Historic moment  reminder of civil rights work

Published 12:00 am Sunday, January 18, 2009

Small towns are often known by the celebrities, athletes and the war heroes they produce — their names emblazoned on streets, buildings and parks; tales of their success fodder for coffee shop conversations.

But occasionally small towns are remembered for ordinary people who demonstrate great courage in the face of an unpopular cause. It is their life, and most times death, that makes us thankful their roots were established in our back yard.  We come to take them for granted.

In short, we forget. 

And in so doing, their voice is silenced.

Meridian has plenty of ordinary folk who showed uncommon courage in building a better community. Chief among them is James Earl Chaney, a Meridian civil rights activist and martyr. He gave his life for equality at a time when few spoke out against racial injustice.

This week in Washington, D. C., when Barack Obama is sworn in as the nation’s 44th president, local civil rights advocates will find it an especially momentous occasion. Four-plus decades of hopes and dreams will come to fruition. The first black person in the history of the United States will occupy the White House.

Rev. Charles Johnson, a former civil rights worker who once advised Chaney, is among the few still alive in Meridian who was deep in the struggle of the 1960s. Johnson said Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday will be an emotional time for him.

“I never thought I’d ever live to see this day,” said Johnson.

It will also bring back memories of a time when Mississippi was a different place, and a group of courageous people were fighting just to vote, Johnson said. It will serve to remind him of people like James Chaney.

Chaney was cultivated in the Meridian Public School District and traveled the south with his father, working as a plasterer to support his family. 

During Freedom Summer 1964, the 21-year-old  devoted himself to the civil rights movement. He was known as a quiet man, hard working and rail thin. Acquaintances said he could go for days on little or no sleep, helping to register black voters and pushing for racial reform.

It was a time in Mississippi when segregation was the battlefield and southern whites viewed the civil rights movement as their Civil War, an effort to undo their preferred lifestyle of keeping white and black people socially separate.

The division line of downtown Meridian was 23rd Avenue. Blacks were allowed to shop at white-owned stores such as Kress’s, Woolworth’s and Newberry’s — located just a block or two from the black-owned businesses. But they weren’t allowed to eat at the lunch counter or work there.

Chaney, black, and Michael Schwerner, white, a fellow civil rights worker from New York, traveled the dusty clay roads of backwoods Mississippi in a blue Ford station wagon day after day, urging blacks to register to vote and helping them overcome the obstacles to do so.

It took great courage. Their safety was always at risk from extremists who used violence to combat the civil rights movement.

Chaney and Schwerner, known as “Mickey” by his friends and “Goatee” by the Ku Klux Klan because of his facial hair, and Schwerner’s wife, Rita, toiled for months with local civil rights workers to teach classes at the community center, educate black people about their rights as citizens and register them to vote.

They did it as members of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, a northern-based civil rights group that had taken hold and begun to change the electoral landscape in many states.

It was a time of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The entire country was changing, hearts were softening, minds were opening, though Mississippi lagged behind.

To help the many Southern blacks who were still rooted in and living among a mindset of the past, CORE and other civil rights groups sent hundreds of northern college students to Mississippi to lend their compassion and their energy to strengthen a movement that struggled to take full hold in this area. Their goal was racial equality in the polling booth.

Schwerner and his wife were among those from the north sent to Meridian to help. They quickly befriended Chaney and traveled with him to a two-week training session in Oxford, Ohio. There they met Andrew Goodman, another white New Yorker. They talked him into returning with them to Meridian after he expressed interest in helping them investigate a church burning in Longdale, a black community east of Philadelphia, tucked away off a winding clay road.

Schwerner had already been targeted by some in the white community as an agitator who, along with Chaney and other civil rights workers, threatened the southern way of life. Weeks earlier, Schwerner had convinced Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale to set up a community center there for voter education.

 

Lured for killing

 

Some people have speculated the church fire was calculated to lure Schwerner back to rural Neshoba County, away from the safer lights of Meridian. In Neshoba County, the Klan was stronger and bolder.

Meridian had a Klan presence, though, and  Schwerner, Chaney and other civil rights workers were used to threats.

Rev. Johnson, a founder of the Meridian Action Committee, recalled that Chaney and Schwerner routinely slept in their car near his Fitkins Memorial Church of the Nazarene, feeling secure there.

“That was the only time they felt safe enough to sleep; they knew they were being watched … and they feared for their lives,” said Johnson, who is still a minister in Meridian.

While nowhere was really “safe” for those in the movement, rural Neshoba County offered the Klan a perfect mix of power and desolate roads to do harm to those that dared to challenge the status quo.

Soon after Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman arrived in Meridian from Ohio they left in the blue Ford station wagon, headed to Longdale. On their way back to Meridian, they were arrested for speeding, later released from jail and then chased down by a mob of Klansmen in cars. They were killed, their bodies buried in an earthen dam in rural East Mississippi.

Forty-five days later their bodies were recovered. But it wasn’t until 2005 that a major conviction was obtained in the case that became a tragic national symbol of injustice.

During the time of Chaney’s efforts to register voters, few people —other than those within the civil rights movement — knew of the work he and others were doing. This very newspaper failed to report it, so there’s no recorded history. There is little record of the picketing, the voter classes or the community centers. The memory of their work has faded with the years, lost in another time.

Even today, Chaney can’t be left to rest as locals continue to vandalize his grave, the headstone repeatedly broken or stolen.

Chaney, a man of Meridian, fought for a voice; he understood the importance of a vote. He represents what is great about our community and our nation.

I can’t imagine that as a line of cars (filled with Klansmen) chased Chaney and the other two civil rights workers to their eventual death he could have ever imagined what will transpire in Washington on Tuesday.

But maybe he did. Maybe it was that thought that empowered him to change racial attitudes in East Mississippi.

There’s no doubt the dream that Chaney and his fellow crusaders worked for — and died for — will be realized when Barack Obama is sworn in, his hand on the very Bible that Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on during his first term.

 

More than a moment

 

In East Mississippi, the civil rights movement was more than just a moment — it was the lifeblood for the likes of Rev. Johnson. They refused to give up despite the threats and the obstacles.

Leaning forward in his chair during our interview, Johnson pulled the thin-rimmed glasses from his face and softly placed them on the table when asked what he would feel when Obama is officially inaugurated.

The preacher, dressed in a Navy pinstripe suit with a Motorola Razr phone clipped to his belt, clinched his eyes to keep the tears back, then swallowed. He told of how the movement succeeded because of the “little people,” the ones who fought for equality and against injustice.

He told how he fed the Schwerners beenie-weenies and helped house them while they were in Meridian during that fateful summer of 1964. He talked about the picketing for better jobs, the boycotts and the fear.

“When he (Obama) steps out he’s not just stepping out for a few elite, he’s stepping out and taking the oath for Polly Heidelberg, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry and Medgar Evers,” said Johnson, his voice striking a rhythmic fervor.

 “He didn’t do it by himself. These were the people who laid the groundwork; that dug the foundation so that he could stand on it. … He will not only stand for them, but he will step out there for the make-up of the United States of America, all colors, all kindred. And when he stands, he won’t just stand to represent black America, but he will stand representing America, which includes all of us.”

“Oh,” said Johnson, his voice fading, “I wish I could be there. I’ve been all the way to Washington; I’ve been to the top of this movement. When he steps out there, I want to stand up and say, ‘God Bless America, Land that I love …'”