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2005 A Righteous Anger in Mississippi: Genre Constraints and Breaking Precedence William H. Lawson

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION

A RIGHTEOUS ANGER IN MISSISSIPPI:

GENRE CONSTRAINTS AND BREAKING PRECEDENCE

By

WILLIAM H. LAWSON

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of William H. Lawson on December

10, 2004.

______Davis Houck Professor Directing Thesis

______Marilyn J Young Committee Member

______Joe Richardson Committee Member

Approved:

______Steve McDowell, Chair, Department of Communication

______John Mayo, Dean, College of Communication

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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For my favorite historian and critic, my father, Brig. Gen. William H. Lawson

In a letter to his son Robert E. Lee wrote: You must study to be frank with the world. Frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do, on every occasion, and take it for granted that you mean to do right. If a friend asks a favor, you should grant it, if it is reasonable; if not, tell him plainly why you cannot; you would wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so is dearly purchased at the sacrifice. Deal kindly but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all, do not appear to others what you are not. If you have any fault to find with any one, tell him, not others, of what you complain; there is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back. We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of any one. It is not only for the best as a matter of principle, but it is the path of peace and honor. In regard to duty, let me, in conclusion of this hasty letter, inform you that nearly a hundred years ago there was a day of remarkable gloom and darkness--- still known as “the dark day”--- a day when the light of the sun was slowly extinguished, as if by an eclipse. The Legislature of Connecticut was in session, and as its members saw the unexpected and unaccountable darkness coming on, they shared in a general awe and terror. It was supposed by many that the last day---the day of judgment--- had come. Someone, in the consternation of the hour moved an adjournment. Then there arouse an old Puritan legislator, Davenport, of Stamford, and said that, if the last day had come, he desired to be found at his place doing his duty, and therefore moved that candles be brought in, so that the House could proceed with its duty. There was a quietness in that man’s mind, the quietness of heavenly wisdom and inflexible willingness to obey present duty. Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things like the old Puritan. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less. Never let your mother or me wear one grey hair for any lack of duty on your part.

Thank you for sharing this wisdom Dad.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank many individuals whose participation was absolutely crucial in the production of this thesis. The assistance of Dana Zapata with formatting and structural issues must be noted. The patience of Shannon Thompson is truly adored by the author, she not only read initial manuscripts, asked inspiring questions, but also gave approving nods. Whether during a game of darts, over a billiard’s table, or enjoying a pint at the pub Derrick Shannon contributed to this thesis through his thoughtful perspective, constant inquisitive disposition, and the countless readings and re-readings he performed over the course of the last few months. It did not matter where or when, Derrick was willing to engage any dialogue concerning this thesis, and I most humbly and personally thank him. You are a true friend Derrick, your earnest sincerity and honorable poise will forever be remembered. Recognition is due to the esteemed defense board of this thesis. Dr. Joe Richardson, Dr. Marilyn J. Young, and Dr. Davis W. Houck represent the kind of scholars and educators the author aspires to become. Dr. Richardson’s insight into the historical narrative drives the storyline of this thesis. Dr. Young’s advice towards the critical approach and practice of this thesis is quiet apparent. Dr. Houck’s persistent and inspiring motivation are inseparable from not only this text, but from the author’s own character. Dr. Houck has lit “a fire that can’t be put out.” Final appreciation and gratitude from the author is extended to Reverend Edwin King. Reverend King openly welcomed this wayward traveling researcher into his home, providing not only authentic, honest, and genuine insight into the Movement, but the most delicious chicken and dumplings, and comfortable bed. His voice, teachings, and legacy will never go unheeded as long as this author can put pen to paper.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………….vi

INTRODUCTION: WHERE IS YOUR BODY? ...... ……………..1

1. THE LAND WAS THEIRS BEFORE THEY WERE THE LAND’S ..……………..6

2. VIOLATING GENERIC CONSTRAINTS FOR JUSTICE ..………………………19

3. “VENGENCE IN MY HEART TONIGHT” ………………………………………..28

4. “DO NOT LET YOUR ANGER DIE” ……..……………………………………….39

CONCLUSION: NOT TO PRAISE BUT TO BURY …………………………………49

APPENDIX A: EULOGY FOR JAMES CHANEY BY DAVE DENNIS …………..55

APPENDIX B: EULOGY FOR JAMES CHANEY BY EDWIN KING ……………..60

NOTES ….…………………………………….………………………………….…….67

BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………..…………………….……75

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………...84

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ABSTRACT

The focus of this thesis centers on the recovery of primary sources. The eulogies within this text serve as examples of speeches which do not fully adhere to the generic propriety of their classification, yet still produce significant rhetorical action embedded within themselves. These eulogies highlight the link between memory and knowledge, and the influence each has upon the other. It is the attempt to persuade public memory in their given rhetorical situation which makes these particular speeches so rhetorically attractive. The goal of this thesis is not to judge whether or not the rhetors are successful with their method of persuasion, the aim is to make manifest the rhetorical action within the texts themselves.

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INTRODUCTION: WHERE IS YOUR BODY?

June 21, 1964, was a day of perfection. Jim Bunning threw the first perfect game the National League had seen in 84 years as the Philadelphia Phillies took the first game of a Sunday doubleheader from the Mets at Shea Stadium.1 Sitting down all 27 Mets batters in succession, Bunning became the eighth man in the 88 year history of Major League Baseball to achieve pitching perfection. Bunning represented a new kind of athlete that day. Coming from a middle class upbringing and having graduated from Xavier University he embodied a new generation of athletes. He was not the son of a dust-bowl farmer, or tenement dweller trying to make the big leagues to escape poverty. His family was not struggling immigrants or small town laborers. James Paul David Bunning was the coming of age of the suburban raised, private schooled, and college educated athlete. Over a thousand miles and seven states away another kind of perfection was being initiated. A group of men were carrying out what they believed to be the perfect crime, and for 44 days that summer they were perfect. Their actions were a first in the state of Mississippi. Never before had white men been buried with black men: a precedent so strong that the bodies had to be buried by moonlight, in an earthen dam, under the nightscape of utmost secrecy. These men were hiding the bodies of three civil rights volunteers.2 Two of the volunteers were not that different from Jim Bunning. Andrew Goodman and Michael (Mickey) Schwerner were middle class men in their early twenties from New York. Both were college educated and ready to make a change in the world beyond their own individual lives. Goodman and Schwerner, like Bunning for baseball, represented a new warrior in the Civil Rights battle: the white, middle class, college student ready and eager to make changes in the turbulent sixties. The two were buried with a Mississippian, James Earl Chaney, another man barely in his twenties, with hardly a high school level of

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education, but willing to shoulder the work that was required to bring change for poor Mississippi blacks like him and his family. Shortly after Bunning finished his perfect game a group of white Mississippi men put their perfect crime into motion. Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were headed into the eastern city limits of Philadelphia, Mississippi, county seat of Neshoba, when they were pulled over for allegedly speeding. They had driven from their base of operations at the Meridian COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) office to inspect the ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church. Mount Zion was in Longdale, a black community just eight miles east of Philadelphia on Highway 16, and was a meeting place for a fledgling voter registration drive Mickey Schwerner was organizing in Neshoba County.3 After inspecting the charred remains of Mount Zion and speaking with congregants who had been assaulted and threatened by the parties responsible for the church bombing, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner had seen and heard enough. The three civil rights workers never made it back to the COFO office to report their findings. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price pulled them over around 4:00 in the afternoon, charged the driver with speeding, and held the three in the county jail until 10:00 that night. Upon their release Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner headed south on Highway 19 towards Meridian with Deputy Price following along behind. Still within the borders of Neshoba County, the three workers turned onto Highway 492 and headed a short way southwest with Price in pursuit. The civil rights workers then disappeared for forty-four days. All theories surrounding the missing volunteers’ disappearance were silenced on August 4, 1964. The bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found fifteen feet under an earthen dam on the Old Jolly Farm five miles southwest of Philadelphia. Andy and Mickey each had a bullet in their chests; James’ body had three. On August 7, the body of James Earl Chaney was laid to rest in a segregated graveyard just south of his hometown in Meridian, Mississippi. After the burial a memorial service was held and over 500 local blacks attended the services. Yet the memorial service was not a typical funeral service. While the traditional hymns were sung and passages from the Bible were read, the eulogies delivered for the slain civil rights worker exceeded the bounds of generic propriety.

