Spies of Mississippi (5 page)

When it was all over, 328 riders had been arrested and jailed in Mississippi, their mug shots preserved in the files of the Commission. The mug shots of young faces—innocence mixed with fear mixed with defiance—seem frozen in time in testimony to a life-and-death struggle.

After the riders returned to their colleges in the North, it was left to local civil rights activists to contest the bus and rail stations that remained segregated. With the glare of the media gone, the local activists faced harsh and often degrading opposition.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Annelle Ponder, and June Johnson had been working on a voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, when they were recruited to take part in a workshop on freedom rider tactics in Charleston, South Carolina. On their way home from the workshop, their bus stopped at a Greyhound terminal café in Winona, Mississippi. The café had a “whites only” sign on its glass door. The newly trained African-American freedom riders walked through the door, sat at the counter, and ordered Cokes and bags of peanuts.

The restaurant manager told them that Negroes could only be served through the rear window and asked them to leave. When they refused, he called the sheriff’s office. The three were promptly arrested and taken to the county jail, where they were denied lawyers and placed in separate cells. Then, a black female trustee—an inmate assigned to assist the prison staff—went to Hamer’s cell and escorted her to a booking room, where the jailer was waiting with a thick, three-inch-wide leather belt with a handle at one end. The jailer ordered Hamer to bend over a table and pull down her skirt. Then he handed the belt to the trustee. A beating ensued. In short order, Hamer and the other women were found guilty of breach of peace, fined $100, and released.

The NAACP reported the beatings to the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. A week later, Justice Department civil rights attorney St. John Barrett interviewed the women and ordered the crime lab to photograph their still-visible wounds. Barrett also traveled to Mississippi with a tape recorder to interview the jail trustee who had administered the beating. In his personal memoir, Barrett recalls the interview:

“What were you in jail for?”

“Waiting trial on grand larceny.”

“Were you a trustee?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means they trusted me. They would let me out of my cell to do the jobs around the jail, like mopping the floors, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, taking meals to the cells—stuff like that.”

“Did the jailer have a strap?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you ever use the strap?”

“Yes, sir. He had me use it on the prisoners who broke the rules. But I only used it when he ordered me to and only for the number of pops he ordered.”

“When the two women were brought to the jail, were you in your cell?”

“No, sir. I was mopping the floor.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well, the police and the jailer put the women in separate cells in the women’s section. They didn’t book or fingerprint them. The police talked for a while and then the jailer told me to get the heavier woman out of her cell and bring her to the booking room. When I brought her, he told her to take her skirt down and lay on a table on her stomach. She didn’t say anything and did like he said. The jailer handed me the strap and told me to give her a few good licks. I gave her a few and he told me to hit her harder and don’t stop until he told me to. I kept on going until I saw she was bleeding. I looked at the jailer and he said O.K.”

Clyde Kennard had been denied a college education and railroaded into prison, but the dream of breaking the color barrier in higher education in Mississippi lived on.
The next attempt came from James Howard Meredith, a Mississippi native, U.S. Air Force veteran, and Jackson State College student. Meredith was also a very private person and an intense proponent of racial equality. He was a man with a mission.

Meredith seemed destined to challenge the racial status quo from as far back as his childhood in poverty-racked Attala County. His father, Cap, was the son of a former slave who had worked tirelessly to acquire his own land and register to vote. Cap built a fence around his family farm to keep trouble out and taught his son J. H. never to abide by the custom of entering a white person’s house only through the back door.

In the air force, J. H. was stationed in Japan, where he was deeply moved by the Japanese people’s acceptance of blacks. Meredith went home with a strong desire to help his own country become more tolerant. Encouraged by the election of President Kennedy and the integration of several segregated southern colleges and universities, he began to envision himself breaking the color barrier in Mississippi.

