This book is not exactly a "who done it." There’s an element of that. But the reality was that most of the community (especially in Philadelphia) and law enforcement (especially the FBI) knew who the perpetrators were. The problem was getting a conviction. In the mid-1960s, Mississippi and Alabama juries were composed solely of white men who believed that killing civil rights workers, and "niggers" generally, was not a crime, it was a public service. It took a change of generations, an expansion of juries to include women and blacks, and a lot of publicity to turn that around.
Another lesson from this book is the importance of publicity in bringing justice. It’s of no small matter that Jerry Mitchell was a journalist, whose bosses were willing to publish stories on these old cases and his efforts to find sources and witnesses. As Mitchell belatedly discovered, before Gannett bought the C-L and its sister paper the Jackson Daily News in 1982, they were owned by a family devoted to white supremacy who were charter members of the establishment. It would have been instructive to reprint (or summarize) some of the stories written at the time in these newspapers about the murders Mitchell wrote about decades later. There may have been only a few, because the death of civil rights activists, whether outside agitators or local people, wasn’t really news in those days.
His stories were not the only publicity about the murders. There were movies, TV shows, and articles in Northern newspapers and national magazines. These often led those who saw them and who knew something to call Mitchell, or the FBI, and report what they knew. Some who did this had been personally involved but had a change of heart over the years. Most had heard a perpetrator talk about participating in, or instigating, the murders. All of these reports helped younger prosecutors acquire the evidence necessary for convictions decades after the deeds. Indeed it was the high-profile cases which eventually received a modicum of justice, not the lesser-knowns.
Some photographs, and maybe an appendix with some of Mitchell’s original stories, would have added icing to the cake. These are quibbles. This book is a good read; both entertaining and informative.
©2020 by Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
Editor's Note:
Jo Freeman is almost finished with her own book on working for SCLC: Tell It Like It Is: Living History in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 1965-66
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