In October, I was in Mississippi again, following leads in my investigation of the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, MS.
Driving home from the swing shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS, Walker was ambushed by Klansmen, who stopped his car on a deserted road and blew his face off with shotguns in the dark of night. He never made it home to his wife and five children. He was 37 years old.
The Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol and the FBI investigated for nine months and identified numerous suspects—including two who were recommended for arrest—but no one was ever charged.
This post works around the edges of the story to convey a little of what it’s like to conduct a real-time investigation of decades-old events. I’ll be publishing an in-depth article about the case soon.
The Tip
“One of my cousins, who still lives in Woodville, told me Emma’s in Centreville,” came the excited voice over the phone. “She just opened up a club there.”
There are two towns in Wilkinson County, MS—Woodville, which is the county seat, and Centreville, which is 15 miles east of there.
The caller was one of Clifton Walker’s nephews. I had just met and interviewed him for the first time the day before in Louisiana. In 1964 he and his family lived on the same 87 acre family plot of land as Walker and his family.
This was big. 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents said Emma, a black cook at the truck stop where Walker’s murder was allegedly planned, had knowledge crucial to solving the case. I had found subjects in the documents and confirmed others dead, but I had nothing on Emma, past or present.
“Did your cousin say the name of the club or where it is?” I asked Walker’s nephew.
“No,” he replied, “she didn’t mention that.”
Centreville is a small town of 1500 people. Finding a club that just opened up there didn’t seem daunting. The town is 45 miles from the hotel where I was staying in Natchez. I got into my rental car and drove there.
Main Street in Centreville is about eight blocks long. I parked my car near the western end, got out and started walking east. After a few blocks, I passed a small group of young black men near the corner of West Park Street and noticed a little place down that road that looked like a bar. A number of people were standing around outside. Was that Emma’s “club”?
After another block, I came to the Camp Van Dorn World War II Museum—the tall, box shaped, single-story brick building might have once been a bank or post office; the brown paint looked newer than the paint on any of the other buildings. Camp Van Dorn was an army base that operated in Centreville from 1942-1947.
It wouldn’t take long in such a small town for rumors about my work to spread widely. Maybe inside the museum I could get into a conversation that would reveal what I needed to know without asking direct questions about Emma.
The door was locked. The museum closed at 4:00 pm, and it was already after 5:00. I turned around and started walking back in the direction of my car and tried to come up with Plan B. One of the guys from the street corner was now standing across the street from me.
He called out: “What’re you looking for?”
His name was Robert. I had my camera over my shoulder. I said I was from Boston.
“Boston, Massachusetts?” he asked, “where they have whales and shit?”
Robert suggested beers; I assented, thinking we might go to the place on West Park, but he took me down the block to McKey’s Grocery.
“What kind of beer you drink?” he asked. “I drink Bud Light.”
“That’s fine. Hey, it’s on me,” I said, giving him a 20, “just give me the change.”
He came back a few minutes later with two 24 oz Bud Light cans.
“Seventeen dollars and three cents. Let me hold some of that for you,” Robert offered. “I’ll take you out to Camp Van Dorn and show you underground bomb bunkers, old torpedos and shit like that. You might take a few pictures of me standing in a cave.“
“Thanks,” I answered. “Maybe if I make it back here, but I need to get back to Natchez soon.”
We walked another block, crossed the street and walked a few feet down West Park and sat down on a stoop in front of an old pair of forest green double-doors.
His friends started coming by.
“This guy is a photographer from Boston,” Robert said.
Robert grabbed one of his buddies and started posing and flashing gang signs.
“Snap me. Don’t forget to snap me.”
One guy pulled off his shirt to show off his tattoos from prison.
“You make sure you take this shit back to Boston, Massachusetts.”
“What kind of white girls you got up there in Boston? They freaky?”
I gestured towards the bar down the block. “How long has this place been around?”
“A long time. Years.”
I snapped more photos of Robert’s friends.
Robert leaned over to me, saying, “They see you sitting here with me, so you’re cool. Why don’t you let me hold that 10 for you?”
It was getting dusky and it was time to go.
At the street corner one of the guys started asking me for $5 for a pack of t-shirts.
I thought about where else I could ask around about Emma’s club, but it was definitely time to go.
I heard them calling out as I walked back to the car. I didn’t turn around. I got into the car and drove down a side street to weave my way back to Highway 24.
I called Walker’s nephew from the car and told him I didn’t find Emma’s place.
The Source
In the morning, I drove to the Natchez Coffee House, got some breakfast, used the wifi and sorted through some of my photographs. At around 11:00 am, I went out to my car to call the Woodville cousin who was the source of the information that Emma had a club. Her mother, now deceased, was another of Clifton Walker’s sisters. All of Walker’s 10 siblings are dead.
“Why did he go and run his mouth off like that without knowing the facts?”
She was exasperated.
“Emma opened a new club there. But it was twenty-five years ago,” she said. “I was a little girl when I heard it. I went to Centreville with my mother. Emma walked past us in the store we were shopping in. Mama said, ‘if it wasn’t for that woman, my brother would still be alive.’”
“Is Emma still there? Is she alive?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
It was a 25-year-old tip.
Return to Centreville
I decided to visit the office of Centreville Chief of Police Jimmy Ray Reese.
“It was over him either using the white restrooms or drinking out of the white water fountain” at International Paper, Chief Reese told me.
Reese said he knew all about the Walker case. He said a number of things I hadn’t heard others say before.
