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(1) "At her desk in the basement of the Meridian City Hall, Marie Knowles, the secretary of the detective bureau, was trying to follow the scraps of conversation on the police radio." // A white Knowles. Did her ancestors own the ancestors of Beyoncé Knowles?
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(2) "To thrive, many Jews concluded, they had to assimilate into the dominant culture in every way possible. Becoming '200 percent Southerners,' they submerged their own religious and cultural heritage, partly out of a frankly acknowledged appetite for the comfortable life and partly out of fear of the violence that never seemed far below the surface in Mississippi."
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(3) "Like everyone in the state, Nussbaum knew the penalties for failing to embrace segregation wholeheartedly. For her defiance of racists, Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser north of Jackson, lost her advertising, her country printing contract and all her friends in town. Her insurance was canceled, her husband lost his job as a hospital administrator and a cross was burned on their lawn. Somehow, Smith managed to keep publishing, but most businesspeople were not so resilient. In McComb, after insurance executive Albert (Red) Heffner, Jr., wrote a letter asking the governor to make a statement sjpporting law and order following the burning of four black churches, segregationists harassed him with obscene telephone calls, threatened to bomb his house, then terminated his office lease and spread rumors he had Communist connections. His insurance business withered and old friends shunned him. The Heffners packed up and moved." // Related to Hugh Heffner?
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(4) "The main instruments for preserving white supremacy, in addition to the Ku Klux Klan, were the private White Citizens Councils and the state-supported Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. The councils were so effective that after the school desegregation decision, the Klan did not become a major factor in Mississippi until Sam Bowers organized the White Knights in 1964. In their recruiting literature in 1960, the councils took credit for the fact that in Mississippi, unlike other states, blacks had not even attempted sit-ins. The councils were a direct response to the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. Shortly after it was issued, a group of bankers, lawyers, planters and businessmen met secretly in the Delta town of Indianola to discuss the impending danger. The minutes of the Citizen Council meeting, reprinted in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bulletin, contained the crux of the approach the councils followed: 'It is the thought of our group that the solution of this problem of desegregation may become easier if various agitators and the like could be removed from the communities in which they now operate. We propose to accomplish this through the careful application of economic pressures.' Their goal was to drive out dissenters - black and white - by destroying their livelihoods."
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(5) "Nussbaum did have a handful of soul mates in the congregation. Emanuel and Elaine Crystal supported the civil rights movement and defended Nussbaum. They also provided food for many of the Freedom Riders and served as contacts for parents in the North concerned about sons and daughters who had traveled to Jackson ti demonstrate. Manny Crystal was chairman of the board of Crawler Parts, Inc., a large firm that imported heavy equipment from Italy. He was relatively immune to the economic pressure which forced others to conform. Elaine Crystal was even more active and outspoken on racial matters than her husband, having been a founding member of Mississippians for Public Education. Privately, some other Jews supported the civil rights cause but were afraid to be identified, more out of fear of economic retaliation than out of any concern about physical danger. But the overwhelming majority of Jews in Jackson and elsewhere in Mississippi held views that were indistinguishable from those of their neighbors. For them, an unwelcome complication was that so many of the demonstrators were Northern Jews - roughly 50 percent of all demonstrators and about 70 percent of all the lawyers who represented them were Jewish. It made it much harder for Southern Jews to remain inconspicuous."
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(6) "Crystal called another meeting of men from the congregation at the Sun 'n Sand Motel. Binder urged that they add to the city's twenty-five-thousand reward. Again a raucous debate erupted. Several of the younger members suggested forming a vigilante group. Harris, in a comment recorded by the FBI, declarwd that for only a thousand dollars he 'could get the Mafia to come to Jackson, Mississippi, to break some arms and legs.' Once more, cooler heads prevailed. About forty of the men pledged to add a total of twenty-five thousand dollars to the city's reward fund. But they insisted on remaining anonymous."
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(7) "The agents would try to win them over, but as Moore said, 'As a last resort we would hold something over them. Fear had a lot to do with it.' Klansmen were notorious for 'beating hell out of their wives,' and the wives would complain to the FBI and request that their husbands be arrested. Instead the agents would inform the Klansmen of their wives' complaints, generating pressure within the families that the FBI could exploit. Extramarital affairs were rampant among Klansmen - another area of vulnerability. 'They were always getting out of bed with their black paramour and then coming to talk with us - that's what bothered me,' Moore said. As Tom Webb put it in his Mississippi drawl, 'A lot of Klansmen used the Klan as an excuse to go off and screw some woman and their wife wouldn't know where they are.'"
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(8) "Anti-Semitism was virtually unheard of in Meridian. This remained true even in the wake of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915, which brought the latent feelings against Jews much closer to the surface elsewhere in the South. As the city fought against decline, the children of its Jewish families tend to drift away. They preferred practicing law or medicine to tending their fathers' retail stores. They moved to Jackson or Atlanta, or even the North. The few who remained lived unpretentious lives of quiet confort despite their wealth. It was these rich, still-prominent Jews living in the same town with top foot soldiers of the White Knights that made Sam Bowers focus his sights on Meridian."
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(9) "At the beginning of 1968, the Klan's activities in Meridian arouse little reaction from the local Jews or the white community in general. For the most part, the attacks were directed against black churches housing Head Start centers and individuals who had offended the Klan in specific ways. Two church bombings in January and one in early February were not mentioned by the Meridian Star - the usual practice of newspapers in Mississippi when it came to crimes against blacks. Then, on February 20, Klansmen burned a grocery store operated by onetime Meridian police sergeant Wallace Miller. Miller was not considered one of Meridian's brightest policemen; Chief Gunn liked to say that 'you could take a five-acre field, get a bucket of manure and dig a hole and put the manure in it and cover it up, and Wallace would find it and step in.' But Miller was a former member of the White Knights who had become an FBI informant and a key witness in the Philadelphia case. He had implicated Bowers in the killing of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman and had given crucial testimony about the details."
