Posted on 07/04/2005 3:21:19 AM PDT by WKB
When musical digital watches first came out in the late 1970s, my old man got one. It played Dixie. He'd call me at college up at LSU and play his watch into the phone.
"Hey chief," I'd say. "One day the Ku Klux Klan or the Black Panthers are going to catch up with you."
I could say that to him, because Efraim O'Sullivan was chief of police in the Mississippi coast town of Ocean Springs, just across the bay from Biloxi. And he was a Jew. It was one thing to be a Jewish cop in Mississippi, but my old man was the first Jewish chief of police in the history of the state.
I am recalling this now because Mississippi, Klansmen and Jews have been in the news these past weeks as the indictment, trial, conviction and sentencing commenced of 80-year-old preacher Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of three men in 1964.
Killen will likely rot in jail till he dies for leading a pack of men who committed one of the greatest atrocities of the civil rights era - the murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Earl Chaney. The first two were New York Jews and the latter a local black. They were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer, an effort to register blacks to vote and promote racial integration. Klansmen and local cops shot them dead and buried them in an earthen dam.
Having grown up in Louisiana and Mississippi, I had been following the trial with interest. From my father I learned to love Israel and to love and respect the South. Like all my friends, I grew up learning the names of the Confederate heroes. In 1982, when I fought with the Israeli army in Beirut, I flew a Confederate flag from the radio antenna. I used to have a statue of General Robert E. Lee glued to the dashboard of my jeep. When I got it back from the Palestinians who once stole it, I found they had broken him off. All that remain are his boots.
And I always rejected the way the Ku Klux Klan hijacked the rebel flag, turning it into a vulgar symbol of racism, of hatred.
LOTS OF ill words have been spoken of the State of Mississippi, of the South. The re-opening of the muck of racist murder, of church burnings and synagogue bombing has conjured up images of a backwards state. Because of films like Mississippi Burning, it's easy to see how many people imagine the state to be full of pot-holed country roads and cops without a fifth-grade education; of cracker farmers and dull-brained Negro sharecroppers.
The truth is so much more complex.
My father was a detective and later commander of the intelligence division of the New Orleans Police Department.
One day back in 1973, a black racist decided to shoot white people. From the Howard Johnson hotel in New Orleans, he killed four civilians and five cops, including my father's close friend, the deputy chief. He shot my father in the arm and ear. The sniper, Mark Essex, was eventually shot down with an Uzi submachine gun my father had managed to acquire for the NOPD through his contacts in Israel.
Not long after this, my old man decided we should move to Israel, where it was safer. (We would eventually arrive on the third day of the Yom Kippur War.) But before he emigrated, my father had one more job to do.
One night, in September 1973, Byron de la Beckwith was headed toward New Orleans. In his back seat was a bomb, a bomb for the Jews. It was Rosh Hashana eve, 1973, and Papa should have been home to dip the apples in honey. But alas, as his last task for the NOPD, my father had received a tip off from the FBI that a white supremacist was on his way to plant a bomb at the home of the head of the Anti Defamation League in New Orleans, a man called Adolf Botnick, known simply as "B." They stopped him when he crossed the parish line on his way from his home in Greenwood, Mississippi. Byron de la Beckwith was handcuffed in the back seat. My daddy sat in the front. His partner was busy at that moment. As they sat alone, the old white Klansman spoke:
"I'm the guy who shot Medgar Evers," he said, referring to the Negro Civil Rights leader who had been murdered 10 years earlier.
Why did Beckwith admit now what he hadn't admitted in two previous mistrials? Perhaps to win sympathy from a fellow Southerner? Alas, he picked the wrong white cop.
Beckwith was acquitted after his attorney convinced jurors that he had been framed. In 1994, Beckwith was finally convicted with Evers's murder, and died in prison in 2001, serving out his life sentence.
Had Beckwith known the name of the cop who arrested him in New Orleans was O'Sullivan, it's doubtful he would have spoken up. The Klan had my father in their sights for some time. A local white supremacist newspaper called The Councilor wrote this story called, "Look Who Corrupted the New Orleans Police."
"In recent years innocent white Christians in New Orleans have been tormented by a 'hate cadre' within the New Orleans police department. One of the cadre - with a synthetic Irish name - has reportedly fled to Tel Aviv to take up permanent residency there. (The immigrating tormentor was known to be a Marxist.)"
They never liked O'Sullivan and especially not his buddy, "B" Botnick. Botnick had become director of the Anti-Defamation League's South Central Regional Office in New Orleans in 1964, a position which served Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. He assumed the post just as Killen had ordered the murder of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. Because two of the victims were Jewish, the ADL began to monitor the Ku Klux Klan more closely.
In 1968, Botnick was involved in an FBI plot to capture Klan bombers in Meridian, Mississippi. During the ensuing battle, one of the bombers was killed and another seriously injured. After this, the KKK frequently monitored and targeted Botnick.
In 1967, Klansman Tommy Tarrants bombed the Beth Israel synagogue in Jackson. As teenagers, we'd visit on NFTY (National Federation of Temple Youth) conventions and they'd show us where it happened. We'd wonder if it could happen again.
But back in the mid 1960s, this was the Deep South that the Yankees had vilified as "another America." Folk singers like Phil Ochs wrote such ballads as Mississippi, find your self another country to be part of.
THE KLAN had an office in New Orleans run by a man called Dean White. He held the names of all the secret members and donors inside. The place was under constant guard.
"We got a girl to make a pass at him and lure him out of the house and around the corner," my father recalled years later. "While they were there, we went in and stole all the records, brought them to headquarters and Xeroxed copies and returned them. They never found out that we had them."
According to my father, his intelligence department began sending people on the list letters threatening to expose them. The KKK had gone on a recruitment drive in the high schools.
