Spies of Mississippi Read online

  How bad was Parchman? The prison farm, constructed after the Civil War as a direct response to the abolition of slavery, was originally designed to instill young, wayward black men with the discipline that the whips of slave owners could no longer administer.

  At the maximum security penitentiary, Kennard worked from sunup to sundown on the prison cotton farm. He urged his mother not to visit—“just make believe I’m back in the army.” He spent Sundays writing letters for illiterate prisoners.

  The NAACP worked without success to overturn Kennard’s conviction but did manage to publicize his plight. Then, after two years of hard time, Kennard doubled over with stomach pain. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Doctors operated immediately, but the cancer had spread too far. The doctors recommended that Kennard be released, given “the extremely poor prognosis in this rather young patient.” But Governor Barnett, determined to send a message to any would-be integrationists, refused to grant clemency. Barnett ordered that the dying man be returned to prison, where he was sent back into the cotton fields.

  With Kennard’s condition worsening, an outcry built up in the northern black press. Black comedian Dick Gregory, who had gained celebrity status entertaining white and black nightclub audiences and appearing on national TV, charged that the military veteran, college student, and chicken farmer had been framed, railroaded into prison, abused, neglected, and left for dead.

  CHAPTER 10

  OVERFLOWING THE JAILS

  —May 24, 1961—

  I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line

  I’m taking a ride to Jackson this time

  Hallelujah I’m a traveling

  Hallelujah, ain’t it fine

  Hallelujah I’m a traveling

  Down freedom’s main line

  The jittery road warriors sat in the red, silver, and white double-decker bus racing down Highway 80 in Alabama en route to Jackson, Mississippi. The freedom riders had to accept the fact that attacks on the bus were possible, even likely, despite the extraordinary police and military protection deployed to prevent violence. As the bus raced past the Alabama countryside, eight National Guardsmen with grim faces and bayonet-tipped rifles stood sentinel over the passengers, including ten newsmen and more than a dozen freedom riders. Sixteen police cars formed an escort, helicopters hovered overhead, and an L19 reconnaissance aircraft kept watch from higher above. As the bus reached the borderline sign reading “Welcome to the Magnolia State,” one rider quipped, “I’m going out of America, into a foreign country.” Freedom Ride coordinator Diane Nash had to take a deep breath. After all, she had resisted calls to abandon the ride to Jackson, insisting that the movement could not succeed if the mere threat of mob violence could stop nonviolent protest.

  As the caravan raced forward, Mississippi National Guardsmen fanned out along a wooded stretch of the route. They had been alerted to a tip that Klansmen planned to dynamite the bus shortly after it crossed the state line. Driving through stop signs and traffic lights, the convoy finally reached the city limits of Jackson and rolled to its destination: the interstate bus terminal. The time had come for the long-awaited showdown between the young activists and the Jackson City Police.

  The protesters bounded off the bus and walked quickly toward the terminal. The black riders headed to the “whites only” waiting room, and the two white riders headed to the room marked “Negroes only.” Jackson police issued two warnings and began making arrests. The police ran the protesters through a gauntlet of officers to waiting paddy wagons and shuttled them off to the local lockup. The first Freedom Ride to Mississippi of summer 1961 had been carried out in perfect choreography. Federal officials, state officials, freedom riders, and police breathed a sigh of relief. Violence had been avoided. At that time, none of them knew that waves of additional buses with hundreds of new riders would soon be en route to Jackson to repeat the process again, and again, and again.

  Three weeks earlier, freedom riders had boarded buses in Washington, D.C., determined to expose segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, and water fountains in bus and train stations. The U.S. Supreme Court had barred segregation in interstate travel in 1960, but the ruling was being ignored south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As the freedom riders moved into the Deep South, white mobs were waiting with insults, threats, bottles, and rocks. Then, outside Anniston, Alabama, an angry mob firebombed a bus and beat the fleeing riders with chains and baseball bats. In Birmingham, a club-wielding mob attacked a bus just two blocks from the police station, with police nowhere in sight to keep the peace.

  In light of the violence, protest organizers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) prepared to call a halt to the rides. Then, U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy brokered a deal with officials in Alabama and Mississippi. The state officials promised to provide protection for the riders if local police could arrest protesters for breach of peace. That’s when a group of young activists from the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) volunteered to make the trip to Jackson. The daring mission was undertaken by a new style of activist personified by Diane Nash, who was younger, more insistent, and seemingly fearless in the face of danger. Convinced that postponing defeat meant empowering the opposition, the freedom riders set out down a dangerous road. The eyes of the nation and the world—stunned by the news accounts of the Alabama attacks and shocked that young students would put their lives on the line—were focused on the drama. All eyes were on Mississippi.

