Freedom Summer (48 page)

As with any group, there were fringes, some dangerous. Dennis Sweeney, having suffered a concussion and frequent arrests in McComb, descended into paranoid schizophrenia. Voices in his head caused Sweeney to gouge dental crowns from his teeth. But the voices did not cease. On a March day in 1980, Sweeney took a gun and entered the Manhattan office of Allard Lowenstein, the “Pied Piper” who had brought Sweeney and other volunteers to the 1963 Freedom Election. Sweeney emptied his gun, killing his former mentor. Found not guilty for reasons of insanity, Sweeney was confined to a mental hospital. Twenty years after the murder, psychiatrists, noting his recovery, released him from all care.

During the Reagan era, sociologist Doug McAdam found ex-volunteers increasingly restless. Many remained searchers, moving from job to job or relationship to relationship, looking for what one called “the ultimate Mississippi.” McAdam also found volunteers, when compared to a national average, more likely to be loners, unmarried or divorced. Just a handful, having seen the stuff democracy is made of, had entered politics. Harold Ickes, son of a member of FDR’s Brain Trust, went from Freedom Summer to law school and then into Democratic Party politics. Ickes later became President Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and ran Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for Senate and the presidency. Barney Frank has been a Massachusetts congressman since 1980. Of Freedom Summer, he spoke for many volunteers: “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life.”

No less than those they recruited, the leaders of Freedom Summer were transformed by its hope and violence. A few months after the summer ended, Bob Moses began a painful withdrawal from Mississippi. Late in 1964, disdaining what James Forman called the “almost Jesus like aura that he and his name had acquired,” Moses changed his surname to Parris, his mother’s maiden name. The following spring, he and Dona moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where they worked with young black students. Soon Moses was in Washington, D.C., speaking out against the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1965, he briefly returned to Africa, where, appalled by American propaganda about the progress of blacks back home, he cut off all contact with whites. Drawn back to Mississippi, he lived again with Amzie Moore in the Delta, but Moore found his protégé bitter and withdrawn.

Although he had filed as a conscientious objector and proven his pacifism daily, Moses got his draft notice in 1966. With his marriage crumbling, his hopes shattered, Moses fled to Montreal, where he worked as a janitor, a night watchman, an airline cook. He also married a former SNCC field secretary. In 1968, Bob and Janet Moses moved to Tanzania, where they taught in a rural school and raised four children. They stayed eight years, returning only when President Jimmy Carter offered amnesty to draft evaders. Moses went back to Harvard to finish the doctorate he had been forced to abandon. Then one day, he visited his daughter’s algebra class. Concerned that inner-city students were falling behind in math, he began devising ways to involve them in his favorite subject. With help from a MacArthur genius grant, Moses’ lessons grew into the Algebra Project.

Moses has since turned the Algebra Project into a continuation of his life’s work. He crafted a clever curriculum using subway trips to model number lines, and lemonade recipes to teach ratios. By 1990, he was traveling all over America, even back to Mississippi to work with teachers and organize parents too often dismissive of math. “Like working with sharecroppers demanding the right to vote, we’re trying to get students demanding quality public education in algebra,” he says. After several years of commuting from Massachusetts to Mississippi, Moses is currently an Eminent Scholar at Florida International University in Miami. In his seventies now, bearded and white-haired, Moses still speaks at math and civil rights conferences around the country. He remains an unforgettable presence to all who have known him. No living American has risked more or done more to make America a full democracy.

Wherever he speaks, Moses mentions Fannie Lou Hamer as an icon of empowerment, but the woman everyone called Mrs. Hamer did not share in the gains she helped Mississippi blacks achieve. Though she kept running for office and speaking out—even addressing the 1968 Democratic Convention—Hamer was soon marginalized by younger activists. She also suffered personal losses and failing health. In 1967, her daughter was injured in a car crash and, denied treatment in the Delta, died en route to a Memphis hospital. Still grieving, Hamer threw herself into child development programs and was quickly embroiled in their acrimonious politics. She worked on Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign and later started her own pig farm to help sharecroppers. But the blackjack beating she had taken in Winona, Mississippi, compounded by a lifetime of poor nutrition and stress, took its toll. Gradually confined to her home, she gave away her last few dollars and died in 1977, penniless. By then, however, she was more spirit than flesh. Her funeral drew a thousand people, including dignitaries from President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Mourners sang “This Little Light of Mine.” The Mississippi legislature, still overwhelmingly white, passed a unanimous resolution commending her. Today, anyone entering Ruleville sees the ornate sign reading “Home of Fannie Lou Hamer,” but her grave-stone best sums up her strength. Beneath the sadly shortened lifespan—1917-1977—is her motto: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

