Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love Page 4

  My family had retained Thomas Haas, a former assistant U.S. attorney from Mobile, to defend me. Tom was a good man and a fine lawyer. But I believed that his positions on race and civil rights issues were entirely too moderate, so I neither liked nor trusted him. My other attorney, Roy Pitts of Meridian, was also capable, although less experienced.

  When Haas, a specialist in constitutional law, decided that my only defense was insanity, I was infuriated. He believed that anyone with views like mine had to be crazy. But the M’Naghten rule stated that I could not be found legally insane if I knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime. By advancing the argument that radicals like me were insane by definition, Haas wanted to challenge and overthrow the M’Naghten rule. I would be his test case.

  I viewed Haas’s assertions as an insult to the Cause. They were in line with the rather common contention among our enemies in the liberal camp that people on the Far Right were sick or mentally ill. My consent to this defense would play into the hands of the enemy and make a mockery of all I believed in and had fought for. I refused to cooperate and demanded that he be fired. But my parents would hear nothing of this and continued to press me to cooperate with my lawyers. The impasse was broken when my girlfriend pleaded with me. She and I had lived together for a time and had considered marriage before I went underground several months earlier. For some reason, her appeals moved me when no others could, and I gave in.

  Haas immediately called in a psychiatrist to examine me. After talking with my family, the psychiatrist, one of my mother’s cousins, came to Meridian and talked with me in the jail for about forty-five minutes. After asking me a series of questions about who and where I was and why, he shifted to what I believed and how and when I had come to these convictions. I explained that I believed America was being undermined by Communists, socialists, liberals, and civil rights leaders who were influenced by a secret Jewish conspiracy intent on gaining control of the world. As a patriotic American, I saw it as my duty to fight it. On the basis of the information he gathered, he formed his opinion of my mental health.

  Before the trial began, Haas was busy filing motions and laying out traps for the prosecution. Later he would use them to appeal the decision. The jury was composed of eleven white people and one black person.

  The trial itself took only two days. The prosecution presented the overwhelming evidence of my guilt. In addition to weapons and explosives with my fingerprints all over them, half the Meridian police force had been eyewitnesses. When the prosecution rested, Tom Haas called my mother to the stand. She testified about the marked changes in my attitudes, values, and behavior as I became increasingly radicalized.

  The psychiatrist was the key defense witness. He testified that in his opinion I was insane and should be given psychiatric treatment rather than sent to prison. In rebuttal, the prosecution called the director of the East Mississippi State Mental Hospital, also a psychiatrist. After reading my psychiatrist’s report, he concluded that I might be emotionally disturbed, but I was not insane.

  Dressed in a navy blue suit, I sat with my attorneys at the heavy oak defense table, taking in the proceedings attentively but disengaged emotionally and saying nothing. The courtroom was under tight security and full of law enforcement officers, reporters from various places, and other approved individuals, as well as my family. There was never any doubt that I would be convicted.

  The case went to the jury late on the second day. After less than two hours of deliberation, they rendered their verdict. Standing beside my lawyers as stoically as I could, I listened as the jury foreman read aloud: “guilty of the capital offense of attempting to place a bomb near a residence.”

  They didn’t buy the insanity plea.

  The judge had three options in sentencing me: death, life in prison, or thirty years in prison. The prosecution had asked for the death penalty. Mississippi had a notorious and well-used gas chamber. However, in a ruling that surprised everybody, the judge sentenced me to thirty years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman prison.

  Up until that moment, I hadn’t dared to hope for any lenience. A death sentence wasn’t just a real possibility; it had been the most likely outcome. But a thirty-year sentence was lenient indeed. I could be out in less than half that time with good behavior. If I didn’t escape first.

  I was then returned to my cell. Now, at last, it was over. I lay on my cell bunk and breathed several deep breaths. Gradually, the tensions of the previous months rolled off of me, and soon I was sound asleep.

  4

  SEEDS OF FEAR AND ANGER

  All of us are significantly shaped by the culture and times in which we grow up. In my case, a major part of the social environment that shaped me was the Southern culture in which I was raised. Like most white Southerners in those days, I embraced the history and conservative culture of the region, which had been passed down from family members, schooling, and the social structures of the time. Some of this was taught and some was “caught.” Many Southerners had a sense of solidarity and pride in the memory of their ancestors who had “fought valiantly” in the Civil War, which some older people still referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression.” Lingering resentment about the Reconstruction period, though fading, was also part of that legacy. People from the North often were viewed as outsiders and held at a distance socially. Black people, the vast majority of whom were not able to get a good education and typically had to work in low-status jobs, were considered by many whites as less intelligent and industrious than whites—and thus inferior.

