1964: FREEDOM SUMMER, DEADLY SUMMER
Philadelphia means “city of brotherly love.” The town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, however, was anything but a city of brotherly love in 1964. It became instead a city of civil rights activity, Ku Klux Klan reaction, racial strife, murder, FBI probes, and international media attention. The two-month hunt for three missing civil rights workers turned the eyes of the world on the little backwater town and its corrupt law enforcement officers. The discovery of the bodies of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman ultimately led to a murder trial conducted by the U.S. Justice Department in a federal court in Mississippi that marked a turning point in southern race relations. Whereas all-white local juries in the Deep South had a history of acquitting their white peers of racial hate-crime charges, this time it was different. This time, an all-white local jury returned a guilty verdict against seven fellow whites, including a sheriff, a deputy sheriff, a former sheriff, a city policeman, and the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These convictions gave hope to the hopeless, showing the black population of Mississippi that a new day had dawned, a day when justice, rather than whiteness, would prevail. This happy ending, however, obscures the tragedy that occurred on June 21, 1964, as three innocent young men were murdered, so it is the story of that tragedy that now must be told.
A town of 5,000 in a county of only 20,000, Philadelphia sits in the middle of Neshoba County, in the east-central red clay hills. About 40 miles from the Alabama line and 70 miles from the state capital, Jackson, Philadelphia is also a mere 30 miles from where James Meredith, the protagonist of the 1962 Ole Miss integration crisis, grew up. The town’s great claim to fame prior to 1964 was its annual Neshoba County Fair, held every summer dating back to the 1800s (except during World War II). The week-long fair has traditionally been the state of Mississippi’s great showcase for political stumping during election years, and the likes of governors James K. Vardaman, Theodore G. Bilbo, and Ross Barnett made some of their fieriest orations there. Even presidential candidates such as Ronald Reagan have spoken there. The only other distinguishing feature separating Neshoba County from most of the other 82 Mississippi counties was its Choctaw Indian reservations. The presence of more than half of all the Choctaws in the state gave Neshoba County a racial milieu that no other county could match. While one might suppose this triad of races should have prevented whites and blacks from polarizing, it did not. Whites were just as determined to maintain their position of superiority there as they were in Birmingham or any other hotbed of civil rights activism. Maybe more so, considering that, upon visiting the town in 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked that it was the worst, most racist place he had ever been.
On the night of June 21, 1964, indeed it was the worst town that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three out-of-towners, could have been in. At 24, Michael Henry “Mickey” Schwerner was the oldest of the three, and the leader. Raised in a Jewish family in New York City, he graduated from Cornell University in 1961 and continued his education at Columbia University. He was married, and both he and his wife joined CORE in 1963. In January 1964, they moved to Meridian, Mississippi, and set up a “COFO” (Council of Federated Organizations) office to coordinate the efforts of CORE, SCLC, SNCC, and NAACP in preparing for “Freedom Summer”—a statewide black-voter-registration drive. There they met Chaney, a 21-year-old local black construction worker and college student. Together they canvassed the rural countryside that spring and summer, talking to the largely uneducated and fearful black residents and holding meetings in black churches to promote voter registration. In June, they spent a few days in Ohio training white college students to come south for the summer and help. There they met Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish student from New York City, who was new to the Freedom Summer project and who accompanied them back to Mississippi.
The presence of COFO workers in rural black areas in Mississippi stirred white resentment not only around Philadelphia but throughout the state in 1964. The state government created auxiliary or supplementary police units to serve as facades to allow Klansmen and other radical segregationists to meet under cover and protection of the law. As civil rights activity increased, random acts of Klan violence, such as beatings, church burnings, and even murder, increased from Holmes County to Hattiesburg, from Neshoba County to Natchez. Philadelphia had no history of being any worse than any other town in terms of racial terrorism, although, rather inexplicably, it was singled out for a Klan campaign in the spring of 1964, playing host to 12 separate cross burnings in April, one of which took place on the courthouse lawn. Meanwhile, the auxiliary police unit in the region met at the National Guard Armory in Philadelphia. Part of the tragedy of these murders is that, of the 1,000 COFO volunteers in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, these three had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The same could have happened to any of the other volunteers, had they been caught in a similar situation—alone and defenseless at night on a rural stretch of highway, at the mercy of corrupt law enforcement officers.
The prelude to the murders began on Tuesday evening, June 16, when the Mount Zion Methodist Church, a black congregation’s modest old edifice, held a combination church meeting and political forum. The Klan had been keeping an eye on the church for weeks, knowing it served as the organizing point for local civil rights activism. As the attendants left the building that night, three of them were assaulted by Klansmen, and one was beaten within an inch of his life. Later that night, the church building went up in flames and burned to the ground. On Sunday, June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman drove in a station wagon northwest from the local hub city of Meridian to Neshoba County, a 40-mile trek up state highway 19, to investigate the beatings and the arson. Cecil Price, the local sheriff’s deputy, identified the car as the one that had been seen around the area lately and that belonged to one of those so-called invaders from up North. He pulled the car over, citing the driver, Chaney, for allegedly speeding. Under normal circumstances, any other driver would have been issued the citation and sent on his way. This, however, was by no means a normal circumstance. The deputy seized the opportunity to teach these integrationists a lesson and hauled them off to the Neshoba County jail. This happened around 4 p.m. The deputy detained the three men for approximately six and a half hours. At around 10:30 p.m., he allowed Chaney to pay a $20 fine and released him. Price and a city policeman, Richard Willis, then tailed their station wagon to the edge of the city limits, moving southwest toward Meridian. That was the last anyone saw of them, at least according to the officers, who then went back to their daily vocation of helping run bootleg whisky around the dry state.
