Thirty grand. A million. Enough to last a lifetime. The actual payoff was said to be the lowest figure, but $30,000 in 1964 was equivalent to more than $200,000 in 2010. “We’d have paid a lot more if we’d had to,” one agent said. “We’d have paid anything.” The story of the payoff is legend in Neshoba County, but to this day, no one is sure whether anyone received any money. Inspector Sullivan always denied making any payoff. But he admitted that on Thursday, July 30, he took his contact—the highway patrolman from Meridian—out to a steak dinner at the Holiday Inn. And there the FBI finally learned where the bodies were buried. The next day, agents began floating rumors and grilling suspects, offering them big rewards, perhaps to stir suspicion among fellow Klansmen once the bodies were found. Someone may have received $30,000, but the highway patrolman, who died of a heart attack two years later, never displayed any sudden wealth. Nor could his role in solving the mystery be revealed. Recognizing he would be killed if identified, the FBI began calling the informant “Mr. X.” On August 1, guarding his secret with rumors, agents headed for the thick woods of Neshoba County.
As the sun rose that Saturday, agents skirted downtown Philadelphia, then headed south along Route 21 toward a farm known as “The Old Jolly Place.” They were looking for an enormous earthfill dam, but they found that Mississippi’s tangled landscape could hide objects far larger than a human body. After an hour hacking through brush, agents phoned headquarters and had a helicopter from the Meridian Naval Air Station fly over. “We’ve spotted the dam,” agents heard on their walkie-talkies. “It’s a big one.” Following directions from overhead, agents slashed through thickets, then topped a rise. Before them stood a crescent of ocher earth, twenty feet high at its midpoint and spanning a gap in the pine trees nearly twice the length of a football field. Mr. X had guaranteed the bodies were somewhere beneath it. “This is no pick and shovel job,” Inspector Sullivan said. He phoned the FBI in Washington, D.C., asking permission to rent heavy equipment. He also filed for a search warrant.
Finding three bodies beneath a dam—if they could be found—would surely quicken what President Johnson had recently called “the summer of our discontent.” But could anything break down the walls of white Mississippi? Persistent talk of a hoax, of media persecution, of “invaders” disrupting cordial race relations—all added up to an entire culture entrenched in denial. Even if the missing men were found, would anything change? “Maybe the best course for everybody is just to let the bodies lie and let the excitement gradually die down,” a Philadelphia man said. No local jury would convict anyone, “so why should we have all this hue and cry, and a big circus trial, with everybody goddamning Mississippi?” Yet because Freedom Summer thrived on hope, at some point hope had to cross the railroad tracks.
From its early planning stages, the summer project had focused a glimmer of its idealism on Mississippi’s impoverished whites. The “White Folks Project” targeted Biloxi, known for being nearly as tolerant as Greenville. In late June, eighteen volunteers had gone from Ohio to the Gulf Coast town to help poor whites “see that their enemy is not the Negro but poverty.” By early July, volunteers were speaking daily with carpenters, barbers, fishermen, even the high school principal. Occasionally they met someone who would listen, but more often “there was no dialogue, just antagonism.” “Why Mississippi?” white folks asked. Why not work in your own states? The White Folks Project soon floundered. Volunteers spent days arguing about whom they should contact, what they should say. Striking out on their own, two women took jobs at a diner to “get the feel of the community” but were discovered as “COFOs” and fired. By August, six volunteers had quit, and the rest were going door-to-door, trying to convince poor whites that the Freedom Democrats were not the “nigger party.” “It looks like the pilot phase of our White Community Project is pretty much over,” one wrote home.
The search for tolerance continued. Could there be a few whites who, while not supporting integration, would at least listen to reason? While the White Folks Project sputtered, lone volunteers took advantage of grudging hospitality. Once it became clear that volunteers were in town for the entire summer, a few were invited into white homes. There they met polite but firm dismissal.
“You Northerners all think that every Mississippian is a bare-footed redneck.”
“How can these kids presume to come into our state, not knowing our people or our customs, and tell us how to live our lives? ”
“What’s so hard to explain to you—to people like you—is how much we care for our niggers. You think we’re heartless because we segregate our society. I tell you that the nigger prefers it that way, same as we do.” Dismayed volunteers headed back to their side of town. Perhaps among the better educated . . .
