Inside the courtroom, Judge Harold Cox, the notorious racist who had ranted against “niggers on a voting drive,” sat before a huge mural depicting Mississippi history, including slaves picking cotton. Cox was silent as prosecutor John Doar led informants through the same stories they had told the FBI—of Klansmen armed with the “elimination” order, of “Preacher” Killen convening the lynch mob, of cars chasing “Goatee,” pulling the three over, taking them to Rock Cut Road. But the judge soon served notice of how things were changing. Early in the trial, a defense attorney questioned a black minister. Hadn’t Michael Schwerner advocated “the burning of draft cards” ? Wasn’t he an atheist? Hadn’t he tried to “to get young Negro males to sign statements that they would rape one white woman a week during the hot summer of 1964 here in Mississippi”? Judge Cox had heard enough. “Who is the author of that question?” he snapped. Preacher Killen, who had suggested it to lawyers, meekly raised his hand.
“I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial,” Cox said. The accused donned straight faces, yet continued to joke and smirk during recesses. All were stunned, however, when the Imperial Wizard’s most trusted aide stepped into the witness box to testify for the prosecution.
Delmar Dennis, a tall, stalwart Methodist minister, had joined the Klan because it was “a white, Christian, militant organization dedicated to states’ rights, segregation, and the preservation of the white civilization.” At his swearing in, Preacher Killen had warned Dennis, “You ain’t joined no Boy Scout group,” but murder did not set well with the minister’s conscience. In October 1964, Dennis had given the FBI enough inside information to fill forty pages. Now, he sat with fists clenched, quoting Klansman after Klansman. Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers on the killings: “It was the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of Jews.” Preacher Killen: “He said . . . people would need to be beaten and occasionally there would have to be elimination.”
“What did he mean by elimination? ”
“He meant killing a person.”
Eight lawyers rose to defend the accused and, by proxy, Mississippi. Delmar Dennis was “a Judas witness” who “instead of thirty pieces of silver . . . got $15,000!” The FBI’s tactics had resembled the Soviet system, “neighbors informing on neighbors.” More than a hundred witnesses swore to seeing the defendants late that Father’s Day evening. Preacher Killen had been at a funeral home. Triggerman Wayne Roberts was with his aunt, playing canasta. The accused were “salt of the earth kind of people . . . as innocent and pure as the driven snow.” Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers was “in church every time the doors are open.” But Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were “low-class riffraff. . . . Mississippians rightfully resent some hairy beatnik from another state visiting our state with hate and defying our people.” As for the murders, “It may well be that these young men were sacrificed by their own kind for publicity or other reasons.”
Summing up, John Doar sought to defuse lingering resentment of “the invasion”: “The federal government is not invading Philadelphia or Neshoba County, Mississippi. . . . These defendants are tried for a crime under federal law in a Mississippi city, before a Mississippi federal judge, in a Mississippi courtroom.” But the defense tapped resentments as old as Confederate culture. “The strong arm of the federal government” had come to Mississippi to prove “that there is a group of people here in Mississippi so filled with that hate that they conspire together . . . to do away and murder outsiders.” Would the tired old bitterness still work? Even if the charge was a “civil rights violation,” could a Mississippi jury convict “good ol’ boys” of killing two “outsiders” and a “nigger” ?
