In the Pines, page 19
In the spring of 1951, before the crepe myrtles that grew all over downtown Prentiss had bloomed, two extraordinary petitions addressed to the “Citizens and Taxpayers of Jefferson Davis County” were filed with the Board of Supervisors. As the local paper of record, the Prentiss Headlight was required to publish them along with all other Jeff Davis County legal notices. In these documents, Black parents, some of whom were NAACP members, called out white officials for their grossly unequal distribution of school funds. The fact that county officials were promising more money in the future “if everything works out” was not good enough. “Our children are suffering now,” D. F. Powell and Ford Hartzog argued. “Not for cafeterias and gymnasiums but for the simple comforts of school life. We have buildings with no window panes, no seats but high benches, not a map or a globe. 2487 white children receive approximately $41,153 for maintenance, per year from taxation which is paid by white and black alike, as compared to about 3100 Negro children [who] receive not one cent.” Technically, these Black residents of the county were still “asking” for help. Their petition and accompanying note appealed to “citizens and taxpayers” for relief. But this approach was not careful or circumspect. It announced that white officials were breaking the law and put them on notice. It was direct.
In the aftermath of Versie Johnson’s lynching, some Black residents of Jeff Davis County founded a civil rights organization and put its membership to work strengthening Black institutions and increasing the number of Black voters. The two goals were intertwined. Black institutions nurtured Black independence, which enabled more people to cast ballots without fear of white retaliation. If enough Black people voted, they could elect a better sheriff.
The year 1951 turned out to be something of a turning point in county history. It was also the year my grandfather ran again for sheriff. When his first term ended in early January 1948, Oury Berry had gone back to running a dairy on the land he and Grace owned close to the Lipsey farm. But in January 1951, a month before he formally announced his candidacy, they sold that property. Two months later, before Oury had started actively campaigning, he and Grace paid $7,500 for the sprawling, one-story wood-frame home where years later I would visit them. The then run-down house at the corner of Second Street and Pearl Avenue dated back to the early days of the town when its double lot a block off Columbia Avenue would have been a fashionable address. By the time they bought it, members of the town elite were building suburban-style homes on the edges of Prentiss. But the house was a short walk from the sheriff’s office in the courthouse.
In his second campaign, Berry made the same pledges he had made when he ran the first time: to stand against corruption, to enforce the laws, including prohibition, and to spend the taxpayers’ money frugally. Again, he listed his qualifications as his family, his faith in God, and his character. But this time he also ran on experience, on what he had done. As he told voters in his announcement for the office on the front page of the Prentiss Headlight, “My record as your former sheriff is open for inspection at all times.” In a sense, my grandfather was not hiding anything. He seemed confident that killing Versie Johnson was not a liability.
As it turned out, he was at least partially right. Oury Berry won the first primary on August 7, 1951, easily. He won the second primary, too, but it was not a landslide. People who had voted for others in the first round seemed to come together around his opponent, Shelby L. Mikell Sr.
It was not clear what attracted so many voters to Mikell, my grandfather’s opponent in the second primary. But one thing stood out in the precinct vote counts: the poll numbers from Mt. Carmel, a community about nine miles northeast of Prentiss. Because Mt. Carmel had once been a white-majority town, it had a polling place. After most of the white people moved to Prentiss to be near the railroad, Mt. Carmel lost its charter. Over the years, Black people bought up the houses, other buildings, and surrounding land, and the former town became a thriving Black settlement. For years, county officials allowed Black people in Mt. Carmel to run a voting precinct there in the general election but did not give them a ballot box for the Democratic primaries. But after Smith v. Allwright, Mt. Carmel residents could not be stopped from voting in the primaries, too.
While Black voters also cast their ballots in other precincts, virtually everyone who went to the polls in Mt. Carmel in 1951 was Black. Tallies from this precinct provided a measure of which candidates Black voters preferred. In the first primary, Oury Berry got 3 votes out of the 110 ballots cast there, while Shelby Mikell got 83, and three of the other four candidates picked up the rest. In the second, Berry got 7 votes in contrast to the 93 earned by his opponent. In Mt. Carmel at least, Black voters did not support my grandfather, and the lynching of Versie Johnson must have been one of the reasons.
Oury Berry still won the second primary, and subsequently the general election, securing a second term as sheriff. But a majority of Jeff Davis residents had always been Black. If local Black folks kept registering and voting, things in Jeff Davis County were going to change.
Over at the Headlight, editors F. A. and Ruth Parker noticed this shift. Endorsing Hugh White for governor ahead of the second primary that would see my grandfather narrowly advance to the general election, they condemned the other leading candidate, Paul Johnson, because of his association with President Truman. White voters, the Parkers warned, should “take all the issues into consideration, including the vote at Mr. Carmel when 103 Negro voters cast their ballots for Paul Johnson with only eleven voting for the other candidates.” If elected governor, Johnson would pay back his supporters by helping force “Harry Truman’s despicable civil rights program,” the very plan laid out in To Secure These Rights, “on a free people. IT MUST NOT HAPPEN HERE!” Two days after the second primary, the Parkers were even more direct, calling Black voters “puppets” and condemning what they called “bloc voting by the Negroes of Jeff Davis County.”
