August 13, 2026 • 54 mins
In 1964, crosses burned all over Mississippi, signaling a return of the Ku Klux Klan. Their big debut was perfectly timed as a show of support for Byron de la Beckwith.
Sources & Further Reading:
Massengill, Reed (2024). Portrait of a racist: Byron De La Beckwith and the Assassination of Medgar Evers. Univ. of Tennessee Press.
DeLaughter, Bobby (2001). Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case. Scribner.
Mitchell, Jerry (2020). Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. Simon & Schuster.
Vollers, Maryanne (1995). Ghosts of Mississippi. Little Brown & Company.
Sims, Patsy (1978). Stein & Day.
Nelson, Stanley (2016). Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s. Louisiana State University Press.
Dirks, Annelieke. “Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960-1965.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 71–98.
Ball, Howard (2004). Murder in Mississippi. University Press of Kansas.
Hamm, Mark (2017). The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism. Columbia University Press
Biondi, K., and J. Curtis. 2018. “From Structural to Stochastic Violence.” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
Newton, Michael (2010). The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. McFarland & Company, Inc.
Dittmer, John (1994). Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Illinois Press.
Payne, Charles (1995). I’ve Got The Light of Freedom. University of California Press.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/accused-in-1964-mississippi-race-slayings-wrote-hate-letter-1.668898
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media. The call came in late at night.
The reporter assigned to man the overnight desk at the
Jackson Clarion Ledger picked up. These crossburnings are visible evidence
of the reactivation of the invisible empire of the Knights
of the ku Klux Klan. The caller proclaimed he wouldn't
(00:27):
give his name. He was reading a prepared statement, shouting
to make himself heard of the reporter's questions, which he
was ignoring. Between the callers rushed recitation and the reporter's
interruptions to try to get answers, the actual message was lost.
The reporter's notes are just fragments, bits and pieces of
(00:49):
the caller's announcement, something about states rights, fighting communism, preserving
our way of life. And the next weekend it happened again,
another anonymous call, more burning crosses. They burned in Jackson
(01:10):
and Vicksburg, Tylertown and Macomb, in Greenwood and in Chickasaw County.
They burned outside black churches and on courthouse lawns, on roadsides,
and in front yards, over and over again. January February, March,
(01:31):
a late night call from a payphone to the overnight
desk at the Clarion Ledger. The clan wanted the paper
to know where the crosses were burning and who did it.
It wasn't every weekend, but it was awfully close. In
April the call came again. This time, crosses were burning
(01:53):
in sixty four of Mississippi's eighty two counties. Was everywhere,
all at once, and they wanted to make sure everyone
knew about it. In the spring of nineteen sixty four,
crosses burned all over Mississippi. They burned for segregation, they
(02:14):
burned for white supremacy. They burned with hatred. They burned
as a warning. They burned specifically for Byron de La Beckwith.
They'd been lit in his honor. The Klan was claiming
him as their own. I'm Molly Conger, and this is
(02:38):
where the La guys we left off. Last week, just
after the first time, Byron Milla Beckwith was tried for
(03:01):
the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The
jury deadlocked, unable to reach a verdict, and the judge
declared a mistrial. In February of nineteen sixty four. Coincidentally,
depending on who you ask, that's the same date given
for the first official meeting of a newly formed organization
(03:22):
called the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Whether or not the clan exists in a particular place
at any particular times never actually a simple question. The
Klan won't actually tell you. It's a secret, and local
(03:42):
reporting in the South during the mid twentieth century famously
ignores and downplays the existence of clan violence, so looking
for specific acknowledgment of clan activity and contemporary reporting can
be hit or miss. There's the FBI's word on the matter,
but we don't have complete records, and they're piecing together
(04:03):
reports from informants, and between the self serving lies of
klansmen getting paid for information and the agent's own confusion
about various internecine squabbles amongst rival klansmen. It's not always
as simple as believing the official government record. Klansmen lie,
the government lies, Transcription errors, rumors, barroom brags, and hazy
(04:25):
memories get locked in as the official record, and the
details don't always make sense. I'll forgive you if you
didn't believe me when I said a few weeks ago
that there was no organized Ku Klux Klan presence in
the state of Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. It doesn't
sound true, but to the extent that anything like this
(04:47):
can be true, it is. When Byron de Lebequit was
getting obsessed with doing everything in his power to ensure
segregation lasted forever, he didn't have the option to join
in his local KKK. There was no clan Clavern in
his area. He was, however, extremely active in his local
(05:09):
Citizens Council. Even without a meaningful clan presence, there were
still lynch mobs and random acts of vigilanti violence. As
we talked about a few weeks ago, a lot of
the violence and intimidation meet it out by members of
the Citizens Council in Mississippi during the nineteen fifties was
really indistinguishable from what you might think of as clan violence.
(05:33):
Shooting a man on the courthouse steps in broad daylight,
abducting voting rights activists in the dead of night and
driving them way out on some lonely country road in
the dark, shooting through living room windows, setting houses on fire.
That's clan behavior. But those were things the Citizens Council
was doing. But most of the people carrying out these
(05:57):
kinds of acts of violence in Mississippi the nineteen fifty
were not operating within the organizational structure of a Mississippi
based organization that called itself the Ku Klux Klan. But
another butt. I know it's all caveats, but that doesn't
exactly mean that there weren't klansmen. There was no Mississippi Klan,
(06:22):
But that doesn't mean there were no klansmen in Mississippi,
if that makes any sense. They weren't abundant, and they
weren't the primary driver of vigilanti violence, but there were
still klansmen. If you were committed enough to the idea
of being a klansman, you could drive across the border
into Louisiana and swear your oath to the Grand Dragon
of a Louisiana based group called the Original Knights of
(06:45):
the Ku Klux Klan, and some people did. Michael Newton's
book The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi lists a wide
variety of claims for the exact date that the Louisiana
Clan started branching out into Missus Sippy. Marianne Vohlers pegs
the earliest date at nineteen fifty five, but she notes
(07:06):
that those early efforts at expansion were scattered and pretty weak,
and at that earlier date people's attachment to the idea
of the Klan was mostly nostalgic. People wanted to say
they were a clansman because maybe their granddaddy was one
in the twenties, but they weren't really doing much more
than reminiscing. Jack Nelson, a journalist who wrote quite a
(07:29):
bit about the Klan in the nineteen seventies, claimed that
Sam Bawers, the man who would lead the Mississippi Clan
through its most violent years in the mid sixties, actually
joined the Louisiana Clan in nineteen fifty five. The FBI
says that Louisiana group didn't even exist in nineteen fifty
five and didn't expand into mississipp until nineteen sixty three.
(07:49):
The historian in Louisiana says nineteen sixty one. An aging
grand Dragon vaguely recalled that it was probably nineteen sixty,
and you can find a lot of sources that say
nineteen sixty two. Historian John Dittmer pinpoints the moment the
Mississippi Clans split from the Louisiana Clan as very specifically
having happened in Natchez in December of nineteen sixty three.
(08:12):
The point is, there are a lot of answers to
this question, and there's probably some truth to all of
these versions. And there was racial violence in Mississippi, whether
or not there were organized claverns of clansmen, there's no
question about that, whether they had big, pointy white hoods,
or if there was a formal hierarchy operating by the
(08:33):
rules of the Kloran under the guidance of a wizard
or a dragon or whatever goofy make believe shit they're
getting up to. That's not necessarily the most important thing.
At the end of the day. It's all pretty nebulous.
But it is fair to say that a Louisia based
group started generating interest in Mississippi by the early nineteen sixties,
(08:57):
and it becomes a lot less vague in February of
nineteen sixty four. Sifting through these various versions of the timeline,
it's clear that there was a growing clan presence in
Mississippi in nineteen sixty three. By the end of that year,
these little but growing Mississippi chapters of the Louisiana based
(09:20):
clan were splintering off. They wanted their own clan in Mississippi,
and there were enough of them in Mississippi to do it.
And because this Mississippi clan would eventually commit a shocking
amount of organized violence and some of the most memorable
murders of the Civil Rights era, there is a significant
(09:42):
FBI file on the Mississippi White Knights, and according to
the FBI, always with a grain of salt, the very
first meeting of the Mississippi White Knights was on February fifteenth,
nineteen sixty four. Now, obviously Byron Della. Beckwith wasn't at
that meeting in February of nineteen sixty four, he was
(10:05):
in jail. This was just a week after Beckwith's first mistrial,
and two hundred clansmen met in Brookhaven, Mississippi, under the
leadership of Sam Bauers. They voted to formally split from
the Louisiana original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and
they formed their own organization, the White Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Now, like I said, this
(10:27):
is the first official meeting that seems to be generally
agreed upon, but it clearly wasn't the first time they
talked about this. Some prep work had gone into planning
this meeting, and this split had been months in the making.
At this first official meeting, they were able to adopt
their constitution, a forty page document that was already written,
(10:49):
and they ratified some founding documents, including an action plan
with their rules of engagement. Official clan activities were organized
into four categories. Project one was just garden variety harassment.
Project two is crossburning. A local clavern had the authority
(11:12):
to take action on a Project one or a Project
two at their own discretion. They could convene for a
regular meeting of their local clan and plan for things
like that. Anything higher than that would need to be
brought to the Imperial Wizard for state level approval. Project
three was a severe beating or arson, and every single
(11:36):
Project four had to be personally signed off on by
Sam Bawers. Project four was elimination. You needed permission from
the Imperial Wizard to carry out an assassination again Byron
de la Beckwith wasn't in the clan at this time.
(11:57):
He wasn't at that meeting because he was in jail.
