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Had the FBI not conducted a separate investigation into the Ku Klux Klan, the case might never have been solved. Toward the middle of the summer a Klan informant revealed that the missing civil rights workers had been in the custody of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department before they were killed and buried in an earthen dam. The entire Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department were members of the Klan! When the bodies were uncovered, the one black worker had every bone in his body broken!
The informant and the wife of one of the deputies were willing to testify in court, but the district attorney refused to file charges. The governor of Mississippi refused to intervene and file state charges. At the time murder was not a federal crime. Had the perpetrators not been peace officers, they could have been charged with the federal crime of kidnapping. But an arrest, even a false arrest and murder, does not constitute kidnapping.
The sheriff and five of his deputies were finally tried in federal court on a nineteenth-century Reconstruction law against depriving a person of his civil rights. The five deputies were convicted and received sentences of four to ten years, with time off for good behavior. Sheriff Rainey got off with a not guilty verdict.
Sheriff Rainey made the most of his notoriety and ran for governor of Mississippi. He garnered forty-five percent of the vote!
With liberty and justice for all. Yeah, right.
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table some of these days, hallelujah
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
Gonna sit at the welcome table some of these days
The summer ended too soon and not soon enough. Too soon to see any real accomplishments — that would take years — and not soon enough to escape from the effects of the pervasive fear and violence. I was struggling with my own private demons, unwanted feelings of anger, hatred, and depression. Even today I feel queasy whenever I hear a Southern accent.
There was widespread concern that once we left and the rest of the world was no longer looking, the blacks we were leaving behind would be facing even more violence. The volunteers were invited to stay if they could, but I had a master’s degree in poultry management waiting to be completed a world away in Michigan. I finished my degree in January of ’65 and returned to Mississippi while I was applying to the Peace Corps and several other organizations.
This time I was sent to the tiny community of Mayersville. Even though it was the county seat ofIssaquenaCounty, there was little more than a courthouse, gas station, grocery store, and a few houses, segregated as always into a black side of town and a white side.
The summer before I had spent Sundays at a variety of black churches, but this time the only church in town was the white Mayersville Baptist Church with perhaps fifty members. I have been a Baptist all my life, so I worked up my courage and went to worship there. No one said a word, even in greeting, as I sat quietly in the back. When I returned the next Sunday I was met at the door by three of their biggest men who told me the church had met and voted not to allow me in their doors. I took this as an opportunity to reason with their pastor, but he just gave me a lecture about the immorality of blacks, and by inference my own immorality. I wrote a letter to Dr. John Lavender, the pastor of my own church, Bakersfield First Baptist Church, asking him to write and verify that I was a member in good standing. He did so, but that didn’t get me anywhere. I wasn’t really surprised.
A joke was going around about a black child sitting on the steps of a big white church crying, “God, why won’t they let me in here?” A voice comes out of the sky, “Don’t fret, son. They won’t let me in there either!”
If you miss me at the back of the bus
You can’t find me nowhere
Come on over to the front of the bus
I’ll be riding up there
I’ll be riding up there, I’ll be riding up there,
Come on over to the front of the bus
I’ll be riding up there
The South was changing, slowly but surely. By 1965 Greyhound bus stations were integrated even in Mississippi, but little else was. At the beginning of the 1964 Freedom Summer we were warned that Mississippi was too dangerous to try some of the integration tactics used elsewhere. We were told specifically not to try any sit-ins.
When I returned in ’65 some of the more militant blacks were chafing at the restrictions and decided to set off on their own. I was invited to join them in their sit-in in Greenwood. We marched into the Woolworth’s and sat down on the stools at the lunch counter. We were immediately told that the store was closed and were asked to leave. They added they were calling the police. We weren’t foolish enough to wait around for the police to get there and quietly left. The door was locked behind us. This was better than sitting all day. We closed them down with hardly any effort.
About Robert C. Hargreaves
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