Mississippi Burning Redux: the FBI, the KKK, and How Three Murdered Civil Rights Workers Changed America
"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." -- Klansman prayer, King James Bible, Romans 12:1
Declassified Files and Historical Perspective
In July 2021, I drove through Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in four days. It doesn't take long to cross one state into another, and Mississippi welcomes visitors with an unexpected state sign: "The Birthplace of America's Music." Mississippi might have birthed B.B. King and Elvis Presley, but its music is less astounding than its landscape. Vast forests surround the interstate, gifting an appreciation of aboriculture.
About an hour from my Jackson destination is a town called Philadelphia. I didn't know anything about Philadelphia, Mississippi until I spent hours in Jackson, Mississippi reading FBI case files concerning three young civil rights workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Perhaps you know they were murdered in 1964 and the state of Mississippi refused to prosecute the suspects, but almost no one knows the full story.
The United States didn't have a national civil rights act until 1964, a direct result of violence against civil rights activists. I'm familiar with part of the law, also called Title VII, but in eight years of legal practice, I can't remember filing more than one Title VII case. In most states, employees would use state, not federal, law but that's assuming a relevant state law exists. Despite using the 1964 civil rights law, I was unaware it contained eleven different sections. Only with the knowledge I gained in Mississippi did two sections of the law, 42 U.S. Code § 1985 and 41 USC § 1986, make awful sense. Before we continue, context is useful.
"No President has really done much for the American Negro, though the past two Presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their Administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy Magazine, January 1969, pp. 232, published posthumously
In 1961, civil rights activists rode interstate buses through the segregated South to force bus companies to honor a Supreme Court case, Morgan vs. Virginia, which disallowed racial segregation on interstate buses. The case was decided in 1946, and the reason you don't know about it is because Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotts were the main catalysts in finally causing desegregated busing in 1956.
One day in 1943, Parks boarded a bus to register to vote. But the back of the bus was standing room only. Instead of stepping off to go to the back door after paying her fare in front, Parks walked down the aisle. The driver, James Blake, demanded that she disembark and re-board at the rear of the bus. Parks got off and waited for the next bus. (L.A. Times, Woo, 2005)
Twelve years later, 1955, is the year Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat. Within two years, with the help of Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other activists, Montgomery, Alabama finally desegregated its buses.
If it took almost fourteen years to desegregate local Southern buses--which were financially dependent on African-American riders--the struggle for equal voting rights obviously would be harder.
Historians and mass media focused on the three young civil rights workers and the corrupt local sheriff. In doing so, they presented an incomplete picture that erased judicial corruption and FBI negligence. Yet, until the FBI's case files were declassified and made available to researchers, no one could reshape the prevailing narrative.
Let's discuss the FBI. Ernest Hemingway called it "anti-Liberal, pro-Fascist, and dangerous [sic] of developing into an American Gestapo." (Source: Hemingway's FBI file, stamped July 17, 1961) At one point, Hemingway, who was running counterintelligence ops in Cuba on behalf of the United States, introduced an FBI agent as "a member of the American Gestapo." That same FBI agent warned J. Edgar Hoover that Hemingway "could tarnish the reputation of the FBI by portraying its agents as 'the dull, heavy-footed, unimaginative professional policeman type.'" (Memo to Hoover from Leddy, Hemingway's FBI file, August 13, 1943) Though the FBI surveilled Hemingway until his suicide, his own family and friends believed Hemingway had mental problems and paranoia. (Modernism on File, Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950, edited by Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick, 2008)
The FBI's antipathy towards writers extended beyond Hemingway. Hoover once called John Franklin Carter, an American columnist--who also happened to be President FDR's personal spy--"a crack-pot, a persistent busy-body, bitten with the Sherlock Holmes bug and plagued with a super-exaggerated ego." (March 1947) The hostility was mutual: "Carter... has always viewed the FBI as a fascist organization," wrote Hoover in September 1941. Ironically, Carter's individual research was sometimes more accurate than the FBI's, especially regarding Japanese-American residents during WWII.
