Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [171]
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