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(10) "When the attacks on the churches began in 1964, Reverend Porter organized a mutual protection society. Porter is remembered as a tough man who 'liked his rifle.' Aside from the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black self-protection group that operated in Louisiana in the 1960s, Porter's group in Meridian was one of the few known organizations formed by local blacks to defend themselves against Klan violence. For blacks, taking up arms was generally considered suicidal. The Meridian group was so informal it did not have a name, but its members had guns and courage. 'When I got word my house was going to be shot into,' recalled Charles Young, 'everyone was alerted and prepared with rifles and shotguns. There was no set number. My neighbors Lonnie Edwards and Rudolph Rairly used to help when I was threatened too. They sat in the upstairs window of their homes. Sometimes they stayed with me when I sent my family away for safety.' Most often, they got the call to turn out to protect Reverend Porter's First Union Baptist Church, which was so well guarded that it escaped damage. Charles Johnson's church, Newell Chapel Methodist, was not so fortunate. It had a wooden parsonage and Johnson, recalling how the Klan destroyed it in 1967, said, 'They attempted to burn it, but a neighbor got up early, saw the fire and called the fire department and they put it out. The second time, they torched it.' Porter's men were also called on with some regularity to protect Bill Ready, who was the only white in the self-protection group. Read liked to joke about surviving eighteen death votes in different klaverns in east Mississippi and Alabama, but there was no denying his life was in constant danger. 'My preacher friends guarded my house for five years,' he said. 'We used to sit up all night many a night, waiting. Our wives had learned to make us all-night meals.'"
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(11) "Some of those who saw no threat represented a particular irony. Paula Ackerman had fled Germany with her late husband, Rabbi William Ackerman, in the late 1930s. The rabbi was hired by Temple Beth Israel and served until he died in November 1950. Paula Ackerman served the temple for more than a year as an acting rabbi. Although she was not ordained and not as educated as a rabbi, she was a strong personality and had learned the tenets and many of the rituals of Judaism from her husband. Having found refuge in a friendly Southern town, Paula Ackerman refused to believe that Meridian's Jews were in any danger. Another who had escaped the Holocaust and found a haven in Meridian was Mrs. Nellie Kass, whose daughter was married to the Ackermans' son. Mrs. Kass scoffed at Schlager's warning. A widow who operated a needlepoint store, she dismissed the idea that her beloved Meridian could experience the kind of violence that had struck the synogogue and the rabbi's house only eighty miles away. It was as though she and other Jews in Meridian refused to believe the Jackson bombings had occurred."
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(12) "Though Williams had been silent while at least two hundred black churches in Mississippi were bombed or burned during his time as a congressman and then governor, he now declared, 'it defies the imagination of civilized people to understand a mind so depraved as to destroy any house of worship.' Ignoring the fact that six black churches in the Meridian area alone had been burned since he had become governor five months earlier, the governor called the bombing of the temple 'the first' terrorism at a house of worship during his administration."
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(13) "Gunn considered himself the keeper of the morals of all his men. More than once, when he found that an officer was having an affair with another officer's wife, he would call in both couples and counsel them. He disliked Everett Keller's brother Sam as much for his dubious morals as for his Klan ties. Sam moonlighted as a country music disc jockey on a local radio station and was widely known as a ladies' man. Around the police station they jokingly referred to him as Killer Keller because one of the women he went out with had been shot to death with his gun while he was in her apartment. Keller claimed the gun had gone off accidentally while she was sewing a tear in his uniform. He was never charged."
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(14) "On another occasion, when tensions flared in Meridian's black neighborhood and there were rumors the Meridian police might be a target of violence, Gunn showed up at a noisy demonstration. 'I'll do what I can to see that there's no violence, and I'll sit on the curb and negotiate with a nigger prostitute,' he told the crowd, 'but the first son of a bitch that throws a brick at one of my police officers is dead.' There was loud murmuring among the demonstrators, but the crowd dispersed. Gunn's disregard for due process was reflected throughout the department. When Meridian police lacked evidence to make arrests, they would simply book suspects on charges of 'D and S' - dangerous and suspicious - and hold them for as many as seventy-two hours. During the early part of Gunn's tenure as a top police official, the department was riddled with Klan members and went in for brutality. 'A den of hatred,' Elsie Logan called it. The detectives' interrogation room was a torture chamber. The 'lie detector,' a two-foot-long black leather strap with a metal spring in it, was used in questioning blacks, and an electric cattle prod and a contraption rigged up with wires and two batteries were used to shock recalcitrant suspects. Marie Knowles, the detective bureau's secretary, never got used to the sound of the clubs smashing against skulls and prisoners screaming in pain. 'They would pop them with anything that was handy,' she said, 'and sometimes just backhand them.'"
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(15) "To the White Knights, Gunn's about-face was more than an outrage. It was dangerous. Bowers' lieutenants did their best to punish and intimidate the chief and all who supported him. There were death threats, harassing telephone calls late at night and more. Gunn responded by organizing trusted police officers into the blackshirt squad, which began using some of the Klan's own tactics against it. In addition to gathering information about Klan activities, the blackshirts waged their own 'COINTELPRO' of anti-Klan harassment, sometimes going so far as to set off small explosions outside Klansmen's houses or shooting into their homes to intimidate them. The chief felt he had almost a divine mandate to stop the violence in Meridian, and he agonized over his inability to do so. His war with the Klan put tremendous strain on him and his family. On those nights when Klan threats had been received, police cars were stationed in the neighborhood. Gunn would eat supper and climb the stairs to the upstairs bedroom in the front of his modest frame house at the corner of B Street and Twenty-fourth Avenue near downtown Meridian. There, in the hot, humid darkness, he would sit for hours with the shotgun across his lap, looking out the window at the empty street and waiting for the Klan."
