LET
US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
One of the
saddest things about history is discovering how often one’s
idols turn out to have feet of clay. Even our most revered heroes
have usually done something to make us cringe, or at least to
search about for some sort of rationalization.
I’m
not referring here to what used to be known as personal pecadilloes—which,
as we have learned in recent years, few of us can agree about,
anyway. What I mean is how disappointed we are to discover that
our great men and women have indulged in some sort of public hypocrisy—when
they have compromised, or even sold out in the name of political
expediency, or when they did not live up to the political ideas
they professed to believe in. Even our most revered presidents
spring readily to mind. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other
founders of our liberty owning slaves, and bringing African-Americans
into the Union as “three-fifths of a man.” Jackson
defying the U.S. Supreme Court, and throwing the Cherokees off
their land. Wilson imprisoning and savagely mistreating dissidents
during World War I, Franklin Roosevelt acquiescing in the detention
of the Nisei and Issei during World War II, Eisenhower refusing
to defend his longtime friend and mentor, George Marshall, so
as not to offend Joe McCarthy. Bill Clinton abrogating our nation’s
sixty-year pledge to provide for the most indigent and helpless
among us.
Presidents
have always had their reasons. To get anything done in a democracy
often means having to compromise away almost everything, in the
cause of preserving some last, little pearl of an idea. Too often,
though, the pearl is spat away along with the sand.
A recent confluence
of events has served to remind us of another such empty compromise
by an American president-to-be. This past summer marked the fortieth
anniversary of the Mississippi “Freedom Summer,” and
the brutal killings of the civil rights workers James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwermer. It
also brought the death, after a long and cruel illness, of a leader
beloved by many Americans, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s admirers
give him most, if not all, the credit for winning the Cold War
with the Soviet Union, and consider him a man of singular moral
vision and clarity. Yet when it came to the civil rights movement—and
to acknowledging the ultimate sacrifice three courageous young
Americans made in that movement—Mr. Reagan’s vision
was permanently befogged by the politics of the moment.
Freedom Summer
was a bold effort by the movement to win the right for all African-Americans
to vote, by training over 1,000, black and white student volunteers—most
of them from the North—and sending them down to Mississippi,
the very heart of the Jim Crow South. The volunteers would live
and work with local blacks, building up local community services
to fight poverty and segregation. Above all, though, the volunteers
were there to help black citizens register to vote—no easy
task, considering the constant physical intimidation and legal
chicanery that state and local authorities employed against them.
In Neshoba County, an isolated, rural swathe of east central Mississippi,
no African-American had been on the voter rolls since 1935.
Michael “Mickey”
Schwerner, the senior white volunteer in Neshoba, was determined
to change all that. A gregarious, 23-year-old Jewish social worker
from New York, who sported a goatee and a Mets cap, he was also
the very embodiment of Northern, “outsider” interference
that so enraged local white Missippians. Schwerner was also a
dedicated, softt-spoken pacifist, who was willing to sit down
and have a friendly discussion about civil rights with anyone.
None of that saved him from the unremitting hostility of local
whites. Before long, he was the main target of a deadly conspiracy
between local police, the Klan and other white supremacist groups,
and Mississippi’s “Sovereignty Commission”—a
secret, illegal state organization unlike anything that had ever
been seen in the United States before, charged with doing whatever
it took to thwart desegregation.
On June 16,
1964, a group of Neshoba Klansmen attacked the Mount Zion Methodist
Church, located in the tiny, black community of Longdale. They
brutally beat and threatened the parishioners—men and women—and
demanded to know the whereabouts of Schwerner. When no one would
tell them, they burned Mount Zion to the ground, one of more than
twenty black churches to meet such a fate in Mississippi that
summer.
Schwerner
hurried back to Mississippi from Oxford, Ohio, where he had been
training new volunteers. He brought one of them with him—Andrew
Goodman, 20, a quiet young college student, also from New York,
and James Chaney, also 20, a black construction worker and volunteer
from the area, who knew both the dark backroads of Neshoba and
the risks they were taking better than his white companions.
