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By Root 1759 0

only to emerge holding shredded scraps as black as Delta topsoil. Men slick with sweat brought out armloads of debris. Soon several black women, their heads wrapped in bright bandannas, came with their own cleaning solutions. And sometime that morning, someone delivered boxes of books. Volunteers tore open the cardboard, finding childhood favorites or, to their dismay, college texts. The books were stacked in piles—“History,” “Reference,” “Language,” “Crud”—and the piles were still small when Fred Winn began talking about bookshelves. Local kids roamed the quarters, bringing back two-by-fours but no planks. Finally Winn, a short, burly man with a mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, noticed the outhouse. With the help of several laughing kids, he rocked and rocked until it toppled with a crash. The smell was paralyzing, but the boards were not as old as they looked, not once Winn grabbed a plane from his toolbox and skinned them clean.

By the time a late-afternoon thunderstorm rumbled across the Delta, the Ruleville Freedom School was ready for classes. The rooms were still musty and the floorboards still creaked, but walls were tacky with fresh paint. A crib headboard found in the attic and spray-painted green had become a blackboard, and fully stocked bookshelves lined both classrooms. Walking through their new school, volunteers could hardly believe what they had accomplished, yet similar miracles were taking place in Vicksburg, in Clarksdale, in Hattiesburg . . . Ruleville’s Freedom School was scheduled to open that Friday. In the meantime, volunteers wondered where else they could tackle a century of despair.

Throughout the first week of July, the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney dominated news from Mississippi. More searchers, more helicopters, more rumors. On Tuesday, a mutilated body turned up by the roadside a hundred miles north of Neshoba County. The man was about Mickey Schwerner’s age, wearing blue jeans and sneakers, but fingerprints ended all speculation. A day later, a cop spotted a goateed man in a café near the Tennessee border. Mississippi newspapers plastered the news on front pages—the man looked “exactly” like Schwerner and had given the cop “dirty looks.” Next, COFO headquarters heard that the three bodies, chained together, had been dumped in the Ross Barnett Reservoir off the Natchez Trace Highway. The FBI tracked down each rumor, “running down all leads on the cranks,” Hoover told LBJ. And continuing to question residents, agents slowly pieced together the events of June 21.

One woman told agents what she had seen that Sunday afternoon. A blue station wagon stopped on Route 16, east of Philadelphia, opposite the Dallas Garage. Two whites and a Negro, fixing a flat. A cop and two highway patrolmen looking on. Patrolman Earl Poe confirmed the story. He and his partner had been sweating in the shade along Route 16 when the blue wagon topped the rise and “let off it.” Seconds later, Deputy Cecil Price had raced by in his black-and-white ’56 Chevy, red light flashing. A crackle had come over the radio—Price asking for assistance. The patrolmen followed and found the station wagon pulled over, the pudgy deputy watching the black man change the tire. Then the two “white boys” got in Poe’s patrol car—the one with the goatee handed the cop the gun left in the backseat. The other patrolman rode with the “Negro boy” in the station wagon, and Deputy Price followed both cars to the jail.

What happened in jail was revealed by a man who had been in an adjacent cell. He told of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney being placed in segregated lockups. Schwerner had asked permission to call his wife. The jailer offered to make the call herself, but Schwerner politely declined. The man remembered Schwerner and Goodman as being calm, telling him they expected to be in jail several days. The details gave the FBI a start, but the forty hours between Sunday night and Tuesday’s discovery of the smoldering station wagon remained a blank slate. And while a few locals had talked, most were still enraged by the FBI