Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [160]
At a preliminary hearing on December 10, Meridian’s federal commissioner, a schoolmarmish woman, ruled the latest Klan confession “hearsay”—and dismissed all charges. Shaking hands, slapping each other on the back, all nineteen men went free. “Ol’ Rainey could be elected governor now,” a man outside the courthouse said. The Justice Department filed new charges on New Year’s Day.
Throughout 1965, Mississippi was torn between law and custom, past and present. In Neshoba County, Sheriff Rainey and his plump deputy were more popular than ever. Cecil Price was talking about running for sheriff when his boss’s term expired. Locals doubted the two lawmen or anyone else would ever be convicted. Elsewhere, Klansmen met in open rallies drawing hundreds. Crosses still blazed at night. COFO’s office in Laurel was burned to the ground, and its offices elsewhere had electricity cut off, windows shot out. Yet shame was finally bringing moderates out of hiding.
Years later, writer Willie Morris remembered “a feeling that we hit the bottom of the barrel with these three murders in 1964.” Following Freedom Summer, investment in Mississippi plummeted. Tourism on the Gulf Coast was cut in half. “I favor dropping an atom bomb on the state of Mississippi,” an Ohio man wrote Time after the Neshoba indictments were dismissed. “I am ashamed that such a savage state exists in the country.” America’s disgust was summed up by Phil Ochs’s ballad, written after his week in Mississippi and debuted to stomps and cheers in a Greenwich Village nightclub.
Here’s to the state of Mississippi,
For underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines,
If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find.
The fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes,
And the calendar is lying when it reads the present time.
Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,
Mississippi, find yourself another country to be a part of.
Faced with economic reprisals and nationwide scorn, a critical mass in Mississippi realized they had no choice but to topple what one Jackson lawyer called “that wall of Never.”
After more than a dozen bombings, McComb had finally fought back against the Klan. In November 1964, sensing that the life of their community was at stake, embattled citizens pooled $5,000 in rewards for information about bombings. Business and civic leaders formed Citizens for Progress, calling for “equal treatment under the law for all citizens regardless of race, creed, position, or wealth.” And on November 18, FBI agents and highway patrolmen watched as a black man was served a bowl of gumbo in a restaurant on Main Street. “The waitress smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ ” noted C. C. Bryant, who had welcomed Bob Moses in 1961. “She even asked us to come back.” A few hours later, blacks desegregated McComb’s Holiday Inn, Woolworth’s, Palace Theater, bus station, and Continental Motel.
In the year following Freedom Summer, similar harbingers of an edgy change surfaced across the state. Forced by federal lawsuits, schools in Jackson, Biloxi, Clarksdale, and Leake County desegregated first-grade classes. In response, all-white private schools, known as “seg academies,” began to spring up wherever integration seemed near. Many had long waiting lists. Two blacks enrolled at Ole Miss, but no one rioted. Early in 1965, the Mississippi Economic Council called for full compliance with the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Paul Johnson praised the position. But good intentions mouthed in Jackson had never meant much in the Piney Woods or the Delta. Full democracy would come to Mississippi only by federal law, or the threat of intervention. As another long hot summer loomed, as Congress inched closer to passing LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Governor Johnson urged the state legislature to concede the inevitable by removing barriers to black registration. During the debate, cops arrested more