Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  The morning after the bomb caved in McComb’s Freedom House, cops stood in the rain near the cratered driveway, studying the rubble. “Looks like termites to me,” one joked. But police and everyone else in McComb knew precisely who was to blame.

  The Ku Klux Klan was said to be a “secret” organization. Masked in secret handshakes, clandestine greetings, and bizarre titles from kleagle to kludd, the Klan rarely claimed responsibility for violence. Yet throughout the spring of 1964, telltale terrorism—the disappearance of five black men, the flogging of blacks in a bayou, the bombing of local heroes’ homes—convinced everyone in Pike County that the Klan was rising again. In the ninety years since its vigilante violence had “redeemed” the state, the Klan had rarely been strong in Mississippi. Whites there saw little need for a Klan. Blacks knew “their place,” and whites knew enough of terror to keep them in it. Only in the 1920s, when “Ku Kluxism” spread across America, did the Klan return to the Magnolia State, but courageous Delta planters had exposed its corruption, leaving the KKK dormant for decades. Then during the civil rights movement, the Klan resurged, and not just in Mississippi. By the summer of 1964, klaverns were meeting all over the South. North Carolina’s Klan had seven thousand members. A “Razorback Klan” raged in Arkansas. Fiery Klan rallies sparked violence in St. Augustine, Florida, and the Klan was spreading “like wild-fire” in Louisiana. Mississippi, as its legacy of lynching proved, had plenty of vigilantes—all summer, the random beatings, threats, and other mayhem were mostly perpetrated by ordinary citizens not affiliated with any klavern. But it took the Klan’s deadly mix of religion, eugenics, and paranoia to turn freelance bigotry into a holy war. Several months before Freedom Summer, a new Klan offshoot began infecting the “Sovereign Realm of Mississippi.”

  The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi had a mission as righteous as that of their ancestors. The mission was explained by The Klan Ledger, a pamphlet distributed that Fourth of July. “We are now in the midst of the ‘long, hot summer’ of agitation which was promised to the Innocent People of Mississippi by the savage blacks and their communist masters,” the pamphlet began. The Ledger went on to denounce “the so-called ‘disappearance’ ” of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Any fool “so simple that he cannot recognize a communist hoax which is as plain as the one they pulled on Kennedy in Dallas” was urged to read J. Edgar Hoover’s treatise on communism, Masters of Deceit. The White Knights, the Ledger said, had taken no action—yet. Klansmen were “NOT involved” in the disappearance—“there was NO DISAPPEARANCE.” However . . . “We are not going to sit back and permit our rights and the rights of our posterity to be negotiated away by a group composed of atheistic priests, brainwashed black savages, and mongrelized money-worshipers, meeting with some stupid or cowardly politician. Take heed, atheists and mongrels, we will not travel your path to a Leninist Hell. . . . Take your choice, SEGREGATION, TRANQUILITY AND JUSTICE OR, BI-RACISM, CHAOS AND DEATH.”

  Bombs and floggings were the hallmarks of the Pike County Klan, but the Neshoba klavern had other ways of making its presence known. From the day after the “so-called ‘disappearance,’ ” the Klan was a secret shared all over Philadelphia, Mississippi. Locals speculated on which tight-lipped farmers, which hot-tempered businessmen, which brutal cops, had joined the klavern. Though Klansmen were supposed to change meeting locations and park their cars at least a block away, the same volatile white men were regularly seen entering the Steak House Café near the Neshoba County courthouse. Locals called them “the goon squad.” In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, the Steak House Café became a private club with white sheets draped over windows. Other suspected Klan haunts included certain downtown barbershops, diners, and drugstores. In the white community, suspicion spread when the FBI repeatedly summoned some lean, leather-necked trucker—or his uncle—to the Delphia Courts Motel. Across the railroad tracks, blacks heard whenever a maid found white robes in her boss’s closet. But Klansmen alone knew just how the Klan operated and where it would strike next.

