The shallow graves of Mississippi

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

There is no substitute for being there.  I have been researching the social history of Mississippi for several months now, but on Monday, September 21, 2009, I toured five towns in north central Mississippi that I have been writing about: Winona, Duck Hill, Grenada, Greenwood and Carrollton.  The experience left me stunned.

My travelling partners were Rev. L. Charles Stovall, a United Methodist pastor from Dallas, and Lola Flowers, mother of Curtis Flowers, the man who has been tried five times for a murder he didn’t commit.

The day began in Winona.  The county jail where civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten half to death in 1963 was demolished long ago and the Trailways depot where Hamer and her companions were arrested is now a strip mall.  There isn’t much of historical value in Winona.  The old courthouse where Hamer and her companions were taken after being beaten was torn down long ago, replaced by the sleek, modern structure where Curtis Flowers has been tried three separate times. (Flowers was also tried in Tupelo and Gulfport).  The first Winona trial ended in a conviction but was overturned because Doug Evans, the District Attorney, illegally barred black residents from the jury.  The next trial featured five (5) black jurors, all of whom voted to acquit Mr. Flowers.  The final trial, held a year ago, also ended in a hung jury.

I’m not trying to convince you that Curtis Flowers is innocent–not today anyway. Today I want to talk about children and the cultural legacies they soak up by a process of osmosis.

In the picture of the Old Montgomery Courthouse you will notice a monument to the fallen heroes of the Confederacy. You see these marble and limestone relics proudly displayed throughout the South. In Mississippi you find Confederate memorials on the grounds of every county courthouse, most of them erected between 1895-and 1915, the period in which the last of the confederate soldiers were shuffling off this mortal coil.

But you won’t find a lot of historical markers in Montgomery County; it’s as if the past has been intentionally stripped away. When the old courthouse was destroyed and a new building erected, the confederate memorial disappeared. It may have been transferred to a cemetary or it may be stored in somebody’s barn (if you know, leave a comment), but it wasn’t taken to the new Montgomery County courthouse.

Perhaps this represents a keen sensitivity to the sensibilities of Montgomery County’s African American residents. If so, the white people of Winona are out of step with the state of Mississippi. In 2001, Mississippi voters were asked to choose between a new-fangled flag designed by a special commission and the old 1894 flag which features the Confederate stars and bars. The result of the referendum was depressingly predictable. In excess of 85% of white residents voted to keep the stars and bars flag while 90% of black voters wanted to be rid of it. Since white voters outnumber black voters two-to-one, the old flag remained. In 1972, four years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the state of Mississippi agreed to name a new holiday in the civil rights leader’s honor.  Just in case somebody might get the wrong idea, the Mississippi legislature decided to honor the blessed memory of Robert E. Lee (the White Marble Man) on the same day.

This decision didn’t sit well with Black opinion leaders. Derrick Johnson of the Mississippi NAACP explained his opposition to the King-Lee linkage this way: “It’s clearly contrary to biblical and Christian principles of loving thy neighbor. That the state would continue to allow this holiday to be celebrated is an affront to close to 40 percent of the population that is African-American. It is a remnant of Mississippi’s segregated past. Could you imagine Israel celebrating Hitler day or Nazi day?”

White Mississippians were offended by this remark. Robert E. Lee is warmly remembered as the nice Confederate who freed his slaves during the War of Northern Aggression and stood for national reconciliation when the shooting started. The fact that Lee (like Abraham Lincoln and almost every other white man of his day) considered black people to be biologically and intellectually inferior to whites, and that he was horrified by the thought of a black man casting a ballot or running for office is beside the point. It is also forgotten that the heroic general held onto his slaves as long as legally possible. The two sons of the South are linked forever (or at least for the immediate future) in Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia. The message isn’t subtle. The January holiday can be used to honor both men or the leader of your choosing.

You won’t find that sentiment in any official documents, of course, but consider this: the state of Mississippi celebrates Confederate Memorial Day each year on the last Monday in April.  All state employees, black, white or indifferent, are given the day off. This too is a sore spot with black Mississippians, but few express their views on the subject too stridently. Support for official white dominance is so institutionalized in Mississippi that anyone opposing its cruel dominion sounds like a bomb-throwing lunatic.

In Mississippi, white is the official color of normal. If you are white your culture is symbolically memorialized and regularly celebrated; if you are a person of color you live with the cynical ambiguity of King-Lee day. If you are black in Mississippi you don’t really exist, or, to put it a bit more gently, your existence is merely tolerated. The real Mississippians are the sons and daughters of the confederacy and no one lets you forget it.

