Civil Rights Events

Mississippi -- Freedom Summer

Murder

 

Andy Goodman's fateful journey to Mississippi began in Manhattan, where he grew up in an upper-middle class family on the Upper West Side. His younger brother, David, says Andy was focused on fairness from an early age - whether it was protecting a little sibling from bullies or protesting social injustices around the country. As a teenager, Andy would take his younger brother to Woolworths, where people demonstrated against school segregation in the south.

 

"He just said ... it's unfair that because of the color of your skin, you should go to a lousy school," David Goodman (Andy’s brother) said. "It was an issue of fairness to him" (Carter 1).

 

Carolyn Goodmen, Andy’s mother, said later: All we knew is he was going to go and be trained, and we gave him permission. Why? Because we couldn’t talk out of two sides of our mouths. We couldn’t say, “This is a horror,” and then say, “Well, it’s okay for other kids. And it’s certainly okay for black kids. But not for my white, middle class son. I don’t want anything to happen to him. I don’t want him to be beaten, I don’t want him to be ending up in jail,” and so on. So off he went to Ohio (Mississippi 3).

 

That sense of social justice led Andy Goodman to Ohio in June 1964. It was there, at a training session for the Congress of Racial Equality, that the Queens College student would meet James Chaney, a black 21-year-old from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a white 24-year-old from New York. [They were working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in nearby Meridian, Mississippi]  They were training hundreds of other volunteers on how to handle the racial turmoil and potential harassment awaiting them in Mississippi (Carter 2).

 

Chaney, a plasterer, had grown up in Meridian in nearby Lauderdale County, and even as a young student had been interested in civil rights work. Schwerner, a Jewish New Yorker, came south to Meridian to set up the COFO office because he believed he could help prevent the spread of hate that had resulted in the Holocaust, an event that had taken the lives of his family members. Chaney volunteered at the Meridian office, and the two young men began to make visits to Neshoba County searching for residents to sponsor voter registration drives and freedom schools (Murder 1).

 

On Memorial Day 1964, Schwerner and Chaney had spoken to the congregation at Mount Zion in rural Neshoba County about setting up a Freedom School, a type of alternative middle and high school that helped to organize African Americans for political and cultural engagement (Carter 1).

 

Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi, [had] sent word in May, 1964 to the Klansmen of Lauderdale and Neshoba counties that it was time to "activate Plan 4." Plan 4 provided for "the elimination" of the despised civil rights activist Michael Schwerner, who the Klan called "Goatee" or "Jew-Boy." Schwerner, the first white civil rights worker based outside of the capital of Jackson, had earned the enmity of the Klan by organizing a black boycott of a white-owned business and aggressively trying to register blacks in and around Meridian to vote.

 

The Klan's first attempt to eliminate Schwerner came on June 16, 1964 in the rural Neshoba County community of Longdale. Schwerner had visited Longdale on Memorial Day to ask permission of the black congregation at Mount Zion Church to use their church as the site of a "Freedom School." The Klan knew of Schwerner's Memorial Day visit to Longdale and expected him to return for a business meeting held at the church on the evening of June 16. About 10 p.m., when the Mount Zion meeting broke up, seven black men and three black women left the building to discover thirty men lined up in military fashion with rifles and shotguns. More men were gathered at the rear of the church. Frustrated when their search for "Jew-Boy" was unsuccessful, some of the Klan members began beating the departing blacks. Ten gallons of gasoline were removed from one of the Klan members' cars and spread around the inside of the church. Mount Zion Church was soon engulfed in flames (Linder Trial 2-3).

 

While in Ohio, Schwerner got word to the church burning.  He and Chaney needed a volunteer to help them investigate the fire and they were quickly impressed by the level-headed Goodman. The three men drove down to Mississippi on June 20 … (Smith 2-3).

 

On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman drove from Meridian to Neshoba County to talk to the church members at Mount Zion (Carter 2).

 

At 3 p.m. the three in the highly visible blue Core-wagon, set off to return to Meridan, Ms. Stationed at the Core office in Meridian was Core worker, Sue Brown, who was told by Schwerner if the three weren't back by 4:30 p.m., then they were in trouble. Deciding that Highway 16 was a safer route, the three turned onto it, headed west, through Philadelphia, Ms, back to Meridan. A few miles outside of Philadelphia, Klan member, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, spotted the CORE wagon on the highway (Montaldo 4).

 

In 1964, Cecil Price, at age 27, was "a younger and less formidable copy" of Sheriff Rainey. The former dairy supplies salesman and then fire chief was said to lack Rainey's friendliness. He was tight-lipped and suspicious of everybody.

 

Price, a Klansman, seemed to derive great pleasure from terrorizing Neshoba County blacks. One night he showed up at a roadhouse popular with young blacks, drew his six-shooter and shouted "All you nigger men get your hands on the wall, and all you nigger women do the Dog" (Linder Cecil 1).