Officially speaking Byron de la Beckwith didn't join the Mississippi
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan until after he
got out of jail a few months later in the
summer of nineteen sixty four, after his second mistrial, because,
of course, officially speaking, there was no Mississippi clan for
(12:17):
him to have joined prior to his arrest in June
of nineteen sixty three. Kind of depending on who you believe,
I could lay fifteen books side by side and try
to sort out the exact moment a particular clansman decided
to talk to his buddies about a schism. But I
think for our purposes it's more interesting to look at
(12:40):
the cross burnings. I mean, people say all kinds of things,
but when a fifteen foot cross doused in kerosene is
shooting a tower of flames into the night sky, somebody
writes that down there's a pretty good record of when
and where somebody set a cross on fire. Across burning
(13:02):
is one of the most recognizable symbols of racial terror.
It is a powerful image. The man who struck the
match doesn't need to leave a note. You know what
he meant. It's the calling card to the Ku Klux Klan.
There is no other reason to light a cross on fire,
(13:22):
because it's never meant anything else. There's no ambiguity about
this image. They might try to argue about it being
a continuation of some centuries old ancestral Scottish rite of
war or something like that. I don't care. I don't
care about that, because we know exactly where the modern
iteration of crossburning comes from. It was made up. It's
(13:46):
from a movie. This is not a continuation of their
cultural heritage. They saw it in a movie. The original
post Civil war ku Klux Klan didn't even do it.
Clansmen burned crosses because that's what the klansmen did in
the nineteen fifteen film The Birth of a Nation, which
was an adaptation of a nineteen oh five novel which
(14:07):
I'm sure very few of them read. The second and
third waves of the Ku Klux Klan adopted the practice
of crossburning because they saw it in a movie. At
rallies and ceremonies, large crosses are burned as a ritual,
but the more commonly known practice is their use as
a tool of intimidation. There were a couple of episodes
(14:31):
way back in twenty twenty four about Berry Black. He
was a Pennsylvania klansman who was arrested during a cross
burning ceremony in Virginia, and he took that case all
the way to the Supreme Court. There's some interesting background
in those episodes about the history of cross burning in
the American South from the nineteen fifties onwards. And when
I was researching for those episodes, I found that newspapers
(14:53):
in the fifties and sixties didn't always take crossburning seriously,
but they tend to take note of them. So they
would usually dismiss it as a prank, but it got
written about. It's hard to ignore even if all you
have to say is we're ignoring this. So when I
(15:13):
was thinking about how to sort out what might be
true in our clan timeline in Mississippi, I decided to
look for the cross burnings. The newspapers are full of
stories about cross burnings. Crosses were burning in Alabama and
Louisiana and Indiana and Georgia and Maryland and one in
(15:34):
New York, But no one in Mississippi is writing about
fiery crosses closer to home. It's not just white reporters
ignoring this problem, right. I looked through digitized archives of
The Jackson Advocate, Too, was a newspaper produced by and
four black Mississippians, and even there not seeing a lot
(15:56):
in the way of cross burnings in the early nineteen
sixties until August of nineteen sixty three. Remember putting us
back in our timeline here. Medgar Evers was killed on
June twelfth Byron Della Beckwith was arrested for the murder
on June twenty second. In July he sent off to
a mental hospital by a judge. In August, his lawyers
(16:18):
won the court battle to get him back out, and
he's sitting in jail. In September, he sent his wife
Willie a letter boasting that the clan was forming again
in Mississippi and they wanted him for a member. How
could he know that? And just as he's penning this
letter to his wife bragging about being invited to join
(16:39):
this new clan. The cross burnings are starting slowly, at first,
without much fanfare. A lonely little cross on the side
of a gravel road in Chula, A smoldering cross in Lexington.
The first few times the newspapers noted it almost as
an oddity. There's no sign of any other activity. No
(17:02):
one's taking credit for it. There's no vandalism. It's not
at anybody's house. It's just flames in the night, in
the middle of nowhere. Practice. Maybe because a week after
those first two lonely little crosses, twenty counties saw cross
(17:22):
burnings in one night. In an editorial in the Franklin
County Advocate, the papers editor David Webb wrote, at this
point early in the game, we would like to point
out that vigilante groups only erupt when people have lost
trust and respect and confidence in law enforcement. For months now,
(17:45):
unruly mobs of extreme liberals have been violently advocating the
overthrow of social customs throughout the nation. They've been aided
and abetted by many law enforcement agencies and elected officials,
particularly on the national scene. It's only natural that where
an extremist group begins to make gains, an extremist group
of an opposite viewpoint will wear its head. While the
(18:09):
KKK or some such group might not be pleasant at
a parlor t we must admit they serve a useful purpose.
And we'd like to bet that their percentage of true
Americans is high, and their percentage of pinks is low
and at the time he's writing this editorial, the Clan
(18:30):
has not come forward to take credit for these cross burnings,
But who else could it be? And he says, you know,
it makes perfect sense that the Clan would show back
up right now, the state of Mississippi is being overrun
by communists and outside agitators and people here to stre
up trouble. All these troublesome leftists from up north are
(18:50):
coming down here to register black voters. All these Jews
and communists and race mixers from up north are coming
down here and riling up our minorities. It's the same rhetorically,
keep hearing right, it's an outside agitator. Everything was fine
before these people came here. Of course we have to
(19:10):
defend ourselves. Of course the Klan is back. We need them.
Decades later, documents would surface that revealed that this editor,
David Webb, had a second job. In nineteen sixty three,
in addition to his duties as the editor of the
Franklin County Advocate, he was the publicity director for a
(19:31):
clan front group called Americans for the Preservation of the
White Race. So he's not just guessing that the Klan
did this. You knew it was the Klan because he
was in the clan. When five more crosses were lit
(20:00):
in November, the Jackson Advocate, again that is a black newspaper,
described them as though they thought their readers may not
be familiar with the concept, which leads me to believe
that it wasn't a terribly common thing to see in
that particular time and place. But again, nobody's taking credit yet.
(20:20):
In the fall of nineteen sixty three, it kind of
seems like they're still practicing. They're working on the mechanics,
the construction, the pageantry, and the timing. They're getting ready
for a big debut. Byron Della. Beckwith's murder trial began
on Monday morning, January twenty seventh, nineteen sixty four. The
(20:42):
Saturday before the trial started, a clansmen called the Jackson
Clarion Ledger to formally announce the clan's returned to Mississippi,
taking credit for the ten crosses burning all over Jackson
in the surrounding suburbs. It took days to impanel a
jury for the trial, so it was Friday before attorneys
gave their open statements in the trial, and that night
(21:03):
a klansman called the newspaper in Vicksburg to take credit
for seven burning crosses. So they're not saying we're doing
this for Byron, but the timing seems significant. Right, They've
been working on it for months, But the first time
they call and take credit for this is the day
before the trial starts, and the Friday after the first
(21:25):
week of the trial. On February seventh, the judge declared
a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. A week later, on
February fifteenth, with Byron Della Beckwith still sitting in the
Hines County jail, the Mississippi White Knights officially adopted their constitution,
swearing in more than two hundred founding members. Like I said,
(21:49):
he wasn't there, He wasn't at the meeting. He was
in jail. He wasn't a klansman. The klan is just
signaling their support for his behavior. Right. They don't know
each other. He didn't even get involved with the clan
until after he gets out of jail a few months later.
And there was no plan for him to join before
he went to jail, unless I don't know, unless maybe
(22:13):
there was. It's a nebulous sort of thing, isn't it. Sure?
We know they didn't have a constitution until this February meeting,
But we also know that constitution was authored by a
man named Gordon Lackey, And from what I read about
Gordon Lackey, it's entirely possible it took him six months
to come up with half an idea, which means he
(22:35):
may have already been brainstorming about the best way to
run a qualification before his best friend Byron de la
Beck with assassinated Medgar Evers. Okay, before we go off
the deep end here, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Was it
(22:55):
my intention to wrap up this series weeks ago? Yeah?
I'm clearly trapped here. This is some sort of cosmic punishment.
I have to sort out the history of the nineteen
sixties for some reason. Did I sit down to write
this episode completely convinced that we're gonna get over the
finish line here and we're gonna move on, no matter
how much I have to cut and cram into a
(23:17):
single episode. Yeah, yeah, that was the plan. I feel
like six parts is really pushing it and really testing
your patience here. Would the show make more sense if
they let me do four ten part mini series a
year instead of keeping the show in a weekly production cycle, Yeah,
that will be the dream. But apparently it's hard to
sell ad space for shows that don't run weekly, so
(23:39):
the network won't let me go into my writing cave
for months at a time to writing big chunks like that.
So we're stuck with what we have, and I think
the world around this man is worth exploring. Something about
this political landscape feels so relevant, and we're going to
(23:59):
keep exploring it until we sort it all out. So
if you're still with me on this journey, instead of
getting to the end of the story, I want to
be here for a minute because there's a lot of
intersecting storylines here, and even though we're bogged down in
specific details, understanding the specific here illuminates some more general
(24:22):
ideas about how organized political violence actually works. The question
of Beckwith's contact with an early version of the Mississippi
Clan isn't some nagging detail. It gets to something we
interrogate on this show all the time, networked violence posing
(24:44):
as a lone wolf attack. That's why it matters so
terribly Exactly when somebody got the idea to get a
clan chapter started in Mississippi and our exploration of motives.
Up to this point, I was sort of building an
(25:04):
argument that supports a more stochastic violence theory of the crime.
