Pillar of Fire (69 page)

 

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, A
UGUST
6—a week after the delivery of the FBI birthday cake—James Lackey, manager of a gasoline station in Athens, Georgia, conceded that he had fudged some details of his whereabouts on the night of the Lemuel Penn murder. He and Cecil Myers indeed had intended to be home from Klan patrol by midnight, as they promised when dropping Cecil's wife, Ruth, and her three sons off at the Lackey home after supper, but in fact they did not return until dawn. “I raised the roof,” Lackey's wife, Loretta, told FBI agents in a separate statement, “asking where they had been all night…& why they hadn't called.” The only answer she got was a cocked pistol in her face from a testy Cecil Myers—“I've killed one. Two won't make no difference,” she quoted him—and his refusal to apologize had festered between the families ever since.

Shortly after James Lackey admitted driving for Myers and Howard Sims—“Sims and Myers kept insisting that I follow the car from Washington…I had no idea that they would really shoot the Negro”—Herbert Guest claimed a more passive role, saying he had been present when the Klan trio had departed from the Guest Garage after unknown quarry and had questioned them following their return about whether they had used his shotgun. Thursday night, on the arrest of Myers, Sims, Lackey, and Guest as conspirators, Georgia Governor Carl Sanders issued a telling statement of balanced regret: “Further, if they are held responsible, I want to extend my sympathy to their families, the same as I did to that of the murdered man, because it will be those families who will have to bear the burden of this nonsensible act.”

At FBI headquarters, Deke DeLoach and his supervisors shared satisfaction that “for the second successive evening a Bureau accomplishment highlighted all newscasts.” The Penn case attracted a tiny fraction of the news attention to Mississippi's triple murder, but public relations machinery made sure to arrange “exclusive credit to the FBI” and “prominent mention” of Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. Supervisors compiled imposing statistics to describe the feats of the Penn task force: 50,611 investigative miles driven by Bureau vehicles, 4,307 clerical hours worked, of which 1,372 were overtime. Meanwhile, other FBI officials searched diligently for ways to circumvent the Supreme Court's crippling
Screws
precedent,
*
which all but blocked federal jurisdiction in civil rights cases by requiring proof of “a specific intent to deprive a person of a federal right.” Review of the Penn case confessions yielded ordinary gutter sentiments—“I am going to kill me a nigger”—far beneath the
Screws
standard of an expressly anti-constitutional motive. The prospect of a halfhearted or aborted state prosecution was so vexing that President Johnson himself made futile suggestions about how to construe the Penn murder as a federal crime. “I think a soldier in uniform ought to have something to do with it,” he said. “Doesn't it?”

In Mississippi, on the advice of a chagrined John Doar at the Justice Department, Moses had posted emergency notice to every COFO office that summer workers must think quickly and clearly to give potential attackers a “
Screws
warning” at the first instant of violence, saying, “I want to inform you that I am here working on voter registration.” This far-fetched legal prescription would lay groundwork for U.S. redress. “If you're gutsy,” Moses continued, “you can add something like, ‘You should know that this is protected by federal law.' Carry on.”

 

O
N
A
UGUST
6, the day of the Lemuel Penn arrests in Georgia, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held its founding statewide convention. Mostly by bus, a crowd upward of two thousand gathered at Jackson's Masonic Temple. The hall was decorated in humble imitation of the national political conventions. Hand-lettered placards grouped the elected delegates by county: Neshoba, Sunflower, Forrest, Leflore. At center stage, beneath an American flag and a banner reading “Freedom Democratic Party,” speakers welcomed a gathering predominantly of sharecroppers who ate sandwiches from paper bags, advanced their dream of voting with formal roll calls, and answered the chilling loss of three colleagues who lay in the morgue with the spirited conviction of a mass meeting. “Until the killing of a black mother's son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother's son,” one speaker cried out, “we who believe in freedom cannot rest.”

