Harold Titus's Blog, page 25
August 4, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover lived in Washington, D.C. all his life. In 1895 he was born in a white, Protestant, middle-class neighborhood known as Seward Square, three blocks behind the Capitol. His family had been civil servants for generations, including his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover, who worked for the Coast Guard (Biography 1).
The eight decades of Hoover's life tell their own story. As early as his teen years, his mind was closing on issues that were to dominate his era. In the school debating society, he argued against women getting the vote and against abolition of the death penalty. He could never bear to come second in anything. When his father began to suffer from mental illness, a niece told me, Hoover "couldn't tolerate the fact. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect." Another relative said: "I sometimes have thought that he really had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people." William Sullivan, a close FBI associate, thought his boss "didn't have affection for one single solitary human being".
Hoover joined the Bureau – at that time just the Bureau of Investigation (the word "Federal" was only added in the 1930s) – as America's first great Communist scare was getting under way, and handpicked as his assistant a man named George Ruch. … Ruch expressed astonishment that left-wingers should even "be allowed to speak and write as they like". Hoover and Ruch favoured deporting people merely for being members of radical organisations, and used the Bureau to spy on lawyers representing those arrested in the infamous Red Raids of 1920. One of them, on whom he was to keep tabs for half a century and deem "the most dangerous man in the United States", was future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (Summers 2).
In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge appointed him head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position Hoover had long coveted. It was in this position that he finally received the power he craved. Hoover inherited the Bureau just after it had been severely tainted with scandal from previous administrations. Upon acceptance, Hoover demanded it be completely divorced from politics and responsible only to the Attorney General. Hoover's conditions were met and he set out on a rejuvenation campaign which would build the Bureau into one of the most powerful government agencies in 20th century America.
… To make his agency respectable, Hoover assembled an elite group of men, white and college-educated, who would represent the Bureau as agents. He demanded conformity and a strict moral code from all of them, demanding them to abstain from alcohol and relations with women. He instituted a training school and effectively made his organization into the symbolic guardian of the country's laws, citizens, and its morals (Biography 2-3).
The favourable publicity Hoover enjoyed was partially deserved. He cleaned up a Bureau that had been notorious for corruption and inefficiency, replacing it with an agent corps that became a byword for integrity. …
Hoover brought modernity and co-ordination at a time of disorganisation. He built the first federal fingerprint bank, and his Identification Division would eventually offer instant access to the prints of 159 million people. His Crime Laboratory became the most advanced in the world. He created the FBI National Academy, a sort of West Point for the future elite of law enforcement (Summers 3).
In 1936 [President Franklin] Roosevelt instructed Hoover to keep him informed on fascist and Communist activities in the U.S. Hoover took the opportunity to increase his domestic surveillance efforts and to maintain a "Custodial Detention List" which included names of "questionable" individuals for possible accusations during wartime. This list included Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he personally despised for her liberal leanings, and later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Lyndon B. Johnson, a personal friend to Hoover, postponed the F.B.I. director's retirement indefinitely. Hoover remained with the Bureau until his death at the age of 77 in 1972 (Biography 4).
Hoover never joined a political party and claimed he was "not political". In fact, he admitted privately, he was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Republican party. He secretly aspired to be president and considered running against Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he thought suspiciously left-wing. Hoover publicly expressed support for Senator Joe McCarthy shortly before McCarthy claimed Truman's State Department was harbouring 200 members of the Communist party. His agents slipped file material to the senator for use in his infamous inquisition, while publicly denying doing so.
…
… Hoover's Division 8, euphemistically entitled Crime Records and Communications, had a priority mission. Crime Records pumped out propaganda that fostered not only the image of the FBI as an organisation that spoke for what was right and just, but of the Director himself as a champion of justice fighting "moral deterioration" and "anarchist elements". Hoover used the department to preach the notion that the political left was responsible for all manner of perceived evils, from changing sexual standards to delinquency (Ackerman 2).
Hoover had gone easy on the mob. It is now clear that Hoover had contacts with organised criminals or their associates in circumstances that made it possible – likely even – that they learned of his sexual proclivities. More than one top mobster claimed the outfit had a hold on Hoover. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's co-founder, was said to have "pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation" and an associate quoted Lansky as claiming, "I fixed that sonofabitch." Carmine Lombardozzi, who was known as "the Italian Meyer Lansky", said: "J Edgar Hoover was in our pocket" (Summers 8).
By 1960, the FBI had opened “subversive” files on some 432,000 Americans. Hoover deemed the most sensitive files as “personal and confidential” and kept them in his office, where his secretary, Helen Gandy, could watch them (Ackerman 2).
Hoover's public position on race, Southerner that he was, was that of the paternalistic white nativist. Less openly, he was racially prejudiced. He shrugged off the miseries of black Americans, preferring to claim they were outside his jurisdiction. "I'm not going to send the FBI in," a Justice Department official recalled him saying testily, "every time some nigger woman says she's been raped." FBI agents paid more attention to investigating black militants than pursuing the Ku Klux Klan.
...
A rumor has persisted that Hoover himself had black ancestry. Early photographs do show him looking somewhat negroid, with noticeably wiry hair. Gossip along those lines was rife in Washington and – true or not – Hoover must have been aware of it. Did anxiety on that front shape the way he behaved towards blacks – just as he lashed out at homosexuals while struggling with his own [presumed] homosexuality (Summers 4-7)?
The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption …. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968. (Halperin 63).
In a memoranda sent to Hoover, King's “I Have a Dream” speech [culminating the March on Washington] was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:
“He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security” (Halperin 77).
On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the FBI the authority to wiretap King. "Hoover had come to Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy and said, 'Look, Stanley Levinson — King's adviser — is a communist. He's a secret communist, he's an underground communist, and he's using Martin Luther King as a cat's paw.' Well, when you put it that way, you weren't gainsaying Hoover if you were John or Bobby Kennedy. So they said yes" (History 4).
On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a … memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].
The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.
In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general [Robert Kennedy] preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.
While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals …. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.
… By January, the FBI had initiated physical and photographic surveillance of King, deploying its most experienced personnel to gather information, and had placed the first of many illegal bugs in Dr. King's room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
According to Justice Department regulations at the time, microphonic surveillance, although it necessitated a physical trespass and was more intrusive than a phone tap, did not require the approval of the attorney general. Even under its own regulations, however, the FBI could only use this technique to gather "important intelligence or evidence relating to matters connected with national security." In this case the FBI planned to use "bugs" to learn about "the [private] activities of Dr. King and his associates" so that King could be "completely discredited." It was clearly illegal.
The Willard Hotel "bug" yielded "19 reels" of tape. The FBI, at least in its own opinion, had struck pay dirt. The bug apparently picked up information about King's private extramarital and perhaps "inter-racial" sexual activities. This opened up the possibility of discrediting King as a Communist who engaged in "moral improprieties."
For J. Edgar Hoover, "immoral" behavior was a crime comparable to "subversive" activity-and of equal utility. Hoover gathered such information on prominent persons to use for political and blackmail purposes. Often he would share such "official and confidential" information with presidents when his surveillance uncovered "obscene matters" on the president's opponents or aides. Sometimes he would let people know he had such information on them, and that list includes Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In this case, however, Hoover did not plan to let King know he had the information to gain a "political" power advantage over him; he planned to use it to destroy him politically. With the Willard Hotel tapes, the FBI campaign moved into high gear.
With Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pressing action on civil rights legislation and calling for a "War on Poverty," Martin Luther King was a man the country and the world thought worthy of honor. In December 1963, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year." … Hoover wrote across a memorandum, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one."
In 1964, while continuing his "nonviolent" activities on behalf of civil rights in St. Augustine, Florida, and other cities, King was awarded honorary degrees by universities; he was invited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, to speak at a ceremony honoring the memory of President Kennedy; he had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome; and, in October, he was named by the Nobel Prize Committee to receive the Peace Prize in December (Halperin 77-80).
Dr. King was well aware early in 1964 of Hoover’s antipathy. Based on unsubstantiated FBI allegations, in April of 1964 conservative columnist Joseph Alsop alleges that an unnamed associate of Dr. King is a Communist. News reports quickly follow, detailing supposedly secret testimony to Congress by FBI Director Hoover charging "Communist influence" over the Civil Rights Movement."
Dr, King answered back. As a general rule, Dr. King prefers not to respond to false charges and personal slanders against himself. But when the Freedom Movement as a whole is smeared he stands to its defense. On April 23 he tells a press conference: "[It is] difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communistic infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement when it has been so completely ineffectual in protecting the Negro from brutality in the Deep South" (Hoover 1-2).
Though he considers himself entitled to defame and vilify anyone he chooses, the slightest criticism of himself or the FBI sends Hoover into a towering rage. King's retort is no exception, and Hoover's already virulent hatred intensifies. FBI agents are ordered to expand their surveillance and redouble their efforts to find damaging personal information that can be used to destroy King's reputation (Halperin 80).
In October, the world learns that Dr. King has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover's obsessive malice can no longer be restrained, it finally erupts into public view on November 18 when he tells a group of journalists that in reference to King's criticism of FBI effectiveness, "I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country. He goes on to charge that King is, "one of the lowest characters" in America, and "controlled" by Communist advisors.
King responds that he is "appalled and surprised" by Hoover's attack. He offers to meet with the FBI Director to discuss the Bureau's "seeming inability to gain convictions in even the most heinous crimes perpetrated against civil rights workers." He cites as examples the brutality in Albany, the four little girls killed in Birmingham, and the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
Hoover intensifies his vendetta against King. Behind the scenes, FBI officials escalate their smear campaign by leaking more derogatory stories to the media. Meanwhile, FBI field agents meet with religious organizations, universities, and government officials to "confidentially" brief them that Dr. King is "associating with Communists" and having extramarital affairs in hotel rooms while on the road for speaking engagements and meetings.
From their illegal hotel bugs they assemble a composite audio sex-tape. They package the tape with a phony letter supposedly from an unidentified Afro-American man. The letter threatens King with public exposure unless he commits suicide before accepting the Nobel Prize. To conceal its FBI origins, they mail it from Miami on November 21. When the package arrives at the SCLC office in Atlanta, staff members are busy preparing for Dr. King's trip to Europe for the Nobel Prize. They assume it's just another recording of a King speech, so without reading the letter they toss the package into a pile of low-priority correspondence to be dealt with when someone has time. Dr. King doesn't actually hear the tape or read the letter until weeks after returning from Oslo (Hoover 3-6).
In part, the letter said: King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [This exact number has been selected for a specific reason; it has definite practical significance]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
It was thirty-four days before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies (Halperin 86).
Publicly, Hoover presses his attack. In a Chicago speech on November 24, he characterizes the Civil Rights Movement as: "pressure groups that would crush the rights of others under heel." And, "They have no compunction in carping, lying, and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates."
Dr. King fears that the public controversy with Hoover risks diverting the Freedom Movement from the critical work ahead. It distracts media attention from the real issues, and with first the Nobel Prize and then the Selma campaign on the horizon he is unwilling to expend precious time and energy responding to FBI slanders. As a conciliatory gesture, he arranges through intermediaries to meet face-to- face with the FBI Director on December 1st. King allows Hoover to dominate the meeting with a long rant justifying and defending the Bureau. Afterwards, King further defuses the situation by telling the press that the meeting was friendly and amicable and that, "I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job."
Dr. King's effort partially succeeds. Hoover and the FBI cease their public attacks, but covert efforts to destroy King and thwart the Freedom Movement continue (Hoover 3-7).
… two noted specialists in psychiatry and psychology said they believed Hoover's sexual torment was very pertinent to his use and abuse of power as America's top law-enforcement officer.
Dr John Money, professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, thought Hoover "needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. He managed to live with his conflict by making others pay the price." Dr Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Hoover suffered from "a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features… paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an authoritarian personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi" (Summers 5-6).
Hoover stands as a reminder that 48 years of power concentrated in one person is a recipe for abuse. It was mostly after his death [1972] that Hoover’s dark side became common knowledge — the covert black-bag jobs, the warrantless surveillance of civil rights leaders and Vietnam-era peace activists, the use of secret files to bully government officials, the snooping on movie stars and senators, and the rest (Ackerman 4).
Works cited:
Ackerman, Kenneth D. “Five myths about J. Edgar Hoover.” The Washington Post. November 9, 2011. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...
“Biography: J. Edgar Hoover.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage, Robert; and Marwick, Christine. “The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U. S. Intelligence Agencies.” Penguin Books, 1976. Web. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA...
“The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List.” NPR Fresh Air. February 14, 2012. Web. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862...
“Hoover Attempts to Destroy Dr. King (Nov-Dec).” Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...
Summers, Anthony. “The Secret life of J Edgar Hoover.” The Guardian. December 31, 2011. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012...
The eight decades of Hoover's life tell their own story. As early as his teen years, his mind was closing on issues that were to dominate his era. In the school debating society, he argued against women getting the vote and against abolition of the death penalty. He could never bear to come second in anything. When his father began to suffer from mental illness, a niece told me, Hoover "couldn't tolerate the fact. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect." Another relative said: "I sometimes have thought that he really had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people." William Sullivan, a close FBI associate, thought his boss "didn't have affection for one single solitary human being".
Hoover joined the Bureau – at that time just the Bureau of Investigation (the word "Federal" was only added in the 1930s) – as America's first great Communist scare was getting under way, and handpicked as his assistant a man named George Ruch. … Ruch expressed astonishment that left-wingers should even "be allowed to speak and write as they like". Hoover and Ruch favoured deporting people merely for being members of radical organisations, and used the Bureau to spy on lawyers representing those arrested in the infamous Red Raids of 1920. One of them, on whom he was to keep tabs for half a century and deem "the most dangerous man in the United States", was future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (Summers 2).
In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge appointed him head of the Bureau of Investigation, a position Hoover had long coveted. It was in this position that he finally received the power he craved. Hoover inherited the Bureau just after it had been severely tainted with scandal from previous administrations. Upon acceptance, Hoover demanded it be completely divorced from politics and responsible only to the Attorney General. Hoover's conditions were met and he set out on a rejuvenation campaign which would build the Bureau into one of the most powerful government agencies in 20th century America.
… To make his agency respectable, Hoover assembled an elite group of men, white and college-educated, who would represent the Bureau as agents. He demanded conformity and a strict moral code from all of them, demanding them to abstain from alcohol and relations with women. He instituted a training school and effectively made his organization into the symbolic guardian of the country's laws, citizens, and its morals (Biography 2-3).
The favourable publicity Hoover enjoyed was partially deserved. He cleaned up a Bureau that had been notorious for corruption and inefficiency, replacing it with an agent corps that became a byword for integrity. …
Hoover brought modernity and co-ordination at a time of disorganisation. He built the first federal fingerprint bank, and his Identification Division would eventually offer instant access to the prints of 159 million people. His Crime Laboratory became the most advanced in the world. He created the FBI National Academy, a sort of West Point for the future elite of law enforcement (Summers 3).
In 1936 [President Franklin] Roosevelt instructed Hoover to keep him informed on fascist and Communist activities in the U.S. Hoover took the opportunity to increase his domestic surveillance efforts and to maintain a "Custodial Detention List" which included names of "questionable" individuals for possible accusations during wartime. This list included Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he personally despised for her liberal leanings, and later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Lyndon B. Johnson, a personal friend to Hoover, postponed the F.B.I. director's retirement indefinitely. Hoover remained with the Bureau until his death at the age of 77 in 1972 (Biography 4).
Hoover never joined a political party and claimed he was "not political". In fact, he admitted privately, he was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Republican party. He secretly aspired to be president and considered running against Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he thought suspiciously left-wing. Hoover publicly expressed support for Senator Joe McCarthy shortly before McCarthy claimed Truman's State Department was harbouring 200 members of the Communist party. His agents slipped file material to the senator for use in his infamous inquisition, while publicly denying doing so.
…
… Hoover's Division 8, euphemistically entitled Crime Records and Communications, had a priority mission. Crime Records pumped out propaganda that fostered not only the image of the FBI as an organisation that spoke for what was right and just, but of the Director himself as a champion of justice fighting "moral deterioration" and "anarchist elements". Hoover used the department to preach the notion that the political left was responsible for all manner of perceived evils, from changing sexual standards to delinquency (Ackerman 2).
Hoover had gone easy on the mob. It is now clear that Hoover had contacts with organised criminals or their associates in circumstances that made it possible – likely even – that they learned of his sexual proclivities. More than one top mobster claimed the outfit had a hold on Hoover. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's co-founder, was said to have "pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation" and an associate quoted Lansky as claiming, "I fixed that sonofabitch." Carmine Lombardozzi, who was known as "the Italian Meyer Lansky", said: "J Edgar Hoover was in our pocket" (Summers 8).
By 1960, the FBI had opened “subversive” files on some 432,000 Americans. Hoover deemed the most sensitive files as “personal and confidential” and kept them in his office, where his secretary, Helen Gandy, could watch them (Ackerman 2).
Hoover's public position on race, Southerner that he was, was that of the paternalistic white nativist. Less openly, he was racially prejudiced. He shrugged off the miseries of black Americans, preferring to claim they were outside his jurisdiction. "I'm not going to send the FBI in," a Justice Department official recalled him saying testily, "every time some nigger woman says she's been raped." FBI agents paid more attention to investigating black militants than pursuing the Ku Klux Klan.
...
A rumor has persisted that Hoover himself had black ancestry. Early photographs do show him looking somewhat negroid, with noticeably wiry hair. Gossip along those lines was rife in Washington and – true or not – Hoover must have been aware of it. Did anxiety on that front shape the way he behaved towards blacks – just as he lashed out at homosexuals while struggling with his own [presumed] homosexuality (Summers 4-7)?
The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption …. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968. (Halperin 63).
In a memoranda sent to Hoover, King's “I Have a Dream” speech [culminating the March on Washington] was characterized as "demagogic," and the presence of "200" Communists among the 250,000 marchers caused the Intelligence Division to state that it had underestimated Communist efforts and influence on American Negroes and the civil rights movement. King was singled out:
“He stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now . . . as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security” (Halperin 77).
On October 10 and 21, Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave the FBI the authority to wiretap King. "Hoover had come to Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy and said, 'Look, Stanley Levinson — King's adviser — is a communist. He's a secret communist, he's an underground communist, and he's using Martin Luther King as a cat's paw.' Well, when you put it that way, you weren't gainsaying Hoover if you were John or Bobby Kennedy. So they said yes" (History 4).
On October 18, 1963, the FBI distributed a … memorandum on King, not only to the Justice Department, but to officials at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Defense Department intelligence agencies. It summarized the bureau's Communist party charges against King and went much further. According to - Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, it was a personal diatribe . . . a personal attack without evidentiary support on the character, the moral character and person of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it was only peripherally related to anything substantive, like whether or not there was Communist infiltration or influence on the civil rights movement.... It was a personal attack on the man and went far afield from the charges [of possible Communist influence].
The attorney general was outraged and demanded that Hoover seek the return of the report. By October 28, all copies were returned. This was the first-and last-official action to deter Hoover's vendetta against King.
In November, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Johnson became president and the Justice Department was in a state of confusion with the attorney general [Robert Kennedy] preoccupied with his personal grief. King viewed the assassination as a tragedy, and hoped it would spawn a new public concern for peace and reconciliation.
While the nation mourned, the FBI held a conference at the beginning of December to plan its campaign to destroy King and the civil rights movement. At that all-day meeting FBI officials put forward proposals …. Officials of the nation's number-one law enforcement agency agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggressive" newsmen, "colored" agents, Dr. King's housekeeper, and even Dr. King's wife or "placing a good looking female plant in King's office" to develop discrediting information and to take action that would lead to his disgrace.
… By January, the FBI had initiated physical and photographic surveillance of King, deploying its most experienced personnel to gather information, and had placed the first of many illegal bugs in Dr. King's room at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
According to Justice Department regulations at the time, microphonic surveillance, although it necessitated a physical trespass and was more intrusive than a phone tap, did not require the approval of the attorney general. Even under its own regulations, however, the FBI could only use this technique to gather "important intelligence or evidence relating to matters connected with national security." In this case the FBI planned to use "bugs" to learn about "the [private] activities of Dr. King and his associates" so that King could be "completely discredited." It was clearly illegal.
The Willard Hotel "bug" yielded "19 reels" of tape. The FBI, at least in its own opinion, had struck pay dirt. The bug apparently picked up information about King's private extramarital and perhaps "inter-racial" sexual activities. This opened up the possibility of discrediting King as a Communist who engaged in "moral improprieties."
For J. Edgar Hoover, "immoral" behavior was a crime comparable to "subversive" activity-and of equal utility. Hoover gathered such information on prominent persons to use for political and blackmail purposes. Often he would share such "official and confidential" information with presidents when his surveillance uncovered "obscene matters" on the president's opponents or aides. Sometimes he would let people know he had such information on them, and that list includes Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In this case, however, Hoover did not plan to let King know he had the information to gain a "political" power advantage over him; he planned to use it to destroy him politically. With the Willard Hotel tapes, the FBI campaign moved into high gear.
With Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pressing action on civil rights legislation and calling for a "War on Poverty," Martin Luther King was a man the country and the world thought worthy of honor. In December 1963, Time magazine named him "Man of the Year." … Hoover wrote across a memorandum, "They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one."
In 1964, while continuing his "nonviolent" activities on behalf of civil rights in St. Augustine, Florida, and other cities, King was awarded honorary degrees by universities; he was invited by Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, to speak at a ceremony honoring the memory of President Kennedy; he had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome; and, in October, he was named by the Nobel Prize Committee to receive the Peace Prize in December (Halperin 77-80).
Dr. King was well aware early in 1964 of Hoover’s antipathy. Based on unsubstantiated FBI allegations, in April of 1964 conservative columnist Joseph Alsop alleges that an unnamed associate of Dr. King is a Communist. News reports quickly follow, detailing supposedly secret testimony to Congress by FBI Director Hoover charging "Communist influence" over the Civil Rights Movement."
Dr, King answered back. As a general rule, Dr. King prefers not to respond to false charges and personal slanders against himself. But when the Freedom Movement as a whole is smeared he stands to its defense. On April 23 he tells a press conference: "[It is] difficult to accept the word of the FBI on communistic infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement when it has been so completely ineffectual in protecting the Negro from brutality in the Deep South" (Hoover 1-2).
Though he considers himself entitled to defame and vilify anyone he chooses, the slightest criticism of himself or the FBI sends Hoover into a towering rage. King's retort is no exception, and Hoover's already virulent hatred intensifies. FBI agents are ordered to expand their surveillance and redouble their efforts to find damaging personal information that can be used to destroy King's reputation (Halperin 80).
In October, the world learns that Dr. King has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover's obsessive malice can no longer be restrained, it finally erupts into public view on November 18 when he tells a group of journalists that in reference to King's criticism of FBI effectiveness, "I consider King to be the most notorious liar in the country. He goes on to charge that King is, "one of the lowest characters" in America, and "controlled" by Communist advisors.
King responds that he is "appalled and surprised" by Hoover's attack. He offers to meet with the FBI Director to discuss the Bureau's "seeming inability to gain convictions in even the most heinous crimes perpetrated against civil rights workers." He cites as examples the brutality in Albany, the four little girls killed in Birmingham, and the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
Hoover intensifies his vendetta against King. Behind the scenes, FBI officials escalate their smear campaign by leaking more derogatory stories to the media. Meanwhile, FBI field agents meet with religious organizations, universities, and government officials to "confidentially" brief them that Dr. King is "associating with Communists" and having extramarital affairs in hotel rooms while on the road for speaking engagements and meetings.
