Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [172]
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.