Evening came late on the longest day of the year. Adults rose from porches. Children were called home from their games. Twilight lingered as if, like the old blues lyric, it hated “to see that evenin’ sun go down.” Finally just after 8:00 p.m., the last pink filaments faded over the Mississippi River, taking with them the last welcomes of the day. Fireflies startled volunteers from out west who had never seen whole fields glitter. Despite such magic, fear crept over volunteers’ host homes and over their souls. Night had come to Mississippi. Night so far south and so rural was darker than any the volunteers had seen, darker and warmer—a muggy greenhouse heat that stifled any hope of a breeze. And then there was the symphony of a southern night, bullfrogs throat-singing and crickets humming as if 10,000 volts pulsed through the trees. The constant screeee of cicadas blasted like a referee’s whistle until a low whoo-whoo interrupted. And then the crickets again, and the whistle and the frogs and the heat—on into the night.
Night had a reputation in Mississippi. Volunteers had heard much about it, and none of what they heard was comforting. Night was when “things happened” here, when “riders” meant not Freedom Riders but night riders, no longer on horseback but in pickups, yet still seeding the darkness with terror. SNCC’s safety handbook was explicit about night: “Do not stand in doorways at night. . . . No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night.” None were likely to flout these rules, but the Mississippi night could easily enter their new homes, their “safe” homes, where streets were pitch-black, where their mere presence put a bull’s-eye on each house. Night had come, all the welcoming people were off the streets, and who knew what type of people were out, fired by a century-old rage.
Across Mississippi, in villages dotting the darkening landscape, locals cleaned up from Father’s Day suppers, then settled in to watch TV—The Ed Sullivan Show, Bonanza, Candid Camera. In Batesville, Chris Williams and others were in the Miles backyard, arms linked, singing Freedom Songs. “Get on Board, Children” and “We’ll Never Turn Back” kept fear at bay, yet when the songs were done, Robert Miles and “Junior” went inside and came out with shotguns. Mounting a flatbed truck, they sat, ready to fire at any car entering the driveway without giving the signal—headlights blinked three times. The scene was mirrored in host homes across Mississippi—dark-skinned men with guns sitting in driveways, on porches, standing guard beneath a sparkling blanket of stars. From inside, volunteers parted curtains and peered into the blackness. Then, weary from the amazing day, they went to bed and tried, for all the mosquitoes, all the sticky heat, all the shrill sounds of night, to get a little sleep.
Night found Muriel Tillinghast upstairs in the project office in Greenville—alone. She was just eight blocks from the Mississippi River, but so far from home and so far south that it made her tremble. Since she had crossed into Mississippi on the midnight bus that turned from singing to silence, the quaking in her stomach had worsened. Riding south along Highway 61, the blues highway whose escape route she was traveling in reverse, she had watched others step off the bus and into the early morning. Town by town, winding through the Delta, she had said good-bye to old friends from Howard and new ones from Ohio. “It was so quick,” she recalled. “Bye, see you later. Ummm, I hope I will see you later.” Shortly after 8:00 a.m., her turn had come. The bus rattled through the empty streets of downtown Greenville, past churches and cafés, drugstores and parks, before reaching the “colored” section. As if she had crossed into another country, Muriel saw sidewalks cracked and broken, houses suddenly smaller, and a slipshod sadness pervading the streets. When she and a half dozen others were dropped off at 901½ Nelson Street, sheer terror sent Muriel straight upstairs into the office. There she stayed, in cluttered rooms above a dry cleaner’s—all day. While other volunteers were welcomed into homes, Muriel huddled inside, terrified by just being in “the black hole” of Mississippi.