"We sent copies of those records to their homes and their parents got angry about it and removed them from some of the high schools," my father told me. "We did it because we were trying to break up the Klan. They were criminals. They were causing riots and killing people," he said. "It caused a lot of people to fall away from them. Their supporters suddenly didn't want to be involved." My father also confided in me many years later that they had come upon something else in the KKK office: a folder with his name on it with photographs, some taken as he left our home's front door. My father's biggest fear was getting shot in front of us.
"What bothered me most was they knew where I lived," he said in his gravely, gruff voice. "That would have been embarrassing, to be shot and killed in front of you all."
By the early 1970s, the Klan was pretty much decimated and impotent in Louisiana and parts of Mississippi. (It would experience a surprising resurgence a generation later, with David Duke of Louisiana running unsuccessfully for governor.) But in 1970, it was a time of integration - reconciliation even. Even the one-armed Mississippi governor John Bell Williams, an avowed segregationist, was installing the most sweeping integration in Mississippi history - albeit by a federal court order. Every time he'd meet my father, he'd try to coax him to the state.
"'We got to find a way to get O'Sullivan to Mississippi,'" my father would quote him as saying.
O'Sullivan eventually did make it to Mississippi. But it was a long, circuitous journey that saw my family move from Jerusalem to the Cajun town of Jennings in the squishy Louisiana swamps, where he served as chief of police, the first Jew ever to hold that position in the history of the Pelican state.
By the late 1970s, Mississippi beckoned him and he went, accepting the job as chief in Ocean Springs. Efraim O'Sullivan bought the digital watch that played Dixie. When people he'd just met said they couldn't say his name, he'd say: "How do you cook your eggs in the morning?"
"Ah fry'em," they'd reply.
"Well, that's my name," he'd say.
He also sought to change things in the little west Jackson County town under the shade of huge live oak trees, their moss swaying from the Gulf breezes. He integrated the police department, hiring the first black officer and the first female beat cop. He urged his cops to be more humane and get connected to the community.
Efraim O'Sullivan passed away this past February. I was lucky enough to have visited him just three weeks before, as he lay dying in his beloved Mississippi. I tried to figure out if his brain was still there behind the flatness of his once bonhomie, quixotic character.
He was a man of many secrets. As I cleared through his papers, I found hand-written letters from Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin thanking him for his service. There was a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy and even a Lebanese driver's license with his photo and the mysterious name Mr. William Badih Marrash. Secrets he had. But he was never a mystery. I don't have to wonder what he would have thought about the case of Killen. Justice, delayed for decades, had finally come to Mississippi.
He was my brother By Paul Simon
He was my brother Five years older than i He was my brother Twenty-three years old the day he died
Freedom writer They cursed my brother to his face Go home outsider This town's gonna be your buryin' place
He was singin' on his knees An angry mob trailed along They shot my brother dead Because he hated what was wrong
He was my brother Tears can't bring him back to me He was my brother And he died so his brothers could be free
PING
Ping
Fascinating, wonderful article; a moving memorial by a loving son.
In 1982, when I fought with the Israeli army in Beirut, I flew a Confederate flag from the radio antenna. I used to have a statue of General Robert E. Lee glued to the dashboard of my jeep.
Sounds like the "Dukes of Israel"
Good mornimg. Happy 4th.
Same to you.
Stay cool
Great read, thanks.
You're welcome
A Blessed 4th to you!!
..........................................
Thanks for posting this. A good, interesting read.
excellent article... have a good fourth. Don't eat too much barbecue.
By that I knew I would like this article.
Don't want you to miss a chance to bash ping.
re: Efraim O'Sullivan, Arieh O'Sullivan...!! LOL. This is great.
I emailed Mr O'Sullivan and told him
I appreciated the article.
I knew two policemen who were shot that day by Essex and company, Sirgo and Arthurs.
And I always rejected the way the Ku Klux Klan hijacked the rebel flag, turning it into a vulgar symbol of racism, of hatred.
"LIVE" WITH TAE Shelby Foote
The American Enterprise ^ | January/February 2001 | Bill Kauffman / Shelby Foote
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1432585/posts
(snip)
TAE: In 1970 you wrote of Klansmen who had appropriated the flag: “I tell them to their faces that they are the scum who have degraded the Confederate flag, converted it from a symbol of honor into a banner of shame, covered it with obscenities like a roadhouse men’s room wall.” Is the Confederate flag today still degraded, or have the recent assaults on it given it a new dignity?
FOOTE: It’s still mainly abused and absurdly defended. And I understand blacks’ feelings when they see the Confederate flag. The real villains are Southerners who knew what that flag truly stood for and allowed yahoos to carry it.
What happened during the period of the Northern students coming down to the South during the civil rights struggle was that to people down in Mississippi they were a pretty scruffy-looking group, and we thought, “They’re sending their trash down here to make trouble for us. Let our trash take care of it.” And our trash did, in a terrible way, like the murder of those three civil rights workers.
We should have stood up and said that those people ought not be allowed within 100 yards of the Confederate flag, let alone use it as a symbol for all they were doing. But we didn’t. It’s hard to take when people define you as corrupt people and scum. So you lash back.
This country has two profound sins on its soul. One is slavery—that’s a sin that we will probably never be able to cleanse ourselves of—and the other was emancipation. They told four and a half million people, “You are free, hit the road,” and made no provision for education. Just told them to go out, and of course they drifted back into sharecropping, which is a form of peonage, and it was just a disaster.
If the South had not lost the war, I’m sure that slavery wouldn’t have survived into the twentieth century, and it’s possible that it might have been brought to an end in a more gradual, less disastrous way. Many of the troubles we’ve got today with black communities are from their being released into the world without being prepared to deal with it.
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