Freedom Summer (13 page)

Bob Moses had told her, “Mississippi can’t be exaggerated.” Now it did not need to be. As night blackened office windows, as other volunteers went to their homes, leaving her alone with a sleeping bag and a host of mice scurrying in the walls, her sense of alarm spiraled. Holed up in the office, she asked herself hard questions. All right, she had always been the organizer, the take-charge person. What now? How could she survive the summer? How could she canvass door-to-door if she could not even force herself to leave the office? Greenville, everyone assured her, was known for its moderation. Freshened by new people and new ideas that came along the river, it had a reputation as “different.” SNCCs said they would “rather get arrested in Greenville than any town in Mississippi.” Yet Muriel did not kid herself.

“Many Mississippi towns were predatory,” she said. “Greenville was not predatory, but it was reactionary. In West Hell the heat may not be boiling, but . . .” For a young black woman on her own a thousand miles from home, accustomed to big cities with well-lit streets, regular traffic, pragmatic people, night released inherited terrors. Night was when Muriel’s grandmother, walking from Texas to D.C., had taken refuge in barns to hide from the Klan. Night was when crosses were burned. Night had been her introduction to Mississippi, and now night had come again. “Mississippi has a black and inky night,” she recalled. “Most of us were city kids. We’d never been in a rural area, certainly had never been in a southern area at night. I shed all the veneer of urban life and got down to basics—food, water, paying attention to even the smallest detail.” All that first night alone in the office, the smallest details made her heart race. Each headlight flashing across a wall startled her. Each shout from the street sat her up. Each creak on the office stairs made her jump. Mississippi, it seemed, could be exaggerated.

To cope with the night, COFO had set up a warning system. All project offices were connected to the Jackson headquarters by a WATS (wide area transmission service) line. Long-distance calls in 1964 were expensive, reserved for emergencies, but the WATS line allowed unlimited calling for a monthly fee, enabling hourly check-ins from offices throughout Mississippi. Like a delicate spiderweb stretched across the state, COFO’s phone network kept a vigil on the summer project, recoiling with each report of violence, relaxing with each report of calm. That first day, only minor flare-ups had been phoned in. Cops had detained a CBS camera crew in Ruleville. A Molotov cocktail exploded in a church basement near Jackson, causing minor damage. That was all. But night had just begun.

COFO’s phone network also protected workers traveling through Mississippi. Anyone sent out from a Freedom House provided a precise return time and promised to phone in if delayed. If the hour came and went with no contact, calls went out to all area jails and police departments. Often these calls turned up a worker arrested and detained. Sometimes the call, alerting cops that someone was watching, prevented a beating. More often it did not. On June 21, as darkness fell, the alarm system was put to a test that justified the worst fears.

Shortly after noon that Sunday, three men had set out from Meridian, in the eastern part of the state, for the remote backwater of Longdale, Mississippi. These were the three who had left Ohio before dawn on Saturday to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. Arriving in Meridian that Saturday night, they had slept, eaten breakfast, had their hair cut, then headed for the ash and twisted rubble that had once been the Mt. Zion Methodist Church. Before entering Neshoba County, a sparsely populated tangle of swamps and fields known to be thick with Klansmen, the group’s leader had issued strict instructions. If they were not back by 4:00 p.m. that Sunday, the calls should begin. The hour came and went. The three did not return. Back in the Meridian office, a volunteer on her first day in Mississippi immediately called COFO in Jackson. But Bob Moses and all the rest were in Ohio, welcoming more volunteers. Without their seasoned fear as guide, the worker on the WATS line advised waiting an hour before calling jails. If the men had car trouble or had taken a longer route home, they would arrive soon. They would arrive soon.

During the endless hour that followed, the three men still did not return. At 5:00 p.m., the WATS line in Jackson rang again. The volunteer penciled phone numbers on paper.

Within minutes, phones rang in jails throughout Neshoba and surrounding counties. The men’s names were Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman. None of the jail clerks admitted having the three in custody, nor any record of their arrest. Philadelphia police “said they knew nothing at all about the case,” that the Neshoba County sheriff was visiting his wife in the hospital and could not be reached. The wait continued. Six p.m. Seven. Seven thirty. Night descended. More calls brought the same answers. The black ribbon roads of Neshoba County were quiet. Volunteers knew nothing about the disappearance, yet a mounting dread was spreading among staffers across the state.