On April 13, 1937, two black men, Roosevelt Townes and ”Bootjack” McDaniels were in the custody of the Montgomery County Sheriff, charged with shooting George Windham, a white merchant in the small community of Duck Hill.  At the conclusion of a court hearing at which the two men entered pleas of not guilty a large white mob (some reports put the number as high as 500) appeared outside the old courthouse.  Sheriff’s deputies had their arms pinned behind their backs, the two defendants were bundled into a waiting school bus and driven to a field near Duck Hill.

According to a newswire report: “After they were seized the mob tortured their victims by searing their flesh with blasts from gasoline blow torches. After thus brutally burning them, the wild mob piled brush high about them, saturated the brush with gasoline, and touched a match to the pyre.” There was a lot more to the lynching, but I will spare you the gruesome details . . . for now.  When this brief summary of the event was read to the House of Representatives even Southern congressmen were horrified. It was widely believed that lynching was a vestige of the past that wouldn’t survive long in the enlightened modern era.  Mississippi had gone 15 months without a lynching prior to 1937.  But the Duck Hill debacle were so horrifying that the House passed America’s first anti-lynching law.

The Senate version of the bill died a few weeks later, killed by a Southern filibuster. Howard Kester, a white man representing the NAACP, arrived in Duck Hill two weeks after the lynching. The charred remains of Townes and McDaniels remained chained to trees until a local pastor managed to have them taken down and buried. The savage torture-slayings had outraged the entire nation to the point that Mississippi residents were writing letters to TIME distancing themselves from the perpetrators. But Kester found that “of the scores of people with whom I talked not a single one greatly deplored the lynching. The citizens of Duck Hill seemed rather well pleased with themselves.”

I related this story to Lola Flowers and Pastor Stovall as we drove through the black end of town looking for someone who could show us the scene of the crime.  No one seemed to know.  The black police chief pointed us the home of the chairman of the Montgomery County NAACP, but he wasn’t home.  As we drove past the town’s white cemetary a small tombstone caught my attention.  The marker stands in memory of Mrs. Virginia Wells, a Duck Hill resident who died in 1937, one month after the town’s infamous lynching.

Finally, we dropped in at the Duck Hill library to see if someone there might be able to assist us.  A friendly woman who looked as if she might have been a young girl in 1937 asked how she could assist me.

 ”This will sound like an odd question,” I began awkwardly, “but I have been doing research on famous lynchings and I keep running across references to what happened in Duck Hill in 1937.”

“I know just what you need,” the woman interjected nervously.  “It’s right here in the back.”  She led me to a small room and pulled out a twenty-page, typewritten document in a vinyl jacket dedicated to notable events in Duck Hill history.  Virtually the entire document, written by an amateur historian from contemporary sources, dealt with the 1937 lynching.

“Is this something folks still talk about?” I asked as I leafed through the account she had given me.

“Oh, no!” the woman replied in horror, “it’s something we want to forget.”

The seventeen-page account of the event that made Duck Hill temporarily famous seventy-two years earlier had very little to say about mobs, bullets, chains or blowtorches.  In fact, the grizzly details were hardly mentioned.  All the emphasis was on the despicable character of Roosevelt Townes.  Readers learned that the man had confessed to at least a dozen crimes committed in the Duck Hill vicinity in addition to the murder in question.

The document failed to mention that these confessions were extracted while Mr. Townes was having his fingers and ears melted away by a blowtorch.

The library account ended with the lengthy confession Townes had allegedly dictated to the Sheriff of Montgomery County–the same man who told state authorities he hadn’t recognized the face of a single face in the mob that spirited his charges away.

In conclusion, the local account of the Duck Hill lynching suggested that, while regrettable, the events of April 13, 1937 represented an effective form of vigilante justice.  Not ideal, by any means, but understandable given the circumstances.

As we drove away from Duck Hill toward Grenada I asked myself how Duck Hill’s black majority felt about the document in the library and why the official narrative was still controlled by the white minority. 

That question should have reasserted itself when we arrived at the courthouse square in Grenada, a town of 15,000 that is divided evenly between black and white residents.   Grenada is the home of Doug Evans, District Attorney for the seven-county 5th district that includes Montgomery County.