 

Not only did Price spot the car, but he also recognized the driver, James Chaney. The Klan hated Chaney, who was a black activist and a born Mississippian. Price pulled the wagon over and arrested and jailed the three students for being under suspicion of arson in the Mount Zion Church fire (Montaldo 5).

 

Despite the fact that the schedule of fines for speeding was posted on the wall, Price said the three men would have to remain in jail until the Justice of the Peace arrived to process the fine. Schwerner asked to make a phone call, but Price denied the request and left the jail. In Meridian, CORE staff began calling nearby jails and police stations, inquiring about the three men -- their standard procedure when organizers failed to return on time. Minnie Herring, the jailer’s wife, claimed there was no phone call on June 21, but CORE records show a call to the Philadelphia jail around 5:30pm (Murder in Mississippi 2).

 

Carolyn Goodman made this public plea.  As the parent of one of the boys who are missing, I am making this plea to all parents everywhere, particularly to the parents of Mississippi. I want to beg them to cooperate in every way possible, in the search for these three boys, and to come forward with any information of any kind which will help in the search.

 

Michael Schwerner’s wife Rita declared: … if all the federal authorities are at the beck and call of the government are unable to do so, I as just one individual will attempt to do so. If this means driving every back road, every dirt road, every alley in the county of Neshoba, I will do it.

 

Former governor Ross Barnett had this to say:…  we’re sorry for any children, any youngsters whose parents do not insist that they stay away from other states, trying to tell people of other states how to conduct their affairs. Because they do not know what it’s all about. And it’s pitiful that parents have not trained their children in the way that they should have. They ought to stay at home and work. They ought to stay at home and tend to their own business.  (Mississippi 5, 7).

 

The FBI investigating the disappearance of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964 were finally able to piece together the events that took place because of Ku Klux Klan informants who were there the evening of the murders.

 

When in the Neshoba County jail, Schwerner asked to make a phone call and the request was refused.

 

Price contacted Klansmen, Edgar Ray Killen, and informed him that he captured Schwerner.

 

Killen called Neshoba and Lauderdale county Klansmen and organized a group for what was referred to as some "butt ripping." A meeting was held at a drive-in in Meridian with local Klan leaders.

 

Another meeting was held later when it was decided that some of the younger Klan members would do the actual killings of the three civil right workers.

 

Killen instructed the younger Klan members to purchase rubber gloves and they all met at 8:15 p.m., reviewed the plan on how the killings would take place and drove by the jail where the three were being held.

 

Killen then left the group to attend a wake for his deceased uncle.

 

Price freed the three jailed men around 10 p.m. and followed them as they drove down Highway 19.

 

A high-speed chase between Price and the CORE group ensued, and Chaney, who was driving, soon stopped the car and the three surrendered to Price.

 

The three men were placed in Price's patrol car and Price, followed by two cars of young Klan members, drove down a dirt road called Rock Cut Road (Montaldo 5-8).

 

It is not known whether the three were beaten before they were killed. Klan informants deny that they were, but there is some physical evidence to the contrary. What is known is that a twenty-six-year-old dishonorably discharged ex-Marine, Wayne Roberts, was the trigger man, shooting first Schwerner, then Goodman, then Chaney, all at point blank range. (FBI informant James Jordan, according to a second informant present at the killings, Doyle Barnette, also fired two shots at Chaney.) The bodies of the three civil rights workers were taken to a dam site at the 253-acre Old Jolly Farm. The farm was owned by Philadelphia businessman Olen Burrage who reportedly had announced at a Klan meeting when the impending arrival in Mississippi of an army of civil rights workers was discussed, "Hell, I've got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them." The bodies were placed together in a hollow at the dam site and then covered with tons of dirt by a Caterpillar D-4 (Linder Trial 7).

 

At 12:30 a.m., Price and Klan member, Neshoba County Sheriff Rainey met. 

 

On August 4, 1964, the FBI received information about the location of the bodies and they were uncovered at the dam site at the Old Jolly Farm (Montaldo 8).

 

Here is a different version of the killings.

 

As they were passing through Philadelphia, Mississippi, they were pulled over by a deputy sheriff and arrested for speeding. They arrived at the jail at 4 p.m. and were released around 10 p.m. that night. The activists were followed by a lynch mob of at least nine men, including a deputy and a local police officer.

 

When the Klansmen caught up to Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, they forced the men into one of the mob’s vehicles and drove them to a secluded county road. Chaney, a black man, was beaten with chains, castrated, and shot while Schwerner and Goodman, the two white activists, were forced to watch. When Schwerner cradled Chaney in his arms … a Klansman asked, “Are you that n***** lover?” When Schwener replied, “Sir, I understand your concern” he was shot in the heart. Goodman attempted to run and was also shot. The bodies were then taken to a farm pond where Herman Tucker was waiting. Tucker used a bulldozer on the property to cover the bodies with dirt. An autopsy revealed that Goodman was likely buried alive since there was red clay dirt in his lungs and in his grasped fists. Evidence at the burial site appears to show he was trying to dig his way out (Carter 2-3).

