to get Kennard of out of prison, the words would not come to him, and his eyes filled with tears. It was the only time anyone could remember seeing Evers break down in public. Twice he started the speech, and twice his voice failed him. Aaron Henry offered to take over, but Evers forced his way through to the end of his talk, and by then everyone in the hall was weeping for Clyde Kennard, and perhaps for Medgar Evers, and perhaps, too, for themselves.

That December Medgar Evers and the Jackson NAACP led a modest, mainly symbolic consumer boycott of Capitol Street, the white shopping district where black clerks were never hired and black shoppers could not try on the clothes they bought.

The merchants refused to negotiate. The boycott was ineffective, and it received no local publicity. News coverage in Mississippi was outrageously biased because the media were almost totally controlled by members of the Citizens’ Councils. The two TV stations in Jackson were cheerleaders for white supremacy. They sometimes blacked out national broadcasts that offered an alternative viewpoint. They even censored network news segments that dealt with civil rights demonstrations and boycotts. Fred Beard, the general manager of WLBT, the NBC affiliate, was a prominent member of the Jackson Citizens’ Council. Members of the Hederman family, who owned the state’s two biggest newspapers, the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
and the Jackson
Daily News
, were notorious segregationists. Only a handful of regional newspapers, most notably Hodding Carter’s Greenville
Democrat-Times
, offered reasonably balanced coverage of the biggest story of the day.

Lawsuits were simmering in the courts, including one to desegregate the county bus line and another to desegregate the public schools. The plaintiffs in the latter case included Reena and Darrell Kenyatta Evers, Medgar and Myrlie’s two older children. (A third child, James Van Dyke Evers, had arrived in 1960.)

In February of 1962 Medgar Evers made his separate peace with the idealistic outsiders from CORE and SNCC who were treading on NAACP territory. Evers saw the need to coordinate all local, state, and national civil rights organizations operating in Mississippi. He joined in talks to set up an alliance called The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Despite Evers’s support, the national NAACP refused to join COFO. Aaron Henry took the titular post of president, but the project was driven by its director, Bob Moses, and assistant director, Dave Dennis.

By then Medgar Evers and Dave Dennis had become close friends. They would slip off together to a little steak restaurant on the outskirts of Jackson to have a drink — Medgar was careful about who saw him relaxing — and talk. Mostly they talked about sports and women while they tried to slough off the tension of their work. But inevitably the conversation would come around to the movement. At this time Medgar was still struggling with his impulse to confront the system the way the SCLC, SNCC, and CORE took it on, while keeping his loyalty to the NAACP. The support he gave Dennis was mainly under the table.

When James Meredith cracked Ole Miss, the confrontation gained new momentum. After troops were sent to Oxford, a thousand new members joined the Citizens’ Council in Jackson alone. About the same time, the Negroes of Jackson staged their first successful boycott of the segregated Mississippi State Fair.

The atmosphere of tension and hope spilled over into the Seventeenth Annual State Conference of Mississippi Branches of the NAACP in November 1962. It was a big event in Jackson, full of national staffers and celebrities. Roy Wilkins gave a speech, and Dick Gregory entertained the crowd.

Dick Gregory had grown up broke and hungry in a St. Louis slum. By 1962 he was a famous nightclub comedian who rode into the big time on a wave of race jokes. He was the Negro’s answer to Lenny Bruce, but without the bitter edge. Gregory could disarm the whites in his audience and make them laugh with him.

“Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people.’ ”

“I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people.’ ”

By the end of 1962 Gregory had been on The Jack Paar Show and on The David Susskind Show, he had cut a comedy album, and he was a Playboy Club regular. Because of the nature of his material and his high profile, he was increasingly drawn into the civil rights movement. He met Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King, Jr., and he performed at fundraisers and rallies. But he never really got emotionally involved in the movement until Medgar Evers asked him to come to Jackson, Mississippi.

