Yesterday’s News

Last weekend the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice held a conference on historical injustices, restitution, and reconciliation. Things started off on Thursday with a session led by Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, and David Dennis, former field secretary for CORE. Their subject was the impending trial of Edgar Ray Killen, who has been charged with the murders of Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

Rita Bender hopes people will talk when Edgar Ray Killen finally walks into a Neshoba County courtroom to face murder charges for the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., more than 40 years ago.

She hopes they will talk about racism, atonement, and why ''good folks" don't confront evil. She hopes they talk about the many unpunished politicians and police officers who encouraged men like Killen to terrorize their black neighbors.

She hopes. But she's not sure it will happen.

''If having this trial can allow that discussion, then the trial is worth having," said the widow of Michael Schwerner, who was killed along with Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964.

But if it's about a small town burying its bloody past and polishing its image, forget it. ''We don't say that we're past all that simply by convicting one crazy old man. . . ."

The Neshoba County district attorney trying Killen's case today says it's unlikely anyone else will be charged with shooting the men and burying their bodies on a muddy farm. But the killers were undoubtedly part of a larger conspiracy, Dennis said. ''It was the culture that existed in the country at that time."

The FBI did not protect black and white activists, who left northern states and southern hometowns to register voters during ''Freedom Summer," he said. The agency did not move quickly to find the workers' bodies, and local politicians accused the civil rights movement of staging the men's disappearances to gain sympathy.

Bender said that many of the local police were Klansmen, and that they exchanged information with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was formed to resist integration and the looming Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When commission files were finally made public in the late 1990s, lists of civil rights workers' cars, license plate numbers and addresses including hers and her husband's were revealed, she said.

The government spied on activists and threatened those who helped them, she said. Sharecroppers who registered to vote were forced from their land; many who registered also lost their jobs and homes.

''They were the white-glove counterpart of the Klan," Bender said of the officials.

If Killen lives to see trial (via Neshoblog), and if he is actually convicted of his crimes, the small moral victory will convince many that we have finally arrived at the just conclusion of a shameful chapter in our history. You will hear many comments like this one, for example, at Neshoblog. As Bender and Dennis (and Steve Schwerner) explain, the responsibility for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and for the widespread fascist terror against African Americans and their allies that was the status quo in Mississippi—extends far beyond Ray Killen's role in these matters. The roots of that terror run deep into the state's infrastructure, and the hanging tree was watered by collusion from the Department of Justice and members of the US Congress.

The current Republicans, and the spineless Democrats who do not meaningfully oppose them, depend on a new, 21st century conspiracy of silence on race. Racist politicians refrain from race baiting, a token number of historic racial murders are finally "solved," the President, whose policies show nothing but contempt for communities of color and low-income people, surrounds himself with Latinos and African Americans.

We are led to believe that the conversation on race is over because it has been artfully excised from the public sphere by Karl Rove and his enablers, the DLC. And if a certain African American leader discusses race and Bush policies in the same breath, the Thought Police IRS is called out to gag his public speech with an audit of his organization. And if Bush and Co. can keep Julian Bond and the rest of us quiet just a little longer, Ward Connerly and his ilk will get their race data collection bans passed to compliment the quieter disappearances of data on discrimination already underway [pdf].

In the present focused blogosphere the Boston Globe report on Rita Bender and David Dennis' talk at Brown University is already ancient history, but their analysis of the Killen trial is far from yesterday's news.