Tomorrow-Land (26 page)

In May the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith filed a lawsuit to have the Jordan Pavilion closed on the grounds that the disputed mural was “anti-Semitic.” Then, ignoring the Fair's “no demonstration” policy, Dr. Prinz led a group of one dozen protesters to the Jordan Pavilion on May 25 and was arrested (although well-behaved, the group was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest; all charges that were dismissed the following month). Meanwhile, his lawyers filed a suit alleging that the Fair's no-pickets-allowed law was unconstitutional, which they eventually won. There would be protests outside both pavilions, much to Moses' chagrin.

And just to add a dose of true international tension to the problem, the Israeli premier, Levi Eshkol, cancelled his scheduled May 11 official visit to the Fair to protest Moses' refusal to remove the mural. A month later, someone removed the national flag of the Kingdom of Jordan flying from the flagpole outside its pavilion, replacing it with a blue-and-white flag inscribed with the words “American Israel.” This prompted the Jordanian ambassador to the United Nations to lodge a formal complaint with the UN.

It was in this atmosphere that the World's Fair Corporation's board of directors met for the first time since opening day. On June 22 they gathered inside the Beech-Nut Theatre in the Better Living Center. Despite the headlines, there was actually good news: The Fair was averaging one million visitors a week, and fixes for general problems were being developed. Charles F. Preusse, the Fair's lawyer, quickly asserted that due to the two outstanding lawsuits regarding the Jordanian mural, a motion be adopted to not discuss the matter. Moses, gavel in hand, quickly accepted the motion.

However, Alex Rose, vice chairman of the Liberal Party of New York and a union leader, wouldn't hear of it. He stepped up to a microphone and declared the Jordanian mural “a war slogan against Israel.” The two
men testily exchanged words, until Senator Jacob K. Javitz, one of the Fair's (and Moses') original backers, took the microphone from Rose and suggested that the matter deserved a vote. Board members fidgeted in their seats or sighed, making little to no effort to hide their displeasure. A vote was taken and Moses' no-discussion faction (which included all of the Fair's top executives and General John J. McCloy) easily won.

Just then Harry Van Arsdale, a powerful union leader, stepped forward to offer his still unvoiced vote to the minority “if I thought that my vote would help Israel.” Moses repeatedly slammed his gavel, drowning him out, and instructed General William E. Potter, the Fair's executive vice president, to issue his report. When New York State Senator Joseph Zaretzki interrupted Potter again, Moses repeatedly banged his gavel.

“You can't gavel this resolution down!” Zaretzki shouted as Moses ignored him. “I'm raising a point of order. Under Article Six of—” But gaveling him down is exactly what Moses did. Potter went on to give his report, and that was the end of the meeting. Within a week, Zaretzki had resigned from the board and began referring to the Master Builder as “Boss Moses.” “Although he is a benevolent despot,” Zaretzki told the
Times,
“[he] is a despot just the same.”

With the situation rapidly devolving into a political blood sport, the New York City Council couldn't resist the urge to jump into the fray (1964 was an election year, after all). They passed a unanimous resolution demanding the mural's removal because it was “gratuitously insulting.” Moses released a statement saying the City Council “asks suppression of free speech” before going on to say that the US Constitution “assumes that ideas will be tested in the intellectual marketplace. Opinions are not to be blue-penciled because some censor, however well intentioned, finds them ‘controversial,' ‘irritating' or ‘offensive.' ” Moses argued, essentially, that there are two sides to every story—even preferred historical narratives of a nation's birth. Noting that the American-Israel Pavilion was now planning a parody of the Jordanian mural in its courtyard—free of charge to the public—that was unabashedly pro-Israel, Moses pointedly asked the City Council if it would “now demand that an iron curtain be drawn around the unofficial American-Israel pavilion?”

Regardless of who asked him to reconsider—including his friend Senator Keating—Moses refused. When it came to censoring pavilions, Moses was remarkably consistent. Just as he had when the US State Department demanded to know the details of the Soviet Union's exhibit, Moses refused to get caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war. No lover of Communism by any stretch of the imagination, Moses noted that if the Soviets were paying for their pavilion, then they could put on any exhibit they wanted, a remarkably laissez-faire approach for such a renowned micromanager.