  Growing up in Mobile, I never knew anything but racial segregation. It was part of the fabric of life throughout the Southern states and always had been. It was what everyone grew up with, and the vast majority of white people considered it normal. All public facilities were segregated. Public restrooms, water fountains, and lunch counters all had signs labeled “White” or “Colored” so people would know which one to use. Restaurants, bars, clubs, buses, trains, schools, neighborhoods, and churches were all segregated. The unquestioned assumption among most whites was that they were superior to blacks and the two races must not be allowed to interact beyond certain set boundaries.

  Having been born into the dominant side of this divided society, I never gave segregation a thought until federal mandates for school desegregation challenged it. Those challenges were very unsettling to me.

  Born in 1946, I was a child of the 1950s. The United States was the most powerful country in the world. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allies to victory in World War II, was president, and widely popular. Churches were strong. The American middle class was growing out of the cities and into the suburbs. The national outlook was generally optimistic. Changes in society seemed beneficial, or at least benign: rock ’n’ roll, Elvis, bigger and faster cars, rising hemlines, and a host of new consumer goods that were being marketed on a magic entertainment box called television. Most Americans remember the 1950s as a decade of domestic peace and prosperity.

  It was also the decade of the family and a resurgence of religion. The Protestant evangelist Billy Graham and the Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen were popular and reaching large numbers of people. Churches were being built in the growing suburbs, and attendance was strong. I was a part of that. My mother made sure that my sister, brother, and I were in church every Sunday. At age thirteen I made a profession of faith and was baptized (though it had no effect on me).

  But there were problems throughout that decade, and they portended change and challenge. During the first half of the decade, the forces of Communism were actively consolidating their gains from World War II. Then the Korean War erupted, intensifying the concern. During the second half of the decade, the Communists were busy expanding into the international political vacuum left by the collapse of the British and French empires.

  America’s preoccupation with domestic life emboldened the Communist regimes. Occasionally something would r
aise an alarm, such as the Army–McCarthy hearings, the discovery that Soviet spies had stolen America’s nuclear secrets, the USSR’s sudden development of the hydrogen bomb, Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, or their surprising launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. Still, for most people, American prosperity eclipsed these ominous developments.

  Here at home, race relations and civil rights were gradually moving out of the shadows and into the national limelight. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was greatly encouraging to black Americans. But to many whites, especially in the South, it was deeply disturbing. That discomfort revealed itself in the infamous desegregation confrontation at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus, with widespread support of segregationists, deployed the National Guard to block nine black students who were scheduled to enter under federal court order. President Eisenhower answered by sending in the army’s famed 101st Airborne Division and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard. Newspaper photos of the army at the school got my attention but didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time.

  Other race-related events were in the newspaper and on the television during that time as well. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white person signaled the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, which gained national attention and became a major victory for the emerging civil rights movement. President Eisenhower went on to sign the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which provided federal protections for the rights of African American voters.

  Throughout most of the 1950s, America looked and felt placid. And even if the placidity was superficial and illusory, that’s how many white people like me remember it. Nevertheless, historic strategic and social shifts were already taking place, setting the stage for the turbulence of the next decade. Reality was about to shatter the illusion of the 1950s on a national scale, just as it would shake my personal life.

  * * *

  The culture and times I grew up in certainly shaped me, but family issues influenced me just as powerfully. By the early sixties I was a walking cauldron of anger and frustration, in part because of my relationship with my father and our dysfunctional home life.

  My father was an intelligent, honest man, with an interest in history, politics, and current events. He worked in auto sales and management when I was young and in real estate when I was a teenager. Like many men in his occupation, he frequently worked until seven or eight in the evening. Unfortunately for my siblings and me, parenting was not one of his strengths. He loved us, but his work demanded and received the best part of his time. He didn’t spend much personal time with me or my brother or sister. He frequently came home after supper, just before we were ready for bed. As I grew up, I would come to resent the order of his priorities.

  Over time, alcohol became a big problem in my father’s life. He was not violent or physically abusive, but the alcohol magnified his detachment and lengthened the emotional distance he already had from his family. I resented my alienation from him, and that resentment fed a growing anger. I hated the distance. I hated the silence. And I eventually came to hate him.

  The strain in our relationship was further strained by the increasing tension between him and my mother, much of which concerned his drinking and its effects on our family. As I became more aware of the dynamic between them, I began to take my mother’s side. Predictably, this turned distance into dispute between my father and me. We had a series of ugly confrontations, and I threatened him once.

  Dad didn’t know how to deal with me, so he stopped dealing with me altogether. That void became a vacuum. It set the stage for a lot of what followed, as it rendered me susceptible as a young man to the influence of those urging others to join the life-or-death cause of saving America, Christianity, and the white race.

