Mamalicious!

I’ve never been all that into Valentine’s Day. Even though Hallmark has a card for every conceivable relationship possible (”Happy Valentine’s Day to My Favorite Gynecologist!”), the day is mostly a celebration of romance–something that was, until recently, in fairly short supply in my life. My reactions to Valentine’s Day varied over the past two decades. Sometimes I took the cynic’s path: Why do we need to set aside a day to tell people we love them? Shouldn’t we be telling showing them this all year round? Other times, Valentine’s Day only served to remind me of what I wanted, but did not have. Not exactly cause for celebration.

What constitutes “romance” is certainly subjective, and “love” and “romance” are different animals. You can have one without a sincere measure of the other, and I’ve been on both sides of that reality. But even now, enjoying the sweetness of having both, I still can’t make a connection between what I have learned about love in nearly 40 years of living, of love found and of love lost–I still can’t make a connection between these complexities and…red hearts, boxes of chocolates, flowers.

Don’t misunderstand. I do believe in love, falling in love, being crazy in love, silly, nauseatingly in love, love-sick…the whole nine. I love love. I come from a long line of hard-loving women, whose default was to let the heart lead, with serious veto power over the head. Then I came along and learned from the school of hard knocks and disappointment that I should not expect to live my life, as my friend Meir puts it, “according to R&B lyrics.”

A rude awakening, but an awakening none the less.

But…my optimism has a longer history than my cynicism. And maybe–hopefully–what sometimes feels like Scrooge-ism in February is really some kind of wisdom. Maybe I have a more grounded, realistic understanding and appreciation of love because I have arrived at that same kind of understanding and appreciation for myself and others.

And, if I turn down the volume on the R&B lyrics for a minute, I embrace the fact–and accept the emotional and intellectual challenge–that God is love. Love is bigger than I once imagined, and sometimes that overwhelms me.

Perhaps, in time, I’ll jump on the Valentine’s Day bandwagon again. Back in the day, year after elementary school year, I looked forward to addressing and licking 27 Valentine’s cards, one for each kid in my class. Remember when distributing those little pastel candy hearts with “be mine” and “let’s kiss” stamped on them could cause a scandal during recess?