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(16) "So in March, facing the indictment and almost certain conviction, he decided to go underground. He immediately set out on a trip to the West, visiting the anti-Semitic Dr. Wesley Swift of Lancaster, California. Tarrants would later testify he bought a rifle from Swift with plans to use it too shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 'That was my ambition, to shoot Dr. King,' Tarrants said later. ' I hated Dr. King.' On March 23, when he returned to his home in Mobile, he found the FBI waiting. Teams of agents were in two cars parked outside his house. He spotted them before they recognized him, however, and escaped. Within a week, Tarrants was in a safe house located in the mountains near Franklin, North Carolina, staying with friends who were followers of Swift and connected with right-wing radicals in Miami. Months later, FBI agents backtracking on Tarrants' trail interviewed a neighbor of the family. The neighbor said the house was used for meetings of extremists from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida as well as North Carolina. He described the host family as 'extremely antiblack and anti-Jewish' and one member as 'crazy enough to blow up the White House.' The area behind the house was used frequently for target practice with firearms ranging from pistols to automatic weapons. Using the North Carolina house as a base, Tarrants was soon making forays into Mississippi for meetings with Bowers and new attacks on Klan targets. He saw himself as a patriot and closely identified himself with another notorious felon and anti-Semite on the run, Robert DePugh, head of the paramilitary Minutemen."
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(17) "The arrest, one of three run-ins the elder Tarrants had with police during several visits to Meridian, made no apparent impression on his son, who later called this period 'the lowest moment of my life, a time of moral insanity and psychotic radicalism.'" // The language used is unfair to the mentally ill.
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(18) "If Tarrants had seen how the Roberts brothers were behaving, he would have been even surer of his conclusion. The two Klansmen had been repeatedly warned by Scarborough and the FBI that any sudden display of wealth could give away their role as informants. 'Hell, we preached to the informants day and night not to spend thw reward money for a while,' Scarborough said. Self-control was beyond them, however. Almost immediately, they bought new cars - Raymond a Thunderbird, Alton Wayne a Cadillac. And they flashed rolls of bills around the Travelers Club and other places. Soon rumors were flying that they were the ones who had betrayed Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth." // Compulsions? Them purchasing these vehicles, then?
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(19) "Their son had been caught in the qct of placing a bomb outside a residence - a capital offense in Mississippi. He had shot and nearly killed a policeman. And the Lauderdale County district attorney had already made clear that he would seek the death penalty. The idea of pleading insanity infuriated Tarrants; he was perfectly sane, he said, and such a defense would mock everything he believed in, everything he had fought and risked his life for. And he knew the plea would mean his mother was ready to testify that she had doubted his sanity since his early teenage years. In the end, realizing the insanity defense offered his best hope of escaping the gas chamber, Tarrants gave in. If the jury rejected the argument, it might still deter them from recommending death. In his opening statement to the jury of nine white men, two white women and a black man, Hass declared that the defense would prove the defendant suffered from 'a severe case of paranoia, a form of schizophrenia,' and that a hereditary element 'foredoomed this defendant to be seriously ill.'"
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(20) "After that encounter, Dean and I enjoyed a close relationship. I kne wother Mississippi ministers who considered it their duty to save souls, but Ken was the only one I knew who would face down the State Police and the medical establishment to obtain treatment for a black man. For a Baptist, he had exceptionally close ties with Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. Dean also worked closely with the ADL, especially with Botnick. In a 1968 memo, Dean noted that they had a cooperative and trusting relationship, that he and Botnick spoke often and that their contacts had increased because of 'the surge of anti-semitic literature by the White Citizens' Council, National States Rights Party and the KKK.'"
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(21) "If Dean and the ADL shared a common antipathy for the Klan, the young minister proved to be far too liberal on civil rights for the ADL and some members of the Mississippi Jewish community. What alarmed Jews who supported the status quo was Dean's close contact with militant civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality. Botnick suspected them of Communist influence. The ADL was relatively conservative in its approach, acutely sensitive to the widespread feeling those days that Jews themselves were too far to the left. In combating anti-Semitism, the ADL had come to embrace some of the FBI's obsessive concern about Communist influences in the civil rights movement. And the two organizations kept some of the more militant civil rights groups under constant surveillance. Their hunt for Communists and Communist sympathizers in the movement made for strange bedfellows. *The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and the state's two veteran senators - John Stennis and James O. Eastland, both outspoken segregationists - exchanged investigative information with the FBI and the ADL.*"
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(22) "For a long time, there was silence. Then Botnick acknowledged that Tarrants and Ainsworth had been lured into an ambush, and he said he had helped plan it. He could not 'morally blow the whistle' on the FBI and the Meridian police, he said, because they had stopped the Klan's atracks on the Jews. I agreed they had stopped the violence - there had been none since the ambush - and I said I coukd understand his point. Cradling the telephone receiver on my shoulder, I typed notes as Botnick resumed talking: 'It was logical someobe had paid to set up the Klan members...he had heloed raise funds for the purpose...wouldn't say how much was paid...wouldn't want to see the ADL involved in a story about the Meridian incident...four guys know I was in on the original planning...it was a trap - you know that.' Before Botnick agreed to partixipate in the planning, he said, the FBI played the tape recording of the Klan threat to blow up a synagogue full of people, including women and children, on which one Klansman could be heard to say, 'Little Jew bastards grow up to be big Jew devils. Kill 'em while they're young.' Trying to draw Botnick out, I assured him again that I could understand why the police would resort to extreme measure with Klan violence running unchecked. In fact, I did understand how Botnick felt. If I had been a Jew in Meridian and knew that Klansmen were threatening to blow up synagogues with people inside, I probably would have contributed to the fund too and probably would have muttered, 'Never again.' At the same time, I was a reporter, and if what I was hearing could be substantiated, what happened at Meridian was one hell of a story that raised serious questions about law enforcement methods used in this case. Discussing his own role, Botnick said, 'We were dealing with animals and I would do it again.' But he acknowledged that he was profoundly upset when he learned a woman had been shot to death. 'I threw up when I heard what happened that night.' For all his candor, Botnick said he did not want anything written about the events leading up to the Meridian trap and certainly did not want to see the ADL portrayed as being involved. None of the participants would talk to me anyway, he said, and I did not have enough facts to write a story."