While the jury deliberated, the defendants yucked it up in the hallway. Only Sam Bowers seemed concerned, smoking and brooding on his own. When the jury deadlocked, the judge ordered them back into deliberation. Finally, a verdict was reached. When read to the court, it left Klansmen visibly shaken. Seven men—Bowers, Roberts, Price, and four others—were found guilty. Seven more, including Sheriff Rainey, were acquitted. A hung jury was declared for four, including Edgar Ray Killen. Claiming she “could never convict a preacher,” a Meridian secretary had been the lone juror defending the organizer of the lynch mob. For the next two months, jurors’ homes were guarded. Many received death threats. Crosses blazed in their hometowns. But in late December 1967, Judge Cox sentenced Wayne Roberts and Sam Bowers to ten years, the rest to three to six. “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man,” the judge declared. “I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”
Outside the courtroom, an onlooker called the verdict “the best thing that’s ever happened to justice in Mississippi.” In Manhattan, Carolyn Goodman hailed the “landmark decision.” Nathan Schwerner hoped Mississippi would soon bring murder charges. Fannie Lee Chaney remarked, “They did better than I thought they would.” After two years of appeals, the convicted went to federal prison in 1970. The case marked the first time since Reconstruction that any white had been convicted of civil rights violations in Mississippi, yet the state still had a generation to travel down the long arc of justice.
Shortly after his Civil Rights Act passed during Freedom Summer, Lyndon Johnson had summoned Nicholas Katzenbach to the Oval Office. “I want you to write me the goddamn best, toughest voting rights act that you can devise,” the president said. Throughout spring and summer of 1965, Congress debated the act. Several congressmen invoked the names Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, urging passage “to insure that they did not die in vain.” Signed into law that August, the Voting Rights Act abolished literacy tests, authorized federal supervision of elections in seven southern states, and required those states to get federal approval for any changes in voting laws. By the end of 1965, 60 percent of Mississippi’s blacks were registered voters. Getting their leaders into office, however, was another matter.
Jim Crow was always based on privilege and power as much as hatred. Mississippi could not hold back the tide of law, but it could enact a new round of legislative voodoo. Responding to the Voting Rights Act, the state legislature passed a dozen bills curbing black political power. City and county elections suddenly became “at-large,” allowing white votes to dilute black votes. School superintendents became appointees. Getting on the ballot became tougher, requiring ten times as many signatures. And the Delta’s “black belt,” a single congressional district for as long as anyone could remember, was carved into three bloated districts aptly resembling pigs at a trough.
In 1967, 108 blacks ran for office in Mississippi. Just twenty-two were elected, most to low-level county positions. A lone black entered the all-white legislature. For the next few years, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged every new voting law, and in 1969, theirs and similar challenges reached the Supreme Court. By a 7-2 margin, the court invalidated all efforts to dilute black votes. The Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, should have “the broadest possible scope.” But as with the Brown ruling, compliance would take a decade or more. In 1972, two-thirds of all blacks in Mississippi could vote, yet just 2.7 percent of state officials were black.
Throughout the 1970s, while Mississippi’s politicians patched their leaky “wall of Never,” ordinary people changed the state. Not by fiat and no longer at a shotgun standoff, white and black slowly came together. Most found that, in hailing from that unique place called Mississippi, they had something in common. “After Freedom Summer,” said Batesville publisher John Howell, a teenager in 1964, “we met black people who, when we got over our grudge at them for having the audacity to want to do things like vote and go to decent schools, were, almost without exception, such sweet and forgiving people.” Bigotry did not disappear, but each act of kindness, each common concern helped southern hospitality melt age-old hostilities. No one can pinpoint a date or time, but at some point “boy” no longer referred to a black man. Titles of respect were bestowed on white and black. And sidewalks, though no wider than before
, had room for black and white, sometimes side by side.
When Panola County pioneer Robert Miles ran for county supervisor, he lost a run-off but was stunned when a white man handed him fifty dollars to help take blacks to the polls. “I never dreamed I’d live to see such a day,” Miles said. Medgar Evers’s brother was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, the state’s first black mayor since Reconstruction. “Hands that picked cotton can now pick the mayor,” Charles Evers said. A few years into his term, Evers got the backing of a former Klan leader. “I count Mayor Evers as a friend now and I have a lot of respect for the man,” E. L. McDaniel said. “We realized it’s not blacks against whites, but the little folks against the big shots.” Ten years after the Ole Miss riots, students elected a black football player as “Colonel Rebel,” the university’s top sports honor. Another first came in 1977 when Unita Blackwell, Muriel Tillinghast’s pupil, became Mississippi’s first black female mayor. Blackwell remained mayor until 1997, eventually winning a MacArthur genius grant and addressing the 1984 Democratic National Convention.
