Forty-three years ago today, three young men went missing in America. They were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Goodman and Schwerner were New York Jews. Chaney was from the deepest shadows of the segregationist South, a black Mississippian.
I might have shaken hands with them at our training for the voter-registration Summer Project in Ohio. But if somebody had asked me to pick them out of a crowd on this date in 1964, I couldn’t have. A few days later, everybody knew who they were. Six weeks later, as a result of an intense FBI-coordinated manhunt that must have had FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover grinding his molars into dust, authorities pulled the three men’s bodies from a berm where Klansmen had stuffed them after their murders.
Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were members of the Congress on Racial Equality, a mixed-race organization which was fighting to ensure that black Americans got the rights they had been constitutionally granted nearly a century previously after tens of thousands of their ancestors bled for their freedom wearing the Union uniform. CORE and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee I had joined backed the radical notion that the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments mean what they say.
Opposed to them, in theory and practice, were an array of powerful Southern officials. The progenitors of their ideology had replaced slavery with a sort of secessionism without war. They called it Jim Crow, an almost mythic name with which to euphemize American apartheid. A system in which uppity nigras got whupped for doing what every American is guaranteed the right to do. Sometimes the whupping ended up with a noose and a bonfire.
Like the bus strikes, and diner sit-ins and Freedom Rides that had begun 10 years before, the tactics of Freedom Summer had both a real and symbolic value. Our job was to register black voters in Mississippi. The presence of outsiders, especially white outsiders, was seen as a way to focus more attention from parts of the nation – and the media - where Jim Crow’s consequences were more likely to be viewed with distaste, disgust or rage.
Long before our arrival, a number of blacks had been murdered in Mississippi for trying to do exactly what we were preparing to do. Herbert Lee was one of them. A farmer who was nearly 50 years old when SNCC tried unsuccessfully to register him, Lee was shot on September 25, 1961, in Liberty, Mississippi, by E.H. Hurst, a local white politician. At trial, he claimed self-defense, and the all-white jury agreed. Lewis Allen, another African-American, said later it wasn't self-defense. He, too, was murdered.
Before him, and before SNCC, there was the Rev. George Lee, no relation, a minister, grocer and printer, who started a local chapter of the NAACP. He persuaded nearly 100 blacks to register and got the feds to intervene so he could vote after he was refused that right in Belzoni, Mississippi. On May 7, 1955, Lee was driving home when someone shotgunned him from a passing car. The Humphreys County sheriff said Lee was killed in a traffic accident, and claimed the lead pellets in his face and head were probably dental fillings. The coroner ruled Lee had died from "unknown causes." No one was ever arrested in the case.
Mississippi was thus considered by CORE and SNCC the toughest segregationist state to crack, a place where black civil rights workers had been routinely harassed, beaten, arrested, firebombed and, as noted, murdered for years.
In pairs, we went door-to-door, sometimes welcomed, sometimes chased off the porch, urging black men and women who had never voted to risk registering and fulfil the 98-year-old promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. All of us were harassed and "warned," dozens of us were beaten, scores of us were arrested, many jailed.
When we heard the news of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner’s disappearance, we all knew they were dead.
As it turned out, we didn’t register a whole lot of voters. But the murderers of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney focused attention on an element essential to maintaining Jim Crow – ruthless terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. It is said that, eventually, the FBI interviewed 1,000 Mississippians about what happened to the three men before finding where the bodies were buried. Amazing what a little media attention can do when one or more of the victims is white.
However, unlike the impression one might get from watching Mississippi Burning, J. Edgar Hoover was no friend of the civil rights movement. A gentleman racist himself, he had strongly suggested in a report about racial tensions to Eisenhower in 1956 that the NAACP was "overzealous" and that communists had strong influence among civil rights leaders. His record of smearing and spying on civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, are well-documented.
The Kennedy Administration had its own reasons for trying to keep the Freedom Rides of 1961 from going forward. When it became apparent the riders would not back down, the FBI was ordered to become involved. Instead of doing something public, transparent and pre-emptive of the Southern establishment’s violent response to any challenge of Jim Crow, Hoover took the secret police’s usual approach and spied on the dissidents. Nothing was done to stop Freedom Riders from being beaten up, firebombed and generally terrorized.