Of course, Black voters were simply doing what white voters had always done. After church, outside at the store, before choir practice, at the family table, and anywhere else they gathered, they talked to one another and shared information as they decided which candidates to support. In the wake of Versie Johnson’s death, increasing numbers of Black residents had been registering to vote and paying the poll tax. And they were determined to have a say in local politics.
During my grandfather’s first years as sheriff, his father Henry Jackson Berry’s behavior had been an embarrassment. My mom told me that Prentiss marshal Curtis Chance had asked her father’s deputies to let him know if H.J. was drinking in public so he could take care of the situation quietly and save my grandfather from having to arrest his own dad. But in early January 1952 just as Oury Berry took the oath of office for the second time, his father died. Even if H.J. had been a liability, he was also Oury’s father, and the loss hurt. My grandfather began his second term as sheriff under his own cloud of grief. And as a man who always did what he understood as his duty, my grandfather now had the added task of looking after his mother, Lula Brady Berry, an educated woman for her generation of rural white southerners and a person who never quite fit into the world in which she had to live.
During my grandfather’s second term as sheriff, the Supreme Court issued their May 17, 1954, decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools, and white people across Mississippi reacted in shock and anger. Mississippi senator James O. Eastland was defiant. “The South will not abide by nor obey this legislative decision by a political court,” he stated baldly. “We will take whatever steps are necessary to retain segregation in education.” In the short run, the Brown decision did not integrate public schools in Jeff Davis County or many other places in the Deep South. What it did instead was inspire a more organized and militant defense of what many white southerners called “our way a life,” the segregationist movement.
About thirty-five miles east of Prentiss in Brookhaven, Thomas Pickens Brady, a lawyer-turned-circuit-court-judge, became a leader of this resistance. Judge Brady was Oury’s cousin—their grandfathers were brothers—and Grace and Oury must have known him. They had bought the farm near town, “the old Brady place,” from his father, also Thomas Brady, and after he died, they paid off their debt to Thomas Pickens Brady.
In a series of “Black Monday” speeches denouncing the Brown decision that he later published as a book, Brady fused legal arguments for states’ rights with racist anthropology as he called on white Americans to eliminate public schools and outlaw the NAACP. He also helped turn the White Citizens’ Council, a group founded in Indianola, Mississippi, about 150 miles northeast of Prentiss, into the leading segregationist organization. Brady’s book, Black Monday, became the movement’s handbook. At their peak, Citizens’ Councils and allied organizations had as many as two hundred and fifty thousand enrolled members. Jeff Davis County residents organized a branch. It met at the courthouse.
No membership lists survived for the Jeff Davis Citizens’ Council, but the Parkers were probably involved as well as my grandparents. I remember my grandfather later denouncing the Klan for its lawlessness, but he would have liked the Citizens’ Council, with its aura of respectability and its claim to be an organization made up of law-abiding citizens. If he joined, he likely did so because he believed in the mission: enforcing segregation laws and customs and preserving white supremacy without resorting to blatant terrorism.
Critics captured its character perfectly when they called it the “country club Klan.” Most of the time but not always, members of local branches of the Citizens’ Council preferred economic pressure and other kinds of bloodless vigilantism to acts of violence. They threatened Black families who tried to vote or to send their kids to white schools with the loss of a job, the recall or denial of a loan, or the refusal to supply credit or goods.
But as the segregationist movement grew more militant, acts of terrorism increased across Mississippi. What Mitchell Gamblin said about white residents of Jeff Davis County and their willingness to murder Black people applied to much of Mississippi. In May 1955, as campaigning began for the August primaries, two shotgun blasts from a passing car killed Reverend George W. Lee, a voting rights activist in Belzoni, Mississippi. Together, Lee and grocery store owner Guy Courts had worked to get Black residents of Humphreys County to pay their poll taxes and register to vote. Ninety-four out of sixteen thousand Black people of voting age there succeeded in completing the process. But that was too many for some white locals. Humphreys County officials said Lee had died in the car wreck that happened after he was shot. When an autopsy found lead pellets in Lee’s neck and jaw, the sheriff suggested they were “fillings from his teeth.”
In August 1955, between the first and second Democratic primaries, the violence only accelerated. Someone shot and killed voting rights activist Lamar Smith in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven. Smith had succeeded in getting about five hundred Black people in Lincoln to register and vote by absentee ballot, and it was possible that some of these people were related to Versie Johnson, since he spent time there growing up and his mother’s family had lived in the area since at least 1870. But the white men who witnessed Smith’s daytime murder would not talk. Despite being present at the courthouse when Smith died and telling people he had seen a white man whom he named “leave the scene of the killing with blood all over him,” the sheriff charged no one. It had nothing to do with voting, but two weeks later two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. When Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River about 180 miles north of Prentiss, the sheriff denied that the corpse belonged to the boy and argued instead that it had been planted as part of an NAACP plot. In November just after the general election, someone shot George Lee’s ally Gus Courts, the only Black person still on the voting rolls in Humphreys County after a harassment campaign drove the others away. Courts survived and fled to Chicago. In Mississippi in the 1950s, white men resisting integration continued to see themselves as the hands of the law. Sheriffs continued to lie.
