I began to feel I belonged to the struggle and that I could contribute.
I left the retreat house filled with respect for black Americans who were ready to make our country live up to its promises. Though I remained inexorably part of the problem, cleaving to the advantages that flowed from my wealthy family, I felt much more ready to take the emotional risk of interacting with both black and white people to help create a more just society. I was one person starting to move in two distinct cultural worlds at the same time.
8
Dealing with Fear
“Well, you have to go sooner or later,” Barbara Morris said in her laconic way. “It might as well be sooner.”
I’d been working at the NAACP for a few months.
Barbara had spent a lot of time in the South, handling a variety of cases. There were a few racially charged criminal trials and lots of work with our Southern branches. In her early thirties, Barbara was an attractive, self-assured black woman with straight black hair. She seemed to have a read on everyone. Her looks, dress, and manner were consistent with somebody who had gone to the right schools and hung out in the right places. She thrived in a way I thought would be impossible for a black woman in the South. Even in the North, however, segregation was the quiet rule, and powerful women, black or white, were the exception.
Barbara had clocked the requisite hours driving the back roads of the South in search of witnesses, and she’d done hard time in courtrooms where the locals bridled at the presence of a strong-willed black woman. That she had a bully pulpit—or at least the wherewithal to speak forcefully to white men in the Deep South—was almost unthinkable. Often she was in mortal danger. In a word, Barbara had serious grit. She also had a sense of style. I was drawn in by the easy way she told terrifying stories about her travels through Jim Crow territory, among them being followed on deserted highways as she drove between towns looking for witnesses.
“I tell you…,” she would say with a chuckle.
Barbara knew I was anxious about working in the South. But I had to go. That was the way it was. Civil rights lawyers had to go where the cases were, and they were generally not in places with a lot of racial harmony. I remember wondering if maybe Barbara felt that white Movement lawyers had a little more to prove than their black counterparts. The reality, however, was more complicated. Sure, I needed to pay my dues. But I had something to prove that was much deeper than anything that was going on between Barbara and me. In the summer of 1964 a civil rights attorney would have to be fundamentally unbalanced not to be nervous about heading South—especially for the first time. It was a dangerous place to challenge a centuries-old racial caste system. Less than a year had passed since Medgar Evers—an NAACP field secretary at the time—was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. He had pulled into his driveway after picking up new T-shirts emblazoned with the legend Jim Crow Must Go, when a bullet from an Enfield M1917 rifle hit him in the back. He didn’t die right away. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested eventually, but he got some “good ol’ boy” treatment and walked away from criminal charges until—nearly three decades later—the times bad changed sufficiently that he was prosecuted and put away for good.
Compounding the feeling that I was heading toward a place where I could get killed, three young civil rights volunteers disappeared in Mississippi right before I was sent to Baton Rouge. The disappearance of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney gripped the nation and was the lead story on all the nightly news programs. The three activists went missing in Neshoba County not long after Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price stopped their blue station wagon on bogus speeding charges. Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan splinter group White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had issued an order to kill Michael Schwerner in particular. That conspiracy was the reason Price had the car’s plate numbers in advance. He arrested all three. And then the plan to kill them was put into play. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were released on their own recognizance in the middle of