Freedom Summer (33 page)

This much was true—FBI agents spoke to Price and Rainey that Friday. The stocky sheriff later boasted of how he’d handled the Federal Bureau of Integration. Yes, he had met agents, Rainey said
,
but if they wanted to see him again, they had better “come with subpoenas.” Behind his bluster, however, agents knew the sheriff was scared. Fearing that COFO’s suit against him might lead to a polygraph test, the sheriff had been inquiring about immunity from prosecution. On Friday, when agents came to his office, Rainey listened as they laid out evidence of his bootlegging. If convicted—
when
convicted—he faced fines, jail, and huge back taxes. But if he told what he knew about the disappearance, the FBI would “take care of him” to the tune of thirty grand. Rainey told the agents nothing. Down the hall, agents told Deputy Price they had spent $3 million looking for the three bodies and would “pay a million more just to know where they were.” With that kind of money, agents said, Price could “buy a cattle ranch in Wyoming.” The plump deputy, wearing his goofy smile, was as silent as the sheriff. But someone talked.

In the decades since Freedom Summer, many have speculated about who told the FBI where to find the bodies. Local suspicions ranged from a drunk who woke up in the woods to witness a triple burial to a Dutch “seer” telling agents the three were buried near a construction site. Many still believe the FBI hired a New York mobster, a member of the Colombo gang known as “The Grim Reaper.” And the hit man apparently flew to Mississippi, pummeled a suspect, stuck a gun in his mouth and screamed, “What happened to the three kids? ” The apocryphal story is mistakenly connected to another Mississippi murder; the truth is more traditional. The “someone” who talked was money, or perhaps just the hint of money.

Thirty grand. A million. Enough to last a lifetime. The actual payoff was said to be the lowest figure, but $30,000 in 1964 was equivalent to more than $200,000 in 2010. “We’d have paid a lot more if we’d had to,” one agent said. “We’d have paid anything.” The story of the payoff is legend in Neshoba County, but to this day, no one is sure whether anyone received any money. Inspector Sullivan always denied making any payoff. But he admitted that on Thursday, July 30, he took his contact—the highway patrolman from Meridian—out to a steak dinner at the Holiday Inn. And there the FBI finally learned where the bodies were buried. The next day, agents began floating rumors and grilling suspects, offering them big rewards, perhaps to stir suspicion among fellow Klansmen once the bodies were found. Someone may have received $30,000, but the highway patrolman, who died of a heart attack two years later, never displayed any sudden wealth. Nor could his role in solving the mystery be revealed. Recognizing he would be killed if identified, the FBI began calling the informant “Mr. X.” On August 1, guarding his secret with rumors, agents headed for the thick woods of Neshoba County.

As the sun rose that Saturday, agents skirted downtown Philadelphia, then headed south along Route 21 toward a farm known as “The Old Jolly Place.” They were looking for an enormous earthfill dam, but they found that Mississippi’s tangled landscape could hide objects far larger than a human body. After an hour hacking through brush, agents phoned headquarters and had a helicopter from the Meridian Naval Air Station fly over. “We’ve spotted the dam,” agents heard on their walkie-talkies. “It’s a big one.” Following directions from overhead, agents slashed through thickets, then topped a rise. Before them stood a crescent of ocher earth, twenty feet high at its midpoint and spanning a gap in the pine trees nearly twice the length of a football field. Mr. X had guaranteed the bodies were somewhere beneath it. “This is no pick and shovel job,” Inspector Sullivan said. He phoned the FBI in Washington, D.C., asking permission to rent heavy equipment. He also filed for a search warrant.

 

 

Finding three bodies beneath a dam—if they could be found—would surely quicken what President Johnson had recently called “the summer of our discontent.” But could anything break down the walls of white Mississippi? Persistent talk of a hoax, of media persecution, of “invaders” disrupting cordial race relations—all added up to an entire culture entrenched in denial. Even if the missing men were found, would anything change? “Maybe the best course for everybody is just to let the bodies lie and let the excitement gradually die down,” a Philadelphia man said. No local jury would convict anyone, “so why should we have all this hue and cry, and a big circus trial, with everybody goddamning Mississippi?” Yet because Freedom Summer thrived on hope, at some point hope had to cross the railroad tracks.

