Freedom Summer (49 page)

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 unnecessary 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
finally
America?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 witnesses, 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?”

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.

Four names in particular stand out from my list. To Chris Williams, Muriel Tillinghast, Fran O’Brien, and Fred Bright Winn, I offer my deepest thanks. Each put up with two long interviews followed by innumerable nit-picking questions that surfaced from out of nowhere on their e-mail queues. And each responded with more thought and detail than I had any right to expect. Along with my admiration for their courage in going to Mississippi, each has my thanks for looking back over so many years to dredge up memories both joyous and painful.

To my mother’s best friend, dedicated teacher Georgie Cooper, I owe heartfelt thanks for getting me started with a detailed reading list from her native Mississippi. Sadly, Georgie passed away before I could show her all she had taught me. I will never forget her enthusiasm, her accent, or her passion for life and literature.

Thanks also to Jan Hillegas, a Freedom Summer volunteer who has lived in Mississippi since 1964. Jan opened her sizable archive of COFO documents, notably the complete WATS line reports that gave me access to hourly events throughout the summer. Jan’s work to preserve COFO records continues, including the revival of the long-abandoned COFO headquarters on Lynch Street, which will soon open as an educational center.

Though I have never met her, I offer special thanks to Elizabeth Martinez, who began compiling volunteers’ letters moments after Freedom Summer ended. Her book,
Letters from Mississippi,
was of invaluable help. It is also the most moving compilation of historical letters I have seen on any subject. Thanks also to ex-volunteer Jim Kates, whose Zephyr Press rereleased
Letters from Mississippi
, and who offered advice early in my research.

Thanks to my patient and wise editor at Viking, Wendy Wolf, for allowing me to give my own touch to another American story. And to my agent, Jeff Kleinman, for his continued help in negotiating the Manuscript Jungle. Two friends and former civil rights activists—Bob Winston and Sue Thrasher—provided encouragement along the way. Bob also offered kind comments on the initial draft. And as always, I owe more than I can express to my wife, Julie, and our two children, for allowing me to head south three times in a single year, and for trying the grits I brought back.