American Experience; 1964; Interview with Rita Schwerner Bender, Civil Rights Activist, part 2 of 2

After they were missing to go north to Washington, tell me about that. What did you feel like you needed to do, and what was your... Well, it was, I guess, a day or two after the disappearance. And it was very clear that there was already starting to be national attention on this disappearance. It was perfectly clear that the way it was being reported had to do with the fact that two of these three men were white. And this was not a unilateral decision I made. It was a decision that was made with a number of other movement people that I needed to draw attention since I was getting this attention in any event. I needed to draw attention to what this was all about, and it wasn't about three men, although it certainly in a personal way was about that.

But it was really about what the nature of the beast was, what the violence was all about, what the denial of just basic human rights was all about, and who were the usual victims of this? I mean, you know, people throw around the words, police state, but Mississippi was, I guess I would call it a clan state. I mean, it was one thing of the police, or perhaps those of us who have lived somewhat coddled lives, think of the police as protectors. The police were not the protectors. The thought wasn't, it seems to make a perfect sense. If this is going to become a call-select or whatever, a national story, let's use that. Let's tell the real story. Let's tell the real story.

And you know, I would say that the very fact that there is with this 50th anniversary so much focus on these three deaths means to a great extent that real story still hasn't been told, because why focus just on these murders? I mean, why don't we have 50th anniversary commemorations of the kids whose bodies were found in the rivers when the Navy was searching for these three? Why don't we talk about just all the other people who were active in the movement and who were killed or beaten or mistreated? And there's very little attention to them. Why don't we talk about where we are now 50 years later, which in many ways isn't the kind of change that one would have hoped to see.

One should have seen in all this time. We still have kids who are going to abysmal schools all over the country, children of color. We have the gerrymandering of election districts to try and eliminate any of the potency of the 65 Civil Rights Act. We have in some ways worse poverty now than particularly people of color experience 50 years ago. I mean, it's just horrendous. It was not the point in a way, though, when the publicity took off about these deaths. I mean, I remember Bob Moses was saying, you know, we felt like, unless, if we could bring America to the way he said, too Mississippi, we felt we could shine a light on what was going on there. Far be it from them to anticipated something like that happening. They knew it was a possibility.

But in a way, was the underlying kind of idea behind Freedom Summer precisely to try and draw attention? Certainly, there was an intention to try and draw attention to the conditions in the state. There was also the recognition, certainly it wasn't intentional that anybody be mistreated. But there was the recognition that there would be pushback and some of it would be violent. Would there be deaths? You know, nobody wanted to contemplate that. But, you know, it certainly had to have been in everybody's minds. I mean, there had been so many deaths before then. Why should this few months be different? There were so many deaths after that. Why should this few months be different?

The difference, of course, was that many of these young college students who came down had voice through their families to try to draw attention to what was going on. And the notion wasn't, oh, let's wait and see who gets killed and then that will get a lot of attention. The notion was that these kids were going to be calling home and writing home and talking about what they were seeing and their families were going to be talking about it and were. And those families had those families or some of them had had considerable clout. Who did you meet with in Washington? Tell me what happened. I met, well, first of all, I was traveling with Bob Zellner. When I was in Oxford, Ohio, participating in the training of the summer volunteers at the time that I got word of the disappearance. And we made a decision the following day that I said I was going back to Mississippi and the decision was that someone had to go with me and it couldn't be somebody who was black because that would make us very clear targets.

And so the decision was it would be Bob Zellner who was a veteran of the movement and knew his way around. And so we went back to Mississippi and we spent a couple of days there, tried to meet with the governor who, when he recognized, he recognized Bob Zellner because he had had some prior exchanges with Bob. And the governor was with George Wallace, the Alabama governor and they had had some kind of function and they were now working up the steps of the governor's mansion. And there were big French doors to the mansion and the minute he saw Zellner, he yelled, that's Zellner. And they literally went running inside the mansion and then stood against the doors from the inside of these French doors, the windows looking out at us.

And it was kind of ludicrous. But anyway, we spent a few days in Mississippi trying to put whatever pressure we could upon people in Philadelphia, the police there who of course didn't want to talk to us at all. And the FBI and in Jackson and then we decided that our next step was to go to Washington. So, Bob was about three days after the disappearance that Bob and I went up to Washington and met with Katzenbach who was the deputy attorney general at the time. I think Robert Kennedy was out of the country and so Katzenbach met with us. And while we were sitting in his office, there was somebody else from Justice Department who was there too and I don't recall.