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Moving beyond the anticipated formula of praise, lament, and consolation that eulogies traditionally adhere to, these speeches of remembrance far transcended the funeral services held that day. By closely examining the eulogies Dave Dennis and Reverend (Rev.) Edwin King delivered at James Chaney’s funeral service an opportunity to better understand civil rights rhetorical discourse presents itself, as well as a chance to perceive how breaking antecedent generic forms shapes the rhetorical action found in these unique public addresses. What this thesis intends to do is situate two rhetorical texts in their appropriate historical context and closely examine how they worked rhetorically. There is something at work with these eulogies situationally that moves these speeches beyond the funeral, and pushes them past the “rhetorical situation”. Borrowing from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “When the rhetorical parameters established by the generic tradition are overstepped, reaction is provoked,” and how the rhetor goes about shaping that reaction is not solely confined by generic constraints.4 This thesis approaches examining the eulogies delivered by Dennis and Rev. King for what they are; it does not assume they merely function as eulogies because that is what is called for by the “rhetorical situation.” Jamieson argues that, “Genres should not be viewed as static forms but as evolving phenomena. One should approach study of genres with a Darwinian rather than a Platonic perspective,” and this thesis is motivated by that notion.5 Rather than criticizing the speeches based solely on generic classifications and expectations, a closer examination of the rhetorical action operating within the texts of the selected eulogies could bring better understanding of how exigencies are addressed and perhaps modified. Dennis and Rev. King do not represent the civil rights rhetors that commonly come to the forefront of our consciousness. Images of Martin Luther King Jr. in front of the Lincoln Memorial or Malcolm X addressing a rally in the streets of New York City often occupy our collective memories. Sound bites from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pervade our recollections of when dogs were loosed, fire hoses aimed, and police batons found their unwitting victims. Leland Griffin recommends “that we turn our attention from the individual ‘great orator’ and undertake research into such selected acts and atmospheres of public address

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as would permit the study of a multiplicity of speakers, speeches, audiences, and occasions.”6 There are numerous studies and articles about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream Speech” and his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”7 The field of rhetoric has also examined the presidential policies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson in regards to the Civil Rights Movement.8 Case studies of Malcolm X’s rhetoric, Stokely Carmichael’s style, and even the persuasion of Robert Moses are prevalent in critical discourse.9 Yet the framework for understanding the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the rhetors actively employed in the construction of movement rhetoric seems overly circumscribed by adherence to the obstensibly “great.” “We may come to a more acute appreciation of the significance of the historically insignificant speaker, the minor orator who, we may find, is often the true fountain head of the moving flood of ideas and words.”10 Griffin’s words offer more than just legitimization for the examination of Dennis and Rev. King’s eulogies; they beg that the study be done. Moving through the significant body of Civil Rights literature available will provide the necessary background for situating the aforementioned eulogies within the summer of 1964. Close textual analysis of the eulogies themselves paired with biographical information about the two rhetors will reveal rhetorical actions, intentions, and their interactions with a complex rhetorical situation. What is significant and extremely attractive about examining the eulogies delivered by Dennis and Rev. King is how these two rhetors, responding to the same “rhetorical situation,” confined within the same expectations of eulogy constraints, sharing the same goals as participants and players in the Civil Rights Movement, produced different rhetorical responses. Dennis and Rev. King are both willing participants in the ceremony of the funeral services, but how that ceremony is approached reflects the individual differences between the two rhetors. Both eulogies share a similarity in that they initially engage an epideictic function and through the course of the speech turn to more deliberative undertones. Here we have an instance that represents the rhetorical trajectory of Civil Rights Movement rhetoric. The eulogy delivered by Dennis could be viewed as a speech act, or a stand-in for rationalizing and justifying black violence. On the other hand, Rev. King’s eulogy emphasizes the need for salvation through seeking forgiveness. Thus both underscore the complexity of civil rights rhetoric.

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A strict Aristotelian reading of these two eulogies would not properly function for the critic attempting to engage the rhetorical action embedded within the texts. Generically examining the speeches would, simply put, miss the point. The attempt of the speakers to provoke changes in their audiences’ opinions and actions would go unnoticed.

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CHAPTER ONE: THE LAND WAS THEIRS BEFORE THEY WERE THE LAND’S11

“All rhetorical analysis deals with the past,” says Stephen Lucas. In order to better understand the rhetorical situation Dave Dennis and Rev. Ed King were responding to in their eulogies for James Chaney, one must become familiar with the climate of terror in Mississippi. One is better prepared to engage the rhetorical action in a given text if there is an understanding of the where, when, what, who, how, and why the text is operating. Lucas contends that “historical understanding is not simply a prolegomenon, but an organic element of the whole process of rhetorical analysis.”12 A look at Mississippi’s troubled past becomes immediate and crucial. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were names added to a list of casualties, a roll call of victims weighed by the imbalanced scale of Southern justice. The ten years preceding Freedom Summer in 1964 reveal Mississippi’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education.13 Spectacle lynching may have gone out of style as an inappropriate way of handling racial issues in the South, but people interested in maintaining the segregated status quo still had their means of persuasion.14 A trail of black bodies could be found throughout the state, evidence that little had changed in Dixie despite the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling. The terror and carnage were swift. On a Saturday afternoon in August 1955, sixty-three year-old farmer Lamar Smith was shot on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi.15 The World War II veteran had been encouraging blacks to get involved with the upcoming Democratic primary. Even though the sheriff admitted seeing a white man leave the scene with blood on him, three defendants were never convicted for the killing. Despite the crowd that was on the courthouse lawn that day, a witness willing to testify to the shooting could never be found. Smith was not the only brave veteran. Other Mississippi blacks returned from overseas combat where they had knowingly put themselves into harm’s way for the cause

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of freedom; they now eagerly volunteered in the fight to bring equality and civil rights to the Magnolia state. Medgar Evers, Clyde Kennard, and James Meredith were all veterans who served the United States in foreign lands only to come home and commit to another great effort. Meredith integrated the Ole Miss campus at Oxford in the fall of 1962; Kennard, who tried to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi, died on the fourth of July the next year after being jailed for five years at Parchman Penitentiary; and weeks before Kennard’s passing Evers was assassinated in his driveway by white supremacist Byron de La Beckwith. There were other blacks murdered in post Brown vs. Board Mississippi. Black bodies found in rivers, black bodies dragged through towns behind pickup trucks, black bodies shot in broad daylight or city streets; black bodies hidden and found in a land unwilling to change its climate of terror. These are the black bodies of Rev. George W. Lee, Emmett Till, Clinton Melton, Mack Parker, Luther Jackson, Herbert Lee, Louis Allen, and James Chaney. Unlike Evers, Kennard, Meredith, and Smith, this list of names was not one of veterans from United States service abroad, but of boys, young men, ministers, and local people. Some were willing activists. Some had no choice. Reverend George W. Lee was vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and known for his activism with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The RCNL was organized by T. R. M. Howard, a successful doctor in the all-black community of Mound Bayou. The RCNL held a mass meeting in the spring of 1955; around 10,000 blacks came to hear several speakers, including Congressmen Charles Diggs from Detroit, and Reverend Lee. 16 Two weeks after Reverend Lee spoke at the rally encouraging blacks to register to vote he was murdered on the streets of the south Delta town of Belzoni. He was driving his car when a convertible pulled up from behind and fired into Lee’s car causing him to crash. He died on the way to the hospital from gun blasts that had torn off the lower side of his face. Later that summer a story spread across the national news wire that shocked the world. The abduction and killing of fourteen-year old Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till cast a spotlight on Mississippi.17 On a Wednesday afternoon late in August a group of boys sat outside Bryant’s Grocery Store in the tiny Delta town of Money, Mississippi. As usual the boys played checkers and talked about girls. Emmett, who was visiting from Chicago

