Spies of Mississippi (3 page)

The Mississippi River Delta is a study in contrast.
The vast stretches of green and white cotton fields are interspersed with eerie, moss-draped cypress swamps. The white-pillared mansions of the plantation elite stand near the huts of the poor dirt farmer. The Delta is home to debutante balls and backroom gambling dens, ramshackle houseboats and majestic paddle wheelers. This sweltering, insect-ridden, and amazingly fertile stretch of bottomland forms, in the words of author James C. Cobb, “the most Southern place on earth.”

Back in the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of slaves worked the vast cotton fields. They were afraid to resist or to run for fear of being whipped, beaten, or sold away from their families. Each day, more black men, women, and children were delivered to the plantations by slave brokers, who purchased their human cargo in the bustling markets of New Orleans and Natchez and marched them in groups of about 30 for hundreds of miles to their oppressive new homes. The seemingly endless supply of slave labor and a ravenous demand for cotton fueled a robust economy dominated by wealthy planters, powerful politicians, and influential businessmen.

The legacy of slavery, the grip of poverty, and widespread illiteracy made it virtually impossible for civil rights workers to organize effectively in the Delta prior to the 1950s. The small cotton-processing towns and thinly populated enclaves seemed destined to be racially segregated and brutally oppressive for African Americans for generations to come. But by the late 1950s, in the hardscrabble river town of Clarksdale, change was in the air. Aaron Henry, president of the Coahoma County Chapter of the NAACP and executive secretary of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, was organizing the black community. The mild-mannered activist was petitioning the local school board to integrate schools, urging the sheriff to crack down on the harassment of black voters, and demanding that newspaper editors refer to black people in their columns with the courtesy titles of Mr., Mrs., and Miss.

Henry, a registered pharmacist and owner of the Fourth Street Drug Store, had turned his pharmacy into a makeshift community center and citizenship school, where he prepared poor sharecroppers, shopkeepers, and household servants to vote for the first time. Affectionately known in the community as Doc, Henry had a unique ability to work across the racial divide and a talent for forming unlikely alliances.

Henry had grown up in a sharecropping family on the Flowers Brothers Plantation outside Clarksdale. He escaped poverty by joining the army and learned his pharmacy craft at Xavier College in New Orleans. After college, drawn by the lure of the land and a determination to end racial prejudice, he returned home to the Delta. “You know that old Mississippi River has never had an ounce of racial prejudice,” he liked to say. “When it comes to bursting over those levees, it doesn’t stop to ask where the colored section is. It just takes all.”

The Commission spies initially underestimated Henry’s effectiveness. They bragged of duping him into divulging valuable information without even knowing it. But over time, Henry’s relentless organizing and alliance building forced the spies to enhance their surveillance. In early 1958, Commission agent Zach Van Landingham traveled to Clarksdale to meet three men—a judge, a candidate for sheriff, and a leader of the Clarksdale chapter of the White Citizens’ Council. The prominent local leaders told the agent that the pharmacist-turned-organizer was stirring up needless trouble in the black community and laid out a plan to rid themselves of the agitator.

The Council would pressure wholesalers to stop selling supplies to Henry’s drugstore and would press doctors to refuse to write prescriptions for patients who shopped there. The economic squeeze would bankrupt Henry and force him to leave town in search of work. The Council also planned to persuade the superintendent of the Coahoma Country Negro School District to fire Henry’s wife, Nicole, from her teaching job just to make sure the couple had no reason to stay in town. “It is believed that if Henry leaves the area,” Van Landingham reported to his superiors at the Commission, “the NAACP will die.”

The Commission surrounded Henry with black informants, who infiltrated his meetings and intercepted his documents. One report noted that an informant code-named J1 “advised that he had been listening very closely in his church,” and it appeared that NAACP meetings were “not well attended” and that Henry was not “doing very well with his drugstore.” But Henry kept holding meetings, signing up members, registering voters, and speaking out in the press. NAACP membership and black voter registration in the region crept upward.

Then, late in 1958, Henry was elected president of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, thus becoming one of the most important civil rights leaders in the state. He forged alliances with multiple civil rights organizations, developed relationships with federal authorities, and made friends with sympathetic journalists.

Despite the recognition and the stature, his struggle was really just beginning. After the mayor and Chamber of Commerce of Clarksdale moved to ban blacks from participating in the 1961 Christmas parade, Henry launched a boycott of white-owned businesses, with the slogan, “If we can’t parade downtown, we won’t trade downtown.” The boycott triggered an unprecedented three-year reign of terror against the black community. During that time, Henry’s wife was fired from her teaching job, his drugstore was firebombed, his house was torched, and he was arrested and jailed on false charges. As punishment, he was tied to the back of a garbage truck and forced to load trash in full view of his neighbors. But the attempt to humiliate him backfired on his tormentors. The sight of an unrelenting freedom worker tethered to a trash truck only enhanced his stature in the black community.