No, it wasn't John Dore. No, I don't recall who it was. But we were sitting there and Jim Foreman, one of the other long time civil rights workers, we were supposed to go to this meeting with us and he was late and so he came bursting into Katzenbach's office as we were sitting there and said, I'm terribly sorry, I'm late, but I was just on the phone with someone in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who is a white man, who was sort of a thorn in the side of local people there for years, who had apparently told someone that he had some information about who had been involved in the kidnapping and killing. And this was long before the bodies, weeks before the bodies were found and that he was now being threatened and he was sitting on his front porch with a shotgun across his knees, sort of daring anybody to come near.

And Katzenbach said, and essentially Foreman was saying, you see, we've got to have protection for civil rights workers and for local people. The federal government has to start protecting people against this violence, you're going to lose this witness who claims to have direct information about what's happened. And Katzenbach said, we've lost witnesses before. And I just remember that scene so vividly because it was just so upfront. It's got per se. Can we settle this? Who else did you meet with in Washington? Bob and I met with President Johnson.

And again, the major message of our meeting was, you know, we want you to do what it takes to figure out what happened to these three people. But the fact that this has happened underscores what has been said for years, there has to be federal protection for civil rights workers, which includes not just kids who come from other places. But very definitely the local folks who at great risk, Mr. President, are organizing the Freedom Democratic Party to try to support your election in the fall.

They're to try to assert their right to vote. And we need your help. You told me a story about how you got into the Oval Office and Challenger took you in. Tell me about it. Oh, well, and I know my recollection is that after we were identified at the entrance to the White House and allowed to come in, Pierre Challenger, who was then the press secretary, met us. And I remember our working through a very long corridor, which I think was an underground passage from one part of the buildings to the other. And we ended up in a sitting room with President Johnson and Mr. Challenger was there.

And there may have been somebody else there that I don't recall. And so we had this conversation about federal protection. Were you fairly outspoken? Yeah, I've sort of been known for that. Well, so we had this conversation. And I was really pushing the president to make a commitment. He was trying to be as evasive as he could be. He was not wanting to go there. And so after a little bit of time, the meeting was over. And we left him. We were walking down this long cart again with Pierre Challenger, who was taking us to the exit. And he was obviously somewhat miffed and said to me, you know, you don't talk to the president of the United States that way. And I was a little bit miffed, so I said, well, I think I just did.

I don't think I got invited to any White House dinner after that. Why was this such a problem for LBJ politically? Actually, Meg, can we do a really quick touch up? I got for a second. So, why was this disappearance such a problem for Johnson? I mean, he doesn't meet people every day when, I mean, this was kind of a big problem. Yes, it was a big problem because it was not the disappearance and potential murder of a black sharecropper someplace in the Delta. It was the disappearance and potential murder of, and I think, by the way, by the time we met with Johnson three or four days after the disappearance, everybody knew it was, there had been murders.

It was not that, you know, I mean, some of the folks in the state were putting out this ridiculous stuff about they had run, the three men had run off to Cuba, and that Castro was having a good laugh about the whole thing. Anybody in their right mind knew what had happened, if not the details. And for Johnson, because two of these three men were right, and because they were well-educated, and their families were connected to other people who knew other people who, you know, some of whom were political. I think the Goodman family was probably more involved in perhaps democratic political stuff, I can't say exactly. But I think that there was the sense that those families, but also the families of all these other kids who were, this was at the very start of the Mississippi summer.

I mean, the fact that we had been up at an Oxford, Ohio for the week before, and Mickey and James Cheney, who was the local black man, who was the third of the three men who disappeared, had been, as was I, part of the training for the summer volunteers, and Andy Goodman was a summer volunteer. I mean, the tragedy about Andy Goodman was he hadn't been in the state 24 hours when he was killed. So if the killers had anything personal against either James Cheney or Mickey Schwerner, they couldn't have had anything personal against Andy Goodman. It was just a horrible circumstance that he was with them.

