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By Root 1886 0

in Mississippi” women marveled at responses that seemed programmed into their hosts. No Negroes wanted to vote except for those who were Communists. Negro schools were not—ahem—a disgrace. Just look at their beautiful buildings. And Mississippi police did “a splendid job.” At one meeting, however, an elderly Mississippi woman broke in. “Girls,” she said, “I just have to tell you you are so wrong.” While serving on a federal civil rights commission, she had heard the abuses, “and there were lots of injustices, terrible ones.” Skirts were straightened, faces fell. The conversation resumed, with fewer platitudes. A few “Wednesdays in Mississippi” women, North and South, would keep in touch that fall.

Even when invited, moderation dared not speak its name in Mississippi. Visiting doctors and ministers were sometimes pulled aside by whites who, looking over their shoulders, confessed that they supported integration. Journalists met locals who admitted their state needed help, but refused to be quoted. “If you print my name next to what I’m going to tell you,” one told the Washington Post, “I’ll be ruined. I’ll lose my business, my friends, I’ll be run out of this state.” The fear seemed exaggerated, until one heard about the Heffners.

Mississippi had few more loyal sons than Albert Heffner. Raised on a Greenwood plantation, the big, jovial man everyone called “Red” had gone to Ole Miss, where he met his wife, Malva, another native. The couple had lived in McComb for ten years. Red’s downtown insurance office was always busy. He and Malva were deeply involved in church activities. Their daughter, Jan, had been Miss Mississippi, with her picture on the billboard outside McComb. When the bombings began in his town, Red had written to the Sovereignty Commission, suggesting that “responsible citizens” stand up to the Klan. “I am not an integrationist, segregationist, conservative, moderate, or liberal,” he noted. “I am just an insurance man in debt up to my ears.” But on July 17, Red Heffner committed what McComb’s mayor would later call “a breach of etiquette.” He invited two “mixers” to dinner.

He had only wanted “to let the Civil Rights workers hear the Mississippi point of view.” But with bombings in McComb on the increase, and sales of guns and dynamite soaring, the jovial insurance man quickly became the target of his town’s feverish fear. Just after dinner, Heffner’s phone rang. The caller asked to speak to volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The conversation was brief, confirming the rumor that was inflaming the neighborhood. Then another call came. “Whose car is that in front of your house? ” An hour later, when Red opened his front door, he was blinded by the headlights of ten cars parked in his yard. Volunteers slowly slipped past the blockade and made it back to the project office, but the Heffners’ ordeal had just begun. First came the phone threats—“If you want to live, get out of town.” “How does you wife like sleeping with niggers?” “You nigger-loving bastard. You’re gonna get your teeth kicked in.” Next, Red was evicted from his office. Rumors that their house would be bombed sent Malva and Jan to live at the Holiday Inn. The Heffners soon heard shocking slander—that Jan worked for the FBI, that their other daughter was in a Communist training school in New York, that Malva was a call girl. Old friends refused to speak to them. No one came to their defense. By early August, the Heffners were considering something they could not have imagined at the start of summer—leaving Mississippi. And by September, after more than three hundred phone threats, the air let out of their tires, their dog poisoned, dead on their doorstep, they were gone. They would never live in Mississippi again. Decades later, talking about their expulsion still brought them to tears.

Searching for tolerance, volunteers finally turned to the only people in Mississippi who had little to lose—alienated teenagers. On August 3, as the FBI was bringing heavy equipment to Neshoba County, Pete Seeger gave a concert in McComb. In his sweat-stained work shirt,