 

At 12:30 A.M., concerned activist leaders placed a call to John Doar, the Justice Department's point man in Mississippi. Less than a week earlier Doar had been in Oxford, Ohio warning Summer Project volunteers that there was "no federal police force" that could protect them from expected trouble in Mississippi. Doar feared the worst. By 6:00 A.M., Doar had invested the FBI with the power to investigate a possible violation of federal law (Linder Trial 8).

 

“Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County,” project director Bob Moses informed an auditorium of volunteers on June 22, 1964. They were planning to work in Mississippi that summer and were being trained at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. “They haven’t come back and we haven’t heard from them.”

 

The assumption of movement workers was that they were dead (Bodies 1).

 

The morning after the civil rights workers' disappearance, the phone rang in the office of Meridian-based FBI agent John Proctor. (In the movie "Mississippi Burning," the character played by Gene Hackman is loosely based on Proctor.) Within hours, Proctor was in Neshoba County interviewing blacks, community leaders, Sheriff Rainey, and Deputy Price. Proctor was a Alabama native who had successfully cultivated relationships with all sorts of people, including local law enforcement officers, who might aid in his investigations. After his interview with Cecil Price, the Deputy slapped Proctor on the back and said, "Hell, John, let's have a drink." Price went to his car and pulled contraband liquor out of his trunk.

 

By the next day, June 23, Proctor had been joined by ten newly arrived special agents and Harry Maynor, his New Orleans-based supervisor (Linder Trial 9).

 

Because two of the three missing men were white with important northern connections, their disappearance quickly captured America’s attention. “The other Philadelphia” made front page headlines as scores of journalists and FBI agents flocked to the state. Within days, marchers were picketing federal buildings in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

 

Rita Schwerner [Michael’s wife] had no allusions about the ugly truth that was motivating the search for her husband. “I personally suspect that Mr. Chaney, who is a native Mississippi Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before, would have gone completely unnoticed,” she told the press.

 

In the coming weeks, more than 150 FBI agents and 200 sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station descended upon the state, yet federal policy towards the protection of civil rights workers in the South did not change. President Johnson, convinced that the entire incident was merely a publicity stunt, worried that if he started “house mothering each [volunteer’s family] that’s gone down there and that doesn’t show up, that we’ll have this White House full of people every day asking for sympathy” (Bodies 1, 4-5).

 

What the KKK had not counted on was the national attention that the three civil rights workers disappearance would ignite. … President, Lyndon B. Johnson put the pressure on J. Edgar Hoover to get the case solved. The first FBI office in Mississippi was opened and the military bused sailors into Neshoba County to help search for the missing men (Montaldo 5).

 

[On June 23] FBI agents found the [burned, still smoldering] remains of the car driven by the activists near a river in northeast Neshoba County. … [Shortly thereafter, Joseph Sullivan, the FBI's Major Case Inspector, arrived on the scene]

 

Fearing the men were dead, the federal government sent hundreds of sailors from a nearby naval air station to search the swamps for the bodies. Although they didn’t find the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the Navy divers who dragged the river discovered two other young black activists, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore; a 14-year-old named Herbert Oarsby, found wearing a CORE T-shirt; and five other black men who remained unidentified. (Carter 4-5).

 

It soon became apparent to Inspector Sullivan the case "would ultimately be solved by conducting an investigation rather than a search." It turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult investigation. Neshoba County residents, many of whom either participated in the conspiracy or knew of it, were tight-lipped. Proctor found that some of his most useful information came from kids, so he would stuff candy in his pockets before setting out for a day's schedule of interviews. A promise of $30,000 in reward money finally brought forward information, passed through an intermediary, concerning the location of the bodies.

 

(Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter with Meridian's Clarion Ledger, reported in a 2010 story that highway patrolman Maynard King told Sullivan the location of the bodies. Mitchell also reported that the FBI's promise of a $30,000 reward was made after the FBI learned the location of the bodies and was part of a strategy to increase finger-pointing and suspicion within the Klan.) On August 4, 1964, John Proctor was at the Old Jolly Farm to take photographs of the bodies as they were uncovered at the dam site. Inspector Sullivan invited Price to the dam site to help in the removal of the bodies. Sullivan was interested in observing the reaction of the Deputy, who was by then under heavy suspicion. Proctor noted that "Price picked up a shovel and dug right in, and gave no indication whatsoever that any of it bothered him" (Linder 10-11).

 

The digging began early on the morning of August 4, six weeks after the men had first gone missing. After several hours of digging and 14 feet and 10 inches deep into the earth, the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were finally discovered lying face down, side by side.

 

An integrated burial in Mississippi was out of the question. Chaney was buried on a hilltop outside of Meridian, and the bodies of Schwerner and Goodman were flown to New York (Bodies 5-6).