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for a few weeks, boasted about a girlfriend back in Chicago who was white.18 Upon a challenge from one of the other boys, Emmett went into the store and made “ugly remarks” and supposedly wolf whistled at the white female clerk tending the counter. Whether or not it was a whistle or a simple “Bye baby,” Emmett unwittingly broke the most sacrosanct rule below the Mason-Dixon Line. When the white woman, Carolyn Bryant, ran out to get a pistol, the group of boys grabbed Emmett quickly, speeding out onto a county road to escape. Days passed and no backlash came from the incident at the Bryant Store until early Sunday, August 28. Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. “Big” Milam, entered the home of Mose “Preacher” Wright, Emmett’s great uncle, and took Emmett from his bed. What exactly happened after the kidnapping party left Wright’s home is still under debate, but the result of whatever occurred that early morning is not up for deliberation. Emmett’s bloated and disfigured body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down by a 75 pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Less than a month later an all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty. In the same year that witnessed the execution of Lee, Smith, and Till, justice was aborted again in Tallahatchie County. Gas station owner Lee McGarrh witnessed first- hand from inside his filling station the murder of his black station attendant Clinton Melton.19 Elmer Kimball, driving his good friend Big Milam’s 1954 green pick-up, pulled up and asked Melton to pump the gas. When the two disputed the amount of money owed for services, Kimball threatened to return with his gun and shoot Melton. Barely ten minutes later, Melton was dead with two gun shots in his head, and one in his hand. Despite two first-hand eye witnesses, another all-white jury, in a county where two-thirds of the population was black, rendered an acquittal. The story of Clyde Kennard takes on a different tone of injustice. Kennard was a Forrest County native from the southeastern Piney Woods region of Mississippi who had served for seven distinguished years as a paratrooper in the United States Army. He had returned to the family farm after his tour of duty and attempted to register for classes for the 1958 fall semester at Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg. When it became obvious to the college officials that Kennard was serious and more than qualified the

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university laid a trap. Upon leaving the campus after an interview discussing his most recent application, Kennard was arrested for reckless driving and possession of five bottles of liquor.20 Kennard was able to beat these charges only to find a year later that he was brought up and convicted of robbery and conspiracy charges, sentenced to serve seven years at Parchman Farms Penitentiary, where he developed stomach cancer under the grueling living conditions. For his crime Kennard allegedly masterminded the theft of 25 dollars worth of chicken feed.21 Also in the southeastern corner of the state in April 1959, Mack Parker awaited trial for allegedly raping a white woman, and in 1959 that is all the justification some of the good white people of Poplarville needed.22 A white mob took Parker from his jail cell, beat him badly, and, after driving to the Louisiana border, shot Parker in the chest twice before dumping his body in the Pearl River.23 When a white woman said the words “rape” and “black” in the same sentence in the deep South, a judge and jury were often not necessary. Later in 1959, Hattie Thomas and her former boyfriend Luther Jackson were parked in a car near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. A patrolman pulled up to the car and ordered the two out of the vehicle. The officer took Jackson around the back of the car where Thomas could not see what was happening.24 Two shots were fired and by the time Thomas was able to get around the car Jackson was dead. The police officer’s name was Lawrence Rainey.25 Five years later, as Sheriff of Neshoba County, Rainey and 18 other white men would be brought up on conspiracy charges for the murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. The Fifties ended with the NAACP being forced underground and Mississippi blacks weary of the white backlash and resistance to change. If change was going to come to Mississippi blacks it would not arrive in the form of civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which had generated success in Montgomery and elsewhere. Change would have to come from the inside, from the local people themselves. Robert Parris Moses arrived in the north Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the summer of 1960.26 Ella Baker, working out of the SCLC office in Atlanta, sent the introspective Harvard graduate student on an exploratory mission to assess potential

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black leaders for an upcoming conference to be held in the fall.27 Moses got off his Greyhound bus and was greeted by “Doc” Aaron Henry, a successful pharmacist in the community. Moses then ventured south to the town of Cleveland where he began his friendship with the man who served as his liaison to Delta blacks, Amzie Moore.28 They talked about how to bring about meaningful change; Moore convinced Moses that political power-- the vote-- was more important and tenable than direct-action desegregation campaigns. The Freedom Rides came to Jackson Mississippi on May 24, 1961, and with the Freedom Riders on board, another wave of activists challenged interstate segregation.29 James Lawson, Stokely Carmichael, and Dave Dennis were followed by James Farmer and Charles Jones as two buses of integrated travelers rolled into Jackson under federally ordered protection. Dennis would be promoted to CORE’s field secretary by the summer of the next year, overseeing the organization’s programs in Mississippi. Even though the Freedom Riders were immediately hauled off to Parchman upon their arrival in the capital city, they had forced the Kennedy administration-- notably Attorney General Robert Kennedy-- to act. Moses left the Delta to finish the final year of his teaching contract; upon his return in the summer of 1961, Moore sent him south to Pike County and McComb, Mississippi, the home of C.C. Bryant. With Bryant’s local connections, Moses was able to enter black communities and tell Delta blacks about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) plan for voter registration drives.30 As an institution SNCC was barely a year old, an organization run mainly by college students to affect change at the grassroots level. The goal for SNCC was to get local people to realize that meaningful change could best come from within local communities, and not from promises made by the government or star-power groups like the NAACP or SCLC. The young organizers of SNCC were looking for something sustainable, not just one-time incidents like the sit-ins, and therefore focused the effort and energy of their volunteers into voter registration. The violence began quickly in McComb. Moses experienced some success registering individuals the initial week or two, but on August 15, while escorting a group of potential voters to register in Liberty, Mississippi, Moses was attacked by Billy

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Caston.31 Caston was the local sheriff’s cousin and it came as no surprise when he was not convicted for assaulting Moses. But the simple fact Moses pressed charges sent a message to other blacks in the area, and soon many would enter the ranks of SNCC. Organizers and volunteers like Hollis Watkins, and Curtis Hayes began working on the voter registration drive, bringing with them an urgent message for transforming the political climate of Mississippi blacks. Later in the fall of 1961, members of SNCC first faced the painful consequences that their efforts to initiate change might bring to local blacks. SNCC relied heavily on locals for nearly every facet of its operation. Meeting places, pamphlet printing and distribution, contact names and numbers all had to come from local blacks inside any given community. Herbert Lee was a charter member of the Amite County NAACP Branch; he had volunteered to drive Moses around the county in order to contact potential blacks willing to register.32 Lee, a farmer and the father of nine children, was shot outside a cotton gin on the morning of September 25.33 The man who shot him, E.H. Hurst, was a member of the Mississippi state legislature, and was acquitted by a coroner’s jury the day after the murder.34 It quickly became clear to SNCC organizers that little, if any, protection would be afforded to them or their cause. Despite the reluctance of the Justice Department to guarantee federal protection to those seeking to exercise their rights as American citizens, SNCC was able to spread its voter registration campaign throughout the Delta and the rest of Mississippi. During this time SNCC was able to not only get its message and mission statement out to potential voters, but also attract crucial volunteers and organizers into its ranks. Volunteers like Sam Block began working in Greenwood, the county seat of Leflore. Women began joining the effort: Victoria Adams, Anne Moody, Annelle Ponder, and Annie Devine started voter education programs in their respective regions and Fannie Lou Hamer became a full-time staff member of SNCC after the plantation she worked on for over thirty-five years evicted her for participating in a voter registration drive. As the ranks and efforts of SNCC continued to grow throughout the fall of 1962, the world’s attention would be shifted to the other side of the Magnolia state. The morning of October 1, 1962, dawned to find 23,000 soldiers under federal orders occupying the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi.35 They were there to

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restore order after a riot occurred the night before. Nearly 3,000 angry whites gathered on that Sunday in an attempt to block James Meredith from successfully enrolling for the fall semester and integrating the state’s most prestigious academic institution. Bricks and bottles were hurled, fires were started, sniper shots rang out-- all aimed at the Federal Marshalls ordered to protect Meredith. When it became apparent to Federal Marshalls that state and local law enforcement officers were unable (or unwilling) to curb the violence, the orders from Washington were issued to federalize Army Guard units.36 Meredith would graduate a year later, in the summer of 1963, after attending classes and living under extreme pressures in an understandably hostile environment. National attention eventually shifted from the integration battle at Ole Miss to the continuing battle in the Delta. During the spring of 1963 comedian Dick Gregory came to Greenwood to help with the distribution of food and needed supplies. Gregory even led a group down to the courthouse in order to attempt to register.37 Greenwood police were under strict orders not to arrest Gregory for fear of the national media attention it would bring to the Movement. Yet despite constant harassment some success was made in Greenwood, and SNCC made the Delta town its Mississippi headquarters. While the voter registration struggle in Greenwood was mounting, a campaign to end segregation in the state’s capitol got under way. John Salter, a sociology professor at Tougaloo College, organized direct action efforts for students. By December in late 1962, a plan to boycott downtown businesses in Jackson was ready to begin. The NAACP had agreed to help the effort by providing funds for bail and Salter began a close relationship with the NAACP’s field secretary for the state of Mississippi, Medgar Evers. The Jackson Movement gained support locally and from the NAACP main office in New York as the summer of 1963 approached. Leaders felt it was now time to shift from boycotts and picket lines to more direct and massive demonstrations. On May 28, Pearlena Lewis, Anne Moody, and Memphis Norman sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Capitol Street.38 A mob quickly gathered; Norman was pulled off his stool and beaten until he was arrested for disturbing the peace. When Norman was hauled off to jail, Lewis and Moody were joined by Joan Trumpauer and Tougaloo professor Lois Chafee. By the time Salter joined the group, a riot was ready to break out. The scene of

