Freedom Summer (14 page)

Within a few days, three photos would be seen around the nation—Goodman posed with a choirboy innocence; Chaney, his kindly face tilted; Schwerner, goateed, with a wry smile. Seen over and over, the trio would soon seem familiar to volunteers, as if they knew these three well. Some would talk of meeting “Andy” in Ohio, having had dinner with Mickey, or hearing Chaney talk to their group. Yet this morning, there were no faces, no trace of the men—just names on a blackboard.

In his five months in Mississippi, some had come to revile Mickey Schwerner as “that Communist Jew Nigger lover.” Yet those who knew him were struck by his kindness, his easygoing manner, his lack of hatred for anyone, black or white. He was “full of life and ideas,” “the gentlest man I have ever known.” A coworker in Meridian paid him the compliment he would have cherished most: “More than any white person I have ever known he could put a colored person at ease.” Of average size and height, usually dressed in a gray sweatshirt, jeans, and black sneakers, Mickey Schwerner loved W. C. Fields, a good game of poker, and the hapless New York Mets. Raised by liberal parents—his father, a wig manufacturer, was a member of the War Resisters League—Mickey grew from a high school beatnik into a veterinary student before becoming a dedicated social worker with a degree from Cornell. By the summer of 1963, he was deeply involved in the social services of lower Manhattan. Each day he rose at 6:00 a.m. to work on civil rights with CORE. He spent afternoons helping teens in a social settlement on the Lower East Side. After dinner, he made home visits or attended meetings, often till midnight. His new wife, Rita, shared his dedication. While still a student at Queens College, she tutored middle school students, did her own work for CORE, and joined her husband on picket lines, where both were arrested for protesting segregated unions.

During the summer of 1963, as racial violence seared America, the civil rights movement captivated the Schwerners. That August, Mickey took teens to the March on Washington, yet it was not Martin Luther King but the Birmingham church bombing a few weeks later that drew him south. “I am now so thoroughly identified with the civil rights struggle that I have an emotional need to offer my services in the South,” the twenty-four-year-old Schwerner wrote on his application for CORE in Mississippi. “I would feel guilty and almost hypocritical if I did not give full time.”

In January 1964, Mickey and Rita Schwerner sublet their Brooklyn Heights apartment, left their cocker spaniel, Gandhi, with friends, and drove their ’59 VW to Jackson. Within days, they were in Meridian, the first white civil rights workers to penetrate Mississippi’s second largest city. Sleeping on cots, showering at a local black hotel, they lived less on their meager salaries than off the infinite energy of their ideals. Each day they tackled the job of turning a filthy old office into a Freedom House. Rita swept, cleaned, and sewed long, blue curtains while Mickey and an eager volunteer named James Chaney did repairs and built bookcases. By late February the house was bustling. A dozen or more kids showed up for Saturday story hours. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, adults came to voter registration classes. Most afternoons, teenagers dropped by just to be with the Schwerners.

Mickey loved to joke and jive with the kids he called “Mississippi’s best hope,” taking them on drives in his VW and talking about freedom. Yet some blacks in Meridian were not ready for this northern couple’s push on civil rights. A high school principal threw Mickey off campus, but he and Rita went back and leafleted a basketball game, drawing more teens to their Freedom House. When the Schwerners talked about removing “Colored Only” signs, CORE thought they were moving too fast, but they were allowed to organize boycotts of downtown stores that refused to hire black clerks. By April, they were fixtures on Meridian’s black side of town. “We’re actually pretty lucky here,” Mickey told a reporter. “I think they’re going to leave us alone.”

