(ed note: This is the second in a series of excerpts from from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Find part one here.)
Late on June 21, 1964, the day that Andrew Goodman arrived in Mississippi as one of the Northern students participating in Freedom Summer, he, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. The manner by which James Chaney, a 21-year old black Mississippian, was killed differed from the deaths of Goodman and Schwerner who were white and who received close range gunshots. While Chaney had also been shot, his skull was crushed. Over time, I decided that this contrastive and particularly savage treatment of Chaney had its idiosyncratic and perverse reason. Of course, the additional, special violence meted out to James Chaney could be simply a demonstration of the flagrant anger that those white Southerners held for black Mississippians, especially those who aligned themselves with Northern students engaging in the summer invasion. On the other hand, one can imagine the high dudgeon those white supremacists harbored for the white students, Goodman and Schwerner, who were set on amending the racial fabric of Mississippi.
Rather, I decided that those who murdered the three civil rights workers meant to send a message, a singularly harsh message, to black Mississippians, a message that echoed the fiendish manner Emmett Till had also been murdered outside Money, Mississippi nearly a decade earlier. Till, only fourteen at the time, was also shot, but first was brutalized callously and mercilessly by having his skull crushed, apparently through repeated blows, probably with the butt handle of a pistol, before being shot. I do not believe that the parallel way these two young African-Americans, Till and Chaney, died was coincidental or accidental, for the similarity meant to convey a message and a warning.
In small towns, blacks had always shared with each other bits of knowledge and experience about racist firebrands to be avoided. And now, following Freedom Summer, the caution would be redoubled for African-Americans to give local “peckerwoods” a lot of space and to try to stay away from confronting them. Blacks and whites together recognized the peckerwoods, those of the same ilk that tore fourteen-year old Emmett Till apart before shooting him and those who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Most every small town in the South had their peckerwoods, the pitiless whites, who seemed to be authorized to enforce violently, if necessary, racial codes and who always seemed, especially to blacks, to be on some kind of prowl. Southern blacks now had real and special incentives for walking on the other side of the street from a gathering of peckerwoods and for letting them take a favored parking space, as white law enforcement officers in small Southern towns often gave peckerwoods a long leash from the law. With blacks threatening advancement everywhere in the South, peckerwoods had reason to lash out at close reminders of those threats. So, blacks woke up cautious and slept cautiously.