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a white mob attacking peaceful protestors made newspaper front pages and turned the Jackson effort into a full fledged mass movement. President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on Tuesday, June 11, stating, “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”39 In this historic address, the president, for the first time, made a public statement supporting the Civil Rights Movement and its efforts. Later that night, at 12:20 A.M., Byron De La Beckwith shot Evers in the back as he walked from his car to his house. De La Beckwith had been hiding in a grove of honeysuckle 150 feet away when he fired his high powered rifle; Evers never made it to the steps of his porch or to his three children who had been waiting up for his return.40 When Evers died so too did the demonstrations in Jackson, and the focus shifted to voter registration instead. In an effort to show the world black Mississippians would vote if given the chance, but would do so in large numbers, plans for a mock election to be held in the fall got underway. The Freedom Vote campaign was officially launched on October 6, and at a state-wide convention that evening the delegation selected Aaron Henry as its nominee for governor of Mississippi.41 Henry’s efforts in the Clarksdale community had been one of the longest ongoing programs for COFO in the state, which won the respect of NAACP and SNCC organizers. For Henry’s running mate Bob Moses asked Tougaloo chaplain Edwin King to be the candidate for lieutenant governor; the white native Mississippian was put on the ticket a week later. The campaign itself represented the first time a white and black candidate had run on the same ticket in post-reconstruction Mississippi. While out stumping, neither Rev. King nor Henry were ever assaulted or jailed, a remarkable feat considering Mississippi’s history of intolerance towards integrated demonstrations. A number of white Stanford and Yale students came to the state at the invitation of Allard Lowenstein to help the campaign effort for the one month that it would be occurring. The little national media attention given to the Freedom Vote ended up focusing primarily on the white students.42 A few white students were already working in Mississippi, primarily in office staffs, when the question soon arose about inviting more to come. Plans for a large summer project involving white students had been discussed, and the issue for the

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organizers became the level of involvement for these students.43 The Mississippi movement debated whether they should segregate themselves or not; it would be an ongoing dispute in strategy for SNCC. As far as strategy was concerned, the Fall 1963 Freedom Vote campaign revealed to the civil rights organizations operating in Mississippi that integrated efforts could produce results. Plans for the proposed summer project went forward and a series of “Freedom Days” were designed to carry the movement through the winter and into the spring of 1964. Freedom Days were held in Canton, Carthage, and Greenwood, but one Freedom Day demonstration proved to be especially interesting. January 22, 1964, was the first Freedom Day in Mississippi, and it was a day of precedent-breaking proportions for Hattiesburg and the state as a whole.44 The night before the demonstration, a mass meeting was held where every civil rights organization was represented. Ella Baker and Lawrence Guyot gave the keynote addresses at the meeting, advice was given about how to handle situations that might occur with law officials the next day, and the integrated crowd was instructed on where and when to meet for the march. To the surprise of many organizers there were only two formal arrests on Freedom Day in Hattiesburg: Bob Moses was arrested for obstruction of a public sidewalk, and one white volunteer was arrested for illegally parking his car. The demonstration was successful, not in the small number of blacks permitted to register during the day, but in the fact that Hattiesburg city officials allowed the demonstration to happen at all. Police lines were never broken throughout the day, and the contingent of white Northern clergymen stood side by side with their black Southern counterparts. Historian Howard Zinn was photographed holding Fannie Lou Hamer’s sign as she took a break from singing and marching, creating an image which represented the success of the day’s demonstration despite the rain. Ten days later another political murder happened. Three years earlier Louis Allen had witnessed the murder of Herbert Lee; word traveled around Amite County that Allen had spoken with Justice Department officials about having seen state legislator E. H. Hurst shoot Lee. Allen made plans to leave for Milwaukee on February 1, once he heard rumors that some whites were plotting to kill him. But the night before he was to leave he was shot twice in the face-- in his driveway.45 After an FBI investigation was

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concluded, no charges were ever filed-- another baleful reminder for civil rights organizers and workers that some would pay the ultimate price for freedom. Moses blamed himself for the murder of Allen. “We can’t protect our own people,” he said, and threw his support and influence behind the plans to bring over a thousand Northern volunteers into the state during the Freedom Summer Project.46 In the early spring of 1964, Michael and Rita Schwerner arrived in Meridian to start working for CORE in Lauderdale County. Both Schwerners were college graduates, and had already been actively involved with social work programs back in New York. Although the two met initial resistance in Meridian, by the beginning of summer they had several staff members working in their community center, the first of its kind in the state, and they could boast of high attendance in education classes. The CORE staff members overseeing the state were so impressed they appointed Mickey head of the fourth district project, a district covering six counties.47 Mickey was the first white organizer to achieve this level of responsibility in Mississippi. As things continued for civil rights organizers through the spring and into the summer, another group in Mississippi was also stepping up its efforts. White violence was nothing new, but the increase of Klan activity was staggering. Nearly 35 churches were bombed and burned during the Freedom Summer campaign.48 Night riders swept across the state unchecked by law officials. Intimidation was no longer strictly economic. On the night of April 24, crosses burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties.49 One church bombing proved to be very significant for both civil rights organizations and the Klan. The black community of Longdale was eight miles east of Philadelphia, on Highway 16. The members of Mount Zion Methodist Church had given Mickey permission to speak to its members about a voter registration initiative for Neshoba County. Mickey asked the congregation if CORE could use the church as a Freedom School during the proposed Freedom Summer Project which was to begin soon. The congregation agreed to allow the civil rights organization use of its hand-built church. A group of men from the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan burned Mount Zion to the ground on the night of June 16.50 Following an evening board meeting, church members encountered the waiting Klansmen. Several elderly members were

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threatened and beaten for their participation with the civil rights workers, and the Klansmen sent a message to Mickey and CORE in the form of smoldering ashes. Mickey Schwerner was not even in Mississippi the night the Klan sent its message. He was with James Chaney in Oxford, Ohio, at an orientation session for volunteers planning on coming to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer Project. Chaney was a local black Meridian resident who had become involved with CORE early in 1964. The twenty-one year old quickly became indispensable to the Schwerners, and was renowned for his skills as a driver on Mississippi’s back country roads. Schwerner and Chaney received news of the church’s fate and the two decided to return to Longdale as soon as possible in order to salvage their fledgling project in Neshoba County. Andrew Goodman, a recent graduate from Queens College who was assigned to the Meridian CORE office for the summer project, joined them as they drove through the night to return to Mississippi. They arrived in Meridian just before nightfall on June 20, and prepared to head into Neshoba County the next day. The trio had planned to view the remains of the church, and interview members who had been there the night the Klan burned Mount Zion. They knew they were going into hostile territory, and made plans to return by four in the afternoon.51 Even one familiar with Mississippi’s history of dealing with “outside agitators” is saddened by the story of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. It is a story of more than just martyrdom; it is a tale which reflects the Mississippi movement’s very struggle. The trio were arrested on the outskirts of Philadelphia after 3:00 P.M., incarcerated in the Neshoba County jail until their release around 10:00 that night only to be pulled over by Deputy Cecil Price nine miles south of town, handed over to a Klan mob to be executed gangland-style, and their bodies hidden under a remote dam. When the trio failed to show up the next day, many civil rights volunteers knew in their hearts what fate had befallen their comrades.52 Segregationist in the state claimed the disappearance was a hoax, that Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were hiding somewhere up north in order to bring more unsavory media attention to Mississippi. Hoax or no hoax, the federal government sprang into action and began a statewide search for the missing civil rights workers involving the FBI, the National Guard, and Navy