 

 

Long after Freedom Summer had changed Mississippi, the rest of America refused to notice. Movies and TV rehashed stale stereotypes—the fat sheriff, bloodhounds and chain gangs, the rope and the shotgun. So when the Hollywood film
Mississippi Burning
came out in 1988, dramatizing the Freedom Summer murders and investigation, it managed to offend everyone. Former volunteers and SNCCs were outraged to see FBI agents portrayed as heroes rather than the bystanders they had been before LBJ ordered them into the swamps. Blacks appeared powerless. And whites complained that the film showed them at their worst. When would America move beyond its stereotypes of Mississippi? Such a day would come only when Mississippi erased the darkest blot on its name.

On the twentieth anniversary of the Neshoba killings, Philadelphia’s mayor observed, “To me, it was sort of like a plane crash. It was just a part of history that happened near Philadelphia, and there’s nothing we could do to erase it.” There was something Philadelphia could do, however, yet the wheels of justice refused to turn. The final redemption began only in 1998, when word leaked of what the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, finally convicted of the Vernon Dahmer murder after four mistrials, had said about his most famous “elimination.” “I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man,” Sam Bowers said. The “main instigator” was “Preacher” Killen, and hearing of Bowers’s boast, the families of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney called for the case to be reopened. Early in 1999, Mississippi’s attorney general began investigating.

The investigation dragged on for five years.
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
reporter Jerry Mitchell dug up new witnesses who had heard Killen discuss the murders. Lawyers plowed through the FBI’s 44,000-page file and the 1967 trial transcript. Meanwhile, key witnesses were dying. Cecil Price, said to be cooperating with the prosecution, fell from a cherry picker. Lawrence Rainey, who after his 1967 acquittal never worked in law enforcement again, died of throat cancer. Two others among the accused also passed away, leaving just eight still living. The most visible was “The Preacher.” Fortunately for investigators, he had a big mouth.

“Had I done it,” Killen said of the Neshoba murders, “I wouldn’t have any regrets.” Others reported hearing “The Preacher” preach the righteousness of the Klan’s most notorious killing. “I’m not going to say they were wrong,” Killen said in 2004. “I believe in self-defense.” That September, the Philadelphia Coalition, an interracial group formed to lobby for further prosecutions, invited Carolyn Goodman and brothers of Michael Schwerner and James Chaney to meet with townspeople. In an emotional encounter, clergymen, high school students, and businessmen told of growing up under the stigma of 1964 and urged Mississippi’s new attorney general to file murder charges. The following January, police arrested Killen in his home.

On June 12, 2005, Philadelphia, Mississippi, awoke to find dozens of cable news trucks surrounding its courthouse. Townspeople were divided on the impending trial. “It was what I’d been wanting and what I’d been praying here for years,” said Deborah Ray Posey, a member of the Philadelphia Coalition. But another resident complained, “The media has profited for four decades by smearing Neshoba County and Mississippi. I ask, ‘When is enough enough?’ ” Despite misgivings, the trial spread word that Mississippi had long since ceased to be a closed society. Civil rights historical markers were—and still are—occasionally vandalized, and some older whites spoke of Freedom Summer as that time when “Communists invaded the state of Mississippi,” yet reporters noted blacks and whites joking together, working together, sometimes even marrying. When the trial began, Philadelphia was again on front pages across America and Europe, but the little town no longer had anything to hide.

Just after 9:00 a.m., Edgar Ray Killen approached the courtroom in his wheelchair. Bald, bespectacled, disabled by a recent logging accident, he breathed through an oxygen tube. Before the trial reached its second day, he was hospitalized for shortness of breath, yet he remained “as strong for segregation as I ever was.” Simmering in his own bile, the bitter old man showed no emotion as he was wheeled to the defense table. In the gallery behind him sat Rita Schwerner Bender, Carolyn Goodman, and Ben and Fannie Lee Chaney. Forty-one years they had waited.