It was a fatal
mistake. When the three young men went to Longdale on June 21
to get a firsthand account of the assault, they were fingered
by the Sovereignty Commission, arrested by state and local police,
and held incommunicado in a Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail for
some six hours—while their captors rounded up a lynching
party. When the civil rights workers were finally released at
10 PM, they found themselves pursued again by the local sheriff
and his deputy, along with a small caravan of cars filled with
Klansmen.
It must have
been terrifying. Chaney decided to make a run for it in the volunteers’
Ford station wagon, trying to lose their pursuers by darting suddenly
off at an exit to a smaller rural route. It didn’t work.
The Klan, and the lawmen—in this case, one and the same—caught
up. The three young men were taken to a sunken dirt road, where
they were shot to death, execution-style—Mickey Schwerner,
who had always believed in the power of human beings to work out
their differences, still trying to talk to his captors out of
it. Their car was burned, and their bodies buried in an earthen
dam.
Yet unlike
so many Mississippi blacks who had disappeared over the years
after daring to stand up for their rights, these bodies would
not stay buried. President Lyndon Johnson imposed upon J. Edgar
Hoover to have the FBI make its first, all-out intervention in
a civil rights case. With the help of a little reward money and
much dogged police work, the G-men found the bodies of the murdered
young men, and seven of the murderers were eventually sent to
prison. In the ultimate tribute to the three young men, Johnson
was able to push the 1965 Voting Rights Act through the Congress—finally
guaranteeing African-Americans the right they had been promised
by the constitution nearly a hundred years before.
Ronald Reagan
opposed that act, as he did everyone of the federal statutes designed
to abolish Jim Crow, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
banned segregated public facilities; and the Fair Housing Act
of 1968. Reagan claimed to personally deplore racism, but spoke
out against all such federal statutes because of “legislative
flaws and faults…[that made] parts of them…in my view,
unconstitutional.” He further believed that the Voting Rights
Act, in particular, was “humiliating to the South.”
Reagan would
later equivocate on these views, allowing that the Fair Housing
Act, for instance, had “hastened the solution of a lot of
problems.” Yet he remained, at best, startlingly tone deaf
on anything to do with race, and unwilling to say anything that
might alienate his political constituency. On the day of Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, for instance, Reagan called
the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader,
“a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with
law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d
break”—an astonishing exercise in moral equivalizing,
which seemed to associate King’s agitation for enforcement
of the civil rights guarantees already embedded in the constitution,
with the action of his own murderer.
But the saddest
example of his willingness to kowtow to political expediency on
race came on August 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair—“a
traditional forum for the outpourings of segregationists such
as former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett,” as Reagan’s
leading biographer, Lou Cannon described it at the time. The appearance
was Reagan’s first stop on the campaign trail since winning
the nomination that year, and he was greeted with “thunderous
applause” by “a crowd almost entirely made up of whites.”
“I believe
in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as
they can at the private level,” candidate Reagan told them,
speaking in the familiar code words of discrimination and segregation—even
adding that, if he were elected, he would “restore to states
and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”
It sounded
alarmingly like a promise to roll back every accomplishment of
the civil rights era. But what Ronald Reagan said in his speech
that day was not as bad as what he didn’t say. There was
no mention whatsoever of the murdered civil rights workers, no
acknowledgment of the cause they had given their lives to. The
man who spent most of his adult life rightly obsessed with the
outrages being perpetrated against human dignity in the Communist
world…had no word to spare against the outrages being perpetrated
against human dignity in the American South. The man who flinched
at the idea of “humiliating” a state by forcing it
to obey the law…was publicly indifferent to the humiliation
of individual citizens being hauled into the woods by a mob, and
executed by the side of a road.
Perhaps we
expect too much. Presidential candidates are not in the business
of telling people what they do not want to hear. Perhaps the best
moral we can draw from Mr. Reagan’s failure of courage is
that a democracy is pushed toward enlightenment by its people,
more than it is ever pulled forward by its leaders.
I will gladly
speak their names again, even if Ronald Reagan could not. James
Chaney. Andrew Goodman. Michael Schwerner. “I mourn’d,
and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