On consecutive Tuesdays in late July, two volunteers visited the University of Mississippi. Nearly two years had passed since brick-throwing mobs had rioted all night to block James Meredith’s enrollment, but William Faulkner’s hometown had only hardened its Rebel resistance. Moderate professors continued to leave for other universities. Locals and students still blamed federal marshals for the riot that had claimed two lives and brought Oxford worldwide notoriety. And now, even if Meredith had quickly finished his degree and left the state, here were more “outsiders” coming to campus to preach integration, to stir up trouble. With city and campus police trailing them, the two volunteers met with Meredith’s former adviser and the campus newspaper editor, who complained of Mississippi’s tarring in the press. Invited back the next week, the two spoke to a sociology class, explaining their work, then fielding questions.
“Would you marry a Negro? ”
“Is your organization Communist? ”
“Why are Negroes so immoral? ”
No minds were changed, but students seemed to listen. Over lunch, volunteers sat in a dining hall echoing with catcalls—“Communist! . . . Queer!” On their way out of town, a pickup chased them until they ducked down back roads. A similar exchange in Vicksburg saw volunteers meet college students in a Catholic rectory. One volunteer found the students “guilty, agonized, and profoundly frightened.” A second meeting was scheduled, but no students showed up.
The summer’s only prolonged cross-cultural contact took place on a series of Wednesdays. Since July 7, a group of black and white women from the Northeast had been flying to Jackson each Tuesday evening. Calling themselves “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” the women were led by Dorothy Height, chair of the National Council of Negro Women, and Polly Cowan, former TV host and mother of two volunteers. Wednesday after Wednesday, the women visited Freedom Schools, talked with volunteers, and met socialites in Jackson and Meridian. As at Ole Miss, politeness and denial prevailed, this time over tea. “Wednesdays in Mississippi” women marveled at responses that seemed programmed into their hosts. No Negroes wanted to vote except for those who were Communists. Negro schools were not—ahem—a disgrace. Just look at their beautiful buildings. And Mississippi police did “a splendid job.” At one meeting, however, an elderly Mississippi woman broke in. “Girls,” she said, “I just have to tell you you are so wrong.” While serving on a federal civil rights commission, she had heard the abuses, “and there were lots of injustices, terrible ones.” Skirts were straightened, faces fell. The conversation resumed, with fewer platitudes. A few “Wednesdays in Mississippi” women, North and South, would keep in touch that fall.
Even when invited, moderation dared not speak its name in Mississippi. Visiting doctors and ministers were sometimes pulled aside by whites who, looking over their shoulders, confessed that they supported integration. Journalists met locals who admitted their state needed help, but refused to be quoted. “If you print my name next to what I’m going to tell you,” one told the Washington Post, “I’ll be ruined. I’ll lose my business, my friends, I’ll be run out of this state.” The fear seemed exaggerated, until one heard about the Heffners.
Mississippi had few more loyal sons than Albert Heffner. Raised on a Greenwo
od plantation, the big, jovial man everyone called “Red” had gone to Ole Miss, where he met his wife, Malva, another native. The couple had lived in McComb for ten years. Red’s downtown insurance office was always busy. He and Malva were deeply involved in church activities. Their daughter, Jan, had been Miss Mississippi, with her picture on the billboard outside McComb. When the bombings began in his town, Red had written to the Sovereignty Commission, suggesting that “responsible citizens” stand up to the Klan. “I am not an integrationist, segregationist, conservative, moderate, or liberal,” he noted. “I am just an insurance man in debt up to my ears.” But on July 17, Red Heffner committed what McComb’s mayor would later call “a breach of etiquette.” He invited two “mixers” to dinner.
He had only wanted “to let the Civil Rights workers hear the Mississippi point of view.” But with bombings in McComb on the increase, and sales of guns and dynamite soaring, the jovial insurance man quickly became the target of his town’s feverish fear. Just after dinner, Heffner’s phone rang. The caller asked to speak to volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The conversation was brief, confirming the rumor that was inflaming the neighborhood. Then another call came. “Whose car is that in front of your house? ” An hour later, when Red opened his front door, he was blinded by the headlights of ten cars parked in his yard. Volunteers slowly slipped past the blockade and made it back to the project office, but the Heffners’ ordeal had just begun. First came the phone threats—“If you want to live, get out of town.” “How does you wife like sleeping with niggers?” “You nigger-loving bastard. You’re gonna get your teeth kicked in.” Next, Red was evicted from his office. Rumors that their house would be bombed sent Malva and Jan to live at the Holiday Inn. The Heffners soon heard shocking slander—that Jan worked for the FBI, that their other daughter was in a Communist training school in New York, that Malva was a call girl. Old friends refused to speak to them. No one came to their defense. By early August, the Heffners were considering something they could not have imagined at the start of summer—leaving Mississippi. And by September, after more than three hundred phone threats, the air let out of their tires, their dog poisoned, dead on their doorstep, they were gone. They would never live in Mississippi again. Decades later, talking about their expulsion still brought them to tears.
