Civil Rights: Grim Discovery in Mississippi

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CIVIL RIGHTS

In 101° heat, FBI agents swarmed over an earthen dam on Olen Barrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Miss. Through the scrub pines and bitterweed, they bulldozed a path to the dam, then brought up a lumbering dragline whose huge bucket shovel began chewing a V-shaped wedge out of the 25-ft.-high levee. Twenty feet down, the shovel uncovered the fully clothed, badly decomposed bodies of three young men, lying side by side in a pocket of red clay. They had been dumped there while the dam was still being built, and in the weeks afterward a local contractor had unknowingly piled earth higher and higher on their primitive graves.

The agents packed the bodies in ice, sealed them in black plastic bags marked Xl, X-2 and X3, and rushed them to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, 80 miles away. There a team of pathologists, using dental and fingerprint charts, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what everybody had already suspected. These were the bodies of missing Civil Rights Work ers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both white, and James Chancy, 21, a Negro.

"They're Just Hiding." Thus ended a six-week search that began after the three men disappeared on June 21, just one day after they had arrived in Mississippi. They had attended a week-long indoctrination course, sponsored by a civil rights coalition called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y. wigmaker and a graduate of Cornell, had been working for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss., since January, had volunteered to go up to Oxford to instruct Northern students in voter-registration techniques. Chancy, a slender young man from Meridian, had accompanied him. Goodman was the son of a New York City building contractor and a student at Queens College. All were working with the 400 volunteers sent into Mississippi by COFO to help register Negroes.

The three had had time for just one night's sleep in Meridian when they decided to drive over to Longdale to inspect the ruins of a Negro church that had been burned down by segregationists. Returning to Meridian, they were picked up outside Philadelphia by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for speeding. Price said later he had held them until 10:30 that steamy, moonlit night, then turned them loose.

The three young men never made it back to Meridian. Two days later, the burned wreck of their blue Ford station wagon was found twelve miles northeast of Philadelphia. While an army of FBI men and 400 sailors took up a painstaking ten-county search, many Mississippians preferred to believe that their disappearance was all a hoax. "They could be in Cuba," said Governor Paul Johnson airily. "They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity," pshawed Neshoba Sheriff L. A. Rainey.