In the long struggle for civil rights in this country one need only utter word to evoke both dread and despair among activists and citizens of good will: Mississippi. The state that claimed the life of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and many others came calling for 3 more 60 years ago. On the night of June 21, 1964 James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were apprehended in Neshoba County by a posse of both local law enforcement and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their crime: Chaney for being black, and Goodman and Schwerner for being volunteers for Freedom Summer. Organized by Bob Moses, Freedom Summer was an attempt to register as many Mississippi blacks as possible while also drawing attention to the obstruction of state officials. The sentence for that crime: cold blooded execution and having their bodies buried in an earthen dam.
In a previous writing I evoked the image of America as a battlefield outside the traditional mindset of set lines, opposing armies, and cut and dry rules of war. Few places in America live up to this image like Mississippi. In college I watched the film “Mississippi Burning” which chronicled the FBI’s 44 day hunt for the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The explicit racial violence in terms of beatings, church bombings, and a climate of fear one sees only in dictatorships permeates the film. In my ignorance I chalked it up to a left-wing Hollywood director looking to sensationalize a dark chapter in one of the more tense moments of the Civil Rights movement. I could not have been more wrong. Subsequent readings of both this episode and the long history of Mississippi from Reconstruction through the end of Jim Crow reveal that the film accurately depicts the method in which apartheid was enforced on American soil.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a massive shock to the segregated South. Each state would choose its own method of resistance to desegregation efforts. My home state of North Carolina chose a quiet path, nominal outward compliance to avoid triggering activists and the federal government. This quiet path resulted in North Carolina by 1973 seeing the least amount of school integration of any state in the South. Virginia chose Massive Resistance, threatening to shutter the entire public school system to avoid compliance. Alabama chose a similar path, with Governor George Wallace literally standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block admission of Viviane Malone and James Hood. But no state could top Mississippi.
The Magnolia State in 1875 had witnessed among the most violent efforts in “Redemption” as Reconstruction came to a violent end. Due to its massive plantation economy the state had been among the richest prior to the Civil War, and also had among the highest concentration of black Americans. The shattering of the social order that the War and abolition brought to the state elicited among the most concentrated violent efforts by the Klan and its fellow travelers. Once the Republican Party was ousted from power the Democrats transformed Mississippi into a one-party racial dictatorship. Poverty was used as a weapon to keep blacks from attaining the resources that would lead to political power. Law enforcement enforced the social order by day, and the Klan by night. Stepping out of line would lead to a warning at best, if not an immediate visit from the Invisible Empire.
The men and women of Freedom Summer would witness firsthand what Mississippi’s black citizens had lived their entire lives. The murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were the product of this state sanctioned resistance. The FBI eventually did locate the bodies of the 3 young men. Justice would come for their killers, but in fits and spurts instead of one fell swoop. The Klan would continue it’s marauding, but at an ever-diminishing pace. Freedom of a sort would come for Mississippi’s black citizens, but the century of the harshest racial apartheid in the United States left scars that remained. One can look at this tale and despair it could have ever happened here. I however look on at the tremendous courage and sacrifice and come away inspired and hopeful that that same spirit can lead us still to an ever more perfect union.