by Lee A. DanielsTwo weeks ago, one of the five white men still living, suspected in the deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner in Neshoba, Mississippi, 1964, died. But at least 73-year-old Billy Wayne Posey “went to his grave knowing the next knock on the door would be for him.” Four are still living “who spouted the spurious notion that they were “superior” to black Americans so that they could act like savages” - and for whom the lawman's knock on the door may still come.
by Lee A. Daniels
Two weeks ago, one of the five white men still living, suspected in the deaths of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner in Neshoba, Mississippi, 1964, died. But at least 73-year-old Billy Wayne Posey “went to his grave knowing the next knock on the door would be for him.” Four are still living “who spouted the spurious notion that they were “superior” to black Americans so that they could act like savages” - and for whom the lawman's knock on the door may still come.
Bending Toward Justice
by Lee A. Daniels
This article originally appeared in TheDefendersOnline, a publication of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“The FBI is examining the details of more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings that occurred before 1969.”
Now there are four left.
Four men still living whose murderous crime in 1964 underscored to a shocked nation and world the evil the regime of legalized racism in the American South fostered.
Four men still living who spouted the spurious notion that they were “superior” to black Americans so that they could act like savages.
Four men still living who know in all of its gruesome detail the maelstrom of violence that took the lives of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner that June night in Neshoba County, Mississippi during the “Mississippi Freedom Summer” of 1964.
Four men still living who, according to the continuing federal investigation of the crime, were part of the Ku Klux Klan mob that killed them. Of all the men there that night – a score or more — only one, Edgar Ray Killen, has been brought to a significant measure of justice. In 2005 a Neshoba County jury convicted him, then 80 years old, of three counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
On August 13 the fifth man on the list of living suspects, Billy Wayne Posey, 73, of Meridian, Mississippi, died of natural causes. He was buried in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
“Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn,” Alvin Sykes exclaimed to a reporter from the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, which during the past two decades has published an extraordinary accounting of the state’s violent resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
“Only one man, Edgar Ray Killen, has been brought to a significant measure of justice.”
Sykes, of Kansas City, Kansas, was the leading force in pushing Congress to enact the legislation in 2008 that created the Justice Department office charged with investigating “cold-case” civil rights murders of that era. Reportedly,the FBI is examining the details of more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings that occurred before 1969. According to the Clarion-Ledger article, Sykes said Posey’s death was a “major setback in our continuing pursuit of truth and justice for Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. However, at least he went to his grave knowing the next knock on the door would be for him.”
And what about the other suspects, I wondered when I read of Posey’s death? Pete Harris, of Meridian. Olen Burrage, of Philadelphia. Richard Willis, then a Philadelphia police officer, of Noxapater. Jimmie Snowden, of Hickory? Will there ever be a knock on the door for them?
II.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
So said the Apostle of Nonviolence during the years when the struggle of black Americans to secure the basic rights of citizenship had to be measured in the lives lost to white-racist violence.
But how long did that arc have to be, wondered a sixteen-year-old boy growing up in outwardly straitened but actually comfortable circumstances in a northern black community far from Mississippi? When would justice be done?
Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were investigating the burning of a rural black church in Neshoba County, when they disappeared on June 21, 1964. They were ambushed by local police officials, jailed briefly in Philadelphia, and then, with the connivance of local police officials, released and ambushed again, this time by a mob of more than twenty Klansmen, driven to a wooded area outside of town; tortured, murdered and buried fifteen feet deep in the Mississippi red clay beneath an earthen dam. Their bodies weren’t found until six weeks later, on August 4.
The Southern segregationists and their Northern fellow-travelers jeered that the disappearance was a fake, staged to assure the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Congress passed the Act on July 1 and President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed it immediately). But anyone possessed of even a small amount of decency knew what had happened.
“The Southern segregationists and their Northern fellow-travelers jeered that the disappearance was a fake.”
Even set against the horrific racist brutality so commonplace in the South in the years before 1965, the murder of the three civil rights workers stood out. Some said, not without reason that it was because two of those missing were young white men.
Perhaps. But it also may have been because the coming certain passage of the landmark civil rights legislation had provided some solace to a nation still stunned at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that previous November.
Malcolm X famously described Kennedy’s murder as “chickens coming home to roost” – meaning, he said, that the violence white America so furiously visited upon black Americans and other people of color around the world, had spun out of its “normal” bounds and claimed the President. The civil rights bill was a totem seemingly refuting that harsh assessment—enabling Americans to tell themselves the racial violence in the South and Kennedy’s slaying were aberrations; that America was still a moral nation.
But one could say that the viciousness of the murders in Mississippi, and the obvious fact that many Neshoba County whites knew who the murderers were, began a shredding of the fabric of belief in the goodness of America. That shredding, fueled by growing domestic opposition to the American war in Southeast Asia and the turmoil in Northern black ghettos, would accelerate rapidly in the coming 18 to 24 months.
“The viciousness of the murders in Mississippi began a shredding of the fabric of belief in the goodness of America.”
And yet, as paradoxical as it may seem, the murder in Mississippi was a confirmation—a tragic confirmation—of how close the Movement was to the destruction of legalized segregation, to blacks’ attainment of civil rights in the South. Violent death at the hands of white racists had always shadowed black Americans’ existence in their native land. But after World War II, blacks’ increased determination to challenge Jim Crow had stripped the White South’s racist violence of the patina of being a declaration of supremacy. Now, the world could see them clearly as acts of depraved desperation.
Black Americans and their white allies understood that in the fight for Negro freedom, in the fight for the future, the road to salvation was going to be hallowed by the blood of the righteous. Some people were going to lose their lives. On that summer night forty-five years ago Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, armed only with the righteousness of their cause, went on an errand. They were looking for justice.
III.
Some consider 1964 a long time ago. But for those who were alive then and believed, rightly, the Civil Rights Movement was pushing them toward a bright future, it remains the lodestar.
This May, James A. Young, an African-American minister and former Neshoba County supervisor, was elected mayor of the predominantly white city of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Born and raised in Philadelphia, in the mid-1960s, he integrated the local elementary school as the only black student in the sixth-grade class. Young told the New York Times that during his campaign, “ … the signs on the doors said ‘Welcome,’ and I actually felt welcome.”
I think I know what Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney must be thinking.
Lee A. Daniels is Communications Director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.
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