From their illegal hotel bugs they assemble a composite audio sex-tape. They package the tape with a phony letter supposedly from an unidentified Afro-American man. The letter threatens King with public exposure unless he commits suicide before accepting the Nobel Prize. To conceal its FBI origins, they mail it from Miami on November 21. When the package arrives at the SCLC office in Atlanta, staff members are busy preparing for Dr. King's trip to Europe for the Nobel Prize. They assume it's just another recording of a King speech, so without reading the letter they toss the package into a pile of low-priority correspondence to be dealt with when someone has time. Dr. King doesn't actually hear the tape or read the letter until weeks after returning from Oslo (Hoover 3-6).
In part, the letter said: King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [This exact number has been selected for a specific reason; it has definite practical significance]. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
It was thirty-four days before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies (Halperin 86).
Publicly, Hoover presses his attack. In a Chicago speech on November 24, he characterizes the Civil Rights Movement as: "pressure groups that would crush the rights of others under heel." And, "They have no compunction in carping, lying, and exaggerating with the fiercest passion, spearheaded at times by Communists and moral degenerates."
Dr. King fears that the public controversy with Hoover risks diverting the Freedom Movement from the critical work ahead. It distracts media attention from the real issues, and with first the Nobel Prize and then the Selma campaign on the horizon he is unwilling to expend precious time and energy responding to FBI slanders. As a conciliatory gesture, he arranges through intermediaries to meet face-to- face with the FBI Director on December 1st. King allows Hoover to dominate the meeting with a long rant justifying and defending the Bureau. Afterwards, King further defuses the situation by telling the press that the meeting was friendly and amicable and that, "I sincerely hope we can forget the confusions of the past and get on with the job."
Dr. King's effort partially succeeds. Hoover and the FBI cease their public attacks, but covert efforts to destroy King and thwart the Freedom Movement continue (Hoover 3-7).
… two noted specialists in psychiatry and psychology said they believed Hoover's sexual torment was very pertinent to his use and abuse of power as America's top law-enforcement officer.
Dr John Money, professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, thought Hoover "needed constantly to destroy other people in order to maintain himself. He managed to live with his conflict by making others pay the price." Dr Harold Lief, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Hoover suffered from "a personality disorder, a narcissistic disorder with mixed obsessive features… paranoid elements, undue suspiciousness and some sadism. A combination of narcissism and paranoia produces what is known as an authoritarian personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi" (Summers 5-6).
Hoover stands as a reminder that 48 years of power concentrated in one person is a recipe for abuse. It was mostly after his death [1972] that Hoover’s dark side became common knowledge — the covert black-bag jobs, the warrantless surveillance of civil rights leaders and Vietnam-era peace activists, the use of secret files to bully government officials, the snooping on movie stars and senators, and the rest (Ackerman 4).
Works cited:
Ackerman, Kenneth D. “Five myths about J. Edgar Hoover.” The Washington Post. November 9, 2011. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...
“Biography: J. Edgar Hoover.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage, Robert; and Marwick, Christine. “The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U. S. Intelligence Agencies.” Penguin Books, 1976. Web. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA...
“The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List.” NPR Fresh Air. February 14, 2012. Web. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862...
“Hoover Attempts to Destroy Dr. King (Nov-Dec).” Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...
Summers, Anthony. “The Secret life of J Edgar Hoover.” The Guardian. December 31, 2011. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012...
August 2, 2019
Interview of Me
Here is an interview of me conducted by Esther Rabbit July 26, 2019. The interview can also be accessed on
https://estherrabbit.com/harold-titus...
7 Questions With Author Harold Titus
Raised most of his childhood in Pasadena, CA, Harold Titus graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in history. He spent 2 years in the army prior to the Vietnam War. He is a retired eighth grade English and American history teacher, having taught 31 years in Orinda, CA.
He enjoyed coaching many of his school’s boys and girls sports teams. Basketball was his favorite sport. He and his wife have lived the past 22 years on the central Oregon coast. For 10 years Titus was active in local and state politics.
Seven years ago he took great pleasure in giving his children and grandchildren copies of his novel, “Crossing the River.” A year ago his second historical novel, “Alsoomse and Wanchese,” was published. Both are legacies of sorts, expressions of who he is, testaments of what can be achieved by hard work.
For the ones of you who are new to my blog, I’m Esther, writer, content creator for authors and massive nerd. If you’re interested to know all the tips & tricks surrounding the process From Writing To Publishing Your Novel, you’re only a click away. For more goodies, articles and giveaways, please consider subscribing to my Newsletter.
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
I am both. First, regarding characters and events, a historical novelist must honor what most historians have agreed upon to be established fact. You must never thumb your nose at truth; you must not substitute intentionally or ignorantly made up stuff. Jeff Shaara does both in Rise to Rebellion, his account of the beginning of the American Revolution. For instance, he has Major John Pitcairn (whom he identifies as Thomas Pitcairn) witnessing the skirmish at Concord’s North Bridge.
Pitcairn never left the center of town! Most of the characters in my novel, Crossing the River, were actual people. I personalized all of them based on what historians know about their thoughts and beliefs and how they conducted themselves. Minor characters that historians know little about I fictionalized, changing their surnames to respect their actual beings. All of this required plotting. The known sequence of events that occurred April 19, 1775, determined the sequence of events of my novel.
Writing my second novel, Alsoomse and Wanchese, was an entirely different experience. Historians know very little about actual Algonquians during the 1580s because their limited sources — reports provided Walter Raleigh by Englishmen engaged in exploration and colonization — focused almost entirely on English endeavors. Almost no effort was made to record what individual Algonquians thought or, in detail, did.
Two Algonquians, Manteo and Wanchese, were taken back to England in 1584 to learn to speak English. From these two natives, Raleigh and his people learned a little bit about North Carolina coastal Algonquian history. The information is sketchy, therefore difficult to interpret. Historians offer conflicting suppositions.
Who attacked whom resulting in a major Roanoke defeat seven or ten years before the arrival of the first Englishmen at Roanoke Island? Whom and where had the Roanoke chief Wingina been fighting in 1584 when he was wounded? My novel begins in the fall of 1583. Before I started writing my first chapter, I had established the identity and strengths and weaknesses of most of my characters – nearly all of them fictitious. I knew how I wanted to particularize the major Roanoke tribal defeat but not Wingina’s wounding.
I knew I had to create events to fill the time gaps between these two important events and the 1584 arrival of the English. My characters, seeking to resolve their individual and tribal conflicts, did that. One fictitious event created impetus for the next. Worthy of note, I had not decided Alsoomse’s fate until several chapters before I finished the novel’s first draft.
What’s your definition of the first draft?
Alsoomse and Wanchese has forty chapters. I wrote them in identical stages: write five chapters, stop, review, eliminate glaring blemishes, write another five chapters. Two years after I had started, I saw before me what I considered to be my first draft. A year and a half later, 18 read-throughs of all of the chapters completed, I submit the manuscript to my publisher.
What are some of the myths around self-publishing / traditional publishing?
The biggest myth that I am cognizant of is that indie writers are hacks. Their works are of poor quality. Proof? Mainstream publishers won’t look at their manuscripts. Agents know this and behave accordingly. Bookstores like Barnes and Noble will not purchase books from indie publishers for fear that the books will not sell.
Such stores might be willing to take three or four books directly from the author providing that the author agrees to take them back if they don’t sell. The reading public reads mainstream published books more than indie books. I myself have appreciated mainstream published books more.
However, I have read several excellent indie novels, Ethan’s Peach Tree by Stan Jensen and A Circle of Earth by Patricia Weil — to name two. Literary agents’ rejection slips do not define necessarily the quality of an unrecognized writer’s work.
Another myth is that mainstream publishers do the grunt work of publicizing your work. Sit back, relax, accept the fruits of your considerable labor. Afterward, when the time seems right, think about starting your next novel.
From what I have read, you are still on your own, doing presentations at distant libraries where nobody shows up; setting up a website to collect followers that might, after a passage of time, take a chance on your book and fork over twenty bucks; finding website owners that are willing to interview you; accepting invitations made by individuals on the internet who say they want to review your book.
Looking back, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning of your journey?
Lower considerably your expectations.
In your community only people who know you will purchase your novel. I advertised in the newspaper of a town 30 miles north of where I live that I would be doing a talk/book signing at the local library. Nobody showed up.
Most people do not leisure-read. Most who like to read are not historical fiction enthusiasts. Those who do read historical fiction gravitate to stories about the Roman Empire or Tudor England. If a reader selects a novel about a time period in American history, most often it is the American Civil War or World War II.
Expect little monetary reward for your product. Each of my paperback novels costs readers approximately twenty dollars. (My publisher determines the price, not me) If a reader purchases one of them on-line from Amazon, after my publisher, the printer, Ingram, and Amazon take their cuts, I net approximately three dollars. If I buy books from my publisher (at a reduced price) to sell to people here in town, I (not my publisher) must pay the shipping cost. The post office makes as much money as I do — about four dollars per book.
A book store on Roanoke Island will sell my Alsoomse and Wanchese novel provided that I ship several copies to it (at my expense) and that I agree that the store gets to pocket 40% of the price it charges purchasers. Adding the cost of paying the post office shipping costs twice (buying the copies from my publisher and sending them to the Roanoke store) to what the publisher and printer would take, I would lose six dollars on each transaction.
The store would have to sell the book for thirty-two (not twenty) dollars for me to break even. Any book that they could not sell would be shipped back to me at my expense. I suspect that this is standard practice with independent stores. Chain stores do not stock indie novels.
Had I known all of the above beforehand, I am not certain that I would have gone forward. Which would have proved to have had greater import? Financial practicality or the desire to communicate what I have learned about human beings, educate, and create?
How do you imagine your target reader?
He/She would be somebody who thoroughly enjoys historical fiction, who is curious about modes of living and cultural practices and beliefs different from our own, who is eager to draw parallels as well as recognize differences, who has a thirst for knowledge, who is empathetic toward characters that need/deserve support, who advocates social justice, who detects in the novel universal themes, who appreciates depth of content, who does not believe that romance or non-stop action are essential elements of a rewarding book.
Is there anything you learned from reader reviews?
One lesson I learned is not to exchange books with another indie writer to give and receive reviews. Knowing that the author of the book that I was reviewing would be judging my own work, I had difficulty being entirely truthful. One writer’s book had its merits and what I considered several shortcomings.
Believing it deserved a 3.5, I rated it a 4. Even though her remarks were complimentary, the writer rated Crossing the River a 3. Another writer gave me two of her books to review. This person’s narrative ability was definitely lacking. I provided several examples of this, striving to be honest, gave one of the books a generous 3-star rating and the other an undeserved 4-star rating. The writer gave Crossing the River a 4-star rating before my ratings of her books appeared on goodreads.com. A week or so later, she changed her rating of my novel to a 3.
Lesson Two.
Wanting to find somebody on the internet willing to review Alsoomse and Wanchese, I accepted an invitation from a person who was pushing her website and who purported to be an devotee of historical fiction. A month or so later, she posted on goodreads.com this one-sentence review:
“While it was refreshing to see a novel with Native American protagonists, I found that the plot moved too slowly to hold my interest.”
She rated the novel 2 stars.
Later, on her website, she posted what appeared to be a full, fair review. Only I could detect that she had not read past the first three or four chapters of the forty-chapter novel. Hours and hours saved, on to the next book had apparently been her decision. If you are going to base your review and rating on three or four chapters, at least admit it. Either that or don’t do the review.
Four people in the last two months have offered via email to review Alsoomse and Wanchese. I asked each of them why they chose my book. None of them messaged back. I stay away now from volume reviewers.
Just how much research is there behind a novel? Tell us how it looks behind the scenes.
Computer file after computer file of cut-and-pasted information about North Carolina coastal plain trees, birds, fish, native settlements, Algonquian culture, agricultural practices, weapons and warfare, religious beliefs, societal structure, the structure of longhouses, gender responsibilities, trade, the making of bows and arrows and of pottery, the curing of wounds, the parts of an English bark, English clothing and weaponry. (What have I left out?)
Add information about the reign of Queen Elizabeth as it pertains especially to attempts at colonization in North America. Everything I could find about Algonquian leaders mentioned in reports written by Englishmen. Different interpretations by historians about what actually happened before and after the English arrived and settled on Roanoke Island.
As I wrote, I discovered that the story took certain directions that required me to research something vital to the story-telling. For instance, I decided that a confrontation between Roanoke natives and a war-like neighboring tribe needed to take place. Over hunting rights.
So where would this confrontation take place? Somewhere along the shoreline of Pamlico Sound nearly halfway between the opposing villages. Most of the terrain along the coastline is very swampy, not conducive to game seeking fresh water. I found an article on the internet about a former lake near the coastline that had eroded into its present state, Stumpy Point Bay. Centuries ago a peat fire had erupted and burned there for several months. Afterward, underground water, filling the exposed cavity, had created the lake. It was still a lake in 1583. I had what I wanted!
When you write a passage about a character making his way through thick vegetation on his way to attack a hostile village, research enables you to visualize what he encounters. From Alsoomse and Wanchese:
They had now gotten through the switchcane. They were entering a dense pocosin thicket. Wanchese indentified leafy wax myrtle; by its little white upside-down clustered flowers zenobia; by its long, white, dangling fingers titi; its black fruit not yet formed large galberry, twice as high as any man present.
Worst of all were bamboo vines, climbing over everything, large thorns sticking out of old growth. “Tear away only the new growth,” Cumay warned. “Be careful where you put your legs and feet. Try not to step on rattlesnakes.”
…
The thicket ended. Scattered pond pine, loblolly bay, and loblolly pine indicated the change, even though wax myrtle and inkberry were present. Happily, the bamboo vines were gone. “We are getting close,” Cumay, stopping, whispered. “Past that grove of pine is an old cornfield. We can hide behind the myrtle until you decide when to strike.”
https://estherrabbit.com/harold-titus...
7 Questions With Author Harold Titus
Raised most of his childhood in Pasadena, CA, Harold Titus graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in history. He spent 2 years in the army prior to the Vietnam War. He is a retired eighth grade English and American history teacher, having taught 31 years in Orinda, CA.
He enjoyed coaching many of his school’s boys and girls sports teams. Basketball was his favorite sport. He and his wife have lived the past 22 years on the central Oregon coast. For 10 years Titus was active in local and state politics.
Seven years ago he took great pleasure in giving his children and grandchildren copies of his novel, “Crossing the River.” A year ago his second historical novel, “Alsoomse and Wanchese,” was published. Both are legacies of sorts, expressions of who he is, testaments of what can be achieved by hard work.
For the ones of you who are new to my blog, I’m Esther, writer, content creator for authors and massive nerd. If you’re interested to know all the tips & tricks surrounding the process From Writing To Publishing Your Novel, you’re only a click away. For more goodies, articles and giveaways, please consider subscribing to my Newsletter.
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
I am both. First, regarding characters and events, a historical novelist must honor what most historians have agreed upon to be established fact. You must never thumb your nose at truth; you must not substitute intentionally or ignorantly made up stuff. Jeff Shaara does both in Rise to Rebellion, his account of the beginning of the American Revolution. For instance, he has Major John Pitcairn (whom he identifies as Thomas Pitcairn) witnessing the skirmish at Concord’s North Bridge.
Pitcairn never left the center of town! Most of the characters in my novel, Crossing the River, were actual people. I personalized all of them based on what historians know about their thoughts and beliefs and how they conducted themselves. Minor characters that historians know little about I fictionalized, changing their surnames to respect their actual beings. All of this required plotting. The known sequence of events that occurred April 19, 1775, determined the sequence of events of my novel.
Writing my second novel, Alsoomse and Wanchese, was an entirely different experience. Historians know very little about actual Algonquians during the 1580s because their limited sources — reports provided Walter Raleigh by Englishmen engaged in exploration and colonization — focused almost entirely on English endeavors. Almost no effort was made to record what individual Algonquians thought or, in detail, did.
Two Algonquians, Manteo and Wanchese, were taken back to England in 1584 to learn to speak English. From these two natives, Raleigh and his people learned a little bit about North Carolina coastal Algonquian history. The information is sketchy, therefore difficult to interpret. Historians offer conflicting suppositions.
Who attacked whom resulting in a major Roanoke defeat seven or ten years before the arrival of the first Englishmen at Roanoke Island? Whom and where had the Roanoke chief Wingina been fighting in 1584 when he was wounded? My novel begins in the fall of 1583. Before I started writing my first chapter, I had established the identity and strengths and weaknesses of most of my characters – nearly all of them fictitious. I knew how I wanted to particularize the major Roanoke tribal defeat but not Wingina’s wounding.
I knew I had to create events to fill the time gaps between these two important events and the 1584 arrival of the English. My characters, seeking to resolve their individual and tribal conflicts, did that. One fictitious event created impetus for the next. Worthy of note, I had not decided Alsoomse’s fate until several chapters before I finished the novel’s first draft.
What’s your definition of the first draft?
Alsoomse and Wanchese has forty chapters. I wrote them in identical stages: write five chapters, stop, review, eliminate glaring blemishes, write another five chapters. Two years after I had started, I saw before me what I considered to be my first draft. A year and a half later, 18 read-throughs of all of the chapters completed, I submit the manuscript to my publisher.
What are some of the myths around self-publishing / traditional publishing?
The biggest myth that I am cognizant of is that indie writers are hacks. Their works are of poor quality. Proof? Mainstream publishers won’t look at their manuscripts. Agents know this and behave accordingly. Bookstores like Barnes and Noble will not purchase books from indie publishers for fear that the books will not sell.
Such stores might be willing to take three or four books directly from the author providing that the author agrees to take them back if they don’t sell. The reading public reads mainstream published books more than indie books. I myself have appreciated mainstream published books more.
However, I have read several excellent indie novels, Ethan’s Peach Tree by Stan Jensen and A Circle of Earth by Patricia Weil — to name two. Literary agents’ rejection slips do not define necessarily the quality of an unrecognized writer’s work.
Another myth is that mainstream publishers do the grunt work of publicizing your work. Sit back, relax, accept the fruits of your considerable labor. Afterward, when the time seems right, think about starting your next novel.
From what I have read, you are still on your own, doing presentations at distant libraries where nobody shows up; setting up a website to collect followers that might, after a passage of time, take a chance on your book and fork over twenty bucks; finding website owners that are willing to interview you; accepting invitations made by individuals on the internet who say they want to review your book.
Looking back, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning of your journey?
Lower considerably your expectations.
In your community only people who know you will purchase your novel. I advertised in the newspaper of a town 30 miles north of where I live that I would be doing a talk/book signing at the local library. Nobody showed up.
Most people do not leisure-read. Most who like to read are not historical fiction enthusiasts. Those who do read historical fiction gravitate to stories about the Roman Empire or Tudor England. If a reader selects a novel about a time period in American history, most often it is the American Civil War or World War II.
Expect little monetary reward for your product. Each of my paperback novels costs readers approximately twenty dollars. (My publisher determines the price, not me) If a reader purchases one of them on-line from Amazon, after my publisher, the printer, Ingram, and Amazon take their cuts, I net approximately three dollars. If I buy books from my publisher (at a reduced price) to sell to people here in town, I (not my publisher) must pay the shipping cost. The post office makes as much money as I do — about four dollars per book.
A book store on Roanoke Island will sell my Alsoomse and Wanchese novel provided that I ship several copies to it (at my expense) and that I agree that the store gets to pocket 40% of the price it charges purchasers. Adding the cost of paying the post office shipping costs twice (buying the copies from my publisher and sending them to the Roanoke store) to what the publisher and printer would take, I would lose six dollars on each transaction.
The store would have to sell the book for thirty-two (not twenty) dollars for me to break even. Any book that they could not sell would be shipped back to me at my expense. I suspect that this is standard practice with independent stores. Chain stores do not stock indie novels.
Had I known all of the above beforehand, I am not certain that I would have gone forward. Which would have proved to have had greater import? Financial practicality or the desire to communicate what I have learned about human beings, educate, and create?
How do you imagine your target reader?
He/She would be somebody who thoroughly enjoys historical fiction, who is curious about modes of living and cultural practices and beliefs different from our own, who is eager to draw parallels as well as recognize differences, who has a thirst for knowledge, who is empathetic toward characters that need/deserve support, who advocates social justice, who detects in the novel universal themes, who appreciates depth of content, who does not believe that romance or non-stop action are essential elements of a rewarding book.
Is there anything you learned from reader reviews?
One lesson I learned is not to exchange books with another indie writer to give and receive reviews. Knowing that the author of the book that I was reviewing would be judging my own work, I had difficulty being entirely truthful. One writer’s book had its merits and what I considered several shortcomings.
Believing it deserved a 3.5, I rated it a 4. Even though her remarks were complimentary, the writer rated Crossing the River a 3. Another writer gave me two of her books to review. This person’s narrative ability was definitely lacking. I provided several examples of this, striving to be honest, gave one of the books a generous 3-star rating and the other an undeserved 4-star rating. The writer gave Crossing the River a 4-star rating before my ratings of her books appeared on goodreads.com. A week or so later, she changed her rating of my novel to a 3.
Lesson Two.
Wanting to find somebody on the internet willing to review Alsoomse and Wanchese, I accepted an invitation from a person who was pushing her website and who purported to be an devotee of historical fiction. A month or so later, she posted on goodreads.com this one-sentence review:
“While it was refreshing to see a novel with Native American protagonists, I found that the plot moved too slowly to hold my interest.”
She rated the novel 2 stars.
Later, on her website, she posted what appeared to be a full, fair review. Only I could detect that she had not read past the first three or four chapters of the forty-chapter novel. Hours and hours saved, on to the next book had apparently been her decision. If you are going to base your review and rating on three or four chapters, at least admit it. Either that or don’t do the review.
Four people in the last two months have offered via email to review Alsoomse and Wanchese. I asked each of them why they chose my book. None of them messaged back. I stay away now from volume reviewers.
Just how much research is there behind a novel? Tell us how it looks behind the scenes.
Computer file after computer file of cut-and-pasted information about North Carolina coastal plain trees, birds, fish, native settlements, Algonquian culture, agricultural practices, weapons and warfare, religious beliefs, societal structure, the structure of longhouses, gender responsibilities, trade, the making of bows and arrows and of pottery, the curing of wounds, the parts of an English bark, English clothing and weaponry. (What have I left out?)
Add information about the reign of Queen Elizabeth as it pertains especially to attempts at colonization in North America. Everything I could find about Algonquian leaders mentioned in reports written by Englishmen. Different interpretations by historians about what actually happened before and after the English arrived and settled on Roanoke Island.
As I wrote, I discovered that the story took certain directions that required me to research something vital to the story-telling. For instance, I decided that a confrontation between Roanoke natives and a war-like neighboring tribe needed to take place. Over hunting rights.
So where would this confrontation take place? Somewhere along the shoreline of Pamlico Sound nearly halfway between the opposing villages. Most of the terrain along the coastline is very swampy, not conducive to game seeking fresh water. I found an article on the internet about a former lake near the coastline that had eroded into its present state, Stumpy Point Bay. Centuries ago a peat fire had erupted and burned there for several months. Afterward, underground water, filling the exposed cavity, had created the lake. It was still a lake in 1583. I had what I wanted!
When you write a passage about a character making his way through thick vegetation on his way to attack a hostile village, research enables you to visualize what he encounters. From Alsoomse and Wanchese:
They had now gotten through the switchcane. They were entering a dense pocosin thicket. Wanchese indentified leafy wax myrtle; by its little white upside-down clustered flowers zenobia; by its long, white, dangling fingers titi; its black fruit not yet formed large galberry, twice as high as any man present.
Worst of all were bamboo vines, climbing over everything, large thorns sticking out of old growth. “Tear away only the new growth,” Cumay warned. “Be careful where you put your legs and feet. Try not to step on rattlesnakes.”
…
The thicket ended. Scattered pond pine, loblolly bay, and loblolly pine indicated the change, even though wax myrtle and inkberry were present. Happily, the bamboo vines were gone. “We are getting close,” Cumay, stopping, whispered. “Past that grove of pine is an old cornfield. We can hide behind the myrtle until you decide when to strike.”