An outstanding student at all-black Jackson State, Meredith applied to transfer to the prestigious University of Mississippi—one of the state’s most prominent symbols of white privilege and power. Located in the quaint town of Oxford and steeped in the traditions of the Old South, Ole Miss was the school of choice for the children of Mississippi’s white elite. On February 4, 1961, Meredith received a telegram from the Ole Miss admissions officer denying his application. Three days later the Ole Miss Board of Trustees voted to revise the admission rules to give the school even more leeway to deny him—or any applicant—from entering. The NAACP filed a lawsuit on Meredith’s behalf, claiming that he had been denied admission because of his race. The state courts backed the trustees with the dubious ruling that there was no official policy of segregation at Ole Miss, even if no black student had ever been enrolled there.

As the case moved through the courts, the Sovereignty Commission sent investigators Andy Hopkins and Virgil Downing to Attala County to investigate Meredith’s relationship with his parents. After arriving in the hardscrabble farming community, the agents stopped at the county courthouse to pore through public records and interviewed county officials and local police to learn more about the Merediths. The investigation turned up nothing that would sink James’s application. The records showed he had purchased 84 acres from his father in 1960 and had secured license plates for a 1959 Volkswagen and a 1952 Cadillac. Sheriff W. T. Wasson told the agents that he had “known Cap Meredith for 20 years and that he knew him to be a good colored person.” The black superintendent of the Coahoma County Separate School District, J. T. Coleman, told investigators that James Meredith’s mother, Roxie, worked for $14 a week as a cook in the Tipton Street School. Unsolicited, Coleman threatened to fire Roxie if she ever publicly supported her son’s aspiration to attend Ole Miss. “Mr. Coleman also stated that should the schools in Mississippi ever be integrated, the schools would be ruined,” Downing reported, “and that he would do everything he possibly could to keep the schools segregated.”

The agents concluded that Cap and Roxie Meredith were determined to maintain a low profile. They hoped their neighbors would not link them to the man behind the Ole Miss controversy, which had become front-page news even in rural backwaters like Attala County. The agents also knew how to let the entire county know that the “integration agitator” at Ole Miss had roots in their community. Cap and Roxie’s low profile was shattered when the investigative report was leaked to the Jackson
Clarion Ledger
. On June 16, 1961, the paper ran a local story headlined “Meredith Drives Cadillac and Compact to Visit Pop.” But the spies’ small-town maneuverings would soon be eclipsed by stunning national news.

June 25, 1962, was James Meredith’s 29th birthday. It was also the day a federal appeals court sent shivers down the spine of the entire white power structure in Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the state court ruling and found that Meredith had been denied entry solely because of his race, victimized by “a carefully calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterful inactivity.” The court ordered that Meredith be admitted that September. The order set the stage for a dramatic showdown between Governor Barnett and President Kennedy aided by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The clock was ticking. The start of the fall semester was just a few months away.

In July, the Sovereignty Commission rushed Hopkins and Downing back to Attala County in a desperate effort to unearth damaging information on the Merediths. The investigations again proved fruitless.

As fall approached, Commission public relations director Erle Johnston rushed an order to the printer for more than a million postcards with a preprinted message expressing resentment at the “unnatural warfare being waged against the sovereign state of Mississippi.” The cards—to be signed by white voters throughout the South—were addressed to President Kennedy, White House, Washington, D.C.

On the evening of September 13, Governor Barnett went on statewide television and declared the standoff to be “our greatest crisis since the War Between the States” and pledging to resist “the evil and illegal forces of tyranny.” Repeating his promise that “no school will be integrated while I am your governor,” Barnett asked for the resignation of any state official unwilling to “suffer imprisonment for this righteous cause.”

