And the rest of the country didn’t seem to care. Years of peaceful protest had been met with bombings, beatings, and simple murder. Mississippi was also where a sniper’s bullet had felled NAACP leader Medgar Evers, where not quite 7 percent of blacks could vote, and where shotguns blasted the shacks of those who dared to register. Kennedy had sent in federal marshals in troop trucks, sparking an all-night riot that left two dead and dozens wounded. A black student’s enrollment at the state university had caused armed whites to pour into Oxford Attorney General Robert F. The nation’s poorest state was where 14-year-old Emmett Till, accused of wolf whistling at a white woman, was tied to a cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. “Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn,” singer Nina Simone crooned. Just before climbing into the station wagon, the black man told his kid brother that they’d go for a drive when he returned.Īlthough it has since achieved a racial reconciliation that rivals South Africa’s, in 1964 Mississippi was synonymous with brutal racial dominance. If they did not return or phone in by 4 p.m., someone would start calling jails, sheriffs, and the FBI. If anything went wrong, they were to call the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) office in Meridian. As two whites traveling with one black, they could expect to be followed, chased, and possibly arrested. Their journey would take them into rural, redneck Neshoba County, where an arsonist had recently torched an African American church. But Mississippi was on a hair trigger: it was on the verge of a savage summer, a violent season so radically different, so idealistic, so daring, that it would redefine freedom in America.īefore leaving Meridian that Sunday, the three volunteers were issued strict instructions. Two days earlier, after the longest filibuster in Senate history, the civil rights bill introduced a year earlier by slain President John F. The economy was booming, inflation was at 1.2 percent, and gas cost 30 cents a gallon. TV commercials urged motorists to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank.” High above in Air Force One, President Lyndon Johnson flew home from California, content with the state of the union. Transistor radios blared early Beatles hits. Across America, it was Father’s Day, a lazy holiday of picnics, barbecues, and doubleheaders. On the first day of summer in 1964, three young activists piled into a blue station wagon in Meridian, Mississippi, and headed into Klan country.
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