Two writers, two charges of fascism against the same American law enforcement agency... but what does this have to do with Mississippi? If one cardinal lesson exists from the civil rights movement, it's that fear or hatred always begets fear and hatred, and the FBI's fear and paranoia of writers led to writers hating the FBI and the FBI becoming paranoid.
Here's the sad thing about it. Of course, a lot of blacks hate white people too. See, hatred always breeds hatred. -- Buford Posey (1977), called a "crack-pot" by locals, probable high-level informant. FBI document 44-2227 has witness implicating Buford and contains handwritten note, "Not to be used in report. Index only."
Leadership matters most when you don't have it, and under Hoover, the FBI's attempts to boost its reputation at others' expense had a purpose: to consolidate domestic intelligence operations under a single umbrella. Predictably, Hoover's overestimation of his own competence, underestimation of other agencies, and disregard for checks and balances backfired. Not only did the FBI antagonize more competent intelligence operators, particularly the OSS, its arrogance splintered the intelligence community in ways that still reverberate. The United States now has no fewer than 18 different intelligence entities, and thanks to Hoover's FBI, 21st century American intelligence might have become both too big to succeed and too paranoid to be useful.
"The really big story is the OSP. The Office of Special Plans. Turns out when [President] Bush wasn't getting the intelligence he wanted, Rumsfeld bypassed the CIA and set up his own intelligence unit. They fed raw unvetted intelligence to Bush and [Colin] Powell who lied us into a war!" -- Official Secrets (2019)
Mississippi Burning
Now that you know the FBI desired total control of domestic intelligence operations and was willing to pursue consolidation at any cost, its role in Mississippi will become clear. To be fair, the FBI was addressing a deliberate campaign to disrupt Mississippi politics, which included placing young white idealists in danger in order to force the media to pay attention.
"[B]y tradition, only white traffic deaths were considered worth submitting... none of us questioned the professional proposition that the loss of a white life had more news value than the loss of a black life." -- journalist Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (1974) pp. 31
The campaign to "break Mississippi" produced violent counter-reactions, and though Mississippi occupies an outsized place in American civil rights history, it was only one part of a Southern reform strategy. In 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders was burned in Anniston, Alabama. In 1963, a Montgomery, Alabama church was firebombed, killing four little girls. In the summer of 1964, twenty black churches in Mississippi were burned to the ground. Nowhere and no one was off-limits, and just as the civil rights movement was planned, so was the violence. Plainclothes police--some of them Klan members--would first attack journalists accompanying Freedom Riders to prevent a record of violence. In Mississippi, on June 16, 1964, the sheriff burned down a church. Read that again: the sheriff, an American community's most independent law-and-order facilitator, burned down a church. His goal was to prevent its use by civil rights workers and to deploy violence to break the will of anyone who dared work with outside community organizers.
"'Barnett do the talkin' and [Sheriff] Rainey do the killin'.'" -- FBI 157-2346, 44-2227
This same sheriff, Lawrence Andrew Rainey, ordered Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman's station wagon to be targeted on June 21, 1964, the night of their murders.
From FBI case files: "On the evening which the Mt. Zion Methodist Church was burned at around 9:00PM... I observed a 1960 black GMC pickup truck followed by four cars pass my home headed... toward the church... I also recognized the car following behind the pickup truck... in which Sheriff [Lawrence] Rainey was a passenger on Sunday." -- Geraldine Stewart, statement given July 14, 1964
Why were five cars headed to a church under the aegis of Neshoba County's sheriff? To attack church members. After a church meeting, the Klan ordered church officers out of their cars, then beat them outside their own church. Sheriff Rainey most likely trailed behind until only Klan members were present and then assisted in the burning and/or the covering up of clues/evidence.
