Funeral Home Politics

Espy likes to keep busy. He even hops atop a backhoe to dig graves before his clients’ funerals. PHOTO BY CADY HERRING

He was furious. “I picked up the phone and told them if they didn’t turn those lights on right now, there would be nobody at work tomorrow. I couldn’t believe people were so insensitive.”

Within two hours, the lights were back on. Espy had made a friend for life. More importantly, he had sent a message. The first black mayor of Clarksdale cared.

The affable, soft-spoken Espy was the Delta’s first black mayor of a biracial town, held office 20 years, led the National Conference of Black Mayors twice and spent more time at the White House than his older brother Mike, former secretary of agriculture and the state’s first black congressman. Along the way, he cracked down on drug gangs and violence and kept the city afloat financially despite grinding poverty and a crippled economy.

Espy grew up in Yazoo City. He spent a good chunk of his youth accompanying his grandfather, T. J. Huddleston, on trips all over Mississippi. Huddleston owned a network of hospitals and more than 20 funeral homes and frequently stopped in on them to see how things were going.

Everywhere they went, his grandfather would fret about the sad state of health care for black people. Huddleston was tired of black women giving birth in cotton fields, Espy said. So he asked people for money.

Huddleston’s refrain could be heard all across black Mississippi: “You give me a dollar to buy a brick, and I’ll build you a hospital.”

It worked. In 1928, the doors opened to Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital in Yazoo City, the first hospital for blacks in the Delta.

Espy watched as his grandfather addressed large groups of people and churches, once before a crowd of about 3,000. “He was a great orator,” said Espy, and he used his power of speech to connect with black people all over the state.

The young Espy remembered all of that when he arrived in Clarksdale to take over one of his grandfather’s funeral homes and people started to urge the easygoing newcomer to get into politics.

Espy lost his first campaign for city council, but it was close. And people took notice. He was asked if he would accept an appointment to a vacancy on the allwhite school board, and he did. Not long after, he ran for the council again and won. Then, in 1989, he was elected mayor.

As he looks back at it now, Espy believes his success was assured when his grandfather picked him up and drove him all over Mississippi to ask for money to build a hospital for black people. The powerful network of funeral homes gave him instant status in Clarksdale. Everyone in town – including the all-important black pastors –knew him. At funerals, he was front and center before the church, saying a few kind words. When he became mayor, that already large network expanded again. Call it funeral home politics.

Espy knew a lot about funeral homes. But he had a lot to learn as mayor.

Right after he started, he was trying to figure out how to use bonds to get some things done for the city. City Clerk Sylvia

Byrd walked into his office and said, “You’re a good person. I love you. But you do not know what you’re talking about.” She said it in such a loving manner, he just laughed. “What?”

“I’m going to teach you about bonds,” Byrd said. “I’m going to teach you about ratings. I’m going to teach you about budgets. I’m going to teach you about everything that you need. In fact, I’m going to help you be the best man this city has ever had.”

Espy was grateful. He may have been in charge of City Hall, but he was running a town in one of the poorest places in the United States. He needed all the help he could get.

“Money is something that a mayor in the Delta cringes about at night,” Espy said. Byrd worked with Espy until he retired in 2013. She taught him how to put his ideas into action. He called her and others in his office his “prayer partners.”

In a town where black people once had to drink from “Black Only” water fountains, the white clerk and the black mayor became fast friends. Espy even gave the eulogy at her first husband’s funeral.

One of Espy’s biggest problems was crime. He realized just how big a problem it really was when an elderly woman told him she couldn’t sleep at night. She kept hearing gunshots. She was scared. And so she slept on the floor to avoid stray bullets that might come her way.

Espy thought about his own mother. He could not stand the thought of someone he loved being afraid to sleep in her own bed. He realized he needed help. “I went straight over there up

Fourth Street to Oxford,” said Espy.

