On June 12, 2005, Philadelphia, Mississippi, awoke to find dozens of cable news trucks surrounding its courthouse. Townspeople were divided on the impending trial. “It was what I’d been wanting and what I’d been praying here for years,” said Deborah Ray Posey, a member of the Philadelphia Coalition. But another resident complained, “The media has profited for four decades by smearing Neshoba County and Mississippi. I ask, ‘When is enough enough?’ ” Despite misgivings, the trial spread word that Mississippi had long since ceased to be a closed society. Civil rights historical markers were—and still are—occasionally vandalized, and some older whites spoke of Freedom Summer as that time when “Communists invaded the state of Mississippi,” yet reporters noted blacks and whites joking together, working together, sometimes even marrying. When the trial began, Philadelphia was again on front pages across America and Europe, but the little town no longer had anything to hide.
Just after 9:00 a.m., Edgar Ray Killen approached the courtroom in his wheelchair. Bald, bespectacled, disabled by a recent logging accident, he breathed through an oxygen tube. Before the trial reached its second day, he was hospitalized for shortness of breath, yet he remained “as strong for segregation as I ever was.” Simmering in his own bile, the bitter old man showed no emotion as he was wheeled to the defense table. In the gallery behind him sat Rita Schwerner Bender, Carolyn Goodman, and Ben and Fannie Lee Chaney. Forty-one years they had waited.
Mickey Schwerner’s widow had remarried, raised a family, and begun practicing law in Seattle, specializing in Restorative Justice, the movement uniting victims with their assailants to foster personal reconciliation. Andrew Goodman’s ninety-year-old mother still lived in the Upper West Side apartment decorated with photos of her lost son. After earning a doctorate in psychology, Carolyn Goodman had developed programs for families in psychiatric crisis. One day, she had opened the door of her apartment to find a man, speaking in a southern accent, asking forgiveness for his role in her son’s murder. “If you want my forgiveness,” she said, “work in your community and help other people. That way lies forgiveness.” The man left in silence.
Beside Goodman sat “J. E.’s” kid brother. Ben Chaney had grown into a tireless civil rights advocate, but only after surrendering to rage over his brother’s murder. Constantly threatened in Mississippi, the Chaneys had moved to New York in 1965, settling in with the help of the Goodmans and Schwerners. Ben seemed to be doing well at a private school, but shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he and friends headed south with a plot. Chaney was not even present at a Florida shootout that killed four whites, but he was sentenced to life in prison. After serving thirteen years, he was paroled with the help of former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who hired him as a law clerk. Chaney has held the same job ever since, doing civil rights work on the side. As head of the James Earl Chaney Foundation, Ben led the Freedom Summer 2004 Ride for Justice, a bus tour visiting civil rights sites, registering voters, and lobbying Mississippi to prosecute his brother’s killers. Fannie Lee Chaney worked as a maid in a nursing home before retiring. Learning of the impending trial, the eighty-two-year-old woman said only, “Mighty long time.” Now the time had arrived.
The past permeated the courtroom. One of Killen’s attorneys had defended Sheriff Rainey in 1967. The judge had first met Killen as a boy presiding over his parents’ funerals. Yet the present also held its ground. Many in the audience had not yet been born by 1964. The district attorney, a Philadelphia first-grader that year, just vaguely recalled the commotion. He had hoped to bring charges against all living members of the Neshoba klavern, but the grand jury had indicted only Killen. Now, as a jury of nine whites and three blacks looked on, he called the first witness—Rita.
While reporters typed on laptops, the freckled woman with close-cropped gray hair told of coming to Mississippi with her husband in 1964. Rita remembered bidding good-bye to Mickey in Ohio and never seeing him again. She remained composed until she recalled first hearing that the blue station wagon had been found, gutted and burned. That was when “it really hit me for the first time that they were dead.” Fannie Lou Hamer had been with her. “She just wrapped her arms around me and the two of us had our faces together and our tears were mingling with each other and we cried.” Some in the gallery wept. Later, a tearful Carolyn Goodman read the court her son’s postcard from Meridian—“This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. . . .”
In between the grieving women, most evidence came from the dead—testimony read from witnesses long deceased. From the 1967 trial transcript, jurors heard of Killen telling his klavern about the “elimination” order, Killen gathering Klansmen, Killen siccing the men on their prey. Living witnesses added more details. A former Meridian cop recalled Killen telling him all about the murders. A convict in a prison jumpsuit recalled his grandfather asking Killen “if he had anything to do with those boys being killed, and he said ‘yes,’ and he was proud of it.” After three days, Fannie Lee Chaney, walking with a cane to the witness box, concluded the prosecution’s case. She remembered making breakfast that Sunday for the trio. Young Ben had cried as his brother prepared to leave. Her oldest son had promised his brother to take him out when he came back, but “J. E. never come back.”
Defense attorneys called on the alibi Killen had used in 1967. He had been at a funeral home that night, mourning for “old Uncle Alex Rich.” But Rich’s family claimed he was not related to Killen, and another witness said Killen had merely entered the funeral home and looked around. “I thought it was unusual because he wasn’t that close to the family.” Summing up, the defense called the trial “nothing but stirring a pot of hate for profit.” But Mississippi’s attorney general compared the Klan to terrorists in Iraq, then urged the jury, “Do your duty. Honor Mississippi. Honor Neshoba County.”