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(23) "Suddenly, the words set up jumped out at me. The June 17, 1968, document began, 'Tonight informant and his brother will meet with Hawkins or the night of June 18, 1968 and they will attempt to set up a job on Al Rose's house.' Moments later, I came upon a memo in which Scarborough reported that he had told George Warner, the district attorney, that 'the two Roberts boys were the keys to the case and they would talk for $85,000' and could clear up the synagogue bombings in Meridian and Jackson and nine church bombings."
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(24) "Reading from a Scarborough report that 'informants wanted a written commitment concerning immunity which was given to them and signed by myself,' I asked, 'The FBI agents didn't sign that too, did they?' 'Uh-uh.' 'You're the only one who signed that?' 'Right.' 'But they were there? I mean, they knew that, they were in on all of that too?' 'Right.'"
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(25) "The next stop was New Orleans and a visit to Botnick at the ADL regional office. We arrived unannounced, but Botnick smiled broadly and welcomed us. I told him we wanted to talk with him for a few minutes. After exchanging how-you-doing pleasantries, I reminded Botnick of our discussion about the Meridian case the previous April. Suddenly, he was frowning. He simoly could not recall much about our conversation at the time, he said. 'Remember, you said you couldn't "morally blow the whistle" on the FBI and the Meridian police for setting up a trap in Meridian because they had stopped the Klan violence?' 'I don't remember that.' Reading slowly from my typewritten notes of the interview with him, I said, 'Here's what you said: "Four guys know I was in on the original planning. It was a trap - you know that." You remember that, don't you?' 'I don't remember that,' he said, shaking his head sideways. 'Remember, you said the FBI palyed a tape recording for you of a Klansman talking about blowing up synagogues full of people, including women and children, and one Klansman said, 'Little Jews grow up to be big Jews,' and 'Kill them while they are young.' Remember you talked about raising funds and you said, 'We were dealing with animals and I would do it again'? But you said when you learned a woman had been killed it made you sick and you said you went in and threw up when you heard about it?' Botnick said he could not recall the details of the interview, but the comments I cited to him were 'incorrect.' I began to tell him some of the things I had learned from Scarborough and from the detective's records. 'It's fantastic - like something out of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-four,' he said. He also denied that Gunn and Key had asked him to arrange to have the Roberts brothers liquidated. Leaving Botnick's office, I felt certain I had just lost a source." // Is Botnick a liar, or did he suffer severe memory impairments? He seems more like a liar to me. // Why does Botnick reference a popular work of fiction, here, also? He was gaslighting Nelson?
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(26) "Although an abundance of documentary and eyewitness testimony clearly marked it as a joint FBI-Meridian police operation, Moore insisted that it was strictly a local show with the FBI merely providing guidance."
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(27) "The Meridian story touched off a flurry of memoranda: FBI officials flatly denied the FBI's involvement in arranging the trap even though facts in the story were demonstratably true and had been heavily documented by Meridian's police records and interviews. On one memo, which quoted Moore as saying the FBI's Jackson office had had 'excellent working relations with Jack Nelson,' Hoover wrote, 'It is obvious now that Nelson played Moore for a sucker.' On another memo denying any FBI role, he wrote, 'I hope SAC [Special Agent in Charge] Moore now realizes Nelson doesn't have a halo over his head.' In another memo, Deputy Director Cartha (Deke) DeLoach declared: 'This is a typical Jack Nelson article filled with lies and vicious innuendo.' Twice before, in early 1968, Hoover and other FBI officials had castigated me for my reporting, the first time for disclosing FBI agents had lied about the Orangeburg incident, and again when Nick Chriss and I managed to interview some witnesses in the Martin Luther King assassination case before FBI agents had contacted them. Once you were on Hoover's 'enemy list,' almost anything you did was subject to the most scathing criticism from the director and his sycophants."
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(28) "Gunn also told reporters that Klan informants had advised him that in covering the Meridian story I had told people that I was part of a group 'which had as its purpose writing a story to discredit my police department and the FBI, and actually remove Mr. Hoover, who they believed had set himself up as a czar. This apparently is a left-winged group that does not want law enforcement.'" // Why use "czar," here? / "Tsar" is the preferred form, also. "Czar" is commonly used by non-scholars in America, and seems to be used disrespectfully. The reason why remains unclear to me.
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(29) "The bureau as a whole was also sensitive to the suggestion that the ambush had gone beyond the law. FBI agents visited Tarrants at Parchman seeking a signed statement denying that he and Kathy Ainsworth had been entrapped at Meridian. The FBI wanted what amounted to legal absolution. Finally, after repeated requests, Tarrants gave them a statement, which was leaked to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The story was carried under the headline, 'Tarrants Absolves FBI of Entrapment.' The statement did not change the facts. The evidence was abundant that the Roberts brothers, in concert with the FBI and Meridian police, had played a pivotal role in the planning of a second bombing in Meridian and in selecting Davidson's house as the target. Moreover, Scarborough's reports amounted to overwhelming evidence that the brothers set up Tarrants and that Raymond, acting for the FBI and the police, pressed for the bombing attempt to be carried out on their timetable."
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(30) "When Roy Moore retired from the FBI at the age of sixty in 1974, he was honored by the local and state leaders and the Anti-Defamation League for directing the FBI's Klan-busting activities. He later served as director of security for the state's largest bank, Jackson's Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He retired from there in 1982 and lives in Jackson. Moore still insists that there was no entrapment and thag police used no illegal or unacceptable practices at Meridian. Jim Ingram retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed Mississippi's commissioner of public safety, the state's top law enforcement post. Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what happened at Meridian. 'It was an ambush, that's what they meant to do,' Ingram told me. 'No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that night.'" // Is it common for former FBI agents to serve as director of security for Deposit Guaranty National Bank?