Searching for tolerance, volunteers finally turned to the only people in Mississippi who had little to lose—alienated teenagers. On August 3, as the FBI was bringing heavy equipment to Neshoba County, Pete Seeger gave a concert in McComb. In his sweat-stained work shirt, his head thrown back, his banjo ringing, Seeger sang “Abiyoyo” and “What a Beautiful City.” The outdoor concert behind the Freedom House drew dozens of black kids, along with volunteers like Ira Landess. Toward the end of the evening, the Manhattan teacher noticed two white boys standing by themselves. They were not singing—at a Pete Seeger concert?—but they did not seem dangerous. Cautiously, Landess approached. The two teens—Gary and Jack—told him they just wanted to hear Seeger. But as they talked, Landess discovered that not every white youth in Mississippi was content to live in a closed society.
One of the teens, Gary Brooks, had recently acquired a dangerous habit—asking questions. After reading Black Like Me, the startling best seller by a white journalist who darkened his skin to roam the South, Brooks began daring himself to cross the tracks. He told no one about his walks through the black side of McComb. He merely wondered. Why were there so few businesses, so few decent homes, such poverty? Why had students at his high school cheered when the principal announced that President Kennedy had been killed? And who were these “invaders” coming to Mississippi? When summer began, Brooks watched McComb explode. Each bomb entrenched the town’s spreading siege mentality. Friends became strangers. Suspicion spread like afternoon heat. No one could be certain who might be in the Klan, what casual remark might be turned against him. Anyone who showed the slightest sympathy for “the COFOs” might be the next Red Heffner hounded out of town.
When Pete Seeger closed his concert, Gary and Jack agreed to continue their conversation with Ira Landess. Gary soon phoned the Freedom House, telling Landess he had several friends who wanted to meet him. They agreed to meet at the Holiday Inn. Some suspected a trap, but Landess trusted the teens. After reviewing security measures, he went alone to the Holiday Inn on the edge of town near Interstate 55. Taking a room, he waited. After an hour, just Gary and Jack showed up. Their friends had “chickened out.” The Manhattan teacher and the Mississippi teens talked for a few hours. Throughout August, Gary and Jack would continue to drop by the Freedom House. Ira Landess welcomed them as heralds of a new Mississippi. The rest of the state would still need shock treatment.
One hundred miles per hour was not an uncommon speed in Mississippi that summer. Battered sedans and pickups flew past fields and barns, chasing SNCC cars. The chases usually ended with the lead car dodging down a back road, or the pursuers, having had their fun, peeling off. The miracle was that no one had been hurt. But until the first day of August, no one had passed on a hill.
The cars collided at the top of the rise. Head on, they slammed into each other, lifting front ends, shattering glass, crumpling chrome and steel. One car was driven by a local man, the other by a Holly Springs SNCC worker driving with Wayne Yancey, a black volunteer from Chicago. Yancey was known for his jovial attitude, his ham-handed pickup lines, and his cowboy hat. At 3:30 p.m. on August 1, the call came to the Holly Springs project office. “You folks better get down to the hospital. Two of your boys had a head-on wreck out on the highway and one of ’em is dead!” Arriving at the hospital, the COFO contingent found a hearse with one dark foot sticking out the back. The ankle was broken, dangling, and through the rear window everyone could see the face. In a monstrous flashback, it reminded some of Emmett Till in his casket. “His head went through the windshield,” someone said.