When the missing-persons report came out the next day, the vast majority of local whites dismissed it as a hoax. They convinced themselves that the three COFO workers had staged their own disappearance in order to draw more attention to their Freedom Summer campaign and thus to enlist more volunteers and collect more donations. Meanwhile, FBI agents arrived within two days to begin an investigation, as did reporters for Newsweek and the New York Times. All received a chilly welcome from most townspeople. By the end of the week, the FBI had set up a special new office in Jackson for handling the investigation, and J. Edgar Hoover himself, the long-time director of the FBI, soon came to dedicate the office. At the same time, 400 naval cadets from the nearby military base in Meridian were on the scene, combing through the swamps looking for bodies. The station wagon had already been found by then, nowhere near the place Price and Willis had claimed but rather 12 miles away on the opposite side of town, burned and gutted. About six weeks later, on August 4, the FBI located the bodies, buried beneath 15 feet of dirt in a nearby pond levee. Now, at least the families could get some closure.
The timing of these murders in the big scheme of American history was monumentally important. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights law ever enacted, was passed on July 2, right in the midst of the missing-persons hunt. It gave the Justice Department enforcement clear powers to prosecute civil rights violations to a greater extent than any law before it. The timing of the discovery of the bodies could not have been worse for local whites, who tried to maintain a business-as-usual approach to opening the Neshoba County Fair on August 10, a mere six days later. Although the fair did go on as scheduled, and turnout was not much less than the normal 50,000, racial strife, the FBI presence, and outside interference in local matters generally cast a dark shadow over the festivities.
It took the FBI another four months of questioning witnesses to gather enough evidence to press charges against anyone. Altogether they charged 21 men initially, although some of the charges were later dropped and others dismissed in court. Through legal maneuvering, the defense managed to ensure that the first court proceedings did no harm, and what followed was a lengthy process of retrials and appeals. While the slow and sometimes frustrating American system of justice took its course, national attention shifted away from Philadelphia and on to other civil rights battlegrounds. During this respite, the black members of Mount Zion rebuilt their church and dedicated it to the memory of the three slain COFO workers, in February 1966.
Four months later, in June 1966, national attention returned to Mississippi, as James Meredith attempted to stage a solo march from Memphis to Jackson but was shot shortly after crossing the state line south of Memphis. This Meredith March, although nowhere near the town of Philadelphia, had important ramifications for it, nonetheless. Upon the shooting of Meredith, many other now-famous civil rights leaders, including the SCLC’s Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC took up the march where their fallen comrade had left off. Although mainly remembered in civil rights history as the march that created the “Black Power” slogan and thus helped change the direction of the movement away from nonviolence to black retaliation, it also afforded King the opportunity to visit Philadelphia for the first time, since he was in the state anyway.14 While there, he led a small march downtown that was scheduled to end at the Neshoba County Courthouse. Again, however, local law enforcement officers stood against the marchers, preventing King from stepping foot on the courthouse lawn. King thus improvised and delivered the brief speech from the curb of the street, then proceeded to lead the marchers back in the direction from whence they had come, all the while being taunted and heckled and ultimately attacked by a white mob. King later recalled that this attack was one of only two times in his life that he felt truly afraid for his life (the other being in a similar march in a suburb of Chicago a month later).
By February 1967, the FBI’s case had wound through the federal court system, all the way to the Supreme Court and back, and was ready for final prosecution. This time, the Justice Department charged 19 men with either violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, conspiring to violate their civil rights, or committing outright murder. The jury that deliberated at the trial was composed of five white men and seven white women, all citizens of the state of Mississippi. The basic story they heard through testimony picked up where the original Price and Willis version ended: the two had indeed let the three go free and then followed them out of town, but they had by then also organized a whole posse to help them carry out a lynching. The officers had immediately stopped the three young men again, forced them into a car, driven them to a dirt road far out in the county, taken them out one by one, and executed them by shooting. They then loaded the bodies into the back of their own station wagon, dumped them in the bottom of the levee, which was then under construction by one of the conspirators, who in turn bulldozed them under right then in the middle of the night. One of the conspirators then took the car to a different location and set it afire. Upon hearing this gruesome story pieced together by various witnesses, the all-white jury quickly returned guilty verdicts against the seven ringleaders, while acquitting the rest. This verdict showed that federal civil rights laws could be effective, that the U.S. government fully intended to enforce them, that even the most recalcitrant of southern states could not stop their enforcement, and that the future might thus be brighter than the past for blacks in Mississippi.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Sunday, January 13th 2013 at 11:06PM
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