 

David Dennis, Jr., son of the CORE leader who co-supervised the Freedom Summer project with Bob Moses, wrote an interesting article August 30, 2017, for Still Crew.  Excerpts follow.

 

As Mississippi director for the Congress of Racial Equality, my dad, David Dennis, Sr., sent Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner to Longdale, MS to investigate a bombing at the Mount Zion church. What my father didn’t know at the time, but is sure of to this day, is that the KKK perpetrated the bombing to lure the three workers out and kill them. The Klan also prioritized Mickey Schwerner as a target. The young, fiery organizer was a dynamo at rallying black people to register to vote. Schwerner offended the Klan most of all because he was white. A traitor. And he was Jewish.

 

The three activists were taken out of that station wagon and shot. Evidence indicates Andrew Goodman was buried alive next to the bodies of Chaney and Schwerner, in pre-prepared graves. There are also variations of the story that indicate that Schwerner and Goodman were shot once in the heart and died immediately and that James Chaney was tortured before being killed. The murders were a culmination of a thoroughly planned conspiracy that started with the burning down of Mt. Zion. A plan that went from the sheriff all the way down to local high school kids. …

 

My father planned to be with the three men when they took the trip to investigate the church bombing. He was supposed to be riding with them when they were murdered. However, his bronchitis got in the way and the three men convinced him to just go home and take care of it. So he reluctantly drove to Shreveport, LA to be with his mother and recover. That was the last time he saw them. My father awaited phone calls about the workers’ whereabouts as standard procedure any time he dispatched someone for an assignment. As soon as he learned the men hadn’t checked in, he knew they were dead. Everyone did. White and black.

 

However, the lynch mob that murdered the men hid the bodies under a dam built on the property of one of the Klansmen, turning the crime into a missing persons story. And since two of the missing men were white, it became national news.

 

For 44 whole days, a country speculated on the whereabouts of the three slain workers. What haunts my father as much as anything else that happened with the three workers is the fact that during the search, more bodies turned up. Slain black men, lynched by the Klan. Local Klan members and even J. Edgar Hoover, who in May stated that “outsiders” coming to Mississippi for Freedom Summer would not be protected by the FBI, fanned the flames of conspiracy, insinuating the three men were Communists who were either killed by their own or fled to Cuba. It seemed likely that the bodies would never be found. If not for [comedian and celebrity civil rights activist] Dick Gregory.

 

… he immediately met with James Farmer, the head of CORE. Gregory, Farmer and a caravan of 16 cars headed to Philadelphia to try to find the men. Gregory, like everyone else, knew those men were dead.

 

… Gregory’s caravan was stopped before being able to conduct a full search, but he was granted an audience with Sheriff Rainey.  …

 

…

 

Gregory noticed a nervousness in the meeting with the Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who was a top conspirator to the murders, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, who was part of the lynch mob, the Chief Investigator of the State Highway Police and a city attorney. Also, he noticed the city attorney would pipe in and answer all of the questions. Gregory cut the meeting short. He had all he needed. It became clear this was a government-sponsored lynching perpetrated by Neshoba County law enforcement.

 

Later, Gregory would say that he put his finger in Rainey’s face and said, “You know you did it. And we’re going to get you!” Gregory presented a singular problem for Rainey and his boys: he was a “nigger” they couldn’t make disappear.

 

Gregory knew that there wouldn’t be an investigation in earnest, so he had a plan.

 

I told Farmer, “Jim, I’ve got the wildest idea.” He said, “ What?” I said, “You know, the only way we’re gonna get it out is with large sums of money. If you’ll put up $100,000, we’ll break this case in one week.”

 

The comedian wasn’t able to get the full $100,000 but he was able to get $25,000 thanks to a phone call to Hugh Hefner.  …

 

Gregory drove to Meridian and announced a $25,000 reward for any information on the location of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. The next day, the FBI put out their own $30,000 reward. However it was Gregory who would receive a tip. “I received a letter quite some time ago that practically pinpointed the spot where the bodies were found,” he continued to tell Mississippi Eyewitness shortly after the bodies were found. “I gave this letter to the FBI and the FBI denied that the letter was any good. But they never denied the location stated in the letter.”

 

As far as many civil rights activists are concerned, it was the pressure Dick Gregory put on the FBI that led to the discovery of the three workers’ bodies. Anyone in Mississippi, my father included, believe the FBI always knew where the bodies were and only revealed where the bodies were after finding out Gregory also had that information. The importance of the discovery of those three bodies can’t be overstated as it revealed, once again, the hellish hatred resting in the heart of Mississippi for black people simply trying to get access to vote. The discovery of the bodies killed conspiracy theories and propaganda that wanted to convince the public that the three men had fled or weren’t victims of racial violence. And the revelation that the men were murdered provided the final straw, creating enough fervor for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to pass Congress (Dennis 1-11).