It was a one-night gig, and he was eager to get it over with. Gregory didn’t like being in Mississippi; there was such an outrageous atmosphere of hostility and fear. He had to admit he held the same prejudice so many northern blacks did against their hayseed brethren down in Mississippi, the ones who’d been left behind in the great move north, the ones Gregory called “verb-busters” for the way they mangled the language. He came down to Mississippi out of a sense of duty, but he was already thinking about the flight home when an old man took the stage.

Gregory later recalled in his autobiography,
Nigger
, how the seventy-eight-year-old man was telling the crowd about his years in jail, where he had done time for killing a Negro who had been sent to burn his house down. The old man had been trying to register voters. “I didn’t mind going to jail for freedom,” the man said, but he had never spent a night apart from his wife. When he finally got out of jail, his wife had died. It tore Dick Gregory up. He gave Medgar Evers a train ticket and some money for the old man to visit his son in California. Something had turned over in his heart. He was involved now.

That night Gregory heard the story of Clyde Kennard for the first time, and Evers introduced him to Kennard’s mother, Leona Smith. Evers sent him more information about the case when Gregory got back to Chicago, and Gregory began to push to get Kennard out of jail. He got the story into the national press, including the news that Kennard was dying of cancer. (The bad publicity finally convinced Governor Ross Barnett to pardon Kennard in the spring of 1963. Kennard died in a Chicago hospital on July 14, 1963, three weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday.)

By the fall of 1962 black folks across the Delta were organizing to resist white supremacy in ways that were unthinkable half a decade earlier. Aaron Henry, the state NAACP president, was leading a boycott of white-owned shops in Clarksdale. A full-blown movement had sprouted in Greenwood, where a hundred blacks at a time were lining up at the courthouse to attempt to register to vote.

In Jackson, home of fifty thousand Negro citizens, there was scant activity. Conservative ministers and business leaders were reluctant to challenge the system. Medgar Evers spent most of his time in other parts of Mississippi, where black communities were more receptive to the civil rights message.

But as the 1962 Christmas season approached, student activists started talking about another boycott. A strategy meeting was held in John Salter’s home where it was decided that blacks would boycott all 150 Capitol Street businesses, not just a few big stores or specific products. They printed five thousand leaflets outlining their demands: equality in hiring and promoting employees; the end of segregated drinking fountains, rest rooms, and seating; the use of courtesy titles — Mrs., Miss, and Mr. — for all races; and service on a first-come, first-served basis.

The organizations that signed the leaflet were the North Jackson Youth Council; the Tougaloo chapter of the NAACP; SNCC, represented on campus by Joan Trumpauer; and CORE, represented by Dave Dennis. In the future they would call themselves the Jackson Movement.

Salter spoke to Medgar Evers about setting up some pickets on Capitol Street. It would mean getting bail money together, and Evers agreed to try to raise some from the national NAACP.

At the last minute the NAACP turned them down. Desperate, Salter turned to a New York civil rights lawyer named William Kunstler, whose daughter attended Tougaloo. Kunstler agreed to help and found donors, including an arm of the SCLC, to pledge a total of three thousand dollars for bail.

On December 12, 1962, Salter and the others drove to Capitol Street and managed to walk up and down in front of Woolworth’s one time before they were hauled off by the Jackson police. Salter counted at least fifty cops and a hundred white spectators. It took two days to bail everyone out, but the publicity payoff was worth it to Salter. The TV crews played into the demonstrators’ hands. On the evening news, they clearly showed the picket signs calling for a boycott.

Mayor Allen Thompson was outraged. The former college Greek professor was a hard-core segregationist, and he was in no mood to bargain. He threatened to sue the pickets for a million dollars. He offered to line Capitol Street with a thousand police to prevent more picketing. And he further vowed to remain calm.

The boycott attracted an avalanche of hate mail and hate calls to the Salter home on the Tougaloo campus. Just before Christmas someone fired a shot into the house, barely missing their sleeping infant daughter.

Medgar continued to give the movement his quiet support. He helped raise property bonds outside the auspices of the NAACP, and he and John Salter became friends.

Evers fascinated Salter, who was drawn to his calm and his kindness and something else. There was a quality in Evers’s eyes, a wild calculation that reminded Salter of a lone wolf or a coyote. He was regal and untamable.