Revisiting Mississippi – 60 Years After the Klan Murder of the Civil Rights Workers, David Welsh, Workers World, 5/25/24
In late spring 2024, Dave Welsh and I went back to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Three civil rights workers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, had been murdered there during the Freedom Summer of 1964. David had worked that summer as a freelance reporter in Mississippi. He had been attacked by a mob in Philadelphia as he tried to investigate two murder suspects. Now, in April 2024, Philadelphia, Mississippi, was commemorating the 60th anniversary of that historic period. How much had things changed?
David rarely spoke about that summer. I remembered the evening news in 1964, the television photos of a rusted-out car in a swamp. That photo signaled that those three volunteers were almost certainly dead. Driving into Mississippi from Memphis now, we wondered if white supremacy organizations like the Ku Klux Klan still flourished. Had former President Trump’s advocacy of white supremacy re-emboldened such groups? The Supreme Court had recently rolled back the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. How had that affected the Black vote in Mississippi?
As David and I now drove down Highway 58 toward Jackson, translucent green trees lined the highway. We crossed over the surging Tallahatchie River, site of the wrenching discovery of Emmett Till’s body in 1954. At 1 PM, we turned off in Grenada heading toward Kosciusko. Inside a local convenience store, a stout man in a khaki uniform, wearing a star-shaped sheriff badge, stood in line to buy fried catfish. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price of Philadelphia had been two Klan members David had investigated in ’64. In 1967, they were on trial for the civil rights murders. Iconic photos showed them at the trial, eating chips, looking smug and defiant. Did this sheriff share their racist views? We bought hushpuppies and cornbread, ate them, and quickly re-entered our rented car. We continued on the back roads to Philadelphia, Mississippi (population 4,702).
As we drove on two-lane roads with occasional bridges over swamps and rivers, tall trees cast large patches of shade. Traveling these roads at night would be daunting. These were the roads on which Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been stopped and killed by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and a group of Klansmen.
On Sunday, June 21, 1964, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had disappeared after showing up at the Mount Zion Church in Longdale, a small Black farming community a few miles north of Philadelphia, Miss. They left Longdale at 4 PM, were picked up by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and a local policeman, and taken to the Philadelphia jail. They were released at 10 PM. Two days later, their burnt-out car was discovered in the nearby Bogree Chitto Swamp. White men in Neshoba County jeered that their disappearance was a hoax. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson stated, “There’s no reason to believe these people were killed.” Choctaw Indians had marched on Highway 16 that Sunday night, June 21st. They said they had seen the civil rights workers but refused to say more.
David now told me about his memories of that summer. In 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing four young African American girls. Martin Luther King, outraged, began the Montgomery bus boycotts. David was working at the Detroit News as a cub reporter. King visited Detroit to lead a march. David’s editor told him he had been observed at the march and emphasized that even on off days, reporters must appear neutral. David didn’t think so. David then attended a demonstration by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization of Black and white activists challenging segregation. SNCC activists from Albany, Georgia, came to the protest. Similar events spread across the country. A short time later, Woolworths and Walgreens integrated their eating facilities. David told me, “Suddenly the power of the people was made visible.” He wrote up the story for the Detroit News. His editor turned it down. “That is Georgia. We are Detroit.”
By May of 1964, David had learned about the upcoming Freedom Summer. Bob Moses and other civil rights activists hoped to recruit 1,000 mostly white students to come to Mississippi to help with voter registration. David asked his editor to let him cover the story. The man replied they would choose a more senior reporter—if they covered the topic at all. David felt his editor was refusing to cover a historical movement. David quit the Detroit News. He would cover the Mississippi summer as a freelance reporter.
He went first to Oxford, Ohio, for training. Bob Moses, who headed up the Mississippi summer project, had witnessed Blacks in Mississippi being beaten and killed. Moses believed the country would only pay attention when this happened to white students. He warned the volunteers: “I don’t want to put you at risk, but I need to put you at risk.”
David interviewed Mickey Schwerner. Mickey was a Jewish volunteer from New York City. He’d been working for six months in Meridian, Mississippi, with a Black student, James Chaney. Chaney had grown up there. Chaney’s great-grandfather had been killed for not handing his land over to white people. He had a history of community activism starting in his teens.
David had then, in June of 1964, headed to Mississippi in his 1958 grey Valiant. Those first nights he lodged with Black farmers. Ku Klux Klan night riders had already tried to burn and bomb their homes and barns. They had formed armed patrols. As a freelance reporter, David could cover what he deemed newsworthy. He called in his reports via pay phone.
That was how David had ended up in Mississippi in 1964. Now, in April 2024, we had reached the small town of Philadelphia, Miss. As we drove down the main street, David recalled that Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had disappeared on June 21st. Their bodies hadn’t yet been discovered. During the week of July 14th, 1964, he’d driven to Philadelphia from Jackson with two other volunteers, Ruth Schein and Daniel Pearlman. David was working on an article, “Neshoba, a Return to Normalcy.” He visited the Philadelphia library with Ruth to find information on Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price. They were Klan members, seemingly under suspicion by the FBI.
