Karl Fleming: A Reporter Goes Home to a New South

Karl Fleming, in the LA Times (6-22-05):

I was one of the first two reporters to arrive in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964, on the day Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman went missing. I was there as Newsweek's main reporter on the Southern civil rights beat, and I went directly to the courthouse with Claude Sitton of the New York Times to question Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. They admitted arresting and jailing the three civil rights workers but insisted that they'd turned them loose and sent them on their way. We immediately believed the kids had been murdered and that Rainey and Price were involved; the guilt was all over them.

We went back to the courthouse the next morning, and this time Rainey said the kids were probably in Cuba by now and that the alleged disappearance was merely a hoax by the "Northern Jew communists" to make Mississippi look bad. When we passed through the courthouse lobby, we were confronted by an angry mob of Philadelphia citizens whose red-faced leader yelled that they wouldn't be having all this race trouble if it weren't for the "outside agitators" encouraged by members of the "nigger-loving, Jew-communist press."

He said we would be killed if we didn't leave town. Back at our motel, a car carrying four men armed with two shotguns and a quart of moonshine was parked in front of our rooms. We escaped by car to nearby Meridian with them in pursuit.

Forty-one years later, almost to the day, after Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were murdered, I went back to Philadelphia to look in on the trial of Edgar Ray (Preacher) Killen, the alleged Ku Klux Klan mastermind of the plot to kill the three civil rights workers, and to see what had changed. But this time, everyone was as nice as could be. Around the old courthouse, I chatted amiably with the local cops, including a black police officer and a female one, and they said everybody was getting along just fine. At the "media center" set up by the town, the smiling, self-described volunteer "den mother" to the 100 media people said that all they asked of the reporters was that they clean up after themselves. And, she said, local ladies were baking cookies for the reporters...

...In Birmingham in 1963, Police Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed attack dogs and fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park on peaceful marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. But last week, I saw black steel replicas of the fire hoses and dogs in the park, and a statue of King himself, carrying the inscription " … his dream liberated Birmingham from itself and began a new day of love, mutual respect and cooperation."

I know that for many people who never spent time in the Old South, the changes may not seem so impressive. Racism certainly still exists in the South, though it is more subtly expressed.

But few remember today the degree to which black people in the 1960s South lived in constant fear. That fear is gone. King always said that there would come a day when the South would be the best place in the nation for whites and blacks to live harmoniously together. Going back and seeing more true integration than I have seen anywhere in the country, I came to believe that though problems persist, this day clearly has come. I felt very much at home again.