Mickey Schwerner’s widow had remarried, raised a family, and begun practicing law in Seattle, specializing in Restorative Justice, the movement uniting victims with their assailants to foster personal reconciliation. Andrew Goodman’s ninety-year-old mother still lived in the Upper West Side apartment decorated with photos of her lost son. After earning a doctorate in psychology, Carolyn Goodman had developed programs for families in psychiatric crisis. One day, she had opened the door of her apartment to find a man, speaking in a southern accent, asking forgiveness for his role in her son’s murder. “If you want my forgiveness,” she said, “work in your community and help other people. That way lies forgiveness.” The man left in silence.

Beside Goodman sat “J. E.’s” kid brother. Ben Chaney had grown into a tireless civil rights advocate, but only after surrendering to rage over his brother’s murder. Constantly threatened in Mississippi, the Chaneys had moved to New York in 1965, settling in with the help of the Goodmans and Schwerners. Ben seemed to be doing well at a private school, but shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he and friends headed south with a plot. Chaney was not even present at a Florida shootout that killed four whites, but he was sentenced to life in prison. After serving thirteen years, he was paroled with the help of former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who hired him as a law clerk. Chaney has held the same job ever since, doing civil rights work on the side. As head of the James Earl Chaney Foundation, Ben led the Freedom Summer 2004 Ride for Justice, a bus tour visiting civil rights sites, registering voters, and lobbying Mississippi to prosecute his brother’s killers. Fannie Lee Chaney worked as a maid in a nursing home before retiring. Learning of the impending trial, the eighty-two-year-old woman said only, “Mighty long time.” Now the time had arrived.

The past permeated the courtroom. One of Killen’s attorneys had defended Sheriff Rainey in 1967. The judge had first met Killen as a boy presiding over his parents’ funerals. Yet the present also held its ground. Many in the audience had not yet been born by 1964. The district attorney, a Philadelphia first-grader that year, just vaguely recalled the commotion. He had hoped to bring charges against all living members of the Neshoba klavern, but the grand jury had indicted only Killen. Now, as a jury of nine whites and three blacks looked on, he called the first witness—Rita.

While reporters typed on laptops, the freckled woman with close-cropped gray hair told of coming to Mississippi with her husband in 1964. Rita remembered bidding good-bye to Mickey in Ohio and never seeing him again. She remained composed until she recalled first hearing that the blue station wagon had been found, gutted and burned. That was when “it really hit me for the first time that they were dead.” Fannie Lou Hamer had been with her. “She just wrapped her arms around me and the two of us had our faces together and our tears were mingling with each other and we cried.” Some in the gallery wept. Later, a tearful Carolyn Goodman read the court her son’s postcard from Meridian—“This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. . . .”

In between the grieving women, most evidence came from the dead—testimony read from witnesses long deceased. From the 1967 trial transcript, jurors heard of Killen telling his klavern about the “elimination” order, Killen gathering Klansmen, Killen siccing the men on their prey. Living witnesses added more details. A former Meridian cop recalled Killen telling him all about the murders. A convict in a prison jumpsuit recalled his grandfather asking Killen “if he had anything to do with those boys being killed, and he said ‘yes,’ and he was proud of it.” After three days, Fannie Lee Chaney, walking with a cane to the witness box, concluded the prosecution’s case. She remembered making breakfast that Sunday for the trio. Young Ben had cried as his brother prepared to leave. Her oldest son had promised his brother to take him out when he came back, but “J. E. never come back.”

Defense attorneys called on the alibi Killen had used in 1967. He had been at a funeral home that night, mourning for “old Uncle Alex Rich.” But Rich’s family claimed he was not related to Killen, and another witness said Killen had merely entered the funeral home and looked around. “I thought it was unusual because he wasn’t that close to the family.” Summing up, the defense called the trial “nothing but stirring a pot of hate for profit.” But Mississippi’s attorney general compared the Klan to terrorists in Iraq, then urged the jury, “Do your duty. Honor Mississippi. Honor Neshoba County.”