July 28, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Freedom Summer -- Challenging the Democratic Party
A major roadblock to gaining voting rights in Mississippi and indeed, across the South, were the state Democratic Parties. “Dixiecrats” as southern Democrats were known, dominated state governments. A web of law, intimidation, official and unofficial force, and violence terrorizing Blacks seeking voting rights, kept Black people from voting. For all practical purposes, in Mississippi and across the South, the Democratic Party was “whites only.”
COFO’s voter registration projects helped to expose Black disenfranchisement, yet the organization’s efforts were ineffective in generating new Black voters in politically meaningful numbers. Much the same was true in other areas of the South where efforts aimed at expanding Black voter registration and political participation were unfolding. So, in Mississippi, COFO began discussing the ways and means of challenging the legitimacy of the state’s Democratic Party at the national level. As a first step, COFO workers organized a “freedom registration” and “freedom vote” in the fall of 1963. This was to prove that Blacks would register and vote if they could do so at unintimidating polling places; that apathy was not the problem, but violence, reprisal, and fear was.
In April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded. Open to all without regard to race, it was a parallel political party designed to simultaneously encourage Black political participation while challenging the validity of Mississippi’s lily-white Democratic Party.
The MFDP decided to challenge the seating of the so-called “regular” state party at the national party’s convention being planned for August in Atlantic City, New Jersey. With the help of hundreds of young volunteers who came to Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964, the MFDP slowly built up its membership and organized parallel precinct, county, and regional meetings. This culminated in a state convention to select delegates for the Atlantic City convention. The 68-person MFDP delegation included a wide variety of homegrown activists known for their determination and militancy in the face of harsh racial oppression. They included E.W. Steptoe, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, Hartman Turnbow and Hazel Palmer, among others. Using ideas developed during the local, county, and regional meetings, the MFDP crafted a political platform (Mississippi MFDP 1-2)
Delegates elected at MFDP’s state convention in Jackson on 6 August 1964 appealed to the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) of 1964 [in Atlantic City] to recognize their party’s delegation in place of the all-white Democratic Party delegation from Mississippi.
… the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and SNCC conducted public and private diplomacy on the MFDP’s behalf. In a nationally televised speech before the DNC credentials committee, MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer spoke passionately about the violence and intimidation suffered by Mississippi blacks seeking to register to vote, concluding, “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.” (Mississippi Stanford 2).
“Is this America, the land of the free and home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America” (Mississippi MFDP 2).
Although President Lyndon Johnson gave an emergency presidential press conference to prevent her testimony from going live over the three television networks, her speech was later aired across the country (Bond 2).
King echoed Hamer’s sentiment, telling the committee, “Any party in the world should be proud to have a delegation such as this seated in their midst. For it is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression” (Mississippi Stanford 3).
The MFDP enjoyed wide support from many liberal Northern delegates, and from members of the Credentials Committee at the Convention who proposed that both delegations be seated (Schein 1).
President Johnson and other Democratic Party leaders, although largely sympathetic to the MFDP’s civil rights stance, were dismayed by the negative publicity the group was causing at a time when Johnson wanted media attention focused on his presidential election campaign. … national party leaders including vice presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey sought to deal with MFDP representatives behind closed doors (Mississippi Britannica 2). Johnson, seeking a peaceful, non-controversial convention and fearful of a Dixiecrat walkout, battered MFDP supporters. Threats were made against supporters in line for federal appointments, and United Automobile Workers leader, Walter Reuther, threatened to withhold money from Martin Luther King’s SCLC.
Finally, a compromise was announced by then-Minneapolis Attorney General Walter Mondale: two [at-large] seats for the MFDP, “guest” status to the remaining MFDP delegates, and full seating of the so-called regulars. No discussion had been held with the MFDP about this “compromise” (Mississippi MFDP 3). The … all-white delegation …would formally promise to support the DNC’s candidates in the upcoming elections (rather than campaign for Republican Barry Goldwater), and segregated delegations would be barred from the 1968 convention.
Although King had told Johnson that he would “do everything in my power to urge [the MFDP] being seated as the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi,” he supported the compromise (King, 19 August 1964). MFDP delegates and many civil rights activists, however, were disheartened by the Credentials Committee’s refusal to seat MFDP delegates. Hamer’s response was, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats” (Mississippi Stanford 4).
Born on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to a family of sharecroppers, [Fannie Lou Hamer] …was the youngest of Lou Ella and Jim Townsend’s twenty children. Her family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1919 to work on the E. W. Brandon plantation.
Hamer’s activism began in the 1950s when she attended several annual conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership organized by Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy businessman and civil rights leader in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. There, Hamer encountered prominent civil rights leaders such as Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs.
Several pivotal moments in Hamer’s life became public reminders that America’s vision of democracy was incongruent with its horrifying reality. In 1961 she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent by a white doctor as part of the state of Mississippi’s plan to reduce the number of impoverished blacks in the state. On August 23, 1962, after hearing a sermon by Rev. James Bevel, she volunteered to become an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help black Mississippians register to vote. While she was traveling by bus on June 3, 1963, state law enforcement officers in Winona, Mississippi, took Hamer and fellow activists to Montgomery County Jail where they were beaten mercilessly. She testified that she was beaten until her “body was hard.” She suffered a blood clot, sustained damage to her kidney, and required a month to recover from the assault. Hamer was not intimidated and after her recovery returned to the effort to register and organize black voters (Bond 1-2).
The MFDP delegates rejected the compromise.
Late in August, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and the SNCC and CORE organizers return to Mississippi. Many are angry at the Democratic Party leadership's refusal to recognize them as legitimate delegates representing Mississippi and furious at the devious political manipulations used to prevent them from bringing their case to a vote on the convention floor. To them, the actions of Johnson, Humphrey, Mondale and others are a betrayal of public pledges and private promises made over the past years of bitter struggle. Yet they are determined to carry on. They are proud of what they have achieved — and proud of holding together in the face of adversity.
…
The immediate question is whether or not to support Johnson in November. Some activists argue that the MFDP should have nothing more to do with the Democrats. Instead, they want the MFDP to become an independent, Black-oriented political party. But with the "regular" (white) Mississippi Democrat Party apparatus now actively supporting the Republican candidate Goldwater, many in the MFDP hope that by campaigning for Johnson they can supplant the segregationists and eventually win recognition from the national party, or at least reap some political rewards after LBJ's inevitable victory. Their view prevails, and the MFDP urges voters to support the Democratic candidate.
… the MFDP adopts a bold plan to push forward the Movement in Mississippi. They will challenge the legitimacy of the 1964 election in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legal arguments and tactics are complex, but the essence is clear and simple — since almost half of the state's population are denied the right to vote, and those few Blacks who do manage to register are prevented from freely participating in the electoral process, the election is clearly fraudulent. Therefore, the House will be asked to set aside the results, refuse to seat the state's white Congressmen, and instead call for new and fair elections in which every citizen can vote regardless of race. Legally, the House has the power to refuse to seat, or to unseat, any member for any reason it chooses — the question is whether it has the political will to do so in defense of Black voting rights.
…
The proponents, of course, know that the chances of actually unseating the white Congressmen are slim to none. But they argue that the effort provides a way of continuing the momentum from Freedom Summer and the Atlantic City challenge, pushing forward local organizing, building the MFDP on the ground, and dramatizing the denial of voting rights and fraudulent elections before the nation. And they believe that if they can build a strong enough case to gain at least some support in Congress this time around, they raise the spectre of future challenges to white-dominated elections across the South.
Under the rules, only a defeated candidate can challenge an election in the House, so Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray run for Congress in three of the state's five Congressional districts. Back in June, MFDP candidates had run in the Mississippi Democratic Primary election, but with few Blacks able to vote they were easily defeated. They then tried to get on the November ballot as Independents, but the state Board of Elections blocked them. So since they are not on the official ballot, they run on a "Freedom Ballot" as was done in 1963. This means that supporters are asked to cast unofficial Freedom Ballots in churches and community centers. …
Since few Mississippi Blacks are registered and whites are overwhelmingly for Goldwater, on election day November 3rd the MFDP's effort to support Johnson has no effect on the election outcome. For the first time since Reconstruction, Mississippi goes Republican — by a margin of 87% to 12%. And as expected, LBJ also looses the other Deep South states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — the states that along with Mississippi have been most ruthless in denying Blacks the right to vote. Also as expected, he wins a nationwide landslide victory over Goldwater. The Democrats gain two seats in the Senate, giving them a two-thirds majority, and 36 seats in the House, providing a huge 295 to 140 majority over the Republicans.
At a White House meeting after the election, Dr. King presses LBJ on the urgent need for federal legislation to protect black voting rights in the South (the kind of legislation that was stripped out of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). The President tells him, "I can't get a voting rights bill through [the coming] session of Congress." Moreover, to enact his "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs, LBJ tells King he will need the support of southern Senators. Support he would lose if he tried to pass voting rights legislation. He assures Dr. King that eventually he will address voting rights — but not in 1965.
Johnson's promise of someday satisfies neither Dr. King nor the Freedom Movement as a whole.
On December 4th, 1964, the MFDP files official notice with the House of Representatives that they are challenging the election in the three Mississippi Congressional districts where Hamer, Gray, and Devine ran on the Freedom Ballot. Under the rules, the challenged candidates have 30 days to respond, bringing the matter to January 4th, 1965, the opening day of the 89th Congress.
…
Congressman William Ryan (D-NY) agrees to move a "fairness resolution" in addition to the Challenge that would block the seating of all five of the white men "elected" to the House from Mississippi. A dozen other members, including John Conyers (D-MI), Edith Green (D-OR), Patsy Mink (D-HI), and the eldest son of FDR, James Roosevelt (D-CA), pledge to support him. The White House and Democratic Party leadership bear down hard to isolate these upstart trouble-makers.
…
The 89th Congress convenes for the first time on January 4th, 1965. Hundreds of MFDP supporters journey by bus from Mississippi to support the Challenge and lobby for the Ryan's resolution. It is illegal to carry signs or conduct a protest inside Capitol buildings, so they line the underground tunnels that Representatives use to reach the House chamber.
On opening day, as congressmen and their aides made their way through these tunnels, they turned a corner and found themselves passing between two lines of silent, working black men and women from Mississippi. The people, spaced about ten feet apart, stood still as statues, dignified, erect, utterly silent. ... The congressmen had come by in little groups, each group, a congressman and one or two aides, deep in conversation. They'd turn the corner, and for a moment the sight of our people would stop them dead in their tracks. We didn't move or say a mumbling word. Then the group would walk between the two rows, but now suddenly very silent. It's hard to describe the power of that moment. I looked into the legislators' faces as they passed. Most could not take their eyes off those careworn, tired black faces. Some offered a timid greeting, a smile, or tentative wave. Others flushed and looked down. All seemed startled. Some clearly nervous, even afraid. All seemed deeply affected in some way. Our people just stood there and looked at them. For these lawmakers using the tunnels that morning, that impassive, profoundly physical presence was an unexpected confrontation with reality. That grave, mute presence became the most effective and eloquent of testimonies. To those passing congressmen, the issue of Southern political injustice could no longer remain an abstract statistic, distant and dismissable. — Kwame Ture (Stokeley Carmichael).
…
The "fairness resolution" is defeated 149-276. But 149 votes to bar five "elected" members of Congress is an astonishing number, more than one-third of the House. The five from Mississippi are sworn in, but the three being directly challenged by Devine, Gray, and Hamer are only "provisionally" seated pending the outcome of the lengthy process.
In one sense, the vote to seat the Mississippi Congressmen is a defeat for justice and a victory for racism. Every member of Congress knows that for generations Blacks in Mississippi — indeed, across the South — have been illegally denied the right to vote. Yet when the time comes to take a stand, almost two-thirds of the House close their eyes to that injustice.
Yet in another sense, winning support from a third of the House for the objection is a huge victory for the Freedom Movement — not a conclusion of the struggle, but a major milestone nonetheless. And it has immediate effects in Mississippi. Editorials in the southern press squeal in outrage that the fair name of Mississippi has been "traduced by radicals." The local airwaves are filled with whining complaints that (as usual) Congress has turned against them and treated unfairly the fair defenders of the glorious "Southern way of life." But those 149 votes send a clear political message to the white power-structure.
…
From January 4th, the MFDP has 40 days to gather evidence in support of their Challenge to the three provisionally seated Congressmen. The challenged Congressmen then have 40 days to collect counter-evidence, followed by 10 days for the MFDP to collect rebuttal evidence. All the evidence is then submitted to Congress, there are periods for filing briefs and legislative process, and then (finally) Congress votes to decide the issue (MFDP 1-10).
Though the mass media focuses mostly on the white volunteers, to some degree the nation is nevertheless becoming aware of voter registration and denial of basic human rights in the South as important issues. Just as the Freedom Rides, Birmingham Campaign, and St. Augustine Movement forced segregation onto the national agenda, media stories and personal letters from Freedom Summer volunteers begin doing the same for the denial of basic human rights in the South. Increasing numbers of northern voters — white as well as Black — call voting rights to the attention of Congress and the White House. As Freedom Summer ends, President Johnson is still telling Black leaders that new civil rights legislation is neither needed nor politically possible, but pressure is building. Pressure that in just four months will explode in Selma, Alabama (Freedom Summer 4).
Works Cited:
Bond, Zanice. “Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977).” BlackPast. March 24, 2018. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-ame...
“Freedom Summer: The Results.” Civil Rights Movement History
Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“MFDP Congressional Challenge (Nov '64-Sept '65).” Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...
“Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).” Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/a...
“Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Research Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
Schein, Ruth. “Mississippi Freedom Summer Project Collection.” The New York Public Library Archieves & Manuscripts. Web. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20768
COFO’s voter registration projects helped to expose Black disenfranchisement, yet the organization’s efforts were ineffective in generating new Black voters in politically meaningful numbers. Much the same was true in other areas of the South where efforts aimed at expanding Black voter registration and political participation were unfolding. So, in Mississippi, COFO began discussing the ways and means of challenging the legitimacy of the state’s Democratic Party at the national level. As a first step, COFO workers organized a “freedom registration” and “freedom vote” in the fall of 1963. This was to prove that Blacks would register and vote if they could do so at unintimidating polling places; that apathy was not the problem, but violence, reprisal, and fear was.
In April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded. Open to all without regard to race, it was a parallel political party designed to simultaneously encourage Black political participation while challenging the validity of Mississippi’s lily-white Democratic Party.
The MFDP decided to challenge the seating of the so-called “regular” state party at the national party’s convention being planned for August in Atlantic City, New Jersey. With the help of hundreds of young volunteers who came to Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964, the MFDP slowly built up its membership and organized parallel precinct, county, and regional meetings. This culminated in a state convention to select delegates for the Atlantic City convention. The 68-person MFDP delegation included a wide variety of homegrown activists known for their determination and militancy in the face of harsh racial oppression. They included E.W. Steptoe, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, Hartman Turnbow and Hazel Palmer, among others. Using ideas developed during the local, county, and regional meetings, the MFDP crafted a political platform (Mississippi MFDP 1-2)
Delegates elected at MFDP’s state convention in Jackson on 6 August 1964 appealed to the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) of 1964 [in Atlantic City] to recognize their party’s delegation in place of the all-white Democratic Party delegation from Mississippi.
… the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and SNCC conducted public and private diplomacy on the MFDP’s behalf. In a nationally televised speech before the DNC credentials committee, MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer spoke passionately about the violence and intimidation suffered by Mississippi blacks seeking to register to vote, concluding, “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.” (Mississippi Stanford 2).
“Is this America, the land of the free and home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America” (Mississippi MFDP 2).
Although President Lyndon Johnson gave an emergency presidential press conference to prevent her testimony from going live over the three television networks, her speech was later aired across the country (Bond 2).
King echoed Hamer’s sentiment, telling the committee, “Any party in the world should be proud to have a delegation such as this seated in their midst. For it is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression” (Mississippi Stanford 3).
The MFDP enjoyed wide support from many liberal Northern delegates, and from members of the Credentials Committee at the Convention who proposed that both delegations be seated (Schein 1).
President Johnson and other Democratic Party leaders, although largely sympathetic to the MFDP’s civil rights stance, were dismayed by the negative publicity the group was causing at a time when Johnson wanted media attention focused on his presidential election campaign. … national party leaders including vice presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey sought to deal with MFDP representatives behind closed doors (Mississippi Britannica 2). Johnson, seeking a peaceful, non-controversial convention and fearful of a Dixiecrat walkout, battered MFDP supporters. Threats were made against supporters in line for federal appointments, and United Automobile Workers leader, Walter Reuther, threatened to withhold money from Martin Luther King’s SCLC.
Finally, a compromise was announced by then-Minneapolis Attorney General Walter Mondale: two [at-large] seats for the MFDP, “guest” status to the remaining MFDP delegates, and full seating of the so-called regulars. No discussion had been held with the MFDP about this “compromise” (Mississippi MFDP 3). The … all-white delegation …would formally promise to support the DNC’s candidates in the upcoming elections (rather than campaign for Republican Barry Goldwater), and segregated delegations would be barred from the 1968 convention.
Although King had told Johnson that he would “do everything in my power to urge [the MFDP] being seated as the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi,” he supported the compromise (King, 19 August 1964). MFDP delegates and many civil rights activists, however, were disheartened by the Credentials Committee’s refusal to seat MFDP delegates. Hamer’s response was, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats” (Mississippi Stanford 4).
Born on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to a family of sharecroppers, [Fannie Lou Hamer] …was the youngest of Lou Ella and Jim Townsend’s twenty children. Her family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1919 to work on the E. W. Brandon plantation.
Hamer’s activism began in the 1950s when she attended several annual conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership organized by Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy businessman and civil rights leader in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. There, Hamer encountered prominent civil rights leaders such as Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs.
Several pivotal moments in Hamer’s life became public reminders that America’s vision of democracy was incongruent with its horrifying reality. In 1961 she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent by a white doctor as part of the state of Mississippi’s plan to reduce the number of impoverished blacks in the state. On August 23, 1962, after hearing a sermon by Rev. James Bevel, she volunteered to become an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help black Mississippians register to vote. While she was traveling by bus on June 3, 1963, state law enforcement officers in Winona, Mississippi, took Hamer and fellow activists to Montgomery County Jail where they were beaten mercilessly. She testified that she was beaten until her “body was hard.” She suffered a blood clot, sustained damage to her kidney, and required a month to recover from the assault. Hamer was not intimidated and after her recovery returned to the effort to register and organize black voters (Bond 1-2).
The MFDP delegates rejected the compromise.
Late in August, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and the SNCC and CORE organizers return to Mississippi. Many are angry at the Democratic Party leadership's refusal to recognize them as legitimate delegates representing Mississippi and furious at the devious political manipulations used to prevent them from bringing their case to a vote on the convention floor. To them, the actions of Johnson, Humphrey, Mondale and others are a betrayal of public pledges and private promises made over the past years of bitter struggle. Yet they are determined to carry on. They are proud of what they have achieved — and proud of holding together in the face of adversity.
…
The immediate question is whether or not to support Johnson in November. Some activists argue that the MFDP should have nothing more to do with the Democrats. Instead, they want the MFDP to become an independent, Black-oriented political party. But with the "regular" (white) Mississippi Democrat Party apparatus now actively supporting the Republican candidate Goldwater, many in the MFDP hope that by campaigning for Johnson they can supplant the segregationists and eventually win recognition from the national party, or at least reap some political rewards after LBJ's inevitable victory. Their view prevails, and the MFDP urges voters to support the Democratic candidate.
… the MFDP adopts a bold plan to push forward the Movement in Mississippi. They will challenge the legitimacy of the 1964 election in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legal arguments and tactics are complex, but the essence is clear and simple — since almost half of the state's population are denied the right to vote, and those few Blacks who do manage to register are prevented from freely participating in the electoral process, the election is clearly fraudulent. Therefore, the House will be asked to set aside the results, refuse to seat the state's white Congressmen, and instead call for new and fair elections in which every citizen can vote regardless of race. Legally, the House has the power to refuse to seat, or to unseat, any member for any reason it chooses — the question is whether it has the political will to do so in defense of Black voting rights.
…
The proponents, of course, know that the chances of actually unseating the white Congressmen are slim to none. But they argue that the effort provides a way of continuing the momentum from Freedom Summer and the Atlantic City challenge, pushing forward local organizing, building the MFDP on the ground, and dramatizing the denial of voting rights and fraudulent elections before the nation. And they believe that if they can build a strong enough case to gain at least some support in Congress this time around, they raise the spectre of future challenges to white-dominated elections across the South.
Under the rules, only a defeated candidate can challenge an election in the House, so Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray run for Congress in three of the state's five Congressional districts. Back in June, MFDP candidates had run in the Mississippi Democratic Primary election, but with few Blacks able to vote they were easily defeated. They then tried to get on the November ballot as Independents, but the state Board of Elections blocked them. So since they are not on the official ballot, they run on a "Freedom Ballot" as was done in 1963. This means that supporters are asked to cast unofficial Freedom Ballots in churches and community centers. …
Since few Mississippi Blacks are registered and whites are overwhelmingly for Goldwater, on election day November 3rd the MFDP's effort to support Johnson has no effect on the election outcome. For the first time since Reconstruction, Mississippi goes Republican — by a margin of 87% to 12%. And as expected, LBJ also looses the other Deep South states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — the states that along with Mississippi have been most ruthless in denying Blacks the right to vote. Also as expected, he wins a nationwide landslide victory over Goldwater. The Democrats gain two seats in the Senate, giving them a two-thirds majority, and 36 seats in the House, providing a huge 295 to 140 majority over the Republicans.
At a White House meeting after the election, Dr. King presses LBJ on the urgent need for federal legislation to protect black voting rights in the South (the kind of legislation that was stripped out of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). The President tells him, "I can't get a voting rights bill through [the coming] session of Congress." Moreover, to enact his "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs, LBJ tells King he will need the support of southern Senators. Support he would lose if he tried to pass voting rights legislation. He assures Dr. King that eventually he will address voting rights — but not in 1965.
Johnson's promise of someday satisfies neither Dr. King nor the Freedom Movement as a whole.
On December 4th, 1964, the MFDP files official notice with the House of Representatives that they are challenging the election in the three Mississippi Congressional districts where Hamer, Gray, and Devine ran on the Freedom Ballot. Under the rules, the challenged candidates have 30 days to respond, bringing the matter to January 4th, 1965, the opening day of the 89th Congress.
…
Congressman William Ryan (D-NY) agrees to move a "fairness resolution" in addition to the Challenge that would block the seating of all five of the white men "elected" to the House from Mississippi. A dozen other members, including John Conyers (D-MI), Edith Green (D-OR), Patsy Mink (D-HI), and the eldest son of FDR, James Roosevelt (D-CA), pledge to support him. The White House and Democratic Party leadership bear down hard to isolate these upstart trouble-makers.
…
The 89th Congress convenes for the first time on January 4th, 1965. Hundreds of MFDP supporters journey by bus from Mississippi to support the Challenge and lobby for the Ryan's resolution. It is illegal to carry signs or conduct a protest inside Capitol buildings, so they line the underground tunnels that Representatives use to reach the House chamber.
On opening day, as congressmen and their aides made their way through these tunnels, they turned a corner and found themselves passing between two lines of silent, working black men and women from Mississippi. The people, spaced about ten feet apart, stood still as statues, dignified, erect, utterly silent. ... The congressmen had come by in little groups, each group, a congressman and one or two aides, deep in conversation. They'd turn the corner, and for a moment the sight of our people would stop them dead in their tracks. We didn't move or say a mumbling word. Then the group would walk between the two rows, but now suddenly very silent. It's hard to describe the power of that moment. I looked into the legislators' faces as they passed. Most could not take their eyes off those careworn, tired black faces. Some offered a timid greeting, a smile, or tentative wave. Others flushed and looked down. All seemed startled. Some clearly nervous, even afraid. All seemed deeply affected in some way. Our people just stood there and looked at them. For these lawmakers using the tunnels that morning, that impassive, profoundly physical presence was an unexpected confrontation with reality. That grave, mute presence became the most effective and eloquent of testimonies. To those passing congressmen, the issue of Southern political injustice could no longer remain an abstract statistic, distant and dismissable. — Kwame Ture (Stokeley Carmichael).
