In honor of Martin Luther King day, I am posting two long excerpts are from “My Soul is Rested,” an oral history of the civil rights movement edited by Howell Raines. Neither pertains to Dr. King directly. They are from two interviews with the leaders of “Freedom Summer”, the voter registration drive in Mississippi, in 1964. Both speak of the murders of volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in Philadelphia Mississippi on June 24 of that year.
Dave Dennis, the state director of CORE, p. 276:
Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney….that bothers me all the time, because as it’s come to me from FBI agents who investigated and also the fact of actual statements by the people who did it…they didn’t want Goodman. At the time that they stopped the car, they thought that I was in that car. That car belonged to me anyway, you know. It was a car assigned to me by CORE….Mickey Schwerner was over there, Chaney was involved in that, because the fact is that I signed Schwerner to the Meridian and Philadelphia, Mississippi, areas….
It just seems that through the whole Movement…for some reason I wasn’t there at the time, and they were all by chance. All by chance. When Medgar was killed, I had his car all day. I had gone to Canton, Mississippi, came back in, met him at the church, gave him his car, and he told me that why don’t I come have a drink. I told him, “Naw, you’re a bad risk for me to go with you to have a drink.” So we laughed about that. I told him I wasn’t going with him; we just laughed. He got in his car and went home, and I got a ride with somebody else that took me home. And a little while later, there was a phone call saying Medgar Evers had just been shot. During that period of time, very seldom I ever, you know, missed a chance to have a drink, because you didn’t get it too often in Mississippi at that period of time. But I said no….
But it just seems as if I was–I was just never there, and that weighs heavy, too, because a lot of things that happened that caused a lot of people to become physically hurt, I started. All right? And I came out of it ninety nine percent of the time without even getting a scratch….