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(2) "To thrive, many Jews concluded, they had to assimilate into the dominant culture in every way possible. Becoming '200 percent Southerners,' they submerged their own religious and cultural heritage, partly out of a frankly acknowledged appetite for the comfortable life and partly out of fear of the violence that never seemed far below the surface in Mississippi."
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(3) "Like everyone in the state, Nussbaum knew the penalties for failing to embrace segregation wholeheartedly. For her defiance of racists, Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser north of Jackson, lost her advertising, her country printing contract and all her friends in town. Her insurance was canceled, her husband lost his job as a hospital administrator and a cross was burned on their lawn. Somehow, Smith managed to keep publishing, but most businesspeople were not so resilient. In McComb, after insurance executive Albert (Red) Heffner, Jr., wrote a letter asking the governor to make a statement sjpporting law and order following the burning of four black churches, segregationists harassed him with obscene telephone calls, threatened to bomb his house, then terminated his office lease and spread rumors he had Communist connections. His insurance business withered and old friends shunned him. The Heffners packed up and moved." // Related to Hugh Heffner?
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(4) "The main instruments for preserving white supremacy, in addition to the Ku Klux Klan, were the private White Citizens Councils and the state-supported Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. The councils were so effective that after the school desegregation decision, the Klan did not become a major factor in Mississippi until Sam Bowers organized the White Knights in 1964. In their recruiting literature in 1960, the councils took credit for the fact that in Mississippi, unlike other states, blacks had not even attempted sit-ins. The councils were a direct response to the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. Shortly after it was issued, a group of bankers, lawyers, planters and businessmen met secretly in the Delta town of Indianola to discuss the impending danger. The minutes of the Citizen Council meeting, reprinted in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bulletin, contained the crux of the approach the councils followed: 'It is the thought of our group that the solution of this problem of desegregation may become easier if various agitators and the like could be removed from the communities in which they now operate. We propose to accomplish this through the careful application of economic pressures.' Their goal was to drive out dissenters - black and white - by destroying their livelihoods."
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(5) "Nussbaum did have a handful of soul mates in the congregation. Emanuel and Elaine Crystal supported the civil rights movement and defended Nussbaum. They also provided food for many of the Freedom Riders and served as contacts for parents in the North concerned about sons and daughters who had traveled to Jackson ti demonstrate. Manny Crystal was chairman of the board of Crawler Parts, Inc., a large firm that imported heavy equipment from Italy. He was relatively immune to the economic pressure which forced others to conform. Elaine Crystal was even more active and outspoken on racial matters than her husband, having been a founding member of Mississippians for Public Education. Privately, some other Jews supported the civil rights cause but were afraid to be identified, more out of fear of economic retaliation than out of any concern about physical danger. But the overwhelming majority of Jews in Jackson and elsewhere in Mississippi held views that were indistinguishable from those of their neighbors. For them, an unwelcome complication was that so many of the demonstrators were Northern Jews - roughly 50 percent of all demonstrators and about 70 percent of all the lawyers who represented them were Jewish. It made it much harder for Southern Jews to remain inconspicuous."
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(6) "Crystal called another meeting of men from the congregation at the Sun 'n Sand Motel. Binder urged that they add to the city's twenty-five-thousand reward. Again a raucous debate erupted. Several of the younger members suggested forming a vigilante group. Harris, in a comment recorded by the FBI, declarwd that for only a thousand dollars he 'could get the Mafia to come to Jackson, Mississippi, to break some arms and legs.' Once more, cooler heads prevailed. About forty of the men pledged to add a total of twenty-five thousand dollars to the city's reward fund. But they insisted on remaining anonymous."
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(7) "The agents would try to win them over, but as Moore said, 'As a last resort we would hold something over them. Fear had a lot to do with it.' Klansmen were notorious for 'beating hell out of their wives,' and the wives would complain to the FBI and request that their husbands be arrested. Instead the agents would inform the Klansmen of their wives' complaints, generating pressure within the families that the FBI could exploit. Extramarital affairs were rampant among Klansmen - another area of vulnerability. 'They were always getting out of bed with their black paramour and then coming to talk with us - that's what bothered me,' Moore said. As Tom Webb put it in his Mississippi drawl, 'A lot of Klansmen used the Klan as an excuse to go off and screw some woman and their wife wouldn't know where they are.'"
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(8) "Anti-Semitism was virtually unheard of in Meridian. This remained true even in the wake of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915, which brought the latent feelings against Jews much closer to the surface elsewhere in the South. As the city fought against decline, the children of its Jewish families tend to drift away. They preferred practicing law or medicine to tending their fathers' retail stores. They moved to Jackson or Atlanta, or even the North. The few who remained lived unpretentious lives of quiet confort despite their wealth. It was these rich, still-prominent Jews living in the same town with top foot soldiers of the White Knights that made Sam Bowers focus his sights on Meridian."
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(9) "At the beginning of 1968, the Klan's activities in Meridian arouse little reaction from the local Jews or the white community in general. For the most part, the attacks were directed against black churches housing Head Start centers and individuals who had offended the Klan in specific ways. Two church bombings in January and one in early February were not mentioned by the Meridian Star - the usual practice of newspapers in Mississippi when it came to crimes against blacks. Then, on February 20, Klansmen burned a grocery store operated by onetime Meridian police sergeant Wallace Miller. Miller was not considered one of Meridian's brightest policemen; Chief Gunn liked to say that 'you could take a five-acre field, get a bucket of manure and dig a hole and put the manure in it and cover it up, and Wallace would find it and step in.' But Miller was a former member of the White Knights who had become an FBI informant and a key witness in the Philadelphia case. He had implicated Bowers in the killing of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman and had given crucial testimony about the details."
