Freedom Summer (44 page)

With Savio leading the protests, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement kept students protesting through December, culminating in a sit-in that closed the administration building. Inspired by Berkeley’s call for free speech, student protests soon broke out across America—against the war, the draft, the patriarchy. And in the forefront of each were veterans of Freedom Summer: who had seen democracy denied, who had watched “the law” subjugate an entire people, and who had come home angry and disillusioned. For the rest of the 1960s, Mississippi would remain their benchmark of injustice, the place where one generation’s American dream went to die. Time and again, 1960s spokesmen—not just Mario Savio but Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, and others—would refer to Mississippi as the school where they had learned to question America. And as protests became increasingly shrill, bewildered parents would ask why their children seemed so cynical about their country. The answer was easy. The children had been to Mississippi.

As volunteers struggled to cope with an unbearably white America, several SNCCs decided they had to leave Mississippi, if only for a few weeks. Racial tensions were rising. Staffers were working without paychecks. SNCC’s Sojourner Fleet cars, after a summer of racing volunteers and staffers around Mississippi, were now lost, wrecked, scattered around the country. A year earlier, SNCC leaders would have faced down these problems, but Freedom Summer had left them even more exhausted than the volunteers.

On his visit to Greenwood in August, Harry Belafonte had seen the emotional toll. Handing over $60,000, the singer made a deal. SNCC could have another $10,000 if leaders agreed to an all-expenses-paid trip—to Africa. On September 11, Belafonte and eleven SNCCs, including Bob and Dona Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and James Forman, flew from New York to the new nation of Guinea. Shortly after they arrived in the palm-shaded, whitewashed capital of Conakry, President Sékou Touré summoned them to his palace. When the invitation came, Fannie Lou Hamer was taking a bath. “I’m definitely not ready to meet no president,” she said. But an hour later, she stood in an opulent palace, in awe. Here was a Delta sharecropper, her recent speech cut off by LBJ, now being kissed on both cheeks by another president, enveloped in his white robe, praised in his flowing French.

For ten days, the frazzled Mississippi veterans soaked up the rarefied air of a nation where blacks ran everything. The trip, Hamer later said, was “the proudest moment of my life. I saw black men flying the airplanes, driving buses, sitting behind the big desks in the bank and just doing everything that I was used to seeing white people do.” Hamer was particularly taken by African women—“so graceful and so poised. I thought about my mother and my grandmother.” From Guinea, two SNCCs went on to Kenya where they met Malcolm X, but the rest returned home to sort through the residue of Freedom Summer.

SNCC’s “beloved community” was coming apart. Once a handful of the bravest and boldest, SNCC suddenly had four hundred staffers, 20 percent of them white. Bob Moses saw racial resentment “welling out like poison.” Too many blacks called whites smug, superior, condescending. Too many whites saw blacks as slow or lazy. With the majority of holdovers being white women, sexual tension flared. “The Negro girls feel neglected because the white girls get the attention.” Black women on her project, one white woman wrote, “just seemed to hate me.” SNCC was also nagged by the future. Should it become a structured CORE-like organization? Or should it remain a freewheeling movement whose members “do what the spirit say do”? What should SNCC’s position be on urban riots? On Vietnam? On Third World movements? And did anyone have the energy to plan for the summer of ’65?

On November 5, 160 SNCC staffers gathered at a church in the seaside town of Waveland, Mississippi. James Forman opened the conference by calling SNCC “a band of brothers.” “We must decide if the circle will be unbroken,” he concluded. “If we remain a band of brothers, a circle of trust, we shall overcome!” But few Freedom Songs followed. Slumped in folding chairs, black and white seemed more at odds than ever. Hands went to hips, brows furrowed, and irritation punctuated every weary sigh, every roll of the eyes. SNCCs had often boasted of being “many minds, one heart,” but now, even hearts were at odds. Disputes broke out over the smallest details. One morning, SNCCs squared off with baseball bats and pool cues. The issue? Cafeteria meal tickets. SNCC, Forman noted, was suffering from “too many people high on freedom, just going off and doing what they want.”

