Mississippi: Act of Savagery
uncredited writer, Time, 3 March 1967
"A moderate in Natchez," Negro Comedian Dick Gregory once said, "is a white man who hangs a nigger from a low tree." Though Gregory is a master of bitter hyperbole, there was no exaggeration in his description as far as one Wharlest Jackson, 36, was concerned last week. Jackson had the sort of background designed to infuriate Natchez-style moderates, not to mention extremists. He had been treasurer of the Natchez branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had actively participated in a boycott of white stores that followed the bombing of another Natchez N.A.A.C.P. official's car in 1965. Worst of all, he had just accepted a promotion—with a 17¢-an-hour raise—to mixer of chemicals at the Armstrong Rubber Co., a position previously held by whites only.
Finishing his first day on the new job and anxious to hurry home to his five children and ailing wife, Jackson slid behind the wheel of his light truck and switched on the ignition. He had driven only three blocks when a bomb exploded under his seat, sending the truck careening into a telephone pole with enough force to kill him instantly.
Linking Arms. Within hours, Negroes were marching the hilly streets to protest the killing. State N.A.A.C.P. Field Secretary Charles Evers led some 2,000 to watch the changing of shifts at the Armstrong plant, which, he says, is infested with Ku Klux Klansmen. Evers, whose brother Medgar, another civil rights worker, was shot to death in front of his Jackson, Miss., house in 1963, warned whites that the patience of Natchez Negroes was just about exhausted. "Once we learn to hate, they're through," he said. "We can kill more people in one day than they've done in 100 years."
Mississippians know Evers as a man of his word, and Natchez whites seemed to take Jackson's murder more seriously than similar incidents in the past—most notably, the still-unsolved slaying of two young Negroes whose dismembered bodies were dredged from the Mississippi River in 1964. The board of aldermen put up a $25,000 reward for the killers, and Armstrong, which has so far pleaded inability to keep Klansmen off its payroll, chipped in another $10,000. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson called the bombing an "act of savagery which stains the honor of our state."
A few Natchez moderates ventured forth after the bombing to support the hitherto-lonely peacekeeping efforts of Mayor John Nosser, 67, a Lebanese-born immigrant who has the distinction of having had his house bombed by white racists and his small chain of dry-goods stores boycotted by Negroes. At week's end, Nosser, Police Chief J. T. Robinson and Sheriff Odell Anders appeared at a Negro protest rally and took part in a tableau the likes of which Mississippi had not seen before. Linking arms with Negro demonstrators, they sang We Shall Overcome.
Filling the Gap. Despite the new mood of concern in Natchez, however, Mississippi's standards of justice still leave something to be desired. More than a dozen Negroes and civil rights workers have either been murdered or died mysteriously there in the past three years without a single conviction by state courts and, in many cases, without even indictments. Last week the Justice Department, using a combination of old Reconstruction laws and new civil rights measures, none of them truly appropriate for so serious a crime as murder, moved to fill the gap in two of the more notorious cases.
In Jackson, a federal grand jury charged 19 men, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his chief deputy, Cecil Price, with conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three young civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Chancy, 21, who were shot dead near Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964. In a separate indictment, the grand jury charged twelve men with conspiring to "intimidate, threaten, and coerce" Hattiesburg Farmer Vernon Dahmer, who died when his home was fire-bombed last year. One man, Sam H. Bowers Jr., 42, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was named in both indictments. With the exception of Bowers, none of the men could be sentenced to more than ten years in jail.