But all these parents were like, wait a minute. This is just getting started. That's right. And there were a thousand kids. My daughter and son are going down there. Yeah. Yeah. There were a thousand kids who were about to go into the state. The first group of kids had gone a few days earlier after the first week of training, and then there was supposed to be a second week. And so, yeah, you had the parents of a thousand kids. Some of those parents, again, who knew their representatives or their senators or people active in politics in the state, in their states very well, who were now saying, this is outrageous. This can't continue. Johnson was going to be facing a very contested election in the fall. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was preparing to file its challenge to the seating of the regular Mississippi Democrats at the National Convention in Atlantic City in August.

There was tremendous pressure on Johnson to try to make this go away. In fact, you know, it's pretty clear that the events of 1964 played a very great part in why the state of Mississippi has been almost ever since a republic. I mean, I think the Kudugra was several years later when Reagan opened his presidential campaign at the Nishoba County Fair, and nobody could miss that symbolism. But the state has been absolutely a republican state ever since except for local places where the black vote locally is big enough to elect Democrats, and in some cases black elected officials.

You say everybody within two or three days were sure they had been killed? What was your feeling about it right away? Were you, did you know right away? Yes. I think it was pretty clear almost instantly. When there was no information in the first few hours, I think it was pretty clear that they had been killed. It looks great. It just stopped in one minute. Okay. Thank you.

Let's talk about the NMTV. Yeah. Who were the delegates? How many about them? Hang on. It's like, hey, Meg. We have to just be quiet. And if people are coming in, they really can't come in during the interview. The door needs to be just people out there. Okay. Does really work. Cross-purposes to what we're trying to do. Who were these people? The MFDP delegates. I think there were about 50 delegates. I don't remember the exact number. 50, 52, something like that. But they were people from most all over the state of Mississippi. They were African Americans. A great many of them had not been allowed to register to vote. They had been trying. Many of them had been trying to do so in their local communities for years.

They were kind of cross-section of people. Aaron Henry was a pharmacist in the Delta. He was a leader. Well, he was one of the people who was running, who had run for statewide office as a MFDP candidate. Fannie Lou Hamer had been a plantation worker. She was the counter on a large plantation in the Delta. It was her job to tally the sacks of cotton that the workers turned in at the end of a work day. And after she tried to register to vote, she was kicked off the plantation where she had lived and worked for, I think, pretty much her whole life many, many years. So some people had, Victoria Gray was a very middle class. I had been a teacher. I was very well educated. But most of the delegates were people who, as you would expect, in that time and place had very minimal education.

And did the difficult and almost, I mean, they lived a virtually subsistence existence. They had barely enough to feed their families when the crops were in. But they were very courageous. It took tremendous, tremendous courage, particularly when you lived in this place, you had no financial resources. There was no out for most of those people, just as there were for civil rights workers who, who, even if they were from the state, many of the kids had some education and some possibility to go other places and do other things.

And there were this group of people, the MFDP delegates, were absolutely committed to the idea that they were going to do this organizing and make this public stand to try again, to get national attention and to put national pressure to deal with the conditions in the state. I guess I want to tell you one little anecdote about one of the voter registrars. This guy was in Forest County, in which Hattiesburg is the major city in Forest County. And his name was Theron Lind, and he was just notorious for his mistreatment of African Americans who tried to register to vote.

One of the things that the Mississippi Constitution required as part of its exclusion of black voters was that the registrar could give you a section of the state constitution and ask you to interpret it to his satisfaction. A lot of these sections were absolutely arcane and probably with a law degree you couldn't interpret them. Certainly not to the satisfaction of the registrar who undoubtedly did not have a law degree. This man, and this became testimony in a very important voting rights case, USV Mississippi. This man had a habit of going beyond asking people to interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution. He would ask them to questions which he rather liked, and they would have to answer them to his satisfaction. And his most famous one was an African American registrar would come in and try to register to vote, and he would say to the person in front of him.

Now tell me how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap? You're laughing. So that's what the MFDP experience had been, was, and that's why they were making this fight. What was the goal they were there in Atlantic City, and what were they trying to do in a nutshell? To be seated as the only legitimate democratic delegates, delegates to the Democratic Party from the state of Mississippi, their caucuses were open to everyone.

They were, again, trying to shine a national spotlight on the exclusion of blacks from any political participation, and that was their goal. They wanted a truly democratic electoral process. They had to testify in front of the credentials. Did you testify? Yes. You know, I don't remember an awful lot about my testimony to be at perfectly honest. I remember Fannie Lou Hamers testimony. There were a number of people who testified James Farmer from a corps and Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry.