"[Billy] Birdsong [a KKK member] related that all of the judges, lawyers and jury supervisors are Klansmen or Klan sympathizers in Neshoba County... the [KKK] group discussed the fact that any judge, prosecutor, District Attorney or juror would be on the side of the Klan in any attempt to prosecute a Klansman for racial violence or his participation in the killing of the three civil rights workers." -- FBI files describing Neshoba Meeting, Saturday, December 12, 1964
Some historians believe three civil rights workers arrived in Mississippi to secure affidavits regarding the church burning and were murdered to prevent further investigation. This causal chain is incorrect. Michael Schwerner arrived in Mississippi as a CORE field worker in January 1964--months before the Mt. Zion church burning.
"WHEREAS, as a result of the movement into the State of a group of individuals self-styled as the ' Freedom Riders', there appears to be imminent danger of a breach of the peace, resistance to the execution of the laws of the State, with threatened unlawful assembly and possibly violence and destruction to private property and loss of life..." -- Mississippi Executive Department Jackson Executive Order
Remember: a sustained, interstate effort to inject political normalcy into Southern politics was occurring, an effort that required local patience and trust, not only because many civil rights workers were non-black, but also because it takes time to organize and register voters. (Barack Obama, a well-paid lawyer, campaigned for President as a "community organizer" so as to associate himself with America's civil rights movement.)
"The future of the United States of America may well be determined here in Mississippi. For it is here that democracy faces its most serious challenge." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Indeed, the main goal in 1964 was to register African-American voters, a revolutionary act in the South, where poll taxes and other barriers existed to deny equal voting rights.
Hatred and Fear
Other than obvious charges of agitation, what inspired such fear and hatred against CORE's Southern involvement? First and foremost, though Schwerner and Goodman appear white, the political establishment in Mississippi viewed them as anything but. Second, Sheriff Rainey was protecting his cut of illegal whiskey sales: the "Sheriff's Office has at least two 'collection men' whose function is to collect money from Negro cafe owners who illegally sell whiskey... [one of the owners is] employed by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company." (FBI Files) Third, many people, including the FBI, believed the men's disappearance was a hoax perpetuated by godless Communists.
The aims and purposes of the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi, which splintered from Louisiana's Original Knights of the KKK, "are to preserve Christian civilization, protect and promote white supremacy and the segregation of the races, to fight Communism and to extend the dignity, heritage, and rights of the white race of America."
Hatred and fear are rarely driven by logic. Schwerner was despised in part because he looked different from anyone locals had ever seen. One witness stated, "this was the first time she had ever met a white man with a beard such as SCHWERNER had, and up to this point she had thought that SCHWERNER was a Negro."
"In Klan circles, 'GOATEE,' as Schwerner was known, was most contemptible." -- FBI report, November 12, 1964
Though Schwerner was assumed Jewish, he was raised Unitarian. While detained at the Morton mayor's house, Schwerner stated his grandfather was Jewish but his father had switched to Unitarianism.
Rita Schwerner, interview, 2014: "Neither Mickey nor I grew up in families in which there was a strong Jewish identity, though we both had grandparents who were immigrants to the United States. I don’t think either of us identified ourselves as directed or infused with anything that was particularly Jewish. I am not a religious person. In fact, I am an atheist and have been most of my adult life. That was certainly true of Mickey."
Whatever his faith, Schwerner was a born-and-bred New Yorker and couldn't be inconspicuous in Mississippi had he tried. The reason his Jewish background is relevant is because the KKK was not only anti-African-American, but anti-Semitic. Several FBI documents report rigorous debates between two KKK factions: one believing the Jew was the greatest threat to Christian civilization and the other, the African-American.
"Bowers advocates the use of the Klan to fight the Zionists or Jews, whom he believes are a greater threat to this country. The opposing faction believes that the Negro is more important; that the black man is a threat to their way of life and that they must be dealt with by the Klan... SAM BOWERS does not believe that the Negro is a threat to the American way of life. He has commented on occasions that the communists have made little headway in their attempts to win over the Negro race in the United States. However, BOWERS believes that the main threat and the target of the Ku Klux Klan should be the 'communist- Jew.'" -- file on Sam Bowers, Jr., of Laurel, MS, Imperial Wizard
We forget when we study American history that all non-Christians and all non-whites were, at one point in time, either segregated or excluded. The effect on the South, as well as other areas, was that Jews and African-Americans often lived and worked side-by-side because ex-New York, Jewish immigrants were not numerous enough to create their own communities. (A tourist visiting downtown Montgomery, Alabama may notice the Rosa Parks statue but not the clock nearby, on which a common Jewish surname is imprinted.)