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reservists.53 J. Edgar Hoover opened an FBI field office in Jackson on July 10, with Hoover attending the opening in person.54 Two days after Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner’s “disappearance,” a search team found the charred hull of the station wagon the trio had driven and were in when stopped for allegedly speeding.55 The blue Ford was found in Bogue Chitto Swamp northeast of Philadelphia; the discovery of the burned station wagon added to theories about the disposal of the bodies of the civil rights workers. The disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner did not stop the plans for Freedom Summer. Northern college students came to the state as proposed and continued forward with the intent to start Freedom Schools and voter registration drives. A rash of legislation was hurried through the Mississippi House and Senate which essentially sought to hamper any attempts the volunteers might make at politically organizing disenfranchised Mississippi blacks.56 Freedom Schools opened their doors on the morning of July 7, and came to represent the insistent principle of flexibility. Staughton Lynd, the mastermind behind the Freedom School’s teaching curriculum, had initially planned for around 20 schools to be opened, but by summer’s end more than 50 schools held classes.57 Organizers had anticipated around 1,000 students, but ended up instructing over 3,000 children, adults, and elderly. The bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found fourteen feet, and ten inches from the crest of an earthen dam on August 4, 1964. Forty-four days after their disappearance, the FBI exhumed the remains on the Old Jolly Farm, well within sight of the ferris wheel at the Neshoba County Fair three miles away.58 Two days later the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) held a state convention to select its delegation to challenge the seating of the Mississippi regulars at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The next day James Chaney was laid to rest on a hill top three miles south of Meridian. Family members, a few friends, and members of the press lowered the twenty- one year old plasterer, who had been promoted to full-time staff status for CORE in east Mississippi in April, under his headstone in a segregated cemetery. Legislation had been

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rushed through the Mississippi state government to refuse the Schwerner’s request to have their son buried next to his friend James Chaney.

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CHAPTER TWO: VIOLATING GENERIC CONSTRAINTS FOR JUSTICE

Rhetorical critics often look for moments when communication addresses and transforms the immediate situation which called it into existence. It could be a moment captured in one of Charles Moore’s photographs, an image of Birmingham firemen aiming jets of water at demonstrators prostrate on the sidewalk.59 It could be a moment similar to Fannie Lou Hamer’s address to a group of blacks in Indianola when she recounted her beating in a Winona jail cell while in police custody.60 Whatever the “moment,” rhetorical scholars seek to fully understand how rhetorical actions work in the world. The relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the field of rhetoric is an intimate one. Matters historical, rhetorical, and cultural find room to breathe in a study which focuses on any public campaign similar to the Civil Rights Movement. What that “breathing room” allows for can be seemingly problematic for a critic at first glance: How is the analysis to be conducted? Is a historical case study to be initiated? Does an Aristotelian reading of the text suffice to discover implied rhetorical action? How does a given community interpret such rhetorical action? This thesis uses what Robert Scott refers to when addressing the tradition of rhetorical methodology as a “tangle of traditions.” Scott feels a rhetor who recognizes this “tangle” is more adept at applying the right rhetorical theories. It becomes a matter of doing “a better job of matching tools to work.”61 It is not so illogical an idea that rhetorical critics have a diverse multitude of “tools” at their disposal, a notion that ensures that meaningful analysis can be contributed to the discourse. It is important to stave off the rhetorical “interstate” approach to theory and analysis which Davis W. Houck refers to in Rhetoric As Currency, making sure critics are awake behind the wheel.62 Good criticism can be seen then as criticism “inviting others to re-experience and casting that invitation in such a form that will not only arrest attention but constitute a matrix for further thought.”63

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Much recent scholarship-- historical, rhetorical, or cultural-- looks at the more nationally recognized speakers from the Civil Rights Movement. There are articles and books covering presidential and legislative rhetoric or policies, and major historical syntheses similar to Taylor Branch’s volumes covering the civil rights period.64 Some works engage “second tier” speakers like Reverend Fred Lee Shuttlesworth, and not-so- common places like Jones County, Mississippi, but the voices at the local levels go largely ignored.65 It seems ironic because most speeches given during the Civil Rights Movement were public addresses made at a local level. In churches, meeting halls, even in secrecy at homes or offices, the voices demanding change go largely unheeded by historians and rhetorical critics.66 This thesis is motivated by the scholarly ideal that Martin J. Medhurst terms “significant scholarship,” and supports the study of the “persuasive public campaign.”67 The eulogies delivered by Dennis and Rev. King for Chaney yield the potential to further “significant scholarship” by addressing several specific issues. These speeches explore the boundaries of genre studies, specifically antecedent precedents which shape eulogistic discourse. The eulogies themselves offer an excellent opportunity to study civil rights rhetoric from grass-roots oriented speakers; Dennis and Rev. King embody the Civil Rights Movement’s goals and aims. Careful examination of these eulogies can produce scholarship which encourages “cross-fertilization between public address scholars and those in other fields.”68 Aside from examining generic constraints placed upon eulogies, a balancing between studies focused on the “oratorical greats” and the “historically insignificant significant speaker” is addressed, along with effects upon public memory and critical-cultural issues. Historical, rhetorical, and cultural perspectives can all be forwarded by the approach this thesis employs. Robert Ivie suggests that, “Knowledge constructed from a rhetorical perspective is about the symbols that organize our lives, some of which empower one gender more than another, while others selectively privilege war over peace, white over black, freedom over tyranny.”69 It is important to examine how these symbols influence a community, how the symbols “form and reform the motives of a community.”70 The deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner meant very different things to the two immediate

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communities. For the Klan and other white supremacists, the murders symbolized a stand, a clearly drawn line that enacted consequences if crossed. The blacks in Mississippi saw the deaths differently. The three civil rights workers may have been viewed as martyrs to the Movement’s goals, or may have come to represent the ultimate symbols of sacrifice for justice. The deaths of the workers clearly meant different things for every community. The eulogies that followed the search for and discovery of the three civil rights workers also can be considered symbolically. In order to appreciate these speeches as symbols, this thesis approaches a framework of analysis that “is patently single. It is not concerned with permanence, nor yet with beauty. It is concerned with effect.”71 Measuring effect is not the end goal of this thesis, but rather attempting to understand how the rhetorical action embedded within the texts works is a more accurate description. A pragmatic approach towards better perceiving the “human experience” within a text, as opposed to an approach rooted in “formalism” looking for characteristics or standards meant to measure effect, helps reveal the rhetorical techniques of the individual rhetor.72 This thesis is more motivated by consequences of rhetorical practices rather than the intent of the rhetor’s argument, which can never be fully understood. “The fact that criticism is a humanistic activity implies more than that it will be less exact than some of the sciences,” echoes the sentiments of this work.73 The focus here is “the understanding of man himself,” and not a scientific examination of cause and effect. Eulogies are symbols in and of themselves, reflecting a branch of epideictic rhetoric. They respond to a universal aspect of human life-- the end-- shaping how the final remembrances of an individual are recalled and situated within memory. Similarities grow out of this situation after the death of an individual and therefore help mold the construction of eulogistic discourse. “Genres are shaped in response to a rhetor’s perception of the expectations of the audience and the demands of the situation,” suggests Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson.74 There is a “proper response” then that is determined in the minds of both speaker and audience; this response is created from both the situation itself and the rhetorical predecessors. Campbell and Jamieson see genre as being “composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic.”75