Clyde Kennard climbed into his 1958 Mercury station wagon and drove from the black farming hamlet of Eatonville to the stately, all-white campus of Mississippi Southern College.
The pristine campus, with its redbrick walkways, white-columned buildings, and shimmering lily ponds, seemed a world away from the family poultry farm that he was running for his ailing mother.

The former U.S. Army paratrooper and University of Chicago political science major was headed to the office of Mississippi Southern president W. D. McCain to get word on his application to enroll at the college. The 30-year-old Kennard was all too aware that he had stirred up a hornet’s nest by applying to an all-white public college, but he had no idea that he was walking into a setup of epic proportions. Commission investigator Zach Van Landingham was waiting for Kennard in President McCain’s office—as was a formal letter of rejection. The police were also watching and waiting with dangerous intentions in mind. The Commission’s role in his undoing would prove that its extraordinary powers were far beyond the point of being contained.

Clyde Kennard was born on June 12, 1927, and raised among the cotton and corn fields of rural Forrest County, Mississippi. At age 12, his family sent him to live with his sister in Chicago so he would have a chance to attend decent schools. In 1945 Kennard enlisted in the army. He graduated from paratrooper school, served as a paratrooper in Korea and Germany, and rose to the rank of sergeant. In 1952, he received an honorable discharge, with the Bronze Star, Korean Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, and Good Conduct Medal to his credit.

After his discharge, Kennard earned a high school diploma, began taking college courses, and enrolled full-time at the University of Chicago. He completed two years toward a political science degree. Then he got bad news: His stepfather was dying, and his mother couldn’t keep up the farm. In spring 1954, at age 28, Kennard left the University of Chicago for the family chicken farm in Mississippi.

Kennard applied for admission to Mississippi Southern in 1956. His application was denied as incomplete. He reapplied in 1958. It was denied again for alleged irregularities. Then, late in 1959, Kennard applied again. This time he explained his decision—and openly mocked the concept of a segregated society—in an editorial in the
Hattiesburg American:
“Are we to assume that two sets of hospitals are to be built for two groups of doctors? Are we to build two bridges across the same stream to give equal opportunity to two groups of engineers? Are we to have two courts of law so as to give both groups of lawyers the same chance to demonstrate their skills; two legislatures for our politically inclined; and of course two governors?” Regarding integration and racial cooperation, Kennard concluded, “I would rather meet my God with this creed than with any other yet devised by human society.”

Suddenly, the army veteran, college student, and poultry farmer had captured public attention. The national press jumped on the story of a black military veteran seeking to break the color barrier in higher education in Mississippi. The NAACP offered legal assistance in case Kennard decided to sue the college to gain admission. And the next entry in the Commission’s secret file read in understated fashion, “The Clyde Kennard problem is no longer simply a local concern.”

Agent Van Landingham began working up an investigation, relying on the initial groundwork provided by a confidential investigator code-named T1. The exhaustive probe examined Kennard’s childhood in Hattiesburg, his upbringing in Chicago, his years in the military, in college, and on the farm. The agents interviewed his friends, teachers, ministers, and business associates and sent a bank examiner to the Citizens’ Bank of Hattiesburg to inspect his accounts. The search turned up nothing that undercut his application. “Persons who know Kennard describe him as intelligent, well educated, quiet spoken, courteous with a desire to better the Negro race,” Van Landingham reported.

The investigators were so intent on finding damning information that their reports presented the most mundane facts with sinister implication. The agents noted that as a student Kennard joined the Progressive Citizens’ Club and the German Club. Furthermore, “the files of confidential agent T1 reflect that Clyde Kennard has no middle name.”

With little to go on, Van Landingham paid a visit to Dudley W. Conner, head of the White Citizens’ Council of Hattiesburg. Without prodding, Conner offered to have his Council henchmen “take care of [Kennard].” When pressed by the investigator on the meaning behind that menacing statement, Conner explained, “Kennard’s car could be hit by a train or he could have some accident on the highway and no one would ever know the difference.”

As an alternative to the Council’s extreme approach, Van Landingham devised a more moderate plan to pressure Kennard to drop his application. As part of that plan, Governor Coleman invited Kennard to a meeting in Jackson and offered to get him into a segregated Negro college or even an integrated university in the North. Short of that, the governor appealed to Kennard to hold off on his application until the controversy over it “cooled down,” maybe after the next election.