David left Ruth at the library. We sat in front of it now as he told me what had happened as he left the library with Daniel in 1964:
“Daniel and I rounded a corner and suddenly everything became quiet.” Two men followed David and Daniel as they walked down Main Street. Two others approached, and a fifth man moved in from the side. One asked David, “May I know what your business is in this town?”
“I am a reporter,” David answered. The man punched David in the eye. Another man hit Daniel and David on the head with a tire chain. David saw blood on Daniel’s head as Daniel ran down the street to the sheriff’s office. The group of men continued to punch and kick David. He had blood streaming down his face. His jaw was aching from the blows of the chain. Daniel rushed back, followed by an unhurried Deputy Cecil Price. Price strolled over to the small crowd that had gathered around David. Their attackers at that point melted back into the crowd. Price asked David and Daniel to identify their attackers. Daniel and David refused. They’d been warned. If they identified perpetrators, they too could end up jailed and disappeared. They were relieved when Price allowed them to leave the increasingly hostile crowd.
David had returned to the library to pick up Ruth. He urged her to hurry. She had been terrified by the sight of blood on his face. They could hear the crowd outside the library. She put on white gloves, despite the heat, in the hopes that this “southern lady” look might mollify the angry people outside, who had, she said, already drawn blood. They walked back to the car in silence, fearful that the slightest wrong move would trigger more violence. One man called out a warning to be out of there by dusk. They got in the car, started it up, and headed back to Jackson. Treated later at a hospital there, David learned he had two cracked ribs, an injured jaw, and several contusions.
On August 4th, 1964, the FBI discovered the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman buried under a newly made dam on a nearby farm. David remained in Mississippi until most volunteers left in mid-August. He wrote an article, “The Valley of Fear,” for Ramparts magazine, about the nine other Black bodies discovered in the FBI search for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. In 1967, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who had strolled down the main street to observe David’s beating at the hands of his fellow Klansmen, was convicted of the murders along with six other local Klansmen. Sheriff Rainey was acquitted. Cecil Price served four of the six years before returning to Philadelphia to live.
In April of 2024, after we revisited David’s memories of that attack, we drove to meet Leroy Clemons, a Philadelphia local historian and youth church leader. Leroy is a well-built Black man in his early sixties, wearing a red shirt and a baseball cap. He took us to the Neshoba Youth Center of the Jerusalem Temple Pentecostal Church. Sitting at a table across from us, he described coaching the local sports teams, now integrated, and working for the Neshoba Youth Council. He had served on the local NAACP, been a city councilman at large. He is currently Chief
Financial Officer of the Jerusalem Temple and a consultant for racial coalition trainings. He plans to run for mayor of Philadelphia in 2025. He talked first about truth and reconciliation.
Leroy had been two years old during Mississippi Summer, too young to remember the disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. However, he had grown up hearing numerous stories of dead and disappeared Black men. “People acted like it was no big thing,” he said. “For example, adults told us kids that a wild man was running loose. Later they told us the wild man had been taken care of.” The “wild man,” Leroy explained, turned out to be a young Black man, “probably bipolar,” a neighbor’s nephew. His aunt called Sheriff Rainey to drive the young man to a nearby institution where he’d often been treated. Sheriff Rainey picked up the young man, took him to a private spot, and shot him dead. Florence Mars, a white woman who resided in Philadelphia, wrote in “Witness to Philadelphia” that Rainey had run for mayor in 1962 under the slogan, “You know me. I’ll do what needs to be done.” She added: “townspeople were also familiar with his deputy, Cecil Price. Unlike earlier sheriffs, often low-key farmers, Rainey and Price sported new cowboy-type uniforms, with nightsticks, blackjacks and revolvers hanging from their belts. They were known as being ‘hard on blacks.’”
Leroy had gone to school with Price’s son. He had played in their house, liked Price’s family. “I never knew Price to swear, to talk like a racist. He wasn’t mean,” Leroy recalled.
Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter based in Mississippi, wrote in “Race Against Time” that in 1998 Price had falsified tests for commercial drivers’ licenses. He was caught and faced ten years in prison. He then began cooperating with the prosecution in the original 1967 case. Price was also working for Olen Burrage, who owned the farm that contained the dam under which the civil rights workers’ bodies were buried. Burrage had been acquitted in the 1967 trial. In 2001, Price had been on top of a cherry-picker on Burrage’s farm. He fell, hit his head, and died a few days later. His death weakened the case the prosecution planned to use to charge Edward Killen, the Klan leader who’d ordered the murders. This death was a calamity for the people trying to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan.