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(10) "When the attacks on the churches began in 1964, Reverend Porter organized a mutual protection society. Porter is remembered as a tough man who 'liked his rifle.' Aside from the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black self-protection group that operated in Louisiana in the 1960s, Porter's group in Meridian was one of the few known organizations formed by local blacks to defend themselves against Klan violence. For blacks, taking up arms was generally considered suicidal. The Meridian group was so informal it did not have a name, but its members had guns and courage. 'When I got word my house was going to be shot into,' recalled Charles Young, 'everyone was alerted and prepared with rifles and shotguns. There was no set number. My neighbors Lonnie Edwards and Rudolph Rairly used to help when I was threatened too. They sat in the upstairs window of their homes. Sometimes they stayed with me when I sent my family away for safety.' Most often, they got the call to turn out to protect Reverend Porter's First Union Baptist Church, which was so well guarded that it escaped damage. Charles Johnson's church, Newell Chapel Methodist, was not so fortunate. It had a wooden parsonage and Johnson, recalling how the Klan destroyed it in 1967, said, 'They attempted to burn it, but a neighbor got up early, saw the fire and called the fire department and they put it out. The second time, they torched it.' Porter's men were also called on with some regularity to protect Bill Ready, who was the only white in the self-protection group. Read liked to joke about surviving eighteen death votes in different klaverns in east Mississippi and Alabama, but there was no denying his life was in constant danger. 'My preacher friends guarded my house for five years,' he said. 'We used to sit up all night many a night, waiting. Our wives had learned to make us all-night meals.'"
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(11) "Some of those who saw no threat represented a particular irony. Paula Ackerman had fled Germany with her late husband, Rabbi William Ackerman, in the late 1930s. The rabbi was hired by Temple Beth Israel and served until he died in November 1950. Paula Ackerman served the temple for more than a year as an acting rabbi. Although she was not ordained and not as educated as a rabbi, she was a strong personality and had learned the tenets and many of the rituals of Judaism from her husband. Having found refuge in a friendly Southern town, Paula Ackerman refused to believe that Meridian's Jews were in any danger. Another who had escaped the Holocaust and found a haven in Meridian was Mrs. Nellie Kass, whose daughter was married to the Ackermans' son. Mrs. Kass scoffed at Schlager's warning. A widow who operated a needlepoint store, she dismissed the idea that her beloved Meridian could experience the kind of violence that had struck the synogogue and the rabbi's house only eighty miles away. It was as though she and other Jews in Meridian refused to believe the Jackson bombings had occurred."
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(12) "Though Williams had been silent while at least two hundred black churches in Mississippi were bombed or burned during his time as a congressman and then governor, he now declared, 'it defies the imagination of civilized people to understand a mind so depraved as to destroy any house of worship.' Ignoring the fact that six black churches in the Meridian area alone had been burned since he had become governor five months earlier, the governor called the bombing of the temple 'the first' terrorism at a house of worship during his administration."
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(13) "Gunn considered himself the keeper of the morals of all his men. More than once, when he found that an officer was having an affair with another officer's wife, he would call in both couples and counsel them. He disliked Everett Keller's brother Sam as much for his dubious morals as for his Klan ties. Sam moonlighted as a country music disc jockey on a local radio station and was widely known as a ladies' man. Around the police station they jokingly referred to him as Killer Keller because one of the women he went out with had been shot to death with his gun while he was in her apartment. Keller claimed the gun had gone off accidentally while she was sewing a tear in his uniform. He was never charged."
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(14) "On another occasion, when tensions flared in Meridian's black neighborhood and there were rumors the Meridian police might be a target of violence, Gunn showed up at a noisy demonstration. 'I'll do what I can to see that there's no violence, and I'll sit on the curb and negotiate with a nigger prostitute,' he told the crowd, 'but the first son of a bitch that throws a brick at one of my police officers is dead.' There was loud murmuring among the demonstrators, but the crowd dispersed. Gunn's disregard for due process was reflected throughout the department. When Meridian police lacked evidence to make arrests, they would simply book suspects on charges of 'D and S' - dangerous and suspicious - and hold them for as many as seventy-two hours. During the early part of Gunn's tenure as a top police official, the department was riddled with Klan members and went in for brutality. 'A den of hatred,' Elsie Logan called it. The detectives' interrogation room was a torture chamber. The 'lie detector,' a two-foot-long black leather strap with a metal spring in it, was used in questioning blacks, and an electric cattle prod and a contraption rigged up with wires and two batteries were used to shock recalcitrant suspects. Marie Knowles, the detective bureau's secretary, never got used to the sound of the clubs smashing against skulls and prisoners screaming in pain. 'They would pop them with anything that was handy,' she said, 'and sometimes just backhand them.'"
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(15) "To the White Knights, Gunn's about-face was more than an outrage. It was dangerous. Bowers' lieutenants did their best to punish and intimidate the chief and all who supported him. There were death threats, harassing telephone calls late at night and more. Gunn responded by organizing trusted police officers into the blackshirt squad, which began using some of the Klan's own tactics against it. In addition to gathering information about Klan activities, the blackshirts waged their own 'COINTELPRO' of anti-Klan harassment, sometimes going so far as to set off small explosions outside Klansmen's houses or shooting into their homes to intimidate them. The chief felt he had almost a divine mandate to stop the violence in Meridian, and he agonized over his inability to do so. His war with the Klan put tremendous strain on him and his family. On those nights when Klan threats had been received, police cars were stationed in the neighborhood. Gunn would eat supper and climb the stairs to the upstairs bedroom in the front of his modest frame house at the corner of B Street and Twenty-fourth Avenue near downtown Meridian. There, in the hot, humid darkness, he would sit for hours with the shotgun across his lap, looking out the window at the empty street and waiting for the Klan."
