Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer

BLACK BODIES IN THE RIVER

RACE, RHETORIC, AND MEDIA SERIES

Davis W. Houck, General Editor

BLACK BODIES IN THE RIVER

SEARCHING FOR FREEDOM SUMMER

Davis W. Houck

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Portions of this work appeared in altered form in a forum section of Rhetoric Review 36, no. 4 (2017).

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Houck, Davis W., author.

Title: Black bodies in the river : searching for Freedom Summer / Davis W. Houck.

Other titles: Race, rhetoric, and media series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2022] | Series: Race, rhetoric, and media series | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061607 (print) | LCCN 2021061608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496840790 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496840783 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496840813 (epub) | ISBN 9781496840806 (epub) | ISBN 9781496840837 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496840820 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mississippi Freedom Project. | African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History. | Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.93.M6 H588 2022 (print) | LCC E185.93.M6 (ebook) | DDC 323.1196/07307620904—dc23/eng/20220112

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061607

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061608

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

TO INGRID HOUCK

August 7, 1943–April 16, 2021

Whose memory remains vibrant, in these pages and elsewhere.

And who is missed terribly.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

BLACK BODIES IN THE RIVER

NOTES

INDEX

PREFACE

This has been a hard project to complete. So hard in fact that I let it go for several years, content just to let it collect dust on my desk and remain unretrieved on my hard drive. I didn’t send it out to colleagues, friends, or family for review. I didn’t send anything in for a conference submission. Always there had been an urgency to get my work published, out in the public eye. But save for a quick colloquium in the pages of Rhetoric Review, I just ignored it, pretended it didn’t really exist. I can’t give you a good explanation why.

And then young Black men started dying (again) at the hands of police officers. Weekly, sometimes daily it seemed, video would surface of yet another Black man losing his life at the end of a police-issued pistol. Or a white knee. The excuse always seemed to be the same: I feared for my life …

In the midst of the latest racial madness a friend called and asked, Hey, are you ever going to do anything with that Black Bodies in the River manuscript? I’d let him, and pretty much only him, read it years earlier. At his instigation I dusted the manuscript off, read it again, and decided that it was worthy of a readership, that the cultural moment seemed right to have it participate in a much larger conversation. And so I set about to revise it, update it, and get feedback.

Three people in particular gave this project a lot of their critical energy. Ira Allen at Northern Arizona University didn’t rest until he’d read every sentence, every endnote, and raised questions accordingly. He did it the old-fashioned way, not with Microsoft. I had the privilege of teaching him back in 2013, but we both know who’s teaching whom these days. Jack Selzer, recently retired from Penn State University’s English department, also did some heavy lifting when it came to editing, reading, asking questions, and making suggestions. Jack is a fellow scholar of the movement in Mississippi and an enthusiastic traveler, and I am grateful for his patient counsel. And Mike Hogan, also recently retired from Penn State University and the Communication Arts program: nobody edits my work with his attention to detail. Nobody asks better questions. And so to Ira, Jack, and Mike, thank you.

I had many other superb readers: Wanda Lynn Fenimore, Ray Fleming, Brian Graves, Dave Tell, Devery Anderson, Amos Kiewe, Mary Ealey, Carol Weigle, Ed King, Fowler Skip Martin, Kyle Jones, and Beauvais McCaddon each added to what’s in these pages. My thanks. As for the many eccentricities that remain, I take full ownership.

The unwieldy story that follows could not have been told well without careful attention to the 1963 Freedom Vote—its aims, how it quickly evolved, its many audiences, and of course its politics; it was a political campaign, after all. Over many years of friendship, the lieutenant governor on that ticket, Rev. Ed King from Jackson, Mississippi, has guided my understanding of that critical five-week campaign in the fall of 1963. Without it, frankly, there is no Summer Project, no Freedom Summer. Rev. King sacrificed a lot to answer Bob Moses’s call to create an interracial ticket, a ticket and a platform that Black Mississippians could rally behind and actually vote for. I am humbled to call him a good friend.

In telling the story of the Freedom Vote, though, I didn’t want to rehash the existing narrative, one told expertly by Joseph Sinsheimer and Bill Lawson. Through the extant archival documents, and newspaper records maintained by Stanford and Yale, we have a pretty good idea of who actually traveled east and south to help organize that frenetic campaign. To my mind, these fifty to sixty undergraduates set the nation on a course that would forever change its racial history. I wanted to find them, if only to say thank you. Holt Ruffin opened up the Stanford part of the story for me, by returning a stranger’s odd Facebook Messenger query. Fowler Skip Martin let me in on his private stash of documents, his remarkable memory, and the inner workings of the Stanford Daily, where he and Ilene Strelitz ran a fairly sophisticated media operation, one that clearly had the president of the university’s attention. Frank Dubofsky, the erstwhile pulling guard on the football team, also shared memories from his few days racing across the country to help organize this quixotic political happening. He admitted that resisting the siren song of Al Lowenstein, his professor the year prior, was simply not in the cards. Dwight Clark, not the Dwight Clark of San Francisco 49ers fame, but dean-level fame at Stanford, also helped me understand the administrative dynamics at the university. The Yale side of the Freedom Vote story remains to be told in greater detail, even as the Yale Daily News is a terrific source of information. Frank Basler shared with me his memory of getting arrested for passing out campaign literature in Indianola, even as the Justice Department quickly arrived at the local jail to interview him. He was headed back to New Haven after only two days in state.