  Governor Barnett, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, the Jackson City Police, and the Sovereignty Commission were waiting with a plan. From their point of view, the best course was to avert violence—along with the negative, worldwide press coverage it would spawn. The police planned to break up white crowds before they became mobs, to arrest protesters without brutality, and to charge them with simple breach of peace instead of violation of segregation laws. In all likelihood, the local courts would issue suspended sentences and modest fines, and the freed students would return home with the northern reporters close behind.

  Behind the scenes, the Commission agents would create files on the freedom riders, including their names, addresses, organizational ties, and mug shots. The investigators would run background checks in the riders’ home states in search of information that could be used to discredit the movement as “subversive and Communist.” The files would be shared with law enforcement agencies in other southern states and used to identify repeat offenders. If all went according to plan, the Commission’s propaganda machine would churn out the story that Mississippi whites had not resorted to violence and Mississippi blacks had not joined the protests, thus proving that segregation was key to peaceful race relations.

  Not surprisingly, all did not go according to their plan. Two weeks into the saga, the first wave of riders was taken to court for an arraignment hearing. Judge James Spencer found the students guilty and issued $200 fines and 60-day suspended sentences. At that point, the young and idealistic riders rewrote the script. Determined to keep the spotlight on segregation by “filling the jails to overflowing,” the riders refused to admit their guilt or to pay their fines. The white riders were returned to the relatively modern Jackson City Jail, while black prisoners went to the grim Hinds County Jail. And with dozens of students boarding Jackson-bound buses and trains, the goal of filling the jails looked attainable.

  A month into the stalemate, the state introduced its response to jail overcrowding. Groups of prisoners were herded from their cells and loaded on gray vans with metal seats and barred windows. The vans drove out of town and into the country. The landscape moved from green hills to vast, flat stretches of green and white cotton fields and creepy cypress swamps. Some 140 miles into the trip, the riders looked through the barred windows and glimpsed a frightening scene. Prison inmates in black-and-white-striped garb chopped cotton in the fields under the gaze of guards on horseback with rifles draped over their arms. In the distance
stood the barbed-wire fences and looming guard towers of the maximum security penitentiary at Parchman. The van crawled through the gate and into the inner core of the prison, stopping at the maximum-security unit that housed death row inmates, solitary confinement cells, and the electric chair.

  The students were marched down grim walkways to even darker cell blocks. The men were led to cells adjacent to other inmates; the women were taken to an isolated unit. All were issued prison clothes, a Bible, an aluminum cup, and a toothbrush. For the first two days, the inmates lived in fear of being beaten by the guards—or “screws”—until it became clear that their national media status was assuring them hands-off treatment.

  Confined to the maximum-security unit with only their Bibles to read, the riders passed the time singing freedom songs. The warden and guards—concerned that the soulful melodies and defiant lyrics could inspire other inmates to join in—repeatedly ordered the singers to stop. When the singing continued, the guards began taking away items of clothing, toothbrushes, and mattresses.

  CORE organizer James Farmer recalled one singer’s response: “He said: ‘Come take my mattress. I’ll keep my soul.’ And everybody started singing, ‘Ain’t gunna let no body turn me ’round, turn me ’round, turn me ’round.’”

  One night the guards introduced a new tactic by removing screens from the cell-block windows. Swarms of mosquitoes flowed into the cells. And worse was on the way: “A guard came in and said, ‘Look at all them bugs. We’re gunna have to spray,’” recalled freedom rider David Frankhauser. “Shortly thereafter, we heard what sounded like a large diesel truck pull up outside the cell block. And what looked like a fire hose was passed in through one of the high windows. As the engine fired up outside, we were hit with a powerful spray of DDT. Being trapped in our cells, with no protection, our bodies, and every inch of the cells, were drenched with the eye-stinging, skin-burning insecticide.”

  Five weeks into the summer stalemate, more than 150 freedom riders had been arrested and convicted, and waves of additional buses were en route to Jackson. Northern newspaper accounts of alleged abuses at Parchman prompted demands that independent delegations be allowed to inspect conditions and interview the prisoners. Mississippi officials needed a bold new story to change the headlines.