 

 

Works cited:

 

“Bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Discovered.”  SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.  Web.  https://snccdigital.org/events/bodies-chaney-goodman-schwerner-discovered/

 

Carter, Joe.  “9 Things You Should Know About the ‘Mississippi Burning’ Murders.”  TGC, the Gospel Coalition.  January 13, 2018.  Web.  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/9-things-know-mississippi-burning-murders/

 

Dennis Jr., David.  “How Dick Gregory Forced the FBI to Find The Bodies of Three Civil Rights Workers Slain in Mississippi.”  Still Crew.  August 30, 2017.  Web.  https://stillcrew.com/how-dick-gregory-forced-the-fbi-to-find-the-bodies-of-goodman-chaney-and-schwerner-fa9790c49ad4

 

Linder, Douglas O.  “Cecil Price.”  Famous Trials.  Web.  https://famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial/1971-price

 

Linder, Douglas O.  “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials,  Web.  https://famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial/1955-home

   

Montaldo, Charles.  "The Mississippi Burning Case." ThoughtCo.  Oct. 25, 2018.  Web.  https://www.thoughtco.com/the-mississippi-burning-case-972177

 

“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.”  nbclearn.com.  Web.  http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the-dream/1964-spotlights/cuecard/48786

 

“Murder in Mississippi.”  American Experience.  Web.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/

 

“The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.”  Mississippi Civil Rights Project.  Web.  https://mscivilrightsproject.org/neshoba/event-neshoba/the-murder-of-chaney-goodman-and-schwerner/

 

Smith, Stephen.  “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.”  CBSNews.  June 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-resonate-50-years-later/



Book Review

A Country of Strangers

Susan Richards Shreve

 



Bottom line.  “A Country of Strangers” is an intriguing novel, made so by the writer’s imagination and skillful narration.

 

The characters make the novel.  In varying degrees every character is flawed.  Before I discuss them, I need to establish the novel’s setting.

 

Moses Bellows and his wife Miracle and Moses’s brother Guy and his wife Aida are tenants living on a former slave plantation in Virginia twenty miles south of Washington, D. C.  The time span of the novel, not counting back stories, is August 1942 to July 1943.  John Spencer, the last surviving heir of the family that had owned the property dating back before the Civil War, had disappeared mysteriously January 12, 1935.  Moses Bellows, first, and then his wife, brother, and sister-in-law had henceforth lived in the plantation house as if they were the owners.  Local whites were furious.  In 1939 they formed a committee to find a way to have Spencer declared legally deceased so that the property could be sold and the Bellows evicted.  In January 1942 Spencer was declared dead and the house and property were put up for sale.  A mid-westerner named Charley Fletcher purchased it.

 

Moses Bellows.  Aida, Moses’s sister-in-law, describes Moses early on as a man who “could make a grizzly have a heart attack on the spot if he’d a mind to.”  Physically imposing, prideful, angry with his station in life, Moses, presumably, had been the last man to see John Spencer alive.  Spencer had been having sex with Miracle, who suspects that Moses murdered him.  Answering her accusations, Moses says that they had not yet found Spencer’s body.  Until they do, Spencer is not dead.  Therefore, “if he isn’t dead, I didn’t kill him.”

 

Miracle Bellows.  Dutiful, loving, given the name “Miracle” by Moses to replace her real name – “Mary” – because it was a white person’s name, Miracle had been quite young when she and Moses had met.  We are told that she had given Moses a picture of Jesus “to keep him pure when she was lamb-innocent and twelve years old and he was twenty, raging with sex and fury at being too long boxed in on one farm in a small town without a future.   Furious that their life together had been reduced to eating dinner together “face to face, across the table, but without a word – Miracle looking out the window with her dark sorrowful eyes as if the rest of her life had been snatched away by the absence of John Spencer,” Moses, “with an anger finally too large for the clapboard house, moved into Spencer’s house.”  Contributing additionally to her melancholy is that she and Moses have not been able to conceive a child.

 

Guy Bellows.  The author describes him early in the novel as somebody who “did not wish to behave grown-up except when he was drinking.”  Inebriated, he became unpredictable, dangerous.  A slow but dependable construction worker, “a simple man, easily led, essentially sweet and without complication,” Guy “wasn’t even bothered by the inner plight of being born colored in northern Virginia as Moses was.  He had only one Golden Rule … He would not tolerate ridicule.  That was that.  Not for himself or of his wife or Moses or Miracle.”  If anyone made fun of any of them, Guy had declared, he would kill him.  He had his shotgun handy for that purpose.

 

Aida Bellows.  Flighty, prone to drinking, hot-blooded, “full of sweetness and temper and trouble at the same time,” Aida “had married Guy Bellows when she was eighteen, and from the start she took charge of him, which was not difficult, because Guy Bellows had locked in step at eleven years old.”