Back in Meridian, Sam Block, whose courage in standing up to Greenwood cops was the stuff of SNCC lore, went to the local jail. Everyone knew Block would settle for no nonsense, but he returned with no news. Eight p.m. They would arrive soon. Pickups began circling the office. The grinding of engines and shouts of “Nigger lovers!” unsettled the steamy, disheveled rooms more than usual. The next hour was even longer. Volunteers and locals, black and white, sat on desks, on floors, waiting, waiting. Some played Ping-Pong in a back room, the click-clock of paddles only tightening the tension. A few walked down the street to get coffee. A volunteer just arrived from Massachusetts read
All Quiet on the Western Front
, its wartime terror seeming to fit the moment. Others just sat beneath a slow ceiling fan. Sweat darkened shirts and blouses. Nine p.m. Should they call Schwerner’s wife, Rita, who was also in Ohio? They had to call someone. They called SNCC in Atlanta. Staffer Mary King began posing as an
Atlanta Constitution
reporter, making her own calls to county jails in Mississippi. Still no trace.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m., a law student taking over the WATS line phoned an FBI agent at his home in Jackson. The student gave the agent the three names and where they had been traveling, then demanded an immediate investigation. The agent said only, “Keep me informed of what happens.” Half an hour later, the CORE office contacted the FBI in Meridian. The agent listened to frantic concerns, just listened. He listened during a second call at 11:00 p.m. and listened some more at midnight. Finally he said he was going to bed. The FBI was not a police force, he said. The wait continued.

Fears were deepening like darkness itself when the first day of Freedom Summer ended. Chris Williams was asleep in Batesville. Muriel Tillinghast was awake and alone amid the shifting shadows of the Greenville office. The rest of the volunteers, having enjoyed the most heartfelt welcome of their lives, were in host homes, asleep or else alert to each whisper of the night. None knew that three men they had seen back in Ohio just two days earlier were missing in Neshoba County. On into the early morning hours, the calls continued—to the Mississippi Highway Patrol, to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., finally to fathers, mothers, a wife. No one offered any answers, any explanation. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had vanished without a clue.

—Anne Moody,
Coming of Age in Mississippi

CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

A lone car trailing dust down a back road in Neshoba County could be seen for miles. Cars were common enough along the sunburned fields fifty miles inside the Alabama line, but not so common that a stranger’s car would not be suspected. When a black man was driving, the suspicion doubled. And if he was a known civil rights worker, perhaps even driving with a white man, there was no way to measure the trouble ahead. So in the final weeks before he disappeared into the darkness of Neshoba County, James Chaney made his visits at night. Crossing the county line, he killed his headlights and punched the accelerator.

Neshoba County, its farmland framed by thickets, its gentle hills bottoming into bogs, had just 20,000 people spread over 570 square miles. Three-quarters were white, with less to fear from Negro voting than in the “black belt” of the Delta. Yet no Negro had registered in Neshoba County since 1955, and anyone who suggested it was time had several forces to reckon with. There was a big, beefy cowboy of a sheriff, elected on a campaign promise to “handle the niggers and the outsiders.” There was the White Citizens’ Council. There was the Klan, posting recruitment flyers and burning crosses that spring. And there were the good people of Neshoba County—merchants, laborers, teachers—all rather partial to the way things had been since their granddaddy’s day.

Neshoba County’s reputation reached far beyond its borders. Steeped in bootleg whiskey and the corruption it brought, Neshoba was known as “one of the wettest dry counties in the dry state of Mississippi.” The county was also notorious as a backwater—provincial, hidebound, friendly to its own but just plain mean to strangers. Not many strangers came to “these parts,” however. Growing up in Neshoba County, a native might pass a lifetime without meeting more than a few people from outside Mississippi. Whites who ventured north returned with stories of cold, crime-ridden cities where blacks were caged in ghettos, where “folks yah met on the street just didn’t care whether yah lived or died.” But blacks who fled north never came back, and those who stayed in Neshoba County learned to be invisible. “We don’t bother no white folks and usually they don’t pay no attention to us,” one said. “We just live here and scratches it out.” Blacks who thought differently had to keep quiet or keep moving.