Both Goodman and Schwerner were of Jewish descent and from New York, but unlike Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were clean-shaven and had worked in construction. Despite any differences, all three were part of America's best and brightest. Schwerner protected the diminutive Robert Reich, a future Secretary of Labor, from high school bullies. Schwerner was married to a future lawyer and had resigned his position as a social worker in New York to go to Mississippi.
Goodman personified his last name: one witness stated, "GOODMAN has a strong desire to help his fellow man." Goodman was known as "a serious-minded person... interested in literature, history, drama, music, and anthropology. Goodman performed in several amateur stage plays, had two brothers, no girlfriend, and enjoyed folk music. According to one FBI report, he arrived in Meridian, MS from civil rights training in Oxford, OH one night before his murder.
Chaney was the oldest sibling and had three younger sisters and one younger brother. Despite being less than 150 pounds and asthmatic, Chaney was captain of both his high school football and track teams. After graduating high school, he started working as a plasterer's apprentice. When Chaney joined CORE, his mother asked, "Ain't you afraid of this?" "Naw, mama, that's what's the matter now--everybody's scared." [America's Uncivil Wars (2005), by Mark Lytle]
How such men could be considered threats to Christian civilization by anyone, including law enforcement, state officials, and a preacher is evidence of hate's power to overwhelm facts and logic. Regarding the government's involvement, most concerning was the FBI's failure to intervene earlier. Sadly, the FBI failed to collaborate with the National Guard and other agencies to protect civil rights workers because of its suspicion of the civil rights movement. Had the FBI done its job earlier or at least collaborated with other executive agencies, Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney might be alive today.
Communism
"Americans as a whole feel threatened by communism on one hand, and, on the other, by the rising tide of aspirations among the undeveloped nations." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy Magazine, January 1969, pp. 234, published posthumously
In 1962, the Soviet Union placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, approximately 90 miles from Florida. When Americans discussed Communism in the 1960s, the issue was as much ideological as epistemological: people knew unfamiliar enemies posed mortal threats not only to America's way of life, but to life itself.
"While the Communist Party, USA, was wiring President Kennedy to send troops to Ole Miss on September 30 in a telegram, the Communists in Cuba were installing missiles aimed at the United States." -- from Ole Miss flyer opposing African-American James Meredith's enrollment
Communists were no strangers to propaganda, using America's de jure segregation to promote their allegedly more egalitarian values on gender and race. If America's ideal woman in the sixties was a suburban wife ready with martinis at 6'o'clock, the ideal Communist woman carried a sickle on one shoulder and a Kalashnikov on the other, simultaneously ready to work in the fields and to defend her land against intruders.
At a KKK member's trial in Jackson, MS:
Q: "You still do, and you were then opposed to Communism and you still are?"
A: "That's right."
Given prevailing tensions, claims civil rights workers were associated with Communists were inevitable. At the same time the FBI was searching for missing civil rights workers, it was asking acquaintances of the three missing men about a "publicity hoax." To their credit, not one witness believed any of the men were capable of such a thing: "she considered him [Chaney] to be the type of individual who would not in any way perpetuate a 'hoax' concerning his disappearance." The FBI thoroughly vetted allegations of a Communist hoax. One FBI report confirms USA's Passport Office, "Cuba Validation Section," has "no record of Cuban validation" requests by Cheney, Schwerner, or Goodman.