…
The "fairness resolution" is defeated 149-276. But 149 votes to bar five "elected" members of Congress is an astonishing number, more than one-third of the House. The five from Mississippi are sworn in, but the three being directly challenged by Devine, Gray, and Hamer are only "provisionally" seated pending the outcome of the lengthy process.
In one sense, the vote to seat the Mississippi Congressmen is a defeat for justice and a victory for racism. Every member of Congress knows that for generations Blacks in Mississippi — indeed, across the South — have been illegally denied the right to vote. Yet when the time comes to take a stand, almost two-thirds of the House close their eyes to that injustice.
Yet in another sense, winning support from a third of the House for the objection is a huge victory for the Freedom Movement — not a conclusion of the struggle, but a major milestone nonetheless. And it has immediate effects in Mississippi. Editorials in the southern press squeal in outrage that the fair name of Mississippi has been "traduced by radicals." The local airwaves are filled with whining complaints that (as usual) Congress has turned against them and treated unfairly the fair defenders of the glorious "Southern way of life." But those 149 votes send a clear political message to the white power-structure.
…
From January 4th, the MFDP has 40 days to gather evidence in support of their Challenge to the three provisionally seated Congressmen. The challenged Congressmen then have 40 days to collect counter-evidence, followed by 10 days for the MFDP to collect rebuttal evidence. All the evidence is then submitted to Congress, there are periods for filing briefs and legislative process, and then (finally) Congress votes to decide the issue (MFDP 1-10).
Though the mass media focuses mostly on the white volunteers, to some degree the nation is nevertheless becoming aware of voter registration and denial of basic human rights in the South as important issues. Just as the Freedom Rides, Birmingham Campaign, and St. Augustine Movement forced segregation onto the national agenda, media stories and personal letters from Freedom Summer volunteers begin doing the same for the denial of basic human rights in the South. Increasing numbers of northern voters — white as well as Black — call voting rights to the attention of Congress and the White House. As Freedom Summer ends, President Johnson is still telling Black leaders that new civil rights legislation is neither needed nor politically possible, but pressure is building. Pressure that in just four months will explode in Selma, Alabama (Freedom Summer 4).
Works Cited:
Bond, Zanice. “Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977).” BlackPast. March 24, 2018. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-ame...
“Freedom Summer: The Results.” Civil Rights Movement History
Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“MFDP Congressional Challenge (Nov '64-Sept '65).” Civil Rights Movement History
1964 July-Dec. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...
“Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).” Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/a...
“Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Research Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/en...
Schein, Ruth. “Mississippi Freedom Summer Project Collection.” The New York Public Library Archieves & Manuscripts. Web. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20768
July 22, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Freedom Summer -- Greenwood and McComb
To locate these two communities (Greenwood north of Jackson and McComb south of Jackson) access this map: https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/natio....
On July 2nd, President Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In some Movement battlegrounds segregation of public facilities begins to collapse. The St. Augustine business community defies Klan threats by agreeing to end "white-only" policies. In Albany, Blacks are served instead of arrested, and SCLC holds its convention in Birmingham with Dr. King and other Black ministers staying at the brand-new Parliament House hotel. But in Selma, whites violently attack young Blacks who dare to defy the color-line, in Jackson the Robert E. Lee hotel converts from a public facility to a "private club" rather than admit Blacks, and across the South deeply entrenched customs of racial segregation remain in place until they are directly challenged. As the old saying goes: "Where the broom don't sweep, the dirt don't move."
Greenwood
In many ways, Greenwood is the epicenter of Freedom Summer activity. It is the heart of the Delta where the majority of projects are located, and SNCC's national office is temporarily relocated there from Atlanta. Here, the strategic priorities are clear — voter registration, community organizing, and building the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] towards the challenge at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Human and financial resources are stretched desperately thin. Sit-ins to test the new Civil Rights Act divert organizer time and attention, cost bail money, and inevitably result in activists languishing in jail. Mississippi whites are already enraged over the "invasion" of "race-mixers" and "agitators," to say nothing of Blacks socially interacting with white activists, particularly young white women. Movement leaders fear that direct-action protests for hamburgers and library cards will intensify both violent retaliation and police repression. But "freedom is in the air," courage is contagious, and the daily humiliations of "white-only/colored-only" cry out for defiance (McGhees 53).
From the beginning, with the first voter-registration effort in McComb after the Freedom Rides SNCC's Mississippi strategy has been based on two premises: First, that the primary goal must be achieving political power for Blacks, which requires voter-registration. Second, that most Afro-Americans in the state cannot afford to patronize white restaurants or theaters, so integrating them is at best merely symbolic. But there is a long-standing disagreement between those who argue that integration efforts provoke so much white violence and state repression that voter-registration is crippled, and those who believe that defiant action by young people awakens courage in adults, helps them rise above their fears, and encourages them to register. That may be true, argue others, but staff and volunteers languishing in jail cells can't canvas or organize and diverting desperately need funds to bail them out weakens the central effort.
But after passage of the Act, young Blacks across the state are eager to defy segregation and exercise their new rights. They want to "spit in the eye" of white racists by integrating hamburger joints and movie theaters. Three years of Movement activity have filled them with courage and now they believe the law is on their side.
Whites, however, are already enraged by the mere existence of Freedom Summer and further inflamed by Johnson signing the Act. In Greenwood and other communities, carloads of armed thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble, some are members of the Sheriff's posse, some are outright Klan. One of these "auxiliary" deputies is Byron De la Beckwith, and everyone in Leflore County, Black and white, know that he murdered Medgar Evers.
The question is thrashed out in meeting after meeting. The majority of SNCC staff agree with Bob Moses that they have to remain disciplined, stick to the plan, and not let themselves or the Movement become distracted. But some staff and some summer volunteers argue that it was the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early 1960s that sparked and energized the Movement and that if the Civil Rights Act is not tested and enforced immediately it will wither away and become just another unenforced law. By and large, adults in the community agree that now is not the time for integrating lunch counters. But young activists not yet old enough to vote are restless, in some communities they take independent action on their own, and when they are arrested or beaten a portion of Movement time and resources has to be diverted in response. Yet at the same time, their courage and defiance does encourage and inspire their elders.
The issue is most acute in Greenwood which has been a center of Freedom Movement activity since early 1962. It comes to a head after national NAACP leaders swoop into town accompanied by reporters and FBI agents. They integrate a few upscale establishments to great media acclaim and then drive off. Afterwards, no one, not even SNCC, can restrain Greenwood's Black youth from direct action at "white-only" establishments (Direct 27-29)
Silas McGhee, 21, is Chair of the Greenwood NAACP Youth Council's Testing Committee. His brother Jake is Assistant Chair. On July 5th, Silas walks three miles from his family's farm to the Leflore Theater in Greenwood. Defying a century of rigid segregation, he takes a seat on the "whites-only" main floor rather than the "Colored" balcony. He is attacked and harassed. The cops haul him home with a warning. When his brothers ask why he went by himself he tells them, "Well, you wasn't nowhere around when I decided to go. I just went."
Greenwood is a small town and word of his attempt to break the color-line spreads through the Black community — and among whites as well. On July 16, Silas observes Freedom Day from across the street. He is not one of the 111 people arrested. As he walks home alone, three Klansmen ambush him and force him at gunpoint into their car. They beat him with clubs and try to lock him in a shed, but he manages to break free. He evades their pursuit and reaches the FBI office Greenwood. Agents arrest the three attackers under the new civil rights law — the first case of its kind in Mississippi.
The McGhees are a tight-knit family and they're not known for backing down. Silas's mother and brothers join him in action and the cops discover that arresting the McGhees just makes them more determined.
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) narrates: “The rest of July was a running battle between the McGhees, the theater, the mob, and the cops. ... Silas and his brother Jake kept going back to the theater. Five or six times. Each time when they tried to leave, a mob greeted them. ... Another night Jake and Silas went back to the movies, but this time when the mob formed, a towering (6'8"), linebacker-built paratrooper in full dress uniform appeared and faced down a member of the mob. Turned out it was their older brother, Clarence (Robinson), a decorated Korean War veteran on active duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A trained American fighting man, taking leave to come defend freedom, democracy, the Constitution, and his younger brothers in his hometown. Then he got himself jailed for assault.”
On Monday evening, August 15, after being released from jail, Silas is resting in a car outside of Lulu's Cafe on Avenue H in the Black community. Rain is pouring down and the night is dark. Two white men in a car drive slowly by, they shoot Silas in the head and speed off. SNCC field-secretary Bob Zellner and summer volunteer Mark Winter strip off their shirts to try to stop the bleeding. With volunteer Linda Whetmore Halpern, they rush Silas to the segregated Greenwood public hospital. Cops at the hospital won't let them in because they're using the "wrong" entrance. They drive around back to the other door, but the cops again bar them — this time because Bob and Mark are not wearing shirts. Linda has to go in alone, her blue dress drenched red with blood. She gets a stretcher and brings Silas inside.
The white doctors in this tax-financed hospital won't treat a wounded Black man, so Dr. Jackson — the only Black MD in Greenwood — is summoned. While he works to save Silas's life, officer Logan of the Greenwood police department tells another cop "Well, they finally got that nigger Silas!" Other cops make it clear that if Silas doesn't die on the operating table he'll be killed during the night. As soon as Silas is stabilized, Movement leaders arrange to have him transferred to a hospital in Jackson (McGhees 54-56).
While white Mississippi mobilizes to defend the "Southern Way of Life" with billy clubs and jail cells, guns and bombs, the White House and Justice Department do nothing. Despite repeated pleas from civil rights leaders, they refuse to condemn or criticize the hate and hysteria being whipped to fever pitch in Mississippi. They refuse to issue any public statement or give any private signal that violence or state repression against nonviolent voter registration efforts will be prosecuted as required by federal law. They refuse to even acknowledge that registering voters and teaching children are neither criminal acts nor subversive plots. FBI Director Hoover does, however, tell the press: "We will not wet-nurse troublemakers."
In early June, just before the [Freedom Summer] project is to begin, a Black delegation [had traveled] … from Mississippi to Washington to warn of impending violence and beg for protection. The President [had been] … out of town. The Attorney General [had been] … unavailable. Congress [had been] … uninterested in holding any hearings. The FBI [had rebuffed] … them as subversives and Communist dupes.
Desperate for someone to hear their pleas, the delegation [had held] … a conference at the National Theater, addressing a volunteer panel of writers, educators, and lawyers, along with several hundred ordinary citizens. Fannie Lou Hamer [had described] … the brutal police beating in Winona MS, Mrs. Allen [had testified] … about the recent murder of her husband, a boy of 14 [had told] … of police brutality against peaceful pickets, and SNCC worker Jimmy Travis [had talked] … of being shot in Greenwood and [had asked] … for federal marshals to protect voter registration workers. Legal scholars [had described] … the statutes allowing — in fact, requiring — the federal government to enforce the law, make arrests, and protect the rights of voters. The transcript [had been] … sent to President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There [had been] … no response.
At the volunteer-orientation in Oxford Ohio, DOJ official John Doar [had addressed] … the volunteers who are about to go down into Mississippi. They [had asked] … him: "What will be the role of the federal government in protecting our lives?" He [had replied] … that so far as their government is concerned they will have to take their chances with a hostile state — defenseless. They will be in the same situation that southern Blacks have endured for generations. The volunteers [had booed] …, but Bob Moses [had stopped] … them, saying, "We don't do that." He [had told] … them that Doar is just being honest (Washington 12-14).
Greenwood's Black community is enraged. More than a dozen young Black men armed with rifles ask SNCC field-secretary Wazir Peacock about invading North Greenwood — a white neighborhood — and retaliating in kind. He tells them that it wouldn't be right to attack whites who had nothing to do with the shooting. He also understands that doing so would bring down a wave of violent repression against the entire Black community. The Klan is known to have been stockpiling military-type weapons, and it's possible that the shooting of Silas is intended to provoke just such a war. The young men agree to concentrate on defending the Black community from further KKK attack.
The shooting of Silas McGhee halts neither the McGhee family nor the work of the Freedom Movement. Voter registration and building the MFDP continue, as do efforts to implement the Civil Rights Act (McGhees 57)).
McComb
Back in the Fall of 1961, the McComb voter-registration project — SNCC's first — was temporarily suppressed by Klan violence, the brutal murder of Herbert Lee, economic retaliation, the expulsion of more than 100 high-school student protesters, federal indifference, and the incarceration of the SNCC staff on trumped up charges. But SNCC has neither forgotten, nor abandoned McComb. In the Fall of '63, SNCC workers briefly return to mobilize support for the Freedom Ballot, and again in January of '64 for voter-registration classes. But Klan repression is unrelenting, threats and intimidation are constant, night-riders shoot up Black homes and businesses, and on January 31st Louis Allen who witnessed Herbert Lee's murder is assassinated.
As they begin planning the Summer Project in early 1964, SNCC activists are determined to re-establish a permanent Freedom Movement presence in McComb. They know with dead certainty that doing so means a showdown with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America, the two KKK factions who have turned the Pearl River area of Southwest Mississippi into "Klan Nation."
The forces of white-supremacy are of the same opinion. Pike County sheriff R.R. Warren tells a meeting of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) that he expects a "long hot summer" and that he may need to recruit their assistance if law enforcement is unable to suppress the COFO "threat." Rumors swirl through the white community that Black men identified by white bandages on their throats have been specifically assigned to rape white women. Parents are warned to know where their small children are at all times. Sales of guns and ammunition spike upward, and Klan membership soars. The oilman who financially backs the Klan has easy access to dynamite, and on the night of June 22nd — 24 hours after the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman — explosions blast through the Black community, damaging the home of NAACP leader C.C. Bryant who grabs his rifle and fires back at the bomber's car.
Initially, COFO leaders judge Southwestern Mississippi too dangerous for the highly visible northern white students, so the McComb and Natchez projects are put on temporary hold until the situation stabilizes. By early July, FBI agents have flooded into the state and the news media is providing extensive coverage of the search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman so COFO decides to risk restarting the McComb project. Led by SNCC organizer and former McComb activist Curtis Hayes (today, Curtis Muhammad), the first contingent of Freedom Summer workers arrive on July 5th.
They open a COFO freedom house on Wall Street in the Black community. Two nights later a dynamite bomb damages the house, injuring Curtis Hayes and volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The FBI "investigates" and does nothing. Over the following days, Black churches are burned in Pike and Amite counties, SNCC field secretary Mendy Samstein is attacked and beaten on a McComb street, and the home of C.C. Bryant's brother is bombed. With no protection from police or the federal government, local Blacks active with the Movement stand armed guard each night against Klan bombers and night riders.
Except for a core of dedicated and courageous activists like the Bryants, Aylene "Mama" Quin, Webb Owens, Willie Mae Cotton, Ernest Nobles, Joe Martin, and a handful of others, fear is pervasive in McComb's Black community. No churches are willing to open their doors for mass meetings, voter-registration classes, or Freedom Schools. The few Blacks who dare the short trip to the county courthouse in Magnolia on voter-registration days face threats of violence and economic retaliation. COFO canvassers are hard pressed to find any willing to take that risk.
But as it was back in '61, it's the Black youth who stand up and move forward. With no church or other building open to it, the McComb Freedom School meets in the dirt yard of the bombed freedom house. Joyce Brown (16), a Freedom School student-teacher pens The House of Liberty, a poem addressed to the community's adults that reads in part:
I asked for your churches, and you turned me down,
But I'll do my work if I have to do it on the ground,
You will not speak for fear of being heard,
So you crawl in your shell and say, "Do not disturb,"
You think because you've turned me away,
You've protected yourself for another day.
— Joyce Brown.
Young activists and COFO organizers circulate her poem throughout the Black community and the elders respond. A church opens its doors to the Freedom School and soon more than 100 students overflow the space — some of them the younger sisters and brothers of the those who had protested and been expelled from Burgland High three years before. "The Freedom School is inspiring the people to lend a hand in the fight," reports school director Ralph Featherstone. "The older people are looking to the young people, and their courage is rubbing off."
Ten Black businessmen secretly gather in Aylene Quin's South of the Border cafe. Inspired by Joyce Brown's poem, they form a movement support committee and contribute $500 (equal to $3,700 in 2012) towards buying land and materials for a community center that will become a movement headquarters. Soon churches open their doors to mass meetings and attendance begins to grow. Local families contribute food and money to support the COFO staff and volunteers.
…
The McComb Movement calls for a mid-August "Freedom Day," an attempt to get as many people as possible to attempt to register at the courthouse in Magnolia. Klan opposition is fierce — crosses are burned, threats of violence and economic retaliation increase, and two dozen cops raid the freedom house in the middle of the night — looking for "illegal liquor" they claim [McComb is a "dry" city]. Back in 1961, the 2nd floor of the Black-owned Burgland Market was used for "Nonviolent High," the precursor freedom school for the expelled high-school students. On August 14, 1964, the building is bombed. Undeterred, several hundred Blacks attend a Freedom Day rally in McComb, and on August 18th, 23 Black men and women manage to take the voter- test at the courthouse in Magnolia. Their applications are denied by registrar Glen Fortenberry. None are registered to vote.
The following week, local activists, SNCC staff, and summer volunteers head north to Atlantic City for the MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention. On the night of August 27-28, as the betrayed MFDP delegates are bitterly making their way back to Mississippi, a bomb explodes near the home of Willie and Matti Dillon in McComb. She is active in the MFDP, two of their children attended the Freedom School, and Willie repaired a COFO car.
Sheriff Warren warns them, "If you don't cooperate with us more than the COFOs, more then [the bombing] is going to happen to you." Warren and FBI agent Frank Ford accuse the Dillons of planting the bomb themselves, then arrest Willie Dillon for "operating a garage without a license" (for fixing the COFO car) and "stealing electricity" because he had rigged a temporary flood light in defense against Klan night riders. He is quickly tried without a lawyer and sentenced to a $600 fine (equal to $4,400 in 2012) and nine months in jail.
By the end of August, the Black community in McComb has endured more than a dozen bombings since the start of Freedom Summer in late June …. As August ends, most of the summer volunteers return to school and with their departure media interest declines. The FBI takes the opportunity to reduce their 16 agents to 4. This further emboldens the Ku Klux Klan who rest secure in the certainty that they are immune from arrest by both local and federal law enforcement.
But SNCC organizers Jesse Harris, Mendy Samstein, and Cephus Hughes, the Rev Harry Bowie from the Delta Ministry, and several summer volunteers remain in McComb. Along with local leaders like the Bryants and Aylene Quin, they are determined to keep the movement moving forward.
Mama Quin is kind and good to everyone, but more than that, she is a towering figure of strength. She can't be intimidated. Three years ago she was one of the first to welcome Moses and lend him and the SNCC workers her support. Her cafe has always been open — despite the threats. And this summer, again she leads the community. She serves Black and white, night after night.
On August 30, the cops plant illegal liquor in Mama Quin's cafe and then arrest her. The white landlord evicts her, and the cafe is closed. Violence and beatings continue. Unable to intimidate Movement leaders, the Klan expands their terror campaign to Blacks who have never been involved in civil rights activities, bombing their homes and businesses to turn them against the Freedom Movement. SNCC writes to Washington, pleading for federal intervention. The Justice Department does nothing.
On the night of September 20, a bomb shatters Aylene Quin's home injuring her children. A second dynamite blast destroys the wood-frame Society Hill Baptist Church which had opened its doors to freedom meetings (when the congregation reconstructs the church they build it with fire-proof brick). Several hundred angry Blacks, many of them armed, pour into the streets, throwing rocks at the cops and threatening retaliatory violence. Only the desperate efforts of COFO organizers and local activists to calm the crowd avert a blood-bath as 100 heavily armed Mississippi State Trooper swarm into town.
Sheriff Warren accuses Mama Quin of planting the bomb that destroyed her home and almost killed her young son and daughter. Dozens of Black leaders, activists, and students are arrested. Many are charged with "criminal syndicalism" — a new state law that prohibits public speaking and political organizing by "subversive" groups. Almost 150 state troopers — one-third of the entire state force — are stationed in McComb. They are an occupying army sent to suppress the Black community. The number of Blacks arrested on various bogus and illegal charges tops 200. The number of Klansmen arrested for terrorism and bombings remains at zero.
With money from the National Council of Churches, SNCC/COFO sends Mama Quin, Matti Dillon, and Ora Bryant — all bombing victims — to Washington to meet with officials and the national press. The Justice Department brushes off the three women with their usual, "doing all we can," platitudes. But news reports and their meetings with members of Congress generate enough pressure that President Johnson meets with them privately. He's in the middle of his campaign against Goldwater and reluctant to take any action that might stir up more resentment among southern white voters, but he also fears that some dramatic escalation of violence in McComb — the assassination of civil rights workers or a violent confrontation between armed Blacks and the Klan/cops — could damage his reputation. He expresses his concern but makes no promises.
Meanwhile, more bombs explode at Black churches and homes in Pike County. The Delta Ministry mobilize clergymen from around the country to come to McComb. Over the next three months almost 100 ministers respond, and with them comes renewed attention from the national media. A dozen visiting ministers are among the 30 people arrested at a second Freedom Day at the courthouse in Magnolia and more are jailed for voter-registration efforts.
… the Black boycott of white businesses, the general sense of violence and tension, and renewed attention from the national media is depressing economic activity. The shopping district is deserted as both whites and Blacks avoid McComb stores. … Business leaders begin meeting to discuss the economic importance of perhaps expanding their concepts of "law and order" beyond suppressing Black protests to include the radical idea of halting KKK bombings.
On September 29, a rumor flashes through the state's white power-structure that the federal government may be on the verge of declaring martial law in McComb. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson immediately meets with local officials. He informs them that he is going to mobilize the state National Guard into McComb to forestall federal action. The McComb and Pike County leaders ask him to hold off for two days to give them a chance to end the violence. Within 24 hours, Klan members are being arrested for the bombings. Within a day, 11 of them are in jail and huge amounts of explosives, weapons, and ammunition have been seized. Obviously, local, state, and federal law enforcement knew all along who the bombers were.
As described by author John Dittmer in Local People, the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, a sweet-heart plea bargain is quickly granted to the terrorists:
... they pleaded either guilty or nolo contendere to charges ranging from attempted arson to bombing. Under Mississippi law the maximum penalty was death, yet the presiding judge, W.H. Watkins, gave the defendants suspended sentences and immediately released them on probation. In justifying his leniency, Judge Watkins stated that the men had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers, some of whom "are people of low morality and unhygienic." The bombers, on the other hand, were from "good families..." That afternoon, thirteen COFO staff members were jailed on charges of operating a food-handling establishment (the freedom house, where they lived) without a permit. On the same day federal judge Sidney Mize rejected Willie Dillon's appeal to have his trial removed to federal court. Judge Mize ruled as he did because "there is no hostility among the general public in Pike County to the Negro race."
Despite "punishments" that don't even amount to the mildest slap on the wrist, the sudden arrest of the Klansmen does accomplish three things. First, it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the authorities knew who the bombers were all along and could have stopped them at any time. Second, it puts the Klan on notice that the white power-structure wants the bombings to stop — and it does. The dynamiting of Black homes, churches, and businesses comes to an abrupt halt. Third, talk of martial law in McComb ceases. The press trumpets a great victory over the KKK.