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There lies then an implied contract between the rhetor and the audience. Conditions, “recognizable forms,” must be met by the speaker in order to fulfill the audience’s expectations of the speaker’s response to the situation. The audience’s expectations have been vouchsafed by similar situations occurring in the past, and the audience is aware of how past similar occurrences should impress upon the current situation. There is an inherent danger here, though, with genre studies-- the missing of implied intentions. One must not assume the eulogies delivered for Chaney function as eulogies merely because that is what the “rhetorical situation” calls for. Checking to see if Dennis and Rev. King adhere to the traditional functions of praise, lament, and consolation which eulogies often adhere to would miss the mark of the rhetorical action made very explicit in the texts. Jamieson admits that, “The question of the extent to which rhetorical response is determined by situation, audience expectations, antecedent rhetoric or other factors requires determined inquiry. It has no a priori answer.”76 Jamieson feels when rhetors choose the appropriate antecedent genre the speaker is guided towards “a response consonant with situational demands.”77 The driving meaning and purpose of the eulogies delivered for Chaney are brought to the foreground not by comparing similarities the speeches might have in common with other eulogies, but rather by examining the departures from eulogistic discourse they adopt. Generic forms are essential to criticism as the means by which the critic comes to understand how the speaker is working to achieve an end,78 but it should be noted that constructive analysis and criticism can be approached by understanding violations of generic form. “On the one hand, a generic critic recognizes the combination of recurrent elements that forms a hybrid, but, on the other hand, such a critic can perceive the unique fusion that is a response to the idiosyncratic needs of a particular situation, institution, and rhetor.”79 At this juncture a general notion of what eulogies are is necessary. Jamieson asserts, “There are fundamental similarities in the ways human beings have responded rhetorically to certain events.” She sees the speech act of eulogies as having “fundamental similarities.” Jamieson understand eulogies as, “A public address, which affirms the reality of the death, eases confrontation with one’s own mortality, transforms the relationship with the deceased to a relationship of memory, and refashions the

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relationship of members of the community in the absence of their deceased friend.”80 Jamieson views eulogistic discourse as a form of public speaking where the speaker needs “no formal training in the art of speaking, no careful study of the audience, no analysis of past responses to comparable situations to know what response is required.”81 One might term the notion “rhetorical nativism,” an inherent behavior or natural reaction. “Form shapes the response of the reader or listener to substance by providing instruction, so to speak, about how to perceive and interpret,” according to Carolyn R. Miller. She views exigency as neither “a cause of rhetorical action nor as intention, but as social motive.”82 There she varies from Bitzer’s notion of exigence which is marked by danger or imperfection. Campbell and Jamieson also attach the notion of performative value to eulogies which is especially useful in looking at the eulogies for James Chaney. “By uniting the bereaved in a rhetorical act, the eulogy affirms that the community will survive the death.”83 The audience and community are encouraged to continue on with the work and ideals advocated by the deceased. This endows eulogies with what Karen Foss terms “the advisory function of eulogies.” Foss explains the presence of this “hortatory tone” as rhetoric meant to advise audience members “on how to handle their guilt, and do so by advocating changes in thinking.”84 The eulogies for Chaney did not iconocize the man, but rather put the emphasis on what he stood for, his purpose-- the cause-- as being worthy of emulation, and encouraged the audience to follow in kind. Looking at the eulogies for James Chaney delivered by Dennis and Rev. King as a “set” compliments more appropriately and fully the rhetorical elements involved with a funeral memorial. Rev. King’s eulogy could be seen as an extension of the preceding eulogy, responding to the exigency Dennis creates during the first eulogy. Rather than two distinct rhetorical moments these eulogies could possibly fuse into a single interactive public address. Eulogies often create “a basis for inspiring an audience to some future virtue on their part.”85 Carpenter and Seltzer found in the delivery of many state funerals “the eulogies’ salient stylistic tendency is to develop applications for the audience.”86 This “stylistic tendency” further demonstrates the consolation function consistent within eulogies as a genre. This notion of communal continuity is a rhetorically significant component for eulogies, meant “to give the audience strength for the present and

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inspiration for the future.”87 Think for a moment about the state funeral for President Nixon. Gathered there was every living former president along with the current president, an unspoken message concerning the survival of leadership beyond Nixon’s individual death. Outlining this advisory function, along with the violations of generic propriety- the “unique fusion”- contained within Dennis and Rev. King’s eulogies, is obtainable by close textual analysis. This sort of analysis aides in making sense of the unpredictable nature of Dennis and Rev. King’s eulogies, and helps disclose the rhetorical action working within the speeches. In his 1986 essay, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann,” Michael Leff explains close textual analysis as the investigation of the relationship between the inner workings of a particular public communication and its historical context in order to discover what makes that discourse function in a persuasive manner. Leff points out, “Oratory succeeds best when it appears to blend into the context of ordinary experience.”88 Funeral services and eulogies are part of our shared “ordinary experiences” as human beings, and when rhetorical action is so infused with common experiences like these the impact of the rhetorical action is heightened. What sets Chaney’s funeral and eulogies apart from the normal experience of death are the circumstances of conspiracy surrounding his death. Textual criticism strives to comprehend our complex rhetorical realities. “The central task of textual criticism is to understand how rhetorical action effects this negation, how the construction of a symbolic event invites a reconstruction of the events to which it refers.”89 According to Leff, this is the goal of close textual analysis. It is not solely the speech or text itself which warrants the attention of a rhetorical scholar, but the thing with which the speech means to affect upon that is also important. Hermann Stelzner asserts, “We do maintain that an address helps to create and sustain a ‘climate’ which justifies activities, even though the speech itself is not the cause of any activity.”90 The climate Stelzner refers to can be best understood as the larger context of culture, and it is the possible cultural effects that Stelzner and Leff find so attractive. Describing the rhetorical work of a text is extremely tricky business because there is not one single meaning, nor is there only one perspective-- a God’s eye point of view-- from which to interpret it. Employing notions from both historical case studies and social

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movement studies helps frame the rhetorical criticism of Dennis and Rev. King’s eulogies. Since an aspect of this topic deals directly with a social movement it makes sense to examine strategies the Civil Rights Movement used in its campaigns. It also makes equally good sense to involve the historical case study approach when examining these eulogies because they occurred within a single, salient historical period. The recovery of oratorical pieces specific to historical movements brings appreciation for how the rhetoric functioned within the movement and how rhetorical action affects culture at large. Stephen R. Goldzwig suggests, “Part of any research agenda for critical rhetorical studies in the 21st Century must surely extend the dialogue of ‘undoing’ unjust power and domination.”91 For criticism to promote that dialogue Goldzwig encourages “certain lost or underrepresented narratives must be inserted into our critical discourse.” 92 Goldzwig’s notion of recovery is echoed by Leland M. Griffin in a similar tone, “that we pay somewhat less attention to the single speaker and more to speakers- that we turn our attention from the individual ‘great orator’ and undertake research into such selected acts and atmospheres of public address as would permit the study of a multiplicity of speakers, speeches, audiences, and occasions.”93 The funeral service and eulogies delivered provide fertile ground for employing both Goldzwig and Griffin’s recommendations. Goldzwig uses the term “critical localism” to justify analyzing rhetorical moments similar to the Chaney funeral services. “Critical localism focuses our attention on the discourse of local communities, practices, and cultures.”94 He suggests that using the lens of critical localism will help rhetorical scholars find and appreciate texts whose influence may not have reached the level of national consciousness but still hold rhetorical value. This furthers Leland’s idea that, “we may come to a more acute appreciation of the significance of the historically insignificant speaker, the minor orator, we may find, is often the true fountainhead of the moving flood of ideas and words.”95 Current rhetorical scholarship addressing the Civil Rights Movement reflects Scott’s notion of “tangled traditions.” There seem to be some main threads within the “tangle” centering on organizations, individuals, and cultural studies. The organization receiving most of the attention is the United States government, particularly the office of

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president.96 In 1993 the Policy Studies Journal dedicated most of its 21st volume to a symposium called “The American Presidency and Civil Rights,” and pieces again range the rhetorical gauntlet from presidential leadership to assessing communication patterns in policy.97 There is also a bulk of scholarship focusing on individuals and speeches, even biographies like Ready for Revolution, about Stokely Carmichael, are geared towards understanding what persuasion is at work in people’s lives and their speeches.98 Much of the rhetorical scenery is of the icons from the Civil Rights Movement, and examines individuals who seem engrained in the national consciousness.99 Rhetorical studies of the Movement have even ventured into marketing and the educational aspects of Movement rhetoric, and branches out to pop-culture studies.100 Gender issues along with religious perspectives also contribute to shape the background of critical discourse, further stretching the boundaries of analysis.101 The range of rhetorical dialogue must continue to represent the diverse “tangle,” and continue to broaden both theorists’ and critics’ understanding of historical-social movements similar to the Civil Rights Movement. Producing relevant and “significant” criticism from Dennis and Rev. King’s eulogies obviously borrows from different analytical tools and may marginalize this thesis’ findings for some critics and theorists. Using a bricoleur’s kaleidoscopic view of rhetorical praxis does not subjugate or downplay the importance of dominant rhetorical systems of inquiry. This thesis, like John O’Grady’s literary pilgrims, will “return to his formerly mundane existence, his community, in a state of spiritual enlightenment.”102 The consequences of selecting these particular eulogies should forward historical and cultural goals of researchers as well. The Civil Rights Movement is a unique historical and cultural happening. This thesis hopes to bridge some of the gap between the ‘great orator’ and the local speaker which did so much of the daily grunt work for the Movement. “My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice. People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.” Ella Baker endorses, in her own words, looking at instances where individuals, local people, made a stand for their salvation and how these individual stands

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came to influence others in the fight to express their voices. Leff reminds us, “we must pay heed to the human voice that resonates in all rhetorical discourse.”103 This thesis takes note of the voices of Dave Dennis and Reverend Edwin King as they eulogized their fellow brother in the struggle for equality. As Zarefsky notes, “the analyst can be a commentator, explicating the rhetorical method in the text and making manifest what is latent in the work.”104 The challenge this thesis answers is to textually unfold the speech as it happens from start to finish, not becoming too concerned with the artistry of the orator, but making evident the rhetorical action embedded in the text.