From its early planning stages, the summer project had focused a glimmer of its idealism on Mississippi’s impoverished whites. The “White Folks Project” targeted Biloxi, known for being nearly as tolerant as Greenville. In late June, eighteen volunteers had gone from Ohio to the Gulf Coast town to help poor whites “see that their enemy is not the Negro but poverty.” By early July, volunteers were speaking daily with carpenters, barbers, fishermen, even the high school principal. Occasionally they met someone who would listen, but more often “there was no dialogue, just antagonism.” “Why Mississippi?” white folks asked. Why not work in your own states? The White Folks Project soon floundered. Volunteers spent days arguing about whom they should contact, what they should say. Striking out on their own, two women took jobs at a diner to “get the feel of the community” but were discovered as “COFOs” and fired. By August, six volunteers had quit, and the rest were going door-to-door, trying to convince poor whites that the Freedom Democrats were not the “nigger party.” “It looks like the pilot phase of our White Community Project is pretty much over,” one wrote home.

The search for tolerance continued. Could there be a few whites who, while not supporting integration, would at least listen to reason? While the White Folks Project sputtered, lone volunteers took advantage of grudging hospitality. Once it became clear that volunteers were in town for the entire summer, a few were invited into white homes. There they met polite but firm dismissal.

“You Northerners all think that every Mississippian is a bare-footed redneck.”

“How can these kids presume to come into our state, not knowing our people or our customs, and tell us how to live our lives? ”

“What’s so hard to explain to you—to people like you—is how much we care for our niggers. You think we’re heartless because we segregate our society. I tell you that the nigger prefers it that way, same as we do.” Dismayed volunteers headed back to their side of town. Perhaps among the better educated . . .

On consecutive Tuesdays in late July, two volunteers visited the University of Mississippi. Nearly two years had passed since brick-throwing mobs had rioted all night to block James Meredith’s enrollment, but William Faulkner’s hometown had only hardened its Rebel resistance. Moderate professors continued to leave for other universities. Locals and students still blamed federal marshals for the riot that had claimed two lives and brought Oxford worldwide notoriety. And now, even if Meredith had quickly finished his degree and left the state, here were more “outsiders” coming to campus to preach integration, to stir up trouble. With city and campus police trailing them, the two volunteers met with Meredith’s former adviser and the campus newspaper editor, who complained of Mississippi’s tarring in the press. Invited back the next week, the two spoke to a sociology class, explaining their work, then fielding questions.

“Would you marry a Negro? ”

“Is your organization Communist? ”

“Why are Negroes so immoral? ”

No minds were changed, but students seemed to listen. Over lunch, volunteers sat in a dining hall echoing with catcalls—“Communist! . . . Queer!” On their way out of town, a pickup chased them until they ducked down back roads. A similar exchange in Vicksburg saw volunteers meet college students in a Catholic rectory. One volunteer found the students “guilty, agonized, and profoundly frightened.” A second meeting was scheduled, but no students showed up.

The summer’s only prolonged cross-cultural contact took place on a series of Wednesdays. Since July 7, a group of black and white women from the Northeast had been flying to Jackson each Tuesday evening. Calling themselves “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” the women were led by Dorothy Height, chair of the National Council of Negro Women, and Polly Cowan, former TV host and mother of two volunteers. Wednesday after Wednesday, the women visited Freedom Schools, talked with volunteers, and met socialites in Jackson and Meridian. As at Ole Miss, politeness and denial prevailed, this time over tea. “Wednesdays in Mississippi” women marveled at responses that seemed programmed into their hosts. No Negroes wanted to vote except for those who were Communists. Negro schools were not—ahem—a disgrace. Just look at their beautiful buildings. And Mississippi police did “a splendid job.” At one meeting, however, an elderly Mississippi woman broke in. “Girls,” she said, “I just have to tell you you are so wrong.” While serving on a federal civil rights commission, she had heard the abuses, “and there were lots of injustices, terrible ones.” Skirts were straightened, faces fell. The conversation resumed, with fewer platitudes. A few “Wednesdays in Mississippi” women, North and South, would keep in touch that fall.