He walked into the U.S. Attorney’s office and asked federal prosecutor John Hailman to bring the feds to Clarksdale. He told him he had permission to do whatever was needed to eradicate the gangs and the violence.

In Hailman’s upcoming book, From Midnight to Guntown: A Prosecutor in the Land of Faulkner and Elvis, he describes Clarksdale in the late 1990s and early 2000s as being overrun by gangs and drug lords. Unemployed young men in Clarksdale had teamed up with relatives in gangs from Chicago and were terrorizing the town after dark.

– HENRY ESPY

“They found in street gangs that camaraderie and sense of belonging so necessary to teenage boys seeking identity,” Hailman said.

Espy, Chief of Police Steve Bingham, Coahoma County Sheriff Andrew Thompson, and District Attorney Laurence Mellen joined forces to get help.

Retired as mayor, Henry Espy still keeps involved at his Century Funeral Home in Clarksdale. PHOTO BY CADY HERRING

Hailman rolled out “Project Safe Neighborhoods,” a program that targeted street gangs.

Meanwhile, Espy went to church services all over Clarksdale and warned people that they were about to get “tough love.” He told them that drugs would no longer be tolerated. He told them that guns would no longer be tolerated. “We are cracking down.”

Overnight, Clarksdale changed. Roadblocks sprang up. The angry “wop-wop-wop-wop” of law enforcement helicopters descended on the city. Undercover police went in to take down gang leaders. Jail cells were full. The crackdown was the talk of the town. And, at least for a while, it worked.

In 2001, Clarksdale reported 131 violent gun crimes, more than one every three days. In 2003, the number dropped to 49, a 60 percent reduction. In 2004, Espy, Bingham, Mellen, and Cpl. Billy Baker received the National Award for Outstanding Local Police Department Involvement in Project Safe Neighborhoods from Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Corney at the national Project Safe Neighborhoods conference.

For Espy, the award meant all that hard work had paid off. “The quality of life starts right there when you reduce crime,” he said.

Espy had his own run-in with the law in 1993, after a losing a race for the congressional seat his brother Mike vacated when he became agriculture secretary. An independent counsel started looking into allegations that Mike Espy illegally accepted gifts from agricultural interests. He was acquitted on all charges and some members of the jury didn’t mind telling the press how weak they thought the government’s case was.

The prosecutor also charged Henry Espy with making false statements to a local bank to get loans to help pay off his congressional campaign debt. But a federal judge acquitted him in a non-jury trial. Some other defendants, including the New Orleans lawyer raising money to pay off Henry Espy’s debts, were convicted. That lawyer was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton as he left office.

During his long career, Espy became a regular at the White House, frequently meeting with Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Once, he asked his brother the congressman for some help from the White House for a local project and his brother replied, “Hey, you’re over there more than I am”

Now, Espy says he’s tired of flying back forth to Washington, tired of going to the White House, tired of the spotlight. The former mayor is content to keep his hand in at the funeral home. He enjoys his work and happily drives around Clarksdale in his truck, listening to the radio. He says that he used to only listen to politics, but he’s happier now with gospel music. He even climbs aboard a backhoe and digs graves for the deceased.

When he looks back, he sees a good life and a remarkably successful family. He was a mayor, his brother a congressman and Cabinet member and his son Chuck is finishing up his time in the Legislature. He takes great delight in recalling how, as a child, his father pushed him and his siblings to make better grades, no matter how well they were already doing.

– HENRY ESPY

“When he found out what our grades were, he would go get this old suitcase and get out his report cards from high school and show them to us,” Espy recalled.

His dad was from a poor family in Dothan, Ala. He worked his way through school and made straight A’s. He couldn’t understand why Espy wasn’t doing the same. “If I can do it,” he would say, “you can, too.”

Espy would shake his head. “Dad, you have seven children that have got individual differences. Our brains are not functioning like yours. We are going to be successful but in our own way.”

As it turned out, he was right. Design by Carson Cain