Like the assassination the previous fall, volunteers would forever remember where they were when they heard. Several were in a Hattiesburg church basement listening to James Forman. He had just spoken about the disappearance, calling it “the first interracial lynching in the history of Mississippi,” when a man came downstairs and whispered in his ear. Forman’s face went blank. He hurried upstairs, leaving volunteers to wonder. When he returned, he shared the news, then walked off. Everyone drifted out of the room.
In Meridian, many were singing along with Pete Seeger. Someone came onstage and handed him a note. Seeger lowered his eyes, then stood to his full height and told the crowd. After gasps and tears, he led the audience in a slow and haunting song.
O healing river
Send down your water
Send down your water
Upon this land
O healing river
Send down your water
And wash the blood
From off our sand.
Lyndon Johnson got the news from J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant. The president’s day had been consumed by the attack on two American PT boats in North Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. Following an earlier assault, he had promised swift retaliation, but from halfway around the world, reports of this latest attack were conflicting: “Many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports.” But moments later, the same captain confirmed the reports as “bona-fide.” That afternoon, the president met with congressional leaders. By 7:00 p.m., he was with his cabinet, authorizing air strikes. At one minute past eight, the call came from Mississippi.
“Mr. Hoover wanted me to call you, sir, immediately, and tell you that the FBI has found three bodies six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Mississippi—six miles west of where the civil rights workers were last seen on the night of June 21st. . . . We have not identified them as yet as the three missing men but we have every reason to believe they are.”
In a somber voice, the president asked, “When are you going to make the announcement? ”
“Within ten minutes sir, if that is all right with you.”
“Okay. If you can hold it about fifteen minutes, I think we ought to notify these families.”
“Mr. President, the only thing I’d suggest is to not . . . do that prior to the time that they’re identified.”
“I think we could tell them that we don’t know, but we found them and that kind of would ease it a little bit.”
Robert and Carolyn Goodman had not gone out much that summer. One evening, the cast of James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mr. Charlie had come to their apartment to offer sympathy. But August 4 was the night before Robert’s birthday. A Czech mime troupe was performing at Lincoln Center. The curtain had just gone up when a man came down the aisle and signaled the couple. Robert Goodman knew instantly. Nathan and Anne Schwerner were vacationing in Vermont when their lawyer called. Anne Schwerner asked whether anyone was there to comfort Mrs. Chaney. Fannie Lee Chaney was home in Meridian. The parents would all be together soon.
By the time darkness fell across the dam site, three faces again stared at America. ABC interrupted the sitcom McHale’s Navy. The NBC bulletin came during the high school drama Mr. Novak. CBS broke into a travelogue. Shortly after 8:00 p.m. Mississippi time, as floodlights lit the dam site, the county coroner arrived with Deputy Price. FBI agents watched Price for any hint of guilt. Stone-faced beneath his cowboy hat, Price helped load three black body bags into a hearse. With Sheriff Rainey vacationing in Biloxi, Price then accompanied the bodies to a medical center in Jackson, where Goodman and Schwerner, their faces worn away by time and earth, were identified by dental records. James Chaney had no such records, but being a black man buried with whites in Mississippi was enough to remove all doubt.
In the coming days, summer’s discontent deepened. War now seemed certain in Vietnam, sparking a protest in Manhattan. Picketers marched outside federal buildings in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., demanding that marshals be sent to Mississippi. After forty-four days of fearing the worst, the worst had been dug out of Mississippi clay. In their Manhattan apartment, the Goodmans spoke to the press. Surrounded by microphones, Robert Goodman droned through a prepared statement while his wife sat by his side, her face as blank as her hopes. Having recently visited the Lincoln Memorial to renew their faith in America, the Goodmans now paraphrased Lincoln—“It is for us the living to dedicate ourselves that these three shall not have died in vain.” The tragedy, Robert Goodman softly said, “is not private, it is part of the public conscience of our country.” In Washington, D.C., a quiet and reflective Rita Schwerner told reporters her husband was “a very gentle man . . . totally committed to the goodness in human beings.” Reporters’ questions were probing and personal.