In bungalows overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, the rancor continued after hours. Class remained a rut, race a chasm in the road ahead. And there was a new obstacle—gender. One of many position papers presented was “Women in the Movement.” The paper outlined how men in SNCC excluded women from top decision making, relegated them to typing and stenography, and treated even female staffers as mere “girls.” Just as “the average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior,” the authors wrote, “so too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority . . . This is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”

As the authors had expected, the paper “hardly caused a ripple.” Yet “Women in the Movement,” written by SNCC veterans Casey Hayden and Mary King, would ripple far beyond the Mississippi beach town. Revised and expanded, the SNCC paper became a founding doctrine of the burgeoning women’s movement. When later read at a Students for a Democratic Society meeting, it would lead women to walk out and form their own caucus. Circulated among friends, the King-Hayden manifesto would lead to women’s consciousness-raising circles, many led by Freedom Summer veterans.

Yet in Waveland, the conference continued as if nothing had happened. After a few days, several members, disgusted by the “brutally aggressive hostility,” walked out. Others kept bickering. Returning to their projects, staffers found more disarray. Rumors of an impending “coup” swept through SNCC. Volunteers sat at typewriters banging out long lists of gripes. Whites lashed out at “bullshitting Negroes.” Blacks refused to “take orders from white folks!” Project directors saw workers wandering in and out of offices. One wrote, “Typical day: Rise at noon, eat, get the mail, drive around, eat, play cards, watch TV and spend the rest of the evening and night drinking at the local café.” Muriel Tillinghast, who had moved to Jackson to run the COFO office, saw SNCC “morphing into a different kind of organization, but we didn’t know where we were going. Many original SNCCs didn’t embrace the change. They thought we would never be the same and that was true.”

Within six months, Bob Moses would resign from SNCC and leave Mississippi. Within a year, many SNCCs would no longer be on speaking terms. Within two years, new SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, arrested again in Greenwood, would lead a crowd in a hypnotic chant: “Black—Power! Black—Power!” Fannie Lou Hamer was one of many baffled by the new militancy. Addressing a SNCC dinner, Hamer lamented that her old peers had become “cold.” Beyond cold, many were carrying guns, even to meetings. It was not long before SNCCs gathering in upstate New York would argue till 2:00 a.m., and then, against Carmichael’s wishes, narrowly vote to expel all whites. When Hamer’s words were invoked against such segregation, one member noted, “Mrs. Hamer is no longer relevant.”

With Moses and other gentle militants gone, SNCC surrendered to rage and resentment. Focus shifted to urban ghettos where the enemy was not the local sheriff but police raids and FBI surveillance, where arrests were not for leafleting but for inciting riots. Endorsing Third World movements, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, SNCC lost much of its white liberal funding. “Black Power,” recognized by Martin Luther King as “an unfortunate choice of words,” made SNCC a lighting rod for white backlash, while “Stokely Starmichael” made SNCC as much talk as action. Too much of the talk, Julius Lester remembered, featured “a growing litany of hatred.” And the only thing anyone in SNCC agreed upon was that Freedom Summer had both cracked Mississippi and shattered the circle of trust.

 

 

While SNCC unraveled, the FBI finally cracked the Klan in Mississippi. The first fissure opened two weeks after Freedom Summer, when a Klansman broke his vow of silence. Wallace Miller had joined the Klan less to fight integration than to fit in. “I got the feeling that anyone who wasn’t a Klansman wasn’t anything,” he told the FBI. But the chubby cop, best known for his barbecue skills, had not counted on covering up murder. Meeting agents in a restaurant, Miller told of a Klan gathering in May where “one of the boys” announced, “We’ve got to get Goatee.” He told how the extermination order on Mickey Schwerner had soon come from the Klan’s Imperial Wizard. He revealed that the Mt. Zion Church had been burned to lure “Goatee” into Neshoba County, and he gave the first inside account of what really happened on the night of June 21.

Precisely as Deputy Cecil Price had said, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been released at 10:30 p.m. But Price had not watched their taillights disappear—he had led the chase. Overtaken by three cars, the station wagon had finally pulled over on Route 19. The three were taken up a dirt road, murdered in cold blood, buried beneath the dam. Two Klansmen were supposed to take the station wagon to Alabama and burn it, but for some reason did not. Officer Miller also gave the FBI the name of the man who shot Goodman and Schwerner. But when asked for more, he refused. He had told all he dared. It might not be enough to convict anyone, but could it lead to an indictment?