Up until the early summer of 1964, Moses was reluctant to veto anything or be seen choosing one side over another, particularly when it came to religion or politics. Choosing sides meant alienating someone. And with his designs for Flushing Meadow Park, he would need millions of dollars in public funds and profits from the Fair; there wasn't time to alienate anyone who could be in a position to help him.

To date, the only exhibit that Moses had censored was Walter Keane's haunting painting of zombie-eyed children titled
Tomorrow Forever,
which bizarrely enough was chosen to hang in the Hall of Education despite the painting's reminiscence of the 1960 British horror film
Village of the Damned
. “His product has become synonymous among critics with the very definition of tasteless hack work,” Canaday wrote in the
New York
Times
. Moses thought so, too, and on the grounds that the painting was in “bad taste,” had it removed. But what upset him even more was realizing he was simpatico with his least favorite art critic. “I hate like hell to agree with that crab Canaday who never loses a chance to toss mud at the Fair,” Moses complained to a friend, “but this time he's right.”

23.

When the terrorists murder with the complicity of the police, and when a society supports and cannot condemn them, then the society—or the state itself—may be guilty. This was Nazi Germany's crime at Auschwitz . . . it was Mississippi's crime at Philadelphia.

—William Bradford Huie,
Three Lives for Mississippi,
1965

 

On April 23, the day after the World's Fair opened, Andrew Goodman had returned to his studies at Queens College. A junior, the twenty-year-old Goodman was working on a sociology paper about the Black Muslims, trying to understand the social forces that had created the segregationist religious organization. Goodman didn't buy into the Nation of Islam's racist rhetoric that all white men were blue-eyed devils, but he thought he understood what was fueling their anger. “The white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general),” he wrote, “has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes toward the negro race.” He went on to conclude that “people must have dignity and identity. If they can't do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.”

Although he had enrolled in Queens College for its strong Drama Department—Goodman was a sometimes actor who performed in off-Broadway plays—he was getting serious about the social sciences, particularly sociology. Whatever his future held, he knew one thing for certain: He was going down to Mississippi to participate in what was being hailed as the Freedom Summer, a massive push—manned by Northern college students and orchestrated by the SNCC and CORE—to register Southern blacks to vote. Goodman had been attending the political lectures at the school. He was in attendance when Louis E. Lomax had first suggested a stall-in to disrupt the World's Fair. After the talk, he was one of fifty students who, motivated by what they heard, approached Lomax to ask him what they should do to help.

After another lecture at Queens College on April 9, Goodman had found his answer. The talk was given by Allard Lowenstein, a veteran
organizer who had helped launch the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, at Queens College. Protesting job discrimination at the World's Fair was a just cause for Goodman, but Mississippi was on the front lines in the battle for black freedom.

Mississippi was, Lowenstein told his Queens College audience, “the most totalitarian state in America.” Essentially a police state run by hate-filled politicians who made a living by appealing to their constituents' racist tendencies, Mississippi exploited the “hate vote” for all its electoral value. And like many Southern states—and even a few Northern ones—Mississippi had its own homegrown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, that did as it pleased.

Lowenstein wasn't trying to sugarcoat the situation. Going to Mississippi would be dangerous. Race violence in Mississippi was as prevalent as summer humidity, and no one, including Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. seemed to mind. A Democrat who was elected in 1964 on a campaign of racial hatred, Johnson's stump speech contained the line: “You know what NAACP stands for—niggers, alligators, apes, coons and possums.” Plenty of Mississippi's sheriffs were friendly with the Klan, if not active members themselves. As syndicated political columnist Joseph Alsop wrote in early June: “Southern Mississippi is now known to contain no fewer than sixty thousand armed men organized to what amounts to terrorism. Acts of terrorism against the local Negro populace are already an everyday occurrence.” Goodman had no illusions about what he was getting himself into. “I'm afraid,” he told a friend before his departure, “but I'm going.”