Informed by a KKK snitch, the FBI knew beforehand that violence would break out in Birmingham. Even though agents knew that one police official regularly passed on information to the Klan, the bureau let the Birmingham cops in on some details about the Freedom Rider's schedule. The bureau’s indifference got too little credit when four girls were blown up in a church basement. The FBI might just as well have been a charter member of the good ol’ boy network when it came to Jim Crow.
When Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner disappeared, however, Bobby Kennedy "urged" Hoover to get a serious investigation going, and he did. By the time their bodies were actually dug up, the uproar over what everybody had known from the beginning was more than a "disappearance" had helped tip Lyndon Johnson’s hand in Congress. The Civil Rights Act had been passed, thanks in part to those three and the Neshoba County Klan mob that murdered them.
Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman didn’t end racism, didn’t make everyone equal, didn’t bring down Jim Crow by themselves. But they did give their lives for freedom, which American myth and reality deems the most patriotic of acts.
Justice for their patriotism took one hell of long time to arrive.
Edgar Ray Killen and his 17 Klan pals smirked their way through much of proceedings when the feds tried them in 1967 for the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. And why not? These men had already escaped prosecution by racists and cowards in state government, their jury was all-white, and William Harold Cox, the presiding judge in the federal case, was a segregationist through and through. He had dismissed the indictments against the 18, but the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered them reinstated. Cox owed his appointment on the bench to his friend and law school roommate, the powerful Senator James O. Eastland. When President Kennedy had sought to appoint Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, Eastland said to Robert Kennedy, "Tell your brother that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the nigger."
Part way through the trial, one of the defense attorneys, Laurel Weir, asked a prosecution witness about Schwerner:
"Now let me ask you if you and Mr. Schwerner didn’t advocate and try to get young male Negroes to sign statements agreeing to rape a white woman a week during the hot summer of 1964?" Cox’s lips trembled. He told Weir the question was "highly improper" unless the defense had "a good basis" for it. He demanded to know what that basis might be. "A note was passed to me by someone," answered Weir. Cox persisted, "Well, who is the author of that question?" A pause. Herman Alford, one of the other defense attorneys, broke the embarrassing silence at the defense table. "Brother Killen wrote the question, one of the defendants." Edgar Ray Killen raised his hand.
While the question was a blunder that changed the tenor of the trial and may well have helped jurors convict seven of the defendants, they acquitted eight and deadlocked on three, including Killen, a Klan recruiter who the prosecution thought was the organizer of the slayings, even though he wasn’t at the scene when the three were beaten, shot and buried in a berm. One juror said she couldn’t vote to convict a preacher. No doubt Edgar Ray smirked at that, too.
Fannie Lee Chaney, mother of James Chaney, at his murderer's trial in 2005.
But, thanks to the dogged efforts of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, who found new evidence, Fannie Lee Chaney, the mother of James Chaney, lived long enough to see Edgar Ray Killen convicted for her son's murder. But to do so, she had to return from New Jersey, where she had gone because of threats, she said, to put her "in a hole like James was." She died last month at age 82,
Two years ago today, Killen was convicted of planning and orchestrating the killings of the three men. Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon sentenced him to 60 years in prison, 20 years for each of his manslaughter convictions in the case. The jury said there was reasonable doubt as to whether this Klan "kleagle" intended for the Klansmen to kill the three.
Some say justice delayed is justice denied, and while there's often truth in that, it can also be an excuse for letting bygones be bygones. But our legal system, whatever its flaws, doesn't take that view, which is why there is no statute of limitations on murder.
To back that up, however, often requires extra effort. The Killen case wouldn't have returned to the courts had it not been for a journalist hammering away. Which is why it's shameful that H.R. 923, the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, has been placed on hold by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. But then what's a little justice to someone with his record on civil rights?
[An earlier version of this Diary was posted at Daily Kos and The Next Hurrah two years ago.]