As I walked around the courthouse square casually snapping pictures I had no idea that I was standing on hallowed ground.  It was here, in the summer and autumn of 1966, that the black residents of Grenada staged one of the most organized, protracted and heroic direct action campaigns of the civil rights movement.  If, like me, you aren’t familiar with the Grenada Campaign it’s because intensive media coverage of the movement ended with the triumph in Selma, Alabama a year earlier.  Edwin King, one of the heroes of the civil rights struggle in Jackson, stressed the importance of the Grenada movement when Pastor Stovall and I interviewed him the day after our tour.

Returning to Arlington, I read through an excellent chronological summary of the Grenada movement written by Bruce Hartford in 1967.  The story left me dumbfounded.  It all began when James Meredith, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer and a host of other civil rights luminaries, marched southward through Mississippi.  Granada officials played nice, assuring the marchers that Grenada, Mississippi didn’t have a race problem.  As Manager John McEachin explained to a reporter, “All we want is to get these people through town and out of here. Good niggers don’t want anything to do with this march. And there are more good niggers than sorry niggers.”

While the Meredith March passed though Grenada,  mass meetings were held in a local Baptist Church featuring Dr. King’s preaching and the powerful gospel singing of Fannie Lou Hamer.  Inspired by these meetings, local black leaders decided to integrate their community.  When the leading lights had moved south to Winona and Greenwood, local leaders, working with a skeleton crew of SCLC organizers, started marching to the Grenada County courthouse square demanding the right to vote.

Initially, white residents appointed three black registrars to assist their black neighbors.  But with media attention shifting away from Granada, the registrations were tossed out.  Undeterred, the people kept congregating at the church and marching to the courthouse square.  The leaders were mostly adult males, but most of the marchers were women and young people.

It wasn’t long before local whites caught on to the rhythm of the movement.  When black marchers arrived at the square they were confronted by hostile white mobs of up to 1,000 people.  As in Duck Hill twenty-nine years earlier, virtually the entire white community was soon implicated in the grossest forms of injustice.   Confronted by a roiling ocean of fear-based racial hatred, a handful of moderate white leaders made futile gestures toward reconciliation, then fell silent.

As the marches continued through late summer, white violence increased steadily.  Black marchers were beaten with metal pipes, beaten with fists and assaulted with dangerous projectiles as law enforcement stood by grinning.  Then, just as the movement celebrated its 100th march, the school year began and hundreds of black children used the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to enroll at white schools.

If Doug Evans, the man prosecuting Curtis Flowers, was living in Grenada at the time, he would have been of school age.  Every day he would have seen cars driven by black parents pulling up at his school.  He would have seen car windows smashed and drivers assaulted.  He would have witnessed black school children pummelled and kicked as they made their way into the school house only to be verbally and physically assaulted throughout the day by teachers and white students alike.  Consider this brief excerpt from Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge:

High school students Dorothy Allen and Poindexter Harbie crawled screaming through a gauntlet, struck by a man with a tree limb and kicked bloody in the face.  A woman tripped twelve-year-old Richard Sigh with her umbrella, whereupon men with pipes broke Sigh’s leg near the hop and chased him away in a frantic hop.  Others mauled polio victim Emerald Cunningham.  Memphis reporter Charles Goodman noticed a woman draw back, cover her mouth, and repeat to no one as she watched a swirling clump of men whip a pigtailed girl: ‘How can they laugh when they are doing it?’

This horror story played out day after agonizing day without respite.  The white community was determined to protect the color line at any cost.  Governor Paul Johnson sparked local hostility when he sent in reinforcements to assist with crowd control.  Local residents wanted the state troopers to leave town so they could deal with the problem themselves.  “You get the Highway Patrol out of here,” an angry man screamed at a town hall meeting, “and in twenty-four hours there won’t be a nigger left.”  City manager John McEachin, the man who had made the “good nigger-sorry nigger” comment a few months earlier, was fired for allowing the governor to send in more police officers.

While the Grenada campaign was unfolding, Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael were struggling for control of a movement.  While King was in Chicago, Carmichael told an enthusiastic crowd in Greenwood that it was time to burn down every courthouse in the state of Mississippi and to start demanding “Black Power.”  Soon this phrase became the sole interest of white reporters and King’s non-violent movement was losing traction.

Edwin King believes the Meredith March should have focused on the fact that Dr. King had “crossed the Rubicon” by opposing the Viet Nam war and embracing the poverty issue.  Instead, media coverage highlighted internal divisions within the civil rights movement itself.

