{ADVISORY: This essay discusses the sort of history that “Republicans” in many states are seeking to erase, because “it might make white people uncomfortable”}
“I belong right here in Mississippi. . . . Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous than in Mississippi. . . . So this is the decisive battleground for America: and every young American who wants to have a part in the decision should be here.”
– Mickey Schwerner, May 1964 (a month before he was killed by Klansmen)
Today is the Summer Solstice, Midsummer Day, the longest day of the year. Fifty-nine years ago, it was the night that was the longest for three Freedom workers in Mississippi. For them, there was no dream, but a Midsummer Night’s Nightmare.
Mississippi in 1964 was the site of some of the most important battles in the struggle over freedom and its meaning. It was like a foreign country or another world . . . or maybe hell. Here’s a story that some in the Freedom Movement liked to tell during that year:
A black student in Chicago who was seeking to find his mission in life was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice firmly instructing: “Go to Mississippi! Go to Mississippi!”
Shaking and sweating, the student replied, “All by myself?”
“Have no fear,” the voice of God answered. “I’ll be with you—as far as Memphis.”
Murder of White People? — That’s News! The national impact of what happened as the Mississippi Freedom Summer began was well described decades later by Walter Cronkite of CBS News: “The time capsule that had been the Old South and had been left alone for so long was being pried open like a rusty tomb. During that week in June, the country would be shocked by the skeletons it began to find.” Mt. Zion Church in the Longdale community in rural Neshoba County, Mississippi, had agreed to host a Freedom School. During the first week that the volunteer orientation was taking place in Ohio, on Tuesday night, June 16, Klansmen attacked members of the church and burned the building. The purpose of the church attack was to lure Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, a white CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) field secretary from New York who had been working in Meridian for several months, to come to Neshoba County to investigate. The Klan referred to the bearded Schwerner as “Goatee” and had targeted the New York Mets baseball cap-wearing “Yankee Jew” for “elimination.” (That Schwerner was a Mets fan in those early years of the team’s existence further demonstrates that he was an idealist willing to support causes others considered hopeless—I speak from experience.) The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency established in 1956 that had devolved into a secret police unit, had circulated to local sheriffs and Klansmen (in many cases one and the same) a description of Schwerner and his vehicle. Three days after the Neshoba County church burning, on Friday evening, June 19, the Senate passed Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bill. It was frightening news for diehard white racists. Two days later, Schwerner, his friend James Chaney (a local black CORE activist), and a just-arrived white summer volunteer, Andrew Goodman, drove up to Neshoba to investigate the incident. A deputy sheriff arrested them for alleged speeding and took them to the county jail in Philadelphia, where they were held Incommunicado until well after dark and then released and told to “get out of town.” They were never heard from again. ♦ ♦ ♦ The night before, while the trio was held in the jail, they were denied their right to make a telephone call, and the jail receptionist told a caller from the COFO office that they were not in custody. They were held until a group of Klansmen could be assembled to kill them. Times had changed, though. It was, one supposes, an example of the decline of traditional values that a public lynching as a form of family entertainment would no longer be accepted by polite society, even in Mississippi. Another aspect of this murder was also a break with lynching tradition. “The murder of the boys is the first interracial lynching in the history of the United States,” an attorney for the Goodman family noted. When the lynch mob was in place along the road back to Meridian, the deputy “freed” the three freedom workers, only to overtake them on the road and turn them over to his Klan brothers, who took them to an isolated location, where they shot and killed all three. The Klansmen took the bodies to bury in an earthen dam on the land of a wealthy white man in the county and then drove the CORE car into the Bogue Chitto swamp, where they burned it. With white people missing and probably dead, much of what the movement had been seeking from the federal government since 1961 and had been repeatedly told was impossible happened almost instantly. By Tuesday morning, the disappearance was front-page news in the New York Times. Later that day the burned-out station wagon was found and the disappearance was the lead story in the Times. President Johnson sent former CIA director Allen Dulles to Mississippi as his personal representative “to evaluate law observance,” and ordered two hundred sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station to conduct a search for the missing young men. The number of FBI agents in Mississippi was soon increased tenfold, from fifteen to 150, and the Jackson office became the agency’s largest.
Governor Paul Johnson, Jr. and other Mississippi officials claimed the disappearance was a hoax and a Communist plot to besmirch the good name of Mississippi. The missing men, they said, were actually “vacationing on a beach in Cuba.” In July, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover visited the state, Governor Johnson told him that “as long as he sat in the governor’s chair, ignorance, hatred, and prejudice would not take over in [Mississippi].” As a candidate for the state’s highest office the year before, Johnson had entertained audiences at his stump speeches by telling them that NAACP stands for “n***ers, alligators, apes, coons and possums.” The movement was now, in some places and at some times, under “the protective glow of the national media.” But the national media’s attention was focused on the three men who had disappeared in Philadelphia, leaving most of what else was going on in the state almost as much in the shadows as it had been. As the search for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman went on, other bodies of murder victims were found. The lower halves of two bodies were discovered in a bayou near the Mississippi River. A body of an unidentified teenager wearing a CORE T-shirt was come across in another river. “Mississippi is the only state where you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting,” one of the Summer Project volunteers wrote in a July letter. “Things are really much better for rabbits—there’s a closed season on rabbits.” But the national media showed little interest in these unexpected bodies. They were black bodies. The distinction was not lost on the black freedom fighters in Mississippi. {NOTE: This essay is adapted from my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin' - 1964: The Year "the Sixties' Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, which is available in hardcover, e-book and audiobook.} ___________________________ NOTE: My times they are a-changin’. I have just retired after teaching for, they tell me (I’m thinking of demanding a recount), a half century, at Millsaps College. I’ll miss the classroom and stimulating discussions with students, but my life won’t change that much, as I have for decades spent most of my time writing. One thing that will change, though, is our income. Without my teaching salary, I need a new source of revenue. A patron or group of patrons establishing a fund to support my writing would be nice, but that’s not in the cards. Therefore, I have decided to start taking paid subscriptions to my Substack essays. I don’t want to keep anyone from reading them free, but for those who can afford a paid subscription, I hope you will do so. There will also occasionally be a premium essay that is only available to paid subscribers.