Nobody told him directly, I need you, Byron de la Beckwith,
to take this thirty six rifle and go to Medgar
Evers's house and shoot him and kill him. Right, we
don't have that specific chain of events and evidence, but
(25:25):
he ended up choosing this particular course of action in
large part because of intense, sustained violent rhetoric encouraging violence
of this general variety. He was inundated with messages dehumanizing
black civil rights activists and encouraging violence against them. There
were thousands of men just like him marinating in this propaganda,
(25:46):
and statistically, one of them was going to take it
as directions. That's sort of the basis of the concept
of stochastic terrorism. It's a concept that has some problems,
but for our purposes here, it's just a theory of
incitement where the person who actually commits the act was
(26:08):
radicalized into it indirectly. They're exposed to constant, intense rhetoric,
typically involving dehumanization of the intended victim group, and this
rhetoric that would lead someone to the conclusion that they
actually get to on their own. No one is specifically
(26:29):
personally coaching them prior to the act. It's not a
bi directional relationship. It is one way communication. It is
someone listening to a radio show and internalizing a message
and deciding to act on it. The term stochastic terrorism
is relatively new. It doesn't show up an academic literature
(26:50):
on terrorism until the early two thousands. Stochasticity as a
concept is morally neutral. In statistics, it just describes some
with a random probability distribution where individual outcomes can't be predicted,
but you can calculate the likelihood of possible outcomes. And
(27:10):
that's why the concept of stochastic terrorism arises not out
of criminology but mathematics and risk management. The first use
of the term was in an article in the Journal
of Risk Finance. Doctor Gordon Wu describes himself as a
catastrophist quote specializing in mathematical aspects of catastrophe insurance risk modeling.
(27:36):
So this isn't a sociological concept, it's math. Doctor Wu
previously worked in risk modeling for other kinds of catastrophes
like natural disasters, but in two thousand and two he
suggested there was a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts
of terrorism and the goal of perpetuating fear through mass
(27:59):
media's coverage of the violence. I think it's worth noting
that two thousand and two is right after two thousand
and one, so it kind of makes sense that someone
whose expertise is not in terrorism would be thinking about
modeling risk of things like terror attacks shortly after the
(28:19):
September eleventh attacks in New York City. A lot of
questionable scholarship about terrorism comes out of the wave of
interest in the topic. After nine to eleven, after Wu's
paper was published, a pseudonymous blogger adopted the term and
redefined it. So Wu is trying to model the risk
of an act of terrorism based on the intensity of
(28:41):
media coverage of previous incidents. The blogger's version isn't about
mathematical modeling. He's using the same term, but now it's
being used as a sort of sociological model of incitement.
That's the definition we're usually talking about today. I'm not
making an actuarial table anything like that. We're talking about
the idea of mass communication as a tool to incite
(29:06):
a particular form of violence intentionally. In the book The
Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, criminologist Mark Hamm defines it
as quote the use of mass media to provoke random
acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but
individually unpredictable. It's just Lewis Beams, leaderless resistance and a
(29:31):
different rapper. It's Tom Metzger talking real loud on his
radio show about the kind of violence somebody should do,
but he's not telling anyone in particular to do anything
in particular. He just might be really impressed if he did.
It is for a more historical example, King Henry the
(29:51):
Second loudly complaining to nobody in particular that he would
love to be rid of that troublesome priest. You know,
it's Donald's Trump's speech at the Ellipse in the morning
of January sixth, telling the crowd that they need to
fight like hell or they won't have a country anymore,
and they need to walk down to the Capitol building
and then sort of stopping there and letting them use
their imaginations. It's just incitement at scale with plausible deniability,
(30:18):
centralized messaging pushed out to followers who don't actually directly
take orders. Most of what I read about stochastic terrorism
is in this extremely modern realm. It is a modern term,
and mass media incitement is much easier in the online age,
(30:38):
so I'm usually seeing the term in connection with the
online neo Nazi accelerationists milieu, these radicalization chambers where people
are using memes and propaganda to push impressionable followers into
carrying out mass shootings, this sort of contagious violence. But
the word terrorism here really locks us into a particular
(31:00):
legal framework, and it's one that can be really limiting,
because when I'm thinking about stochastic terrorism, I'm thinking about
a clan leader trying to incite other clansmen to do
a clan activity, a Nazi chat room full of Nazis,
situations where everyone involved is a non state actor. But
(31:21):
as anthropologist Koarina Beyondi writes, this kind of incitement is
actually an essential element of any repressive regime. Quote. Authoritarian
movements rely on non state partisans to extend violence well
beyond the state in every facet of everyday life. So
(31:43):
I don't know, I think it might be time for
us to abandon the idea of capital t terrorism because
that's sort of defined by action that threatens the state.
To call this stochastic terrorism ignores the degree to which
the exact same style of incitement creates lane old structural
violence at a societal level and state sanctioned vigilanti violence.
(32:07):
Jim Crow would not have worked without state level encouragement
of ordinary citizens engaging in violence and intimidation in support
of state policy. Men like Beckwith were steeped in the
propaganda of organizations like the Citizens Council. That's sort of
a classic stochastic terror setup, right. He's reading hate group
(32:28):
newsletters about a civilization ending danger of integration. He's being
pushed in this direction by this intentionally radicalizing message from
a hate group. But that's not the only factor here.
He lives in a political environment where this kind of
violence is a functional part of the way the state works.
(32:51):
This violence is integral to the project of the state,
So you can't really use the legal framework of terrorism here.
We explored some of the media Beckwith would have been
consuming in the months leading up to the assassination of
Bedgar Evers, and we looked at the evidence that he
was becoming obsessed with the idea that Evers was to
(33:13):
blame for the growing presence of civil rights activists in
Mississippi and the ongoing erosion of legal segregation. And he
wasn't alone in that. Evers was the focal point for
the rage of countless segregationists in Mississippi. FBI agent Tom
Van Riper had spoken to Ever several times before the murder.
(33:35):
When Evers called the FBI to report threats on his life,
it was Ben Riper he often spoke to, and the
agent called Evers a dead man walking, and he believed
that even if Byron de la Beckwith hadn't decided to
shoot Medgar Evers that night, someone else would have. That
just statistically speaking, enough people wanted this man dead, that
(33:58):
he was going to die that year regardless. It was
just that kind of environment, this intense violent rhetoric and
general atmosphere of permissiveness when it comes to extra judicial violence,
that was enough to put that gun in somebody's hand.
Somebody was going to be the statistically predictable outcome in
(34:19):
this stochastic model. That's what the agent is saying here, right.
This is obviously something he said before the term stochastic
terrorism was coined. But that's what he's saying, and I
guess that's reasonable. I mean, I sort of presented that
argument to you in a previous episode, and I am
(34:40):
willing to say that the evidence absolutely supports this as
a possible version of reality. But like so many stories
where we're being asked to believe that a lone wolf
made a completely independent decision to take action all by
himself in connection with nothing in no one, there is
actually some evidence that he was acting on direct orders
(35:02):
from someone else. I still believe that the ambient levels
of incitement to racial violence are high enough in Mississippi
in nineteen sixty three that it was leading people to
commit random acts of interpersonal racial violence, but I don't
think that was enough to explain this assassination. In her
(35:28):
book Ghosts of Mississippi, Marian Vohlers joins the chorus of
sources agreeing that there's no precise answer to the question
of when the Mississippi Clan started to coalesce back into
a meaningful force, but she suggests that the sudden escalation
of organized violent attacks on black Mississippians in the fall
of nineteen sixty two points to the beginning of what
(35:51):
would become the Mississippi White Knights. These attacks came as
a response to the admission of James Meredith at the
University Mississippi. Remember a few weeks ago we talked about
the violent rioting at Ole miss and the fall of
nineteen sixty two, and how that riot was a turning
point for Beckwith. This is less than a year before
(36:12):
he murders Medgar Evers, and he's sitting at home seeing
pictures of the United States Army occupying Oxford, Mississippi, and
it kind of sent him off the deep bend. And
Vallers is pointing to this moment in time, these Oxford
riots in the fall of nineteen sixty two, as the
beginning of a surge of violent activity that seems to
be in retaliation for the desegregation of Ole Miss. One
(36:37):
of the retaliatory attacks she points to us evidence of
nascent clan activity in the aftermath of the Old Miss
riots took place in Beckwith's hometown of Greenwood. Shortly after
James Meredith was successfully enrolled with the help of the
United States Army, other black students attempted to enroll the
University of Mississippi. One of them was Dewey Green, a
(37:01):
young Navy veteran whose whole family was involved in the
voter registration efforts in Greenwood, and in March of nineteen sixty three,
someone fired a shotgun through the front windows of the
Green family home. Dewey's father, George Green, so the shots
came from a car that had followed him home. One
source claims witnesses saw the shooter jump into a waiting
(37:23):
car whose description matched Beckwith's rather distinctive company vehicle. I
don't know where that claim comes from. I'm offering it
to you because it could be very important, but I
can't actually confidently source it. It's presented as established fact
(37:45):
in Michael Newton's history of the Mississippi Clan. But Newton
has this nasty little habit of putting his end notes
at the end of each paragraph, not individual sentences. So
you get to the end of an eight sentence paragraph
and there's just a single number, and you go to
that note, and there are half a dozen different sources,
(38:06):
and you don't know which source goes to which fact
in the paragraph. Tying BACKWI to a prior act of
racial violence, particularly one that involves firing a gun at
a black man in his home. Is kind of an
explosive claim, and I hadn't seen it anywhere else. So
I did track down all of the books in that EndNote,
(38:28):
and I did find where Newton got it from. It
comes from Professor Charles Payne's nineteen ninety five book I've
Got the Light of Freedom, the organizing Tradition of the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle, And for some reason, Pain doesn't cite
it either. His book is actually very well cited. He's
not making baseless allegations. It's a well footnoted book. But
(38:53):
this particular claim is just parked in the notes without
any explanation or source. So I don't know what to
make of that. But it isn't hard to believe that
Byron de la Beckwith's car could have been spotted at
the scene of some racial intimidation and Greenwood in the
spring of nineteen sixty three, because we know he was
(39:15):
doing that, and read Massing Guild's biography of Beckwith, we
see that in the early months of sixty three, just
a few months before the murder, he starts riding around
Greenwood at night, harassing black activists, to the point that
he was well known among organizers with the student Non
(39:35):
Violent Coordinating Committee because he would just roll by them
and photograph them. We know he was actively engaged in
stalking and intimidating activists in Greenwood, and it says he
would do it with a friend mass And Gill's book
doesn't say who that friend was, where they met, what
(39:56):
they had in common, just they harassed black people together.