Heat wilted everyone in the hall. COFO chairman Aaron Henry wiped his face with a handkerchief on the platform near Rev. Edwin King, who stirred the air with a church-issue hand fan. In shirtsleeves and his trademark bow tie, Washington attorney Joseph Rauh explained his “magic numbers” for achieving a practical miracle at the Democratic National Convention two weeks hence. “Eleven and eight!” he shouted. Under party rules, eleven votes (10 percent) from the 108-member Credentials Committee could send a minority report to the convention floor recommending that the Freedom Democrats be seated instead of, or alongside, the regular Mississippi Democrats, and a petition from eight states could secure a roll call vote. Rauh envisioned a stark moral and logical choice posed on national television in the glare of widespread revulsion against racial brutality in Mississippi. Democratic delegates would be loath to support the all-white delegation over the Freedom Democrats, he predicted, especially since the regular Democrats, including Governor Johnson and the state legislature itself, were endorsing the Republican nominee because of his stance against the civil rights bill. “When you have two [delegations] that claim to represent the regular party, you take the
loyal
one,” Rauh declared, surveying a Masonic Temple unanimous for Lyndon Johnson. “There's not a Goldwater fan in the house!”

“Bob Moses didn't seem so confident,” one volunteer in attendance wrote home. “President Johnson is afraid he will lose the whole South if he seats the FDP.” One Sunflower County delegate rose from the floor to ask exactly what the Freedom Democrats would do way up in New Jersey, where most had never ventured. “As things stand right now,” Aaron Henry candidly replied, “we don't know what the hell we're going to do when we get to Atlantic City.”

In a plaid suit jacket, removing her dark glasses to speak, Ella Baker alone seemed in command as she compressed the lessons of thirty years' activism into a keynote address. She declared the new party “open to
all
the people who wish to subscribe to its principles…even the son of the planter on whose plantation you work.” To exercise the vote was a serious matter, and beyond courage they would need knowledge of history plus the good sense to detect phoniness in their leaders and themselves. “Now this is not the kind of a keynote speech perhaps you like,” said Baker, “but I'm not trying to make you feel good.” At night after work, “instead of spending our time at the television and radio,” she said they all needed to be studying the world around them. She urged them to read W. J. Cash's classic political study,
The Mind of the South
. “Young men and women want some meaning in their lives,” said Baker. “Big cars do not give meaning. Place in the power structure does not give meaning.”

In the audience, correspondent Paul Good marveled that Baker's summons to civic duty earned thunderous ovations. The crowd erupted into a prolonged demonstration of dancing and weaving to a succession of freedom songs—“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “This Little Light of Mine.” “This was probably the most soul-felt march ever to occur in a political convention,” a volunteer wrote home. Another volunteer, transfixed by the sight of county placards bobbing above heads and arms, observed that “all of us here are pretty emotional about the names of the counties.” Labels that normally headed the daily toll of affliction, she added, for once “meant people who work 14 hours a day from sun-up to sun-down picking cotton, and live in homes with no plumbing and no paint, were casting ballots to send a delegation to Atlantic City.”

Strong sentiments masked some conflicts and caused others. Charles Evers refused to observe even a moment of the historic convention, taking refuge in his office upstairs at the Masonic Temple. Like his slain brother Medgar, he partly shared the resentment of his NAACP employers toward the upstart young people and their untried tactics such as the “pretender” political party. In reply, organizers of the summer project pushed slates of freedom delegates that excluded most NAACP candidates as too “middle-class” to represent Mississippi Negroes. “Misunderstanding” over fund-raising memorials briefly divided partisans of SNCC, which claimed martyr Andrew Goodman, from CORE, which had employed Schwerner and Chaney.

Outside the hall, shrill public disputes continued over the meaning of the three murders. Some agents of the state government hinted that the precise information about the location of the grave site indicated the FBI's complicity in the crime, while others drew comfort from reports that the still-secret autopsies showed no signs of beatings—as though proof of swift execution by gunshot might somehow deflect suspicion from the Mississippi Klan.