White Greenville, a mile south along the mounded levee, was a thriving city, but black Greenville was like no place Muriel had ever seen. Decades earlier, Nelson Street had been the living, pulsing heart of the black community, attracting top blues singers and inspiring a song, the “Nelson Street Blues.” But by 1964 the street was just a shadow of itself, with just a drugstore, a few juke joints, and some boarded-up blues clubs clinging to life. To a young woman from Washington, D.C., Nelson Street looked like a one-horse town from an old Western movie. Muriel had seen poverty before. As part of a Lutheran mission to Guyana, she had traveled into “the bush,” met descendants of slaves living in bamboo huts, saw a child die of malnutrition. But that was another country; this was her own. All her life she had heard about the Mississippi her mother had fled, and now she was there. Gone were the idealism, the solidarity that had sent her south. In their place was a primal dread that recalled every tale of lynching she had ever read, every southern horror she had ever heard. Greenville project director Charlie Cobb, the man she had called each Sunday throughout the spring, might have calmed her, but he was still in Ohio, preparing for the second training. And nothing any fresh-faced volunteer said could convince Muriel to leave the office. “I was petrified,” she recalled.
Bob Moses had told her, “Mississippi can’t be exaggerated.” Now it did not need to be. As night blackened office windows, as other volunteers went to their homes, leaving her alone with a sleeping bag and a host of mice scurrying in the walls, her sense of alarm spiraled. Holed up in the office, she asked herself hard questions. All right, she had always been the organizer, the take-charge person. What now? How could she survive the summer? How could she canvass door-to-door if she could not even force herself to leave the office? Greenville, everyone assured her, was known for its moderation. Freshened by new people and new ideas that came along the river, it had a reputation as “different.” SNCCs said they would “rather get arrested in Greenville than any town in Mississippi.” Yet Muriel did not kid herself.
“Many Mississippi towns were predatory,” she said. “Greenville was not predatory, but it was reactionary. In West Hell the heat may not be boiling, but . . .” For a young black woman on her own a thousand miles from home, accustomed to big cities with well-lit streets, regular traffic, pragmatic people, night released inherited terrors. Night was when Muriel’s grandmother, walking from Texas to D.C., had taken refuge in barns to hide from the Klan. Night was when crosses were burned. Night had been her introduction to Mississippi, and now night had come again. “Mississippi has a black and inky night,” she recalled. “Most of us were city kids. We’d never been in a rural area, certainly had never been in a southern area at night. I shed all the veneer of urban life and got down to basics—food, water, paying attention to even the smallest detail.” All that first night alone in the office, the smallest details made her heart race. Each headlight flashing across a wall startled her. Each shout from the street sat her up. Each creak on the office stairs made her jump. Mississippi, it seemed, could be exaggerated.
To cope with the night, COFO had set up a warning system. All project offices were connected to the Jackson headquarters by a WATS (wide area transmission service) line. Long-distance calls in 1964 were expensive, reserved for emergencies, but the WATS line allowed unlimited calling for a monthly fee, enabling hourly check-ins from offices throughout Mississippi. Like a delicate spiderweb stretched across the state, COFO’s phone network kept a vigil on the summer project, recoiling with each report of violence, relaxing with each report of calm. That first day, only minor flare-ups had been phoned in. Cops had detained a CBS camera crew in Ruleville. A Molotov cocktail exploded in a church basement near Jackson, causing minor damage. That was all. But night had just begun.
COFO’s phone network also protected workers traveling through Mississippi. Anyone sent out from a Freedom House provided a precise return time and promised to phone in if delayed. If the hour came and went with no contact, calls went out to all area jails and police departments. Often these calls turned up a worke
r arrested and detained. Sometimes the call, alerting cops that someone was watching, prevented a beating. More often it did not. On June 21, as darkness fell, the alarm system was put to a test that justified the worst fears.
Shortly after noon that Sunday, three men had set out from Meridian, in the eastern part of the state, for the remote backwater of Longdale, Mississippi. These were the three who had left Ohio before dawn on Saturday to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. Arriving in Meridian that Saturday night, they had slept, eaten breakfast, had their hair cut, then headed for the ash and twisted rubble that had once been the Mt. Zion Methodist Church. Before entering Neshoba County, a sparsely populated tangle of swamps and fields known to be thick with Klansmen, the group’s leader had issued strict instructions. If they were not back by 4:00 p.m. that Sunday, the calls should begin. The hour came and went. The three did not return. Back in the Meridian office, a volunteer on her first day in Mississippi immediately called COFO in Jackson. But Bob Moses and all the rest were in Ohio, welcoming more volunteers. Without their seasoned fear as guide, the worker on the WATS line advised waiting an hour before calling jails. If the men had car trouble or had taken a longer route home, they would arrive soon. They would arrive soon.