But in “Whites Only” Mississippi, the Schwerners could not have aroused more outrage. They had only been in the state a few days when a cop told them, “I just want you to know you’re about as welcome here as hair on a biscuit.” Soon they were spotted as not just outsiders, not just Jews, but “mixers.” Rita was even seen talking with black men. And although it would have fit well in Greenwich Village, Mickey’s goatee was a red flag in the clean-cut South. He had shaved it before leaving Brooklyn, but grew it back in March, saying anyone who hated him would need no excuse. Black kids loved Mickey’s goatee and called him “Mitch” after TV’s bearded choral leader Mitch Miller, but the beard enraged some whites, providing the nickname Mickey first heard when arrested for picketing that May—“You must be that Communist-Jew nigger lover they call ‘Goatee.’ ” By then, threats had become part of daily life. Callers to the Freedom House accused Rita of sleeping with Negroes. Others chanted, “That Jewboy is dead! That Jewboy is dead!” Electricity was cut off several times, water occasionally, and the Schwerners moved again and again when host families sensed their homes targeted. Mississippi’s Sovereignty Commission had already given their license plate number to police departments throughout the state.

In late May, Mickey told his father he was “a marked man.” A few days later, the Schwerners took their phone off the hook. Rita was sometimes homesick and convinced that if she got pregnant, they would leave, but Mickey was rooted. “I belong right here in Mississippi,” he told a friend. “Nothing threatens peace among men like the idea of white supremacy. Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi. . . . So this is the decisive battleground for America, and every young American who wants to have a part in the decision should be here.”

Anchoring the Schwerners’ commitment was the commitment they inspired in others. James Chaney, shy and self-effacing, was as opposite the gregarious Mickey Schwerner as their skin color. Because James’s middle name was Earl, his family called him J. E., but Schwerner always called him “Bear,” and the two were inseparable. “Mickey could count on Jim to walk through hell with him,” a Freedom House regular said. After the army rejected him for having asthma, Chaney had drifted, working odd jobs, spending months unemployed, then helping his father plaster houses. But when his father left home, the two fought, and Chaney stormed off the job. Committed to civil rights since high school, he found his way into the Schwerners’ circle. It felt like coming home.

“Mama,” he said, “I believe I done found an organization that I can be in and do something for myself and somebody else, too.”

But Fannie Lee Chaney, raising five children on $28 a week, knew Mississippi better. “Ain’t you afraid of this? ” she asked.

“Naw, Mama, that’s what’s the matter now,” Chaney said. “Everybody’s scared.”

By the time he started his night runs into Neshoba County, Chaney was a CORE staffer. At twenty-one, he was also on the verge of being a father, but he would not be around for the birth. The day his daughter was born, he was driving with Mickey and Rita to the Ohio training. There the three agreed that volunteer Andrew Goodman was the man they wanted to start a Freedom School in Neshoba County. And when they heard that the church set to host the school had burned to the ground, Schwerner and Chaney returned to Mississippi with their new recruit.

Before his face appeared on an FBI poster, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman might have been a poster boy for youthful altruism. With passions ranging from drama to poetry to the Holocaust, Goodman was, his mother recalled, “a born activist.” Like Mickey Schwerner, he had attended the progressive Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Like the Schwerners, the Goodmans were a liberal family. Their dinner guests included such McCarthy-era pariahs as Alger Hiss, Zero Mostel, and their own attorney, who had defended the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. While in high school, Andrew Goodman had taken a bus to Appalachia to report on impoverished coal miners. In college, he shifted majors and campuses until settling at Queens College to study drama. He was planning to spend the summer of 1964 building a school in Mexico, but when he heard Fannie Lou Hamer speak at his college, he came home and told his parents he just had to go to Mississippi.

When his father asked why, Goodman’s idealism poured out: “Because this is the most important thing going on in the country! If someone says he cares about people, how can he not be concerned about this?” Carolyn Goodman, a psychologist, felt her son might as well have said, “I want to go off to war,” but she managed to respond that Mississippi seemed like “a great idea.” His father realized, “We couldn’t turn our backs on the values we had instilled in him at home.” Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, offered to provide the $150 in expenses, but Andy took a job loading trucks. Two months later, he was packing his duffel bag. As hopeful as his photo suggested, Goodman packed a sweater for a summer in Mississippi. “I’m scared,” he told a friend. “I’m scared but I’m going.” When he left for Ohio, Carolyn Goodman slipped iodine and bandages in her son’s bag. In Ohio, Goodman was originally slated to work in Vicksburg but was recruited by the Schwerners. Once reassigned, he called his parents. “Don’t worry,” he told them, “I’m going to a CORE area. It’s safer.” And on June 21, when he awoke in Mississippi, he wrote home:

At noon that Sunday, the three men set out for Neshoba County in the same blue Ford wagon Chaney drove on his night runs. Before they left, twelve-year-old Ben Chaney, whom Schwerner called “Cub,” was crying and asking to go with his big brother. Chaney told Ben to be patient. When he came back that afternoon, they’d go driving. Ben began waiting.