  A Klansman’s weapons were as blunt as dynamite and as cheap as gasoline, but Mississippi’s White Knights had four explicit tactics in their holy war. The first was publicity—mostly cross burning and leafleting. The second—“burning and dynamiting.” The third tactic was flogging, and the fourth, “extermination.” The Klan’s Imperial Wizard was the only man who could order the fourth tactic, and no one outside the Klan knew who he was.

  Sam Holloway Bowers did not fit the stereotype of a Klansman. Slim and soft-spoken, Bowers fancied himself a southern gentleman, several cuts above his followers. “The typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing,” Bowers said. “I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.” Bowers’s grandfather had served four terms in Congress, and his father, a salesman, had instilled in Bowers a fierce righteousness about all things white, southern, and Christian. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Bowers had attended the University of Southern California on the GI Bill, then returned to Mississippi to start a vending machine company in Laurel. But by the late 1950s, the southern gentleman had developed a fascination with swastikas, guns, and anything that exploded. With the cold war raging and blacks stirring throughout Mississippi, Bowers’s righteousness festered into full-blown paranoia. He began warning friends that communists were training an army of blacks in Cuba. The army would soon invade the Gulf Coast. The president would then federalize the Mississippi National Guard, forcing whites to evacuate the state, leaving it defenseless against the black-communist onslaught. The Kremlin, Bowers often said, was a front for Jews trying to topple Christianity. To such a fevered mind, Freedom Summer was a clarion call.

  Late in 1963, Bowers started his own klavern, and a few months later, he gathered two hundred men to form the statewide White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He soon drafted a Klan Konstitution calling Mississippi a “Sovereign Realm” to be protected by himself as Imperial Wizard and a two-house Klongress. From his klavern in Laurel, Bowers began relaying orders: “The purpose and function of this organization is to preserve Christian Civilization. . . . The Will and Capability of the Liberals, Comsymps, Traitors, Atheists, and Communists to resist and subvert Christian, American Principles MUST BE DESTROYED. This is our Sacred Task.”

  Just as no one outside the Klan knew the Imperial Wizard’s identity, no one knew whether he had ordered extermination for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. But Bowers’s paranoia, inflaming dozens of upstart klaverns and backed by stockpiles of dynamite and gasoline, added up to a single tactic—terror. And although their primary targets were black, the Klan terrorized anyone who got in its way. Before Freedom Summer was over, crosses would burn on the lawns of two mayors, a newspaper editor, a doctor who contributed to a church rebuilding fund, a grocer who refused to fire his black workers, even a judge. The message was unmistakable and effective. And as the summer heated up, with moderate voices terrorized into silence, the Klan proceeded with its sacred task to drive off “our Satanic enemies” and ignite Mississippi.

  Robert Kennedy had warned LBJ. Shortly before Freedom Summer, Kennedy had notified the president: “Some forty instances of Klan type activity or police brutality have come to the department’s attention over the past four months. I have little doubt that this will increase.” Come July, the president, whose father had been threatened by the Texas Klan, turned again to J. Edgar Hoover. “I think you ought to put fifty, a hundred people after this Klan . . . ,” LBJ told Hoover. “You ought to have the best intelligence system—better than you’ve got on the Communists. . . . I don’t want these Klansmen to open their mouth without your knowing what they’re saying.” Hoover sent more agents with instructions “to identify and interview every Klansman in the state.” Then on July 9, the FBI director stunned Mississippians by announcing he was coming to Jackson. The next day.

  Hoover had never been to Mississippi, and news of his arrival stirred a frenzy of spec
ulation. “Neshoba Arrests Believed Imminent,” the Meridian Star headlined. Arrests, however, were nowhere near. FBI agents were still finding Neshoba County a human swamp. Some residents had finally begun to talk, but not about the disappearance. Agents questioning locals were subjected to tiresome rants about Communists and Jews, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The resistance on the street was less subtle. Agents walking through Philadelphia were shouldered off sidewalks, spat upon, hounded by threats. One even found rattlesnakes in his car. FBI veteran Joseph Sullivan, the burly, crew-cut agent heading the investigation, had found just one reliable source—the Meridian highway patrolman who had handed over the initial list of seven suspects. From late June into early July, Sullivan and his source met on sidewalks and in cafés to talk about the Klan and “whose neighbors were friendly with who.” But whenever Sullivan asked about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the patrolman fell silent. As for the rest of Neshoba County, Sullivan said it needed no Klan because its ordinary citizens were the most conspiratorial he had ever met. Three weeks after their arrival, many of Sullivan’s men had given up. The search was “just going through the motions,” one said. But a few held out hope: “We haven’t even started leaning on suspects yet. When we do, we’re going to lean real hard. I feel like somebody will break.”

