The Grim Roster

Despite its high purpose, the Negro revolution breeds violence and death. Among its victims have been Baltimore Postman William Moore, shot on an Alabama highway while on a one-man civil rights march; Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Medgar Evers, shot in the back by a bushwhacker; and those four Negro girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church.

Last week there was more violence, and three more victims may have been added to the grim roster. They were two young white men and a Negro youth, all civil rights workers, missing in the murky, snake-infested swamps of eastern Mississippi, where the charred shell of their Ford station wagon was found.

The Trip South. The trail to the Mississippi swamp started on the serene, sycamore-shaded campus of the West ern College for Women at Oxford, Ohio. There, two weeks ago, an in doctrination course started for some 800 Northern college students who had volunteered to spend the summer in Mississippi working toward increased Negro voting registration. The project was sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a combine of four civil rights organizations, and by the National Council of Churches.

Among the staff for that indoctrination course were Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Chancy, 21. "Mickey" Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y., wig manufacturer, was a Cornell graduate in 1961, a social worker on New York's Lower East Side before joining the Congress of Racial Equality two years ago. Last January, Schwerner and his wife Rita, 22, went South, opened a Negro community center in Meridian, Miss. It included a 10,000-book library donated by Northern students. Rita taught reading and citizenship, instructed Negro women in how to work sewing machines, while Mickey worked on Negro vote registration.

Chancy was one of Schwerner's most helpful aides. He was a slender Meridian Negro lad who had dropped out of high school as a sophomore, became a plasterer, eventually joined CORE. When COFO called for volunteer instructors for the Ohio training course, Chancy went with Schwerner.

Among their Oxford students was Andrew Goodman, 20, son of a New York City building contractor and a junior at Queens College. The Mississippi project was Goodman's second active civil rights venture; he had been among those who picketed President Johnson at the World's Fair opening.

On Saturday, June 20, their week-long Oxford orientation course completed, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman and five other young civil rights workers got into a CORE-owned blue station wagon to drive to Meridian. They had scheduled their trip so as to avoid driving through Deep Dixie after dark, always a perilous proposition for integration workers in such states as Alabama and Mississippi. As they passed through Birmingham, Ala., a car loaded with white teenagers pulled alongside, screamed "Nigger lover!" at a white girl student sitting next to Chaney in the station wagon.

To the Church Ruins. The next day, Sunday, June 21, the three men got haircuts from a Negro barber in Meridian. They planned to drive to Longdale, Miss., 50 miles away in adjoining Neshoba County, to inspect the ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, which had been burned to the ground five days before. Bombings and burnings seem fashionable in Mississippi nowadays. Recently, churches at Brandon, Ruleville, Clinton and Hattiesburg have been either damaged or destroyed by fire or bombs; a Negro home in McComb has been bombed, and the N.A.A.C.P. meeting place in Moss Point was set afire.

Before leaving town, they dropped by the COFO office. Schwerner told an aide to call the FBI if he was not back by 4:30 that afternoon. Threats had become a commonplace in his life, but in recent weeks they had seemed even more ominous. Besides, he knew that the license number of the station wagon had been circulated by the area's Citizens Council. Chaney had the car's tank filled with gasoline before leaving Meridian; the three workers did not want to make any unnecessary stops in dangerous territory.

It was hot, nearly 100DEG, and hardly a breeze stirred the mimosa trees and scrub pines that dotted the landscape near the charred church ruins. There was not much to see at the burned church site--a twisted tin roof and a blackened iron bell in the ashes. The three drove a mile down the road to the farmhouse of Junior Roosevelt Cole, 58, a Negro and lay leader of the church, who told them that on the night of the fire he was dragged from his car in the churchyard and clubbed unconscious by a mob of whites. Schwerner asked Cole to come to Meridian Tuesday. "We want to get this fire business straightened out," Schwerner told him. "We want to stop all this."

The Search. At 5 o'clock that afternoon, while driving back to Meridian, the Ford was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Miss. (pop. 5,500), by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Price arrested Chaney on a charge of driving 65 m.p.h. in a 30-m.p.h. zone, took all three to the county jail, just off the town square.

While booking them--Chaney for speeding, and Schwerner and Goodman "for investigation"--Mrs. Millie Herring, wife of the jailer, wrote "Negro male" after each man's name, then scratched out the entry beside Schwerner's and Goodman's and penned in "white." Said she later: "I declare, I was just so confused I wrote it wrong." All three were questioned, fed a meal of spoon bread, green peas, potatoes and salad by Mrs. Herring. Then, after Chancy paid a $20 fine, they were told to get out of the county.

Deputy Price followed them to the edge of town, later said he saw their car head south down Mississippi Highway 19 toward Meridian. Price was the last person known to have seen Schwerner, Chancy and Goodman. That was at 10:30 Sunday night.

When the three failed to show up in Meridian, COFO workers called the FBI, which at that time had no evidence on which to enter the case, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, which declined to do more than issue a routine missing-persons bulletin. Then, Tuesday afternoon, a telephone tip on the station wagon's whereabouts came to the FBI office in Meridian. Agents rushed to the northeast corner of Neshoba County, found the gutted car in a blackberry thicket 40 feet off State Highway 21 near the dank Bogue Chitto Swamp. The site, twelve miles northeast of Philadelphia, was in the opposite direction from which Deputy Price said he saw the civil rights workers going when they left Sunday night. By the time the law got there, Choctaw Indians from a nearby reservation had stripped three hubcaps from the station wagon.

Side by Side. After the discovery of the car, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered a full-scale search by an army of FBI agents he had ordered into the state. The Mississippi Highway Patrol came alive, worked with the federals in beating the swamps of Neshoba County and questioning rural residents. President Johnson sent one time CIA Director Allen Dulles to Jack son to confer with Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson on the state's law-enforcement capabilities--and its willingness to cooperate. After a one-day trip, Dulles reported back that "a very real and very difficult problem which will take many months to solve" exists in Mississippi. But, he insisted, he saw "no likely explosion" soon.

President Johnson ordered 200 sailors from the Meridian Naval Auxiliary Air Station into Neshoba County to join in the search (the White House, through a mistake, at first announced that the sailors were marines, bringing screams of anguish from segregationists about another federal invasion of the South). Armed only with sticks to protect themselves against the water moccasins and rattlers that abound in the area, the sailors tucked and taped up their pants legs to ward off mosquitoes and chiggers, began poking under every bush and peering down every abandoned well.

At week's end, there was still no sign of the missing men. Some people shared the suspicion voiced by Neshoba County Sheriff L. A. Rainey: "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state." But with each passing day, the possibility of a hoax seemed less and less likely. Whatever their fate, whether dead or alive, the case of the three young civil rights workers would reverberate around the U.S. for the rest of this summer and beyond.

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