“Back in those days they had the signs, you know. He’d been told don’t do one or the other. And apparently he did and he was found shot with buckshot. Something like 250 holes were found in his car. I think a tree might have been cut across the road and he might have gotten out to check on the tree and they shot him.”
I told him about Emma.
“Yeah I know her,” he said.
“She still around?” I asked.
“Yup,” he replied, “I talked to Emma last week. She was involved?”
It was no longer dated hearsay. Emma was alive.
“She’s mentioned in the documents as having knowledge,” I explained, trying to not speak too excitedly.
“I’ve been in law enforcement in this town 33 years, 34 years in January. She’s been here ever since then,” Reese said. “She ran a big night club. I know her quite well, and we always got along good.”
“When she ran that juke, I was the deputy and we had a lot dealings,” Reese continued. “A lot of them at these jukes don’t like to tell you who was fighting, but she’d always point em out to me and have em arrested and try to stop things. She tried to run a pretty good place. She had a lot of pull back in them days.”
I finally met Emma the next morning. She was 81 years old, tall, even as she bent to use her cane. She had small, braided pigtails pinned tightly behind her ears. She was getting over the flu and was wearing a white, terrycloth robe. Her recollections comported with details in the 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents.
“They come down there and they questioned me,” she said. “They knocked on the door, I answered the door and they just pushed the door on over.”
After the murder she was living in Louisiana.
“They brought me big pictures. He was laying there with blood, he was full of blood and I didn’t look at them cause it was horrible.”
She clearly had not forgotten it.
Did she have information crucial to my investigation? She sure didn’t think so, but that remains to be seen.
(Cross-posted on The Civil Rights Cold Case Project blog.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 16, 2009 at 12:25 am
You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 2, 2008 at 3:12 pm
“You have to come here… you just can’t understand unless you see it… please come,” Gayle Tart said to me. Kermit Moore, an organizer from the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, had referred me to Tart, an African-American attorney in Gulfport, for a perspective on Hurricane Katrina’s impact in Mississippi.
Her urgency was persuasive. In late January, after I had traveled around the Gulf Coast region for a week, I met Tart in a private home in Gulfport. “Now we can talk,” she said. “Until you saw what I saw, I couldn’t talk to you. You had no way of understanding.”
Tart was right.
Two things I could not understand from where I sat in Boston were the true extent of Katrina’s geographic reach in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—wiping out an entire region of the country—and the scale of human costs, compounded by government policies, local, state, and federal.
Even before the trip, I knew something wasn’t right about the media’s coverage of Mississippi. I heard entire towns were wiped out, but I didn’t hear anything about African American communities, even though Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans in the United States. Even along the Gulf Coast, one of the whitest parts of the state, there are many heavily African-American areas. For instance, Gulfport, the second largest city in the state, is one-third African American; parts of the city are over 90% African American. But Katrina’s impact on African-American communities on the Mississippi coast was virtually absent from the news.
On October 11, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced the formation of his Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal. “The Coast and South Mississippi will decide their own destiny,” Barbour said, “but with strong support from the Commission, our Congressional delegation, state officials and many others.”
But whom, exactly, will government support? “It took some seven weeks after that commission was convened to even have a committee on housing, even though housing was the main thing the goddamn storm knocked out,” noted Derrick Evans, founder and director of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, an innovative nonprofit community development corporation in the historic African-American settlement, now part of Gulfport. “They quickly fast-tracked legislation to allow the casinos to be rebuilt on land so that the casino companies and operators wouldn’t abandon the Gulf Coast. An opportunity was missed to also require those folks, when they rebuild, to pay into an affordable housing trust fund, like the hotels do in Boston.”
To travel through the Gulf Coast region is to move through a twilight zone where thousands of people are in limbo, with no sense of their future. In contrast to the damage Katrina brought in New Orleans, the storm was largely color-blind in its immediate destruction of Mississippi. Like New Orleans, however, there are racial and economic dimensions to everything in the aftermath—from the availability of resources for relief and cleanup to reconstruction plans.
“On September 29, 2005, four weeks after the storm, after weeks of begging FEMA and a visit to Washington, D.C., to get congressional support, a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center finally arrived in East Biloxi,” said Ward 2 City Councilor Bill Stallworth, speaking before Congress last December. “That same week, the Red Cross set up an assistance center.”
“In emergency room triage, you attend to the person with their arm hanging off, not the one with the splinter,” Stallworth continued. “The Red Cross and FEMA seem to have a different mindset. The areas of Biloxi that were not as hard hit received a rapid response, while a good three and half weeks past the storm, we were still awaiting assistance.”
“We could see other areas with lights, and we didn’t have lights,” recalled an African-American accountant in Gulfport, Sam Arnold, who is currently a community organizer with International Relief and Development. “We were like two or three weeks in, and we could see the main highway [49], since our community is only two blocks off the highway. The businesses on 49 had lights, and we didn’t have lights. And you know, you really can’t function without electricity.”
The immediate housing crisis for storm survivors is translating into land grabs in low-income neighborhoods. Most widely at risk are African-American neighborhoods, many of them of historic significance, though not widely recognized as such.
(Read the rest.)
The online version is currently no-frills, without any of the images that appear in the magazine. I’ve uploaded a PDF offset of Gone to Mississippi [2.2 MB], in case you’d like to see it.
The image, above, appears on the opening pages of my article. Go here to see it large.
It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 10, 2006 at 11:03 pm
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