Mississippi Cool

(This piece ran in the Richmond (Va.) Style Weekly as the "Back Page" editorial July 13, 2005.)

MISSISSIPPI COOL

In August of 1964, just before I turned eighteen years old, three bodies were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, after their disappearance the previous June. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two guys from New York, were down south “agitating” by registering blacks to vote in Neshoba County. They, along with a local man, James Chaney, were apparently murdered by some members of the Ku Klux Klan who did not take kindly to the notion of blacks exercising the civil right to vote, nor those “stirring things up.”

No one was ever prosecuted under Mississippi law for their killings until last week. A federal jury had deadlocked in 1967 in the case against Edgar Ray Killen, “a former Ku Klux Klansman … part-time preacher and sawmill operator” (according to recent AP reports) but finally the 80-year-old Killen, in a wheelchair and with an oxygen tube up his nose, was convicted in state court of lesser charges of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years on each charge, consecutive, which amounts to a life sentence.

Killen’s misfortune was to have outlived most of the other suspects. Many folks celebrated Killen’s convictions last week, but they were based, not upon live testimony but mostly upon read statements of decedents that were admittedly not subject to cross-examination by his lawyers. One has to be concerned about the due-process implications of those convictions, but such concerns will be muted in the clamor of celebration. The horrific case is given credit for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

At the time of their deaths, I was one of those callow white southerners who wondered what the fuss was all about. Most FBI agents and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, were also openly indifferent to the plight of civil rights workers in the South. One wonders if he, too, did not feel they got what they were “asking for.” The movie, “Mississippi Burning” purports to credit FBI agents for diligent investigation and prosecution of early civil rights offenses, but it is a lie. Like myself at the time, the FBI and Hoover didn’t give a damn.

A lot of southern politicians have rankled under the South-focused enforcements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and have railed against them over the years. Even recently, the Mississippi Senators Thad Cochran and former Majority Leader Trent Lott refused to support an anti-lynching resolution that passed the US Senate. (Hang ‘em high—still.) However, those relatively modest legal changes were really good for the South and all of us inhabitants. We white folks in the South owe a lot of our current freedoms to the memories of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and many others who died for our civil liberties (but not our sins).

During the 2004 presidential campaign, for some reason I was reminded of something that I had forgotten: the underlying basis for my strong dislike of Ronald Reagan, which I have felt all these years since he started his first campaign for President in the summer of 1980. I have found myself in a persistent lonely position. My first memories of Ronald Reagan were pleasant ones from his hosting of the “GE Theater” and of “Death Valley Days” on TV. I could easily have become a Reagan supporter like so many others drawn to his cheery, avuncular personality. After the dour, unfortunate presidency of Jimmy Carter, many voters were ready to kick him out of the White House and install the ever-optimistic Reagan. The fact that he is now dead further protects his popular legacy.

Some Republicans have been very adept at exploiting the underlying residual fears and resentments of many white Southerners regarding the true emancipation of blacks. The repugnant inactions of Senators Cochran and Lott are but one example. Democrats have piously resisted, for the most part, such exploitation, but many blacks feel “tokenized” by the Democratic Party to this day. Ronald Reagan was one of those politicians who did not worry himself much about residual memories and images. He soundly defeated Southerner Jimmy Carter in the South in 1980.

The thing that sealed my hostility toward Reagan was his early trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi in the summer of 1980 to basically raise Hell about the popular legal fiction of “states’ rights,” a red-meat issue for white Southerners. Reagan (and his handlers) had to know what the specific history of Philadelphia was, and I believe that is specifically why they went there, to assure white voters with a wink and a nod (Reagan’s famous signals) that he “understood.” What business would a former California governor otherwise have in a backwater like Philadelphia, Mississippi, except to say, “I’m one of you”?

Somehow I was reminded of all this 24 years later. I remembered that a US presidential candidate was openly sly and indifferent to the murderous horror of what he was seemingly endorsing. Mean, unambiguous messages were being sent, but the animosity toward Jimmy Carter was so intense, no one I knew cared. But I never really forgot how I felt about Reagan, to the point of nausea.

Edgar Ray Killen will enter the penitentiary, probably never to come out, except in a body-bag. We should remember that Ronald Reagan proved in the summer of 1980 that “politics ain’t bean-bag,” as his political nemesis Tip O’Neill supposedly said. Ronald Reagan proved that winning is everything, and that being president means never having to say you’re sorry.


POSTSCRIPT, 2007: I recall that W. C. Fields's tombstone epitaph supposedly reads:
"All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." I think he was not referring to Mississippi.