Of the many things the Freedom Vote accomplished, perhaps the one the Council of Federated Organizations did not see coming involved the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The leader of that organization, Sam Bowers, quickly discerned what was next: a much more robust effort to enfranchise Black Mississippians. Different klaverns were directly involved in the 1964 murders of at least five men: Charles Moore and Henry Dee on May 2 and of course Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner on June 21. These murders put into motion the events that occupy these pages. My journey with this history began with a 2006 documentary on Freedom Summer, and it continues quite literally to the present day.

One of my external and anonymous reviewers for this project made one very urgent request, which I honor here. I believe the text would greatly benefit by a comment from the author—perhaps in more than one place—that he acknowledges the potential implications/impacts his work may have on experiences of historical trauma and racial pain. Reviewer A, a self-identified African American, is right: reliving the gruesome details of what happened to so many young Black men (and women, and children) demands an acknowledgement that writing about Black pain, suffering, and death can and does (re)traumatize. In telling the stories of Moore, Dee, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, my aim is to document the extent of the racial hatred that motivated their killings and try to contextualize just what these volunteers and COFO workers confronted on a daily basis. Documenting that sadism and cruelty can indeed be very traumatizing.

Such trauma can spill over into memory, and I spend the second half of this project detailing specific memory events and texts, the ways in which the awful events of 1964 continue to play themselves out in a culture of remembrance—and thus, a culture of forgetting, too. Even as we continue to witness Confederate memorials hoisted out of parks, city streets, campuses, and public squares, new memorials take their place; such is the dynamism inherent to who and what a culture chooses to remember, where and when. On the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for example, three student dormitory lobbies were dedicated in 2021 to the memories of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. No doubt additional memorials bearing the names of different civil rights martyrs will continue to proliferate on American landscapes in the years ahead. And literally on the day I’m sending off this project, the state of Mississippi dedicated a new memory marker to Charles Moore and Henry Dee, at the very spot in Meadville where the Klan abducted them, replacing the makeshift, vernacular marker often vandalized and destroyed.

What remains curious and rather urgent to me as a scholar of the American civil rights movement is when memory and history collide, which they do often in the telling of this story. If historians, journalists, filmmakers, and others adopt rather uncritically a preferred memory of what supposedly happened during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, how does this affect what constitutes history, and with what effects on its many audiences? Does it matter that an eleventh-grader in Mansfield, Ohio, tells his classmates that eight unidentified Black bodies were discovered during the search for the three missing men? Does it matter when a full professor tells that same story to her peers at a conference, or in publication? Does it matter when that same story appears on a museum wall, or in the pages of The Atlantic? And just where did that preferred memory originate? And why? Whose preferences are represented? Who’s forgotten?

What if the memory/history isn’t true? Does someone want it to be true, in spite of the evidence? Who? And, why?

These are some of my questions in this project. As a rhetorical critic, I attempt to answer them by asking this question: What persuasive work gets done with such claims? The repetition of purportedly factual information, and the proliferation, and even exaggeration, of those claims, tells me something important might be going on. My job is to figure out what it might be. In the present case, yes, I’m most interested in the number of supposedly unidentified Black bodies discovered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, but I’m just as interested in understanding the rhetorical work performed by repeating that shocking claim.

As of this writing, in July 2021, claims of unidentified Black bodies discovered during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner continue to proliferate.

Speaking of memory and history, just a note about the dedication page. Before she was Ingrid Houck, she was Ingrid Holzinger, and then Ingrid Hatten, who came of age in postwar Wiesbaden, Germany, where any talk of Hitler and the Third Reich was forbidden. She eventually moved to the United States and flew the flag of her new country in the front yard of every home where she lived. We traveled the country together, piecing civil rights stories together from different archives. She was a ready researcher: patient, eager, and perhaps a bit opportunistic, too. At the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2010, we worked on microfilm machines a few stations apart. I was delighted to hear her machine printing repeatedly, as clearly she was finding all kinds of great newspaper material for this particular project. Later, as I gathered all of her printed pages, I glanced at her trove of documents. I couldn’t believe it: they were all recipes she wanted for her own kitchen archive! I miss her. We miss her.