Jurors deliberated for an afternoon before telling the judge they were deadlocked. The judge ordered them to resume deliberation the next day—June 21. At 11:30 a.m., they filed back into the courtroom. Killen sat in a dark sport coat, his head shaking slightly as the verdict was read. On each of three counts, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter. Families hugged and fought back tears. Speaking for his mother, Ben Chaney said, “She believes the life of her son has value.” Rita Schwerner Bender was disgusted that the charge had been reduced to manslaughter but thanked the people of Neshoba County for bringing about this “day of great importance.” Killen was sentenced to sixty years. Released on bail pending appeal and his own complaints of poor health, he was soon seen driving around Neshoba County, flaunting his freedom. In August, an angry judge ordered him back to jail, where he remains.
Each June 21, as they have every Freedom Summer anniversary since 1965, dozens come to Neshoba County to remember. Setting out in a caravan, they visit James Chaney’s grave, now braced upright to deter vandals. Then, driving along Route 19, recently renamed Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway, they turn onto Rock Cut Road and enter its eerie, haunted woods. At the exact site of the three murders, they set stones on the sacred ground. And they ask “Why only Killen?” Five men convicted of civil rights violations in 1967 are still living. In 1969 a federal appeals court found these men complicit “in a calculated, cold-blooded and merciless plot to murder the three men,” so why not try them for murder? Further prosecution, however, remains elusive. In 2008, the federal Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was passed to fund investigations into such “cold cases.” Yet Jerry Mitchell thinks more than money will be needed. The Clarion-Ledger reporter sees enough evidence for another “Mississippi Burning” trial, but wonders whether the state has the will. “Other cold cases are not very viable,” Mitchell said. “This one, on the other hand, you’ve got 40,000 pages of documents, living witnesses, trial transcripts—the real basis of a case. It should be investigated again, and I don’t know why it hasn’t been.”
The legacy of Freedom Summer remains embattled. Was it a catalyst for change or an unnec
essary provocation that instilled new venom in a dying culture? Interviewed in the mid-1980s, Citizens’ Council president William Simmons remained defiant. “That was the time of the hippies just coming in,” he said, missing the date by three years. “Many had on hippie uniforms and conducted themselves in hippie ways. . . . The arrogance that they showed in wanting to reform a whole state in the way they thought it should be created resentment.” SNCC staffer Charlie Cobb concedes that the summer “changed Mississippi forever,” but believes the changes were inevitable. “You were going to get these federal laws—the Civil Rights Bill in ’64, and the Voting Rights Act in ’65. And eventually you were going to get some slowing of the violence.” Given the loss of momentum among locals, Cobb concluded, “It would have been better to go the other way.”
But many others cannot praise Freedom Summer highly enough. Aaron Henry called it “the greatest sociological experiment the nation has ever pulled off.” The summer changed Mississippi and “the minds of blacks . . . [who] began to look upon themselves as somebody.” Fannie Lou Hamer all but sanctified the “Christ-like” volunteers. “They were the best friends we ever met,” she said. “ . . . We had wondered if there was anybody human enough to see us as human beings instead of animals.” And Georgia congressman John Lewis, interviewed during the 2008 presidential campaign, saw a longer legacy. “Freedom Summer injected a new spirit into the very vein of life in Mississippi and the country,” the former SNCC chair said. “It literally brought the country to Mississippi. People were able to see the horror and evil of blatant racial discrimination. If it hadn’t been for the veterans of Freedom Summer, there would be no Barack Obama.”
Tuesday, January 20, 2009, was clear and chilly in Mississippi. Light snow fell in Oxford. Even the Gulf Coast awoke to freezing temperatures. For most of the morning, Mississippians went about their business. In small diners near courthouse squares, waitresses served biscuits and gravy, eggs and grits. Light trucks rolled off the assembly line at the Nissan factory outside Canton. Cars zipped along Interstate 55—north toward Memphis, south toward the Louisiana line. But then toward 11:00 a.m., time seemed to stop as Mississippi bore witness to Freedom Summer’s final fruit.
Barack Obama handily won Mississippi’s Democratic primary, but come November, he did not win the state that has voted Republican in all but one election (Jimmy Carter’s) since 1964. Yet throughout the 2008 campaign, Mississippi’s reconciliation was on display. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger and other papers endorsed Obama. On election day, a white plantation owner in Panola County, though not an Obama supporter, loaded black workers in his pickup and drove them to the polls. Voter turnout hit record highs, and, as in the rest of America, voting for a black presidential candidate brought tears and celebration. But when the votes were tallied, some had a hard time getting used to the idea of a black family in the White House.
