Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  On Thursday afternoon, striding into those same swamps came the two hundred sailors ordered by President Johnson. All wore white sailor hats and grimy old shoes. The men taped pant legs to their ankles to keep leeches out. Grabbing branches to fend off snakes, the sailors searched until dusk. Before plunging in, many noted how strangely evil a Mississippi swamp appeared. The waters were opaque, calm, and flat, with no clue to their depths. Dragon-flies, like little blue helicopters, darted over floating logs. Heat hung like a shroud over the pea-green carpet, but nothing beneath it stirred. And then, every so often from the black water below, a bubble surfaced, popped, and was gone.

  From Lyndon Johnson on down, federal officials thought they were doing everything possible to find the men. But what about preventing future disappearances? Congressmen were besieged by parents’ calls and telegrams demanding that federal marshals protect their children. LBJ’s men were unanimously opposed. Sending in troops, said Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, “would have an irretrievable effect for two or three generations.” Robert Kennedy insisted Mississippi’s smoldering violence was “a local matter for local law enforcement.” Prominent law professors disagreed, issuing a statement citing the Justice Department’s legal right to intervene. But intervene how? Protecting “a thousand of these youngsters going down there . . . living in the homes of the colored population” would be an “almost superhuman task,” J. Edgar Hoover told Allen Dulles. With Klansmen in the Mississippi Highway Patrol, Klansmen among “the chiefs of police,” even some sheriffs in the Klan, “you almost have got to keep an agent with them as they come into the state,” Hoover said. In New York, Malcolm X offered members of his Muslim Mosque as protection. No one took him up on the offer.

  Newspapers and Congress soon joined the debate. The Washington Post praised “this breathtakingly admirable group of youngsters” but said federal protection was “simply impossible.” The New York Times outlined the risks of “a second Reconstruction.” On the Senate floor, Mississippi’s John Stennis was urging the president to issue “a firm, positive statement” to stop “this invasion” when New York’s Jacob Javits leaped to his feet. Americans, Javits shouted, had the right to go anywhere they wanted. Stennis responded that any blood shed in Mississippi “will be on the hands of those who formed and led this invasion into a state where they were not welcome nor invited.” Faced with pressure to do something, LBJ stood firm. He would send more FBI that weekend, but he would not be responsible for a “second Reconstruction.” “I’m not going to send troops on my people if I can avoid it,” he said. “And they got to help me avoid it.”

  Would Mississippi help? Overnight, the long-dreaded “invasion” had come to resemble an occupation. Sailors slogged through swamps. Reporters from across America as well as France, England, and Germany descended on Philadelphia. FBI agents were stopping cars at checkpoints. Aluminum skiffs were motoring along a coffee-brown river as agents dragged grappling hooks along its bottom. The occupation stirred deep resentments, bringing the sediment to the surface. Watching the search from a bridge, several young men lit up Marlboros and traded jokes: “We throw two or three niggers in every year to feed the fish,” one yucked. Another told the FBI how to find James Chaney. “Why don’t you just float a relief check out there on top of the water? That black sonofabitch’ll reach up and grab it.” A few sober voices spoke in private, but only a few. “You know damn well our law is mixed up in this,” a Philadelphia man told the Rotary Club. “I can’t see why we have to protect them.” A local woman was appalled: “The idea of these people trying to defend murder!” The way things were going, many said, Mississippi would be under federal occupation by mid-July. And wasn’t it a shame, one added, given that the whole affair “if it was boiled down to gravy there wouldn’t be much to it, no how.”