No voting rights activists died in Jeff Davis County in these years. A key factor was the sheer number of Black voters. Would-be vigilantes and law enforcement officials would have had trouble choosing a target. The Jeff Davis voter rolls at the end of 1954 contained almost thirteen hundred Black names, out of a Black population over twenty-one years of age in 1950 that numbered approximately 3,923. Organizing by NAACP members had played a part in encouraging people to become voters, but so had other networks, like kinship and church membership. Somehow, Circuit Clerk Larkin Davis had allowed not just a few Black people whom white residents approved of but also hundreds of others to register successfully. There were simply too many voters to threaten them all and no clear leaders of the registration effort to kill.
It did not save Versie Johnson, but the separate world Black people had built in Jeff Davis County did offer some protection from the economic threats segregationists used so effectively in other parts of Mississippi like the Delta. The many successful Black farmers in the area were hard to intimidate. The federal government set cotton prices, and the fiber, unlike many agricultural products, did not spoil. Neither did timber. Someone would gin what they grew and buy any second-growth trees they cut, and they could sell any surplus corn, vegetables, and livestock above what their families needed to their Black neighbors. Some Black professionals like public school teachers were vulnerable as government employees. Others like ministers were not.
At the Prentiss Institute, professors and staff were safe, too, as long as Bertha Johnson, who ran the school after her husband died in 1953, did not disapprove of their actions. Because she operated a private institution that got some money from the county to educate Black high school students, Johnson might have been a moderating influence. In 1958, white officials were on good enough terms with her to buy the land where they opened Prentiss’s first Black high school from the Prentiss Institute and to name it J. E. Johnson after her husband. But her son A. L. Johnson, the dean of the Prentiss Institute in the 1950s, was a member of the NAACP. And 1958 and 1963 reports from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency created by the state in 1956, portrayed the Prentiss Institute as a “hot bed” and a “beehive” of NAACP activity.
Because intimidation had failed, Jeff Davis officials tried another strategy, one Citizens’ Councils were advocating across the state in 1955 and 1956. In February 1956, James Daniel, the newly elected circuit clerk, simply voided the county’s voter registration rolls and required everyone to reregister. Black residents like Daniel S. Ross, who had been voting for about five years; Dudley Hawthorn and Genora Holloway, who had been voting for eight to ten years; and even John E. Barnes, who had been voting for forty, suddenly found themselves rejected because they failed to interpret the Mississippi Constitution to Daniel’s satisfaction. The circuit clerk made most of them take the new written test, a provision that voters had to be able to read a passage and write a “reasonable” explanation of it as set out in an amendment the state passed in 1955 to tighten voter restrictions. The new law clearly said that people who had been registered before January 1, 1954, could qualify under the old law, which did not require literacy, making Daniel’s actions illegal. But few understood these details, and Black people who did had little leverage. Daniel could just as easily administer the oral test and say they failed that one as well. In Jeff Davis County, the number of Black voters dropped from over 1,220 in 1954 to about 100 in 1956.
Across Mississippi, Black registration declined from approximately twenty-two thousand in 1954 to about eight thousand in 1956, a tiny fraction of the 497,354 Black people in the state old enough to cast ballots. Activists claimed that at least thirty-one Mississippi counties did not allow any of their Black residents to vote. Aided by state NAACP officials like Medgar Evers, local NAACP chapters urged rejected applicants to respond to these voting roll purges by trying again. In Jeff Davis, members of farm-owning families and people associated with the Prentiss Institute put on their church clothes and drove or caught a ride or walked to Prentiss and made their way down the neat, brick-paved Columbia Avenue to the columned courthouse. Sometimes Daniel said he was too busy and sent them away. Other times he made them wait for hours and then gave them the test and flunked them again. On rare occasions, he actually passed a Black applicant. Rejected applicants noted the date and the time and the names of any witnesses. They were not just trying to get on the voter rolls. They were also gathering evidence.
In 1958, an NAACP legal team led by Constance Baker Motley used affidavits provided by Black residents of Jeff Davis to file Darby v. Daniel, the civil rights organization’s first Mississippi voting rights case. At a time when the threat of segregationist violence and the certainty of economic reprisals kept many Black residents of the state from coming forward, Prentiss NAACP members and their relatives and neighbors somehow found the courage to fight. The lead plaintiff in the case, Reverend H. D. Darby, had become a voter around 1950, soon after he moved to Prentiss so his children could attend high school at the Prentiss Institute. The family lived in a farmhouse on the school property, and Darby occasionally did day labor there, like driving a tractor for the school, while continuing to pastor an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in another county. He was also a member of the Prentiss NAACP.