  The time I wasn’t spending with my father left room for lots of other things. One of my favorite distractions was watching television. I liked movies about World War II, and there were lots of them on TV. I saw the United States as a great nation committed to good and fighting for freedom in the world. I was proud of my country and proud of her history. The film classics that reinforced these themes significantly shaped my thinking about America, patriotism, and my duty.

  I also watched a lot of westerns, soaking up their classic portrayal of the struggle between good and evil. The scripts and the messages were mostly the same. The good guys, played by tall, rugged men, had to fight the bad guys, and were sometimes wounded, but they always won. Likewise, Superman fought the forces of evil in the name of “truth, justice, and the American way” and always won. The Andy Griffith Show pictured simple life in small-town America, projecting an idyllic picture of good and moral communities. These movies and television programs had a major, even if unrecognized, role in shaping my view of life and the world.

  Like many kids at this age, I dabbled in collecting stamps and coins and assembling model cars. Eventually, playing chess became one of my main interests. The son of a Greek family that lived next to my grandmother was also an avid chess player, and we played often. It was through him that I first encountered anti-Semitism. For some reason he disliked Jewish people and had audio recordings of some of Hitler’s speeches. I listened to a few with him and found them transfixing, even though I didn’t understand German. That seemingly minor experience planted a seed that would bear bitter fruit in the years ahead.

  Around this time, into my emotional cauldron came a new feeling to join my anger and frustration: fear. Its origin lay in the events in the once-sleepy island nation of Cuba. For me, and for a lot of Americans, the 1960s were a decade defined by fear. When the Communists were making advances in faraway places like Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, the threat did not seem quite so imminent. Suddenly, however, in 1959 Communists were in Cuba. Alarmed, Americans demanded action. But the 1961 CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion was a miserable failure. It was followed in short succession by failures in the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Communist construction of the Berlin Wall.

  These events embarrassed the United States. They signaled weakness. They revealed indecision in the White House and created uncertainty about America’s leadership. People like me, who were concerned about the spread of totalitarian evil, were greatly discouraged. I wondered, How could the greatest, most powerful nation on earth fail to dislodge the Communist dictator at our doorstep?

  Then came more unsettling news. The Soviet Union began the military reinforcement of the Castro regime. Even worse, American U-2 spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missile launch facilities under construction at bases they had secretly built. The Cuban missile crisis generated unprecedented fear in the United States, especially in cities like Mobile that were now in range of a nuclear strike. With its large air force base and a busy shipping port, Mobile seemed an attractive target.

  I remember watching TV news footage of U.S. warships confronting Soviet ships in the Atlantic. Americans watched the dramatic confrontation play out on television, not knowing what might happen. The threat of nuclear war was ever present and very real.

  As if Communism weren’t enough of a threat to the nation, the nascent civil rights movement presented a rising threat to the national status quo. I became more aware of it when the Congress of Racial Equality sent Freedom Riders from Washington, DC, on a bus trip through the South. Violent opposition had erupted along the way, putting race relations squarely in the headlines and further escalating racial tensions. In the Mobile newspaper, I saw photographs and read about lunch-counter protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the burning of Freedom Rider buses.

  Then came the enrollment of James Meredith in the University of Mississippi in October 1962. Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, another strong segregationist, publicly opposed desegregation, as did most white Mississippians. Deadly rioting broke out at Ole Miss, requiring U.S. marshals and federal troops to restore
order. I read about the violence in the newspaper, but I was only fifteen at the time. Nothing like that was happening in Mobile, and the problems were too far away to make a big impression on me. But that event, along with the earlier race-related events challenging the status quo, was laying a foundation that would fuel my opposition to the civil rights movement.

  In June 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace, in defiance of a federal court order, stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block admission of two African American students. This high-drama media event was his way of fulfilling a promise from his inaugural speech a few months earlier: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”1

  A dramatic confrontation ensued with United States deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and was nationally televised. Wallace was ordered to step aside. He refused. Mr. Katzenbach called President Kennedy, who immediately federalized the Alabama National Guard, which was standing with Wallace. The students were then admitted.2

  Most white people in Alabama, however, were strongly supportive of Governor Wallace. Like many others, I was outraged by the incident. I was incensed at the federal government for intruding in what I believed to be state affairs. A few weeks later, Governor Wallace denounced the civil rights movement as part of the Communist conspiracy. Not long afterward, I read an article alleging that the FBI had discovered that certain civil rights leaders were associating with known Communists. I believed these things were true, and I was alarmed.

  On June 12, the day after Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door, Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi. He had been working tirelessly to overturn segregation and secure better opportunities for African Americans in Mississippi.