But segregation, denial of voting rights, poverty, exploitation, and virulent racism still persist in McComb and Pike County and the Freedom Movement carries on. Dynamite has failed to break it, arrests haven't halted it. The struggle for justice in "Klan nation" continues. In November, McComb Blacks participate in another mock Freedom Vote to protest denial of voting rights and lay the foundation for a MFDP Congressional Challenge (McComb 58-66).
Works cited:
“Direct Action and the Civil Rights Act.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“McComb — Breaking the Klan Siege (July '64-March '65).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“The McGhees of Greenwood (July-Aug).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“Washington Does Nothing.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
On July 2nd, President Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In some Movement battlegrounds segregation of public facilities begins to collapse. The St. Augustine business community defies Klan threats by agreeing to end "white-only" policies. In Albany, Blacks are served instead of arrested, and SCLC holds its convention in Birmingham with Dr. King and other Black ministers staying at the brand-new Parliament House hotel. But in Selma, whites violently attack young Blacks who dare to defy the color-line, in Jackson the Robert E. Lee hotel converts from a public facility to a "private club" rather than admit Blacks, and across the South deeply entrenched customs of racial segregation remain in place until they are directly challenged. As the old saying goes: "Where the broom don't sweep, the dirt don't move."
Greenwood
In many ways, Greenwood is the epicenter of Freedom Summer activity. It is the heart of the Delta where the majority of projects are located, and SNCC's national office is temporarily relocated there from Atlanta. Here, the strategic priorities are clear — voter registration, community organizing, and building the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] towards the challenge at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Human and financial resources are stretched desperately thin. Sit-ins to test the new Civil Rights Act divert organizer time and attention, cost bail money, and inevitably result in activists languishing in jail. Mississippi whites are already enraged over the "invasion" of "race-mixers" and "agitators," to say nothing of Blacks socially interacting with white activists, particularly young white women. Movement leaders fear that direct-action protests for hamburgers and library cards will intensify both violent retaliation and police repression. But "freedom is in the air," courage is contagious, and the daily humiliations of "white-only/colored-only" cry out for defiance (McGhees 53).
From the beginning, with the first voter-registration effort in McComb after the Freedom Rides SNCC's Mississippi strategy has been based on two premises: First, that the primary goal must be achieving political power for Blacks, which requires voter-registration. Second, that most Afro-Americans in the state cannot afford to patronize white restaurants or theaters, so integrating them is at best merely symbolic. But there is a long-standing disagreement between those who argue that integration efforts provoke so much white violence and state repression that voter-registration is crippled, and those who believe that defiant action by young people awakens courage in adults, helps them rise above their fears, and encourages them to register. That may be true, argue others, but staff and volunteers languishing in jail cells can't canvas or organize and diverting desperately need funds to bail them out weakens the central effort.
But after passage of the Act, young Blacks across the state are eager to defy segregation and exercise their new rights. They want to "spit in the eye" of white racists by integrating hamburger joints and movie theaters. Three years of Movement activity have filled them with courage and now they believe the law is on their side.
Whites, however, are already enraged by the mere existence of Freedom Summer and further inflamed by Johnson signing the Act. In Greenwood and other communities, carloads of armed thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble, some are members of the Sheriff's posse, some are outright Klan. One of these "auxiliary" deputies is Byron De la Beckwith, and everyone in Leflore County, Black and white, know that he murdered Medgar Evers.
The question is thrashed out in meeting after meeting. The majority of SNCC staff agree with Bob Moses that they have to remain disciplined, stick to the plan, and not let themselves or the Movement become distracted. But some staff and some summer volunteers argue that it was the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early 1960s that sparked and energized the Movement and that if the Civil Rights Act is not tested and enforced immediately it will wither away and become just another unenforced law. By and large, adults in the community agree that now is not the time for integrating lunch counters. But young activists not yet old enough to vote are restless, in some communities they take independent action on their own, and when they are arrested or beaten a portion of Movement time and resources has to be diverted in response. Yet at the same time, their courage and defiance does encourage and inspire their elders.
The issue is most acute in Greenwood which has been a center of Freedom Movement activity since early 1962. It comes to a head after national NAACP leaders swoop into town accompanied by reporters and FBI agents. They integrate a few upscale establishments to great media acclaim and then drive off. Afterwards, no one, not even SNCC, can restrain Greenwood's Black youth from direct action at "white-only" establishments (Direct 27-29)
Silas McGhee, 21, is Chair of the Greenwood NAACP Youth Council's Testing Committee. His brother Jake is Assistant Chair. On July 5th, Silas walks three miles from his family's farm to the Leflore Theater in Greenwood. Defying a century of rigid segregation, he takes a seat on the "whites-only" main floor rather than the "Colored" balcony. He is attacked and harassed. The cops haul him home with a warning. When his brothers ask why he went by himself he tells them, "Well, you wasn't nowhere around when I decided to go. I just went."
Greenwood is a small town and word of his attempt to break the color-line spreads through the Black community — and among whites as well. On July 16, Silas observes Freedom Day from across the street. He is not one of the 111 people arrested. As he walks home alone, three Klansmen ambush him and force him at gunpoint into their car. They beat him with clubs and try to lock him in a shed, but he manages to break free. He evades their pursuit and reaches the FBI office Greenwood. Agents arrest the three attackers under the new civil rights law — the first case of its kind in Mississippi.
The McGhees are a tight-knit family and they're not known for backing down. Silas's mother and brothers join him in action and the cops discover that arresting the McGhees just makes them more determined.
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) narrates: “The rest of July was a running battle between the McGhees, the theater, the mob, and the cops. ... Silas and his brother Jake kept going back to the theater. Five or six times. Each time when they tried to leave, a mob greeted them. ... Another night Jake and Silas went back to the movies, but this time when the mob formed, a towering (6'8"), linebacker-built paratrooper in full dress uniform appeared and faced down a member of the mob. Turned out it was their older brother, Clarence (Robinson), a decorated Korean War veteran on active duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A trained American fighting man, taking leave to come defend freedom, democracy, the Constitution, and his younger brothers in his hometown. Then he got himself jailed for assault.”
On Monday evening, August 15, after being released from jail, Silas is resting in a car outside of Lulu's Cafe on Avenue H in the Black community. Rain is pouring down and the night is dark. Two white men in a car drive slowly by, they shoot Silas in the head and speed off. SNCC field-secretary Bob Zellner and summer volunteer Mark Winter strip off their shirts to try to stop the bleeding. With volunteer Linda Whetmore Halpern, they rush Silas to the segregated Greenwood public hospital. Cops at the hospital won't let them in because they're using the "wrong" entrance. They drive around back to the other door, but the cops again bar them — this time because Bob and Mark are not wearing shirts. Linda has to go in alone, her blue dress drenched red with blood. She gets a stretcher and brings Silas inside.
The white doctors in this tax-financed hospital won't treat a wounded Black man, so Dr. Jackson — the only Black MD in Greenwood — is summoned. While he works to save Silas's life, officer Logan of the Greenwood police department tells another cop "Well, they finally got that nigger Silas!" Other cops make it clear that if Silas doesn't die on the operating table he'll be killed during the night. As soon as Silas is stabilized, Movement leaders arrange to have him transferred to a hospital in Jackson (McGhees 54-56).
While white Mississippi mobilizes to defend the "Southern Way of Life" with billy clubs and jail cells, guns and bombs, the White House and Justice Department do nothing. Despite repeated pleas from civil rights leaders, they refuse to condemn or criticize the hate and hysteria being whipped to fever pitch in Mississippi. They refuse to issue any public statement or give any private signal that violence or state repression against nonviolent voter registration efforts will be prosecuted as required by federal law. They refuse to even acknowledge that registering voters and teaching children are neither criminal acts nor subversive plots. FBI Director Hoover does, however, tell the press: "We will not wet-nurse troublemakers."
In early June, just before the [Freedom Summer] project is to begin, a Black delegation [had traveled] … from Mississippi to Washington to warn of impending violence and beg for protection. The President [had been] … out of town. The Attorney General [had been] … unavailable. Congress [had been] … uninterested in holding any hearings. The FBI [had rebuffed] … them as subversives and Communist dupes.
Desperate for someone to hear their pleas, the delegation [had held] … a conference at the National Theater, addressing a volunteer panel of writers, educators, and lawyers, along with several hundred ordinary citizens. Fannie Lou Hamer [had described] … the brutal police beating in Winona MS, Mrs. Allen [had testified] … about the recent murder of her husband, a boy of 14 [had told] … of police brutality against peaceful pickets, and SNCC worker Jimmy Travis [had talked] … of being shot in Greenwood and [had asked] … for federal marshals to protect voter registration workers. Legal scholars [had described] … the statutes allowing — in fact, requiring — the federal government to enforce the law, make arrests, and protect the rights of voters. The transcript [had been] … sent to President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There [had been] … no response.
At the volunteer-orientation in Oxford Ohio, DOJ official John Doar [had addressed] … the volunteers who are about to go down into Mississippi. They [had asked] … him: "What will be the role of the federal government in protecting our lives?" He [had replied] … that so far as their government is concerned they will have to take their chances with a hostile state — defenseless. They will be in the same situation that southern Blacks have endured for generations. The volunteers [had booed] …, but Bob Moses [had stopped] … them, saying, "We don't do that." He [had told] … them that Doar is just being honest (Washington 12-14).
Greenwood's Black community is enraged. More than a dozen young Black men armed with rifles ask SNCC field-secretary Wazir Peacock about invading North Greenwood — a white neighborhood — and retaliating in kind. He tells them that it wouldn't be right to attack whites who had nothing to do with the shooting. He also understands that doing so would bring down a wave of violent repression against the entire Black community. The Klan is known to have been stockpiling military-type weapons, and it's possible that the shooting of Silas is intended to provoke just such a war. The young men agree to concentrate on defending the Black community from further KKK attack.
The shooting of Silas McGhee halts neither the McGhee family nor the work of the Freedom Movement. Voter registration and building the MFDP continue, as do efforts to implement the Civil Rights Act (McGhees 57)).
McComb
Back in the Fall of 1961, the McComb voter-registration project — SNCC's first — was temporarily suppressed by Klan violence, the brutal murder of Herbert Lee, economic retaliation, the expulsion of more than 100 high-school student protesters, federal indifference, and the incarceration of the SNCC staff on trumped up charges. But SNCC has neither forgotten, nor abandoned McComb. In the Fall of '63, SNCC workers briefly return to mobilize support for the Freedom Ballot, and again in January of '64 for voter-registration classes. But Klan repression is unrelenting, threats and intimidation are constant, night-riders shoot up Black homes and businesses, and on January 31st Louis Allen who witnessed Herbert Lee's murder is assassinated.
As they begin planning the Summer Project in early 1964, SNCC activists are determined to re-establish a permanent Freedom Movement presence in McComb. They know with dead certainty that doing so means a showdown with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America, the two KKK factions who have turned the Pearl River area of Southwest Mississippi into "Klan Nation."
The forces of white-supremacy are of the same opinion. Pike County sheriff R.R. Warren tells a meeting of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) that he expects a "long hot summer" and that he may need to recruit their assistance if law enforcement is unable to suppress the COFO "threat." Rumors swirl through the white community that Black men identified by white bandages on their throats have been specifically assigned to rape white women. Parents are warned to know where their small children are at all times. Sales of guns and ammunition spike upward, and Klan membership soars. The oilman who financially backs the Klan has easy access to dynamite, and on the night of June 22nd — 24 hours after the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman — explosions blast through the Black community, damaging the home of NAACP leader C.C. Bryant who grabs his rifle and fires back at the bomber's car.
Initially, COFO leaders judge Southwestern Mississippi too dangerous for the highly visible northern white students, so the McComb and Natchez projects are put on temporary hold until the situation stabilizes. By early July, FBI agents have flooded into the state and the news media is providing extensive coverage of the search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman so COFO decides to risk restarting the McComb project. Led by SNCC organizer and former McComb activist Curtis Hayes (today, Curtis Muhammad), the first contingent of Freedom Summer workers arrive on July 5th.
They open a COFO freedom house on Wall Street in the Black community. Two nights later a dynamite bomb damages the house, injuring Curtis Hayes and volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The FBI "investigates" and does nothing. Over the following days, Black churches are burned in Pike and Amite counties, SNCC field secretary Mendy Samstein is attacked and beaten on a McComb street, and the home of C.C. Bryant's brother is bombed. With no protection from police or the federal government, local Blacks active with the Movement stand armed guard each night against Klan bombers and night riders.
Except for a core of dedicated and courageous activists like the Bryants, Aylene "Mama" Quin, Webb Owens, Willie Mae Cotton, Ernest Nobles, Joe Martin, and a handful of others, fear is pervasive in McComb's Black community. No churches are willing to open their doors for mass meetings, voter-registration classes, or Freedom Schools. The few Blacks who dare the short trip to the county courthouse in Magnolia on voter-registration days face threats of violence and economic retaliation. COFO canvassers are hard pressed to find any willing to take that risk.
But as it was back in '61, it's the Black youth who stand up and move forward. With no church or other building open to it, the McComb Freedom School meets in the dirt yard of the bombed freedom house. Joyce Brown (16), a Freedom School student-teacher pens The House of Liberty, a poem addressed to the community's adults that reads in part:
I asked for your churches, and you turned me down,
But I'll do my work if I have to do it on the ground,
You will not speak for fear of being heard,
So you crawl in your shell and say, "Do not disturb,"
You think because you've turned me away,
You've protected yourself for another day.
— Joyce Brown.
Young activists and COFO organizers circulate her poem throughout the Black community and the elders respond. A church opens its doors to the Freedom School and soon more than 100 students overflow the space — some of them the younger sisters and brothers of the those who had protested and been expelled from Burgland High three years before. "The Freedom School is inspiring the people to lend a hand in the fight," reports school director Ralph Featherstone. "The older people are looking to the young people, and their courage is rubbing off."
Ten Black businessmen secretly gather in Aylene Quin's South of the Border cafe. Inspired by Joyce Brown's poem, they form a movement support committee and contribute $500 (equal to $3,700 in 2012) towards buying land and materials for a community center that will become a movement headquarters. Soon churches open their doors to mass meetings and attendance begins to grow. Local families contribute food and money to support the COFO staff and volunteers.
…
The McComb Movement calls for a mid-August "Freedom Day," an attempt to get as many people as possible to attempt to register at the courthouse in Magnolia. Klan opposition is fierce — crosses are burned, threats of violence and economic retaliation increase, and two dozen cops raid the freedom house in the middle of the night — looking for "illegal liquor" they claim [McComb is a "dry" city]. Back in 1961, the 2nd floor of the Black-owned Burgland Market was used for "Nonviolent High," the precursor freedom school for the expelled high-school students. On August 14, 1964, the building is bombed. Undeterred, several hundred Blacks attend a Freedom Day rally in McComb, and on August 18th, 23 Black men and women manage to take the voter- test at the courthouse in Magnolia. Their applications are denied by registrar Glen Fortenberry. None are registered to vote.
The following week, local activists, SNCC staff, and summer volunteers head north to Atlantic City for the MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention. On the night of August 27-28, as the betrayed MFDP delegates are bitterly making their way back to Mississippi, a bomb explodes near the home of Willie and Matti Dillon in McComb. She is active in the MFDP, two of their children attended the Freedom School, and Willie repaired a COFO car.
Sheriff Warren warns them, "If you don't cooperate with us more than the COFOs, more then [the bombing] is going to happen to you." Warren and FBI agent Frank Ford accuse the Dillons of planting the bomb themselves, then arrest Willie Dillon for "operating a garage without a license" (for fixing the COFO car) and "stealing electricity" because he had rigged a temporary flood light in defense against Klan night riders. He is quickly tried without a lawyer and sentenced to a $600 fine (equal to $4,400 in 2012) and nine months in jail.
By the end of August, the Black community in McComb has endured more than a dozen bombings since the start of Freedom Summer in late June …. As August ends, most of the summer volunteers return to school and with their departure media interest declines. The FBI takes the opportunity to reduce their 16 agents to 4. This further emboldens the Ku Klux Klan who rest secure in the certainty that they are immune from arrest by both local and federal law enforcement.
But SNCC organizers Jesse Harris, Mendy Samstein, and Cephus Hughes, the Rev Harry Bowie from the Delta Ministry, and several summer volunteers remain in McComb. Along with local leaders like the Bryants and Aylene Quin, they are determined to keep the movement moving forward.
Mama Quin is kind and good to everyone, but more than that, she is a towering figure of strength. She can't be intimidated. Three years ago she was one of the first to welcome Moses and lend him and the SNCC workers her support. Her cafe has always been open — despite the threats. And this summer, again she leads the community. She serves Black and white, night after night.
On August 30, the cops plant illegal liquor in Mama Quin's cafe and then arrest her. The white landlord evicts her, and the cafe is closed. Violence and beatings continue. Unable to intimidate Movement leaders, the Klan expands their terror campaign to Blacks who have never been involved in civil rights activities, bombing their homes and businesses to turn them against the Freedom Movement. SNCC writes to Washington, pleading for federal intervention. The Justice Department does nothing.
On the night of September 20, a bomb shatters Aylene Quin's home injuring her children. A second dynamite blast destroys the wood-frame Society Hill Baptist Church which had opened its doors to freedom meetings (when the congregation reconstructs the church they build it with fire-proof brick). Several hundred angry Blacks, many of them armed, pour into the streets, throwing rocks at the cops and threatening retaliatory violence. Only the desperate efforts of COFO organizers and local activists to calm the crowd avert a blood-bath as 100 heavily armed Mississippi State Trooper swarm into town.
Sheriff Warren accuses Mama Quin of planting the bomb that destroyed her home and almost killed her young son and daughter. Dozens of Black leaders, activists, and students are arrested. Many are charged with "criminal syndicalism" — a new state law that prohibits public speaking and political organizing by "subversive" groups. Almost 150 state troopers — one-third of the entire state force — are stationed in McComb. They are an occupying army sent to suppress the Black community. The number of Blacks arrested on various bogus and illegal charges tops 200. The number of Klansmen arrested for terrorism and bombings remains at zero.
With money from the National Council of Churches, SNCC/COFO sends Mama Quin, Matti Dillon, and Ora Bryant — all bombing victims — to Washington to meet with officials and the national press. The Justice Department brushes off the three women with their usual, "doing all we can," platitudes. But news reports and their meetings with members of Congress generate enough pressure that President Johnson meets with them privately. He's in the middle of his campaign against Goldwater and reluctant to take any action that might stir up more resentment among southern white voters, but he also fears that some dramatic escalation of violence in McComb — the assassination of civil rights workers or a violent confrontation between armed Blacks and the Klan/cops — could damage his reputation. He expresses his concern but makes no promises.
Meanwhile, more bombs explode at Black churches and homes in Pike County. The Delta Ministry mobilize clergymen from around the country to come to McComb. Over the next three months almost 100 ministers respond, and with them comes renewed attention from the national media. A dozen visiting ministers are among the 30 people arrested at a second Freedom Day at the courthouse in Magnolia and more are jailed for voter-registration efforts.
… the Black boycott of white businesses, the general sense of violence and tension, and renewed attention from the national media is depressing economic activity. The shopping district is deserted as both whites and Blacks avoid McComb stores. … Business leaders begin meeting to discuss the economic importance of perhaps expanding their concepts of "law and order" beyond suppressing Black protests to include the radical idea of halting KKK bombings.
On September 29, a rumor flashes through the state's white power-structure that the federal government may be on the verge of declaring martial law in McComb. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson immediately meets with local officials. He informs them that he is going to mobilize the state National Guard into McComb to forestall federal action. The McComb and Pike County leaders ask him to hold off for two days to give them a chance to end the violence. Within 24 hours, Klan members are being arrested for the bombings. Within a day, 11 of them are in jail and huge amounts of explosives, weapons, and ammunition have been seized. Obviously, local, state, and federal law enforcement knew all along who the bombers were.
As described by author John Dittmer in Local People, the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, a sweet-heart plea bargain is quickly granted to the terrorists:
... they pleaded either guilty or nolo contendere to charges ranging from attempted arson to bombing. Under Mississippi law the maximum penalty was death, yet the presiding judge, W.H. Watkins, gave the defendants suspended sentences and immediately released them on probation. In justifying his leniency, Judge Watkins stated that the men had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers, some of whom "are people of low morality and unhygienic." The bombers, on the other hand, were from "good families..." That afternoon, thirteen COFO staff members were jailed on charges of operating a food-handling establishment (the freedom house, where they lived) without a permit. On the same day federal judge Sidney Mize rejected Willie Dillon's appeal to have his trial removed to federal court. Judge Mize ruled as he did because "there is no hostility among the general public in Pike County to the Negro race."
Despite "punishments" that don't even amount to the mildest slap on the wrist, the sudden arrest of the Klansmen does accomplish three things. First, it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the authorities knew who the bombers were all along and could have stopped them at any time. Second, it puts the Klan on notice that the white power-structure wants the bombings to stop — and it does. The dynamiting of Black homes, churches, and businesses comes to an abrupt halt. Third, talk of martial law in McComb ceases. The press trumpets a great victory over the KKK.
But segregation, denial of voting rights, poverty, exploitation, and virulent racism still persist in McComb and Pike County and the Freedom Movement carries on. Dynamite has failed to break it, arrests haven't halted it. The struggle for justice in "Klan nation" continues. In November, McComb Blacks participate in another mock Freedom Vote to protest denial of voting rights and lay the foundation for a MFDP Congressional Challenge (McComb 58-66).
Works cited:
“Direct Action and the Civil Rights Act.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“McComb — Breaking the Klan Siege (July '64-March '65).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“The McGhees of Greenwood (July-Aug).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
“Washington Does Nothing.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...
July 14, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi -- Freedom Summer -- Delayed Justice
Following the discovery of the bodies of the murdered civil rights activists, Carolyn Goodman, Rita Schwerner, and Fanny Lee Chaney made these public statements.
Carolyn Goodman: All I can say is that if the people who have expressed their feelings most eloquently to us in these past weeks are any reflection of what I believe are the vast numbers of people throughout this country, I have great optimism.
Rita Schwerner: As you know, lynchings in Mississippi are not uncommon, they have occurred for many, many years. Uh, maybe this one could be the last if some positive steps were taken to show that the people in this country have had enough. That they require that human beings be treated as human beings.
Fanny Lee Chaney: Well, you all know that I am Fannie Lee Chaney, the mother of James Chaney. Y’all know what my child was doing. He was trying for us all to make a better living. And he had two fellows from New York – had their own home and everything, didn’t have nothing to worry about. But they come here to help us. Did y’all know they come here to help us? They died for us (Mississippi 15)!
It would be informants from within the Klan that would break the case open. The first information, from a Klan member at the periphery of the conspiracy, enabled the FBI to focus on the more central figures. One Klan member who received a great deal of attention from prosecutor John Proctor was James Jordan, a Meridian speakeasy owner. Over the course of five increasingly rough interviews, Jordan came to see turning state's evidence as his best bet to avoid a long prison term. He was also promised $3500 and help in relocating himself and his family in return for his full story. Jordan would become the government's key witness to the crime (Linder Trial 3).
State and local law enforcement did not pursue filing charges, claiming insufficient evidence. Knowing that state authorities would never charge the alleged attackers and that an all-white jury would refuse to convict the suspects of murder, on December 4, the Justice Department [using an 1870 post-reconstruction civil rights law] charged 21 men with conspiring to violate Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman’s civil rights.
Prosecutors brought the charges before a federal grand jury, which indicted 18 men in January 1965. The following month, presiding judge William Harold Cox dismissed the charges against the majority of the defendants, maintaining that the law applied only to law enforcement -- in this case, deputy sheriff Price, the county sheriff, and a patrolman. The prosecution appealed, and in 1966 the Supreme Court reinstated the charges, ruling that the law applied to both law enforcement officials and civilians.
