Race and Reminders
Probably the most prominent story involves the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, who is being tried for his alleged part in the murders of James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman during Freedom Summer in 1964. For the most part the trial is symbolic as much as anything – Killen is 80, he was not the triggerman, and few seriously believe that the main motivating factor is either vengeance or the chance to rehabilitate “Preacher Ray.”
One unexpected element of the story involves what appears to be the small town of Philadelphia’s opportunity finally to, in the words of the Boston Globe, “Forge a hopeful future from” its “racist past.” Neshoba county’s reputation among civil rights workers was legendary. Several years after the killings (represented, in a rather ham-handed way, in the movie “Mississippi Burning”) Martin Luther King Jr. visited and came away calling Philadelphia the worst town he had ever seen in terms of racism. Given King’s experiences, that is a striking assertion. Philadelphia was in the news again in 1980 when Ronald Reagan chose, naively, stupidly, callously, to give his first major campaign speech (devoted to State’s Rights, natch) in Philadelphia at the behest of young Mississippi Congressman Trent Lott. In 1989, when then-Mississippi Secretary of State Dick Molpus apologized to the families of the three young men, the backlash proved harmful to his career. Perhaps this will be the opportunity for Philadelphia to remove this blot from its escutcheon.
But let us not be too hasty in cheering all Mississippians for going gently into that good night of racial tolerance. When the Senate gathered recently to apologize for its failure to enact lynching legislation throughout the 20th century, a symbolic but powerful move, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, the state’s two Senators, were nowhere to be seen. No one was shocked by Lott’s lack of support for the legislation. The former Ole Miss cheerleader who opposed James Meredith’s entry into his university, who changed political parties almost solely over the issue of civil rights, and who believed in 2002 (and presumably still does) that the Dixiecrats ought to have won the 1948 presidential election was not likely to take a stand for anything with even a whiff of a civil rights imprimatur. But Cochran's ommission came as more of a surprise. When asked about his lack of support for the feel-good resolution, Cochran’s response was terse: “I’m not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn’t do,” he told Washington Post columnist William Raspberry (who responded with this piece). Problem is, (well, there are many problems with this fatuous answer, but time is a factor here) that as Raspberry reveals, on two separate occassions Cochran’s name managed to make it on to the co-sponsorship of apologies to Native Americans and Japanese Americans. Apparently Cochran simply is not in the business of apologizing to black folks who suffered worse in his home state than anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Senator Robert Byrd has come out with a bulky memoir in which he still is unable fully to confront honestly his past ties with the Ku Klux Klan. Eric Pianin in yesterday’s Washington Post puts the Senator’s feet to the fire. Oddly, unlike, say, Trent Lott (or even Ronald Reagan, to be honest), Senator Byrd’s record on race since the Civil Rights Movement is better than anyone could have expected from the man who shamefully filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 14 hours. Since 1980 it has been rather good (he consistently receives 80% or thereabouts favorable ratings from the NAACP; Lott usually weighs in at about 10%). But his rhetoric has been wretched (who can forget Byrd’s inane, baffling, and offensive-to-all tirade against “white n------” a few years back?). His disingenuousness on the realities of his involvement in the Klan is a further problem for him. That involvement went on far longer than it ought to have, but it also ended before, say, the rise of the Dixiecrat Party from which Trent Lott today thinks Americans would have benefited. And Byrd's Klan past is not a secret. There is no plausible denial. Byrd had a chance with this memoir (which will appear today from West Virginia University Press) to address his personal history honestly. Instead, he seems to have tried the same old obfuscation and half-hearted apologia in lieu of staring uncomfortable truths square in the face.
Finally, on HNN’s main page, the University of Delaware’s Gary May writes about his own investigations into the parts played by the FBI and the KKK in the 1965 Klan murder of Viola Liuzzo in Alabama. The central figure in this tale is Gary Thomas Rowe, someone whose activities I have come to know well, as he played a vital and seamy role as an FBI informant while a member of the KKK during the Freedom Rides and in the years after. May’s new book, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, not only will be a must-read for Civil Rights historians, but also for those interested in the inner workings of government organizations that often tie themselves to bad guys in order allagedly to hunt down worse guys. May goes even further, though, in connecting his explorations to the role of informers in our global war against terrorists today.
Race is still with us. Incidents such as these will continue to reemerge. Sometimes when they do, they will bring about healing. Other times they will open old sores. And often they will simply serve to pick at scabs that serve as ugly, painful, festering reminders of self-inflicted wounds from our past.