But flipping through the big fat FBI file in the
Mississippi White Nights, I stumbled on a memo about an
unnamed informants report from a clan meeting. One of the
men listed as being in attendance at the clan meeting
was a Greenwood resident named Gordon Lackey, And in this memo,
(40:20):
the agent explains that he already knows who Gordon Lackey
is because they've spoken before. Lackey was interviewed about Byron
de La Beckwith back when Beckwith was first arrested for
murder in June of nineteen sixty three, and in that interview,
Lackie says that in the spring of nineteen sixty three,
during this period of heightened tensions and frequent demonstrations in Greenwood,
(40:42):
those couple of months there where black businesses were being
burned down, and snake organizers were getting shot at on
a weekly basis. Back then, he and his best friend,
Byron de la Beckwith would have a couple of beers
and then drive around town taking pictures of black CIS
rights activists. They would drive by the snack office and
(41:03):
snap pictures of everybody coming and going, and then they
would show those pictures to their friends. He doesn't say
anymore about why they took those pictures or what kind
of friends they showed them to, and he doesn't admit
to anything more than the pictures. But Gordon Lackey, a
founding member of the Mississippi Clan, is putting himself in
(41:27):
the car with Beckwith harassing black civil rights activists in
Greenwood in March of nineteen sixty three, So, unsourced claim
or not, it may well have been them speeding away
from George Green's house. And if that's the case, we
have Byron Della Beckwith and a klansman firing a gun
(41:50):
at a black man in his house three months before
he killed Metger Evers. So this isn't a random act
of violence. It's a pattern. Now, and not to spoil
where we're going to end up, but Byron dela Bequeth
would later admit that Gordon Lackey was there with him
the night he shot met your efforts. But here in
(42:27):
March of nineteen sixty three where had this sort of
transitional moment. The Citizens Council has sort of straddled the
line between traditional, legitimate political and social organizing and vigilanti violence.
Marian Vohlers describes the Council's violence as more ad hoc
than programmatic. During this period. You know, they've shot a
(42:51):
few people in the face here and there, but for
the most part, their institutional, structural political above board. They
use social and economic pressure with the threat of violence,
and sometimes that violence follows, but mostly they're canceling leases
(43:14):
and calling up loans and firing people. They're putting pressure
on them to keep them from stepping out of line.
They'll still shoot you ivy step two far out of line,
but the clan doesn't work that way. Sam Bowers, White
Knights are all violence. There's no if or when or later.
(43:36):
It's violence. It's the only tool in the toolbox. And
here I think with Byron de la Beckwith and Gordon
Lackey riding around Greenwood, this is the transition point. So
it's factually correct to say Byron Dela beck With was
not in the Mississippi White Knights in the months before
(43:59):
he killed Medgar Ev because there was no such group yet.
But it's also fair to say that he was getting
drunk and riding around at night terrorizing black voting rights
activists with his best friend, the author of the Mississippi
White Knights clan constitution. He was no stranger to this
(44:20):
emerging wave of clan violence, even though it had not
yet officially announced itself, so it's hardly a coincidence. The
clan chose to announce their arrival by burning crosses the
weekend before his trial started, then the weekend after opening arguments,
and then the weekend before the second trial started, and
(44:41):
the weekend that fell in the middle of the second trial,
and the weekend after he was released. And every time
the clan burned these crosses for Byron Dela beck With,
they called the newspaper and let them know who did it.
In March of nineteen sixty four, while Byron delabeqa With
was awaiting his second murder trial, the newly formed Mississippi
(45:04):
White Knights gathered for a statewide meeting. Representatives from every
clavern in the state were there, and Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers issued an order every clavern was to send members
to Jackson to attend Beckweth's second trial. We can't let
him down, he said. They needed to be there to
(45:27):
show their support and their respect because he'd sacrificed something.
During the second trial, the courtroom was packed every day
with klansmen. During the first trial, there had been some
tension because the seating in the courtroom was integrated. Entry
(45:48):
was first come, first serve, and a lot of black
Mississippians showed up to see the trial. But this time around,
the Klansmen got there early and nobody else could get in.
When Beckwith was brought into the courtroom on the first
day of the trial, seventy five klansmen rose to their
feet in unison as a show of respect, something that
(46:08):
Beckwith was so charmed by that he wrote about it
in a letter to his wife. When cross is burned
during the first trial, the governor of Mississippi wasn't concerned.
Governor Johnson was asked about this apparent resurgence of the Klan,
but he changed the subject. He's not worried about the clan.
He's more concerned about the activities of the minorities. There's
(46:33):
no clan anybody can burn across. Maybe a child did it.
He's fresh off the campaign, he's only a few weeks
into his term when he's being asked about the clan.
I wonder when he denied the existence of the clan,
did he know that his campaign communications director was a clansman.
(46:56):
I guess I can't prove that he did. The second trial,
one of those waves of cross burnings was in Nashoba County.
Sheriff Lawrence Rainey said he'd look into it, but he
had a feeling it was done by outsiders who were
looking to disrupt the good race relations enjoyed by all
residents of Nashoba County. There's no racial problems in Nashoba County,
(47:20):
Rainey said. And besides, he already investigated, and there's no
proof there's any clansman in Nashoba County. He checked. This
statement to the local newspaper. Came just a few weeks
before Sheriff Rainey himself was implicated in a clan conspiracy
that ended in the lynching of three young men, and
(47:42):
when Rainy was eventually indicted on federal charges for his
role in the murders. The clan dispatched Byron de la
Beckwith to counsel him. After Beckwith's second mistrial, he was
allowed to go home. The state hadn't decided yet if
they would see a third trial, but in the meantime
he could pay a bond and go back home to Greenwood.
(48:05):
The Citizen's Council of Greenwood welcomed him home with a
big banner hanging from an overpass. But his new friends
in the clan did something even flashier. They lit across
in almost every county in the entire state of Mississippi. Okay,
but maybe that's a coincidence, you're saying. I don't know
why you would say that to me. Surely you trust
(48:28):
me at least a little bit by now, I don't
lie to you. But okay, I'm listening. Maybe the clan
is burning so many crosses at this point that it's
just a coincidence that this massive, state wide, simultaneous crossburning
just happened to be at the same time as another
major development in Byron Della Beckwith's life could be. And
(48:53):
maybe if nothing else of note had happened at the
April nineteen sixty four meeting of the Clan Clavern and
Laurel Mississippi. The informant wouldn't have written this down and
I wouldn't be able to promise you those crosses were
present for Byron de la Beckwith. When the Laurel Clavern
convened days after Beckwith's release, Edgar ray Killen had two
(49:15):
messages for his Clavern from the Imperial Wizard. There were
orders to set across ablaze and celebration for Byron. Of
course that's in the memo, but that wasn't the most
important thing they talked about at that meeting. That wasn't
what was on the Klansman's mind that day. Edgar ray
(49:35):
Killen presided over a contentious meeting the Klansmen and Laurel
wanted to vote on sending a request up the chain
to the Imperial Wizard. In the spring of nineteen sixty four,
Freedom Summer was about to be in full swing. Activists
from all over the country were already working with organizers
(49:56):
in Mississippi for a massive summer long push to register
as many black voters as possible, and some of those
organizers had already been on the ground for months. One
of them, a young social worker from New York City,
had been working with black voters in nearby Meridians since January,
and he had immediately become a focal point for their rage.
(50:20):
I mean, he was from New York City, he was Jewish,
he had a beard like some kind of hippie communist
or something, and he was just so committed to registering
all those black voters. And he was good at it.
He was dedicated to the work, and he was damn
(50:42):
good at what they sent him there to do. And
at that meeting in April of nineteen sixty four, the
Clavern was clamoring to request permission from the Imperial Wizard
to do something about the man they just called Goateee. Sure, okay,
we'll burn those crosses for buy we get it. But
let's vote on doing something about that jew from New York.
(51:06):
And according to the memo documenting the report of the informant,
Edgar ray Killen looked out of the clavern and he said,
no need, we don't need to vote. The clan state
leadership has already approved a Project four. Project four can
(51:26):
only be approved by sam Bowers himself because Project four
is elimination. And so after that meeting in April, the
clansmen in Mississippi did as directed. They dutifully set fire
to cross as across the state to celebrate Beckwith's freedom,
and two months later, a mob of those same clansmen
(51:49):
abducted and murdered Michael Scherner, alongside fellow civil rights activists
James Cheney and Andrew Goodman. The state of Mississippi was
in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The
Hines County prosecutor thought that putting Byron Dela Beckwith back
on trial right now would only make things worse, so
(52:10):
he didn't, and then he never did. When a clan
informant came forward with information about Beckwi's repeated public confessions
to the murder, the FBI buried it because they needed
that informant to help them prosecute these newer, more politically
explosive murders. In nineteen sixty four, the Mississippi Burning murders
(52:35):
derailed the possibility of trying Byron Dela Beckwith for murder
for a third time, and ironically, twenty five years later,
a reporter chasing a story about those murders accidentally turned
up the sealed state records that reopened Beckwith's case and
finally got justice for met your evers. I know we've
(52:57):
been wandering through the wilderness on this story for a
while now, but I'm actually so excited about where it's
going because not only is this a rare story that
has a hero who doesn't need a tragic end, it's
a hero tailor made to appeal to me, specifically, because
the hero of this story is a journalist who is
(53:19):
so committed to reading old government documents that he forced
the state to reopen cold case after cold case, rounding
up and prosecuting the elderly clansmen who'd spent decades thinking
they got away with murder. Weird Little Guys It's a
(53:51):
production of Coolsale Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(54:14):
on the Weird Little Guys subreddite. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
Guys
All Zone Media. The call came in late at night.