In February 1967 another federal grand jury indicted the men once again, and in October the trial began in Judge Cox’s courtroom. Cox was known as a segregationist -- he had been the subject of an unsuccessful impeachment attempt after describing African American witnesses in an earlier case as “chimpanzees.” But on the first day of the trial, when the defense attorney asked a witness whether Schwerner was part of a plot to rape white women during the summer of 1964, Cox called the question improper, stating, “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial."
Prosecutor John Doar later called Cox’s response to the rape question a turning point in the fight for justice. “If there had been any feeling in the courtroom that the defendants were invulnerable to conviction in Mississippi, this incident dispelled it completely," Doar said afterwards. "Cox made it clear he was taking the trial seriously. That made the jurors stop and think: ‘If Judge Cox is taking this stand, we’d better meet our responsibility as well'" (Murder in Mississippi 8-10).
The trial of the sixteen accused began October 7, 1967. A jury of seven white men and five white women, ranging in ages from 34 to 67, was selected. Defense attorneys exercised peremptory challenges against all seventeen potential black jurors. A white man, who admitted under questioning by Robert Hauberg, the U.S. Attorney for Mississippi, that he had been a member of the KKK "a couple of years ago," was challenged for cause. Judge Cox denied the challenge.
The heart of the government's case was presented through the testimony of three Klan informants, Wallace Miller, Delmar Dennis, and James Jordan. Miller described the organization of the Lauderdale klavern and described his conversations with Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon and Kleagle Edgar Ray Killen about the June 21 operation in Neshoba County. Dennis incriminated Sam Bowers, the founder and Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi. Dennis quoted Bowers as having said after the killing of Schwerner and the two others, "It was the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew." … Dennis described a Klan meeting in the pasture of Klan member Clayton Lewis. He then pointed to Lewis, the mayor of Philadelphia, sitting at the defense table as a member of the twelve-man defense team. James Jordan was the government's only witness to the actual killings. Fearing a Klan assassination, the government had arranged to have Jordan hustled into court by five agents with guns drawn. After first requiring hospitalization for hyperventilating, and then collapsing and having to be carried from the courtroom on a stretcher, an obviously nervous Jordan finally made it to the witness stand. Jordan described the events of June 21 and the early morning of June 22, from the gathering of Klan members in Meridian to the burial of the bodies at the Old Jolly Farm. His vivid testimony caused one black female spectator to break down and have to be led from the courtroom, sobbing.
The defense case consisted of a series of alibi and character witnesses. Local residents testified as to the "reputation for truth and veracity" of various defendants, or to having seen them on June 21 at locations such as funeral homes or hospitals.
John Doar presented the closing argument for the government on October 18. Doar told the jury that "this was a calculated, cold-blooded plot. Three men, hardly more than boys were its victims." Pointing at Price, Doar said that "Price used the machinery of law, his office, his power, his authority, his badge, his uniform, his jail, his police car, his police gun, he used them all to take, to hold, to capture and kill." Doar concluded by telling jurors that what he and the other lawyers said "will soon be forgotten, but what you twelve do here today will long be remembered."
…
On the morning of October 20, 1967, the jury returned with its verdict. The verdict on its face appears to be the result of a compromise. Seven defendants, mostly from Lauderdale County, were convicted. The list of convicted men included Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, trigger man Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, and Horace Barnett. Seven men, mostly from Neshoba County, were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, burial site owner Olen Burrage, and Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon. In three cases, including that of Edgar Ray Killen, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. (Charges were dropped against one defendant, Travis Barnette, before deliberations.)…
On December 29, Judge Cox imposed sentences. Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four. Cox said of his sentences, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved" (Linder Trial 4-7).
None of the convicted Klansmen served more than six years in prison. One major conspirator, Edgar Ray Killen, a klansman and part-time pastor, went free after the jury deadlocked 11-1. The lone holdout told them she could “never convict a preacher” (Murder in Mississippi 9).
[Deputy] Price declared himself a candidate for sheriff in 1967, at the same time he was facing trial with his fellow Klan conspirators. Price lost the election to Hop Barnette, one of his co-defendants.
Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served his time at Sandstone federal penitentiary in Minnesota. After his release in 1974, Price returned to Philadelphia where he worked as a surveyor, oil company driver, and as a watchmaker in a jewelry shop.
…
Price died on May 6, 2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He died in the same hospital in Jackson where thirty-seven years earlier he helped transport the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers for autopsies (Linder Cecil 4).
In 1998, Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, published excerpts from a 1984 interview with Samuel Bowers in which he spoke openly about the killings. “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man, which everybody -- including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else knows that that happened,” Bowers said. Mitchell’s reporting established that Bowers was referring to [Edgar Ray] Killen. … (Murder in Mississippi 9).
Mitchell's interest in the case had piqued after watching a press screening of "Mississippi Burning" in 1988. A pair of FBI agents at the screening dissected the film for Mitchell and told the reporter what really happened.
"The thing that was horrifying to me was you had more than 20 guys involved in killing these three young men and no one has been prosecuted for murder," Mitchell recalled.
Mitchell, whose reporting also helped secure convictions in other high-profile civil rights era cases, began looking closely at the "Mississippi Burning" case. His big break came when he obtained leaked files from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a segregationist group that tried to curb growing civil rights activism. Mitchell found out that the state had spied on Michael Schwerner and his wife for three months before he, Goodman and Chaney were murdered (Smith 9).
In 1999, Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore announced that the state would reopen the case. At his request, the FBI turned over more than 40,000 pages related to the initial investigation (Murder in Mississippi 10).
Indictment of Killen was delayed. On October 6, 2004 approximately 500 people marched in support of Killen’s state prosecution.
On January 6, 2005, the State of Mississippi charged 79-year-old former Klan preacher Edgar Ray Killen with murder in connection with the slayings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Police arrested Killen at his home following a grand jury session, according to Neshoba County Sheriff Larry Myers. Convicted Klan conspirator Billy Wayne Posey expressed anger at Killen's arrest: "After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous...like a nightmare." … Carolyn Goodman, the 89-year-old mother of victim Andrew Goodman, was pleased with the news. She hoped the killers would someday be "behind bars and think about what they've done" (Linder Trial 9).
Although several of the other conspirators were still alive at the time, the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to indict anyone else. The trial drew national news coverage; members of the victims’ families were present at the trial, some as witnesses and some as observers. Ultimately, the jury [nine whites and three blacks] found insufficient evidence for a murder conviction, but did find Killen guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter (Murder in Mississippi 10).
According to FBI files and court transcripts from a 1967 federal conspiracy trial, Killen had done most of the planning in the ambush killings.
… witnesses [had] testified that on June 21, 1964, Killen went to Meridian to round up carloads of Klansmen to ambush Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, telling some of the Klan members to bring plastic or rubber gloves. Witnesses [had] said Killen then went to a Philadelphia funeral home as an alibi while the fatal attack occurred (Pettus 3).
Judge Marcus Gordon today sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to serve three 20-year terms, one for each conviction of manslaughter in connection with the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964. Judge Gordon said in pronouncing sentence, "I have taken into consideration that there are three lives in this case and that the three lives should be absolutely respected." Sentencing followed Killen's conviction earlier in the week. The manslaughter convictions came after nearly three days of jury deliberations. The jury found that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Killen intended that the klansmen kill the civil rights workers, and thus did not return a murder conviction (Linder Trial 10).
The courts had finally acknowledged the "Mississippi Burning" killings but the public sentiment was mixed. After Killen was arrested, [investigator reporter] Mitchell says he was threatened by some residents in an area where a "let-sleeping-dogs-lie" mentality prevailed. One man wrote a letter in 2005 to the Clarion-Ledger editor, saying Mitchell "should be tarred, feathered and run out of the state of Mississippi."
But Mitchell says others were grateful for the belated justice as Mississippi tried to shed its racially charged past (Smith 10).
In February 2010, Killen sued the FBI, claiming the government used a mafia hit man to pistol-whip and intimidate witnesses for information in the case. The federal lawsuit sought millions of dollars in damages and a declaration that his rights were violated when the FBI allegedly used a gangster known as “The Grim Reaper” during the investigation. The lawsuit was later dismissed (Pettus 5).
Linda Schiro, the ex-girlfriend of former mobster Gregory Scarpa, nicknamed "The Grim Reaper," testifying for the prosecution in a murder case, stated that Scarpa put a gun in the mouth of a Ku Klux Klansman in an effort to gain information about the location of the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The ploy worked and the bodies were soon dug up in an earthen dam. Scarpa died in prison in the 1990s.
Schiro's story confirmed reports, coming from confidential FBI sources in 1994, that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover had turned to the Colombo crime family for help in cracking the "Mississippi Burning" case.
On March 15,[2013] Owen Burrage died at age 82. Burrage owned the farm on which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were buried under an earthen dam, but was acquitted in the 1967 trial. Days before the killings, Burrage bragged that his 250-foot long dam would make a good burial place for civil rights workers. According to an FBI informant, Burrage told a roomful of KKKers discussing the arrival of the civil rights workers in 1964: "Hell, I've got a dam that will hold a hundred of them." Horace Barnette told the FBI that around midnight after the killings, Burrage was waitng at his farm to direct Klansmen to the dam site. Burrage then went to his trucking company garage to get gasoline that was used to burn the civil rights workers' station wagon. With the death of Burrage, only one of the 18 people originally indicted remains alive. The survivor is Pete Harris, who witnesses say called the Klansman to gather on the night of the murders (Linder Trial 11-12).
Killen, serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman , died at 9 p.m. Thursday, January 11, 2018. He was 92.
“It wasn’t even murder. It was manslaughter,” David Goodman, Andrew’s younger brother, observed Friday.
“His life spanned a period in this country where members of the Ku Klux Klan like him were able to believe they had a right to take other people’s lives, and that’s a form of terrorism,” Goodman said. “Many took black lives with impunity.”
…
[Michael] Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said on the day Killen was convicted that the slayings were part of a larger problem of violence in Mississippi against black people and others who challenged the segregationist status quo.
“Preacher Killen did not act in a vacuum and the members of the Klan who were members of the police department and the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol didn’t act in a vacuum,” she said.
Goodman said …that Killen’s passing is a reminder that issues of racism and white nationalism remain today. He pointed to the violent rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia ….
Killen wouldn’t say much about the killings during a 2014 interview with The Associated Press inside the penitentiary. He said he remained a segregationist who did not believe in racial equality, but contended he harbored no ill will toward black people. Killen said he never had talked about the events that landed him behind bars, and never would.
…
When she learned of Killen’s death, Chaney’s sister, the Rev. Julia Chaney Moss, said her first thought was that “God has been kind to him. And for that I am grateful.”
“My last thought on this is just that I only wish peace and blessings for all the families as well as the families of the perpetrators,” she said. (Pettus 6-8).
Works cited:
Linder, Douglas O. “Cecil Price.” Famous Trials. Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Linder, Douglas O. “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials, Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.” nbclearn.com. Web. http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the...
“Murder in Mississippi.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
Pettus, Emily Wagster and Santana, Rebecca. “Man Convicted of 3 Killing Civil Rights Workers Dies in Jail.” AP News. January 13, 2018. Web. https://www.apnews.com/3d82e778b5d643...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
Carolyn Goodman: All I can say is that if the people who have expressed their feelings most eloquently to us in these past weeks are any reflection of what I believe are the vast numbers of people throughout this country, I have great optimism.
Rita Schwerner: As you know, lynchings in Mississippi are not uncommon, they have occurred for many, many years. Uh, maybe this one could be the last if some positive steps were taken to show that the people in this country have had enough. That they require that human beings be treated as human beings.
Fanny Lee Chaney: Well, you all know that I am Fannie Lee Chaney, the mother of James Chaney. Y’all know what my child was doing. He was trying for us all to make a better living. And he had two fellows from New York – had their own home and everything, didn’t have nothing to worry about. But they come here to help us. Did y’all know they come here to help us? They died for us (Mississippi 15)!
It would be informants from within the Klan that would break the case open. The first information, from a Klan member at the periphery of the conspiracy, enabled the FBI to focus on the more central figures. One Klan member who received a great deal of attention from prosecutor John Proctor was James Jordan, a Meridian speakeasy owner. Over the course of five increasingly rough interviews, Jordan came to see turning state's evidence as his best bet to avoid a long prison term. He was also promised $3500 and help in relocating himself and his family in return for his full story. Jordan would become the government's key witness to the crime (Linder Trial 3).
State and local law enforcement did not pursue filing charges, claiming insufficient evidence. Knowing that state authorities would never charge the alleged attackers and that an all-white jury would refuse to convict the suspects of murder, on December 4, the Justice Department [using an 1870 post-reconstruction civil rights law] charged 21 men with conspiring to violate Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman’s civil rights.
Prosecutors brought the charges before a federal grand jury, which indicted 18 men in January 1965. The following month, presiding judge William Harold Cox dismissed the charges against the majority of the defendants, maintaining that the law applied only to law enforcement -- in this case, deputy sheriff Price, the county sheriff, and a patrolman. The prosecution appealed, and in 1966 the Supreme Court reinstated the charges, ruling that the law applied to both law enforcement officials and civilians.
In February 1967 another federal grand jury indicted the men once again, and in October the trial began in Judge Cox’s courtroom. Cox was known as a segregationist -- he had been the subject of an unsuccessful impeachment attempt after describing African American witnesses in an earlier case as “chimpanzees.” But on the first day of the trial, when the defense attorney asked a witness whether Schwerner was part of a plot to rape white women during the summer of 1964, Cox called the question improper, stating, “I’m not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial."
Prosecutor John Doar later called Cox’s response to the rape question a turning point in the fight for justice. “If there had been any feeling in the courtroom that the defendants were invulnerable to conviction in Mississippi, this incident dispelled it completely," Doar said afterwards. "Cox made it clear he was taking the trial seriously. That made the jurors stop and think: ‘If Judge Cox is taking this stand, we’d better meet our responsibility as well'" (Murder in Mississippi 8-10).
The trial of the sixteen accused began October 7, 1967. A jury of seven white men and five white women, ranging in ages from 34 to 67, was selected. Defense attorneys exercised peremptory challenges against all seventeen potential black jurors. A white man, who admitted under questioning by Robert Hauberg, the U.S. Attorney for Mississippi, that he had been a member of the KKK "a couple of years ago," was challenged for cause. Judge Cox denied the challenge.
The heart of the government's case was presented through the testimony of three Klan informants, Wallace Miller, Delmar Dennis, and James Jordan. Miller described the organization of the Lauderdale klavern and described his conversations with Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon and Kleagle Edgar Ray Killen about the June 21 operation in Neshoba County. Dennis incriminated Sam Bowers, the founder and Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi. Dennis quoted Bowers as having said after the killing of Schwerner and the two others, "It was the first time that Christians had planned and carried out the execution of a Jew." … Dennis described a Klan meeting in the pasture of Klan member Clayton Lewis. He then pointed to Lewis, the mayor of Philadelphia, sitting at the defense table as a member of the twelve-man defense team. James Jordan was the government's only witness to the actual killings. Fearing a Klan assassination, the government had arranged to have Jordan hustled into court by five agents with guns drawn. After first requiring hospitalization for hyperventilating, and then collapsing and having to be carried from the courtroom on a stretcher, an obviously nervous Jordan finally made it to the witness stand. Jordan described the events of June 21 and the early morning of June 22, from the gathering of Klan members in Meridian to the burial of the bodies at the Old Jolly Farm. His vivid testimony caused one black female spectator to break down and have to be led from the courtroom, sobbing.
The defense case consisted of a series of alibi and character witnesses. Local residents testified as to the "reputation for truth and veracity" of various defendants, or to having seen them on June 21 at locations such as funeral homes or hospitals.
John Doar presented the closing argument for the government on October 18. Doar told the jury that "this was a calculated, cold-blooded plot. Three men, hardly more than boys were its victims." Pointing at Price, Doar said that "Price used the machinery of law, his office, his power, his authority, his badge, his uniform, his jail, his police car, his police gun, he used them all to take, to hold, to capture and kill." Doar concluded by telling jurors that what he and the other lawyers said "will soon be forgotten, but what you twelve do here today will long be remembered."
…
On the morning of October 20, 1967, the jury returned with its verdict. The verdict on its face appears to be the result of a compromise. Seven defendants, mostly from Lauderdale County, were convicted. The list of convicted men included Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, trigger man Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, and Horace Barnett. Seven men, mostly from Neshoba County, were acquitted, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, burial site owner Olen Burrage, and Exalted Cyclops Frank Herndon. In three cases, including that of Edgar Ray Killen, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. (Charges were dropped against one defendant, Travis Barnette, before deliberations.)…
On December 29, Judge Cox imposed sentences. Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four. Cox said of his sentences, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man-- I gave them all what I thought they deserved" (Linder Trial 4-7).
None of the convicted Klansmen served more than six years in prison. One major conspirator, Edgar Ray Killen, a klansman and part-time pastor, went free after the jury deadlocked 11-1. The lone holdout told them she could “never convict a preacher” (Murder in Mississippi 9).
[Deputy] Price declared himself a candidate for sheriff in 1967, at the same time he was facing trial with his fellow Klan conspirators. Price lost the election to Hop Barnette, one of his co-defendants.
Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served his time at Sandstone federal penitentiary in Minnesota. After his release in 1974, Price returned to Philadelphia where he worked as a surveyor, oil company driver, and as a watchmaker in a jewelry shop.
…
Price died on May 6, 2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He died in the same hospital in Jackson where thirty-seven years earlier he helped transport the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers for autopsies (Linder Cecil 4).
In 1998, Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, published excerpts from a 1984 interview with Samuel Bowers in which he spoke openly about the killings. “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man, which everybody -- including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else knows that that happened,” Bowers said. Mitchell’s reporting established that Bowers was referring to [Edgar Ray] Killen. … (Murder in Mississippi 9).
Mitchell's interest in the case had piqued after watching a press screening of "Mississippi Burning" in 1988. A pair of FBI agents at the screening dissected the film for Mitchell and told the reporter what really happened.
"The thing that was horrifying to me was you had more than 20 guys involved in killing these three young men and no one has been prosecuted for murder," Mitchell recalled.
Mitchell, whose reporting also helped secure convictions in other high-profile civil rights era cases, began looking closely at the "Mississippi Burning" case. His big break came when he obtained leaked files from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a segregationist group that tried to curb growing civil rights activism. Mitchell found out that the state had spied on Michael Schwerner and his wife for three months before he, Goodman and Chaney were murdered (Smith 9).
In 1999, Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore announced that the state would reopen the case. At his request, the FBI turned over more than 40,000 pages related to the initial investigation (Murder in Mississippi 10).
Indictment of Killen was delayed. On October 6, 2004 approximately 500 people marched in support of Killen’s state prosecution.
On January 6, 2005, the State of Mississippi charged 79-year-old former Klan preacher Edgar Ray Killen with murder in connection with the slayings of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Police arrested Killen at his home following a grand jury session, according to Neshoba County Sheriff Larry Myers. Convicted Klan conspirator Billy Wayne Posey expressed anger at Killen's arrest: "After 40 years to come back and do something like this is ridiculous...like a nightmare." … Carolyn Goodman, the 89-year-old mother of victim Andrew Goodman, was pleased with the news. She hoped the killers would someday be "behind bars and think about what they've done" (Linder Trial 9).
Although several of the other conspirators were still alive at the time, the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to indict anyone else. The trial drew national news coverage; members of the victims’ families were present at the trial, some as witnesses and some as observers. Ultimately, the jury [nine whites and three blacks] found insufficient evidence for a murder conviction, but did find Killen guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter (Murder in Mississippi 10).
According to FBI files and court transcripts from a 1967 federal conspiracy trial, Killen had done most of the planning in the ambush killings.
… witnesses [had] testified that on June 21, 1964, Killen went to Meridian to round up carloads of Klansmen to ambush Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, telling some of the Klan members to bring plastic or rubber gloves. Witnesses [had] said Killen then went to a Philadelphia funeral home as an alibi while the fatal attack occurred (Pettus 3).
Judge Marcus Gordon today sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to serve three 20-year terms, one for each conviction of manslaughter in connection with the deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964. Judge Gordon said in pronouncing sentence, "I have taken into consideration that there are three lives in this case and that the three lives should be absolutely respected." Sentencing followed Killen's conviction earlier in the week. The manslaughter convictions came after nearly three days of jury deliberations. The jury found that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Killen intended that the klansmen kill the civil rights workers, and thus did not return a murder conviction (Linder Trial 10).
The courts had finally acknowledged the "Mississippi Burning" killings but the public sentiment was mixed. After Killen was arrested, [investigator reporter] Mitchell says he was threatened by some residents in an area where a "let-sleeping-dogs-lie" mentality prevailed. One man wrote a letter in 2005 to the Clarion-Ledger editor, saying Mitchell "should be tarred, feathered and run out of the state of Mississippi."
But Mitchell says others were grateful for the belated justice as Mississippi tried to shed its racially charged past (Smith 10).
In February 2010, Killen sued the FBI, claiming the government used a mafia hit man to pistol-whip and intimidate witnesses for information in the case. The federal lawsuit sought millions of dollars in damages and a declaration that his rights were violated when the FBI allegedly used a gangster known as “The Grim Reaper” during the investigation. The lawsuit was later dismissed (Pettus 5).
Linda Schiro, the ex-girlfriend of former mobster Gregory Scarpa, nicknamed "The Grim Reaper," testifying for the prosecution in a murder case, stated that Scarpa put a gun in the mouth of a Ku Klux Klansman in an effort to gain information about the location of the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The ploy worked and the bodies were soon dug up in an earthen dam. Scarpa died in prison in the 1990s.
Schiro's story confirmed reports, coming from confidential FBI sources in 1994, that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover had turned to the Colombo crime family for help in cracking the "Mississippi Burning" case.
On March 15,[2013] Owen Burrage died at age 82. Burrage owned the farm on which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were buried under an earthen dam, but was acquitted in the 1967 trial. Days before the killings, Burrage bragged that his 250-foot long dam would make a good burial place for civil rights workers. According to an FBI informant, Burrage told a roomful of KKKers discussing the arrival of the civil rights workers in 1964: "Hell, I've got a dam that will hold a hundred of them." Horace Barnette told the FBI that around midnight after the killings, Burrage was waitng at his farm to direct Klansmen to the dam site. Burrage then went to his trucking company garage to get gasoline that was used to burn the civil rights workers' station wagon. With the death of Burrage, only one of the 18 people originally indicted remains alive. The survivor is Pete Harris, who witnesses say called the Klansman to gather on the night of the murders (Linder Trial 11-12).
Killen, serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman , died at 9 p.m. Thursday, January 11, 2018. He was 92.
“It wasn’t even murder. It was manslaughter,” David Goodman, Andrew’s younger brother, observed Friday.
“His life spanned a period in this country where members of the Ku Klux Klan like him were able to believe they had a right to take other people’s lives, and that’s a form of terrorism,” Goodman said. “Many took black lives with impunity.”
…
[Michael] Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said on the day Killen was convicted that the slayings were part of a larger problem of violence in Mississippi against black people and others who challenged the segregationist status quo.
“Preacher Killen did not act in a vacuum and the members of the Klan who were members of the police department and the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol didn’t act in a vacuum,” she said.
Goodman said …that Killen’s passing is a reminder that issues of racism and white nationalism remain today. He pointed to the violent rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia ….
Killen wouldn’t say much about the killings during a 2014 interview with The Associated Press inside the penitentiary. He said he remained a segregationist who did not believe in racial equality, but contended he harbored no ill will toward black people. Killen said he never had talked about the events that landed him behind bars, and never would.
…
When she learned of Killen’s death, Chaney’s sister, the Rev. Julia Chaney Moss, said her first thought was that “God has been kind to him. And for that I am grateful.”
“My last thought on this is just that I only wish peace and blessings for all the families as well as the families of the perpetrators,” she said. (Pettus 6-8).
Works cited:
Linder, Douglas O. “Cecil Price.” Famous Trials. Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Linder, Douglas O. “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials, Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.” nbclearn.com. Web. http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the...
