BY BARRY SHEPPARD  
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three young civil rights workers missing in Mississippi, must now be presumed dead—lynched by police and white supremacists. While the search for their bodies continues, the racist reign of terror in that state mounts.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], spearhead of the fight for justice there, charges that “Mississippi law enforcement officials and private citizens are engaged in a conspiracy to harass and intimidate local Negroes and civil-rights workers through cross-burnings, beatings, shootings and illegal arrests.”

Despite these well-known facts, President Johnson stubbornly refuses to intervene to protect the lives of Negroes and civil-rights workers in Mississippi. Though his oath of office obliges him to protect their constitutional rights, he is defaulting in this duty lest he offend the powerful Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Thus he has turned a deaf ear to pleas to send federal troops or marshals to Mississippi and to deputize and arm Negroes there.

Instead of sending troops, Johnson has utilized a number of publicity gimmicks to give the impression that he is “doing something.” None of these gimmicks extends federal protection to Mississippi Negroes or civil-rights workers or cuts into the power of the state’s Negro-hating officials and racist organizations.

Johnson’s first gimmick was to send spymaster Allen Dulles, former CIA head, to Mississippi. When the headlines subsided, it turned out that Dulles’ mission was only a fact-finding junket consisting mainly of having a conversation with the Governor.

James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, along with other Mississippi Negroes, managed to see Dulles. Forman told him the federal government must honor “repeated requests made by local and national civil-rights leaders for a federal protective force in Mississippi.” But Johnson ignored this plea and many others.

Johnson’s second gimmick was to order a few hundred U.S. sailors (they were first announced as Marines) to the area where the civil-rights workers had disappeared. But the sailors were first disarmed by Johnson’s order and their mission was not protection but merely to help search for the bodies.

SNCC has chronicled some of the harassment Mississippi civil-rights workers have been subjected to in the week following the disappearance of the three young men:

On June 21, the day of the disappearance, police in Rulevile stopped a carload of summer volunteers for “questioning”; ordered other volunteers off the street in Clarksdale; jailed a civil-rights worker James Brown on a trumped-up charge of “reckless driving” in Mayben. SNCC worker Andrew Barnes in Natchez barely escaped ten men who broke into his car and stole literature and personal items.

On June 23 three homes were bombed in McComb. Two reporters were chased from Ruleville to Greenwood at speeds up to 90 miles per hour. In Jackson a Negro man was shot twice in the head while following two white men who had fired into a Negro cafe.

Whites in cars circled the Negro community in Ruleville June 24, throwing bottles at cars and homes. Armed whites met voter registration workers in Drew. SNCC worker Morton Thomas was ordered from Hollandale by the mayor and police chief who said he could not do voter-registration work without a permit. In Canton a car used by voter-registration workers was shot into, and CORE worker Scott Smith barely missed being hit by a shotgun blast.

Five more bomb threats occurred in McComb the same day; 40 M-l rifles were stolen from a National Guard armory in Collins.

A white man set fire to a hall used for registration meetings in Moss Point, and two white SNCC volunteers were held overnight without charges. In Jackson a Negro minister’s home was shot into, and in Clarksdale Police Chief Collins threatened to beat volunteer Fred Winyard….

Eight voter-registration workers were jailed in Columbus on June 26, and CORE worker Ed Hollander was beaten in a Jackson jail. In Ruleville on June 27 a pro civil-rights white minister was prevented from attending a white church by the mayor. Night-riders fired into a volunteers’ car on June 28 in Hattiesburg; the following day Pete Stoner, white SNCC field secretary, was arrested on two traffic charges in the same city.

Police and other law-enforcement officials are hand in glove with white-supremacist organizations like the Klan and the Association for the Preservation of the White Race, noted for its strength in Philadelphia, Miss. All indications are that the local official who arrested James E. Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, on June 21 either arranged for them to be killed in the jail or handed them over to a lynch gang.

The state and local police in Mississippi are not going to protect the lives of Negroes and civil-rights workers. Johnson knows this. If he continues to refuse to arm and deputize Mississippi Negroes and use federal troops to enforce the Constitution, then the blood of future victims of the white-supremacists will be on his hands.

Johnson’s refusal to act is emboldening the racists and convincing them that they can get away with murder. In the face of the mounting terror and the federal government’s failure to provide minimum protection, Negroes in Mississippi have the right and duty to arm and organize themselves for self-defense.
 
 
Related articles:
40 years later: Mississippi Klansman charged for civil rights workers’ murder
Is it justice, 40 years later?
SWP in 1964: ‘Federal troops to Mississippi!’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home