Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [46]
In the nightmare hours of June 22, phone calls startled sleepers from Mississippi to Moscow. Three men were missing, vanished, gone. SNCC in Atlanta called the Justice Department three times. Each call deepened concern, until by morning John Doar gave the FBI power to investigate. But the FBI agent in Jackson still refused to act. On the Ohio campus, a stunned Rita Schwerner lay curled on a cot, making her own calls. In New York, CORE director James Farmer was awakened at 2:30 a.m. A few hours later, a call alerted attorney William Kunstler. “You don’t know me,” the caller said, “but my son, Mickey, told me to call you if he ever needed a lawyer.” In Moscow, a UPI reporter phoned Dick Gregory. The comedian canceled his goodwill tour and headed for Mississippi, where phones were ringing all over the state. Another call to Meridian: no word of the three. A call to the Mississippi Highway Patrol—without a sheriff’s order, no missing persons bulletin could be issued for seventy-two hours. More calls. To sheriffs. To Washington, D.C. To the FBI in Jackson . . .
At 6:55 a.m., the first breakthrough came with a follow-up call to the Neshoba County jail. The jailer’s wife, having earlier denied seeing the three, now admitted they had been in custody. Brought in about 4:00 p.m. Sunday, James Chaney had been booked for speeding, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman held “for investigation.” But all three had been released at 6:00 p.m. The news sent shudders through COFO’s phone network. Freedom Summer planners had expected something like this, but on the first day of the project?
Volunteers still did not know. In Greenville, Muriel Tillinghast, hollow-eyed from sleeping on the floor, welcomed others to the office she would refuse to leave all that week. In Batesville, Chris Williams had another down-home breakfast and, with orders come from COFO to “lay low,” wondered when the work would begin. Meanwhile in Ohio, a second group of trainees was about to hear the most chilling of all SNCC stories from Mississippi. At 9:30 a.m. Bob Moses stood before an auditorium of fresh faces—Freedom School teachers—explaining Mississippi from a blackboard map. Calling the state “The Closed Society,” he added, “Mississippi is closed, locked. We think the key is the vote.” He paused, looked at his feet, then resumed. “There is an analogy to The Plague, by Camus. The country isn’t willing yet to admit it has the plague, but it pervades the whole society.” Just then, three SNCCs entered and called Moses over. When he returned to the stage, his voice was even softer, his manner still more grave.
“Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. They haven’t come back and we haven’t had any word from them.” The auditorium rippled with alarm. In the confusion, a waiflike woman with dark, closely cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses strode to the stage. Rita Schwerner asked volunteers to group by home states and send telegrams to their congressmen, demanding an FBI investigation. When someone asked how to spell the names of the missing, she strode to the blackboard and erased half of Mississippi. Then, as if it were not her husband but some stranger who had vanished, she calmly wrote the names in block letters. The clicking of the chalk could be heard to the back of the auditorium. Suddenly there was no need to “scare the crap” out of anyone. Each face bore a primal fear—this could happen to me. While volunteers grouped, Moses slipped outside and slumped down on a step overlooking a spreading lawn. Occasionally a friend approached to give him a hug. One whispered, “You are not responsible for this,” but Moses sat there for hours.