“Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of, Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of.”
It was the summer of 1964, the first one after President Kennedy was murdered in Texas. It was June 21, the day spring turned to summer. It was Freedom Summer, when kids came south to help register African-American voters in the states of the old Confederacy.
Ground Zero, as it were, was Mississippi, and on June 21 in Neshoba County, three civil rights workers were murdered. Two were white men who had come south — Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — and the third was a Mississippi black man named James Chaney.
It took the FBI and other searchers 44 days to find their bodies, which had been buried deep in an earthen dam, and the state of Mississippi refused to try their killers for murder. As horrifying as it sounds, white men murdering black me wasn’t really against the law in Mississippi.
Whether it was Emmett Till in 1955, Medgar Evers in 1963 or a host of others, Mississippi was off the reservation when it came to racial justice. In fact, killing a black man was almost a rite of passage in racist circles.
Eight of the 18 men involved in the killings were convicted of federal civil rights charges. No one served more than six years.
Edgar Ray Killen, the leader of the mob who got a hung jury in the federal trial, finally was convicted in state court in 2005 of three counts of manslaughter.
Progress?
A little.
But there was a horrible part to the story 16 years after the murders.
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said Democrats would lose the South for a generation. It has been worse than that, of course, but one true obscenity came in 1980 when the Republican nominee for president kicked off his fall campaign at the Neshoba County Fair with a speech on how the GOP supported so-called States’ Rights.
His name was Ronald Reagan.