 

Prudential Dargon.  Thirteen-year-old Prudential, staying with her mother’s sister Miracle and Moses, is pregnant.  She refuses to identify the impregnator, but narrative hints impugn her father.  Miracle and Moses plan to take the child as their own after Prudential gives birth.  Ulysses Dargon, Prudential’s father, “was a large angry man … so strong he had a reputation in southern South Carolina for it.  But what struck everyone in Okrakan about Ulysses was the clear fact that he would do anything.  He had no rules, and when he drank, which was plenty, he beat his wife.”  Fiercely independent, Prudential plans to live in New York City after her child’s birth to pursue a career on the radio.

 

Charley Fletcher.  A middle class white man whose mother had insisted that he had a great gift to provide the world, a successful Minneapolis journalist, he had been called to Washington, D. C. after the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold an important position in the newly created newspaper censorship department.  Several years earlier he had married a Danish actress, Lara Bergmann, after meeting her at the Olympic Games in Berlin.  Seeking a quiet life, a refuge away from the capitol where Lara and her daughter Kate, born out of wedlock, would feel secure, Charley purchased John Spencer’s property.  Charley reveals himself to be an insecure liberal.  Daunted that he has been turned down for service in the army (he has flat feet), he considers himself inferior to his competitive Minneapolis newspaper colleague, photographer Tom Elliott, who has been accepted into the Air Force.  Shamed that he had been declared 4-F, suspecting that Lara and Tom were lovers, Charley had become, too often, impotent.  Desiring a singular achievement, Charley wants his family and the Bellows to become friends, socialize, see each other as equals.  Moses rebuffs him.  Moses’s mother had often admonished Moses about heeding “boundaries,” rules, “how it was important to know the rules and play by them.”  Moses did not want to be Charley Fletcher’s or any white man’s friend.  Fletcher was violating black and white boundaries.

 

Lara Fletcher.  Unhappy about being isolated on the newly purchased property, desirous of the social life to which she was accustomed, Lara, initially, is resentful of her changed existence.  Early in their marriage Lara and Charley had been ardent lovers.  She “did not know when the mischief and romance between them had faded, when the love-making had changed.  First there were long lapses as if their marriage had become familiar and ordinary and then the kind of awkwardness of characters in a comedy of manners and then after Sam [their infant son] was on the way, the romance was gone altogether.”  One hour each weekday while left alone in her private room she daydreamed about Tom Elliott.  In her dreams she had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1940, kept in solitary confinement “because she was beautiful and therefore dangerous.”  Before she had been imprisoned, she had met Tom Elliott, a young American photographer.  They had fallen in love.  The war over, released, returned to Denmark, she is visited by Elliott, malnourished, ill, in need of care.  She touches a scar across his left cheek.  It disappears.  He declares that she is magical.  “He took the book from her stomach, put it on the floor, and dropped the sides of her robe.”

 

Kate Fletcher.  Upon arrival at the Spencer property, Kate wants to become acquainted with Prudential.  Repeatedly scorned, Kate matches Prudential’s combativeness.  An incident at the Quaker private school that Kate attends seals Kate and Prudential’s eventual friendship.  Pole Trickett, a male classmate, had pulled Kate behind a bush on the school grounds.  Covering her mouth with a hand, he had exposed himself.  She had bit him.  A day later the principal, responding to Pole’s mother’s complaint, had called her into his office to answer for her behavior.  Kate had stated that Pole “took his sticking-out penis from his pants and tried to put my face on it.”  The principal, offended by her use of the word “penis,” had washed her mouth out with soap.  Encountering Prudential on the way home, Kate declares that she is quitting the school.  She states the reason.  “I had no idea that kind of misfortune could happen to a white girl, “Prudential comments.  Kate responds: “Then you don’t know much.  Misfortunes happen to everyone.  Even in America.”

 

Even though they are fully developed, interesting to analyze characters, I dud not empathize all that much with Susan Shreve’s characters.  The exception was Prudential.  Victimized more than the others by circumstances beyond her ability to affect, she is not afraid to strike back against injustice.  While a crowd of whites waits outside the plantation house to witness the Bellowses vacate John Spencer’s house prior to the Fletcher family’s arrival, Prudential leaves through the front door, advances out toward the crowd to the sign near the road that reads “Elm Grove, 1803,” brings it back into the house, paints on the back of the sign “Skunk Farm, 1942,” takes it back close to the road and repositions it, her relabeling faced toward the road.  Several months later, having sought him out on the private school’s grounds, she throws Clorox in Pole Trickett’s face.

 

The author’s writing is solid, in places lyrical.  The characters are authentic, imaginatively conceived.  Susan Richards Shreve is indeed a professional writer.  As I continued to read, however, I became increasingly impatient.  Where is this story going? I wondered.  It depicts the gulf of understanding between blacks and whites, yes, but any novel that involves the races particularly at that time depicts that.  What else?  What large purpose?  The author chooses a climax.  Consequences follow.  The end.  All of it, I felt, a bit contrived.     