In the meantime, I don’t knock anyone else’s celebration of the day. And I will never turn away a box of Godiva chocolates. Please note.

~~~

This year on Valentine’s Day, I find myself in the middle of a 32-Day Black History blogathon that has given me an incentive to consider Valentine’s Day in a different light, to think about that bigger love.

I searched Wikipedia for the origins of Valentine’s Day, seeking some “black” connection, I suppose. I found this:

Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14. In North America, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. The holiday is named after two among the numerous Early Christian martyrs named Valentine. The day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

Nothing explicitly about black folks, but we sure know a thing or twenty about martyrs. Of course Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to mind immediately. But so did three lesser-known martyrs of the Civil Rights-era: Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney.

There’s no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
–John 15:13 (New Living Translation)

Back to wiki…

The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders involved the 1964 slayings of three political activists during the American Civil Rights Movement.

The murders of James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish social worker also from New York, symbolized the risks of participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the South during what became known as “Freedom Summer”, dedicated to voter registration.

The case also underscored the extensive participation of Jewish-Americans during the Civil Rights era working in concert with African-Americans.

The case

The killings of the three young men occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, just one day after the trio had arrived in Mississippi. The men had just finished a week-long training on the campus of Western College for Women (now part of Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio) regarding strategies on how to register blacks to vote.

After getting a haircut from an African-American barber in Meridian, the three men headed to Longdale, 50 miles away in Neshoba County, in order to inspect the ruins of Mount Zion United Methodist Church. The church, a meeting place for civil rights groups, had been burned just five days earlier.

Before they left the area, they stopped by the local office of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group of four civil rights organizations. Schwerner, aware that the station wagon’s license number had been given to members of the notorious local Citizens Council, told COFO workers to contact the FBI if he hadn’t called them by 4:30 p.m.

At approximately 5:00, Neshoba County deputy Cecil Price stopped the blue Ford carrying the trio. He arrested Chaney for allegedly driving 35 miles per hour over the speed limit. He also booked Goodman and Schwerner, “for investigation.”

Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were all denied telephone calls during their time at the jail. COFO workers made attempts to find the three men, but when they called the Neshoba County jail, the secretary followed her instructions to lie and told the workers the three young men were not there.

While awaiting their release, the men were given a dinner of spoon bread, green peas, potatoes and salad. Chaney was then fined $20, and the three men were ordered to leave the county. Price followed them to the edge of town, and saw them heading toward Meridian on State Highway 19, at approximately 10:30 p.m.

Disappearance

The three men never arrived in Meridian. Police found guns in the charred remains of the station wagon, which had three of its hubcaps removed. They noted the car was facing the opposite direction from what Price had told investigators.

Some local officials were hardly sympathetic to the situation. Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey said, “They’re just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state”. Mississippi governor Paul Johnson dismissed concern by stating that “they could be in Cuba“.

For a while, the trail went cold. When the FBI offered a $25,000 reward for news of the men’s whereabouts, a break came in the case. On 4th August (1964), acting on information received, the FBI found the bodies of the three men on Olen Burrage’s Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia. The identity of the informant, known as “Mr. X.”, was a closely held secret for 40 years. In the process of reopening the case, journalist Jerry Mitchell and teacher Barry Bradford uncovered his real name. Autopsies revealed that Goodman and Schwerner had each been shot once in the heart with a .38-caliber bullet, while Chaney had been shot three times after being severely beaten.

Trial

The US Justice Department charged eighteen individuals under the 1870 US Force Act, with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights (by murder). The charges were lodged against Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and 16 other men. Cecil Price was among the seven men found guilty (see U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al.). Two of the defendants, E.G. Barnett, a Democratic candidate for sheriff, and Edgar Ray Killen, a local minister, had been strongly implicated in the murders by witnesses, but because the jury came to a deadlock on their charges, they were acquitted.

Aftermath

For much of the next four decades, no legal action was taken on the murders. Several films dramatized the events of that summer. In 1974, a CBS made-for-television movie aired, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, co-starring Wayne Rogers and Ned Beatty. This was followed in 1988 by Mississippi Burning, with Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman; and in 1990 by Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Blair Underwood and Josh Charles. The sympathetic portrayal of FBI agents in the first two movies angered civil rights activists, who believed they received too much credit.

Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, wrote extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer.

In the case of the civil rights workers, Mitchell developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the state to take action. Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell’s efforts. Bradford later achieved recognition for helping clear the name of Civil Rights martyr Clyde Kennard.

Together the team produced a documentary for the National History Day contest. It presented important new evidence and compelling reasons to reopen the case. The team also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen, which helped convince the State to reinvestigate. Partially by using evidence developed by Bradford and the students, Mitchell was able to determine the identity of “Mr. X”, the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964.

Mitchell’s investigation and the high school students’ work in creating Congressional pressure, national media attention and a taped conversation with Killen prompted action. On the 40th anniversary of the murders, a multi-ethnic group of citizens in Philadelphia, Mississippi, issued a call for justice. The multi-ethnic Philadelphia Coalition, which had gathered to work on racial reconciliation, issued a call for justice in the case of the civil rights workers. More than 1500 people, including civil rights leaders and Mississippi Gov. Haley R. Barbour, joined them in Philadelphia to publicize a desire to revisit the case.

2005 Trial

On January 6, 2005, a Neshoba County grand jury indicted Edgar Ray Killen on three counts of murder. When Mississippi Attorney General prosecuted the case, it was the first time the state took action against the perpetrators. On June 21, 2005, a jury convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter.

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi (1980) where the three civil rights workers were murdered.

Playing to the GOP ‘Southern Strategy,’ and urged by Trent Lott, Reagan’s mention of his support for “states’ rights” was clearly understood by white Southern voters as a code for opposition to black civil rights.

Mob Involvement

In 2007 Linda Schiro testified in a different court case that her late boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa Sr., a soldier of the Colombo crime family, had been recruited by the FBI to help find the civil rights workers’ bodies. She said that Scarpa told her he had forced a Klansman to reveal the whereabouts of the victims by placing a gun in his mouth. The notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era had been talked about in mob circles for years.

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You are in the midst of a blogathon celebrating 32 Days of Black History! Yvette at Six Impossible Things…and I are joined by InkogNegro,Christina, Chris,and Tami.Visit, comment, bookmark!

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 12:51 am and is filed under 32 Days of Black History, Love 101, Race Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.