As school busing battles tore apart Boston and other cities, Mississippi schools did their own dance around integration. “Seg academies” continued to flourish, but whites who could not gain admission and those unafraid of “mixing” sat beside blacks in public schools. Cafeterias remained self-segregated, but in locker rooms, in hallways, at pep rallies, black and white talked, sometimes fought, and discovered they could get along. Lyndon Johnson had predicted as much during Freedom Summer. “I can’t make people integrate but maybe we can make them feel guilty if they don’t,” he had told an aide. “And once that happens, and they find out the jaws of hell don’t open, and fire and brimstone doesn’t flood down on them, then maybe they’ll see just how they have been taken advantage of.”
Late in 1979, the Mississippi legislature finally obeyed the U.S. Supreme Court. The Delta again became one congressional district. Hundreds of blacks were elected as mayors, city councilmen, and state legislators. In 1986, Mike Espy became Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, and the following year, a black woman was crowned Miss Mississippi. Throughout the 1990s, black political power steadily grew, giving Mississippi more black elected officials than any other state. At the time of this writing, 28 percent of the legislature is black, and the list of cities run by black mayors reads like a tour of Freedom Summer: McComb, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Itta Bena, Greenville, Greenwood, Holly Springs, Ruleville, Drew. . . . In 2009, even Philadelphia, Mississippi, elected a black mayor. Today, the Mississippi Delta still holds America’s deepest pockets of poverty. Black income there remains just over half that of local whites, and in Greenwood or Greenville, as in towns throughout Mississippi, railroad tracks still demarcate stark differences in housing, education, and living standards. Yet in any town from Biloxi north to the Tennessee border, one can enter a café and see whites and blacks talking in ways one rarely sees farther north. And no one taken into custody has to fear the sheriff, his deputies, or the terror the night used to bring. But is Mississippi’s racial progress more than skin-deep?
“The Promised Land is still far off,” Hodding Carter III observed. “Black folks are still on the outside, looking in when it comes to jobs, equal education, housing, etc. But here, sadly enough, that does not much distinguish Mississippi from the rest of the country. What did distinguish us—racism red of fang and claw, in the saddle and riding hard—no longer prevails. What is in the hearts of individuals is one thing; how they now find they must operate in public is another. We are talking about fundamental change, which has left the state still far from the mountaintop, but it has been climbing for some time. It may go sideways from time to time, but it isn’t going back.”
Poet Margaret Walker Alexander agreed: “I believe that despite the terrible racist image Mississippi has had in the past, despite her historic reputation for political demagoguery, despite racial violence and especially lynching, despite all the statistics about being on the bottom, Mississippi, and especially urban Mississippi, offers a better life for most black people than any other state in which I have lived or visited.”
In just a generation, Mississippi had progressed so far that its children were shocked by stories from the recent past. In 1984, when a former activist told kids about having to duck down in integrated cars, the kids gasped. “Not in Mississippi!” some said. But as Mississippi shed its past, would anyone dare to dredge up the horrors of Freedom Summer?
After the savage season, volunteers had gone separate ways—careening through the 1960s, then settling into the rest of their lives. Tenth and twentieth anniversaries of Freedom Summer passed but no one had the energy to mend a broken circle of trust. In 1989, however, feelers went out, and dozens of volunteers came to the first full reunion. Meeting in Philadelphia, they visited the rebuilt Mt. Zion Church and heard Mississippi’s attorney general formally apologize to the families of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. It was a short reunion, but the healing had begun. Five years later, nearly four hundred volunteers descended on Mississippi and no one spoke of an invasion.