"After we had returned to his office he went into a long harangue on the segregation-integration of public facilities with Communism." -- seen in Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
Regardless of political party, pointing the finger at outsiders and foreigners during uncertain times is always good strategy, especially if the integrity of the voting process can be questioned. Upon discovering the ringleader of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, once ran for Sheriff, I wasn't surprised. The Klan ran southeastern Mississippi, knew the times were a'changing, and saw murder as just another way to ensure power and payoffs in an area with scant economic opportunity. You might even say the ideal Mississippian shaved regularly, carried a Smith and Wesson gun, loved God and whiskey, and stood perpetually willing to defend the Southern way of life.
"Mississippi was ready to fight Germany... in 1939 when the rest of the nation was still isolationist... We've always been quick on the trigger. If you left it up to Mississippians, we'd still be in Vietnam." -- Buford Posey, high-level confidential informant, unclear if related to KKK member Billy Wayne Posey
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (written in 2021, self-published in July 2022 after numerous submissions to domestic and international journals were rejected)
ISSN 2770-002X
"If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won't." -- William Faulkner, born and raised in Mississippi, The Paris Review (1956), the year following Emmett Till's murder
January 1964: Michael Henry Schwerner aka "Mickey," employed by CORE, arrives in Mississippi. (Other records state Schwerner worked for COFO, Congress of Federated Organizations.)
March 1964: in late March, at a Klavern [Klansman meeting] in Meridian, the county chapter of the Klan votes to kill Michael Schwerner, though "many members stated local vote unnecessary since agreement already reached at state level."
May 22, 1964: James E. Chaney aka J.E., while driving Schwerner in a 1963 Ford station wagon, is involved in a possibly orchestrated car accident in which he admits fault. He is fined for "reckless driving." A lawsuit is filed demanding $9,999 in damages.
"[Witness] gained the impression through this brief conversation with CHANEY that CHANEY had not been associated with CORE prior to this time." (Of the three civil rights workers, only 21 years-old Chaney, born in Meridian, MS, is a local. Except for one summer in Texas, Chaney spent his entire life in Meridian.)
May 24 or May 25, 1964: Schwerner, driving a car with several African-American passengers, is stopped in Morton, MS and cited for "improper passing." Schwerner lacks the cash to pay his fine and is transported to the Morton mayor's residence until his friends can gather enough money to pay the fine. While the report states "it was not the custom of authorities in Morton to put a person in jail for a violation of this type while waiting for their fine or bond to be paid," it is likely Schwerner was deliberately stopped in order to gather information.
June 16, 1964: according to Dora Cole, 25 or 30 white men confront church members at the Mt. Zion Methodist Church and "several of the church members were beaten by them." Members met to discuss "educational meetings [remedial schooling aka "Freedom Schools"] to be held at the church to deal with school drop-outs and getting people qualified to vote." (FBI File 44-2227, July 14, 1964)
June 20, 1964: after weeks of civil rights training in Oxford, OH, Goodman drives to Meridian, MS, arriving at night. In less than 30 hours, he will be murdered.
June 21, 1964: Chaney is arrested by Mississippi Highway Patrol and/or other local law enforcement for speeding and held in Neshoba County Jail. In the car are Schwerner and Goodman, who are "arrested for investigation."
"SCHWERNER said they were arrested by Highway Patrolmen and a Sheriff or Deputy Sheriff. (pp. 164, MIBURN, Part 4 of 9)"
Apparently, all three men are first taken to a state hospital before being transferred into the sheriff's custody and county jail but the record does not allow certainty. It is possible the Highway Patrolman escorted the men to the state hospital in order to protect them.
[Note: subsequent FBI investigations report Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were arrested by Neshoba County Sheriff Price around 3:00pm.]
June 21, 1964: around 10:00pm, after paying a fine, all three men are released and indicate they are heading to Meridian.
June 21, 1964: while on their way to Meridian, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman are arrested again by local law enforcement, put into vehicles, and transported near an unfinished earthen dam "about fifteen or twenty miles away" from Philadelphia, MS. They are taken out of the vehicles one at a time and on a nondescript country road, where Klansman Wayne Roberts asks Schwerner, "shaking his finger in his face," "Do you think you're as good as a n*gg*er?" or "Are you that n*gg*r lover?"
