Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [55]
By Thursday, even the president of the United States was counting the days. “I imagine they’re in that lake,” Johnson told an aide that afternoon. “It’s my guess. Three days now.” The rest of the nation watched and waited. The concern was for more than just three men. Murder had always marred America’s self-image, but it had been an especially disfiguring year. The previous twelve months had seen Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway, four little girls killed in a Birmingham church, the assassination in Dallas, and the televised murder of the alleged assassin. A strangler was on the loose in Boston, throttling innocent women. In New York that spring, Kitty Genovese had been murdered in full view of dozens of neighbors, who had not even called the police. Now came this news from Mississippi. What was America becoming? “We are basically a law abiding nation,” President Johnson reminded Americans that week. But so long as three men were missing in Mississippi, the jury was still out.
Although the FBI had begun to move, although two hundred sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station were preparing to join the search, SNCC had little faith in any federal investigation. “We need the FBI before the fact,” Bob Moses said. “We have them now after the fact.” SNCC had to conduct its own search. Shortly after the news reached Ohio, two cars left the leafy campus. Taking different routes lest both be halted by police, the drivers planned to rendezvous that Tuesday afternoon in Meridian. Crossing into Mississippi, each team phoned in on schedule. “No word yet.” One car was delayed outside Holly Springs by ATAC students lecturing about the Tenth Amendment. Still, it arrived on time. The other was . . . missing. More panic swept through the Meridian office, panic that continued all night and into Wednesday morning. When Stokely Carmichael and Charlie Cobb finally showed up, they told of another near miss. Their old Buick had broken down in Durant, a town “knowed for mean.” Cops had not bought their cover—that they were schoolteachers headed for a Florida vacation. Carmichael was held overnight, but Cobb was told—at 10:00 p.m.—that he could go free. He refused, was thrown out of jail, and spent a terrifying night in the car, clutching a tire iron and “praying for sunrise.” The following morning, Cobb bailed out Carmichael and they drove to Meridian, ready to search.
Toward dusk on the third day after the disappearance, SNCC’s search team snuck into Neshoba County. Making their way along back roads, they visited the ashes of the Mt. Zion Church, then found refuge in a shack filled with rifles. Over a dinner of collards and ham hocks, they heard what local blacks thought had happened. The three had surely been killed by “those same peckerwoods” who burned the church. “Ain’t no telling where they done hid the bodies.” The men waited until midnight, then set out for the swamps. Their hosts drove them as James Chaney would have, headlights out, slamming over rutted roads, clambering deeper into Klan territory, where a wrong turn would have meant a flogging or another disappearance. Piling out of pickups, they spread out into swamps and creeks, searched barns and wells, used long sticks to probe muddy ditches. The muggy night seemed alive with fear. Any moment they expected to hear the thud of stick against a shoulder or torso, but all they heard were snakes hissing, mosquitoes whining, and deerflies buzzing their ears. They trudged on, ankle deep, knee deep, waist deep. Vines snagged their clothes; brambles slashed their arms. The teams searched until the sky turned salmon pink, returned to cabins to sweat more than sleep, then searched again the following midnight, tracking down the latest rumors. “So and so said they saw something. . . . We heard tell. . . . So and so heard the white people talking about . . .” Finally, rumors said the Klan had learned of their presence, and the midnight searches were called off.