Civil Rights Events

Mississippi -- Freedom Summer

White Volunteers

 

Don't call me the brave one for going
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
—Phil Ochs, “Going Down to Mississippi” (Allen 1)

 

For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.

 

SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.

 

More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.

 

Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

 

Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE (What 1-3).

 

Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).

 

For Moses, the idealism of Freedom Summer was inseparable from the practical task of making it work. In 1962 SNCC and a group of civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had joined together to form The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

 

A year later in the fall 1963 Mississippi state elections, COFO aided by Yale and Stanford students staged a symbolic “freedom vote” to show that if blacks could go to the polls without fear of reprisals, they would do so in record numbers. At unofficial polling booths set up in black communities across Mississippi, more than 80,000 blacks cast their protest votes for COFO’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor candidates, Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College in Jackson.

 

Intrigued by out-of-state college students working as volunteers in a Mississippi election, the media gave the freedom vote campaign the kind of publicity SNCC had not received in its earlier voter registration efforts.

 

In the summer of 1964 Moses sought to build on the fall freedom-vote campaign. This time a presidential election, not simply statewide elections, would be at issue, but the publicity the freedom vote had won earlier was not all that led Moses to favor the Mississippi Summer Project, despite the doubts many in COFO had about the values of bringing large numbers of white college students to Mississippi.

 

The response of the white South to the 1963 March on Washington was a new wave of racial violence. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 was the event that got the most public attention in this period because it resulted in the deaths of four black girls who had been attending Sunday school.

 

Like everyone in the civil rights movement, Moses was horrified by the killings in Birmingham, but he was equally shaken by the death months later of Lewis Allen in January 1964. Allen was an eyewitness to the fatal 1961 shooting of Herbert Lee, a black farmer from Amite County who had been helping Moses with voter registration. The shooter was E. H. Hurst, a white state representative who was never indicted by a coroner’s jury after he claimed he was defending himself against Lee.

 

Allen offered to testify against Hurst, but when Moses asked the Justice Department to give Allen protection, Justice Department officials refused to do so, paving the way for Allen’s death. Moses believed such civil rights-inspired murders would continue to go unpunished in Mississippi if the victims were black, and he saw Freedom Summer as one antidote to that problem.

 

Moses was candid in 1964 about his motives for bringing white students to Mississippi at a time when so much of the country was indifferent to the killing of blacks in Mississippi. “When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don’t identify with Negroes,” Moses told the predominantly white summer volunteers during their June training sessions at Oxford, Ohio (Mills 4-6).

 

For many whites in Mississippi, like Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, the prospect of hundreds of mainly white volunteers coming to the state signaled a second “War of Northern Aggression.” And as Mayor Thompson put it, “They won’t have a chance.” So before the summer began, the number of state troopers doubled. The state legislature passed dawn-to-dusk curfews, and Ku Klux Klan numbers expanded. The legislature tried to outlaw planned Freedom Schools. Crosses were burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties on a single night (Freedom 1).

 

Moses was right about the impact of so many white college students going to Mississippi. On June 21, three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers—James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white New Yorkers—disappeared shortly after arriving in Meridian, Mississippi, from Oxford, Ohio. Their disappearance became national news (Mills 6).

 

Heather Tobis Booth … was among those at the University of Chicago who answered the call for volunteers.

 

“I had been brought up to believe we were in a society that should treat people equally,” she says. Her parents had taught that “we shouldn’t just say the words—we should work to make it happen.”

 

…

 

Looking back, alumni [of the University of Chicago] involved in Freedom Summer say it deepened their commitment to social justice and shaped their lives in lasting, if not always straightforward ways. They formed bonds with black civil rights activists and gained additional respect for the bravery of everyday people trying to claim their rights. Leaving Mississippi, “I felt we had accomplished a great deal,” says Peter Rabinowitz …

 

…

 

Once in Mississippi, volunteers like Booth and Rabinowitz were tasked with registering new voters, staffing community centers, and educating high school students in “Freedom Schools.”

 

These peaceful activities made volunteers targets of local law enforcement and violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Arrests and fire bombings were a regular part of life for civil rights workers in Mississippi. SNCC organizers carefully screened applicants to the summer project to find those with the maturity to handle the heavy responsibility of the work.

 

Rabinowitz, whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer, had been involved with the movement since junior high. He was tasked with teaching in a Freedom School, but had no idea what he would be asked to teach.

 

What he found was a group of high school students hungry to learn material that was not available in their segregated schools. Somewhat to his surprise, Rabinowitz’s students asked to study French.

 

It was a point of pride for students who had been told they would never need the language. “French was something that was taught in white schools but not in the black schools,” he explains. “This was something that had been kept from them.”

 

Rabinowitz taught his students elementary French and exposed them to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, he hoped to “convince them they were just as smart as anybody else.”

 

Booth spent the summer traveling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to register new voters. Many of the people she met lived under extreme poverty. Still, “they opened their homes and their hearts to us,” she says.