  Suspicions of a hoax were spreading throughout Mississippi. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger claimed Andrew Goodman had been spotted boarding a bus in Baton Rouge. CORE, rumor had it, had phoned police on Sunday afternoon before the men came up missing. And the Schwerners’ VW? Odd that it was nowhere to be found. Letters to editors “proved” the hoax; otherwise why would Andrew Goodman, whose boyish face networks were showing in footage from the Ohio training, have been filmed before he “disappeared” ? And wasn’t Mississippi getting a black eye on the nightly news? Walter Cronkite spoke of “Bloody Neshoba.” NBC interviewed a Neshoba County man who said Sheriff Rainey was involved. ABC let Mississippians damn their state with callous denial: “I believe them jokers planned this and are sittin’ up in New York laughin’ at us Mississippi folk,” one man said. A woman added, “If they’re dead, I feel like they asked for it. They came here lookin’ for trouble.”

  In contrast to Mississippi, the aggrieved families displayed uncommon grace. On Thursday afternoon, TV cameras jammed the Goodmans’ stylish Manhattan apartment. While flashbulbs popped, Carolyn Goodman read an appeal “to all parents everywhere, particularly the parents of Mississippi who, like myself, have experienced the softness, the warmth and the beauty of a child whom they cherish and love and want to protect. I want to beg them to cooperate in every way possible in the search for these three boys.” Graying Anne Schwerner then spoke about James Chaney, “a Negro, a friend, and a brother to my boy Mickey.” Though she had never met Mrs. Chaney, she wished “I could take her in my arms.” Back in Mississippi, Fannie Lee Chaney said little, even when a cross was burned on her lawn. This was not the first disappearance in her family. Decades earlier, her grandfather had refused to sell his land to a white man. Only his shoes, shirt, and watch were ever found. Now, head in her hands, the stunned woman told the press, “I’m just hoping and not thinking.” Like President Johnson, most assumed the three men were dead. “For God’s sake,” Nathan Schwerner shouted at a reporter. “Don’t you know we’ll never see Mickey again?” An FBI agent confided, “We’re now looking for bodies.” Yet the mothers insisted their sons might be found in some jail, some barn, somewhere. While they held out hope, Rita Schwerner, whom some had thought too small and frail to work in Mississippi, returned to take on the entire state.

  As the mothers spoke to the press, Rita flew into Jackson. Speaking to reporters at the airport, she announced, “I am going to find my husband and the other two people. I am going to find out what happened to them.” Rita also issued several demands—“that scores of federal marshals be sent to Mississippi . . . that there be a full scale investigation of reports of the involvement of some law enforcement officers . . . that President Johnson’s personal envoy Allen Dulles confer with those in Meridian who know precisely what is going on.” “In a word,” she concluded, “we demand ‘freedom now.’ ” Accompanied by SNCC’s Bob Zellner, Rita then headed for the capitol to speak to Governor Paul Johnson.

  After listening to a clerk go on and on about the beauty of Mississippi, Rita finally learned the governor was at his mansion, greeting George Wallace. “I’m sure Wallace is much more important to Mississippi than three missing men,” Rita said. Entering the mansion grounds, she found the two governors heading a receiving line. Stepping in line, she heard someone mention the missing men. And she heard Johnson joke, “Governor Wallace and I are the only ones who know where they are, and we’re not telling.” Moments later, when Johnson bent to greet Rita, Bob Zellner shook his hand and introduced her as the wife of Michael Schwerner. When Johnson recoiled, Zellner held tightly to his hand, asking if it was true “that you and Governor Wallace here know where the missing civil rights workers are?” Panic broke out as reporters shouted questions and state troopers yanked Zellner away. Wallace and Johnson retreated inside and slammed the door. Hustled off the grounds, Rita moved on to meet Allen Dulles. The president’s envoy kept her waiting fo rty-five minutes, then spoke with her for five. When Dulles offered his sympathy, Rita replied, “I don’t want your sympathy! I want my husband back!”

  On Friday afternoon, Rita was in Philadelphia talking to FBI agents at the Delphia Courts Motel. Suddenly Sher
iff Rainey pulled in to the concrete lot. Striding up to her, the tobacco chaw still in his cheek, Rainey barked, “What in the goddamn hell are you doin’ here?” Rita stood her ground. She would not leave until she saw the station wagon. As a menacing crowd gathered, Rainey invited Rita into his patrol car to talk. Sensing the woman’s mood, a highway patrol investigator warned Rita not to be too hard on the sheriff. His wife was in the hospital.