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(16) "So in March, facing the indictment and almost certain conviction, he decided to go underground. He immediately set out on a trip to the West, visiting the anti-Semitic Dr. Wesley Swift of Lancaster, California. Tarrants would later testify he bought a rifle from Swift with plans to use it too shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 'That was my ambition, to shoot Dr. King,' Tarrants said later. ' I hated Dr. King.' On March 23, when he returned to his home in Mobile, he found the FBI waiting. Teams of agents were in two cars parked outside his house. He spotted them before they recognized him, however, and escaped. Within a week, Tarrants was in a safe house located in the mountains near Franklin, North Carolina, staying with friends who were followers of Swift and connected with right-wing radicals in Miami. Months later, FBI agents backtracking on Tarrants' trail interviewed a neighbor of the family. The neighbor said the house was used for meetings of extremists from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida as well as North Carolina. He described the host family as 'extremely antiblack and anti-Jewish' and one member as 'crazy enough to blow up the White House.' The area behind the house was used frequently for target practice with firearms ranging from pistols to automatic weapons. Using the North Carolina house as a base, Tarrants was soon making forays into Mississippi for meetings with Bowers and new attacks on Klan targets. He saw himself as a patriot and closely identified himself with another notorious felon and anti-Semite on the run, Robert DePugh, head of the paramilitary Minutemen."
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(17) "The arrest, one of three run-ins the elder Tarrants had with police during several visits to Meridian, made no apparent impression on his son, who later called this period 'the lowest moment of my life, a time of moral insanity and psychotic radicalism.'" // The language used is unfair to the mentally ill.
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(18) "If Tarrants had seen how the Roberts brothers were behaving, he would have been even surer of his conclusion. The two Klansmen had been repeatedly warned by Scarborough and the FBI that any sudden display of wealth could give away their role as informants. 'Hell, we preached to the informants day and night not to spend thw reward money for a while,' Scarborough said. Self-control was beyond them, however. Almost immediately, they bought new cars - Raymond a Thunderbird, Alton Wayne a Cadillac. And they flashed rolls of bills around the Travelers Club and other places. Soon rumors were flying that they were the ones who had betrayed Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth." // Compulsions? Them purchasing these vehicles, then?
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(19) "Their son had been caught in the qct of placing a bomb outside a residence - a capital offense in Mississippi. He had shot and nearly killed a policeman. And the Lauderdale County district attorney had already made clear that he would seek the death penalty. The idea of pleading insanity infuriated Tarrants; he was perfectly sane, he said, and such a defense would mock everything he believed in, everything he had fought and risked his life for. And he knew the plea would mean his mother was ready to testify that she had doubted his sanity since his early teenage years. In the end, realizing the insanity defense offered his best hope of escaping the gas chamber, Tarrants gave in. If the jury rejected the argument, it might still deter them from recommending death. In his opening statement to the jury of nine white men, two white women and a black man, Hass declared that the defense would prove the defendant suffered from 'a severe case of paranoia, a form of schizophrenia,' and that a hereditary element 'foredoomed this defendant to be seriously ill.'"
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(20) "After that encounter, Dean and I enjoyed a close relationship. I kne wother Mississippi ministers who considered it their duty to save souls, but Ken was the only one I knew who would face down the State Police and the medical establishment to obtain treatment for a black man. For a Baptist, he had exceptionally close ties with Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. Dean also worked closely with the ADL, especially with Botnick. In a 1968 memo, Dean noted that they had a cooperative and trusting relationship, that he and Botnick spoke often and that their contacts had increased because of 'the surge of anti-semitic literature by the White Citizens' Council, National States Rights Party and the KKK.'"
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(21) "If Dean and the ADL shared a common antipathy for the Klan, the young minister proved to be far too liberal on civil rights for the ADL and some members of the Mississippi Jewish community. What alarmed Jews who supported the status quo was Dean's close contact with militant civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality. Botnick suspected them of Communist influence. The ADL was relatively conservative in its approach, acutely sensitive to the widespread feeling those days that Jews themselves were too far to the left. In combating anti-Semitism, the ADL had come to embrace some of the FBI's obsessive concern about Communist influences in the civil rights movement. And the two organizations kept some of the more militant civil rights groups under constant surveillance. Their hunt for Communists and Communist sympathizers in the movement made for strange bedfellows. *The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and the state's two veteran senators - John Stennis and James O. Eastland, both outspoken segregationists - exchanged investigative information with the FBI and the ADL.*"
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(22) "For a long time, there was silence. Then Botnick acknowledged that Tarrants and Ainsworth had been lured into an ambush, and he said he had helped plan it. He could not 'morally blow the whistle' on the FBI and the Meridian police, he said, because they had stopped the Klan's atracks on the Jews. I agreed they had stopped the violence - there had been none since the ambush - and I said I coukd understand his point. Cradling the telephone receiver on my shoulder, I typed notes as Botnick resumed talking: 'It was logical someobe had paid to set up the Klan members...he had heloed raise funds for the purpose...wouldn't say how much was paid...wouldn't want to see the ADL involved in a story about the Meridian incident...four guys know I was in on the original planning...it was a trap - you know that.' Before Botnick agreed to partixipate in the planning, he said, the FBI played the tape recording of the Klan threat to blow up a synagogue full of people, including women and children, on which one Klansman could be heard to say, 'Little Jew bastards grow up to be big Jew devils. Kill 'em while they're young.' Trying to draw Botnick out, I assured him again that I could understand why the police would resort to extreme measure with Klan violence running unchecked. In fact, I did understand how Botnick felt. If I had been a Jew in Meridian and knew that Klansmen were threatening to blow up synagogues with people inside, I probably would have contributed to the fund too and probably would have muttered, 'Never again.' At the same time, I was a reporter, and if what I was hearing could be substantiated, what happened at Meridian was one hell of a story that raised serious questions about law enforcement methods used in this case. Discussing his own role, Botnick said, 'We were dealing with animals and I would do it again.' But he acknowledged that he was profoundly upset when he learned a woman had been shot to death. 'I threw up when I heard what happened that night.' For all his candor, Botnick said he did not want anything written about the events leading up to the Meridian trap and certainly did not want to see the ADL portrayed as being involved. None of the participants would talk to me anyway, he said, and I did not have enough facts to write a story."
