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By Root 1728 0

news of his arrival stirred a frenzy of speculation. “Neshoba Arrests Believed Imminent,” the Meridian Star headlined. Arrests, however, were nowhere near. FBI agents were still finding Neshoba County a human swamp. Some residents had finally begun to talk, but not about the disappearance. Agents questioning locals were subjected to tiresome rants about Communists and Jews, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The resistance on the street was less subtle. Agents walking through Philadelphia were shouldered off sidewalks, spat upon, hounded by threats. One even found rattlesnakes in his car. FBI veteran Joseph Sullivan, the burly, crew-cut agent heading the investigation, had found just one reliable source—the Meridian highway patrolman who had handed over the initial list of seven suspects. From late June into early July, Sullivan and his source met on sidewalks and in cafés to talk about the Klan and “whose neighbors were friendly with who.” But whenever Sullivan asked about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the patrolman fell silent. As for the rest of Neshoba County, Sullivan said it needed no Klan because its ordinary citizens were the most conspiratorial he had ever met. Three weeks after their arrival, many of Sullivan’s men had given up. The search was “just going through the motions,” one said. But a few held out hope: “We haven’t even started leaning on suspects yet. When we do, we’re going to lean real hard. I feel like somebody will break.”

On Friday morning, July 10, a bulky, bulldoggish figure strode onto the tarmac at the Jackson airport. J. Edgar Hoover was greeted by Governor Paul Johnson and Jackson mayor Allen Thompson. “This is truly a great day!” the mayor said, pumping Hoover’s hand. Hoover, wearing his usual scowl, did not seem to agree. He knew next to nothing about Mississippi—he had called the Delta town where the FBI had recently made arrests “Teeny Weeny.” Opening an office in Jackson had been Hoover’s idea, but going there in July was not. LBJ had arranged the visit. “This Mississippi thing is awful mean,” the president complained. “I’m gonna have to walk a tight-wire there.” Along with sending Hoover, Johnson had ordered the FBI to make its presence in Jackson as public as possible, and all that week, agents had hastily converted an abandoned bank into the bureau’s first Mississippi headquarters. Empty file cabinets were dragged in. False facades covered bare concrete. American flags were on prominent display. But standing at a podium in this Potemkin office, Hoover had little to announce.

He began by noting that Mississippi had the third lowest crime rate in America. (Mississippi newspapers touted this half-truth all summer, yet although the state’s nonviolent crime rate was among the nation’s lowest, its murder rate was the highest, more than double the national norm.) When reporters asked Hoover about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, he was blunt. “I don’t close it as an absolute certainty,” he said, “but I consider that they are dead.” The search, however, would go on. Another fifty agents had arrived—solely to investigate. “We most certainly do not and will not give protection to civil rights workers,” Hoover insisted. He hinted he would visit Neshoba County, but death threats to his motel later made him cancel his plans. Not everyone in Mississippi thought Hoover’s visit marked “truly a great day!” Alarmed at the FBI invasion, Mississippians were joking that the letters FBI stood for “Federal Bureau of Integration.” In Jackson, a state senator denounced the “calculated insult” of having two hundred FBI agents in Mississippi “carrying out the wishes of Bobby Kennedy.”

While Hoover spoke in Jackson that morning, the sickness struck in the full glare of daylight. Toward noon in Hattiesburg, a middle-aged man and his nephew tossed a tire iron into a pickup and set out to “whup” the first “white niggers” they met. They were driving near the railroad tracks when they spotted, on an embankment, three white men walking with two black teenage girls. Stopping their truck, sprinting up the grassy