During the endless hour that followed, the three men still did not return. At 5:00 p.m., the WATS line in Jackson rang again. The volunteer penciled phone numbers on paper.
Philadelphia Jail—656-3765
Meridian City Jail 485-9811
County 482-7262
Within minutes, phones rang in jails throughout Neshoba and surrounding counties. The men’s names were Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman. None of the jail clerks admitted having the three in custody, nor any record of their arrest. Philadelphia police “said they knew nothing at all about the case,” that the Neshoba County sheriff was visiting his wife in the hospital and could not be reached. The wait continued. Six p.m. Seven. Seven thirty. Night descended. More calls brought the same answers. The black ribbon roads of Neshoba County were quiet. Volunteers knew nothing about the disappearance, yet a mounting dread was spreading among staffers across the state.
Back in Meridian, Sam Block, whose courage in standing up to Greenwood cops was the stuff of SNCC lore, went to the local jail. Everyone knew Block would settle for no nonsense, but he returned with no news. Eight p.m. They would arrive soon. Pickups began circling the office. The grinding of engines and shouts of “Nigger lovers!” unsettled the steamy, disheveled rooms more than usual. The next hour was even longer. Volunteers and locals, black and white, sat on desks, on floors, waiting, waiting. Some played Ping-Pong in a back room, the click-clock of paddles only tightening the tension. A few walked down the street to get coffee. A volunteer just arrived from Massachusetts read All Quiet on the Western Front, its wartime terror seeming to fit the moment. Others just sat beneath a slow ceiling fan. Sweat darkened shirts and blouses. Nine p.m. Should they call Schwerner’s wife, Rita, who was also in Ohio? They had to call someone. They called SNCC in Atlanta. Staffer Mary King began posing as an Atlanta Constitution reporter, making her own calls to county jails in Mississippi. Still no trace.
Shortly after 10:00 p.m., a law student taking over the WATS line phoned an FBI agent at his home in Jackson. The student gave the agent the three names and where they had been traveling, then demanded an immediate investigation. The agent said only, “Keep me informed of what happens.” Half an hour later, the CORE office contacted the FBI in Meridian. The agent listened to frantic concerns, just listened. He listened during a second call at 11:00 p.m. and listened some more at midnight. Finally he said he was going to bed. The FBI was not a police force, he said. The wait continued.
Fears were deepening like darkness itself when the first day of Freedom Summer ended. Chris Williams was asleep in Batesville. Muriel Tillinghast was awake and alone amid the shifting shadows of the Greenville office. The rest of the volunteers, having enjoyed the most heartfelt welcome of their lives, were in host homes, asleep or else alert to each whisper of the night. None knew that three men they had seen back in Ohio just two days earlier were missing in Neshoba County. On into the early morning hours, the calls continued—to the Mississippi Highway Patrol, to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., finally to fathers, mothers, a wife. No one offered any answers, any explanation. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had vanished without a clue.
Before the sit-in, I had always hated the whites in Mississippi. Now I knew it was impossible for me to hate sickness. The whites had a disease, an incurable disease in its final stage. What were our chances against such a disease?
—Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
CHAPTER FOUR
“The Decisive Battlefield for America”
A lone car trailing dust down a back road in Neshoba County could be seen for miles. Cars were common enough along the sunburned fields fifty miles inside the Alabama line, but not so common that a stranger’s car would not be suspected. When a black man was driving, the suspicion doubled. And if he was a known civil rights worker, perhaps even driving with a white man, there was no way to measure the trouble ahead. So in the final weeks before he disappeared into the darkness of Neshoba County, James Chaney made his visits at night. Crossing the county line, he killed his headlights and punched the accelerator.