Van Landingham also organized a committee of influential black educators to lobby Kennard to drop his application. The educators agreed to make the case in exchange for the governor’s support for a state-funded Negro junior college in Hattiesburg. Pleading with Kennard to take back the application, they warned that his attempt to become the first black admitted to an all-white college could undercut black schools and lead to trouble, even bloodshed.

Kennard refused to back down. Now, for him, it was a matter of principle. He even questioned the role of the investigators on his trail. “Is it the integrationists or segregationists who are employing secret investigators to search records?” he asked.

The fateful meeting between Kennard and Mississippi Southern president McCain was set for Tuesday, September 14, 1959, at 9:30 a.m. The entire meeting lasted just 20 minutes. McCain and Van Landingham implored Kennard to give up, but he politely held his ground. Then Mississippi Southern admissions director Aubrey Lucas was called into the office to hand Kennard the official letter of rejection, which claimed that his University of Chicago transcripts were incomplete and that his physical examination records had been altered, proving that he lacked the moral character to attend the prestigious college.

Kennard was escorted out of the office and back toward his car. In the distance he saw two campus police officers standing next to his vehicle. Constables Charlie Ward and Lee Daniels confronted him, accused him of speeding through the campus, and placed him under arrest for reckless driving. As one of the constables took Kennard into custody, the other apparently opened the station wagon and planted five half-pints of liquor under the front seat. Later that day, Kennard was charged with reckless driving and possession of liquor. At that time Mississippi was a dry state, and possessing liquor was technically illegal even though it was sold openly and was widely available.

After learning of the arrest, Van Landingham called the governor’s office with the news. He told Coleman’s administrative assistant, “It appeared to be a frame up with the planting of evidence in his car.”

Throughout his campaign for governor, Ross Barnett traveled the state stoking the fears of small-town white voters with racially charged stump speeches.
His voice moved from soft cadence to rolling thunder as he warned that their “cherished way of life” was being threatened by the “integrationists, agitators, subversives, and race mixers.” “I am a Mississippi segregationist and proud of it,” Barnett said to wild cheers. The crowds whooped, stomped their feet, and shouted back, “You tell ‘em, Ross.”

Barnett had lost two previous campaigns for governor, but this time he had an added advantage. The successful private attorney and former Klansman had been handpicked and endorsed by the White Citizens’ Council, which had become a powerful political force in the state in a few short years. In fact, as Barnett picked up the pace of his campaign in 1959, the Council had more than 200 chapters with more than 80,000 members in Mississippi.

On the campaign trail, Barnett zeroed in on the federal government. The 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation ruling had been just the beginning of a steady federal assault on segregation. The U.S. Justice Department had formed a special division to make sure the states enforced a growing body of civil rights laws. Congress was considering sweeping new legislation to mandate integration in public buildings, parks, and playgrounds and to ban racial discrimination in the workplace. Furthermore, a young, liberal Massachusetts congressman named John F. Kennedy was running for President. For the first time, a viable candidate for the nation’s highest office was courting the black vote. Barnett knew change was coming. He also knew that fear of that change was his ticket to power.

Barnett told voters that the national politicians were trampling on Mississippi’s right to govern itself. His campaign workers even nailed posters to telephone poles in small towns warning that only he could stop “the occupation forces from the N.A.A.C.P. and the specially trained goon squads from the Justice Department.”

With his arms waving and his voice trembling, he pledged that no public school, park, swimming pool, or restroom would be integrated on his watch. And in the end, this fierce segregationist, with a flair for drama that would become his hallmark, summed up his position on integration with one word: “Never!” Standing on the campaign stage, he would proclaim segregation forever, and his hillbilly band would break into song, “He’s for segregation one hundred percent / He’s not a moderate, like some other gent.”

Barnett also criticized departing governor Coleman for failing to use the Commission to neutralize the enemy. The fact that Barnett had no knowledge of the Commission’s secret operations didn’t stop him from charging the segregation watchdogs with sleeping on the job.

Since Governor Coleman was ineligible to run for a consecutive second term under state law, Lieutenant Governor J. Carroll Gartin opposed Barnett in the key Democratic primary. And since the Republican Party had no viable candidate to run in the general election, the winner of the Democratic primary was certain to become governor. Gartin, a moderate on race in the Coleman tradition, could not rile up as much segregationist fervor as his demagogic rival. By the time the primary was held in August 1959, Barnett was gaining momentum, and he ended up winning by a comfortable margin. Upon hearing the news of Barnett’s victory, outgoing Governor Coleman said, “May the good Lord help us for the next four years.” With that, Ross Barnett rode a wave of white fear into the governor’s mansion.