Nevertheless, Edward Killen was convicted in 2004 of ordering the murders. Leroy believed that his conviction was an important step in limiting Klan influence. Though seven Klansmen were convicted in 1967, no one did more than ten years for those crimes. The conviction of Edward Killen was a turning point. Killen was convicted of “manslaughter” and given 30 years, ensuring he would die in prison, which he did.
Leroy said the murders of the civil rights workers were never discussed as he was growing up, “not in our homes, and not in the schools. You were either with the Klan or against them. White people were also terrified. Whites thought Black people blamed them for the murders. But Black people understood the pervasive fear.”
In 2004, a group called the Philadelphia Coalition began to meet weekly in each other’s homes. It included white, Black, and Native American citizens. Leroy described a white woman at one of the first meetings who kept getting up to look out the window: “I know they’re there; I know they’re watching us,” she kept repeating.
As people shared their memories in the Coalition, they learned more about the deaths of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. Some stories involved collaborators. As the three activists had driven Highway 16 toward Longdale, a Black man, headed on an outing with his family, had seen them. The man went straight to the sheriff’s office to report his sighting. This set a deadly plan in motion. The Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had already issued an “elimination order” for the deaths of Chaney and Schwerner, with a caveat—the murder must occur outside Lauderdale County where Schwerner and Chaney resided. Klan members had burned the Mount Zion Church and beat several members days earlier. They did this to lure the young men out of Lauderdale County, knowing the boys would investigate the incident.
Why would a Black man run to tell Sheriff Rainey about the whereabouts of the civil rights workers? The man later told the Philadelphia Coalition, “You don’t understand. Me and Rainey were like brothers.” Leroy explained, “There was always a chance that if a Black did a white person a favor, it would give them a step up in the white community.”
Klan members had accosted Mount Zion Church members a few hours before they burned the church, just days before the murders. They had singled out an older man, Bud Cole, beating him so badly he almost died. Bud Cole’s daughter explained why at a candlelight commemoration years later. Another Black man was provided “all the drink he ever wanted” by members of the Klan if he reported on the activities at Mount Zion Church. This man told the Klan that Bud Cole was the local civil rights instigator. He gave the Klan members this false information to ensure his supply of alcohol. He had asked Bud Cole’s forgiveness years later.
Leroy revealed details about the night of June 21, 1964. Chaney was beaten with a chain so badly that every bone in his body was broken. An autopsy ordered by the family confirmed this. Schwerner and Goodman had been forced to watch. Schwerner, who had worked closely with Chaney for months, broke away and ran to Chaney. A Klansman asked, “You love this nigger that much?” He then shot Schwerner under the arm, straight through the heart. Goodman tried to run and was shot in the chest. Chaney was castrated, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, a Klan warning to Black men to stay away from white women. Leroy told us this was done to almost every Black man killed in those days. Leroy also told us that Goodman’s body had dirt under his nails—an indication that he had still been alive when buried under the dam. These details show the explosive rage, psychological and physical torture, that mark hate crimes.
In 1966, after James Meredith’s March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Martin Luther King returned to Philadelphia, Miss., to commemorate the three civil rights workers. While there, he stated that he sensed the presence of the murderers. Deputy Cecil Price, standing behind King, responded: Yes, the killers are here.
Leroy now reassured us that “Philadelphia is now one of the safest counties in Mississippi,” largely due to the work of the Philadelphia Coalition. He gave some examples. In 1964, the Meridian and Philadelphia police force was composed totally of Klan members. Leroy said that now six out of every ten policemen in the county are Black. In 2009, Philadelphia elected a Black mayor, who is still in office. Leroy plans to run in 2025. Philadelphia is now a majority Black town and votes Democratic. Per Leroy, some Klan members remain but are dying off.
Leroy felt that the struggles and progress made by the civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965 carried contradictions. Black businesses suffered once white businesses integrated. Leroy received a good education in an integrated school. He also saw how the Black schools, churches, and the community as a whole were weakened. Black churches had been a bastion of the civil rights movement. Now, having to protect their nonprofit status, Black churches were wary of taking controversial political stands.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan began his candidacy at the Neshoba County Fair in a nod and wink to white supremacy. Southern states then shifted Republican. In 2016, Donald Trump’s son spoke as a surrogate for his father at that same Neshoba County fair.
A Black historian and professor, Derrion Herrington, speaking recently about the large number of Mississippi Black voters since 1964, added, “I notice that whoever Black people vote for in Mississippi never get elected.”
In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi no longer needs to get federal pre-clearance for its congressional maps. In 2024, in Alexander versus the State Conference of the South Carolina NAACP, yet another ruling made it almost impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. According to the current Supreme Court, if a state claims its process isn’t racial gerrymandering, it isn’t. Thus Black votes are again being nullified in Mississippi and other southern states.
