Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  23.

  When the terrorists murder with the complicity of the police, and when a society supports and cannot condemn them, then the society—or the state itself—may be guilty. This was Nazi Germany’s crime at Auschwitz . . . it was Mississippi’s crime at Philadelphia.

  —William Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi, 1965

  On April 23, the day after the World’s Fair opened, Andrew Goodman had returned to his studies at Queens College. A junior, the twenty-year-old Goodman was working on a sociology paper about the Black Muslims, trying to understand the social forces that had created the segregationist religious organization. Goodman didn’t buy into the Nation of Islam’s racist rhetoric that all white men were blue-eyed devils, but he thought he understood what was fueling their anger. “The white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general),” he wrote, “has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes toward the negro race.” He went on to conclude that “people must have dignity and identity. If they can’t do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.”

  Although he had enrolled in Queens College for its strong Drama Department—Goodman was a sometimes actor who performed in off-Broadway plays—he was getting serious about the social sciences, particularly sociology. Whatever his future held, he knew one thing for certain: He was going down to Mississippi to participate in what was being hailed as the Freedom Summer, a massive push—manned by Northern college students and orchestrated by the SNCC and CORE—to register Southern blacks to vote. Goodman had been attending the political lectures at the school. He was in attendance when Louis E. Lomax had first suggested a stall-in to disrupt the World’s Fair. After the talk, he was one of fifty students who, motivated by what they heard, approached Lomax to ask him what they should do to help.

  After another lecture at Queens College on April 9, Goodman had found his answer. The talk was given by Allard Lowenstein, a veteran organizer who had helped launch the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, at Queens College. Protesting job discrimination at the World’s Fair was a just cause for Goodman, but Mississippi was on the front lines in the battle for black freedom.

  Mississippi was, Lowenstein told his Queens College audience, “the most totalitarian state in America.” Essentially a police state run by hate-filled politicians who made a living by appealing to their constituents’ racist tendencies, Mississippi exploited the “hate vote” for all its electoral value. And like many Southern states—and even a few Northern ones—Mississippi had its own homegrown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, that did as it pleased.

  Lowenstein wasn’t trying to sugarcoat the situation. Going to Mississippi would be dangerous. Race violence in Mississippi was as prevalent as summer humidity, and no one, including Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. seemed to mind. A Democrat who was elected in 1964 on a campaign of racial hatred, Johnson’s stump speech contained the line: “You know what NAACP stands for—niggers, alligators, apes, coons and possums.” Plenty of Mississippi’s sheriffs were friendly with the Klan, if not active members themselves. As syndicated political columnist Joseph Alsop wrote in early June: “Southern Mississippi is now known to contain no fewer than sixty thousand armed men organized to what amounts to terrorism. Acts of terrorism against the local Negro populace are already an everyday occurrence.” Goodman had no illusions about what he was getting himself into. “I’m afraid,” he told a friend before his departure, “but I’m going.”

  By the time Goodman left in mid-June, fellow New Yorkers Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, age twenty-four, and his wife, Rita, twenty-two, were already in Meridian, Mississippi. They had been there since January 17, after driving their Volkswagen all the way from their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. So optimistic about human nature was Schwerner, that he, a conscientious and outgoing young man, had bought a German car, something that many Jewish Americans—particularly ones that had lost family members in the Holocaust like Schwerner had—actively avoided.

  On April 23, the day after the World’s Fair opened, the married couple and another CORE worker wrote a letter to their organization’s national office requesting that James Chaney, age twenty-two, get added to the group’s payroll. Chaney, a local African American from Meridian, was central to their work. He also drove the blue Ford station wagon that CORE had given the group, racing his way around every back road in Meridian and the local counties like he had hellhounds on his trail. It was an important survival skill for a black Mississippian—or a Northern college student: Getting pulled over by a white police officer on a backcountry road with only the moonlight as a witness could be a death sentence. And Chaney was unafraid to recruit blacks in the toughest areas where the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme. “Chaney was one of our best men,” James L. Farmer Jr. would later say. “He was a native of Mississippi. He was a child of the soiled. . . . He was invaluable.”

  Most importantly, he was their link to the local black community, who were well aware of young, white Northerners and the hell they would catch if local whites or the police heard they were talking to outside “agitators.” Someone might burn a cross on their lawn or firebomb their house. There were eyes watching them everywhere, including the “Big Toms”—local blacks who spied for the police. Sometimes called “Judas niggers” by their fellow black Mississippians, they were often well-to-do black locals who had a stake in the status quo and were expected to keep their poorer black brethren in line and away from these young civil rights workers and their Northern ideas about integration. Chaney knew better than anyone else what local blacks were up against; he understood their pain and fears; he knew what their lives were like. And he knew that state-sanctioned organizations such as the KKK were all but immune from punishment.

  In mid-June the Schwerners and Chaney traveled to the Women’s College in Columbus, Ohio, for three days of training, and met Goodman for the first time. They had plenty in common: Goodman and Mickey had attended the prestigious Walton School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Goodman had grown up; and Goodman was a student at Queens College, where Rita was finishing up her BA in English. “He was such a fine, intelligent, unassuming young man,” Rita would later say. “He and I had much to talk about.”

