From Civil Rights Murders to Confederate Monuments

Chapter 5 Exorcising the Ghosts of the Past: From Civil Rights Murders to Confederate Monuments

William Faulkner, the legendary Mississippi-bred writer who wrestled in his novels with the tortured legacies of the South, famously noted that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” Recognizing the absence of power and privilege in Faulkner’s formulation, James Baldwin’s searing indictment of Faulkner’s fail- ure to “exorcise a history which is also a curse” further asserts that the victims of history cannot “accept that history’s arrogant and unjust judgment” (Bald- win 1998: 381). Contesting the curse embedded in the South’s haunted past, whether through the re-trials of the murderers of civil rights activists or the deconstruction of Confederate monuments, entails both a re-framing of that past and a confrontation with the ghosts of that past. Such hauntings are, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, intimately connected to “the structure of every hegemony” (Derrida 1994: 37). In this case, the focus of this chapter will be on a white hegemony that inscribed in the law, public acts, and public spaces the arrogance and injustices of structural racism. When Edgar Ray Killen died in prison on January 11, 2018, just a few days short of his ninety-third birthday, it seemingly ended the chapter on the noto- rious Klan murders of civil rights activists in Mississippi during the 1960s. Con- victed of the planning and participation in the murders of James Chaney, An- drew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner in June 1964, Killen was the last of those white terrorists and murderers who died in prison. Preceding him on November 5, 2006 was Sam Bowers, imprisoned for the firebombing and sub sequent murder of Vernon Dahmer in January 1966. Also, dying in prison on January 21, 2001 after his long-awaited conviction for the assassination of Med- gar Evers in June 1963 was Byron De La Beckwith. It took years after the crimes each committed to prosecute them successfully and send them to prison (Ro- mano 2014: 9–12). In the aftermath of the 1994 conviction of De La Beckwith, the Atlanta Constitution opined, “an evil ghost has been exorcised, an ugly chapter has been closed, and Mississippi’s changes for the better had been confirmed” (quoted in Romano 2014: 143). However, while a chapter might have been closed, there is still the book on white supremacy that haunts not just Mississippi but also the whole national experience, especially in relationship to racial injustice. By examining in some detail the murder of Medgar Evers and the trials of Byron De La Beckwith, one

From Civil Rights Murders to Confederate Monuments 69 might be able to comprehend not only the weaponized whiteness of the past, but also how white identity politics, defeated finally in one era, can, nonethe- less, be resurrected to haunt the living in the present. Indeed, as the legendary leader of the Birmingham civil rights movement, Fred Shuttlesworth, asserted, “If you don’t tell it like it was, it can never be as it ought to be” (quoted in Ro- mano 2014: 183). Indeed, the struggle to achieve racial justice requires not only prosecuting the past criminal actions of white supremacists, but also contend- ing with the persistence of the injustices of white identity politics. Hence, for Shuttlesworth and other racial justice activists, “refusing to recognize the legacies of past racial practices in the present (would be) another manifestation of racism” (Romano 2014: 184–185). Certainly, the re-trials of those individuals who murdered civil rights advo- cates from the 1960s opened the possibility for a much more radical examina- tion of institutional racism. After the October 1992 hearing before a Mississippi court to dismiss the trial against Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, his long-suffering and eloquent widow, Myrlie Evers, defended the need to go forward with the trial. “We have to settle those dastardly acts of old,” she said. “If we don’t, we will live with ghosts that will haunt us forever” (quoted in Vollers 1995: 321). The Beckwith trial and eventual conviction in 1994 initiated a period of attempting to bring to justice those who plotted and carried out high-profile murders of civil rights activists. Ac- cording to the Southern Poverty Law Center, close to 22 murder cases have been re-opened in the South since 1989, resulting in 25 arrests and 16 convic- tions. The three most significant cases (Beckwith, Bowers, and Killen) have been part of a decade long (1994–2005) effort to re-try those murder cases and achieve what the legal scholar, Margaret Russell calls “retrospective justice” (Russell 2003: 1225–1268). In effect, the legal hauntings of these cases, especially for the families of the victims, required judicial restitution if not racial reconciliation with the past.1 What this first part of Chapter 5 intends to explore, if not exorcise, are those ghosts of white supremacy that continue to haunt us as we attempt to reformu- late the hegemonic ordering of race in the United States, especially the trans- formation and persistence of white supremacy and white identity politics. I intend to focus on the murder of Medgar Evers and the legal and racial hauntings that are attached to his murder, and the eventual conviction of his mur- derer, Byron De La Beckwith in 1994, after two mistrials in 1963 and 1964. I want to examine briefly the historical context of the civil rights movement that

1 As of 2014 an account of those men sent to prison for racially motivated murders during the 1950s and 1960s was more than twenty. See Romano 2014: 2.