Even when invited, moderation dared not speak its name in Mississippi. Visiting doctors and ministers were sometimes pulled aside by whites who, looking over their shoulders, confessed that they supported integration. Journalists met locals who admitted their state needed help, but refused to be quoted. “If you print my name next to what I’m going to tell you,” one told the
Washington Post
, “I’ll be ruined. I’ll lose my business, my friends, I’ll be run out of this state.” The fear seemed exaggerated, until one heard about the Heffners.

Mississippi had few more loyal sons than Albert Heffner. Raised on a Greenwood plantation, the big, jovial man everyone called “Red” had gone to Ole Miss, where he met his wife, Malva, another native. The couple had lived in McComb for ten years. Red’s downtown insurance office was always busy. He and Malva were deeply involved in church activities. Their daughter, Jan, had been Miss Mississippi, with her picture on the billboard outside McComb. When the bombings began in his town, Red had written to the Sovereignty Commission, suggesting that “responsible citizens” stand up to the Klan. “I am not an integrationist, segregationist, conservative, moderate, or liberal,” he noted. “I am just an insurance man in debt up to my ears.” But on July 17, Red Heffner committed what McComb’s mayor would later call “a breach of etiquette.” He invited two “mixers” to dinner.

He had only wanted “to let the Civil Rights workers hear the Mississippi point of view.” But with bombings in McComb on the increase, and sales of guns and dynamite soaring, the jovial insurance man quickly became the target of his town’s feverish fear. Just after dinner, Heffner’s phone rang. The caller asked to speak to volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The conversation was brief, confirming the rumor that was inflaming the neighborhood. Then another call came. “Whose car is that in front of your house? ” An hour later, when Red opened his front door, he was blinded by the headlights of ten cars parked in his yard. Volunteers slowly slipped past the blockade and made it back to the project office, but the Heffners’ ordeal had just begun. First came the phone threats—“If you want to live, get out of town.” “How does you wife like sleeping with niggers?” “You nigger-loving bastard. You’re gonna get your teeth kicked in.” Next, Red was evicted from his office. Rumors that their house would be bombed sent Malva and Jan to live at the Holiday Inn. The Heffners soon heard shocking slander—that Jan worked for the FBI, that their other daughter was in a Communist training school in New York, that Malva was a call girl. Old friends refused to speak to them. No one came to their defense. By early August, the Heffners were considering something they could not have imagined at the start of summer—leaving Mississippi. And by September, after more than three hundred phone threats, the air let out of their tires, their dog poisoned, dead on their doorstep, they were gone. They would never live in Mississippi again. Decades later, talking about their expulsion still brought them to tears.

Searching for tolerance, volunteers finally turned to the only people in Mississippi who had little to lose—alienated teenagers. On August 3, as the FBI was bringing heavy equipment to Neshoba County, Pete Seeger gave a concert in McComb. In his sweat-stained work shirt, his head thrown back, his banjo ringing, Seeger sang “Abiyoyo” and “What a Beautiful City.” The outdoor concert behind the Freedom House drew dozens of black kids, along with volunteers like Ira Landess. Toward the end of the evening, the Manhattan teacher noticed two white boys standing by themselves. They were not singing—at a Pete Seeger concert?—but they did not seem dangerous. Cautiously, Landess approached. The two teens—Gary and Jack—told him they just wanted to hear Seeger. But as they talked, Landess discovered that not every white youth in Mississippi was content to live in a closed society.

One of the teens, Gary Brooks, had recently acquired a dangerous habit—asking questions. After reading
Black Like Me
, the startling best seller by a white journalist who darkened his skin to roam the South, Brooks began daring himself to cross the tracks. He told no one about his walks through the black side of McComb. He merely wondered. Why were there so few businesses, so few decent homes, such poverty? Why had students at his high school cheered when the principal announced that President Kennedy had been killed? And who were these “invaders” coming to Mississippi? When summer began, Brooks watched McComb explode. Each bomb entrenched the town’s spreading siege mentality. Friends became strangers. Suspicion spread like afternoon heat. No one could be certain who might be in the Klan, what casual remark might be turned against him. Anyone who showed the slightest sympathy for “the COFOs” might be the next Red Heffner hounded out of town.