“Did you love your husband? ”
“Why are you so calm? ”
“What did your husband die for? ”
“That, I would imagine, is up to the people of the United States,” Rita answered. “For me, I think three very good men were killed, men who could have made unbelievable contributions to American life.” Nathan and Anne Schwerner made no public statement. James Chaney’s mother said only, “My boy died a martyr for something he believed in—I believe in—and as soon as his little brother Ben gets old enough he’ll take James’ place as a civil rights worker.”
The national press was not so restrained.
The closed society that is Mississippi is a blot on the country.
—Hartford Courant
The murders of Michael Henry Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Earl Chaney are a horrendous example of an unthinking and inhuman reaction that might happen wherever mobs make themselves custodians or nullifiers of the law.
—New York Times
None of those who have died in Mississippi have died in vain. The corpses in the river, the three bodies in the levee are all damning witnesses to a way of life that is indifferent to life. . . . The discovery of the three bodies ends a long ordeal for the boys’ parents. The ordeal for Mississippi has just begun.
—Washington Post
Back in Mississippi, those still steeped in denial anticipated a different ordeal. A few seemed repentant. “We must track down the murderers of these men and we must bring them to justice,” wrote the Vicksburg Post. “The honor of our state is at stake.” Hodding Carter’s Delta Democrat-Times noted, “Many of us in Mississippi need to take a long hard look at ourselves. We could begin by altering the sorry record of interracial justice which we have made over the past decade.” But others circled the wagons, predicting “a new hate campaign against Mississippi.” A farmer in Meridian clung to the past. “It was those integration groups that got rid of them,” he said. “They couldn’t let them live after they disappeared for fear everyone would find out it was a hoax.” Another voiced the ill many were too polite to speak of the dead: “If they had stayed home where they belonged nothing would have happened to them.”
On the day the bodies were found, dozens of volunteers were arrested for passing out Freedom Democrat leaflets. That night two more churches went up in flames. But once the news spread from Neshoba County, the violence ceased. For the next four days, with Mississippi again spotlighted in shame, a tense calm prevailed. As details of the murders emerged—they had been quick, there was no evidence the men had been beaten—arguments erupted over the bodies. Distrusting Mississippi doctors, the Schwerners sent their own physician to perform autopsies. Dr. David Spain found single bullets lodged in Goodman’s spine and Schwerner’s left lung. Powder burns proved both had been shot point-blank. Then, examining Chaney’s body, the doctor stirred a controversy that has yet to settle. Contrary to initial reports, he announced, Chaney had been horribly beaten. Shot three times, he had several broken bones, one shoulder “reduced to a pulp,” his skull caved in. “In my extensive experience of twenty-five years as a pathologist and as a
medical examiner,” the doctor announced, “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high speed accidents such as airplane crashes.” (Chaney’s beating was frequently cited as further proof of savagery. Later evidence suggested he had been run over by the bulldozer burying him, but autopsy photos revealed in 2000 showed that Chaney was severely beaten before being shot.)
When LBJ spoke at his Texas ranch, predicting “substantive results” in the Neshoba murder case, reporters flocked to Philadelphia, expecting arrests. They found the town swarming with activity. The Neshoba County Fair was just days away, and the fairgrounds, two miles south of where the bodies were found, were humming. The fair was “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” drawing thousands eager to while away long, story-filled nights in wooden cabins of picture-perfect nostalgia, with creaking porches and rocking chairs. Philadelphia lived for its famous fair, and nothing, not even the stench of death, would dampen it. Reporters asking questions about bodies and burials had to settle for answers about the “giant house party.” But behind closed doors, many in Philadelphia were asking the same question. After a six-week intensive search, how had the bodies suddenly turned up? Some said the dam, built in May but still holding no water, attracted suspicion. Others noted Dick Gregory’s informant letter, which the FBI publicly discounted. Those still enraged by the bureau’s invasion insisted agents had planted bodies beneath the dam. As talk of a payoff spread, suspicion focused on anyone displaying sudden status—a new car, a barbecue, a hunting rifle. Whoever the informant was, many said, they would “hate to be in his shoes” if his name was discovered. (The name of the informant Mr. X—agent Joseph Sullivan’s chummy highway patrolman from Meridian—would not be revealed until 2005. Speculation on which Klansman revealed the burial site to Mr. X remains rampant.)