The reporter assigned to man the overnight desk at the
Jackson Clarion Ledger picked up. These crossburnings are visible evidence
of the reactivation of the invisible empire of the Knights
of the ku Klux Klan. The caller proclaimed he wouldn't
(00:27):
give his name. He was reading a prepared statement, shouting
to make himself heard of the reporter's questions, which he
was ignoring. Between the callers rushed recitation and the reporter's
interruptions to try to get answers, the actual message was lost.
The reporter's notes are just fragments, bits and pieces of
(00:49):
the caller's announcement, something about states rights, fighting communism, preserving
our way of life. And the next weekend it happened again,
another anonymous call, more burning crosses. They burned in Jackson
(01:10):
and Vicksburg, Tylertown and Macomb, in Greenwood and in Chickasaw County.
They burned outside black churches and on courthouse lawns, on roadsides,
and in front yards, over and over again. January February, March,
(01:31):
a late night call from a payphone to the overnight
desk at the Clarion Ledger. The clan wanted the paper
to know where the crosses were burning and who did it.
It wasn't every weekend, but it was awfully close. In
April the call came again. This time, crosses were burning
(01:53):
in sixty four of Mississippi's eighty two counties. Was everywhere,
all at once, and they wanted to make sure everyone
knew about it. In the spring of nineteen sixty four,
crosses burned all over Mississippi. They burned for segregation, they
(02:14):
burned for white supremacy. They burned with hatred. They burned
as a warning. They burned specifically for Byron de La Beckwith.
They'd been lit in his honor. The Klan was claiming
him as their own. I'm Molly Conger, and this is
(02:38):
where the La guys we left off. Last week, just
after the first time, Byron Milla Beckwith was tried for
(03:01):
the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The
jury deadlocked, unable to reach a verdict, and the judge
declared a mistrial. In February of nineteen sixty four. Coincidentally,
depending on who you ask, that's the same date given
for the first official meeting of a newly formed organization
(03:22):
called the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Whether or not the clan exists in a particular place
at any particular times never actually a simple question. The
Klan won't actually tell you. It's a secret, and local
(03:42):
reporting in the South during the mid twentieth century famously
ignores and downplays the existence of clan violence, so looking
for specific acknowledgment of clan activity and contemporary reporting can
be hit or miss. There's the FBI's word on the matter,
but we don't have complete records, and they're piecing together
(04:03):
reports from informants, and between the self serving lies of
klansmen getting paid for information and the agent's own confusion
about various internecine squabbles amongst rival klansmen. It's not always
as simple as believing the official government record. Klansmen lie,
the government lies, Transcription errors, rumors, barroom brags, and hazy
(04:25):
memories get locked in as the official record, and the
details don't always make sense. I'll forgive you if you
didn't believe me when I said a few weeks ago
that there was no organized Ku Klux Klan presence in
the state of Mississippi in the nineteen fifties. It doesn't
sound true, but to the extent that anything like this
(04:47):
can be true, it is. When Byron de Lebequit was
getting obsessed with doing everything in his power to ensure
segregation lasted forever, he didn't have the option to join
in his local KKK. There was no clan Clavern in
his area. He was, however, extremely active in his local
(05:09):
Citizens Council. Even without a meaningful clan presence, there were
still lynch mobs and random acts of vigilanti violence. As
we talked about a few weeks ago, a lot of
the violence and intimidation meet it out by members of
the Citizens Council in Mississippi during the nineteen fifties was
really indistinguishable from what you might think of as clan violence.
(05:33):
Shooting a man on the courthouse steps in broad daylight,
abducting voting rights activists in the dead of night and
driving them way out on some lonely country road in
the dark, shooting through living room windows, setting houses on fire.
That's clan behavior. But those were things the Citizens Council
was doing. But most of the people carrying out these
(05:57):
kinds of acts of violence in Mississippi the nineteen fifty
were not operating within the organizational structure of a Mississippi
based organization that called itself the Ku Klux Klan. But
another butt. I know it's all caveats, but that doesn't
exactly mean that there weren't klansmen. There was no Mississippi Klan,
(06:22):
But that doesn't mean there were no klansmen in Mississippi,
if that makes any sense. They weren't abundant, and they
weren't the primary driver of vigilanti violence, but there were
still klansmen. If you were committed enough to the idea
of being a klansman, you could drive across the border
into Louisiana and swear your oath to the Grand Dragon
of a Louisiana based group called the Original Knights of
(06:45):
the Ku Klux Klan, and some people did. Michael Newton's
book The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi lists a wide
variety of claims for the exact date that the Louisiana
Clan started branching out into Missus Sippy. Marianne Vohlers pegs
the earliest date at nineteen fifty five, but she notes
(07:06):
that those early efforts at expansion were scattered and pretty weak,
and at that earlier date people's attachment to the idea
of the Klan was mostly nostalgic. People wanted to say
they were a clansman because maybe their granddaddy was one
in the twenties, but they weren't really doing much more
than reminiscing. Jack Nelson, a journalist who wrote quite a
(07:29):
bit about the Klan in the nineteen seventies, claimed that
Sam Bawers, the man who would lead the Mississippi Clan
through its most violent years in the mid sixties, actually
joined the Louisiana Clan in nineteen fifty five. The FBI
says that Louisiana group didn't even exist in nineteen fifty
five and didn't expand into mississipp until nineteen sixty three.
(07:49):
The historian in Louisiana says nineteen sixty one. An aging
grand Dragon vaguely recalled that it was probably nineteen sixty,
and you can find a lot of sources that say
nineteen sixty two. Historian John Dittmer pinpoints the moment the
Mississippi Clans split from the Louisiana Clan as very specifically
having happened in Natchez in December of nineteen sixty three.
(08:12):
The point is, there are a lot of answers to
this question, and there's probably some truth to all of
these versions. And there was racial violence in Mississippi, whether
or not there were organized claverns of clansmen, there's no
question about that, whether they had big, pointy white hoods,
or if there was a formal hierarchy operating by the
(08:33):
rules of the Kloran under the guidance of a wizard
or a dragon or whatever goofy make believe shit they're
getting up to. That's not necessarily the most important thing.
At the end of the day. It's all pretty nebulous.
But it is fair to say that a Louisia based
group started generating interest in Mississippi by the early nineteen sixties,
(08:57):
and it becomes a lot less vague in February of
nineteen sixty four. Sifting through these various versions of the timeline,
it's clear that there was a growing clan presence in
Mississippi in nineteen sixty three. By the end of that year,
these little but growing Mississippi chapters of the Louisiana based
(09:20):
clan were splintering off. They wanted their own clan in Mississippi,
and there were enough of them in Mississippi to do it.
And because this Mississippi clan would eventually commit a shocking
amount of organized violence and some of the most memorable
murders of the Civil Rights era, there is a significant
(09:42):
FBI file on the Mississippi White Knights, and according to
the FBI, always with a grain of salt, the very
first meeting of the Mississippi White Knights was on February fifteenth,
nineteen sixty four. Now, obviously Byron Della. Beckwith wasn't at
that meeting in February of nineteen sixty four, he was
(10:05):
in jail. This was just a week after Beckwith's first mistrial,
and two hundred clansmen met in Brookhaven, Mississippi, under the
leadership of Sam Bauers. They voted to formally split from
the Louisiana original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and
they formed their own organization, the White Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Now, like I said, this
(10:27):
is the first official meeting that seems to be generally
agreed upon, but it clearly wasn't the first time they
talked about this. Some prep work had gone into planning
this meeting, and this split had been months in the making.
At this first official meeting, they were able to adopt
their constitution, a forty page document that was already written,
(10:49):
and they ratified some founding documents, including an action plan
with their rules of engagement. Official clan activities were organized
into four categories. Project one was just garden variety harassment.
Project two is crossburning. A local clavern had the authority
(11:12):
to take action on a Project one or a Project
two at their own discretion. They could convene for a
regular meeting of their local clan and plan for things
like that. Anything higher than that would need to be
brought to the Imperial Wizard for state level approval. Project
three was a severe beating or arson, and every single
(11:36):
Project four had to be personally signed off on by
Sam Bawers. Project four was elimination. You needed permission from
the Imperial Wizard to carry out an assassination again Byron
de la Beckwith wasn't in the clan at this time.
(11:57):
He wasn't at that meeting because he was in jail.
Officially speaking Byron de la Beckwith didn't join the Mississippi
White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan until after he
got out of jail a few months later in the
summer of nineteen sixty four, after his second mistrial, because,
of course, officially speaking, there was no Mississippi clan for
(12:17):
him to have joined prior to his arrest in June
of nineteen sixty three. Kind of depending on who you believe,
I could lay fifteen books side by side and try
to sort out the exact moment a particular clansman decided
to talk to his buddies about a schism. But I
think for our purposes it's more interesting to look at
(12:40):
the cross burnings. I mean, people say all kinds of things,
but when a fifteen foot cross doused in kerosene is
shooting a tower of flames into the night sky, somebody
writes that down there's a pretty good record of when
and where somebody set a cross on fire. Across burning
(13:02):
is one of the most recognizable symbols of racial terror.