  Commission publicity director Erle Johnston had headed north in an effort to persuade skeptical audiences that all was returning to normal in Jackson. In late June, he told a gathering at the Rotary Club in Pocatello, Idaho, that the “self-styled” freedom riders had “failed” to reveal a dark side to southern segregation. To the contrary, Johnston claimed, riders had “brought many representatives of the news media into Mississippi who were able to learn firsthand how the two races work and live in harmony.” Looking his audience in the eye, the public relations man claimed that the riders had inadvertently “done the state a service.”

  At about that time, Commission investigator Andy Hopkins began corresponding with R. J. Strickland, chief investigator of the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee. The two were members of a coalition of southern law enforcement investigators who shared information and tactics for fighting “subversion.” Strickland supplied Hopkins—a graduate of the FBI training academy—with a four-page document entitled “Fair Play for Cuba.” It contained the names of 202 people who had allegedly flown to Havana, Cuba, four months earlier. Two names on the list—compiled from flight manifests at Miami International Airport—were those of freedom riders arrested in Jackson. Was their visit to Cuba—an island nation off the coast of Florida and a communist ally of the Soviet Union—proof of a link between the civil rights movement and international communism? Was this the bombshell the state needed to change the headlines?

  On June 29, Brigadier General T. B. Birdsong—director of public safety and founder of the Mississippi Highway Patrol—called a press conference at which he promised to remove any guesswork from the assembled journalists’ reporting by disclosing conclusive proof of a major communist role in planning and directing the Freedom Rides. He revealed that unnamed sources had provided unnamed state investigators with a verified list of 202 names of students who had attended a “Fair Play for Cuba” seminar in Havana the previous February. Birdsong named Kathleen Pleune of Chicago and David Wahlstorm of Madison, Wisconsin, as participants in the Cuban seminar. Both had been arrested as freedom riders in Jackson. “They’re pawns in the hands of the Communists,” Birdsong charged. He then went on to make a series of allegations that went far beyond the known facts. He claimed that the students had attended an intensive workshop on civil disobedience tactics conducted by nine agents of the Soviet Union in Cuba. He stated that the workshop had provided detailed instruction on carrying out “sit-ins and walk-ins and freedom rides”—and that the Russian instructors had “inspired and directed” the entire Freedom Ride movement.

  CORE immediately branded the allegations ridiculous and the press conference an unfounded “smear tactic.” An attorney for one of the students telegraphed Birdsong with a demand for proof that Soviet agents had led a workshop on freedom riding during the Cuban trip. Birdsong backed off. The subsequent reporting made the story relatively clear: The students had gone to Cuba with a leftist group seeking to improve Cuban-American relations, but there were no civil disobedience training sessions led by Soviet agents, and there was no tactical advice on freedom riding. The state’s bid to regain the propaganda edge fizzled as the northern press lost interest. And more freedom riders kept coming.

  Just a week later an even more insidious piece of propaganda hit the newsstands. This one came from black newsman and Commission collaborator Percy Greene. Greene’s Jackson Advocate ran an eight-column headline above his feature story daring Reverend Martin Luther King to join a Freedom Ride to Jackson. The piece predicted that King would be arrested and would face potentially deadly consequences at Parchman. On July 6, 1961, the inflammatory article was gleefully covered by the segregationist Jackson Daily News, which claimed that King had steered clear of the Freedom Rides because he was too busy “caddillacking around the country making speeches and taking bows.”

  Despite the public relations diatribes, the freedom riders continued to arrive at the depots, the police continued to make arrests, the judges continued to issue fines, and the guards kept ordering prisoners to stop singing. The scorecard of arrests and convictions that ran regularly in the Jackson Daily News was no longer a power statement of the state’s ability to punish the “invaders.” Now it was a reminder of the persistence of the protesters and the outside media attention it spawned.

  As events unfolded in Jackson, Washington was applying quiet but persistent power. U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue a regulation specifically barring interstate bus and rail companies from allowing segregation at their stations. Now the companies that ran the bus and train lines were subject to serious fines for allowing segregation to continue. As of September 1, 1961, the “whites only” and “Negroes only” signs at bus and rail depots gradually began to come down. The freedom riders had won a major victory, although it would take more time to fully enforce the anti-segregation law.

  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 Winon
a, 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?”