Neshoba County, its farmland framed by thickets, its gentle hills bottoming into bogs, had just 20,000 people spread over 570 square miles. Three-quarters were white, with less to fear from Negro voting than in the “black belt” of the Delta. Yet no Negro had registered in Neshoba County since 1955, and anyone who suggested it was time had several forces to reckon with. There was a big, beefy cowboy of a sheriff, elected on a campaign promise to “handle the niggers and the outsiders.” There was the White Citizens’ Council. There was the Klan, posting recruitment flyers and burning crosses that spring. And there were the good people of Neshoba County—merchants, laborers, teachers—all rather partial to the way things had been since their granddaddy’s day.
Neshoba County’s reputation reached far beyond its borders. Steeped in bootleg whiskey and the corruption it brought, Neshoba was known as “one of the wettest dry counties in the dry state of Mississippi.” The county was also notorious as a backwater—provincial, hidebound, friendly to its own but just plain mean to strangers. Not many strangers came to “these parts,” however. Growing up in Neshoba County, a native might pass a lifetime without meeting more than a few people from outside Mississippi. Whites who ventured north returned with stories of cold, crime-ridden cities where blacks were caged in ghettos, where “folks yah met on the street just didn’t care whether yah lived or died.” But blacks who fled north never came back, and those who stayed in Neshoba County learned to be invisible. “We don’t bother no white folks and usually they don’t pay no attention to us,” one said. “We just live here and scratches it out.” Blacks who thought differently had to keep quiet or keep moving.
Racing down dirt paths lit only by his parking lights and the moon, James Chaney often hit speeds of seventy-five or eighty. Though raised in adjacent Lauderdale County, Chaney knew Neshoba, knew every gully, every ditch, every shack where a black family was brave enough to “reddish to vote.” Flying past swamps, skittering over rutted roads, Chaney’s blue Ford wagon was a shadowy streak by moonlight. When he arrived at a dark cabin, Chaney cautiously stepped out and whistled. His white companion waited. A candle or kerosene lamp signaled that they had the right place. They entered and in the gloaming, talked about family, farming, and finally, voting. Leaving leaflets about registration classes in Meridian, they hopped in the station wagon and sped on. Throughout the spring of 1964, each night run continued for as long as Chaney could stand the tension. Then he would drive toward the county line as fast as fear could take him. Crossing into Lauderdale County, Chaney flipped on his headlights, slowed to a safe speed, and headed home.
In the nightmare hours of June 22, p
hone calls startled sleepers from Mississippi to Moscow. Three men were missing, vanished, gone. SNCC in Atlanta called the Justice Department three times. Each call deepened concern, until by morning John Doar gave the FBI power to investigate. But the FBI agent in Jackson still refused to act. On the Ohio campus, a stunned Rita Schwerner lay curled on a cot, making her own calls. In New York, CORE director James Farmer was awakened at 2:30 a.m. A few hours later, a call alerted attorney William Kunstler. “You don’t know me,” the caller said, “but my son, Mickey, told me to call you if he ever needed a lawyer.” In Moscow, a UPI reporter phoned Dick Gregory. The comedian canceled his goodwill tour and headed for Mississippi, where phones were ringing all over the state. Another call to Meridian: no word of the three. A call to the Mississippi Highway Patrol—without a sheriff’s order, no missing persons bulletin could be issued for seventy-two hours. More calls. To sheriffs. To Washington, D.C. To the FBI in Jackson . . .
At 6:55 a.m., the first breakthrough came with a follow-up call to the Neshoba County jail. The jailer’s wife, having earlier denied seeing the three, now admitted they had been in custody. Brought in about 4:00 p.m. Sunday, James Chaney had been booked for speeding, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman held “for investigation.” But all three had been released at 6:00 p.m. The news sent shudders through COFO’s phone network. Freedom Summer planners had expected something like this, but on the first day of the project?
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