It is a powerful image. The man who struck the
match doesn't need to leave a note. You know what
he meant. It's the calling card to the Ku Klux Klan.
There is no other reason to light a cross on fire,
(13:22):
because it's never meant anything else. There's no ambiguity about
this image. They might try to argue about it being
a continuation of some centuries old ancestral Scottish rite of
war or something like that. I don't care. I don't
care about that, because we know exactly where the modern
iteration of crossburning comes from. It was made up. It's
(13:46):
from a movie. This is not a continuation of their
cultural heritage. They saw it in a movie. The original
post Civil war ku Klux Klan didn't even do it.
Clansmen burned crosses because that's what the klansmen did in
the nineteen fifteen film The Birth of a Nation, which
was an adaptation of a nineteen oh five novel which
(14:07):
I'm sure very few of them read. The second and
third waves of the Ku Klux Klan adopted the practice
of crossburning because they saw it in a movie. At
rallies and ceremonies, large crosses are burned as a ritual,
but the more commonly known practice is their use as
a tool of intimidation. There were a couple of episodes
(14:31):
way back in twenty twenty four about Berry Black. He
was a Pennsylvania klansman who was arrested during a cross
burning ceremony in Virginia, and he took that case all
the way to the Supreme Court. There's some interesting background
in those episodes about the history of cross burning in
the American South from the nineteen fifties onwards. And when
I was researching for those episodes, I found that newspapers
(14:53):
in the fifties and sixties didn't always take crossburning seriously,
but they tend to take note of them. So they
would usually dismiss it as a prank, but it got
written about. It's hard to ignore even if all you
have to say is we're ignoring this. So when I
(15:13):
was thinking about how to sort out what might be
true in our clan timeline in Mississippi, I decided to
look for the cross burnings. The newspapers are full of
stories about cross burnings. Crosses were burning in Alabama and
Louisiana and Indiana and Georgia and Maryland and one in
(15:34):
New York, But no one in Mississippi is writing about
fiery crosses closer to home. It's not just white reporters
ignoring this problem, right. I looked through digitized archives of
The Jackson Advocate, Too, was a newspaper produced by and
four black Mississippians, and even there not seeing a lot
(15:56):
in the way of cross burnings in the early nineteen
sixties until August of nineteen sixty three. Remember putting us
back in our timeline here. Medgar Evers was killed on
June twelfth Byron Della Beckwith was arrested for the murder
on June twenty second. In July he sent off to
a mental hospital by a judge. In August, his lawyers
(16:18):
won the court battle to get him back out, and
he's sitting in jail. In September, he sent his wife
Willie a letter boasting that the clan was forming again
in Mississippi and they wanted him for a member. How
could he know that? And just as he's penning this
letter to his wife bragging about being invited to join
(16:39):
this new clan. The cross burnings are starting slowly, at first,
without much fanfare. A lonely little cross on the side
of a gravel road in Chula, A smoldering cross in Lexington.
The first few times the newspapers noted it almost as
an oddity. There's no sign of any other activity. No
(17:02):
one's taking credit for it. There's no vandalism. It's not
at anybody's house. It's just flames in the night, in
the middle of nowhere. Practice. Maybe because a week after
those first two lonely little crosses, twenty counties saw cross
(17:22):
burnings in one night. In an editorial in the Franklin
County Advocate, the papers editor David Webb wrote, at this
point early in the game, we would like to point
out that vigilante groups only erupt when people have lost
trust and respect and confidence in law enforcement. For months now,
(17:45):
unruly mobs of extreme liberals have been violently advocating the
overthrow of social customs throughout the nation. They've been aided
and abetted by many law enforcement agencies and elected officials,
particularly on the national scene. It's only natural that where
an extremist group begins to make gains, an extremist group
of an opposite viewpoint will wear its head. While the
(18:09):
KKK or some such group might not be pleasant at
a parlor t we must admit they serve a useful purpose.
And we'd like to bet that their percentage of true
Americans is high, and their percentage of pinks is low
and at the time he's writing this editorial, the Clan
(18:30):
has not come forward to take credit for these cross burnings,
But who else could it be? And he says, you know,
it makes perfect sense that the Clan would show back
up right now, the state of Mississippi is being overrun
by communists and outside agitators and people here to stre
up trouble. All these troublesome leftists from up north are
(18:50):
coming down here to register black voters. All these Jews
and communists and race mixers from up north are coming
down here and riling up our minorities. It's the same rhetorically,
keep hearing right, it's an outside agitator. Everything was fine
before these people came here. Of course we have to
(19:10):
defend ourselves. Of course the Klan is back. We need them.
Decades later, documents would surface that revealed that this editor,
David Webb, had a second job. In nineteen sixty three,
in addition to his duties as the editor of the
Franklin County Advocate, he was the publicity director for a
(19:31):
clan front group called Americans for the Preservation of the
White Race. So he's not just guessing that the Klan
did this. You knew it was the Klan because he
was in the clan. When five more crosses were lit
(20:00):
in November, the Jackson Advocate, again that is a black newspaper,
described them as though they thought their readers may not
be familiar with the concept, which leads me to believe
that it wasn't a terribly common thing to see in
that particular time and place. But again, nobody's taking credit yet.
(20:20):
In the fall of nineteen sixty three, it kind of
seems like they're still practicing. They're working on the mechanics,
the construction, the pageantry, and the timing. They're getting ready
for a big debut. Byron Della. Beckwith's murder trial began
on Monday morning, January twenty seventh, nineteen sixty four. The
(20:42):
Saturday before the trial started, a clansmen called the Jackson
Clarion Ledger to formally announce the clan's returned to Mississippi,
taking credit for the ten crosses burning all over Jackson
in the surrounding suburbs. It took days to impanel a
jury for the trial, so it was Friday before attorneys
gave their open statements in the trial, and that night
(21:03):
a klansman called the newspaper in Vicksburg to take credit
for seven burning crosses. So they're not saying we're doing
this for Byron, but the timing seems significant. Right, They've
been working on it for months, But the first time
they call and take credit for this is the day
before the trial starts, and the Friday after the first
(21:25):
week of the trial. On February seventh, the judge declared
a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. A week later, on
February fifteenth, with Byron Della Beckwith still sitting in the
Hines County jail, the Mississippi White Knights officially adopted their constitution,
swearing in more than two hundred founding members. Like I said,
(21:49):
he wasn't there, He wasn't at the meeting. He was
in jail. He wasn't a klansman. The klan is just
signaling their support for his behavior. Right. They don't know
each other. He didn't even get involved with the clan
until after he gets out of jail a few months later.
And there was no plan for him to join before
he went to jail, unless I don't know, unless maybe
(22:13):
there was. It's a nebulous sort of thing, isn't it. Sure?
We know they didn't have a constitution until this February meeting,
But we also know that constitution was authored by a
man named Gordon Lackey, And from what I read about
Gordon Lackey, it's entirely possible it took him six months
to come up with half an idea, which means he
(22:35):
may have already been brainstorming about the best way to
run a qualification before his best friend Byron de la
Beck with assassinated Medgar Evers. Okay, before we go off
the deep end here, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Was it
(22:55):
my intention to wrap up this series weeks ago? Yeah?
I'm clearly trapped here. This is some sort of cosmic punishment.
I have to sort out the history of the nineteen
sixties for some reason. Did I sit down to write
this episode completely convinced that we're gonna get over the
finish line here and we're gonna move on, no matter
how much I have to cut and cram into a
(23:17):
single episode. Yeah, yeah, that was the plan. I feel
like six parts is really pushing it and really testing
your patience here. Would the show make more sense if
they let me do four ten part mini series a
year instead of keeping the show in a weekly production cycle, Yeah,
that will be the dream. But apparently it's hard to
sell ad space for shows that don't run weekly, so
(23:39):
the network won't let me go into my writing cave
for months at a time to writing big chunks like that.
So we're stuck with what we have, and I think
the world around this man is worth exploring. Something about
this political landscape feels so relevant, and we're going to
(23:59):
keep exploring it until we sort it all out. So
if you're still with me on this journey, instead of
getting to the end of the story, I want to
be here for a minute because there's a lot of
intersecting storylines here, and even though we're bogged down in
specific details, understanding the specific here illuminates some more general
(24:22):
ideas about how organized political violence actually works. The question
of Beckwith's contact with an early version of the Mississippi
Clan isn't some nagging detail. It gets to something we
interrogate on this show all the time, networked violence posing
(24:44):
as a lone wolf attack. That's why it matters so
terribly Exactly when somebody got the idea to get a
clan chapter started in Mississippi and our exploration of motives.
Up to this point, I was sort of building an
(25:04):
argument that supports a more stochastic violence theory of the crime.
Nobody told him directly, I need you, Byron de la Beckwith,
to take this thirty six rifle and go to Medgar
Evers's house and shoot him and kill him. Right, we
don't have that specific chain of events and evidence, but
(25:25):
he ended up choosing this particular course of action in
large part because of intense, sustained violent rhetoric encouraging violence
of this general variety. He was inundated with messages dehumanizing
black civil rights activists and encouraging violence against them. There
were thousands of men just like him marinating in this propaganda,
(25:46):
and statistically, one of them was going to take it
as directions. That's sort of the basis of the concept
of stochastic terrorism. It's a concept that has some problems,
but for our purposes here, it's just a theory of
incitement where the person who actually commits the act was
(26:08):
radicalized into it indirectly. They're exposed to constant, intense rhetoric,
typically involving dehumanization of the intended victim group, and this
rhetoric that would lead someone to the conclusion that they
actually get to on their own. No one is specifically
(26:29):
personally coaching them prior to the act. It's not a
bi directional relationship. It is one way communication. It is
someone listening to a radio show and internalizing a message
and deciding to act on it. The term stochastic terrorism
is relatively new. It doesn't show up an academic literature
(26:50):
on terrorism until the early two thousands. Stochasticity as a
concept is morally neutral. In statistics, it just describes some
with a random probability distribution where individual outcomes can't be predicted,
but you can calculate the likelihood of possible outcomes. And
(27:10):
that's why the concept of stochastic terrorism arises not out
of criminology but mathematics and risk management. The first use
of the term was in an article in the Journal
of Risk Finance. Doctor Gordon Wu describes himself as a
catastrophist quote specializing in mathematical aspects of catastrophe insurance risk modeling.
