"It took a small army of gun-totin', tobacco-chewin', snuff-eatin' cowards to beat up my father."
Mrs. Emily Cole Calloway was referring to the Ku Klux Klansmen who, in June 1964, thought her father was harboring civil rights activists and stopped his car as he returned home from an evening meeting at his church.
"The road was blocked," Mrs. Calloway said. "Somebody jumped out of the woods with a bright flashlight. 'Where them white boys?' they demanded.
"They yanked the door open, yanked my father out of the car, and started beating him. They yelled, 'If you don't tell us where them white boys are, we're goin' to kill you.'
"Mother decided to try to get out. All of them had guns aimed at her head.
They threw Papa in the ditch. Mama is not a big lady, but somehow [after the KKK left] she dragged him up the embankment and put him in the car.
"At home, she had to drag Papa out of the car. She put him on the front porch and sat him down. She went inside the house and got some towels and water, and washed him up as well as she could. She put him on the bed.
"Then she got the double-barrel shotgun. 'Just in case they want to come back, I'm going to be ready,' she said. 'I was going to get, not everybody, but I'd get somebody.' She sat there all night with the gun on her lap."
Mrs. Calloway's father refused to see his local doctor, afraid that he might have been among the assailants.
Instead, his two sons, who lived in New York and Chicago, took him to Chicago for treatment. There, he was diagnosed with a broken skull, five broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, and a severely damaged leg.
Ms. Jewel Rush McDonald, whose mother and brother were also beaten, explained, "About ten people were here [on that Tuesday night] to count donations from the previous Sunday service. ... They yanked my brother out of his truck and beat him. Then they yanked my mother out of the truck and beat her."
Like Mrs. Callaway's father, the elder Mrs. McDonald refused to see a doctor. "'The doctor might be one of them that was out there tonight,' she told me.
She kept talking about those people 'with army rifles' that came from the National Guard here in Neshoba County."
That night, June 16, 1964, the Klan burned the Mt. Zion Baptist Church to the ground.
Five days later, on June 21 (Father's Day), the Klan, with assistance from Neshoba County sheriff's deputies, murdered the three civil rights activists they had been seeking.
The victims were James Earl Chaney (21), a black from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24), whites from New York. They were volunteers of the Freedom Summer program who were trained to register blacks to vote.
On August 4, thanks to a massive FBI investigation code-named "Mississippi Burning," their bodies were found buried under a newly constructed earthen dam eight miles south of Philadelphia. All three had been shot at close range, yet an autopsy revealed that Chaney might have been still alive when buried. (Source: Wikipedia, Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner)
After three years of legal wrangling, nineteen men went on trial for the murders.
On October 27, 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the men guilty, including Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price and KKK imperial wizard Sam Bowers. Nine others were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on three more.
When other Freedom Summer volunteers heard that their colleagues were missing and presumed dead -- and understood the risks involved -- a thousand young people poured into the state, dedicated to continuing the voter registration drive and knowing that to
give in to violence could end the Civil Rights Movement.
Schwerner's body was cremated. Goodman is buried in New York. And Chaney's grave is in a pastoral setting in rural Meridian, Mississippi. Two massive steel bolsters hold the large tombstone upright because it has been vandalized and tipped over in recent times.
Next blog: "Segregation Stories: Moses Walker and Dr. Lewis Walker"
