Freedom Summer (16 page)

Like most in Neshoba County, the sheriff mocked the disappearance. The three men were “hid somewhere trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure.” After spitting on the asphalt, Rainey told Farmer he would only meet with four men. The rest would have to wait by the highway. Moments later, Rainey’s patrol car led a lone sedan into town. At the courthouse, the black men walked past glaring white faces, then rode a silent elevator to the sheriff’s office. Inside, a slow ceiling fan kept the temperature just below ninety. The black men bristled, tense and indignant, but Rainey and Deputy Price seemed delighted by the attention, smirking and joking while county attorneys handled all questions.

Farmer demanded to visit the burned-out Mt. Zion Church. He was told he would need a search warrant. John Lewis insisted on seeing the burned Ford wagon. He was refused, lest he “destroy evidence.” So there had been a crime, Lewis countered. “
If
there has been a crime,” the lawyer said with a smile. “Those boys may have decided to go up north or someplace and have a short vacation. They’ll probably be coming back shortly.” Farmer mentioned his young volunteers, ready to search. Heads shook. Private property. Water moccasins. Trespassing. “We don’t want anything to happen to you down here.” After several brittle minutes, the black men were escorted outside, past the shotguns and sour faces, to the cars waiting at city limits. All were certain the smug sheriff and his smiling deputy knew exactly what had happened to the missing men.

Back in Meridian, as thunder rattled rooftops, a mass meeting crackled with anger. Dick Gregory offered $25,000—just arranged in a call to
Playboy
publisher Hugh Hefner—to anyone finding the missing men and those responsible. That evening, rain clouds parted to reveal an eclipsing moon. In small towns across the state, “redneck boys” roared through “Niggertowns,” shouting, throwing bottles, daring anyone to mess with Mississippi.

 

 

Someone had miscalculated. Someone had not recognized how times had changed. Time was when a murder in Mississippi had stayed in Mississippi, when few even heard about the crime, when the rest of America went about its business, distanced by culture and geography. But that time had passed. It was 1964, and when three men disappeared in the most remote corner of the South’s most rural state, the whole nation heard the news the next day. Whoever knew the whereabouts of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney must have been surprised to see what an old-fashioned Mississippi lynching—if that’s what it had been—had unleashed. Because never had a disappearance in the Deep South sent such tremors through the nation. The alarm also paid unwelcome tribute to the planners of Freedom Summer. Their cynicism had been dead on. All the blacks murdered in Mississippi since Emmett Till had scarcely raised concerns beyond state borders. The killing of Herbert Lee had been reported in just one major newspaper; the murder of Louis Allen was found only on back pages. But when
whites
were killed . . . “It’s a shame that national concern is aroused only after two white boys are missing,” John Lewis told the press. SNCCs had expected as much, but someone in Mississippi had not.

By Thursday, even the president of the United States was counting the days. “I imagine they’re in that lake,” Johnson told an aide that afternoon. “It’s my guess. Three days now.” The rest of the nation watched and waited. The concern was for more than just three men. Murder had always marred America’s self-image, but it had been an especially disfiguring year. The previous twelve months had seen Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway, four little girls killed in a Birmingham church, the assassination in Dallas, and the televised murder of the alleged assassin. A strangler was on the loose in Boston, throttling innocent women. In New York that spring, Kitty Genovese had been murdered in full view of dozens of neighbors, who had not even called the police. Now came this news from Mississippi. What was America becoming? “We are basically a law abiding nation,” President Johnson reminded Americans that week. But so long as three men were missing in Mississippi, the jury was still out.

Although the FBI had begun to move, although two hundred sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station were preparing to join the search, SNCC had little faith in any federal investigation. “We need the FBI before the fact,” Bob Moses said. “We have them now after the fact.” SNCC had to conduct its own search. Shortly after the news reached Ohio, two cars left the leafy campus. Taking different routes lest both be halted by police, the drivers planned to rendezvous that Tuesday afternoon in Meridian. Crossing into Mississippi, each team phoned in on schedule. “No word yet.” One car was delayed outside Holly Springs by ATAC students lecturing about the Tenth Amendment. Still, it arrived on time. The other was . . . missing. More panic swept through the Meridian office, panic that continued all night and into Wednesday morning. When Stokely Carmichael and Charlie Cobb finally showed up, they told of another near miss. Their old Buick had broken down in Durant, a town “knowed for mean.” Cops had not bought their cover—that they were schoolteachers headed for a Florida vacation. Carmichael was held overnight, but Cobb was told—at 10:00 p.m.—that he could go free. He refused, was thrown out of jail, and spent a terrifying night in the car, clutching a tire iron and “praying for sunrise.” The following morning, Cobb bailed out Carmichael and they drove to Meridian, ready to search.

