Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [48]
But in “Whites Only” Mississippi, the Schwerners could not have aroused more outrage. They had only been in the state a few days when a cop told them, “I just want you to know you’re about as welcome here as hair on a biscuit.” Soon they were spotted as not just outsiders, not just Jews, but “mixers.” Rita was even seen talking with black men. And although it would have fit well in Greenwich Village, Mickey’s goatee was a red flag in the clean-cut South. He had shaved it before leaving Brooklyn, but grew it back in March, saying anyone who hated him would need no excuse. Black kids loved Mickey’s goatee and called him “Mitch” after TV’s bearded choral leader Mitch Miller, but the beard enraged some whites, providing the nickname Mickey first heard when arrested for picketing that May—“You must be that Communist-Jew nigger lover they call ‘Goatee.’ ” By then, threats had become part of daily life. Callers to the Freedom House accused Rita of sleeping with Negroes. Others chanted, “That Jewboy is dead! That Jewboy is dead!” Electricity was cut off several times, water occasionally, and the Schwerners moved again and again when host families sensed their homes targeted. Mississippi’s Sovereignty Commission had already given their license plate number to police departments throughout the state.
In late May, Mickey told his father he was “a marked man.” A few days later, the Schwerners took their phone off the hook. Rita was sometimes homesick and convinced that if she got pregnant, they would leave, but Mickey was rooted. “I belong right here in Mississippi,” he told a friend. “Nothing threatens peace among men like the idea of white supremacy. Nowhere in the world is the idea of white supremacy more firmly entrenched, or more cancerous, than in Mississippi. . . . So this is the decisive battleground for America, and every young American who wants to have a part in the decision should be here.”
Anchoring the Schwerners’ commitment was the commitment they inspired in others. James Chaney, shy and self-effacing, was as opposite the gregarious Mickey Schwerner as their skin color. Because James’s middle name was Earl, his family called him J. E., but Schwerner always called him “Bear,” and the two were inseparable. “Mickey could count on Jim to walk through hell with him,” a Freedom House regular said. After the army rejected him for having asthma, Chaney had drifted, working odd jobs, spending months unemployed, then helping his father plaster houses. But when his father left home, the two fought, and Chaney stormed off the job. Committed to civil rights since high school, he found his way into the Schwerners’ circle. It felt like coming home.
“Mama,” he said, “I believe I done found an organization that I can be in and do something for myself and somebody else, too.”
But Fannie Lee Chaney, raising five children on $28 a week, knew Mississippi better. “Ain’t you afraid of this? ” she asked.
“Naw, Mama, that’s what’s the matter now,” Chaney said. “Everybody’s scared.”
By the time he started his night runs into Neshoba County, Chaney was a CORE staffer. At twenty-one, he was also on the verge of being a father, but he would not be around for the birth. The day his daughter was born, he was driving with Mickey and Rita to the Ohio training. There the three agreed that volunteer Andrew Goodman was the man they wanted to start a Freedom School in Neshoba County. And when they heard that the church set to host the school had burned to the ground, Schwerner and Chaney returned to Mississippi with their new recruit.
Before his face appeared on an FBI poster, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman might have been a poster boy for youthful altruism. With passions ranging from drama to poetry to the Holocaust, Goodman was, his mother recalled, “a born activist.” Like Mickey Schwerner, he had attended the progressive Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Like