  “Well, at least he still has a wife to be concerned about,” Rita said. “I ask him only to do me the courtesy of telling me where my husband is.”

  “But the sheriff doesn’t know that.”

  Rita persisted. “Sheriff Rainey, I feel that you know what happened. I’m going to find out if I can. If you don’t want me to find out, you’ll have to kill me.”

  Rainey’s neck reddened. His fists clenched the steering wheel. “I’m very shocked,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you said that.” The sheriff then took Rita and Zellner to see the station wagon. While garage mechanics hooted Rebel yells, they eyed the blackened shell. Since the moment she heard the car had been found, Rita had known she would never see her husband again. Now she saw the proof. When she and Zellner left, a green pickup, the same one that had blocked the highway when they entered Philadelphia that morning, chased them out of town.

  By week’s end, Mississippi had become a national obsession. Only weeks earlier, all civil rights news had come out of St. Augustine, Florida, where Martin Luther King and others were braving the Klan and white mobs to integrate public pools and beaches. But suddenly, TV, radio, and newspapers turned to the Magnolia State, reporting on its alarming poverty and backwoods violence. James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society, calling the state “as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America,” hit best-seller lists. Folksingers from Judy Collins to Pete Seeger began scheduling summer concerts in Jackson, Greenville, and McComb. Dozens of doctors and lawyers signed up to spend July or August in Mississippi, and SNCC offices were flooded with calls from people hoping to volunteer, so many that Bob Moses spoke out: “A wave of untrained and unoriented volunteers into the project areas would serve only to disrupt what is now a well-controlled plan of operation throughout the state.” That afternoon in Chicago, a black man pulled his car over near the Calumet Express-way, took out a rifle, and shot himself in the head. A policeman found his note: “This is for the three in Philadelphia. They wouldn’t let me join the movement and I’m giving my brain this way.”

  Under the national spotlight, Philadelphia was at a breaking point. Appalled by reporters and FBI “swarm[ing] upon our land like termites on old lumber,” people huddled on street corners, talking, whispering when strangers passed. Near the courthouse, a driver rammed a cameraman’s car. When the cameraman stepped out, so did the driver, clutching a hunting knife. Police intervened. Angry whites trailed New York Times reporter Claude Sitton, who sought safety through a chance connection. It happened that the small town making national news was the hometown of the Times’s managing editor. Learning how his town was behaving, Turner Catledge had written a friend, “Where, oh where, are those decent people I used to know? ” Now, as menacing whites approached Sitton, he and a Newsweek reporter ducked into the hardware store owned by Catledge’s uncle. “Be frank with you, Sitton,” the uncle said. “If you were a black man being whupped out here on the sidewalk, I might help you. But you got no business here. And I wouldn’t lift a finger if they was stomping the hell out of you.” As the two reporters drove toward their hotel, a car chased them to the county line.

  On the fifth night of what everyone was now calling the “long hot summer,” Mississippi erupted. In town after town, volunteers were hounded by pickups, taunted by obscenities, arrested on trumped-up charges. Beer cans flew, and a SNCC car’s tires were slashed. In Hattiesburg, whites spread flyers through the black community warning: “Beware, good Negro citizens. When we come to get the agitators, stay away.” Near Jackson, someone broke into a church, doused the floor in kerosene, and tossed a match. In the midst of this mayhem, the most startling news came from the Delta. On Thursday, two volunteers had been abducted at gunpoint—“Want us to do to you what they did over in Philadelphia?”—and held at a gas station awaiting a bus to send them north. On the COFO log, it was just another in the lengthening list of incidents, but the following evening, the FBI arrested three white men in Itta Bena. SNCCs could barely believe the news. “You dig it?” a volunteer wrote home. “They are in a Southern jail!” That night, warned that a church would be bombed, Itta Bena cops surrounded it and kept all whites away.