In 2024, families discovered a jail in Jackson, Mississippi, held the bodies of over 200 dead and disappeared Black men. No one had notified the relatives. In 2024 in Jackson, a jury convicted a white policeman of shooting a Black man in the mouth after raiding a Jackson Airbnb owned by a white woman who rented to Black men. Leroy admitted, “We still have problems in Jackson.” These current incidents sound similar to the numerous dead and disappeared Black men who were the subject of David’s 1964 article, “Valley of Fear.”
Who were these people who hated Blacks and activist whites so much they would kill and torture them? Who, for that matter, was Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price? Leroy had seen in Price a kindly family man. At a commemoration of the murders decades later, Andrew Goodman’s mother told Leroy that Cecil Price had come to her in New York, dropped to his knees, and asked forgiveness for her son’s death. Leroy believes that Price had a “change of heart.”
When the bodies of the three young men were found, the FBI arranged it so that Price had to wheel their bodies into the morgue. The FBI hoped he might incriminate himself. His face was impassive. Yet twenty odd years later, Price asked Goodman’s mother for forgiveness. Is it possible that this rage, which can lead to murder and torture, under other conditions, such as the truth and reconciliation that Leroy described, can also be transformed?
In a small town near Oxford, Mississippi, along Highway 55, David and I stopped at a local Waffle House. A Black woman with a chipped tooth told us she had driven a forklift in nearby Carthage. She got good pay, she said, but was forced to leave when her car was totaled. She now managed the Waffle House. During our conversation, I told her David’s history. “It’s a miracle you’re alive,” she said to him. She told the other Black workers about David. One by one, they came from behind the counter to thank him.
In the summer of freedom in old Mississippi
Andrew, Mickey, and James
Down an old country road, at the old church of Zion
All they found were embers and flames,
Taken on the highway, surrounded by the mob
You could smell magnolia and the kudzu vine,
Killed by the Klan in the swamps of Neshoba
Their memory remains in my mind.**
“Undying Love” song from the CD, *Stand with the People*, copyright David Welsh 2015
Sources:
Black Landscapes Matter, edited by Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada, page 104, Part Three, “Notes from the Field,” chapter, “Site of the Unseen: The Racial Gaming of America” by Austin Allen. Copyright 2020, University of Virginia Press. Dr. Austin Allen talked to David and me about his drives through Mississippi on his way to and from Atlanta to New Orleans, and his experiences when looking for Chaney’s grave around Meridian in February 2024.
Southern Journey, by Tom Dent, copyright 1997, chapter, “Mississippi.” Tom Dent also visited Philadelphia, retraced the route that Chaney took when he was murdered, and was told in 1991 (27 years later) that it was not safe to drive there at night. The couple he visited, who took care of the commemoration site at Mt. Zion, were worried about their son when Tom Dent visited. Their son had had an encounter with the police that landed him, unfairly, in prison. Chaney’s gravesite in Meridian had a bullet hole that had shattered the head of the photograph of Chaney so that the picture was chipped.
The Summer That Didn’t End, by Len Holt, De Capo Press, New York, New York, copyright 1965 (pages 268 includes testimonies by David Welsh and Daniel Pearlman, page 45 discusses contributions of Ruth Schein).
Letters from Mississippi, Elizabeth Martinez, Zephyr Press, Brookline, MA, copyright 2007
Witness to Philadelphia, Florence Mars
Race Against Time, Jerry Mitchell, Simon and Schuster, New York, New York, copyright 2020. Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter based in Mississippi, reports on four formerly unsolved cases from the Civil Rights era. He played a role in the resurrection of the trials against the Klansmen involved in the murders of Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, and the four young women killed in the Birmingham bombings.
Conversations with Leroy Emmons, April 24, 2024, in Philadelphia, Mississippi
Conversations with David Welsh, 2015-2024. Conversation with his two children, May Ying Welsh and Elias Welsh, regarding memories told to them by David Welsh. May Ying Welsh visited Ruth Schein with David around 1995 and recalls her account of the event in Philadelphia (Ruth Schein now deceased).
Conversation with Phil Hutchings, former head of SNCC, May 2024
Documentary, “Freedom on My Mind” by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford, funded by Clarity and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Documentary, “Mississippi Sovereign Commission” detailed the surveillance placed on the volunteers and the reporters even before they arrived in Mississippi, the level of infiltration of the civil rights organizations, often by Black members, the degree to which the activities of the KKK were known by politicians, lawyers, and businessmen both in Mississippi and in the US government.
Mississippi Eyewitness – The Three Civil Rights Workers and How They Were Murdered – The Exclusive Story by Ramparts Magazine, special edition, summer 1964. David Welsh has an article in that edition, called “The Valley of Fear.”
CD by David Welsh, “Stand with the People,” song “Undying Love” the first verse of which is quoted at the end of this article, about Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