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(23) "Suddenly, the words set up jumped out at me. The June 17, 1968, document began, 'Tonight informant and his brother will meet with Hawkins or the night of June 18, 1968 and they will attempt to set up a job on Al Rose's house.' Moments later, I came upon a memo in which Scarborough reported that he had told George Warner, the district attorney, that 'the two Roberts boys were the keys to the case and they would talk for $85,000' and could clear up the synagogue bombings in Meridian and Jackson and nine church bombings."
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(24) "Reading from a Scarborough report that 'informants wanted a written commitment concerning immunity which was given to them and signed by myself,' I asked, 'The FBI agents didn't sign that too, did they?' 'Uh-uh.' 'You're the only one who signed that?' 'Right.' 'But they were there? I mean, they knew that, they were in on all of that too?' 'Right.'"
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(25) "The next stop was New Orleans and a visit to Botnick at the ADL regional office. We arrived unannounced, but Botnick smiled broadly and welcomed us. I told him we wanted to talk with him for a few minutes. After exchanging how-you-doing pleasantries, I reminded Botnick of our discussion about the Meridian case the previous April. Suddenly, he was frowning. He simoly could not recall much about our conversation at the time, he said. 'Remember, you said you couldn't "morally blow the whistle" on the FBI and the Meridian police for setting up a trap in Meridian because they had stopped the Klan violence?' 'I don't remember that.' Reading slowly from my typewritten notes of the interview with him, I said, 'Here's what you said: "Four guys know I was in on the original planning. It was a trap - you know that." You remember that, don't you?' 'I don't remember that,' he said, shaking his head sideways. 'Remember, you said the FBI palyed a tape recording for you of a Klansman talking about blowing up synagogues full of people, including women and children, and one Klansman said, 'Little Jews grow up to be big Jews,' and 'Kill them while they are young.' Remember you talked about raising funds and you said, 'We were dealing with animals and I would do it again'? But you said when you learned a woman had been killed it made you sick and you said you went in and threw up when you heard about it?' Botnick said he could not recall the details of the interview, but the comments I cited to him were 'incorrect.' I began to tell him some of the things I had learned from Scarborough and from the detective's records. 'It's fantastic - like something out of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-four,' he said. He also denied that Gunn and Key had asked him to arrange to have the Roberts brothers liquidated. Leaving Botnick's office, I felt certain I had just lost a source." // Is Botnick a liar, or did he suffer severe memory impairments? He seems more like a liar to me. // Why does Botnick reference a popular work of fiction, here, also? He was gaslighting Nelson?
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(26) "Although an abundance of documentary and eyewitness testimony clearly marked it as a joint FBI-Meridian police operation, Moore insisted that it was strictly a local show with the FBI merely providing guidance."
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(27) "The Meridian story touched off a flurry of memoranda: FBI officials flatly denied the FBI's involvement in arranging the trap even though facts in the story were demonstratably true and had been heavily documented by Meridian's police records and interviews. On one memo, which quoted Moore as saying the FBI's Jackson office had had 'excellent working relations with Jack Nelson,' Hoover wrote, 'It is obvious now that Nelson played Moore for a sucker.' On another memo denying any FBI role, he wrote, 'I hope SAC [Special Agent in Charge] Moore now realizes Nelson doesn't have a halo over his head.' In another memo, Deputy Director Cartha (Deke) DeLoach declared: 'This is a typical Jack Nelson article filled with lies and vicious innuendo.' Twice before, in early 1968, Hoover and other FBI officials had castigated me for my reporting, the first time for disclosing FBI agents had lied about the Orangeburg incident, and again when Nick Chriss and I managed to interview some witnesses in the Martin Luther King assassination case before FBI agents had contacted them. Once you were on Hoover's 'enemy list,' almost anything you did was subject to the most scathing criticism from the director and his sycophants."
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(28) "Gunn also told reporters that Klan informants had advised him that in covering the Meridian story I had told people that I was part of a group 'which had as its purpose writing a story to discredit my police department and the FBI, and actually remove Mr. Hoover, who they believed had set himself up as a czar. This apparently is a left-winged group that does not want law enforcement.'" // Why use "czar," here? / "Tsar" is the preferred form, also. "Czar" is commonly used by non-scholars in America, and seems to be used disrespectfully. The reason why remains unclear to me.
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(29) "The bureau as a whole was also sensitive to the suggestion that the ambush had gone beyond the law. FBI agents visited Tarrants at Parchman seeking a signed statement denying that he and Kathy Ainsworth had been entrapped at Meridian. The FBI wanted what amounted to legal absolution. Finally, after repeated requests, Tarrants gave them a statement, which was leaked to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The story was carried under the headline, 'Tarrants Absolves FBI of Entrapment.' The statement did not change the facts. The evidence was abundant that the Roberts brothers, in concert with the FBI and Meridian police, had played a pivotal role in the planning of a second bombing in Meridian and in selecting Davidson's house as the target. Moreover, Scarborough's reports amounted to overwhelming evidence that the brothers set up Tarrants and that Raymond, acting for the FBI and the police, pressed for the bombing attempt to be carried out on their timetable."
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(30) "When Roy Moore retired from the FBI at the age of sixty in 1974, he was honored by the local and state leaders and the Anti-Defamation League for directing the FBI's Klan-busting activities. He later served as director of security for the state's largest bank, Jackson's Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He retired from there in 1982 and lives in Jackson. Moore still insists that there was no entrapment and thag police used no illegal or unacceptable practices at Meridian. Jim Ingram retired from the FBI at age fifty in 1982 and succeeded Moore at the Deposit Guaranty National Bank. He lives in Jackson. In 1992 he was appointed Mississippi's commissioner of public safety, the state's top law enforcement post. Ingram disagrees with his close friend Moore about what happened at Meridian. 'It was an ambush, that's what they meant to do,' Ingram told me. 'No question about that. They meant to kill them out there that night.'" // Is it common for former FBI agents to serve as director of security for Deposit Guaranty National Bank?