Toward dusk on the third day after the disappearance, SNCC’s search team snuck into Neshoba County. Making their way along back roads, they visited the ashes of the Mt. Zion Church, then found refuge in a shack filled with rifles. Over a dinner of collards and ham hocks, they heard what local blacks thought had happened. The three had surely been killed by “those same peckerwoods” who burned the church. “Ain’t no telling where they done hid the bodies.” The men waited until midnight, then set out for the swamps. Their hosts drove them as James Chaney would have, headlights out, slamming over rutted roads, clambering deeper into Klan territory, where a wrong turn would have meant a flogging or another disappearance. Piling out of pickups, they spread out into swamps and creeks, searched barns and wells, used long sticks to probe muddy ditches. The muggy night seemed alive with fear. Any moment they expected to hear the thud of stick against a shoulder or torso, but all they heard were snakes hissing, mosquitoes whining, and deerflies buzzing their ears. They trudged on, ankle deep, knee deep, waist deep. Vines snagged their clothes; brambles slashed their arms. The teams searched until the sky turned salmon pink, returned to cabins to sweat more than sleep, then searched again the following midnight, tracking down the latest rumors. “So and so said they saw something. . . . We heard tell. . . . So and so heard the white people talking about . . .” Finally, rumors said the Klan had learned of their presence, and the midnight searches were called off.

On Thursday afternoon, striding into those same swamps came the two hundred sailors ordered by President Johnson. All wore white sailor hats and grimy old shoes. The men taped pant legs to their ankles to keep leeches out. Grabbing branches to fend off snakes, the sailors searched until dusk. Before plunging in, many noted how strangely evil a Mississippi swamp appeared. The waters were opaque, calm, and flat, with no clue to their depths. Dragon-flies, like little blue helicopters, darted over floating logs. Heat hung like a shroud over the pea-green carpet, but nothing beneath it stirred. And then, every so often from the black water below, a bubble surfaced, popped, and was gone.

 

 

From Lyndon Johnson on down, federal officials thought they were doing everything possible to find the men. But what about preventing future disappearances? Congressmen were besieged by parents’ calls and telegrams demanding that federal marshals protect their children. LBJ’s men were unanimously opposed. Sending in troops, said Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, “would have an irretrievable effect for two or three generations.” Robert Kennedy insisted Mississippi’s smoldering violence was “a local matter for local law enforcement.” Prominent law professors disagreed, issuing a statement citing the Justice Department’s legal right to intervene. But intervene how? Protecting “a thousand of these youngsters going down there . . . living in the homes of the colored population” would be an “almost superhuman task,” J. Edgar Hoover told Allen Dulles. With Klansmen in the Mississippi Highway Patrol, Klansmen among “the chiefs of police,” even some sheriffs in the Klan, “you almost have got to keep an agent with them as they come into the state,” Hoover said. In New York, Malcolm X offered members of his Muslim Mosque as protection. No one took him up on the offer.

Newspapers and Congress soon joined the debate. The
Washington Post
praised “this breathtakingly admirable group of youngsters” but said federal protection was “simply impossible.” The
New York Times
outlined the risks of “a second Reconstruction.” On the Senate floor, Mississippi’s John Stennis was urging the president to issue “a firm, positive statement” to stop “this invasion” when New York’s Jacob Javits leaped to his feet. Americans, Javits shouted, had the right to go anywhere they wanted. Stennis responded that any blood shed in Mississippi “will be on the hands of those who formed and led this invasion into a state where they were not welcome nor invited.” Faced with pressure to do
something
, LBJ stood firm. He would send more FBI that weekend, but he would not be responsible for a “second Reconstruction.” “I’m not going to send troops on my people if I can avoid it,” he said. “And they got to help me avoid it.”

Would Mississippi help? Overnight, the long-dreaded “invasion” had come to resemble an occupation. Sailors slogged through swamps. Reporters from across America as well as France, England, and Germany descended on Philadelphia. FBI agents were stopping cars at checkpoints. Aluminum skiffs were motoring along a coffee-brown river as agents dragged grappling hooks along its bottom. The occupation stirred deep resentments, bringing the sediment to the surface. Watching the search from a bridge, several young men lit up Marlboros and traded jokes: “We throw two or three niggers in every year to feed the fish,” one yucked. Another told the FBI how to find James Chaney. “Why don’t you just float a relief check out there on top of the water? That black sonofabitch’ll reach up and grab it.” A few sober voices spoke in private, but only a few. “You know damn well our law is mixed up in this,” a Philadelphia man told the Rotary Club. “I can’t see why we have to protect them.” A local woman was appalled: “The idea of these people trying to defend murder!” The way things were going, many said, Mississippi would be under federal occupation by mid-July. And wasn’t it a shame, one added, given that the whole affair “if it was boiled down to gravy there wouldn’t be much to it, no how.”