Racing down dirt paths lit only by his parking lights and the moon, James Chaney often hit speeds of seventy-five or eighty. Though raised in adjacent Lauderdale County, Chaney knew Neshoba, knew every gully, every ditch, every shack where a black family was brave enough to “reddish to vote.” Flying past swamps, skittering over rutted roads, Chaney’s blue Ford wagon was a shadowy streak by moonlight. When he arrived at a dark cabin, Chaney cautiously stepped out and whistled. His white companion waited. A candle or kerosene lamp signaled that they had the right place. They entered and in the gloaming, talked about family, farming, and finally, voting. Leaving leaflets about registration classes in Meridian, they hopped in the station wagon and sped on. Throughout the spring of 1964, each night run continued for as long as Chaney could stand the tension. Then he would drive toward the county line as fast as fear could take him. Crossing into Lauderdale County, Chaney flipped on his headlights, slowed to a safe speed, and headed home.

 

 

In the nightmare hours of June 22, phone calls startled sleepers from Mississippi to Moscow. Three men were missing, vanished, gone. SNCC in Atlanta called the Justice Department three times. Each call deepened concern, until by morning John Doar gave the FBI power to investigate. But the FBI agent in Jackson still refused to act. On the Ohio campus, a stunned Rita Schwerner lay curled on a cot, making her own calls. In New York, CORE director James Farmer was awakened at 2:30 a.m. A few hours later, a call alerted attorney William Kunstler. “You don’t know me,” the caller said, “but my son, Mickey, told me to call you if he ever needed a lawyer.” In Moscow, a UPI reporter phoned Dick Gregory. The comedian canceled his goodwill tour and headed for Mississippi, where phones were ringing all over the state. Another call to Meridian: no word of the three. A call to the Mississippi Highway Patrol—without a sheriff’s order, no missing persons bulletin could be issued for seventy-two hours. More calls. To sheriffs. To Washington, D.C. To the FBI in Jackson . . .

At 6:55 a.m., the first breakthrough came with a follow-up call to the Neshoba County jail. The jailer’s wife, having earlier denied seeing the three, now admitted they had been in custody. Brought in about 4:00 p.m. Sunday, James Chaney had been booked for speeding, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman held “for investigation.” But all three had been released at 6:00 p.m. The news sent shudders through COFO’s phone network. Freedom Summer planners had expected something like this, but on the first day of the project?

Volunteers still did not know. In Greenville, Muriel Tillinghast, hollow-eyed from sleeping on the floor, welcomed others to the office she would refuse to leave all that week. In Batesville, Chris Williams had another down-home breakfast and, with orders come from COFO to “lay low,” wondered when the work would begin. Meanwhile in Ohio, a second group of trainees was about to hear the most chilling of all SNCC stories from Mississippi. At 9:30 a.m. Bob Moses stood before an auditorium of fresh faces—Freedom School teachers—explaining Mississippi from a blackboard map. Calling the state “The Closed Society,” he added, “Mississippi is closed, locked. We think the key is the vote.” He paused, looked at his feet, then resumed. “There is an analogy to
The Plague,
by Camus. The country isn’t willing yet to admit it has the plague, but it pervades the whole society.” Just then, three SNCCs entered and called Moses over. When he returned to the stage, his voice was even softer, his manner still more grave.

“Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. They haven’t come back and we haven’t had any word from them.” The auditorium rippled with alarm. In the confusion, a waiflike woman with dark, closely cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses strode to the stage. Rita Schwerner asked volunteers to group by home states and send telegrams to their congressmen, demanding an FBI investigation. When someone asked how to spell the names of the missing, she strode to the blackboard and erased half of Mississippi. Then, as if it were not her husband but some stranger who had vanished, she calmly wrote the names in block letters. The clicking of the chalk could be heard to the back of the auditorium. Suddenly there was no need to “scare the crap” out of anyone. Each face bore a primal fear—this could happen to
me
. While volunteers grouped, Moses slipped outside and slumped down on a step overlooking a spreading lawn. Occasionally a friend approached to give him a hug. One whispered, “You are not responsible for this,” but Moses sat there for hours.