 

…

 

Throughout the summer, Northern volunteers were sheltered by the Mississippi black community. They stayed with black families, worked with black leaders of SNCC and other local organizations, and, for safety reasons, rarely ventured into white parts of town.

 

The culture shock could be intense. Goldsmith [another University of Chicago student] remembers a seasoned SNCC organizer taking him aside after he ate a sandwich in front of other workers and volunteers. He was told that in some impoverished parts of Mississippi, “you never eat in front of somebody else, because you don’t know if they’ve eaten today.”

 

From the student volunteers to the experienced SNCC organizers to the local families supporting the cause, everyone involved in Freedom Summer was united by the shared danger they faced.

 

The murder of three Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—reminded everyone of the high stakes of their work.

 

Rabinowitz knew both Goodman and Schwerner personally. He had chosen a project in Meridian, Miss. specifically to work with them. Learning of their disappearance “didn’t give me pause, but it sure terrified me,” Rabinowitz said.  …

 

Traveling in integrated cars posed a constant risk. Booth remembers hiding on the floor of a car to avoid being seen with black volunteers. She was briefly arrested early in her stay in Mississippi and spent several hours in jail before being released.

 

Yet Booth argues the dangers faced by Freedom Summer volunteers were far less severe than those faced by the new voters they registered.

 

“It was an act of courage and bravery and commitment to vote when they knew their lives might be threatened, their jobs might be threatened, they might be beaten,” she says.

 

“They weren’t going back to a safe place at the end of the summer” (Allen 2-7).

 

Chude Allen was 20 years old when she made the trek to Mississippi.

 

“I volunteered because I understood that the struggle to end segregation and racism in the South was one that was as important for White people as it was for Black people. This was my fight as well as other people’s fight,” says Allen. “I believed that racism was wrong and that segregation and the discrimination against African Americans was unjust and that unjust laws were to be challenged.”

 

On the first day of Freedom Summer, the student volunteers learned that Chaney, 21, Goodman, 20 and Schwerner, 24, were missing. The three had traveled to Neshoba County, Miss., to investigate the bombing of a Black church. They never returned. Organizers feared the worst. This was Mississippi after all. Missing, says Allen, meant they were dead.

 

“When I volunteered, I knew I might die,” says Allen, who worked in Freedom Schools in Holly Springs, Miss. “White people in the U.S. didn’t care if Black people died, but they cared if White people did and that is what happened. They would never have looked for them if it had just been James Chaney and two of his friends. No one would have cared” (Joiner 2).

 

The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.

 

"This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."

 

The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered (Smith 1).

 

The ten weeks that comprised the “long hot summer” centered around several goals: to establish Freedom Schools and community centers throughout the state, to increase black voter registration, and to ultimately challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in August.

 

…

 

Freedom Summer included more than 44 projects, grouped by congressional districts across the state. These projects ranged in size and scope. For example, Hattiesburg had more than 50 volunteers and staff while some projects had as few as two workers. Most projects built upon existing movement activity and relationships with local Black leaders.

 

Yet other aspects of the summer project, such as the establishment of Freedom Schools marked a new element in the Mississippi Movement. In a state where funding for white schools sometimes quadrupled the amount spent on Black schools, all but three summer projects had Freedom Schools. Work-shop style courses ranged from basic reading and math, civics, African-American history to modern Africa and French.

 

…

 

Midway through the summer, the project’s emphasis shifted from voter registration towards challenging the Mississippi Democrat’s all-white delegation. Local people began attempting–without success–to attend delegate selection meetings. A Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been formed in April and a delegation of MFDP members was selected to challenge the so-called “regular” delegates at the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August.

 

By the end of Freedom Summer, there had been 6 known murders, 35 known shootings, 4 people critically wounded, at least 80 volunteers beaten, and more than 1,000 people arrested (Freedom 1-4).

 

On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC.

 

…

 

The lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early ’60s had already made ending desegregation a dramatic issue for the nation. The aim of Freedom Summer was to build on that momentum by giving an explicitly political focus, centered on the right to vote, to the civil rights movement (Mills 2).

 

  

 

 

Works cited:

 

Allen, Susie.  “”Remembering ‘Freedom Summer.’”  The University of Chicago.  Web.  https://www.uchicago.edu/features/remembering_freedom_summer/

 

“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University.  Web.  https://snccdigital.org/events/freedom-summer/

 

Joiner, Lottie L.  “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.”  Daily Beast.  June 21, 2016.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississippi-closes-the-case-on-freedom-summer-murders

 

Mills, Nicolaus.  “The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price.”  Daily Beast.  June 21, 2014.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-1964-miss-freedom-summer-protests-won-progress-at-a-bloody-price

 

Smith, Stephen.  “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.”  CBSNews.  June 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-resonate-50-years-later/

 

“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University."  American RadioWorks.  Web.  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/bmoses.html

 

“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?”  Wisconsin Historical Society.  Web.  https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS3707