“Murder in Mississippi.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
Pettus, Emily Wagster and Santana, Rebecca. “Man Convicted of 3 Killing Civil Rights Workers Dies in Jail.” AP News. January 13, 2018. Web. https://www.apnews.com/3d82e778b5d643...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
July 7, 2019
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...
Carter, Joe. “9 Things You Should Know About the ‘Mississippi Burning’ Murders.” TGC, the Gospel Coalition. January 13, 2018. Web. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/ar...
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-gregor...
Linder, Douglas O. “Cecil Price.” Famous Trials. Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Linder, Douglas O. “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials, Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Montaldo, Charles. "The Mississippi Burning Case." ThoughtCo. Oct. 25, 2018. Web. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-mississ...
“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.” nbclearn.com. Web. http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the...
“Murder in Mississippi.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
“The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.” Mississippi Civil Rights Project. Web. https://mscivilrightsproject.org/nesh...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
"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...
Carter, Joe. “9 Things You Should Know About the ‘Mississippi Burning’ Murders.” TGC, the Gospel Coalition. January 13, 2018. Web. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/ar...
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-gregor...
Linder, Douglas O. “Cecil Price.” Famous Trials. Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Linder, Douglas O. “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials, Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...
Montaldo, Charles. "The Mississippi Burning Case." ThoughtCo. Oct. 25, 2018. Web. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-mississ...
“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.” nbclearn.com. Web. http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the...
“Murder in Mississippi.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...
“The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.” Mississippi Civil Rights Project. Web. https://mscivilrightsproject.org/nesh...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
June 30, 2019
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/rem...
“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedo...
Joiner, Lottie L. “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississ...
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-196...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." American RadioWorks. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?” Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Reco...
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/rem...
“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedo...
Joiner, Lottie L. “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississ...
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-196...
Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...
“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." American RadioWorks. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...
“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?” Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Reco...
June 23, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- March on Washington -- August 28, 1963
The 1963 event was officially dubbed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Its main aims were racial equality and full employment for blacks and whites. Unemployment was rising then, especially among minorities. And although there had been several major pushes for equal rights over the last decade, little progress had been made. By 1962, civil rights legislation (to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or sex) was stalled in Congress, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy was unwilling to lend any help [sources: Erickson, Penrice].
Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).
Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:
A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march. …
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:
A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”
Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”
Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.
At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.
Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.
To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).
On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.
These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.
The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!
Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).
Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).
There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."
Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.
Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."
In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.
With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).
… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).
The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).
Rachelle Horowitz commented:
It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”
Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:
Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.
Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:
I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?
Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front. John Lewis recalled:
Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.
Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).
“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory
Juanita Abernathy remembered:
I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).
Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).
John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.
I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.
The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”
The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech. In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”
Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.
It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).
It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.
Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.
Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
…
America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. …
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).
As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."
…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
…
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Dream 4-6).
Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.
Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.
John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.
Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.
My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?
Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.
Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).
Works cited:
“An Oral History of the March on Washington.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Kettler, Sara. “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.” Biography. August 25, 2017. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/march-...
“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware. Web. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...
McManus, Melanie Radzicki. “How the March on Washington Worked.” How Stuff Works.com. August 26, 2013. Web. https://history.howstuffworks.com/his...
Frustrated, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the AFL-CIO] proposed a march on Washington to demand equal rights and jobs for all. But the response from mainstream civil rights organizations was tepid [source: Penrice]. Then King signed on. Suddenly, the idea began to pick up steam. Civil rights groups that often disagreed with each other banded together -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Conference of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In June 1963, a date was set: Aug. 28, 1963. The buzz was 100,000 would attend, mainly blacks. Many people became unnerved. Mainstream media wondered if the march would devolve into a riot. President Kennedy asked organizers to call off the march, but they refused. So to help ensure public safety, liquor stores and bars were shuttered that day. Stores hid or moved their valuable items. Federal employees were given the day off. And innumerable military personnel were on standby (McManus 1-2).
Rachelle Horowitz, an aide to Bayard Rustin, interviewed in 2013 declared:
A. Philip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] had tried to put on a march in 1941 to protest discrimination in the armed forces and for a fair employment policy commission. He called off that march when FDR issued an executive order [prohibiting discrimination in the national defense industry]. But Randolph always believed that you had to move the civil rights struggle to Washington, to the center of power. In January 1963, Bayard Rustin sent a memo to A. Philip Randolph in essence saying the time is now to really conceive of a big march. …
John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, added:
A. Philip Randolph had this idea in the back of his mind for many years. When he had his chance to make another demand for a March on Washington, he told President Kennedy in a meeting at the White House in June 1963 that we were going to march on Washington. It was the so-called “Big Six,” Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr. and myself. Out of the blue Mr. Randolph spoke up. He was the dean of black leadership, the spokesperson. He said “Mr. President, the black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.” President Kennedy didn’t like the idea, hearing people talk about a march on Washington. He said, “If you bring all these people to Washington, won’t there be violence and chaos and disorder and we will never get a civil rights bill through the Congress?” Mr. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.”
Harry Belafonte said; “We had to seize this opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission.”
Joyce Ladner, SNCC activist, had a practical motive for supporting a march.
At that point, the police all over Mississippi had cracked down so hard on us that it was more and more difficult to raise bond money, to organize without harassment from the local cops and the racists. I thought a large march would demonstrate that we had support outside our small group.
Harry Belafonte would bring celebrity support.
To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic. We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day. Those that wanted to sit on the platform could do that, but we should be in among the citizens—the ordinary citizens—of the day. Somebody should just turn around and there was Paul Newman. Or turn around and there was Burt Lancaster. I went first to one of my closest friends, Marlon Brando, and asked if he would be willing to chair the leading delegation from California. And he said yes. Not only enthusiastically but committed himself to really working and calling friends (Oral 4-8).
On July 2, 1963, leaders from six civil rights groups — A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr., James Farmer, Roy Wilkins and John Lewis — announced plans for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. These men all wanted equality for black Americans, but the tactics and methods they adopted often varied.
These leaders also disagreed on who should handle march logistics. Randolph wanted to put Bayard Rustin in charge, as Rustin was a skilled organizer — during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Rustin had counseled King on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. But Rustin was gay (he'd been arrested in 1953 on a "morals" charge), had joined the Communist Party for a short time and had gone to prison for refusing to serve during World War II.
The solution was for Randolph to become march director and select Rustin as his deputy; Rustin then set up an office in Harlem and got to work. His tasks included getting funds for a sound system, having brochures printed, arranging for drinking water and directing volunteers to prepare boxed lunches. Plus he had to plan for how many toilets the crowd — 150,000 were hoped for — would require (Kettler 1-2)!
Volunteers prepared 80,000 50-cent boxed lunches (consisting of a cheese sandwich, a slice of poundcake and an apple). Rustin marshaled more than 2,200 chartered buses, 40 special trains, 22 first-aid stations, eight 2,500-gallon water-storage tank trucks and 21 portable water fountains (Oral 3).
Rustin did everything from coaching volunteer marshals in nonviolent crowd control techniques to creating a 12-page manual for bus captains, instructing them on issues like where to park their vehicles and locate bathrooms for passengers. He managed to divvy up the limited podium time among competing interests without angering anyone (McManus 6).
There was wariness and anger in Washington, D.C. about the march, which opposing politicians denounced as a Communist plot. President John F. Kennedy feared that any disturbance could derail his proposed civil rights legislation (though he eventually accepted the march and offered some support). Two Southern Democrats in Congress even tried to legislate the demonstration away — one wanted to halt mass protests while a civil rights bill was under consideration, the other attempted to outlaw interstate travel for "any conduct which would tend to incite to riot."
Three weeks before the march, Senator Strom Thurmond read out details of Rustin's 1953 arrest on the Senate floor. However, given Thurmond's stance as a staunch segregationist, no one broke with Rustin. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who worked in Rustin's Harlem office, later noted, "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement, but you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the sole female member of the march's administrative committee, had spent years battling for civil rights and knew how much of a contribution women had made to the movement: Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Diane Nash fought to continue Freedom Rides when others wanted to quit and countless women faced danger in order to register voters.
Given all this, Hedgeman and others wanted a female speaker for the march. But Rustin cited the overloaded program as a reason not to add anyone else (he also felt other women would get jealous if just one were chosen). As the march's date approached, Hedgeman wrote a letter to the committee to demand a female speaker, noting, "It is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial."
In the end, a "Tribute to Negro Women" was added to the program. At the march, Daisy Bates, who'd helped the Little Rock Nine as they'd integrated their school system, read a prepared statement, then several women who'd contributed to the movement were named. It was a compromise, but it didn't offer a female civil rights speaker.
With violence expected, Washington planned to have 6,000 officers — police, marshals and National Guardsman — on hand on August 28, with thousands more soldiers available at nearby bases. (Kettler 3-5).
… some of the march's most vocal dissidents were black, namely Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and later the leader of SNCC. But over time he moved away from King's theory of nonviolence and toward one of self-defense; he also coined the "black power" slogan. The March on Washington, in Carmichael's view, was "only a sanitized, middle-class version of the real black movement," so he refused to attend. Black nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X bitterly referred to the event as "The Farce on Washington" and discouraged fellow Nation of Islam members from attending. Curiously, he himself attended (McManus 9).
The potent symbolism of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial—timed to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and following President John F. Kennedy’s announcement in June that he would submit a civil rights bill to Congress—transfixed the nation (Oral 2).
Rachelle Horowitz commented:
It was about 5:30 in the morning, it’s gray, it’s muggy, people are setting up. There’s nobody there for the march except some reporters and they start annoying Bayard and pestering him: “Where are the people, where are the people?” Bayard very elegantly took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. Took out a pocket watch that he used, looked at both and said, “It’s all coming according to schedule,” and he put it away. The reporters went away and I asked, “What were you looking at?” He said, “A blank piece of paper.” Sure enough, eventually, about 8:30 or 9, the trains were pulling in and people were coming up singing and the buses came. There’s always that moment of “We know the buses are chartered, but will they really come.”
Courtland Cox, a SNCC activist, said:
Bayard and I left together. It was real early, maybe 6 or 7 in the morning. We went out to the Mall and there was literally no one there. Nobody there. Bayard looks at me and says, “You think anybody is coming to this?” and just as he says that, a group of young people from an NAACP chapter came over the horizon. From that time, the flow was steady. We found out that we couldn’t see anyone there because so many people were in buses, in trains and, particularly, on the roads, that the roads were clogged. Once the flow started, it was just volumes of people coming.
Civil right activist Barry Rosenberg related:
I could hardly sleep the night before the march. I got there early. Maybe 10:30 in the morning, people were milling around. There were maybe 20,000 folks out there. It was August; I forgot to wear a hat. I was a little concerned about getting burned up. I went and got a Coke. When I got back, people just poured in from all directions. If you were facing the podium, I was on the right-hand side. People were greeting each other; I got chills, I got choked up. People were hugging and shaking hands and asking “Where are you from” (Oral 11-12)?
Attendance climbed to about 250,000. The huge procession headed down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial without the march's leaders, who had to hurry to the front. John Lewis recalled:
Early that morning the ten of us [the Big Six, plus four other march leaders] boarded cars that brought us to Capitol Hill. We visited the leadership of the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. In addition, we met on the House side with the chairman of the judiciary committee, the ranking member, because that’s where the civil rights legislation will come. We did the same thing on the Senate side. We left Capitol Hill, walked down Constitution Avenue. Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. We thought we might get 75,000 people showing up on August 28. When we saw this unbelievable crowd coming out of Union Station, we knew it was going to be more than 75,000. People were already marching. It was like “There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” We said, “What are we going to do? The people are already marching! There go my people. Let me catch up with them.” What we did, the ten of us, was grab each other’s arms, made a line across the sea of marchers. People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial.
Joyce Ladner said: “As the day passed a lot of individual people were there. Odetta and Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan. They began warming up the crowd very early, began singing. It was not tense at all, wasn’t a picnic either. Somewhere in between; people were happy to see each other, renewing acquaintances, everyone was very pleasant” (Oral 12-14).
“It’s a pleasure being here and nice being out of jail. And to be honest with you, the last time I’ve seen this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.” — Activist and comedian Dick Gregory
Juanita Abernathy remembered:
I don’t know where that march started out. It looked like we marched forever before we got to the Mall. You were used to marching; you wear comfortable shoes so your feet won’t hurt and you don’t get blisters. We got to the stage and Coretta [Scott King] and I sat on the second row. Mahalia [Jackson] sat on the first row, because she was singing. We were on the left side of the stage. I wanted to scream, we were so happy, we were ecstatic. We had no idea it would be that many people—as far as you could see there were heads. What I called a sea of people; because all you could see was people, everywhere, just a sea of heads and what jubilation. Which said to us in the civil rights movement: “Your work has not been in vain. We are with you. We are part of you” (Oral 12-17).
Several male civil rights leaders gave speeches, as did union and religious leaders. In his talk, Randolph said, "Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy" (Kettler 1-4).
John Lewis, interviewed in 2013, had this to say about his speech.
I started working on my speech several days before the March on Washington. We tried to come up with a speech that would represent the young people: the foot soldiers, people on the front lines. Some people call us the “shock troops” into the delta of Mississippi, into Alabama, southwest Georgia, eastern Arkansas, the people who had been arrested, jailed and beaten. Not only our own staffers but also the people that we were working with. They needed someone to speak for them.
The night before the march, Bayard Rustin put a note under my door and said, “John, you should come downstairs. There’s some discussion about your speech, some people have a problem with your speech.”
The archbishop [of Washington, D.C.] had threatened not to give the invocation if I kept some words and phrases in the speech. In the original speech I said something like “In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s proposed civil rights bill. It was too little, too late. It did not protect old women and young children in nonviolent protests run down by policemen on horseback and police dogs.”
Much farther down I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way General Sherman did, nonviolently.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t say that; it’s too inflammatory.” I think that was the concern of the people in the Kennedy administration. We didn’t delete that portion of the speech. We did not until we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.
It was at the back side of Mr. Lincoln that Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said to me, “John, they still have a problem with your speech. Can we change this, can we change that?” I loved Martin Luther King, I loved and admired A. Philip Randolph, and I couldn’t say no to those two men. I dropped all reference to marching through the South the way Sherman did. I said something like “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, we will march through cities, towns and hamlets and villages all across America.” I was thinking about how I was going to deliver the speech. I was 23 years old and it was a sea of humanity out there that I had to face (Oral 9-10, 18).
It was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that is best remembered at the event.
Courtland Cox: What’s interesting was not only the crowd all the way to the Reflecting Pool, but that people were up in trees, they were everywhere. When King started speaking, and as he was speaking, Mahalia Jackson began like a chant and response. She was like his amen corner. She kept saying “Tell ’em Rev” the whole time he was speaking. She was just talking to him.
Julian Bond: When Dr. King spoke, he commanded the attention of everybody there. His speech, with his slow, slow cadence at first and then picking up speed and going faster and faster. You saw what a magnificent speechmaker he was, and you knew something important was happening (Oral 19-20).
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
…
America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
… This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. …
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone (Dream 1-3).
As the speech was winding down, Mahalia Jackson, a close friend of King's, felt it needed to go in a different direction. So she shouted to him from behind the podium, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did, improvising that well-loved section from speeches and sermons he had given in the past (McManus 10).
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal."
…
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
…
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last" (Dream 4-6).
Joyce Ladner: Medgar Evers’ death was a subtext of the march. Everyone was aware that one of the truly great heroes in the Deep South had just been murdered. And therefore, Mr. President, your request that we go slow doesn’t make sense.
Rachelle Horowitz: The podium sort of cleared. Those of us who had worked on the march, the staff people and the SNCC staff, stood at the bottom of the memorial. We linked arms and we sang “We Shall Overcome” and we probably cried. There were some SNCC people who were cynical about Dr. King and we forced them to admit it was really a great speech.
John Lewis: After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.
Joyce Ladner: After the march, all the people had left and a group of SNCC people were standing there with remnants of things to clean up. This small group of people had to go back south. We were dedicated to going south, to take this giant problem on, fighting the problem we had left behind.
My sister Dorie and I walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, Malcolm X was holding forth. He was talking about the “Farce on Washington.” Reporters and others were crowded around him. His ideal would have been, you take your freedom, grab it, not ask the government to free you. I do recall very clearly wondering who was right, King and us or Malcolm?
Actor and future director Ken Howard: One thing about the march: It was a step. You have to realize the tumultuousness of the times. Just a few weeks later, four little black girls got blown up at a church in the South. After the march, you had the feeling that things will change—and then these little girls were killed. As they said about the walk on the moon, it was a “small step,” but it was a step nonetheless that people heard. The loss of those girls was sad, but it was another step, because individuals began to see there was an injustice being done.
Only in retrospect do you see just how each little piece enabled a building to be built. Who would have thought a minister from a small black church in Atlanta would have a monument on the Mall? You wouldn’t think a minister from a small black church would be a “drum major” in a movement helping a people gain their rights as citizens. It’s only from the mountaintop of time that you see that it all made a difference. Each individual thing played a role (Oral 21-25).
Works cited:
“An Oral History of the March on Washington.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2013. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Kettler, Sara. “March on Washington: The Activists Who Took a Stand for Equality.” Biography. August 25, 2017. Web. https://www.biography.com/news/march-...
“Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington Address.” University of Delaware. Web. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...
McManus, Melanie Radzicki. “How the March on Washington Worked.” How Stuff Works.com. August 26, 2013. Web. https://history.howstuffworks.com/his...
June 16, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing -- Aftermath
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15 was the third bombing in 11 days, after a federal court order had come down mandating the integration of Alabama’s school system.
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).
Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.
At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.
…
City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he said (Six Dead 2-3).
Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.
City police shot a 16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).
Virgil Ware, aged 13, was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15 miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice, reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).
Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals" (The 16th Street 4).
Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street 5).
King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).
President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being rushed in (Six Dead 6).
Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit (The 16th Street 5).
Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th Street 6).
On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street 6).
In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.
The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.
In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street 7).
Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown 4).
Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. [Chambliss died in prison on October 29, 1985] In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. His boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send Cherry to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls (16th Street 8).
What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of the slain? Several have bared the souls to the media.
Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham, never wanted to live in Birmingham again. I wanted to get away from those painful memories,” he says. “The biggest struggle I had going on back then [was], Why did we live there? I thought it was the most god-awful place to live.”
Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”
Cross says she forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies. “I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who don’t know any better.”
They went back to school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that day. (Waxman 5-6).
Sarah and Janie Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."
Janie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.
"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."
(She now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).
She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."
What most concerns Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening, "like an open sore to us" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 8-9).
Carolyn McKinstry: When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at 10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because there was nothing we could do about it.
The first thing that stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham. The mood of the community was such that they did not think white people were going to convict one of their own for the death of black children. But the truth was, in Birmingham, no one thought that black life was important. It didn’t matter that blacks were killed, that little girls were killed in Sunday school.
It [the bombing] gave us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends. That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.
It softened the heart of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham, Alabama, but for the rest of the world. We may yet see something very horrible become a force for good. And I think that is what we saw to a large extent. The following year we saw the signing of the civil-rights legislation (Joiner 5-6).
Sources cited:
“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...
“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN Library. September 7, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/196...
“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...
Brown, Deneen L. “Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The Wasnington Post. December 12, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...
Longman, Martin. “Remember the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Washington Monthly. September 15, 2017. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09...
“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United Press International. September 16, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
“The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Modern American Poetry. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...
In the aftermath of the bombing, thousands of angry black protesters gathered at the scene of the bombing. When Governor Wallace sent police and state troopers to break the protests up, violence broke out across the city; a number of protesters were arrested, and two young African American men were killed (one by police) before the National Guard was called in to restore order (Birmingham 2).
Negroes stoned cars in other sections of Birmingham and police exchanged shots with a Negro firing wild shotgun blasts two blocks from the church. It took officers two hours to disperse the screaming, surging crowd of 2,000 Negroes who ran to the church at the sound of the blast.
At least 20 persons were hurt badly enough by the blast to be treated at hospitals. Many more, cut and bruised by flying debris, were treated privately.
…
City Police Inspector W.J. Haley said as many as 15 sticks of dynamite must have been used. "We have talked to witnesses who say they saw a car drive by and then speed away just before the bomb hit," he said (Six Dead 2-3).
Two Negro youths were killed in outbreaks of shooting seven hours after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, and a third was wounded.
City police shot a 16-year-old Negro [Johnny Robinson] to death when he refused to heed their commands to halt after they caught him stoning cars. … They said he fled down an alley when they caught him stoning cars. They shot him when he refused to halt (Six Dead 4).
Virgil Ware, aged 13, was shot in the cheek and chest with a revolver in a residential suburb 15 miles north of the city. A 16-year-old white youth named Larry Sims fired the gun (given to him by another youth named Michael Farley) at Ware, who was sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by his brother. Sims and Farley had been riding home from an anti-integration rally which had denounced the church bombing. When he spotted Ware and his brother, Sims fired twice, reportedly with his eyes closed. (Sims and Farley were later convicted of second-degree manslaughter, although the judge suspended their sentences and imposed two years’ probation upon each youth.) (Longman 1).
Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals" (The 16th Street 4).
Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands" (16th Street 5).
King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN….” (Brown 3).
President Kennedy, yachting off Newport, R.I., was notified by radio-telephone and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered his chief civil rights troubleshooter, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham. At least 25 FBI agents, including bomb experts from Washington, were being rushed in (Six Dead 6).
Kennedy made this statement the next day. "If these cruel and tragic events can only awaken that city and state - if they can only awaken this entire nation to a realization of the folly of racial injustice and hatred and violence, then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost" (1963 Birmingham 2).
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit (The 16th Street 5).
Several days prior to the bombing, Chambliss, a retired auto mechanic, “foreshadowed the violence to come when he told his niece, ‘Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate’" (16th Street 6).
On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite (The 16th Street 6).
In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing - Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash. All four men were members of Birmingham's Cahaba River Group, a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Eastview Klavern #13 was considered one of the most violent groups in the South and was responsible for the 1961 attacks on the Freedom Riders at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham.
The investigation ended in 1968 with no indictments. According to the FBI, although they had identified the four suspects, witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. In addition, information from FBI surveillances was not admissible in court. Hoover chose not to approve arrests, stating, "The chance of prosecution in state or federal court is remote." Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no charges were filed in the 1960s for the bombing of the church.
In 1971, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with witnesses who had been reluctant to testify (16th Street 7).
Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General” (Brown 4).
Investigators discovered that, while the FBI had accumulated evidence against the bombers, under orders from Hoover they had not disclosed the evidence to county prosecutors. Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder on November 14, 1977; however, it would be decades before the other suspects were tried for their crimes. [Chambliss died in prison on October 29, 1985] In 2000, the FBI assisted Alabama state authorities in bringing charges against the remaining suspects. On May 1, 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted as well. His boasts that he was the one who planted the bomb next to the church wall helped send Cherry to prison for life. Herman Cash died in 1994 having never been prosecuted for the murders of the four girls (16th Street 8).
What of the survivors, the children who had been friends of the slain? Several have bared the souls to the media.
Dale Long drove to Birmingham to see the 2001 court proceedings, hoping to find some closure — but he still suspects that not all of the people who participated in the bombing were apprehended. He’s gone back home throughout the years to see family and revisit the church, but the trips haven’t gotten any easier. “I never moved back to Birmingham, never wanted to live in Birmingham again. I wanted to get away from those painful memories,” he says. “The biggest struggle I had going on back then [was], Why did we live there? I thought it was the most god-awful place to live.”
Barbara Cross: “If it happened to older people, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Cross argues. “How would you feel if you went to go find your child and you couldn’t? The [home] phone would be constantly ringing with white women calling my house to tell my parents, ‘We don’t all think like that.'”