  While they attended conferences and seminars, word reached them that Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi, a rural district outside of Meridian, was burned to the ground and several of its members—including an elderly man—were pistol-whipped and beaten by Klansmen who had discovered that the churchgoers had met with Mickey Schwerner. Long before Goodman had ever met him, Schwerner was on the KKK’s hit list. To those who wanted him dead, he was simply known as Goatee.

  Schwerner’s regular uniform of blue jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, a blue New York Mets cap, and Beatnik-esque facial hair made him stand out like a thicket of weeds on fresh-cut Mississippi grass. Schwerner was a social worker back in New York, having graduated from Cornell University in 1962. He had a disarming nature that put people at ease—no easy feat for a white Northerner in the rural South. He had become fast friends with the soft-spoken Chaney, whom he affectionately dubbed Bear, often eating home-cooked meals at Chaney’s house. In time, Fannie Lou Chaney would come to think of Schwerner as another son.

  Everywhere Schwerner went outside his activist family, white bigots shouted at him “Communist nigger-loving Jewboy!” and the like. Many of his verbal tormentors were, by day, law-abiding, church-going citizens. Under the cover of darkness, they wore elaborate costumes, burned crosses, firebombed black churches and homes, and did much worse.

  It was exactly this kind of hatred that drew Schwerner and Goodman to Mississippi. After reading about the September 15 murders of the four little girls at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, Schwerner knew he wanted to do more. As a Jew who believed the kind of hatred that produced Nazi Germany wouldn’t happen again, he went down to Mississippi to make sure that it didn’t. The
n he heard about the beatings in Longdale and how their church was burned to the ground. He refused to stay in Ohio any longer. By 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were driving back to Meridian, while Schwerner’s wife, Rita, stayed behind to teach new trainees for another week. After they arrived, Schwerner reminded Goodman that things might get ugly; he needed to be ready.

  “I’m no child,” Goodman told him. “I want to get into the thick of the fight.”

  Things were happening fast. Just hours before the trio took off for Mississippi, a momentous event in the history of the American republic had occurred: The US Senate finally passed President Johnson’s civil rights bill by a margin that, in the end, wasn’t even close: seventy-three to twenty-seven. The bill had passed after the longest filibuster in the chamber’s history, courtesy of the “Southern bloc” of racist Dixiecrats led by Senator Richard B. Russell, who declared: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”

  On the morning of June 10, 1964, the resistance faltered. Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat and former Klansman from West Virginia, then in his first term, was the last hold out. There would be no more delay to the most important legislative achievement in America of the twentieth century. No longer could the Dixiecrats, including the ignoble signers of the Southern Manifesto or the handful of Republicans who had joined them—including the man who would soon represent the Grand Old Party as its presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona—hold back the tide of history. For the first time in America, discrimination in the public square was illegal.

  In New York, where the Empire State’s pair of liberal Republican senators, Jacob K. Javitz and Kenneth Keating—both friends of the World’s Fair and Robert Moses—proudly voted for the bill, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was viewed as the momentous event that it was. In Meridian, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, the passage of the Civil Rights Act was just the latest offensive by the North. The Dallas Morning News wrote an editorial claiming that the real trouble wasn’t Jim Crow but “the unjustified, uncalled for invasion” of Mississippi “by a bunch of Northern students schooled in advance in causing trouble under the guise of bringing ‘freedom’ to . . . Negroes.” Mississippi’s Governor Johnson predicted “turmoil, strife and bloodshed lie ahead” for his state. After signing the bill into law, President Johnson lamented to an aide that “we just lost the South for a generation.” In fact, it would be a lot longer than that.

  The same day that Southern newspapers and radio lamented that their “way of life” was now illegal—June 21, 1964—was the day that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman arrived in Meridian. The next morning they drove out to Longdale to meet with the victimized members of the burned-out Mount Zion Methodist Church. But before he left, Schwerner reminded Sue Brown, a young black woman who worked at the center, that they would be back by 4:00 p.m., as per standard operating procedure. If they weren’t back by 4:30 p.m. then, according to procedure, she should start calling every police station, jailhouse, or courthouse in the surrounding areas. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll be back.” When 4:30 came and went and no one had seen the three of them, Brown began a frantic round of phone calls, including one to the jailhouse in nearby Philadelphia, on which she was informed that no one by those names had been arrested.

  That was a lie.

  In the same blue Ford station wagon that they drove from Ohio, the trio had headed toward Meridian on Route 491 around 3:00 p.m. That’s when Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price saw them, and promptly arrested them. Some witnesses said that the Ford station wagon tried to outrace Price, but that the deputy shot their tire out. Price charged Chaney, who was driving, with speeding; he claimed the other two were being held “for suspicion of arson” for burning the Mount Zion Methodist Church, an utter fabrication. After they had been put in jail—Schwerner and Goodman with white prisoners and Chaney with a black prisoner—­­it wasn’t long before someone made a phone call informing local Klansmen that Goatee was in custody in Philadelphia. The plan to murder Schwerner was quickly set in stone. The only question that remained was what to do with the other two. Soon enough, the Klansmen decided their fate: They would have to die with Goatee.

