Word: greenwood
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When Beckwith was five, his father died of what the death certificate termed "pneumonia and alcoholism." The widow returned to Greenwood with her son, was hospitalized several times for mental ailments, died of cancer at 47. The boy was then twelve. He was thereafter reared by an eccentric uncle, William Green Yerger, who dabbled at farming his family's remaining cotton acres. Mostly, the uncle liked to catch catfish. Sometimes he just stuffed the fish into a dresser drawer at home and left them there...
...family home rotted too. Says a Greenwood merchant: "Beckwith was reared in the sort of place white people ought not to live in." Yet the premises were cluttered with mementos of the family's better days: a letter to Beckwith's grandmother from Jeff Davis: pieces of china from Beauvoir, the Davis mansion near Biloxi. To Beckwith, these must have suggested lush plantations, colonnaded mansions-and white supremacy...
Beckwith returned to Greenwood, worked for ten years as a tobacco salesman. He and his wife were divorced, remarried, then separated-and Beckwith lived alone in the tumble-down family house. Last January he became a fertilizer salesman. He was glib enough to be good at selling but, as one employer obliquely put it, he was "overly enthusiastic about things not concerned with...
...that was meant Beckwith's segregationist obsessions. He attended Greenwood's Episcopal Church of the Nativity. But, says a member, "He tried to inject racism into everything. If you talked about Noah and the Ark, he'd want to know if there were any Negroes in the Ark." In pursuit of his obsessions, Beckwith passed out racist pamphlets that he wrote himself, launched such an aggressive recruiting drive for the local white Citizens Council that its officers finally asked him to desist. He also stood in the doorway of Greenwood's bus terminal to block Negroes...
...obviously weird ways, Beckwith still has his defenders in Greenwood. A local fund drive is under way to pay his legal expenses. Declares a Greenwood businessman: "I say the shooting of Evers was a patriotic act. If Delay pulled the trigger that night, he must have felt he was doing it for the South and the state." Says a Beckwith friend: "Beckwith is a Joan of Arc, and his cause is to destroy the evil of forced integration. I don't think he is fit mentally. But Joan of Arc was a little abnormal...