By the time Martin Luther King returned to Grenada he was physically and emotionally spent.  His speech on September 19th was fiery but King was far past the point of exhaustion.  Since Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t around, Andrew Young summoned Joan Baez to arouse his leader with freedom songs.   Still in the grip of a deep depression, King was able to rise from his bed and continue the fight.

Even the best accounts of the civil rights movement divert attention from Grenada from the time King left in mid-summer to his return in mid-September.  But the heart-rending struggle that unfolded between these dates is the real story.

This dreadful state of affairs dragged on until a federal judge ordered local authorities to protect black students.  Finally, fearing that a show-down with the national guard would be a public relations disaster for Grenada and the State of Mississippi, local officials relented.  By this time, hundreds of protestors had spent time in the hospital and dozens of leaders had been carried off to the notorious Parchman plantation prison and other Mississippi lock-ups.

I understood none of this when I was in Grenada and it has left me eager for a return trip, this time in the company of a larger group led by a local resident who can interpret the history.  I took a picture of the box-like Grenada County courthouse and Doug Evan’s office a few blocks away.  Then I got back in the car and we headed southwest in the direction of Greenwood.

You know you have entered the Mississippi Delta when the Kudzu laden hills suddenly level out into a flat plain.  A few miles later we arrived in the black side of Greenwood.  Amazed by the poverty around me, I left the car to take a few pictures.  A local resident approached me.  “You interested in Robert Johnson and all them?” he asked.

“Did Robert Johnson live in Greenwood?” I asked.

“Hell, yeah,” the man replied.  “Robert Johnson, Honey Boy Edwards, all them old bluesmen lived and played around here.  But you need to be in Baptist Town to see all of that.  Here, I’ll climb in the car with you and show you how to get there.”

Knowing a teachable moment when I see one I complied.  My new friend took us to the Baptist Town Convenience Store and introduced me to the proprietor.

Baptist Town

“You are looking at the poorest neighborhood in America,” the man told me.  “We ain’t proud of it, but there it is.  A few years back I brought Honey Boy Edwards back here to play.  We was driving through Baptist Town and Honey Boy says, ‘Man, this place ain’t changed a lick in the past sixty years.”

I could believe it.  Every building within eyesight was dilapidated to the point of collapse, but it was the look in the faces of the people wandering in and out of the store that told the story.  The owner had a few fuzzy memories of the Greenwood civil rights movement but I doubted many of his younger customers had any coherent appreciation of the sacrifices their grandparent’s generation had made.

We returned to the car and drove a few blocks to the Leflore County courthouse, an impressive structure dominated by a massive Confederate memorial that had been dedicated in 1915.  I circled the building looking for any acknowledgment of the civil rights movement.  Although Greenwood in 65% black, no memorial counterpart to the imposing Confederate Memorial could be found.

A quick driving tour of Greenwood explained why.  We drove through poor and working class neighborhoods without seeing a white face.  Suddenly we were in an upscale older neighborhood dominated by two-story mansions.  We had entered the world of white.  Although Greenwood has elected its fair share of black leaders, the locus of raw political leverage remains unchanged.

After stopping for supper, we motored eastward toward Carroll County.  A few minutes after crossing the county line, the flat road twisted into a steep climb and we were out of the Delta.

Like Montgomery County, Carroll County was sternly resistant to the civil rights onslaught.  While black residents were lining up for voter registration in Greenwood, federal registrars in Carroll County waited four straight days without a single black applicant showing up.  Without outside leadership it was almost impossible for black residents to make a stand against what people were still unapologetically calling ”white supremacy”.

The Carroll County Courthouse

Grenada and Montgomery Counties may have abandoned their old granite courthouses, but the courthouse in Carrollton hasn’t changed significantly since it was built in 1876, the year it was built.   A major remodel in 1992 removed the last vestiges of the bullet holes that riddled the structure back in 1886.

The Carrollton Massacre (remembered locally as the “Carrollton riot”) marked the transition from the Reconstruction period to the Jim Crow era.  Ed and Charley Brown, half-Indian and half-black brothers, had an encounter with a white man named James Liddell.  The molasses the Brown brothers were delivering was spilt and angry words were exchanged.  A short while later, Liddell emerged from a local cafe and approached the Browns again.  Asked why he was still hanging around, Ed Brown told Liddell it was none of his God damned business.  Liddell slapped Brown across the face, a melee erupted and gunfire was exchanged during which Liddell was wounded in the leg.

