Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [87]
The weekend offered more cause for “deep sorrow.” In the numbing brutality that followed, Mississippi’s stark divides, separating moderate from hard-liner, redneck from socialite, assailant from onlooker, blurred in relentless revenge. And a state proud of its hospitality could no longer deny that any level of savagery now seemed possible. Canton. Browning. Laurel. Firebomb thrown at a Freedom House. Church burned. Twelve-year-old boys hit with baseball bats while cops look on. Vicksburg. Jackson. Natchez. Bomb thrown into a black café. Elderly white man beats a black woman in a coffee shop. Two more churches doused in kerosene, flames consuming the altars, the crucifixes, the wooden walls, leaving blackened cement stairs climbing from the ashes. From across Mississippi, the reports kept coming in—of assaults, bombings, and finally bodies.
On Sunday evening, July 12, a CBS reporter called the CORE office in Meridian. Had they heard the news? A fisherman downriver in Louisiana had spotted a body snagged on a log. A half body—legs only, clad in blue jeans, sneakers, bound at the ankles. No one had checked skin color, but the jeans had a leather belt with a buckle stamped M, and a gold watch and key chain in one pocket. The COFO worker shuddered. Mickey Schwerner had a similar belt, watch, and chain. And he always wore blue jeans and sneakers. Only the day before, someone had rushed in with a rumor that if the bodies were found, they would be “mutilated and scattered in different states.” CORE called lawyer William Kunstler in New York. He phoned Rita Schwerner. Rita said her husband’s watch was silver, not gold. He had no belt buckle with an M. But by then the FBI was already rushing to Louisiana, along with a navy frogman to search the river bottom. The following day, agents found another half body lying on a sandbar. Both corpses were black. Papers in back pockets identified the men as college students from Alcorn A & M. Abducted in May, they had been murdered, tied to the motor block of an old Jeep, and thrown in the river. “Mississippi is the only state where you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting,” a volunteer wrote his parents. “Negroes disappear down here every week and are never heard about. . . . Jesus Christ, this is supposed to be America in 1964.”
And when reading a son’s or daughter’s letter about corpses, church burnings, attacks with tire irons, what were parents supposed to think? Mississippi’s “low” crime rate notwithstanding, violence there had become so common that it no longer made front pages. Friends kept asking parents how they could let their children spend summer “down there.” Relatives phoned—“Did you see the horrible photo of that rabbi? ” Some parents were now calling their children daily, begging them to come home. “We did not flee Hitler for my daughter to become a martyr,” one mother said. But as their children soldiered on, most parents only called each other.
Ever since learning of the summer project, total strangers had been sharing worries about their dedicated, idealistic, slightly crazy kids. In late April, parents in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) had written LBJ, asking for federal protection against the “tanks, guns, and troop carriers” stockpiled in Mississippi. A month later, Boston parents did the same. Two weeks before the disappearance, a “Parents