Cross says she forgives the Klansmen behind the bombing, because that’s what the Sunday School lesson taught that day said to do. Entitled “The Love That Forgives,” it was centered on Matthew 5:43-48, which contains the instruction to love one’s enemies. “I hate what they did but I can separate the hate of the doing from the hate of the person,” Cross explains. “I wasn’t taught to hate. I pray for those who don’t know any better.”
They went back to school the day after the bombing, on the thought that they had to show they were not intimidated, but what they had seen had shaken them. Long notes that he didn’t get any counseling as a student in Birmingham; these days, he works with kids who might need help as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And it wasn’t until Cross was a college freshman at Tuskegee University in 1968 that she realized that certain health issues were a result of the trauma of that day. (Waxman 5-6).
Sarah and Janie Collins: It is no surprise that Sarah and her sister Janie have never fully shaken off the horror of that day 34 years ago. "I never smiled, and I never talked about what had happened," says Janie. "Then, back in 1985, someone told me that it was going to destroy me if I didn't start talking about it. So I did. I ended up checking into Brookwood (Medical Center, for psychotherapy) for 37 days."
Janie, like Sarah, now works as a housekeeper. Her employer, plastic surgeon Dr. Peter Bunting, had no notion of her connection to the bombing when he hired her. "I almost fell off my stool when she told me," he says, adding that while Janie holds no grudge, "I think she will always be in a state of healing - which is true of the city too." Janie lives in a spacious one-story home and is a member of a small church congregation called Fellowship West.
"She is queen," says Christopher Williams, "always so positive and outgoing that it's hard for me to imagine the timid, nervous person she says she was for so many years. She told me that she thinks she's finally crossed the bridge from the bombing, and I said, "Maybe you are the bridge."
(She now suffers from glaucoma in her left eye).
She worked as a short-order cook after high school and was married for three years to a city worker before she took a foundry job, which she held for 16 years. In 1988, she married Leroy Cox, a mechanic, and the two live together in a small, cheerful prefab house; a statue of the Virgin Mary graces its tiny front yard. Sarah's family members say she has always been the peacemaker, even as she struggled to find peace for herself. "In 1989," Sarah recalls, "a prophet called out to me at church and prayed for me to be relieved of my nervousness and fear. It has been better since then. The panic attacks in the middle of the night finally subsided."
What most concerns Sarah and Janie now is the forlorn state of Addie's grave site in a cemetery so close to the Birmingham airport that the roar of jets seem to mock the mourners below. The grass is overgrown, and a dirt road leading there is rutted, but Janie and Sarah can't afford to move their sister. "It is," says Janie, standing over the grave at dusk on a hot Alabama evening, "like an open sore to us" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 8-9).
Carolyn McKinstry: When I went home that Sunday, I remember one or two people calling my mother, looking for their children. One of them was Mrs. Robertson, Carole’s mother. Later somebody else called and said that the girls in the bathroom never made it out. My heart jumped. I knew who they were talking about. I was shocked. I was numb. The bomb exploded on Sunday at 10:22 a.m. On Monday morning at 8 o’clock, I was sitting in my classroom. No one said anything. No one said, “Let’s have a moment of silent prayer.” No one said, “Let’s have a memorial. Let’s talk about it.” Even in my home we didn’t talk about it. My parents never said, are you OK? Do you miss your friends? Are you afraid? I think the reason we didn’t talk about it primarily was because there was nothing we could do about it.
The first thing that stands out is the pain of that day. How horrible it was and learning that my friends had died. The second thing that stands out is that no one responded. No one did anything. For the first 14 years after the bombing of the church, no one was arrested. Nothing happened. The police and FBI acted as though they didn’t have any evidence or enough evidence. But the police would later say they did not feel they could get a conviction in Birmingham. The mood of the community was such that they did not think white people were going to convict one of their own for the death of black children. But the truth was, in Birmingham, no one thought that black life was important. It didn’t matter that blacks were killed, that little girls were killed in Sunday school.
It [the bombing] gave us a reputation that we didn’t want. There is nowhere in the world that you can go that people don’t know this story. That’s how horrific it was. And how people saw what we had done. When we finally prosecuted someone 14 years later and then 32 years later, I think it was because we received pressure from the rest of the world. You know how people can shame you? You want to make amends. That one image we could never get rid of: killing babies in church all in the name of segregation. So I think when we began the prosecuting of the last two men, it was an attempt to say we have changed. We are a different nation.
It softened the heart of the oppressors. What Dr. King said to us was that unmerited suffering was always redemptive. He also said that the blood of these girls might well serve as a redemptive force not only for Birmingham, Alabama, but for the rest of the world. We may yet see something very horrible become a force for good. And I think that is what we saw to a large extent. The following year we saw the signing of the civil-rights legislation (Joiner 5-6).
Sources cited:
“16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963).” National Park Service. March 23, 2016. Web. https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstre...
“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN Library. September 7, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/196...
“Birmingham Church Bombing.” History. A&E Television Networks. August 28, 2018. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/...
Brown, Deneen L. “Doug Jones triumphs in an Alabama Senate race that conjured a deadly church bombing.” The Wasnington Post. December 12, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r...
Joiner, Lottie L. “50 Years Later: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Daily Beast. September 15, 2013. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/50-year...
Longman, Martin. “Remember the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Washington Monthly. September 15, 2017. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09...
“Six Dead After Church Bombing.” United Press International. September 16, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
“The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing.” Modern American Poetry. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Waxman, Olivia B. “16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: 'I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It'.” Time. Web. http://time.com/5394093/16th-street-b...
June 9, 2019
Civil Rights Events -- Birmingham 1963 -- 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing -- Remembering the Victims
The four girls killed were
Addie Mae Collins, 14,
Denise McNair, 11,
Carole Robertson, 14,
Cynthia Wesley, 14,
Janie, Sarah, and Addie Mae Collins
While Sarah’s parents comforted her at the hospital, her older sister Janie, 16, who had survived the bombing unscathed, was taken to the University Hospital morgue to help identify a body. "I looked at the face, and I couldn't tell who it was," she says of the crumpled form she viewed. "Then I saw this little brown shoe - you know, like a loafer - and I recognized it right away."
...
After the blast, Sarah's face was so drenched in blood, says Cross, that "when they asked me who she was, I had to say I had no idea." In the hospital, Sarah, whose eyes were bandaged, wondered why Addie didn't visit with the rest of the family. Her sister Janie told her that "Addie's back is hurting." Sarah learned of Addie's death when she overheard Janie talking to a nurse. "It hurt real bad," Sarah says. "I just didn't know what I would do without Addie." Sarah spent three months in the hospital, ultimately losing her right eye.
Addie's family was the poorest of the four. She was one of seven children born to Oscar Collins, a janitor, and Alice, a homemaker. "It was clear that she lacked things," recalls Rev. John Cross, the pastor of the church at the time of the bombing. "But she was a quiet, sweet girl." And, Sarah adds, a budding artist: "She could draw people real good" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 1-2).
Addie Mae Collins and two of her sisters would go door to door every day after school, selling their mother's handmade cotton aprons and potholders.
The trio collected 35 cents for potholders and 50 cents for aprons. The bibbed aprons netted 75 cents.
"Addie liked to do it. She looked forward to it," said sister Sarah … "We sold a lot of them."
When she wasn't selling her mother's wares, Addie liked to play hopscotch, sing in the church choir, draw portraits, and wear bright colors.
The Hill Elementary School eighth-grader loved to pitch while playing ball, too. "I remember that underhand," said older sister Janie,,,.
She also remembers Addie's spirit. "She wasn't a shy or timid person. Addie was a courageous person."
Addie, born April 18, 1949, was the seventh of eight children born to Oscar and Alice Collins. When disagreements erupted among the siblings inside the home on Sixth Court West, Addie was the peacemaker.
"She just always wanted us to love one another and treat each other right," Mrs. Rudolph [Sarah] said. "She was a happy person also, and she loved life."
The routine was the same every Saturday night at the Collins household - starching Sunday dresses for church. Sept. 14, 1963, was no different when Addie pulled out a white dress. Older sister Flora pressed and curled Addie's short hair.
"We thought it looked pretty on her," said Mrs. Gaines [Janie].
… "I feel like I lost my best friend," said Mrs. Rudolph [Sarah]. "We were always going places together" (Temple 1-3).
Cynthia Wesley
Cynthia Wesley, whose parents were … teachers, left the house that day having been admonished by her mother to adjust her slip to be presentable in church (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
There were times when Cynthia Wesley's father came home weary after a night of patrolling his Smithfield neighborhood for would-be mischief-makers. Or worse, bombers.
Claude A. Wesley was one of several men who volunteered to ensure another peaceful night on Dynamite Hill, nicknamed for the frequent and unsolved bombings in a former white neighborhood that was increasingly a home to blacks.
The Wesleys tried to protect their daughter from segregation's brutality.
"We were extremely naive," remembers friend and playmate Karen Floyd Savage. "We didn't really discuss things in depth like that."
The first adopted daughter of Claude and Gertrude Wesley, Cynthia was a petite girl with a narrow face and size 2 dress. Cynthia's mother made her clothes, which fit her thin frame perfectly.
She attended the now-defunct Ullman High School, where she did well in math, reading and the band. She invited friends to parties in her back yard, playing soulful tunes and serving refreshments. She was born April 30, 1949.
"Cynthia was just full of fun all the time," Mrs. Savage said. "We were constantly laughing."
It was while the two girls attended Wilkerson Elementary School that Cynthia traded her gold-band ring topped with a clear, rectangular stone for a 1954 class ring that belonged to Mrs. Savage.
"We just sort of liked each others' rings and we just traded with no question of wanting it back," Mrs. Savage said.
Cynthia made friends easily, talking often to close pal Rickey Powell. On Sept. 14, 1963, she invited Rickey to church the next day for a Sunday youth program. Powell accepted, only to reluctantly decline when his mother wanted him to accompany her to a funeral.
"We were like peas in a pod," Powell said. "That was my best bud."
When Cynthia died in the church blast, she was still wearing the ring Mrs. Savage gave her when they were younger. Cynthia's father identified her by that ring when he went to the morgue.
The death of the four girls crushed Mrs. Savage.
"I was so young. I never realized someone would hate you so much that they would go to that extent. In a way, that was sort of the death of my own innocence" (Temple 3-4).
Denise McNair
Denise McNair, the daughter of photo shop owner Chris and schoolteacher Maxine, was an inquisitive girl who never understood why she couldn't get a sandwich at the same counter as white children (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
Denise McNair liked her dolls, left mudpies in the mailbox for childhood crushes and organized a neighborhood fund-raiser to fight muscular dystrophy.
Born Nov. 17, 1951, Carol Denise McNair was the first child of Chris and Maxine McNair. Her playmates called her Niecie.
A pupil at Center Street Elementary School, she had a knack of gathering neighborhood children to play on the block. She held tea parties, belonged to the Brownies and played baseball.
"Everybody liked her even if they didn't like each other," said childhood friend Rhonda Nunn Thomas. "She could play with anybody."
She and Rhonda would dream of husbands, children and careers. "At one point I would be delivering babies and she was going to be the pediatrician," Mrs. Thomas said.
At some point in her young life, Denise asked the neighborhood children to put on skits and dance routines and to read poetry in a big production to raise money for muscular dystrophy. It became an annual event. People gathered in the yard to watch the show in Denise's carport — the main stage. Children donated their pennies, dimes and nickels. Adults gave larger sums.
The muscular dystrophy fund-raiser was always Denise's project — one that nobody refused.
"It was the idea we were doing something special for some kids," Mrs. Thomas said. "How could you turn it down?"
A relative always thought the girl with the thick, shoulder-length hair and sparkling eyes would be a teacher because she was "a leader from the heart."
Friend and retired dentist Florita Jamison Askew remembers Denise as a child who smiled a lot, even for the camera when she lost her baby teeth.
"She was always a ham," Mrs. Askew said.
"I bet she would have been a real go-getter. She and Carole (Robertson) both. I just wonder sometimes."
Smithfield Recreation Center's auditorium became a dance school every Saturday afternoon when eager girls arrived for lessons in tap, ballet and modern jazz (Temple 5-7).
Carole Robertson
Carole Robertson, whose father was a band master at an elementary school and whose mother was a librarian, was an avid reader, dancer and clarinet player. (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
Carole Robertson, wearing a leotard and toting black patent leather tap shoes and pink ballet slippers, was among the crowd [at the dance school every Saturday].
"We didn't have any problems getting our chores done so we could get to dancing class on Saturdays," said Florita Jamison Askew, who attended classes with Carole and Carole's big sister. "Nobody ever wanted to miss them."
Students worked hard on their ballet and shuffle steps in preparation for the annual spring recital, where they got to wear makeup and dance with their hair down." It was a lot of fun," Mrs. Askew said.
Born April 24, 1949, Carole was the third child of Alpha and Alvin Robertson. Older siblings were Dianne and Alvin.
Carole was an avid reader and straight-A student who belonged to Jack and Jill of America, the Girl Scouts, the Parker High School marching band and science club. She also had attended Wilkerson Elementary School, where she sang in the choir.
Carole walked fast and with a smile.
"She moved through the halls rapidly, not running, but just full of life," said retired Birmingham teacher Lottie Palmer, who was a science club sponsor." She was a girl that was anxious to succeed and do well.
Carole grew up in a Smithfield home that was full of love, friends and the aroma of good cooking, especially her mother's spaghetti.
"There was a lot of warmth in the house. The food was good and the people were kind," Mrs. Askew said. "That was kind of my second home."
Inside the one-story home with the wrap-around porch, Mrs. Askew and the Robertson girls practiced dances such as the cha-cha and tried out different hairstyles — often on Carole, who didn't mind being the model.
Carole once told Mrs. Askew, now a retired dentist, about her desire to preserve the past.
"I remember a statement she made — she wanted to teach history or do something historical. I thought how ironic it was that she would remain a part of history forever."
In 1976, Chicago residents established the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, a social service agency that serves children and their families. Named after Carole, it is dedicated to the memory of all four girls.
Members of the Jack and Jill choir were scheduled to sing at Carole's funeral Sept. 17, 1963, at St. John AME Church. "Of course, we didn't do much singing," said choir member Karen Floyd Savage. "We cried through it" (Temple 7-9).
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a eulogy of the four slain girls September 18. Here are excerpts.
... they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.
Today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare: (Yeah, Well): Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day. (Yeah, Yes) And may the flight of angels (That’s right) take thee to thy eternal rest. God bless you (Martin 1-2).
Works cited:
“Martin Luther King's Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, delivered at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. September 18, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Smith, Kyle; Wescott, Gail Cameron; and Craig, David Cobb. “The Day the Children Died.” People Magazine. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Temple, Chandra. “Profiles of the Victims.” The Birmingham News. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Addie Mae Collins, 14,
Denise McNair, 11,
Carole Robertson, 14,
Cynthia Wesley, 14,
Janie, Sarah, and Addie Mae Collins
While Sarah’s parents comforted her at the hospital, her older sister Janie, 16, who had survived the bombing unscathed, was taken to the University Hospital morgue to help identify a body. "I looked at the face, and I couldn't tell who it was," she says of the crumpled form she viewed. "Then I saw this little brown shoe - you know, like a loafer - and I recognized it right away."
...
After the blast, Sarah's face was so drenched in blood, says Cross, that "when they asked me who she was, I had to say I had no idea." In the hospital, Sarah, whose eyes were bandaged, wondered why Addie didn't visit with the rest of the family. Her sister Janie told her that "Addie's back is hurting." Sarah learned of Addie's death when she overheard Janie talking to a nurse. "It hurt real bad," Sarah says. "I just didn't know what I would do without Addie." Sarah spent three months in the hospital, ultimately losing her right eye.
Addie's family was the poorest of the four. She was one of seven children born to Oscar Collins, a janitor, and Alice, a homemaker. "It was clear that she lacked things," recalls Rev. John Cross, the pastor of the church at the time of the bombing. "But she was a quiet, sweet girl." And, Sarah adds, a budding artist: "She could draw people real good" (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 1-2).
Addie Mae Collins and two of her sisters would go door to door every day after school, selling their mother's handmade cotton aprons and potholders.
The trio collected 35 cents for potholders and 50 cents for aprons. The bibbed aprons netted 75 cents.
"Addie liked to do it. She looked forward to it," said sister Sarah … "We sold a lot of them."
When she wasn't selling her mother's wares, Addie liked to play hopscotch, sing in the church choir, draw portraits, and wear bright colors.
The Hill Elementary School eighth-grader loved to pitch while playing ball, too. "I remember that underhand," said older sister Janie,,,.
She also remembers Addie's spirit. "She wasn't a shy or timid person. Addie was a courageous person."
Addie, born April 18, 1949, was the seventh of eight children born to Oscar and Alice Collins. When disagreements erupted among the siblings inside the home on Sixth Court West, Addie was the peacemaker.
"She just always wanted us to love one another and treat each other right," Mrs. Rudolph [Sarah] said. "She was a happy person also, and she loved life."
The routine was the same every Saturday night at the Collins household - starching Sunday dresses for church. Sept. 14, 1963, was no different when Addie pulled out a white dress. Older sister Flora pressed and curled Addie's short hair.
"We thought it looked pretty on her," said Mrs. Gaines [Janie].
… "I feel like I lost my best friend," said Mrs. Rudolph [Sarah]. "We were always going places together" (Temple 1-3).
Cynthia Wesley
Cynthia Wesley, whose parents were … teachers, left the house that day having been admonished by her mother to adjust her slip to be presentable in church (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
There were times when Cynthia Wesley's father came home weary after a night of patrolling his Smithfield neighborhood for would-be mischief-makers. Or worse, bombers.
Claude A. Wesley was one of several men who volunteered to ensure another peaceful night on Dynamite Hill, nicknamed for the frequent and unsolved bombings in a former white neighborhood that was increasingly a home to blacks.
The Wesleys tried to protect their daughter from segregation's brutality.
"We were extremely naive," remembers friend and playmate Karen Floyd Savage. "We didn't really discuss things in depth like that."
The first adopted daughter of Claude and Gertrude Wesley, Cynthia was a petite girl with a narrow face and size 2 dress. Cynthia's mother made her clothes, which fit her thin frame perfectly.
She attended the now-defunct Ullman High School, where she did well in math, reading and the band. She invited friends to parties in her back yard, playing soulful tunes and serving refreshments. She was born April 30, 1949.
"Cynthia was just full of fun all the time," Mrs. Savage said. "We were constantly laughing."
It was while the two girls attended Wilkerson Elementary School that Cynthia traded her gold-band ring topped with a clear, rectangular stone for a 1954 class ring that belonged to Mrs. Savage.
"We just sort of liked each others' rings and we just traded with no question of wanting it back," Mrs. Savage said.
Cynthia made friends easily, talking often to close pal Rickey Powell. On Sept. 14, 1963, she invited Rickey to church the next day for a Sunday youth program. Powell accepted, only to reluctantly decline when his mother wanted him to accompany her to a funeral.
"We were like peas in a pod," Powell said. "That was my best bud."
When Cynthia died in the church blast, she was still wearing the ring Mrs. Savage gave her when they were younger. Cynthia's father identified her by that ring when he went to the morgue.
The death of the four girls crushed Mrs. Savage.
"I was so young. I never realized someone would hate you so much that they would go to that extent. In a way, that was sort of the death of my own innocence" (Temple 3-4).
Denise McNair
Denise McNair, the daughter of photo shop owner Chris and schoolteacher Maxine, was an inquisitive girl who never understood why she couldn't get a sandwich at the same counter as white children (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
Denise McNair liked her dolls, left mudpies in the mailbox for childhood crushes and organized a neighborhood fund-raiser to fight muscular dystrophy.
Born Nov. 17, 1951, Carol Denise McNair was the first child of Chris and Maxine McNair. Her playmates called her Niecie.
A pupil at Center Street Elementary School, she had a knack of gathering neighborhood children to play on the block. She held tea parties, belonged to the Brownies and played baseball.
"Everybody liked her even if they didn't like each other," said childhood friend Rhonda Nunn Thomas. "She could play with anybody."
She and Rhonda would dream of husbands, children and careers. "At one point I would be delivering babies and she was going to be the pediatrician," Mrs. Thomas said.
At some point in her young life, Denise asked the neighborhood children to put on skits and dance routines and to read poetry in a big production to raise money for muscular dystrophy. It became an annual event. People gathered in the yard to watch the show in Denise's carport — the main stage. Children donated their pennies, dimes and nickels. Adults gave larger sums.
The muscular dystrophy fund-raiser was always Denise's project — one that nobody refused.
"It was the idea we were doing something special for some kids," Mrs. Thomas said. "How could you turn it down?"
A relative always thought the girl with the thick, shoulder-length hair and sparkling eyes would be a teacher because she was "a leader from the heart."
Friend and retired dentist Florita Jamison Askew remembers Denise as a child who smiled a lot, even for the camera when she lost her baby teeth.
"She was always a ham," Mrs. Askew said.
"I bet she would have been a real go-getter. She and Carole (Robertson) both. I just wonder sometimes."
Smithfield Recreation Center's auditorium became a dance school every Saturday afternoon when eager girls arrived for lessons in tap, ballet and modern jazz (Temple 5-7).
Carole Robertson
Carole Robertson, whose father was a band master at an elementary school and whose mother was a librarian, was an avid reader, dancer and clarinet player. (Smith, Wescott, and Craig 5).
Carole Robertson, wearing a leotard and toting black patent leather tap shoes and pink ballet slippers, was among the crowd [at the dance school every Saturday].
"We didn't have any problems getting our chores done so we could get to dancing class on Saturdays," said Florita Jamison Askew, who attended classes with Carole and Carole's big sister. "Nobody ever wanted to miss them."
Students worked hard on their ballet and shuffle steps in preparation for the annual spring recital, where they got to wear makeup and dance with their hair down." It was a lot of fun," Mrs. Askew said.
Born April 24, 1949, Carole was the third child of Alpha and Alvin Robertson. Older siblings were Dianne and Alvin.
Carole was an avid reader and straight-A student who belonged to Jack and Jill of America, the Girl Scouts, the Parker High School marching band and science club. She also had attended Wilkerson Elementary School, where she sang in the choir.
Carole walked fast and with a smile.
"She moved through the halls rapidly, not running, but just full of life," said retired Birmingham teacher Lottie Palmer, who was a science club sponsor." She was a girl that was anxious to succeed and do well.
Carole grew up in a Smithfield home that was full of love, friends and the aroma of good cooking, especially her mother's spaghetti.
"There was a lot of warmth in the house. The food was good and the people were kind," Mrs. Askew said. "That was kind of my second home."
Inside the one-story home with the wrap-around porch, Mrs. Askew and the Robertson girls practiced dances such as the cha-cha and tried out different hairstyles — often on Carole, who didn't mind being the model.
Carole once told Mrs. Askew, now a retired dentist, about her desire to preserve the past.
"I remember a statement she made — she wanted to teach history or do something historical. I thought how ironic it was that she would remain a part of history forever."
In 1976, Chicago residents established the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, a social service agency that serves children and their families. Named after Carole, it is dedicated to the memory of all four girls.
Members of the Jack and Jill choir were scheduled to sing at Carole's funeral Sept. 17, 1963, at St. John AME Church. "Of course, we didn't do much singing," said choir member Karen Floyd Savage. "We cried through it" (Temple 7-9).
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a eulogy of the four slain girls September 18. Here are excerpts.
... they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.
Today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare: (Yeah, Well): Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day. (Yeah, Yes) And may the flight of angels (That’s right) take thee to thy eternal rest. God bless you (Martin 1-2).
Works cited:
“Martin Luther King's Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, delivered at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. September 18, 1963. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Smith, Kyle; Wescott, Gail Cameron; and Craig, David Cobb. “The Day the Children Died.” People Magazine. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
Temple, Chandra. “Profiles of the Victims.” The Birmingham News. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/...