BLACK BODIES IN THE RIVER

Some there are who have left behind them a name to be commemorated in story. Others are unremembered, they have perished as though they had never existed, as though they had never been born.

—ECCLESIASTICUS 44:8–9

They’ll find some new bodies on the weekend. That’s when everybody goes fishing, so some new bodies will turn up.

—JULIAN BOND, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE, JULY 30, 1964

The river is just right.

—ANONYMOUS JAILER, COLUMBUS, MISSISSIPPI

Even as newspaper editors around the state raged about the communist invaders, the beatnik hippies, and always, it seemed, the sex-obsessed sophomores, Mr. and Mrs. James Bowles did what many Mississippians, white and Black, liked to do on the humid, sultry summer weekends: they went fishing. Formed when the Mississippi River cut a new path, the Old River is a sluggish backwater that curves west around the ghostly and long-abandoned Davis Plantation, Brierfield, a twenty-five-thousand-acre cotton expanse, south and west of Vicksburg, once owned and operated by the president of the Confederacy and his brother.¹

From their small skiff, and nearing noon, Mrs. Bowles noticed what appeared to be a floating log.² As they moved closer, the floating object revealed its secret: splayed across the log was a pair of jeans, the legs of which were bound together by hay wire. Startled by their discovery, the Bowleses knew better than to try and retrieve the ghostly jeans missing a head and torso. Quickly did they return to shore and find a pay phone; they called Clayton Cox at the Tallulah (Louisiana) Police Department and reported what they’d seen near the Palmyra Chute off the Old River. Officer Cox quickly notified fish and game officials in both Louisiana and Mississippi; Joseph Sullivan and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also called about the grisly Sunday discovery. A huge press contingent, headquartered mostly in Meridian, Mississippi, more than 150 miles away, packed its cameras and film and sprinted west toward the Old River; this might be the break they’d been waiting twenty-one days for. Nineteen-year-old John Rogan also got a call at a funeral home in Tallulah, Louisiana; he quickly grabbed a pair of gloves and a body bag and headed for Parker’s Landing. With two other men piloting the small skiff into the swollen chute, Rogan attempted to put the remains snagged on the log into the body bag. A foot fell off as he tried to gently dislodge the brittle cadaver.

By Monday morning, July 13, newspapers in nearby Natchez reported what many locals were only whispering: the body of missing civil rights worker Michael Mickey Schwerner might have finally been discovered. Why Schwerner? The twenty-four-year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organizer and Cornell graduate always wore jeans and sneakers; the corpse appeared to be white; and perhaps most revealing of all, the jeans were fastened by a leather belt with a letter M belt buckle. Surely the other two missing workers, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were nearby, somewhere in the murky waters of the Old River.³

More law enforcement and FBI officials quickly and expertly moved in with grappling hooks and seines. Additional local, regional, and national press also quickly assembled. A second headless body, also bound at the hands and feet with hay wire, was discovered on Monday. Navy frogmen from Charleston, South Carolina, were ordered in to determine if, in fact, the Old River was a Klan boneyard. The grotesque discoveries even had the ear of President Lyndon Johnson, who was informed on July 13 by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that bodies had been recovered.⁴

But whoever drowned the two bodies had made one critical error: In their haste to dispose of the bodies, in their attempts to forever sink the evidence of their crimes and the identities of their victims, they hadn’t searched both bodies’ pockets for identifying clues. On the first body was a jeans pocket and a wallet, a selective service card, and a key bearing the inscription VD1–47. The second body pulled from the Old River also contained a selective service card in a back pocket.

In this wholly accidental manner did officials identify the two headless and badly decomposed corpses as Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Both Black. Both only nineteen years old. Neither involved with civil rights. Both were locals who’d gone missing on May 2 from their homes in Franklin County, in the Ku Klux Klan hotbed of southwestern Mississippi. And both, according to the white Mississippi press, were good negroes. In other words, Moore and Dee were quiet, humble, and hardworking.⁵ They were certainly not part of the invading communists out to change Mississippi’s way of life. They were emphatically not Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney. As such, they were not part of the Summer Project.

Not yet.

•••

Of course we know that the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James E. Chaney (JE) were eventually found. Buried under several tons of fill dirt on the Old Jolly Farm located just six miles south and west of Philadelphia, Mississippi, their story has largely become the story of the summer of 1964, what we today know as Freedom Summer. And perhaps more than any other discrete episode in the civil rights movement, the events of June, July, and August in Mississippi dominate civil rights history and civil rights memory. Julian Bond, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) communication director, famously truncated contemporary popular civil rights history thus: "Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white kids came down and saved the