Tell me about Mrs. Hamers testimony. Mrs. Hamers testimony was remarkable. This is a woman who had, I don't think very much more than a third grade education. She was extremely powerful, strong person, and I mean that in a psychological sense. She was very articulate, so much so, that in the middle of her testimony, which was being the whole credentials committee, hearing was being televised. Sorry, I took a chance to get that. I don't know why that didn't get it. Probably the light attracts them. The credentials committee testimony was being, hearing was being televised.

And while we didn't know it until a little while afterwards, apparently what happened was that in the middle of Fannie Lou Hamers testimony, the president was so upset about her power, her ability to tell the story of brutality and denial. That he called an immediate press conference to co-opt the television coverage of the credentials committee. And of course those of us who were in the room didn't know this till after the fact. What was the outcome of the compromise that was sort of procured by Humphrey and Monday on the app? In fact, what was the offer and did the MFDP accept it?

You bet Humphrey very much wanted to be on the ticket in the fall as Johnson's vice presidential nominee. He wanted it so badly, I suspect he could taste it. And he had probably, he and Monday, particularly Humphrey because of the way he was jockeying for the nomination, had liberal credentials probably as significant as anybody in the Congress at the time. And Humphrey tried to put a great deal of pressure on the MFDP to back off. Essentially the message was, you've made your point. Now let us get on with our business.

And the MFDP said, no, we are your business. Some of the sympathetic delegates actually gave their passes to MFDP delegates to sneak them on to the convention floor on the night of the nominations. It was really quite a remarkable few days. Humphrey was trying to broker a deal which would give the MFDP to non-voting delegates to the convention. And that this would be sort of a down payment of a promise for the future. And the MFDP refused it. And Mrs. Hamer famously said, I didn't come all this way just to have no non-voting seat. So they refused.

They gave a great moral sort of moment. Politics meets morale. It's quite interesting. And yeah, I mean, I think that the MFDP delegates, and there was heated discussion among them. But I think the MFDP delegates understood something that professional politicians couldn't fathom. There were some things that some beliefs that were so strongly held and so deep and had been purchased with so many tears that they couldn't be traded. What was the feeling in the ranks of your group and you personally when the deal fell through? When the deal fell through or the seating fell through? When the seating went in effect, the crusade was wanted and you did not access.

Oh, it was very bitter. It was very hurtful. Perhaps we had deluded ourselves into thinking it could happen. Perhaps we were not political enough to understand that how the game was played. But it was a bitter moment. And I think it had some long-term effect in the direction that some segments of the movement took after that. You know, those few years had been so intense for people that there had there been some victory at that convention. It might have given a sense of momentum that was needed after all that had happened. But it was one more very bitter disappointment and I think it made it hard for some people to go on.

And of course, the result of that in many ways was that the people who were living their day-to-day lives in places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. And to, in a different way, you know, in the rest of the country, poor black folk, I think, got the message. We really don't matter very much in the national scheme of things. And that had lasting consequences. And it had lasting consequences not just... It had lasting consequences for the entire country, whoever we were. I think that a good deal of the unfinished business in this country that we are still living with comes from what was conveyed.

I don't want to put it all on the Mississippi MFDP challenge, I think that was one of many things. But I think a lot of this unfinished business comes from a sense that... How do I say it? Increasingly maybe. More so than for a good number of years, it seems to me. There really is a sense that if you are somebody of wealth and education, you dilute yourself that you had it coming to you and you're smarter than everybody else. And therefore, you get to keep it. I think we have become increasingly mean-spirited as a nation. And I really do worry about that for our children and our grandchildren. It's a very bad place, I think, we're in.

That's a good point. Did it split the movement? Did it foster a kind of cynical nationalism movement towards Black Power? Did that Atlantic City have some fallout? Oh, I think that Atlantic City did have some fallout. I think that many people were bitter about it. But again, I think it's a little bit of a mistake. It was a dramatic moment and it certainly was very hurtful for the people who were directly involved in it. Although interestingly, some of the Black folks, the delegates, just kept on plotting afterwards. So maybe they should have been obvious the strongest. But yeah, I think it's a mistake, though, to point to any one event and say this changed the course of everything. It certainly was one of the things that caused that change, the shift.