(27:36):
So this isn't a sociological concept, it's math. Doctor Wu
previously worked in risk modeling for other kinds of catastrophes
like natural disasters, but in two thousand and two he
suggested there was a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts
of terrorism and the goal of perpetuating fear through mass
(27:59):
media's coverage of the violence. I think it's worth noting
that two thousand and two is right after two thousand
and one, so it kind of makes sense that someone
whose expertise is not in terrorism would be thinking about
modeling risk of things like terror attacks shortly after the
(28:19):
September eleventh attacks in New York City. A lot of
questionable scholarship about terrorism comes out of the wave of
interest in the topic. After nine to eleven, after Wu's
paper was published, a pseudonymous blogger adopted the term and
redefined it. So Wu is trying to model the risk
of an act of terrorism based on the intensity of
(28:41):
media coverage of previous incidents. The blogger's version isn't about
mathematical modeling. He's using the same term, but now it's
being used as a sort of sociological model of incitement.
That's the definition we're usually talking about today. I'm not
making an actuarial table anything like that. We're talking about
the idea of mass communication as a tool to incite
(29:06):
a particular form of violence intentionally. In the book The
Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, criminologist Mark Hamm defines it
as quote the use of mass media to provoke random
acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but
individually unpredictable. It's just Lewis Beams, leaderless resistance and a
(29:31):
different rapper. It's Tom Metzger talking real loud on his
radio show about the kind of violence somebody should do,
but he's not telling anyone in particular to do anything
in particular. He just might be really impressed if he did.
It is for a more historical example, King Henry the
(29:51):
Second loudly complaining to nobody in particular that he would
love to be rid of that troublesome priest. You know,
it's Donald's Trump's speech at the Ellipse in the morning
of January sixth, telling the crowd that they need to
fight like hell or they won't have a country anymore,
and they need to walk down to the Capitol building
and then sort of stopping there and letting them use
their imaginations. It's just incitement at scale with plausible deniability,
(30:18):
centralized messaging pushed out to followers who don't actually directly
take orders. Most of what I read about stochastic terrorism
is in this extremely modern realm. It is a modern term,
and mass media incitement is much easier in the online age,
(30:38):
so I'm usually seeing the term in connection with the
online neo Nazi accelerationists milieu, these radicalization chambers where people
are using memes and propaganda to push impressionable followers into
carrying out mass shootings, this sort of contagious violence. But
the word terrorism here really locks us into a particular
(31:00):
legal framework, and it's one that can be really limiting,
because when I'm thinking about stochastic terrorism, I'm thinking about
a clan leader trying to incite other clansmen to do
a clan activity, a Nazi chat room full of Nazis,
situations where everyone involved is a non state actor. But
(31:21):
as anthropologist Koarina Beyondi writes, this kind of incitement is
actually an essential element of any repressive regime. Quote. Authoritarian
movements rely on non state partisans to extend violence well
beyond the state in every facet of everyday life. So
(31:43):
I don't know, I think it might be time for
us to abandon the idea of capital t terrorism because
that's sort of defined by action that threatens the state.
To call this stochastic terrorism ignores the degree to which
the exact same style of incitement creates lane old structural
violence at a societal level and state sanctioned vigilanti violence.
(32:07):
Jim Crow would not have worked without state level encouragement
of ordinary citizens engaging in violence and intimidation in support
of state policy. Men like Beckwith were steeped in the
propaganda of organizations like the Citizens Council. That's sort of
a classic stochastic terror setup, right. He's reading hate group
(32:28):
newsletters about a civilization ending danger of integration. He's being
pushed in this direction by this intentionally radicalizing message from
a hate group. But that's not the only factor here.
He lives in a political environment where this kind of
violence is a functional part of the way the state works.
(32:51):
This violence is integral to the project of the state,
So you can't really use the legal framework of terrorism here.
We explored some of the media Beckwith would have been
consuming in the months leading up to the assassination of
Bedgar Evers, and we looked at the evidence that he
was becoming obsessed with the idea that Evers was to
(33:13):
blame for the growing presence of civil rights activists in
Mississippi and the ongoing erosion of legal segregation. And he
wasn't alone in that. Evers was the focal point for
the rage of countless segregationists in Mississippi. FBI agent Tom
Van Riper had spoken to Ever several times before the murder.
(33:35):
When Evers called the FBI to report threats on his life,
it was Ben Riper he often spoke to, and the
agent called Evers a dead man walking, and he believed
that even if Byron de la Beckwith hadn't decided to
shoot Medgar Evers that night, someone else would have. That
just statistically speaking, enough people wanted this man dead, that
(33:58):
he was going to die that year regardless. It was
just that kind of environment, this intense violent rhetoric and
general atmosphere of permissiveness when it comes to extra judicial violence,
that was enough to put that gun in somebody's hand.
Somebody was going to be the statistically predictable outcome in
(34:19):
this stochastic model. That's what the agent is saying here, right.
This is obviously something he said before the term stochastic
terrorism was coined. But that's what he's saying, and I
guess that's reasonable. I mean, I sort of presented that
argument to you in a previous episode, and I am
(34:40):
willing to say that the evidence absolutely supports this as
a possible version of reality. But like so many stories
where we're being asked to believe that a lone wolf
made a completely independent decision to take action all by
himself in connection with nothing in no one, there is
actually some evidence that he was acting on direct orders
(35:02):
from someone else. I still believe that the ambient levels
of incitement to racial violence are high enough in Mississippi
in nineteen sixty three that it was leading people to
commit random acts of interpersonal racial violence, but I don't
think that was enough to explain this assassination. In her
(35:28):
book Ghosts of Mississippi, Marian Vohlers joins the chorus of
sources agreeing that there's no precise answer to the question
of when the Mississippi Clan started to coalesce back into
a meaningful force, but she suggests that the sudden escalation
of organized violent attacks on black Mississippians in the fall
of nineteen sixty two points to the beginning of what
(35:51):
would become the Mississippi White Knights. These attacks came as
a response to the admission of James Meredith at the
University Mississippi. Remember a few weeks ago we talked about
the violent rioting at Ole miss and the fall of
nineteen sixty two, and how that riot was a turning
point for Beckwith. This is less than a year before
(36:12):
he murders Medgar Evers, and he's sitting at home seeing
pictures of the United States Army occupying Oxford, Mississippi, and
it kind of sent him off the deep bend. And
Vallers is pointing to this moment in time, these Oxford
riots in the fall of nineteen sixty two, as the
beginning of a surge of violent activity that seems to
be in retaliation for the desegregation of Ole Miss. One
(36:37):
of the retaliatory attacks she points to us evidence of
nascent clan activity in the aftermath of the Old Miss
riots took place in Beckwith's hometown of Greenwood. Shortly after
James Meredith was successfully enrolled with the help of the
United States Army, other black students attempted to enroll the
University of Mississippi. One of them was Dewey Green, a
(37:01):
young Navy veteran whose whole family was involved in the
voter registration efforts in Greenwood, and in March of nineteen sixty three,
someone fired a shotgun through the front windows of the
Green family home. Dewey's father, George Green, so the shots
came from a car that had followed him home. One
source claims witnesses saw the shooter jump into a waiting
(37:23):
car whose description matched Beckwith's rather distinctive company vehicle. I
don't know where that claim comes from. I'm offering it
to you because it could be very important, but I
can't actually confidently source it. It's presented as established fact
(37:45):
in Michael Newton's history of the Mississippi Clan. But Newton
has this nasty little habit of putting his end notes
at the end of each paragraph, not individual sentences. So
you get to the end of an eight sentence paragraph
and there's just a single number, and you go to
that note, and there are half a dozen different sources,
(38:06):
and you don't know which source goes to which fact
in the paragraph. Tying BACKWI to a prior act of
racial violence, particularly one that involves firing a gun at
a black man in his home. Is kind of an
explosive claim, and I hadn't seen it anywhere else. So
I did track down all of the books in that EndNote,
(38:28):
and I did find where Newton got it from. It
comes from Professor Charles Payne's nineteen ninety five book I've
Got the Light of Freedom, the organizing Tradition of the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle, And for some reason, Pain doesn't cite
it either. His book is actually very well cited. He's
not making baseless allegations. It's a well footnoted book. But
(38:53):
this particular claim is just parked in the notes without
any explanation or source. So I don't know what to
make of that. But it isn't hard to believe that
Byron de la Beckwith's car could have been spotted at
the scene of some racial intimidation and Greenwood in the
spring of nineteen sixty three, because we know he was
(39:15):
doing that, and read Massing Guild's biography of Beckwith, we
see that in the early months of sixty three, just
a few months before the murder, he starts riding around
Greenwood at night, harassing black activists, to the point that
he was well known among organizers with the student Non
(39:35):
Violent Coordinating Committee because he would just roll by them
and photograph them. We know he was actively engaged in
stalking and intimidating activists in Greenwood, and it says he
would do it with a friend mass And Gill's book
doesn't say who that friend was, where they met, what
(39:56):
they had in common, just they harassed black people together.