At the dam site, state troopers kept sightseers away while FBI agents sifted dirt and scoured approach roads for clues. They found none. Olen Burrage, owner of the site, denied suspicions. “I want people to know I’m sorry it happened,” the burly businessman said. “I just don’t know why anybody would kill them, and I don’t believe in anything like that.” The bodies that had lain together throughout Freedom Summer were soon separated. Rita Schwerner hoped her husband could rest in the earth with his friend, but no mortician in Mississippi would touch an integrated burial. James Chaney was to be buried on a hilltop outside Meridian. The bodies of Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were flown to New York.
The movement in Mississippi changed that weekend. SNCC’s faith that “courage displaces fear [and] love transforms hate” suddenly seemed insulting. Many would continue to march, unarmed and singing, into the billy clubs, into the black buses taking them to jail. But countless members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would no longer speak of nonviolence. Those who did would encounter disdain. “Y’all can be non-violent,” one Delta man said, “but I ain’t going to let them folks come up here and shoot and not have nothing to shoot back with.” Black Greenwood, on edge all summer, was boiling over. Blacks were boycotting a store owned by the cop who dragged the pregnant woman on Freedom Day. Outside the store, police patrolled in full riot gear. Silas McGhee continued his campaign to integrate the Leflore Theater. Emerging into melees, pelted with bottles, Silas returned to the theater night after night. And now three bodies . . .
On the night of August 4, blacks at a Greenwood rally raged against neighbors who still refused to join the movement, to “have some race pride!” Stokely Carmichael promised to “loudmouth everyone in this town ain’t doin’ right!” Then he added, “Another thing. We’re not goin’ to stick with this non-violence forever. We don’t go shooting up their houses. It’s not us who does that.” Later that night at SNCC headquarters, Carmichael and others debated bringing guns back into the office. After agreeing it was about time, Carmichael left the room to call COFO headquarters “to get the mandate from Bob.” No one knows what Moses said, but Carmichael returned chastened. “What I think we ought to do is work harder on freedom registration forms,” he said. All that week, SNCC veteran Bob Zellner asked others, in private, if they were interested in his plan to kill Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price. None were. Yet not even Bob Moses could keep the “nonviolent” in SNCC’s name much longer.
On Friday, August 7, both James Chaney and nonviolence were laid to rest in Mississippi. Following Chaney’s private burial, a memorial march through Meridian drew streams of silent mourners. At dusk, hundreds gathered inside a church lit by TV lights and filled with shouts and sobs. As a swelling chorus sang “We Shall Overcome,” Fannie Lee Chaney stood in a black veil, hugging her twelve-year-old son, dressed in his Sunday suit. Deprived of his brother, his best friend, Ben Chaney wavered between sorrow and rage. On the way to the funeral, Ben had stared down a photographer, then muttered, “I’m gonna kill ’em! I’m gonna kill ’em!” Watching the casket lowered into the grave, he shouted, “I want my brother!” But now, as mournful voices filled the church, he leaned against his mother, wiped his glistening face, and sang. “We Shalllll . . .” Then realizing the finality of a funeral, that he would never see his big brother again, Ben dissolved in tears. Watching him weep, COFO chairman Dave Dennis decided to scrap the speech he had planned.