  The plan was simple. The police let the three go on Sunday, June 22, after 10:00 p.m., telling them to hightail it out of town. Then they followed them and pulled them over again. This time, they forced the three “agitators” into the backseat of a car and drove down a dark, dirt road, where the KKK were waiting. As the trio sat in the car wondering what would happen next, the Klansmen jeered them with chants of “If you stayed were you were, you’d be safe, but now you’re here with us.”

  They pulled Schwerner out of the backseat and shoved him against the car, pointing a gun at his chest.

  “You think a nigger is as good as me?” one of them asked.

  Before Schwerner could answer the question, his assailant blew a hole in his chest. Then they grabbed Goodman, who had barely been in Mississippi twenty-four hours, and the same assailant blasted him with the same gun—one shot to the chest.

  “All you left me was a nigger to kill,” Chaney’s assailant lamented as they grabbed him from the backseat. After seeing what had happened to his good friend Schwerner and Goodman, Chaney struggled, trying to make a break for it. But after being shot three times, the native Mississippian fell. Then, according to forensic evidence, they beat him so savagely, his skull and shoulder were crushed.

  The attackers dumped the bodies at the bottom of a ditch on a farm three miles south of Philadelphia. After tossing the three in the Mississippi earth in the wee hours of June 23, amidst the silence of a hot and humid summer night in the middle of nowhere, a bulldozer covered the spot where the bodies were buried, pouring cement over the makeshift dirt grave, yet no one heard a thing. The ditch would be flooded over just as soon as the new dam was finished. Nobody would ever see the three again, they thought.

  At home in New York, Farmer got a call about the missing men at 2:30 a.m. In Ohio, Rita Schwerner received the news, too. By Tuesday, President Johnson was getting briefings about the case. One of the first things he did was call Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, head of the powerful Judiciary Committee and one of the Senate’s most rabid segregationists. Eastland told Johnson that the whole thing wasn’t true, suggesting to the president, a fellow Southerner, that there was no Klan activity in that part of his state. The trio was probably off somewhere having fun; it was all just a plan to disgrace Mississippians.

  Soon the media, national and international, were reporting the story. In no time at all, Meridian was flooded with reporters. Eventually, J. Edgar Hoover would reluctantly send his FBI men down to Mississippi—the only state where the bureau had no full-time office. Hoover had made no secret of his contempt for civil rights organizations or the likes of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman; all of them, according to America’s top cop, were Communist stooges.

  On July 2, while President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, surrounded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Farmer and Robert Kennedy, reporters and FBI agents were flooding the back roads of Mississippi, talking to anyone who might have seen something; their questions were met with stony silence. According to many Mississippi officials, the three men had faked their own disappearance so that the federal government would “invade” the South; in their eyes, it was the Civil War all over again. Even those whites in Meridian who hated the Klan and what they represented didn’t want all these foreigners around.

  As FBI agents and newspapers reporters collected information in Neshoba County, on July 18 another racial disturbance was exploding in New York City. After all the riotous tension of the previous year, it was only fitting that it should happen in Harlem, the epicenter of black life in New York and a prime example of what was wrong with the city�
�s urban centers. “Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth,” wrote novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, in an essay that appeared in summer of 1964, just before Harlem burned.*

  ** Although the article appeared in the August 1964 issue of Harper’s, making it seem uncannily prescient, it was actually penned in 1948, five years after the Harlem Riots of 1943.

  Two days earlier on East 76th Street, a confrontation between an Irish immigrant superintendent and three black youths would leave New York’s political class, national civil rights leaders, and many Americans shaking their heads in disbelief. What’s known for certain is this: The superintendent was watering the flowers and sidewalk in front of the building where he worked. The black teenagers were attending summer school at Robert F. Wagner Sr. Junior High School—namesake of Mayor Wagner’s father—in the mayor’s old Yorkville neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The teens didn’t live in the area; they were from further uptown. But the local school board—perhaps in an attempt at desegregation—had sent the youths to the overwhelmingly white district, which still maintained a strong German-American flavor. The teens, for whatever reason, decided to sit down on the building’s stoop and relax a while. The superintendent said he asked them to move. They either didn’t, or didn’t move fast enough.

  What happened next remains murky. Either by accident or by design, the superintendent sprayed the three youths with the hose. Some reports said the teens had provoked the superintendent; others said it was just an accident; still others said the superintendent, in his thick Irish brogue, taunted the teens by shouting “I’ll wash the black off you!” In the summer of 1964, with memories of Birmingham police pummeling black children with powerful fire hoses still fresh, such an innocuous instrument as a garden hose was viewed by young blacks as a weapon rife with symbolism. The teens reached for the most obvious weapons they could find: garbage can lids and the debris stacked inside. Soon bottles and other detritus were being thrown at the Irishman, who fled into the building behind him. The garbage and bottles shattered the building’s glass front door.