On the afternoon of September 20, Barnett entered a boardroom on the Ole Miss campus, ready for the first of what would prove to be several dramatic face-to-face confrontations with federal marshals who had been assigned to escort Meredith to register for the fall semester. The governor read a statement denying the application, and the marshals and Meredith walked away to try again another day. In a similar confrontation on September 25, Barnett pulled out his trademark humor to endear himself to his supporters and to frustrate his foes. Surrounded by his white supporters as a phalanx of white federal marshals led Meredith into the room, Barnett looked into the sea of white faces and asked, “Which one of you is Mr. Meredith?” The federal agents scowled, Meredith smiled, and the onlookers howled.

As events continued to unfold, Barnett was buying time by carrying on secret phone conversations with President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy, who were now committed to enforcing the court order despite the probable loss of support from powerful southerners in Congress. The governor tried unsuccessfully to convince the Kennedy brothers to postpone the enrollment indefinitely, warning that bloody riots would shake the campus if a black student were allowed to enroll.

Barnett, needing a point man for the delicate negotiations with the Kennedys, turned to his close friend and confidant Tom Watkins, a successful private attorney and member of the governing board of the Sovereignty Commission. Manning the phone line to Washington, Watkins became the key conduit between Barnett and the two Kennedys.

With all sides grappling for a solution, Watkins proposed a series of schemes designed to get Meredith safely ensconced at Ole Miss and to allow Barnett to save his reputation as a staunch, unbending segregationist. Watkins warned that “if there is to be any school integration in Mississippi, it would have to be done forcefully.” In one carefully orchestrated scheme, a federal marshal was to shove Barnett aside and move past him to register the student. Feigning shock, Barnett would save face by condemning the use of federal force against a sitting governor. The stage was set, the actors had their roles, and the curtain was rising when the script abruptly changed: Barnett’s plane was grounded by bad weather in Jackson and Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson was left to take his place in Oxford. Unfortunately, no one had shared the script with Johnson, who refused to stand aside and pushed back hard against the dumbfounded marshal. The defiant act ingratiated Johnson with the white masses and proved invaluable to his future political career.

Another plan called for the governor and his supporters to make a historic last stand at a gate to Ole Miss, face-to-face with 30 armed federal marshals acting as a shield for Meredith. The lead marshal would pull his gun and point it at Barnett, who would only then call upon his supporters to stand down to avoid bloodshed. When Robert Kennedy repeated the scheme to Barnett and Watkins over the phone, the governor demurred. He would only sound the retreat if all 30 marshals pulled their weapons and threatened to fire.

“I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns,” Barnett told an exasperated Robert Kennedy. “If one pulls his gun and we all turn, it would be very embarrassing.”

Then the secret phone negotiations took a bizarre twist. Faced with a federal contempt-of-court charge, a $10,000-per-day fine, and possible jail time, the savior of segregation began to cave to the pressure of pending financial ruin and imprisonment. His hundreds of thousands of white supporters would have been horrified to learn that the chief executive of their “sovereign” state was secretly working with the “forces of tyranny” to assure a black man’s peaceful enrollment at Ole Miss—this from the man who had publicly proclaimed, “Ross Barnett will rot in a federal jail before he lets one nigra cross the threshold of our sacred white schools.” The enemies of segregation were closing in, and Barnett was now negotiating the terms of surrender.

On Saturday, September 29, President Kennedy himself called Barnett to offer a new plan. It called for the governor to rally his forces at the Oxford campus while federal marshals quietly registered Meredith at a state college board office in Jackson. The date was set for Monday, October 1. Barnett could save face by accusing the Kennedys of registering the black student behind his back. Barnett and Watkins agreed to the plan and promised to use the Mississippi Highway Patrol and Mississippi National Guard to maintain calm at Ole Miss. It turns out that both the Kennedy brothers and Barnett were football fans and, in the parlance of the game, their plan resembled a hidden ball trick, in which a running back pretends to have the ball while the actual ball carrier, unnoticed, carries it downfield.