The day after the election, racial tension flared at a high school in Columbus, Mississippi. A heated argument over Obama scared some teens into texting their parents, who came to take them home. Elsewhere in Mississippi, some whites grew tired of hearing about the “first black president.” “Why can’t it be that he’s the next president?” one woman asked. “If he can get America back to where it should be, it doesn’t matter what color he is.” And near Jackson, a school bus driver ordered two boys to stop talking about Obama. They refused. “This is history, woman,” one said to the driver, who threw both kids off the bus. District officials promised to discipline the driver. By Inauguration Day, however, Mississippi seemed more amazed than concerned by the change. “I voted for Obama,” said seventy-eight-year-old James “Little Man” Presley, still working the cotton fields in Panola County. “There’s a heap of pride in voting for a black man.”
As the new president put his hand on the Lincoln Bible, Mississippi held its breath. In classrooms that had excluded their ancestors, in courthouses where registration had been a cruel farce, in cafés they had dared not even enter, blacks watched alongside whites. And when President Obama finished his oath, cheers erupted. In Hattiesburg, Vernon Dahmer’s widow wept. “Oh, if he’d just been able to see it, Lord,” Ellie Dahmer said. “I hope he can see this day.” At a Greenville café where Obama had stopped during his primary campaign, the elderly owner beamed. “It’s the most wonderful day of my life,” Demetrius Buck said. And in Ruleville, Fannie Lou Hamer’s searching question from 1964 seemed to echo down through the decades. Was this finallyAmerica?
Amid many celebrations in the nation’s capital, one group had an especially poignant reunion. Two dozen SNCC veterans gathered in Washington, D.C., to share stories of old times, old battles. Yet the vast majority of Freedom Summer volunteers were nowhere near the limelight on Inauguration Day. Bob Moses spoke on the cable program Democracy Now, recapping the 1964 Freedom Democrat challenge “where the stage was set that allowed this to happen.” But the mainstream media remained fixated on Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Meanwhile in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Mendocino, California; in Englewood, New Jersey, and Lewistown, Montana; in Omaha and Memphis, Indianapolis and Atlanta, some seven hundred Americans no one had ever heard of watched as the living embodiment of the hope that sent them to Mississippi stepped to the podium.
My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. . . .
An hour before the inauguration, Chris Williams addressed his colleagues at Williams College. Few had any idea that the gregarious architect had once been a civil rights worker. Chris recapped his tenure as a teenager in Mississippi, told of how three men had been murdered on his first day there, how he had gone to Atlantic City, how America had changed since. Then he went to watch.
. . . They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction . . .
For Fran O’Brien, Inauguration Day was “the closest thing to a perfect day one can reasonably expect in this world.” Not having a TV, she listened to the ceremony on the radio, alone in her home. After it was over, she went to a diner and watched clips on TV. She did not plan to tell anyone about Freedom Summer, but a black waitress noticed the white-haired woman’s tears. So Fran told Ebony about teaching in Vicksburg, befriending Mrs. Garrett, enjoying the children. She spoke of fear and hope, but not of horror. The waitress asked many questions and Fran answered patiently. She then went to an art museum, but many of the paintings were blurred.
. . . What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply . . .
Bright Winn took time out from his plumbing business to watch in his San Francisco home. He looked in vain for his son in the crowd on the Mall, then got a call from him, with cheering in the background. Muriel Tillinghast, though having worked tirelessly for Obama, declined to celebrate in Washington, D.C. Wary of crowds in her native city, she watched the inauguration alone with her cats and turtle in her church in Brooklyn.
. . . and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. . . .
During the speech, many who had been in Mississippi thought about the martyrs—not just Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, but Herbert Lee and Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and more than a dozen others killed in Mississippi in the name of civil rights. And later that afternoon, some Freedom Summer veterans called each other for the first time in a decade. “It took fo rty-five years,” one said, “but we helped make this day.” Looking back, they took measure of the summer so long ago. They had not been heroes— that honorific was still reserved for the locals. Nor were they crusaders— many had gone before them. The volunteers had merely gone to Mississippi when few others dared to go. As wi
tnesses, as spotlights, they had lent their youthful energy to the struggles of the downtrodden and neglected. Living in shacks, singing in mass meetings, surviving sticky summer nights and inching afternoons, they had endured Mississippi’s hardships. Yet the men and women of Freedom Summer had done more than endure. Echoing William Faulkner’s famous dictum, they had prevailed. They had transcended the hatred, spread the hope, lifted and revived the trampled dream of democracy. Forty-five years after Freedom Summer, their own personal past, filtered through the historic inauguration of a black president, added up to a “freedom high” that lasted for days. And then time went back to work, marching on into an America most dared not imagine they would live to see.
“At the end of it all, I guess what really caught me by surprise is that my fellow citizens voted for Obama in such large numbers, giving him a resounding victory,” Chris Williams said. “I didn’t think we had reached that place yet. How can we not be optimistic?”
Acknowledgments
Because Freedom Summer involved more than one thousand people, each with stories to tell, I am indebted to those who shared their stories, either with me or in letters, journals, diaries, and other first-person sources. Of the fifty-two people I interviewed, some were telling their stories for the first time, and I thank them for their bravery and candor. Many more, including Bob Moses, Hollis Watkins, and other SNCC veterans, graciously took time out from their ongoing activism to share, once again, oft-told stories of that singular summer.
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