By the time Goodman left in mid-June, fellow New Yorkers Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, age twenty-four, and his wife, Rita, twenty-two, were already in Meridian, Mississippi. They had been there since January 17, after driving their Volkswagen all the way from their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. So optimistic about human nature was Schwerner, that he, a conscientious and outgoing young man, had bought a German car, something that many Jewish Americans—particularly ones that had lost family members in the Holocaust like Schwerner had—actively avoided.

On April 23, the day after the World's Fair opened, the married couple and another CORE worker wrote a letter to their organization's national office requesting that James Chaney, age twenty-two, get added to the group's payroll. Chaney, a local African American from Meridian, was central to their work. He also drove the blue Ford station wagon that CORE had given the group, racing his way around every back road in Meridian and the local counties like he had hellhounds on his trail. It was an important survival skill for a black Mississippian—or a Northern college student: Getting pulled over by a white police officer on a backcountry road with only the moonlight as a witness could be a death sentence. And Chaney was unafraid to recruit blacks in the toughest areas where the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme. “Chaney was one of our best men,” James L. Farmer Jr. would later say. “He was a native of Mississippi. He was a child of the soiled. . . . He was invaluable.”

Most importantly, he was their link to the local black community, who were well aware of young, white Northerners and the hell they would catch if local whites or the police heard they were talking to outside “agitators.” Someone might burn a cross on their lawn or firebomb their house. There were eyes watching them everywhere, including the “Big Toms”—local blacks who spied for the police. Sometimes called “Judas niggers” by their fellow black Mississippians, they were often well-to-do black locals who had a stake in the status quo and were expected to keep their poorer black brethren in line and away from these young civil rights workers and their Northern ideas about integration. Chaney knew better than anyone else what local blacks were up against; he understood their pain and fears; he knew what their lives were like. And he knew that state-sanctioned organizations such as the KKK were all but immune from punishment.

In mid-June
the Schwerners and Chaney traveled to the Women's College in Columbus, Ohio, for three days of training, and met Goodman for the first time. They had plenty in common: Goodman and Mickey had attended the prestigious Walton School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where Goodman had grown up; and Goodman was a student at Queens College, where Rita was finishing up her BA in English. “He
was such a fine, intelligent, unassuming young man,” Rita would later say. “He and I had much to talk about.”

While they attended conferences and seminars, word reached them that Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi, a rural district outside of Meridian, was burned to the ground and several of its members—including an elderly man—were pistol-whipped and beaten by Klansmen who had discovered that the churchgoers had met with Mickey Schwerner. Long before Goodman had ever met him, Schwerner was on the KKK's hit list. To those who wanted him dead, he was simply known as Goatee.

Schwerner's regular uniform of blue jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, a blue New York Mets cap, and Beatnik-esque facial hair made him stand out like a thicket of weeds on fresh-cut Mississippi grass. Schwerner was a social worker back in New York, having graduated from Cornell University in 1962. He had a disarming nature that put people at ease—no easy feat for a white Northerner in the rural South. He had become fast friends with the soft-spoken Chaney, whom he affectionately dubbed Bear, often eating home-cooked meals at Chaney's house. In time, Fannie Lou Chaney would come to think of Schwerner as another son.

Everywhere Schwerner went outside his activist family, white bigots shouted at him “Communist nigger-loving Jewboy!” and the like. Many of his verbal tormentors were, by day, law-abiding, church-going citizens. Under the cover of darkness, they wore elaborate costumes, burned crosses, firebombed black churches and homes, and did much worse.

It was exactly this kind of hatred that drew Schwerner and Goodman to Mississippi. After reading about the September 15 murders of the four little girls at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, Schwerner knew he wanted to do more. As a Jew who believed the kind of hatred that produced Nazi Germany wouldn't happen again, he went down to Mississippi to make sure that it didn't. Then he heard about the beatings in Longdale and how their church was burned to the ground. He refused to stay in Ohio any longer. By 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were driving back to Meridian, while
Schwerner's wife, Rita, stayed behind to teach new trainees for another week. After they arrived, Schwerner reminded Goodman that things might get ugly; he needed to be ready.

“I'm no child,” Goodman told him. “I want to get into the thick of the fight.”

