Free The Ghosts of Mississippi by Maryanne Vollers Page A

“Great White Race”; “Homo Mongoloideus” — the “yellow man”; and “Homo Africanus” — the Negro. While the first two races made strides in developing civilizations, he said, “the negroid man, like the modern lizard, evolved not.”
    He hammered away at the greatest fear of a self-respecting white supremacist: race mixing, mongrelization, and the defilement of white women. Mongrelization, he pointed out, had caused the destruction of past civilizations: “Whenever and wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock … his blood has been infused with the blood of the negro, the white man, his intellect and culture have died.”
    He said Africans should have been grateful for the opportunity to be slaves. He compared them to well-broken horses, beasts of burden.
    Among his more memorable observations was this: “The loveliest and the purest of God’s creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman and her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl.”
    Naturally Judge Brady called to memory the outrages of the War Between the States and the humiliation of Radical Reconstruction. He warned Washington against pursuing its plans to force integration on the South: “Pour a little coal oil of political expediency and hope of racial amalgamation upon the flickering blaze which you have created and you will start a conflagration in the South which all of Neptune’s mighty ocean cannot quench.”
    As soon as Brady published his speech in booklet form, Beckwith took to the streets of Greenwood to sell copies. His missionary zeal was ignited. The enemy had been identified. The troika of communism, atheism, and integration were now linked in Beckwith’s mind as the root of evil. As he once put it, his “race, color and creed innards got out of sorts.”
    Robert Patterson was another Deltan inspired by Black Monday. Patterson was a beefy red-haired cotton planter from Sunflower County and a local celebrity of sorts. Before he joined the army, he had been a college football star and captain of his Mississippi State team in 1942. He had always held some radical conservative views, and he had quietly contributed anti-Semitic articles to fringe publications. But after he read Black Monday, he decided to devote himself to the cause of fighting integration.
    One night in July Patterson and thirteen other prominent white men got together in an Indianola living room and set up a new organization called the Citizens’ Council. A week later a hundred men attended an open meeting at city hall. Within four years there would be 80,000 paid members in Mississippi and 300,000 in councils across the South.
    It was the end, for a while, of the white southern liberal. Any opposition to segregation was labeled traitorous. The Citizens’ Councils controlled the local, and in some cases state, elections. Their common enemy was the NAACP, the “communist front group” that had brought the lawsuit that threatened the southern way of life.
    As soon as Beckwith heard about the Citizens’ Councils he signed right up. He was a big joiner. On a business resume he compiled thirty years later, Beckwith listed all of his affiliations, starting with the Boy Scouts. Along with his church groups, there was the 4-H Club, Knights of Pythias, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Masons, Knights Templar, Shriners, LeFlore County Hunting and Fishing Association, Greenwood Historical Society, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Sons of the American Revolution (he held state offices in that one), the NRA, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, and the Moose Lodge of Greenwood.
    Yet Byron De La Beckwith would never admit that he had joined the Ku Klux Klan. In later years, after his name was linked with various hate crimes around the South, Beckwith would issue a standard non-denial when asked outright if he was a member: “I’ve been accused of it.” He