Schwerner, most likely stunned and frightened, does not respond until the third time the question is asked. The third time Schwerner hears the question, he responds, "I know just how you feel, sir." Using a .38 revolver, Klansman Roberts shoots Schwerner once between the ribs at point blank range. Goodman is removed from the car and shot once in a similar fashion, then Klansman Jim Jordan shoots Chaney three times. Later, another Klansman refers to the three murdered civil rights workers as "the anti-Christs."
The Klansmen transport the dead bodies a few miles away. Buried near an unfinished dam, Chaney was lying face down in a ditch; Goodman was lying face down in crumpled position; and Schwerner lay face down in a position similar to Chaney. When their bodies were discovered, the bulldozer used to bury them or deployed to find them had so damaged the men's bodies that people assumed all three were beaten severely before being shot; in fact, none was beaten.
June 29, 1964: in a letter postmarked from McComb, MS on June 29 from Mississippi State Hospital in Whitfield, MS, Andrew Goodman tells his parents, "three men brought me here from Philadelphia, Miss. after burning our station wagon. After being admitted here, Channey [sic], Schwerner and I were separated and locked up in a cell... I haven't been able to get any messages out to you. They were all torn up by the nurse... I am doing as well as can be expected. Please do not worry about me. NAACP is only twelve miles away. Love to all, Andy."
When Goodman's body was discovered, evidence indicated he was buried alive. His left hand was clenched in a fist and contained an object used to attempt to unearth himself: "The left hand of this body was clenched in a tight fist. Opening of this fist disclosed a rock-like object." (MIBURN, Part 5 of 9)
July 8, 1964: Schwerner's parents hire attorney William Moses Kunstler to file a federal complaint charging conspiracy, kidnapping, terrorism, and possible murder.
July 15, 1964: FBI takes a report indicating that June 22, 1964, witnesses saw a "burned station wagon" while fishing on the Bogue Chitto Creek. The witness is mistakenly listed as a "suspect."
Assuming only one 1963 Ford Fairlane station wagon belonged to the three civil rights workers, apparently plans had changed: "No, HERMAN [TUCKER] will take it [station wagon] to Alabama where it will be burned."
July 1964: "[Klansman] James E. Jordan [aka Jim Jordan] disposes of a foreign-made pistol... [possibly a Luger] by melting it down."
August 4, 1964: based on information from a confidential informant, possibly Horace Doyle Barnett, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman are found.
October 1964: the FBI arrests 18 men allegedly connected with the murders but the state of Mississippi refuses to try them, citing a lack of evidence.
1964 to 1967: to gain informants, the FBI infiltrates Lauderdale County's KKK but may not have realized county judges--who have discretion in approving jurors--probably do not attend Klan meetings. It is unclear whether any federal judges were discovered to be part of the Klan.
The FBI proceeds to turn Klan members against each other by promoting the least competent members into leadership positions, then sowing division:
"Klansman GEORGE H. BIRDSONG, aka Billy, was pushed into a leadership role in the Lauderdale County Klavern through the activities of Jackson informants to exploit his nasty disposition and his wild and intemperate manner. He succeed in destroying harmony in klan operations not only internally in Lauderdale County but with the state klan organization and the adjacent Neshoba organization..." (Defection of George H. Birdsong)
1967: seven men are convicted on federal conspiracy charges. None serve more than six years, and none are tried for murder. The ringleader, Edgar Ray Killen aka Preacher Killen, is not convicted and continues working as a Christian pastor.
Klansman oath: I "hereby pledge, swear and dedicate my mind and my body to the holy cause of preserving Christian civilization... Not only will I die in order to preserve Christian civilization but I will live and labor mightily for the Spirit of Christ and all men..."
1989: one year after the movie Mississippi Burning, the Attorney General of Mississippi begins looking into whether sufficient evidence exists to prosecute Edgar Killen. The review is code-named "The Saladin Project."
January 7, 2005: based on new evidence, including a Sam Bowers interview, Edgar Killen is charged with manslaughter. On June 21, he is convicted.
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