Things were happening fast. Just hours before the trio took off for Mississippi, a momentous event in the history of the American republic had occurred: The US Senate finally passed President Johnson's civil rights bill by a margin that, in the end, wasn't even close: seventy-three to twenty-seven. The bill had passed after the longest filibuster in the chamber's history, courtesy of the “Southern bloc” of racist Dixiecrats led by Senator Richard B. Russell, who declared: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”

On the morning of June 10, 1964, the resistance faltered. Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat and former Klansman from West Virginia, then in his first term, was the last hold out. There would be no more delay to the most important legislative achievement in America of the twentieth century. No longer could the Dixiecrats, including the ignoble signers of the Southern Manifesto or the handful of Republicans who had joined them—including the man who would soon represent the Grand Old Party as its presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona—hold back the tide of history. For the first time in America, discrimination in the public square was illegal.

In New York, where the Empire State's pair of liberal Republican senators, Jacob K. Javitz and Kenneth Keating—both friends of the World's Fair and Robert Moses—proudly voted for the bill, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was viewed as the momentous event that it was. In Meridian, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, the passage of the Civil Rights Act was just the latest offensive by the North. The
Dallas Morning News
wrote an editorial claiming that the real trouble wasn't Jim Crow but “the unjustified, uncalled for invasion” of Mississippi “by a bunch of Northern students schooled in advance in
causing trouble under the guise of bringing ‘freedom' to . . . Negroes.” Mississippi's Governor Johnson predicted “turmoil, strife and bloodshed lie ahead” for his state. After signing the bill into law, President Johnson lamented to an aide that “we just lost the South for a generation.” In fact, it would be a lot longer than that.

The same day that Southern newspapers and radio lamented that their “way of life” was now illegal—June 21, 1964—was the day that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman arrived in Meridian. The next morning they drove out to Longdale to meet with the victimized members of the burned-out Mount Zion Methodist Church. But before he left, Schwerner reminded Sue Brown, a young black woman who worked at the center, that they would be back by 4:00 p.m., as per standard operating procedure. If they weren't back by 4:30 p.m. then, according to procedure, she should start calling every police station, jailhouse, or courthouse in the surrounding areas. “Don't worry,” he said, “we'll be back.” When 4:30 came and went and no one had seen the three of them, Brown began a frantic round of phone calls, including one to the jailhouse in nearby Philadelphia, on which she was informed that no one by those names had been arrested.

That was a lie.

In the same blue Ford station wagon that they drove from Ohio, the trio had headed toward Meridian on Route 491 around 3:00 p.m. That's when Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price saw them, and promptly arrested them. Some witnesses said that the Ford station wagon tried to outrace Price, but that the deputy shot their tire out. Price charged Chaney, who was driving, with speeding; he claimed the other two were being held “for suspicion of arson” for burning the Mount Zion Methodist Church, an utter fabrication. After they had been put in jail—Schwerner and Goodman with white prisoners and Chaney with a black prisoner—­­it wasn't long before someone made a phone call informing local Klansmen that Goatee was in custody in Philadelphia. The plan to murder Schwerner was quickly set in stone. The only question that remained was what to do with the other two. Soon enough, the Klansmen decided their fate: They would have to die with Goatee.

The plan was simple. The police let the three go on Sunday, June 22, after 10:00 p.m., telling them to hightail it out of town. Then they followed them and pulled them over again. This time, they forced the three “agitators” into the backseat of a car and drove down a dark, dirt road, where the KKK were waiting. As the trio sat in the car wondering what would happen next, the Klansmen jeered them with chants of “If you stayed were you were, you'd be safe, but now you're here with us.”

They pulled Schwerner out of the backseat and shoved him against the car, pointing a gun at his chest.

“You think a nigger is as good as me?” one of them asked.

Before Schwerner could answer the question, his assailant blew a hole in his chest. Then they grabbed Goodman, who had barely been in Mississippi twenty-four hours, and the same assailant blasted him with the same gun—one shot to the chest.

“All you left me was a nigger to kill,” Chaney's assailant lamented as they grabbed him from the backseat. After seeing what had happened to his good friend Schwerner and Goodman, Chaney struggled, trying to make a break for it. But after being shot three times, the native Mississippian fell. Then, according to forensic evidence, they beat him so savagely, his skull and shoulder were crushed.