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CHAPTER THREE: “VENGENCE IN MY HEART”

“Until the killing of a black mother’s son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.”105 Ella Baker spoke these words the day before James Chaney’s funeral. She was addressing a rally for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Jackson, where delegates of the new party were planning to challenge the seating of the Mississippi regulars for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The next afternoon hundreds of blacks gathered to mourn the passing of Chaney in his hometown of Meridian, after he had been properly buried by family members and friends on the hill top of a segregated grave yard three miles south of town.106 Local Meridian pastors and ministers read passages from the Bible, led the congregation of mourners in hymns, spoke prayers, and took care not to inflame the emotions of the crowd gathered at First Union Baptist Church. The opening remarks from two clergymen stressed turning the service into “love’s hour,” ensuring the community will survive by recognizing the cause and struggle for which Chaney had given his life. “We have come here to proclaim to the world that all men might know that life has conquered death, that love has conquered hate, that freedom is conquering slavery’s darkness. That God has truly overcome the world, and we too shall overcome.”107 Two verses from the hymn “Rock of Ages” were sung before prayers and scripture passages continued. The song seemed timid, sung in a passive nature by the congregation. Hollowness pervades the voices singing, a weariness or tired strain common to much of the singing from the Movement years. The introit prayers called to God for strength, asking the Lord to lead them forward, and give the survivors “courage to continue on in discouraging situations.” The congregation began to cry out “Amen!” and “Yes, Lord!” at certain points, a call-and-response interplay between speaker and audience. An intimacy can be felt as individual voices called out from the crowd in reply. 28

Another clergyman read from Psalm 23 the lines, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me,” and, from the New Testament, portions of the “Sermon on the Mount.” Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “To the South On Its New Slavery” was recited before a female voice sang a solo. The trained voice moved through “Let Me Walk Close To Thee” with an operatic style that was appropriately both somber and reflective. A speaker introduced the night’s first guest, and Dave Dennis came to the pulpit to speak. The Freedom Rider had arrived three years earlier in the summer of 1961 as the Freedom Rides rolled into Jackson. By the next summer Dennis assumed the responsibilities of CORE’s Mississippi field secretary. The young black man from New Orleans had been in Mississippi ever since, often taking flak from his administrators back east for joining the efforts of other organizations like SNCC and not initiating his own programs in the name of the CORE organization. Dennis and Bob Moses became co- directors for COFO during 1963, merging the efforts made by both SNCC and CORE workers. National offices from both organizations were unhappy since media attention labeled the civil rights workers “COFO workers” rather than their own organizations’ names. Media attention meant donations for their respective organizations, and shifting that focus could cut into fund raising. It seems Moses and Dennis were more worried about making a difference in people’s lives than making money. Dennis was the Assistant Program Director for the Mississippi Summer Project and carried a heavy psychological burden. Through the course of the summer he had grown cynical about the nonviolent tactics used by the Movement, calling it, “really just a waste of good lives.”108 Dennis, who was at his mother’s home in Shreveport recovering from a recent illness the night Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner disappeared, went to the pulpit visibly irritated. Rev. King remembers the tenor of the funeral memorial “was so cautious a stranger might have thought the victim had been killed in an auto accident,” and as Dennis waited to deliver his eulogy he, “became more and more angry the longer the preachers went on.”109 The intentionally maintained delicate mood of the service was about to be shattered. “I’m not here to do the traditional thing most of us do at such a gathering,” warned Dennis with the first words out of his mouth. Yet this statement would not be the

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only indicator generic boundaries were about to be overstepped.110 What this opening phrase more than hints at is a departure from tradition, and it establishes a tension which will underline the rest of the speech. This eulogy functions more like a call-to-action address, a sort of calling to arms for the black community in Mississippi. In other words, Dennis creates an exigency for Mississippi blacks to respond to. Dennis does address the fact he is violating audience expectations at this funeral service. He does not, however, spend much time within the parameters of a generic eulogy, and what attention to traditional eulogies Dennis complies with is over after his opening remarks: I’m not here to do the traditional thing most of us do at such a gathering. And that is to tell of what a great person the individual was and some of the great works the person was involved in and etcetera. I think we all know because he walked these dusty streets of Meridian and around here before I came here. With you and around you. Played with your kids and he talked to all of them. And what I want to talk about is really what I really grieve about. I don’t grieve for Chaney because the fact is I feel he lived a fuller life than many of us will ever live. I feel that he’s got his freedom and we are still fighting for it. Dennis distances Chaney from the speech with references to him as a “person”, and an “individual” instead of actually naming Chaney in the opening. In the duration of Dennis’ eulogy Chaney is mentioned only four more times, and two of those references are within the context of the three slain civil rights workers as a whole. The speech functions less like eulogistic discourse and more like a speech attacking complacency. Dennis does not attempt to reform the audience’s relationship to Chaney as one of a relationship based on memory now that Chaney is deceased, but rather incites and encourages his audience to enter the battle for their own individual freedoms. The religious undertone is present in these opening remarks as Dennis places Chaney beyond the constraints of Earthly struggle, and therefore refuses to “grieve for Chaney,” buying into the spiritual qualities of Chaney’s death for civil rights. This remark also lends itself to a statement of consolation. Dennis may be intending to comfort surviving Movement veterans by underscoring Chaney’s absence and distancing him from the on-going

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struggles. Dennis holds a different aspect of consolation; he is communicating a bigger meaning to Chaney’s death. “But what I want to talk about right now is the living dead that we have right among our midst, not only in the state of Mississippi, but throughout the nation.” These “living dead” are the ones Dennis hopes to reach out to during his plea for action. Dennis is aware of the reporters, cameras, and recorders present, and understands the message of his speech will reach beyond the walls of the church. He puts the blame for the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner not only on the individuals “who pulled the trigger or did the beating or dug the hole with the shovel,” but extends the blame to include “the President on down in the government of the state of Mississippi.” Dennis feels if these parties had done their jobs responsibly “we wouldn’t be here today to mourn the death of a brave young man like James Chaney.” There are no specific names of individuals mentioned as Dennis distributes blame for the murders, pointing the finger at the systems in place rather than the individuals within the system of oppression. Some responsibility is laid upon the system itself as Dennis acknowledges the varying levels of government. Dennis prefaces his call to action within an historical framework of other acts of injustice from Mississippi’s past. In each instance of aborted justice Dennis is careful to note what happened to the suspected killers. He points out the Emmett Till killers are “walking the streets right now,” and the people responsible for the murder of Mack Parker “were caught but they were never brought to trial.” Dennis highlights the Medgar Evers trial when “the person who was governor of the state at that particular time going up and shaking hands when the jury said that it could not come to a verdict.” He even makes mention of “the Lee’s,” Reverend George and Herbert, whose killers never made it to trial. Dennis weaves together these incidents where the killers are known yet escape the responsibilities of their actions. The word “remember” recurs throughout the list of martyrs linking the memories of the fallen with the knowledge of the outcomes surrounding the fallen. It also links the memory function of the eulogy to these other deaths. The end result is that every martyr becomes paired with an instance of aborted justice. This link is crucial for Dennis as it is his means of communicating a certitude of awareness for how the outcome of this particular death is already prescribed.