But flipping through the big fat FBI file in the
Mississippi White Nights, I stumbled on a memo about an
unnamed informants report from a clan meeting. One of the
men listed as being in attendance at the clan meeting
was a Greenwood resident named Gordon Lackey, And in this memo,
(40:20):
the agent explains that he already knows who Gordon Lackey
is because they've spoken before. Lackey was interviewed about Byron
de La Beckwith back when Beckwith was first arrested for
murder in June of nineteen sixty three, and in that interview,
Lackie says that in the spring of nineteen sixty three,
during this period of heightened tensions and frequent demonstrations in Greenwood,
(40:42):
those couple of months there where black businesses were being
burned down, and snake organizers were getting shot at on
a weekly basis. Back then, he and his best friend,
Byron de la Beckwith would have a couple of beers
and then drive around town taking pictures of black CIS
rights activists. They would drive by the snack office and
(41:03):
snap pictures of everybody coming and going, and then they
would show those pictures to their friends. He doesn't say
anymore about why they took those pictures or what kind
of friends they showed them to, and he doesn't admit
to anything more than the pictures. But Gordon Lackey, a
founding member of the Mississippi Clan, is putting himself in
(41:27):
the car with Beckwith harassing black civil rights activists in
Greenwood in March of nineteen sixty three, So, unsourced claim
or not, it may well have been them speeding away
from George Green's house. And if that's the case, we
have Byron Della Beckwith and a klansman firing a gun
(41:50):
at a black man in his house three months before
he killed Metger Evers. So this isn't a random act
of violence. It's a pattern. Now, and not to spoil
where we're going to end up, but Byron dela Bequeth
would later admit that Gordon Lackey was there with him
the night he shot met your efforts. But here in
(42:27):
March of nineteen sixty three where had this sort of
transitional moment. The Citizens Council has sort of straddled the
line between traditional, legitimate political and social organizing and vigilanti violence.
Marian Vohlers describes the Council's violence as more ad hoc
than programmatic. During this period. You know, they've shot a
(42:51):
few people in the face here and there, but for
the most part, their institutional, structural political above board. They
use social and economic pressure with the threat of violence,
and sometimes that violence follows, but mostly they're canceling leases
(43:14):
and calling up loans and firing people. They're putting pressure
on them to keep them from stepping out of line.
They'll still shoot you ivy step two far out of line,
but the clan doesn't work that way. Sam Bowers, White
Knights are all violence. There's no if or when or later.
(43:36):
It's violence. It's the only tool in the toolbox. And
here I think with Byron de la Beckwith and Gordon
Lackey riding around Greenwood, this is the transition point. So
it's factually correct to say Byron Dela beck With was
not in the Mississippi White Knights in the months before
(43:59):
he killed Medgar Ev because there was no such group yet.
But it's also fair to say that he was getting
drunk and riding around at night terrorizing black voting rights
activists with his best friend, the author of the Mississippi
White Knights clan constitution. He was no stranger to this
(44:20):
emerging wave of clan violence, even though it had not
yet officially announced itself, so it's hardly a coincidence. The
clan chose to announce their arrival by burning crosses the
weekend before his trial started, then the weekend after opening arguments,
and then the weekend before the second trial started, and
(44:41):
the weekend that fell in the middle of the second trial,
and the weekend after he was released. And every time
the clan burned these crosses for Byron Dela beck With,
they called the newspaper and let them know who did it.
In March of nineteen sixty four, while Byron delabeqa With
was awaiting his second murder trial, the newly formed Mississippi
(45:04):
White Knights gathered for a statewide meeting. Representatives from every
clavern in the state were there, and Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers issued an order every clavern was to send members
to Jackson to attend Beckweth's second trial. We can't let
him down, he said. They needed to be there to
(45:27):
show their support and their respect because he'd sacrificed something.
During the second trial, the courtroom was packed every day
with klansmen. During the first trial, there had been some
tension because the seating in the courtroom was integrated. Entry
(45:48):
was first come, first serve, and a lot of black
Mississippians showed up to see the trial. But this time around,
the Klansmen got there early and nobody else could get in.
When Beckwith was brought into the courtroom on the first
day of the trial, seventy five klansmen rose to their
feet in unison as a show of respect, something that
(46:08):
Beckwith was so charmed by that he wrote about it
in a letter to his wife. When cross is burned
during the first trial, the governor of Mississippi wasn't concerned.
Governor Johnson was asked about this apparent resurgence of the Klan,
but he changed the subject. He's not worried about the clan.
He's more concerned about the activities of the minorities. There's
(46:33):
no clan anybody can burn across. Maybe a child did it.
He's fresh off the campaign, he's only a few weeks
into his term when he's being asked about the clan.
I wonder when he denied the existence of the clan,
did he know that his campaign communications director was a clansman.
(46:56):
I guess I can't prove that he did. The second trial,
one of those waves of cross burnings was in Nashoba County.
Sheriff Lawrence Rainey said he'd look into it, but he
had a feeling it was done by outsiders who were
looking to disrupt the good race relations enjoyed by all
residents of Nashoba County. There's no racial problems in Nashoba County,
(47:20):
Rainey said. And besides, he already investigated, and there's no
proof there's any clansman in Nashoba County. He checked. This
statement to the local newspaper. Came just a few weeks
before Sheriff Rainey himself was implicated in a clan conspiracy
that ended in the lynching of three young men, and
(47:42):
when Rainy was eventually indicted on federal charges for his
role in the murders. The clan dispatched Byron de la
Beckwith to counsel him. After Beckwith's second mistrial, he was
allowed to go home. The state hadn't decided yet if
they would see a third trial, but in the meantime
he could pay a bond and go back home to Greenwood.
(48:05):
The Citizen's Council of Greenwood welcomed him home with a
big banner hanging from an overpass. But his new friends
in the clan did something even flashier. They lit across
in almost every county in the entire state of Mississippi. Okay,
but maybe that's a coincidence, you're saying. I don't know
why you would say that to me. Surely you trust
(48:28):
me at least a little bit by now, I don't
lie to you. But okay, I'm listening. Maybe the clan
is burning so many crosses at this point that it's
just a coincidence that this massive, state wide, simultaneous crossburning
just happened to be at the same time as another
major development in Byron Della Beckwith's life could be. And
(48:53):
maybe if nothing else of note had happened at the
April nineteen sixty four meeting of the Clan Clavern and
Laurel Mississippi. The informant wouldn't have written this down and
I wouldn't be able to promise you those crosses were
present for Byron de la Beckwith. When the Laurel Clavern
convened days after Beckwith's release, Edgar ray Killen had two
(49:15):
messages for his Clavern from the Imperial Wizard. There were
orders to set across ablaze and celebration for Byron. Of
course that's in the memo, but that wasn't the most
important thing they talked about at that meeting. That wasn't
what was on the Klansman's mind that day. Edgar ray
(49:35):
Killen presided over a contentious meeting the Klansmen and Laurel
wanted to vote on sending a request up the chain
to the Imperial Wizard. In the spring of nineteen sixty four,
Freedom Summer was about to be in full swing. Activists
from all over the country were already working with organizers
(49:56):
in Mississippi for a massive summer long push to register
as many black voters as possible, and some of those
organizers had already been on the ground for months. One
of them, a young social worker from New York City,
had been working with black voters in nearby Meridians since January,
and he had immediately become a focal point for their rage.
(50:20):
I mean, he was from New York City, he was Jewish,
he had a beard like some kind of hippie communist
or something, and he was just so committed to registering
all those black voters. And he was good at it.
He was dedicated to the work, and he was damn
(50:42):
good at what they sent him there to do. And
at that meeting in April of nineteen sixty four, the
Clavern was clamoring to request permission from the Imperial Wizard
to do something about the man they just called Goateee. Sure, okay,
we'll burn those crosses for buy we get it. But
let's vote on doing something about that jew from New York.
(51:06):
And according to the memo documenting the report of the informant,
Edgar ray Killen looked out of the clavern and he said,
no need, we don't need to vote. The clan state
leadership has already approved a Project four. Project four can
(51:26):
only be approved by sam Bowers himself because Project four
is elimination. And so after that meeting in April, the
clansmen in Mississippi did as directed. They dutifully set fire
to cross as across the state to celebrate Beckwith's freedom,
and two months later, a mob of those same clansmen
(51:49):
abducted and murdered Michael Scherner, alongside fellow civil rights activists
James Cheney and Andrew Goodman. The state of Mississippi was
in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The
Hines County prosecutor thought that putting Byron Dela Beckwith back
on trial right now would only make things worse, so
(52:10):
he didn't, and then he never did. When a clan
informant came forward with information about Beckwi's repeated public confessions
to the murder, the FBI buried it because they needed
that informant to help them prosecute these newer, more politically
explosive murders. In nineteen sixty four, the Mississippi Burning murders
(52:35):
derailed the possibility of trying Byron Dela Beckwith for murder
for a third time, and ironically, twenty five years later,
a reporter chasing a story about those murders accidentally turned
up the sealed state records that reopened Beckwith's case and
finally got justice for met your evers. I know we've
(52:57):
been wandering through the wilderness on this story for a
while now, but I'm actually so excited about where it's
going because not only is this a rare story that
has a hero who doesn't need a tragic end, it's
a hero tailor made to appeal to me, specifically, because
the hero of this story is a journalist who is
(53:19):
so committed to reading old government documents that he forced
the state to reopen cold case after cold case, rounding
up and prosecuting the elderly clansmen who'd spent decades thinking
they got away with murder. Weird Little Guys It's a
(53:51):
production of Coolsale Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(54:14):
on the Weird Little Guys subreddite. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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