Suspicions of a hoax were spreading throughout Mississippi. The
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
claimed Andrew Goodman had been spotted boarding a bus in Baton Rouge. CORE, rumor had it, had phoned police on Sunday afternoon
before
the men came up missing. And the Schwerners’ VW? Odd that it was nowhere to be found. Letters to editors “proved” the hoax; otherwise why would Andrew Goodman, whose boyish face networks were showing in footage from the Ohio training, have been filmed before he “disappeared” ? And wasn’t Mississippi getting a black eye on the nightly news? Walter Cronkite spoke of “Bloody Neshoba.” NBC interviewed a Neshoba County man who said Sheriff Rainey was involved. ABC let Mississippians damn their state with callous denial: “I believe them jokers planned this and are sittin’ up in New York laughin’ at us Mississippi folk,” one man said. A woman added, “If they’re dead, I feel like they asked for it. They came here lookin’ for trouble.”

In contrast to Mississippi, the aggrieved families displayed uncommon grace. On Thursday afternoon, TV cameras jammed the Goodmans’ stylish Manhattan apartment. While flashbulbs popped, Carolyn Goodman read an appeal “to all parents everywhere, particularly the parents of Mississippi who, like myself, have experienced the softness, the warmth and the beauty of a child whom they cherish and love and want to protect. I want to beg them to cooperate in every way possible in the search for these three boys.” Graying Anne Schwerner then spoke about James Chaney, “a Negro, a friend, and a brother to my boy Mickey.” Though she had never met Mrs. Chaney, she wished “I could take her in my arms.” Back in Mississippi, Fannie Lee Chaney said little, even when a cross was burned on her lawn. This was not the first disappearance in her family. Decades earlier, her grandfather had refused to sell his land to a white man. Only his shoes, shirt, and watch were ever found. Now, head in her hands, the stunned woman told the press, “I’m just hoping and not thinking.” Like President Johnson, most assumed the three men were dead. “For God’s sake,” Nathan Schwerner shouted at a reporter. “Don’t you know we’ll never see Mickey again?” An FBI agent confided, “We’re now looking for bodies.” Yet the mothers insisted their sons might be found in some jail, some barn, somewhere. While they held out hope, Rita Schwerner, whom some had thought too small and frail to work in Mississippi, returned to take on the entire state.

As the mothers spoke to the press, Rita flew into Jackson. Speaking to reporters at the airport, she announced, “I am going to find my husband and the other two people. I am going to find out what happened to them.” Rita also issued several demands—“that scores of federal marshals be sent to Mississippi . . . that there be a full scale investigation of reports of the involvement of some law enforcement officers . . . that President Johnson’s personal envoy Allen Dulles confer with those in Meridian who know precisely what is going on.” “In a word,” she concluded, “we demand ‘freedom now.’ ” Accompanied by SNCC’s Bob Zellner, Rita then headed for the capitol to speak to Governor Paul Johnson.

After listening to a clerk go on and on about the beauty of Mississippi, Rita finally learned the governor was at his mansion, greeting George Wallace. “I’m sure Wallace is much more important to Mississippi than three missing men,” Rita said. Entering the mansion grounds, she found the two governors heading a receiving line. Stepping in line, she heard someone mention the missing men. And she heard Johnson joke, “Governor Wallace and I are the only ones who know where they are, and we’re not telling.” Moments later, when Johnson bent to greet Rita, Bob Zellner shook his hand and introduced her as the wife of Michael Schwerner. When Johnson recoiled, Zellner held tightly to his hand, asking if it was true “that you and Governor Wallace here know where the missing civil rights workers are?” Panic broke out as reporters shouted questions and state troopers yanked Zellner away. Wallace and Johnson retreated inside and slammed the door. Hustled off the grounds, Rita moved on to meet Allen Dulles. The president’s envoy kept her waiting fo rty-five minutes, then spoke with her for five. When Dulles offered his sympathy, Rita replied, “I don’t want your sympathy! I want my husband back!”