 

 

By late Monday morning, the men had been missing for eighteen hours. In Jackson, word had just come from Philadelphia. Spotted in jail at 9:00 p.m. Sunday, the three men appeared bruised and battered. COFO again called the FBI. Hearing of the alleged brutality, the agent in Jackson finally acted—he called his New Orleans office. SNCC was growing desperate. What about an air search? Roadblocks? An all-points bulletin? Mississippi was heating up in ways that had little to do with the humidity. All that morning, project offices were besieged with angry calls—“Nigger Lover!”; “Communist!”; “Go to hell!” After their warm welcomes in black communities, volunteers were finding first encounters with whites strange and sinister. Several were approached by nattily dressed college students. Calling themselves the Association of Tenth Amendment Conservatives (ATAC), the students talked on and on about states’ rights and the danger of minorities “issuing dictatorial orders.” But other whites did more than talk. Volunteers crossing the tracks to the white side of town were drilled by hate stares and startled by the loathing they would endure all summer.

In Clarksdale, at the north end of the Delta, a volunteer from Los Angeles was talking to blacks when a cop pulled up.

“What’re you doing here? ”

“I’m helping to register voters.”

“Don’t you know that the niggers don’t want any help? Don’t you know you’re not wanted here? What are you son-of-a-bitch bastards doing here anyway? ” When the volunteer tried to answer, he was ordered into the police car, where two snarling men cursed him: “Your mother’s not fit to work in a nigger whorehouse.” Jailed, denied phone calls, the man was finally released and told to get the hell out of Mississippi. Clarksdale, the sheriff said, had a hundred deputized citizens armed with billy clubs, “just waiting for the signal to split some head open. . . . Some folks are going to get hurt, maybe some killed, but then things will settle down.”

All that frantic Monday, despite mounting fear, the FBI in Jackson refused to investigate. SNCC was outraged but not surprised. Since Bob Moses had first come to Mississippi, SNCCs had knocked on federal doors, asking simply that the law be enforced. They were met with a palpable indifference. John F. Kennedy had no use for SNCC, considering its members “sons of bitches” who “had an investment in violence.” Robert Kennedy, hoping to steer civil rights from the streets to the courts, had his Justice Department file some two dozen voter discrimination lawsuits in Mississippi, but all were tangled in appeals or overturned by Mississippi judges, one of whom ranted against “niggers on a voter drive.” Frustrated at every turn, Moses had filed his own suit.
Moses v. Kennedy and Hoover
listed the long litany of brutality, demanding that the attorney general and FBI director “arrest any Mississippi law enforcement officer interfering with Negro voting.” Moses lost the case and appealed.

The federal record on protecting civil rights workers was even worse. John Doar had investigated threats against Herbert Lee and Louis Allen but refused protection. And both had been gunned down. Robert Kennedy delayed protection for the Freedom Riders, even after their bus was firebombed. His request for a “cooling off period” became a SNCC joke. But SNCC reserved its deepest cynicism for the FBI. SNCCs often saw FBI agents on the fringes of some violent mob—taking notes. Taking notes while Bob Zellner was nearly killed by a mob in McComb, taking notes while a police dog tore at Bob Moses in Greenwood, taking notes while cops lashed out in Canton or Jackson. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover did not apologize. Convinced the civil rights movement was infused with Communists, Hoover was already eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, whom he considered “a true Marxist-Leninist from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.” When pressed about the FBI’s hands-off approach, Hoover declared, “We do not wet nurse those who go down to reform the South.”