  On Friday morning, July 10, a bulky, bulldoggish figure strode onto the tarmac at the Jackson airport. J. Edgar Hoover was greeted by Governor Paul Johnson and Jackson mayor Allen Thompson. “This is truly a great day!” the mayor said, pumping Hoover’s hand. Hoover, wearing his usual scowl, did not seem to agree. He knew next to nothing about Mississippi—he had called the Delta town where the FBI had recently made arrests “Teeny Weeny.” Opening an office in Jackson had been Hoover’s idea, but going there in July was not. LBJ had arranged the visit. “This Mississippi thing is awful mean,” the president complained. “I’m gonna have to walk a tight-wire there.” Along with sending Hoover, Johnson had ordered the FBI to make its presence in Jackson as public as possible, and all that week, agents had hastily converted an abandoned bank into the bureau’s first Mississippi headquarters. Empty file cabinets were dragged in. False facades covered bare concrete. American flags were on prominent display. But standing at a podium in this Potemkin office, Hoover had little to announce.

  He began by noting that Mississippi had the third lowest crime rate in America. (Mississippi newspapers touted this half-truth all summer, yet although the state’s nonviolent crime rate was among the nation’s lowest, its murder rate was the highest, more than double the national norm.) When reporters asked Hoover about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, he was blunt. “I don’t close it as an absolute certainty,” he said, “but I consider that they are dead.” The search, however, would go on. Another fifty agents had arrived—solely to investigate. “We most certainly do not and will not give protection to civil rights workers,” Hoover insisted. He hinted he would visit Neshoba County, but death threats to his motel later made him cancel his plans. Not everyone in Mississippi thought Hoover’s visit marked “truly a great day!” Alarmed at the FBI invasion, Mississippians were joking that the letters FBI stood for “Federal Bureau of Integration.” In Jackson, a state senator denounced the “calculated insult” of having two hundred FBI agents in Mississippi “carrying out the wishes of Bobby Kennedy.”

  While Hoover spoke in Jackson that morning, the sickness struck in the full glare of daylight. Toward noon in Hattiesburg, a middle-aged man and his nephew tossed a tire iron into a pickup and set out to “whup” the first “white niggers” they met. They were driving near the railroad tracks when they spotted, on an embankment, three white men walking with two black teenage girls. Stopping their truck, sprinting up the grassy incline, the attackers raced past the girls, who could only watch in horror. Fists leveled one volunteer. Another, kicked and pummeled, rolled into a ball, scattering his canvassing forms. The attacker gathered the papers and shoved them in the volunteer’s mouth, shouting, “Eat this shit, nigger lover!” The third victim, a rabbi from Ohio, took the full brunt of the sickness. The tire iron smashed the rabbi’s temple. As he slumped to the ground, the attacker flailed away. After a minute, the men raced down the embankment and drove off. The next day, photos of Rabbi Joseph Lelyveld, his shirt more scarlet than white, circulated around the country along with his expression of “deep sorrow for Mississippi.”

  The weekend offered more cause for “deep sorrow.” In the numbing brutality that followed, Mississippi’s stark divides, separating moderate from hard-liner, redneck from socialite, assailant from onlooker, blurred in relentless revenge. And a state proud of its hospitality could no longer deny that any level of savagery now seemed possible. Canton. Browning. Laurel. Firebomb thrown at a Freedom House. Church burned. Twelve-year-old boys hit with baseball bats while cops look on. Vicksburg. Jackson. Natchez. Bomb thrown into a black café. Elderly white man beats a black woman in a coffee shop. Two more churches doused in kerosene, flames consuming the altars, the crucifixes, the wooden walls, leaving blackened cement stairs climbing from the ashes. From across Mississippi, the reports kept coming in—of assaults, bombings, and finally bodies.

