Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

crime . He was abducted by a mob of white men from jail in Poplarville and taken
to the Louisiana border where he was shot . His body was disposed of in the Pearl
River. This was the first "old-fashioned" lynching in the state since World Q .
Although the FBI turned over evidence and the identities of Parker's lynchers to
state authorities, no arrests were made .
28 . Sam Bailey, interview by the author, tape recording, July 14, 1994, Jackson,
Mississippi.
29 . Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory : Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar
Evers . (Reading, Mass . : Addison-Wesley, 1994, 48, 61 ; Charles Payne, I've of
the Light of Freedom : The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom
Struggle . (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995), 287;Evers, For Us, 273 .
30. Robert Moses, interview by author, tape recording, June 26, 1994, Jackson,
MS ; MacArthur Cotton, interview by author.
3 l . Byron De La Beckwith, an unapologetic white supremacist and segregationist
was, after three trials over a thirty year period, convicted of murdering Medgar
Evers . Beckwith was a member of the Citizen's Council of the Delta town of
Greenwood. A weapon found in a vacant lot near the Evers' home contained
Beckwith's fingerprint . Eyewitnesses placed Beckwith in Jackson, ninety miles
from Greenwood, the evening of the murders . The first two trials ended in hung
juries . With assistance from the Citizen's Council and the Sovereignty Comrnission
jurors were pressured into freeing Beckwith . Beckwith's third trial took place
in Movement Mississippi. For a closer look into Beckwith and his trial, read
Nossiter, Of Long Memory and Massengill, Anatomy of a Racist.
32 . Nossiter, Of Long Memory. 62 ; Mendelshon, The MaMrs . 72-73 ; Massengill .
Portrait of a Racist , 135-136 ; Payne, Light of Freedom. 288-289 ; Evers, r Us
302-303 .
33 . Sam Bailey, interview by the author
34. In Black folk culture the trickster, a form of folk hero, is a character who
manipulates the powerful in order to win concessions . John W. Roberts in From
Trickster to Badman : The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (1989) speak ,
of how the Black trickster can utilize his or her cleverness and acumen for survival
but can resort to violence if necessary. In this regard Roberts states " . . the
trickster who could adeptly stand inside his dupe's sense of reality and manipul .t , ,