Church lawyer Jack Pratt pitched into the propaganda war. On Thursday and Friday—a year after bursting naively into Parchman Penitentiary to rescue forgotten Leflore County prisoners—he arranged and observed a follow-up autopsy on behalf of the Chaney family, then persuaded pathologist David Spain to render his conclusion in nontechnical language: “…I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high-speed accidents such as airplane crashes.” Although later evidence would show that the bone damage had been caused by a bulldozer during burial, Pratt's efforts reversed the
New York Times
news headings overnight, from “No Evidence of Beating…learned authoritatively,” to “Chaney Was Given a Brutal Beating.”

Hastily—once the mortuary segregation laws were invoked to block family desires for joint permanent burial in Mississippi—the remains of James Chaney were transported from the second autopsy in Jackson home to Meridian for reinterment alone before dark on Friday. Then silent marches wound through town from four churches to converge upon the tiny, wood-framed First Union Baptist. (“The police held up traffic at stoplights,” a volunteer wrote home, “and of all the white people watching, only one girl heckled.”) There, under the bright lights of television news, one architect of the summer project delivered a volcanic eulogy. CORE's David Dennis had promised his national office a calming and hopeful message, but on sight of the victim's broken young brother—“little Ben Chaney here, and the others like him in the audience”—he snapped.

Dennis gripped the broad pulpit draped with white cloth. “I bury,” he started, then winced, eyes closed. “Not bury. Sorry. But I
blame
the people in Washington, D.C., and on down….” He decried “the living dead we have right in our midst, not only in Mississippi but throughout the nation.” His voice became a whispered shriek: “See, I
know
what's gonna happen! I feel it
deep
in my heart. When they find the people who killed those guys in Neshoba County, they've got to come down to the state of Mississippi and have a jury of all their cousins, their aunts, their uncles. I know what they're gonna say—not guilty…I'm
tired
of that!” Overwrought, Dennis waved spread fingers to and from his chest. “I'm not going to stand here and ask anyone not to be angry, not to be bitter tonight!” he shouted. “…We've got to stand up. The best way we can remember James Chaney is to demand our rights…. If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us…then God damn your souls!” Tears choked off further words, and the crowd answered with moans.

Bob Moses snapped differently. He lost himself to what a kindred observer called the “blessed chaos” of a Freedom School convention that same Friday and Saturday in Meridian. While it was impossible yet to know the future miracles among the youth delegates from across Mississippi, such as the fourth-grade sisters destined to become a law professor and a Fulbright scholar, no gloom could withstand the energy of the recitals, displays, and caucuses on public business. The student assembly took as its call a variation on the Declaration of Independence
*
composed by the Freedom School at St. John's United Methodist in Hattiesburg—the church of Victoria Gray, now a Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives—then formed eight committees to create a “youth platform” for the Freedom Democratic Party. An education caucus proposed thirteen planks: “4. That the school year consist of nine (9) consecutive months….13. That teacher brutality be eliminated.” Others returned with recommendations that were variously general (“Negroes appointed to the police force in large numbers”), specialized (“Cotton planting allotments to be made on the basis of family size”), and clairvoyant (“We oppose nuclear testing in residential areas”).
*

In plenary session, the Freedom School delegates eventually voted down as “too socialistic” a plank calling for land reform, and replaced, in the foreign policy section, a targeted boycott of Fidel Castro's Cuba with a more general call: “The United States should stop supporting dictatorships in other countries….” For Moses, specifics counted little next to the pulsating debate itself, with haggles over procedure and the meaning of words. It rolled back primal fear not only in the students but the volunteer teachers—Stanley Zibulsky, the New Yorker petrified when he arrived at Vernon Dahmer's farm in July, was among many hoping to stay on in Mississippi past the summer. Debate released crippled imaginations into soaring, unpredictable flight, as Freedom School students who newly measured the world by their notions also undertook to decorate COFO offices with original art. They carried Moses beyond shock or the revelry of a ragtime funeral. “It was the single time in my life that I have seen Bob the happiest,” said a fellow observer at the Freedom School convention. “He just ate it up.”