  On Sunday evening, July 12, a CBS reporter called the CORE office in Meridian. Had they heard the news? A fisherman downriver in Louisiana had spotted a body snagged on a log. A half body—legs only, clad in blue jeans, sneakers, bound at the ankles. No one had checked skin color, but the jeans had a leather belt with a buckle stamped M, and a gold watch and key chain in one pocket. The COFO worker shuddered. Mickey Schwerner had a similar belt, watch, and chain. And he always wore blue jeans and sneakers. Only the day before, someone had rushed in with a rumor that if the bodies were found, they would be “mutilated and scattered in different states.” CORE called lawyer William Kunstler in New York. He phoned Rita Schwerner. Rita said her husband’s watch was silver, not gold. He had no belt buckle with an M. But by then the FBI was already rushing to Louisiana, along with a navy frogman to search the river bottom. The following day, agents found another half body lying on a sandbar. Both corpses were black. Papers in back pockets identified the men as college students from Alcorn A & M. Abducted in May, they had been murdered, tied to the motor block of an old Jeep, and thrown in the river. “Mississippi is the only state where you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting,” a volunteer wrote his parents. “Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about. . . . Jesus Christ, this is supposed to be America in 1964.”

  And when reading a son’s or daughter’s letter about corpses, church burnings, attacks with tire irons, what were parents supposed to think? Mississippi’s “low” crime rate notwithstanding, violence there had become so common that it no longer made front pages. Friends kept asking parents how they could let their children spend summer “down there.” Relatives phoned—“Did you see the horrible photo of that rabbi? ” Some parents were now calling their children daily, begging them to come home. “We did not flee Hitler for my daughter to become a martyr,” one mother said. But as their children soldiered on, most parents only called each other.

  Ever since learning of the summer project, total strangers had been sharing worries about their dedicated, idealistic, slightly crazy kids. In late April, parents in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) had written LBJ, asking for federal protection against the “tanks, guns, and troop carriers” stockpiled in Mississippi. A month later, Boston parents did the same. Two weeks before the disappearance, a “Parents Emergency Committee” in Manhattan telegrammed LBJ, urging action “before a tragic incident takes place.” And three days after the tragic incident, two dozen parents had flown to Washington, D.C., to speak with senators, the deputy attorney general, and a White House aide.

  Some parents had more clout than others. In Whittier, California, Fran O’Brien’s mother could only buy a subscription to the Vicksburg Post and worry. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Jean Williams could merely save letters from “Xtoph” and hope for the best. I
n Washington, D.C., Holly Tillinghast, having taught in Mississippi, could only fear the worst. But a few parents had pipelines straight to Congress.

  One morning in early July, volunteer Steve Bingham awoke in Mileston to find the Mississippi Highway Patrol looking for him. Bingham was the grandson of Hiram Bingham, discoverer of Machu Picchu and later a U.S. senator. The Binghams were one of Connecticut’s most prominent families, but now their youngest son was living with eight other volunteers in a shack on a dirt road in Mississippi, cooking on camp stoves and getting water from a hand pump in the backyard. The Binghams, though backing their son’s decision to go south, were concerned. Shortly after Steve Bingham reached Mississippi, his father contacted Mississippi senator John Stennis, an old family friend. Bingham was not merely concerned about his own son—he wanted all volunteers protected. But Stennis called Governor Paul Johnson, and Steve Bingham soon found himself guarded day and night by highway patrolmen. Bingham only shed his bodyguards with the help of Bob Moses. Knowing patrolmen were as scared of the Klan as everyone else, Moses had Bingham tell the highway patrol that their protection would allow him to work in Klan-ridden Natchez. The bodyguards abandoned Bingham within an hour. Later that summer, when a New Yorker was arrested while driving Allard Lowenstein around Mississippi, cops took one look at the name on his driver’s license—Franklin Delano Roosevelt III—and let him go.