We're almost done, but this just maybe rise up a little bit, maybe 5,000 feet up a little bit. And think about the year for me if you can. Just because, for all its artificiality, we are making a movie in 1964. If you were to, just as an exercise, if you were to, if I was to ask you to sort of look back over the 12 months of that year and begin an answer to me with 1964 was the year dot dot dot. What would you set, what would you have, would you have a, I'll give you a minute to think about it. Do I get it? No, that's all right. Just going to.

Yes. Sorry. That's good. Thank you. Keep me beautiful. Yeah, it's my job. You know, if you have to try and put your put, put brackets around it and you can go back to 19 to November 22, 1963. And Kennedy's assassination, and you think about the year, the long, it's what Frederick Logoval with Vietnam, it's called the long 1964. I think it's faster than you were. More faster. Is there a, is there a way you'd answer that question or chill in that blank? It's a mad leaves approach to. The year 1964, and again, going back, at least to the, to the Kennedy assassination and looking forward and probably into 65 and beyond, was a very traumatic year for the country. And the Kennedy assassination was certainly traumatic. A assassination of any, any president would be very traumatic.

Johnson was a very different kind of animal. The Mississippi movement was certainly getting a great deal of attention and putting a good deal of pressure on Johnson and on the Congress. The Bay of Tonkin resolution in August of 1964 really caused a very major shift in American foreign policy and had the effect as, as you look forward from there of drawing us into a, a long and senseless and brutal war.

Happens on the day that the bodies are discovered. Is it about 64 do you think where all of these, all of these forces seem to be finally being unleashed? I mean, the Beatles come to America. The free speech movement happens at Berkeley, Barry Goldwater, and the conservative movement finally bursts out the scene. And the steepest published. And Freedom Summer. And yes, 63 had been this big moment. But I wonder whether there is, these genies are being led out of the balls. Maybe one genie uncorks another, uncorks another. Maybe, well, I guess I can speak a little bit about my perception of the, of the women's movement. You know, women in the civil rights movement were treated to some extent as second class.

And many of the women who experienced the civil rights movement actually became quite outspoken as feminists. So did one affect the other, yes, certainly. And I'd like to believe it affected the men around them as well. Some, yes, some, no. The Beatles, I mean, I guess again, the Beatles were a kind of looser kind of public persona than had been experienced at least in the United States. You know, what's interesting is that the civil rights movement seems to have such an impact on all of these other aspects. Like, you know, Berkeley, the Mario Savio, and all these people that came out of Freedom Summer. That's right.

Is there, you know, obviously the work of African American civil rights activists is in a huge part of the story of 64. But there's also another story, which is the sort of radicalization of young white people on both the left and on the right with young Americans, for example, and Barry Goldwater's army. Is this, you were one of those people. Is that what's happening? Does that happen in 1964? Does the sort of the youth, the white youth of America wake up in some way? I have a hard time sort of saying it happened in 1964. I think as with most social movements, there tends to be some gradual development. And then maybe it reaches a critical mass where the rest of the society sort of notices, hey, something's changed. But I started college in 1959.

And, you know, the sit-ins around, the sit-ins started in many places in what the spring of 60, or maybe 60, fall of 60. And so there's a group of, I mean, at that point it was a small group, almost all black college students. But there were supporting demonstrations. I can remember them. I was in Ann Arbor, and I can remember them at the Woolworths in Ann Arbor. That were kind of supportive demonstrations. So there were starting to be groups of young people who were looking around and saying something was wrong here. So the construct of a year and saying suddenly everything changed.

Well, maybe suddenly it was noisy enough and in your face enough that people noticed it. But I think the change didn't happen quite that suddenly. Just as you can look now as what's happened in terms of gay rights. And you can't say, gee, suddenly everybody woke up this year and said, what we've been doing is crazy. Can you argue, though, that in some ways the phenomenon for lack of a better term of the death of your husband and those two other people, was this sort of moment when something fundamental did finally spill over, did shift? In part maybe because of the media frenzy that it attended it? Well, if those deaths were in some way responsible for a shift, it was because of the media frenzy and the media frenzy was because of who they were, that they were right. I think again, it's not a one thing. I mean, I think that the media frenzy or the media attention to those deaths continues all these years later to be significant of the fact that white Americans value those lives more.

Why should we remember 1964? I think we should remember the unfinished business of this country. And if what you are doing helps people to understand that that business is unfinished, then it's worth remembering and worth talking about. Let's do room time. 30 seconds. We just need to go up. This is room time for redebender. 30 seconds. Now where is that?