Two days later, the Brown brothers were arraigned before a judge, accused of assaulting Liddell.  Still viewing themselves as American citizens in the spirit of Reconstruction, the brothers charged Liddell with assaulting them.  The brothers were taken back to a holding cell.  A few days later, a white mob stormed the local lock-up and secured an inmate they took to be Ed Brown.  The man was shot and hanged.  Unfortunately, the lynch victim was a young man named Will McKinney.

Staircase in the Carroll County Courthouse

When a hearing was heard regarding the charges filed against Liddell by the Brown brothers, the courthouse was packed with black spectators.  They had been warned to stay away, but the wonder of seeing a black man filing charges against a white man generated tremendous curiosity.  As the hearing proceeded, a posse of white riders from Liddell’s home in Greenwood dismounted outside the courthouse.  Armed men entered the handsome building, climbing the stairs to second story courtroom and shooting every black person they encountered.  When the men burst into the courtroom panic erupted.  Many black residents jumped out of windows to escape the onslaught.  Some died from the fall; those who survived were gunned down as they lay writhing on the ground.

A grand jury looking into the matter theorized that the armed men must have been goaded into action by gunfire from the Brown brothers.  “The evidence before us goes to show that the Browns were turbulent and desperate half breeds, always ready for a conflict” the grand jury opined.

No one knows how many black people died that day (two dozen would be a modest estimate) but no white residents were injured.  With the passing of time, even local historians were forced to admit that the men from Greenwood had carried out a well organized campaign of terror designed to put the black man back in his place.

You won’t find any reference to any of this on the courthouse square in Carrollton, of course.  The picturesque community appears to have been frozen in time.  Little has changed since that fateful day and the community would make an excellent tourist destination were it not for the incident that created bold headlines across America in 1886.

Seventeen years after the massacre for which the town is famous, a Civil War Memorial, impressive for a poor, underpopulated county, was erected on the northwest corner of courthouse grounds.   As you move clockwise around the monument the dedication unfolds: “To the memory of Carroll’s Confederate soldiers who fought in defense of our constitutional rights from Bethel to Appomattox.  Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.”

By 1903, the “truth” of white supremacy was standing tall again in Carroll County and throughout the South. Given this kind of history it’s not hard to see why the Mississippi NAACP objects to a flag sporting the stars and bars, a cynical marriage between the legacy of Robert E. Lee and the legacy of Martin Luther King, and an annual state holiday dedicated to the glories of the Confederacy.

The Carrollton massacre happened a very long time ago, but it helps to explain why, exactly eighty years later, federal registrars couldn’t get a single black person in Carroll County to register. In the waning days of the 20th century, Mississippi politicians were still gathering in the Carroll County town Black Hawk to curry favor with “conservative” voters and raise money for the County’s all-white private school. But that is another story.

Events have conspired to maintain white power in Mississippi and every aspect of the state culture, including the criminal justice system, has been adversely affected. White residents who were toddlers in 1886 were in the prime of middle age when two men were tortured to death with blowtorches in Duck Hill. Children attending elementary school in 1937 were in their mid-30s when Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten half to death in the Montgomery County Jail. Duck Hill is ten miles north of Winona, the town where Curtis Flowers will go to trial for the sixth time in June; Carrollton is ten miles west. Grenada is ten miles north of Duck Hill. Greenwood is ten miles west of Carrollton. The entire region would fit into a corner of the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex and it shares a common mythology.

Men like Doug Evans and women like Lydia Chassaniol are products of this culture and they behave accordingly. As white Mississippi revels in its confederate mythology innocent men like Curtis Flowers can be convicted without meaningful evidence so long as they appear to fit the “sorry nigger” profile. The criminal justice system was derailed by bigotry in 1886, in 1937, in 1963 and in 1966. In those years, the justice system was a cruel joke and people of color lived outside the law.  When a thoroughly compromised legal system couldn’t adequately defend white interests, vigilante justice came into play.

By the time Curtis Flowers was arrested thirty years after the violence in Grenada the days of overt race baiting were over.  But the shoddy “investigation” of the Tardy murders and the manipulation of vulnerable witnesses in this case shows how little things have changed in cases involving a socially prominent white victim and a low-status black suspect.   The gaudy trappings of white supremacy have been toned down over the years and vigilante justice has all but disappeared; but inside the courtrooms of rural Mississippi the old rules still apply.