So there was some irony that the big football game between Ole Miss and Kentucky was scheduled for Jackson’s Memorial Stadium that very night. At game time, more than 46,000 fans packed the stands, where the Meredith showdown was generating more buzz than the game itself. As Barnett walked to the governor’s box, the crowd began waving Confederate flags and chanting, “We want Ross. We want Ross.” Barnett, the consummate political showman, couldn’t resist the adoration. Despite his promise to the Kennedys to maintain calm, he chose to play the hero one more time. At halftime he walked to midfield, stood at a microphone, clenched his fist, waved his arms, and shouted, “I love Mississippi, I love her people. I love our customs.” The crowd went into a frenzy.

Ole Miss student Gerald Blessy recalled the scene years later: “I looked back at the crowd and saw anger in the faces of the people right next to me and it sort of flashed through my mind that those rebel flags looked liked swastikas. These were just ordinary school kids who were being whipped into a fever pitch of emotion by their own leaders. It was just like the Nazis had done.”

Commission public relations chief Erle Johnston had a different recollection of Barnett’s speech: “As he stood there, smiling, acknowledging the cheers of the multitude, he was more than a governor of Mississippi. He was a symbol of the South, with the red blood of his Confederate soldier father running through his veins.”

After the game hundreds of students began the 175-mile drive to Oxford. They were spoiling for a fight. And Barnett called Washington and left a message for Robert Kennedy: The deal to enroll Meredith was off. In the game to come, there would be no hidden ball trick.

The next morning, Sunday, September 30, an infuriated attorney general called Barnett with a threat. The President was prepared to go on national television that night to tell the American people that “you had an agreement to permit Meredith to go to Jackson to register, and your lawyer, Mr. Watkins, said this was satisfactory.” Barnett’s blood ran cold. This would mean that the entire nation would know of his secret talk with the Kennedys. Even more important, the entire white power structure of the state of Mississippi would know that the ardent segregationist and former Klansman had sold out the cause. The official transcript of the phone conversation reads as follows:

RB [Ross Barnett]
:
That won’t do at all.

RFK [Robert Kennedy]
:
You broke your word to him.

RB
:
You don’t mean the President is going to say that tonight?

RFK
:
Of course he is; you broke your word; now you suggest we send in troops, fighting their way through a barricade. You gave your word. Mr. Watkins gave him his word. You didn’t keep it.

RB
:
Don’t say that. Please don’t mention it.

The Attorney General then instructed Barnett and Watkins to prepare a statement to be read by the governor on statewide TV that night. They would consent to the enrollment and call for calm at Ole Miss. Barnett and Watkins wrote a script and reviewed it with Robert Kennedy later that day. The pillar of segregated education in Mississippi would fall to the earth with these words by Ross Barnett: “My heart says never but my good judgment abhors the bloodshed that would follow…. We must at all odds preserve the peace and avoid bloodshed.”

Despite the capitulation, President Kennedy had given up on Barnett. Forget the hidden ball trick. The President was charging through Barnett’s front line. He placed the Mississippi National Guard under his authority and alerted the U.S. Army base at Memphis to prepare for possible deployment to Oxford. As the military units moved into action that eventful Sunday, student mobs began roaming the campus, shouting racial slurs and hurling rocks and bricks. Hundreds of armed men—including Klansmen from across the South and white militias from as far away as California—began arriving in Oxford to take on the federal forces. At about 5:30 p.m., Meredith was escorted to the Ole Miss campus by dozens of U.S. marshals wearing gas masks, vests, and helmets and equipped with tear-gas launchers, batons, and sidearms. Within an hour, Ole Miss erupted into a full-scale riot. For hours, clouds of tear gas rode the breeze, and the sound of gunshots crackled in the night. Mississippi National Guard troops arrived at about 11 p.m., and U.S. Army units showed up at 2 a.m. By the end of the long night, more than 20,000 troops had descended on the campus. They seized control, restored order, and arrested more than 200 people. Two people were dead, and 165 federal agents were injured—23 by gunfire. On Monday, October 1, 1962, James H. Meredith attended his first class. The subject was American history.