The FBI hoped Mississippi might press murder charges, but Governor Paul Johnson refused, even when more evidence was gathered. The state attorney general saw no point in a Neshoba County trial, where the judge and several jurors would probably be Klansmen. And Johnson balked, lest his constituents think “[Martin Luther] King was calling the shots.” So on the first day of autumn, Judge O. H. Barnett, cousin of former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, convened a federal grand jury in Biloxi. “Now is the time for the government to put up or shut up,” the judge announced. Because murder is not a federal crime unless committed on federal property, the grand jury could only weigh indictments for civil rights violations. With denial still rampant in Mississippi, any indictment would be a landmark. But when the grand jury subpoenaed FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover, unwilling to scare off future informers, refused to let his men testify. The grand jury, complaining that “our investigation has been curtailed, and in fact stymied” by the FBI, failed to issue indictments in the Neshoba killings. The case dragged on. The FBI went looking for more informants, men who could, as J. Edgar Hoover boasted, “put the fear of God into the Ku Klux Klan.”

James Jordan was a balding, middle-aged construction worker known to agents as a “floater,” a “hustler.” Jordan had moved to Gulfport to get a job, but the FBI tracked him there in mid-October. He soon learned that agents knew all about his role in the killings. A fellow Klansman had told them. Jordan said nothing at first, but five subsequent interrogations got tougher. “I’m going to see your ass in jail,” an agent told Jordan. Offered $3,500 and federal protection, Jordan finally told all he knew. And the FBI, after spending more than $800,000, after interviewing a thousand locals and nearly five hundred Klansmen, finally learned the darkest details from the first night of Freedom Summer.

The sun was setting but the June evening was holding hot and humid when word went out from the Neshoba County jail—“Goatee” was in custody. Klansman Edgar Ray Killen hurried to the Longhorn Drive-in on the edge of Meridian to gather a lynch mob. “Killen said they had three civil rights workers in jail in Philadelphia and that they needed ‘their asses tore up,’ ” Jordan told the FBI. The job had to be done in a hurry because the men, held on a minor charge, would soon be released. One man hurried to a pay phone. Others hopped in a car to gather Klansmen who did not have phones. Killen, a short, scrawny man known as “The Preacher” because he occasionally spoke from local pulpits, said they would need gloves. At a Klansman’s grocery store, the men got six pairs, brown cotton. A Klansman’s trailer park became the rendezvous point. The men would meet there, then head for the jail. Everyone should bring guns.

It was not every day a klavern carried out an extermination order, and as volunteers settled in for their first night in Mississippi, more than a dozen Klansmen converged on the silent streets of Philadelphia. The killers were a random lot—the preacher, assorted truck drivers and contractors, Neshoba County’s former sheriff, cops young and old—but all shared their Imperial Wizard’s fanatical resolve to get “Goatee” and repel “the nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi.”

At 9:00 p.m., three cars and a pickup parked outside the courthouse. One man entered the jail and returned with the news: “Goatee,” some other white man, and a nigger were still behind bars. Killen led his crew to a dark street within sight of the jail, then had the group drop him at a funeral home as an alibi. The men came back downtown and waited until a fat old cop came up. The three were gone, he said, headed south on Route 19. Three cars set out in pursuit. They were soon joined by Deputy Cecil Price in his patrol car, chasing the fleeing station wagon over roller-coaster hills, faster and faster. All the cars were roaring at a hundred miles per hour when James Chaney finally decided to pull over. No one ever found out why.

Price ordered the men out of their car and into his. Strobe-lit by his red light, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney piled into the backseat. Blinding headlights from behind told them that this time they would not get off with a speeding ticket. One Klansman drove the station wagon, following Price and other cars back toward Philadelphia.

Roads in Neshoba County do not merge; they cut away from the highway, plunging into forest and thickets. Price abruptly turned onto a narrow slash of gravel known as Rock Cut Road. Passing two houses, the cars headed through cut clay banks surrounded by woods. Jordan waited on the highway, then drove up Rock Cut Road. Approaching, he heard muffled voices. Engines stopped. Car doors slammed. Then came “a volley of shots.”