High speeds were common in Mississippi that summer, but when the state wanted to slow down, nothing happened in a hurry. For the rest of the afternoon, volunteers and SNCCs argued with cops and pleaded with doctors. Hearing that the car’s driver was in the hospital, a volunteer who was also a nurse rushed inside. She saw the man on a gurney, his jaw broken, his face maroon and purple. Doctors had given him a shot and an X-ray, but when the nurse-volunteer insisted he be rushed to a Memphis hospital, she was dragged outside. Cops swarming around the hearse would not let anyone touch Wayne Yancey’s body. And the driver could not be taken to Memphis—he was under arrest. Hearing that the car was nearby, SNCC staffer Cleveland Sellers walked off to find it—totaled. The windshield was two spiderwebs of glass. The steering column lay in the front seat. Blood splattered the interior. When Sellers insisted on claiming the car, he was arrested. It took two more hours of arguing, but the driver was finally taken to Memphis, then flown to Chicago, where he recovered. Volunteers drove the body of Wayne Yancey to his family home in Tennessee. Back at the project office, they hung his cowboy hat on a wall. In the summer swamp of suspicion, some were certain Yancey had been murdered. Some still think so, although all evidence points to an accident. Two nights after Yancey’s death, a steam shovel and a bulldozer, trucked from Jackson, arrived at the dam site in Neshoba County. Mississippi’s hour of reckoning had come.
Dwarfed by the sprawling landfill, FBI agents showed up at 8:00 a.m. on August 4, armed with a search warrant valid for ten days. Agents also brought sleeping bags, tarps, and enough food to last as long as the search might take. By 8:15, they had sealed off the property, handed its owner the search warrant, and prepared the shovel that would dig to the bottom of the dam if necessary. But where along the vast landfill should they dig? Standing atop the dam, a heavy equipment operator shoved a stick in the ground fifty yards from the western end. “I’d say start digging here.” But having been told the bodies were beneath the middle of the dam, an agent yanked the stick and walked fifteen paces toward the center. “We’ll start here,” he said. The digging began at 9:00 a.m. The death scene was fram
ed by skinny pine trees and a cloudless sky. The temperature already neared 90.
As the steam shovel bit into the dam, agents scurried like insects, scribbling notes, taking photos, gathering dirt samples. A stinging sun soon cleared the pines, sweat-soaking white shirts and blue collars. No one beyond the site, no one in America aside from the president and top FBI officials, knew of the digging. Back at the Delphia Courts Motel, Inspector Sullivan kept in touch by walkie-talkie. The digging continued, cutting a small U atop the dam.
At 11:00 a.m. agents noticed “the faint odor of decaying material.” Yet those who had fought in World War II knew that smell, and it was not faint for long. Agents halted the shovel and began digging with trowels. They found nothing, and by noon the machine was plunging deeper.
By 3:00 p.m., when the temperature topped 100, a V-shaped gash had been gouged nearly to ground level. Clouds of blue-green flies swarmed around the cut. The smell wafted to the sky, where vultures circled. One agent was writing in his logbook when another spotted the boot. A black Wellington boot sticking from the earth. Agents began digging with shovels and bare hands. In the reeking heat, one stumbled from the pit, vomiting. Others donned white masks or lit cigars, believing one stench would drown another. For the next two hours, they clawed at the Mississippi earth, uncovering legs clad in Wrangler jeans, a hand with a wedding ring, and finally a torso, shirtless, with a bullet hole under one armpit. Agents called Inspector Sullivan. “Reporting one WB. Repeat one WB.” One white body. Sullivan used a more arcane code to alert his headquarters. He radioed the FBI in Washington: “We’ve uncapped one oil well.”
At 5:07 p.m., agents unearthed Andrew Goodman. Facedown, arms outstretched, he lay under the body of Mickey Schwerner. In his left hand, Goodman held a piece of earth, gripped so tightly it could barely be pried from his fingers. Some would later wonder. Had the innocent young man believed he could fight off a lynch mob with a rock? Or, noting how the pressed clay matched the earth that covered him, some asked whether Andrew Goodman, though found with a bullet through his chest, had been buried alive. In Goodman’s back pocket, agents discovered a wallet with his draft card. Word went back to Washington. Something about a second oil well. Seven minutes later, the third well was uncapped. James Chaney lay on his back, barefoot, beside the other two. “Mickey could count on Jim to walk through hell with him,” the Freedom House worker had said. Now Mickey Schwerner, the man he called “Bear,” and the new friend they had brought from Ohio, had reached the far side. Someone phoned the county coroner as the news began rippling across Mississippi, across America.
Freedom Summer Page 26