Linda Chavez
A new day dawns in the South
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
I spent much of the summer of 1964 at the public swimming pool
near my home in Denver. I turned 17 that year, but my parents thought I was
too young to work, so every day, I would walk the dozen or so blocks to
Cheesman Park, with my suit and towel and a book to read. In August that
summer I met a Southern boy who struck up a conversation poolside. I don't
remember his name or where exactly he was from, but I do remember his
Southern drawl, warm and liquid, and what he taught me about racial
attitudes in his part of the country.
I thought about him and our conversations when the verdict came
down Tuesday in a murder that took place that same summer of 1964 in
Mississippi. Forty-one years to the day when civil rights workers James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered in
Philadelphia, Miss., the ringleader in their killings finally received some
measure of justice. After two days of deliberations, a Mississippi jury
found Edgar Ray Killen, now 80 years old and in failing health, guilty of
three counts of manslaughter. Unlike an all-white jury that had failed to
convict Killen in 1965 of separate, federal civil rights charges in the
murders, this Mississippi jury was made up of nine whites and three blacks,
who voted unanimously to convict. Times have changed in Mississippi, indeed,
throughout the South.
The disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman galvanized
the nation that summer. The evening news was filled with stories of "Freedom
Summer," the mass influx of mostly white students from the North into
Mississippi to help register disenfranchised blacks. When these three young
men — two whites from New York and one black from Mississippi — went
missing, their story came to symbolize the violence and race hatred that
infected the South. On August 4th, FBI agents discovered their bodies and
their torched-out Ford in an earthen dam. They had been beaten, tortured and
shot to death on a country road on June 21st by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen,
shortly after local police had released the young men after stopping them
for an alleged traffic violation. Barely two weeks later, the Democratic
National Convention met in Atlantic City, N.J., to nominate Lyndon Baines
Johnson for president — which brings me back to my Southern acquaintance.
The young man invited me to a party one day after we'd met at
the pool. He and a friend picked me up that evening, and we went back to his
friend's parents' house. There were a lot of adults around, many of whom
were transfixed in front of a small black and white television set in the
living room watching the Democratic convention. I sat beside my new friend
as the roll call of delegates proceeded on the screen. The minute one of the
delegates pronounced LBJ's name, my friend muttered viciously under his
breath: "nigger-lover." I was stunned. I had only heard that word once
before in my life from a boy in fifth grade who'd been sent to principal's
office for having uttered it. I couldn't believe my ears. How could my date,
who just minutes before had been the picture of Southern charm and
gentlemanly demeanor, have turned into such a bigot?
"Why do you hate Negroes?" I asked him. He looked at me like I
was crazy.
"You Yankees don't know anything about it," he said defensively.
We barely spoke the rest of the evening, and I never saw him
again after he dropped me off that night. But I've thought about him many
times. I've often wondered whether he ever got over his hatred. No doubt
he'd learned it from his parents, and they from theirs before them. For
generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise
black people. Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other
way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged
the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.
Edgar Ray Killen, described by friends and family as "a good man," was one
of that generation of Southerners. Thankfully new generations have replaced
the Old South, and Killen's conviction may help close that chapter of
Southern history. Who knows, my old acquaintance may even be one of those
New Southerners who applauds this week's long overdue justice.
JWR contributor Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Her latest book is "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)