At the airport in Jackson, a banner read “Welcome Homecoming 1964- 1994.” On this thirtieth anniversary, most veterans were returning to Mississippi for the first time. After comparing lives, sharing photos of children and grandchildren, crossing hands for tearful renditions of Freedom Songs, volunteers boarded buses. Back at their old sites, few could believe this was, in fact, Mississippi. The sight of black cops startled them. Holly Springs’ black mayor gave volunteers the key to the city. Freedom School teachers met former students, learning of their college degrees and political offices. Beneath the surface, however, bigotry still seethed. Visiting James Chaney’s grave, volunteers found it vandalized. Ben Chaney, a civil rights activist, told them, “There has not been meaningful change in Mississippi.” Many agreed; others took their doubts deep into communities where they had once lived. The poverty was still painful, but reunions with white-haired hosts soothed spirits. Yet even though Mississippi had recently convicted Medgar Evers’s assassin, many “ghosts of Mississippi” remained.
It took Fran O’Brien twenty-five years to exorcise the demons of that single summer night. In June 1965, still repressing the Klan beating, finding memories of Mississippi “rosier and rosier,” she had returned to Vicksburg. She found her old Community Center in rubble and her project running on a shoestring. Fran hoped to teach former students, but she had “stepped into a hornet’s nest.” The statewide power struggle over child care sent her from COFO to Head Start and back again. After four weeks, she went home to southern California. That fall, she entered grad school and, in 1967, began teaching in California’s central valley.
During her first spring in the classroom, Martin Luther King was killed. Overhearing kids say, “It’s a good thing they got that Communist,” Fran decided to speak to them. “I told them that Martin Luther King was not a Communist and I knew because I had met him.” She spoke about the civil rights movement as a veteran. She spoke as she would continue to speak to children all her life. But decades would pass before she could speak about all of what happened that summer.
As the terror buried itself deeper, any talk of civil rights gave Fran nightmares. When she watched slaves flogged during the TV miniseries Roots, she woke up screaming. But in 1989, after attending the first Freedom Summer reunion, she sat down to write and the horror came pouring out. “It had been a rather quiet summer in Vicksburg . . .” Writing about the beating allowed Fran to face down fear and humiliation, but after a lifetime of empathy, she could not bring herself to blame the Klan. “One might as well hold a skunk morally accountable for spraying or a rattlesnake for striking,” she wrote. Fran’s “Journey into Light” was later published in an anthology of writings about Freedom Summer.
Though she worked her entire life with children, Fran never married—“I never really had the time”—nor had children of her own. Before retiring, she taught for thirty-four years, usually
in classrooms for physically or mentally handicapped kids. In her students’ struggle for acceptance, she found parallels to the civil rights movement. Over the years, she nurtured a devout Christian faith that she cannot imagine living without. This quiet, gentle woman lives alone in a small house on a hillside near Bakersfield, California. None of her neighbors suspects she was once part of the summer that changed even their own attitudes about race and freedom.
In his final nine months in Indianola, Fred Winn faced an explosive violence that escalated all winter and into the spring. Arrested five times, hounded by his draft board, targeted by local whites, Fred somehow survived, but relentless pressure led to drastic moves. In February 1965, suddenly classified 1-A and in no mood to fight for the country whose racism he was confronting, he took a female coworker to Greenville and married her. The wedding was a joke, with the “flowers” just grass yanked from outside the church, and a cold kiss. “Yes, I know it sounds a bit wild,” he wrote his father. “It was the only thing I could do to get out.” The marriage would be annulled later that year, but the wedding—and Fred’s arrest record—kept the draft at arm’s length. Nothing, however, could tamp down Indianola’s surging violence.
In March 1965, a Molotov cocktail burned the Freedom School to the ground. Several who had been living in the school crammed into Irene Magruder’s house, forcing Fred to sleep in her living room. All continued working on a new voting drive. Come April, the drive became a rush when Sunflower County was slapped with a federal injunction and three hundred blacks were registered. Many stood outside the courthouse, hugging and crying. “I was so glad I wanted to holler ‘Freedom,’ ” one old woman said. The payback came swiftly.
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