Since entering Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, Dennis had taught classes in nonviolence and helped quell the pending riot at Medgar Evers’s wake. Early in 1964, Dennis had met Mickey and Rita Schwerner and suggested they work in Meridian. On June 21, he had planned to accompany Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney into Neshoba County, but a case of bronchitis kept him home. Now he stood before mourners, overwhelmed by grief and guilt. Fannie Lee Chaney had asked him to give the eulogy—something calm, something inspiring—but Dennis suddenly saw nonviolence as “a mistake.” In his high-pitched voice, he began speaking not from notes, nor from the heart, but from an entire race’s resentment and wrath.
“Sorry, but I’m not here to do the traditional thing most of us do at such a gathering,” the skinny, sad-eyed Dennis began. “What I want to talk about right now is the living dead that we have right among our midst, not only in the state of Mississippi but throughout the nation. Those are the people who don’t care. . . .” As Dennis spoke, one hand trembling, the other gripping the podium, mourners rose to meet his words, calling out “Amen” and “All right!” Dennis enshrined James Chaney in the lengthening list of martyrs—Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and Herbert Lee and the countless other blacks in Mississippi whose murders had gone unpunished. Enough, his every word said. His body began to shake. His pitch rose to a fever. Enough.
“I’m sick and tired of going to memorials. I’m sick and tired of going to funerals!”
“Yes!”
“I’ve got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight.”
“So have I! ”
“And I’m not going to stand here and ask anybody here not to be angry tonight!”
“YES! ”
Dennis spoke of blacks fighting in World War II and coming home to Mississippi “to live as slaves.” He knew that “when they find the people who killed these guys in Neshoba County” there would be a trial. Yes, and “a jury of their cousins, their aunts, and their uncles.” And he knew what the verdict would be—“not guilty. Because no one saw them pull the trigger. I’m tired of that!”
“Yes, God help us! ”
“I am, too! I’m sick of it! ”
Dennis spoke for “the young kids . . . for little Ben Chaney here and the other ones like him.” When some applauded, Dennis lashed out. “Don’t get your frustration out by clapping your hands!” Tilting his head, biting one lip, he fought back tears, fought for words.
“This is our country, too!” he shouted. “We didn’t ask to come here when they brought us over here. . . .”
“AMEN, RIGHT! ”
“The best thing that we can do for Mr. Chaney, for Mickey Schwerner, for Andrew Goodman is stand up and DEMAND our rights!”
“All right! ”
“Don’t just look at me and the people here and go back and say that you’ve been to a nice service . . .”
“Amen! ”
“If you do go back home and sit down and take it, God damn your souls!”
“That’s the truth! ”
“Stand up!” Dennis shouted. Then, his voice falling to a desperate whisper, he pleaded—“Don’t bow down anymore. Hold your heads up.” His eyes watering, Dennis concluded. “We want our freedom now, (now!) I don’t want to go to another memorial. I’m tired of funerals.” He banged his fist on the podium, then pointed to the sky. “Tired of it! We’ve got to stand up.” His voice shattering, he walked off the stage.
Two days later, separate memorials were held for Goodman and Schwerner in Manhattan. Crowds of nearly two thousand attended each. Goodman’s service, at the Ethical Culture Institute on the Upper West Side, was interrupted by a bomb threat, but police removed two large flowerpots and the ceremony continued. Rabbi Joseph Lelyveld, still scarred from his severe beating in Hattiesburg a month earlier, gave one of many eulogies: “The tragedy of Andy Goodman cannot be separated from the tragedy of mankind. Along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, he has become the eternal evocation of all the host of beautiful young men and women who are carrying forward the struggle for which they gave their lives.” When the service ended, someone took the yellow rose atop the coffin and handed it to Carolyn Goodman. She came to the center aisle, turned back, and took first the arm of Fannie Lee Chaney, just flown in from Mississippi, then the arm of Anne Schwerner. Three mothers, heads bowed, dressed in black, weeping as one, walked slowly from the chapel.
Freedom Summer Page 27