  Of all the Americans watching the news that week, none watched with greater alarm than the volunteers in Ohio, bound for Mississippi. SNCC structured its second training much like the first, yet volunteers found the mood on campus “like a funeral parlor.” From the first bulletins out of Neshoba County, frantic parents began calling, begging their children to come home. All week, psychiatrist Robert Coles met with anxious, terrified volunteers. Diagnosing panic, “near psychosis,” or just “character disorders,” Coles sent eight students home. But in the rest, he witnessed the power of idealism. “Suddenly hundreds of young Americans became charged with new energy and determination,” Coles wrote. “Suddenly I saw fear turn into toughness, vacillation into quiet conviction.” Many volunteers found their way to the chapel. Others crowded around TVs to watch Walter Cronkite, to see the car towed out of the swamp, to watch the ABC special The Search in Mississippi . When the program ended, volunteers joined hands and sang. “You know what we’re all doing,” one man told the group. “We’re moving the world.”

  The first volunteers, trained for voter registration, had arrived with the confidence of young politicos. But this second group consisted of Freedom School teachers. Accustomed to working with children, they now faced the likelihood of being beaten, jailed, even murdered. All that week, they struggled to explain to terrified parents why they would not turn back.

  June 27

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  This letter is hard to write because I would like so much to communicate how I feel and I don’t know if I can. It is very hard to answer to your attitude that if I loved you I wouldn’t do this—hard, because the thought is cruel. I can only hope you have the sensitivity to understand that I can both love you very much and desire to go to Mississippi . . .

  Dear Folks,

  . . . You should know that it would be a lot nicer in Hawaii than in Mississippi this summer. I am afraid of the situation down there, and the beaches and the safety are very alluring. But I am perhaps more afraid of the kind of life I would fall into in Hawaii. I sense somehow that I am at a crucial moment in my life and that to return home where everything is secure and made for me would be to choose a kind of death. . . . I feel the urgent need, somehow, to enter life, to be born into it. . . .

  On their last evening in the safe North, volunteers again filled the campus auditorium. A spectral déjà vu loomed over the meeting. The previous Friday night, the three missing men had sat in this same auditorium, sang these same songs, heard these same leaders. Now this second group would follow them down. First, however, they listened one last time to Bob Moses.

  Sighing and starting in, Moses asked if anyone had read the book that was becoming trendy on campuses, Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. It had much to say about good and evil, he said. Then pausing, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses, Moses said softly, “The kids are dead.” He hesitated, letting his words sink in. “When we heard the news at the beginning I knew they were dead. When we heard they had been arrested I knew there had been a frame-up. We didn’t say this earlier because of Rita, because she was really holding out for every hope. There may be more deaths. . . .” Across the auditorium, some looked at their feet, others remained riveted on the reluctant “Jesus of the movement.” “I justify myself because I’m taking risks myself,” Moses continued, “and I’m not asking people to do things I’m not willing to do. And the ot
her thing is, people were being killed already, the Negroes of Mississippi, and I feel, anyway, responsible for their deaths. Herbert Lee killed, Louis Allen killed, five others killed this year. In some way you have to come to grips with that, know what it means. If you are going to do anything about it, other people are going to be killed.”

  Moses knew what some were saying—that the summer project was “an attempt to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi.” Yet he saw a bigger, darker picture. “In our country we have some real evil, and the attempt to do something about it involves enormous effort . . . and therefore tremendous risks. If for any reason you’re hesitant about what you’re getting into, it’s better for you to leave. Because what has got to be done has to be done in a certain way, or otherwise it won’t get done.” Volunteers sat, some faces streaked with tears, others just shining on Moses, pinning their faith in America, in humanity, on his words.