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The list of Mississippi martyrs gives Dennis a head of steam to legitimize and initiate his call to action. An emotional outpouring begins to make its argument for action: Well I’m getting sick and tired! I’m sick and tired of going to memorials! I’m sick and tired of going to funerals! I’ve got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight! And I’m sick and tired and can’t help but feel bitter, you see, deep down inside and I’m not going to stand here and ask anybody not to be angry tonight.111 Dennis acknowledges the tone and sentiments of the audience, but not in the prescriptive mode eulogistic discourse advises; rather than soothe he incites. He tells the crowd it is okay to feel angry; it is acceptable to possess feelings of vengeance. Retaliation, reprisal, and retribution become the manner and mechanisms recommended to the congregation for managing their feelings. The phrase “sick and tired” is not just a throw away line; Dennis is borrowing from Fannie Lou Hamer’s rhetorical lexicon. More than just a common Movement saying, it embodies the urgency for action, and it details the need for achievements to be attained. A very conspicuous “I” becomes apparent in Dennis’ text, making the address a very personal and intimate experience. Dennis brings in more notions of bodily sacrifice on behalf of blacks. He talks of war veterans and the love for their country they exhibited by serving in the armed forces. “Meanwhile you understand there are people in this country with no eyes, without a leg, without an arm, to defend this country and to come back to do what? To live as slaves you see, and I’m sick and tired of that.” Dennis stresses the need for action in these statements involving bodily sacrifice, in part because the Movement is closely associated with the idea of putting oneself knowingly in harm’s way to reach a goal. Dennis returns to his earlier line of reasoning to conclude the outcome of Chaney’s death. Dennis embodies this knowledge: You see, I know what's gonna happen! I feel it deep in my heart! When they find the people who killed these guys in Neshoba County, you've got to come back to the state of Mississippi and have a jury of their cousins, their aunts and their uncles. And I know what they're going to say--not guilty.

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Like every other murdered martyr in Mississippi, Chaney’s killers will go unpunished by the current system. Is he also condemning the recently passed civil rights bill which guarantees no voting rights protection, and therefore has no effect upon jury selection in the state of Mississippi? Dennis ties his need for the audience to shake off their complacent tendencies for the sake of the children’s future. He specifically acknowledges “little Ben Chaney” and other children like him. He wants them to know they do not have to feel they will suffer through the same atrocities and hardships, but warns it could come to pass “unless we as individuals stand up and demand our rights in this dad-blasted country, you see. We have to stand up and demand it because tomorrow, baby, it could be you or your child.” Dennis steps out of eulogistic discourse, openly indicting his audience. He charges the crowd with a responsibility and invokes the rhetorical tradition of an Old Testament prophet. This functions rhetorically not strictly as a warning or vision of the future, but also qualifies the need for embodied action. It is ultimately the audience’s reaction to the murder, rather than their memory, of Chaney that Dennis’ eulogy attempts to shape and influence. The rhetorical message in his address is focused on instilling a need for action: And one thing that I’m worried about is just exactly what are we going to do as people as a result of what happened, for what this guy died for and the other people died for. We’re going to come to this memorial here, say, “Oh, what a shame,” go back home and pray to the Lord as we’ve done for years. We go back to work in some white folks’ kitchen tomorrow and forget the about the whole God-blasted thing, you see. [Audience starts clapping] Don’t applaud! Don’t applaud! Don’t get your frustration out by clapping your hands. Each and every one of us as individuals is going to have to take it upon ourself to become leaders in our community. Block by block, house by house, city by city, state by state throughout this entire country. It is not enough to just attend the funeral; Dennis tries to get the audience to assume a responsibility for embarking on a course of action. He advises against becoming a member of the “living dead.” It is crucial for Dennis that the audience does not continue

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with the traditional cultural reaction to memorial services for fallen martyrs. The audience has misinterpreted his intentions, and matters must be clarified. He tells the audience the best way to remember Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner is to do their part and at least register to vote, “Demanding, don’t ask if I can become a registered voter. Demand! Say, ‘Baby, I’m here!’” Dennis is shaping the memories of his audience. He still keeps his focus away from Chaney the individual, continuing to condemn the usual reaction of the black community to instances similar to Chaney’s death. There is an organizational aspect in Dennis’ speech of making voting and registering to vote a physical and personal thing. Rather than clapping Dennis wants the physics transferred into political action. Dennis extends the physical aspects of registering and voting while at the same time incorporating more of the audience. Having already touched on the youth he gives examples to the elderly. “I look at the people of grey hair down here, the tiredness in the face and I think about the millions of bolls of cotton that you picked, the millions of actions it took to chop it for $10 a week, $25 a week, or whatever you could get to eat.” This inclusion acts as a link as is relates to the older members of the audience. Dennis leaves little room for conciliation to the white community. There is no appeasement to them, but rather harsh insinuations and accusations: For the whites in the community and those same ones you cook for, wash and iron for, who come right out and say, “I can't sit down and eat beside a nigger,” or anything like that. I'm tired of that, you see. I'm tired of him talking about how much he hates me and he can't stand for me to go to school with his children and all of that. But yet, when he wants someone to baby-sit for him, he gets my black mammy to hold that baby! And as long as he can do that, he can sit down beside me, he can watch me go up there and register to vote, he can watch me take some type of public office in this state, and he can sit down as I rule over him just as he's ruled over me for years, you see. Physical qualities again come to the forefront of the rhetorical language. Dennis is careful to point out the hypocrisy of white thinking when it comes to school integration and day care needs. The white community fears miscegenation yet it allows non-sexual black

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nannies to care for white children. More physicality is present at the end of this section, making the white man “sit down” and “watch” as blacks “rule over him.” There are heavy implications as to just how the ruling will be conducted by blacks as well. Dennis foresees that blacks will “rule over him just as he’s ruled over me for years.” There is precedence for the way to rule, and it is not necessarily a matter of upholding justice for all or making integration the aim. Dennis openly attacks the argument for blacks to return to Africa. “Well, I'm ready to go back to Africa, baby, when all the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and they all go back to their country where they came from too, you see.” This is a very defiant gesture, and interesting since Dennis associates Jewishness as a sort of nationality. It gives the Jewish culture a sense of nationness, and therefore a meaning of independence based upon those qualities of nationhood, an interesting comment since Jews were also active in the Movement, as is clearly evidenced by the deaths of Goodman and Schwerner. As the end of Dennis’ speech nears he attempts to account for any excuses the audience may provide for maintaining a complacent stance. Dennis encourages the congregation to speak to other blacks, especially to any relatives in Neshoba. “They only have 12% of the population that's black over there. So that man thinks he's going to run over us over there. But we're going in there, baby! We're going to organize in there, and we're going to get those people registered to vote and organized.” Dennis preempts any reasons for explaining the continuation of complacency. There will be no more contentment for inaction. The most memorable part of Dennis’ speech, and maybe the most powerful too, comes as he seems physically and emotionally exhausted. He issues a clear challenge to the crowd: Don’t just look at me and the people here and go back and say that you’ve been to a nice service, a lot of people came, there were a lot of hot-blasted newsmen around, anything like that. But your work is just beginning. I’m going to tell you deep down in my heart what I feel right now. If you do go back home and sit down and take it, God damn your souls! This brave declaration comes nearly at the end of Dennis’ address. With no pretense or feel of a finished script Dennis tells his audience what he is feeling in the immediate

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moment. This phrase is often how the speech is remembered due to the context in which it is said. A church and a funeral service hardly seems the appropriate time and place to lay eternal judgment upon complacent people. By profaning the divine Dennis equates complacent individuals with souls not worth the effort to save. Dennis has spent himself through his phrases of indictment. He utters a few barely discernable phrases, and seems to fade into a state of exhausted desperation. An extreme anxiety can be felt in his voice as he makes his last statements, “We want our freedom now. I don’t want to have to go to another memorial. I’m tired of funerals, all of ‘em. We’ve got to stand up!”112 As quickly as the fire is ignited, it is spent. There is no positive note which Dennis ends on, but rather desperate a call for action. It is important at this juncture to obtain a sense of what prophetic discourse may entail, and how it might function rhetorically. Prophetic forms of discourse have “a sense of mission, a desire to bring the practice of the people into accord with sacred principles, and an uncompromising, often excoriating stance toward a reluctant audience.”113 Whatever the individual prophet’s goal might be, the value of the message lies within the audience’s reception: The prophetic life as presented by the prophet and his disciples becomes its own rhetoric, and it must be judged according to the example it presents, not according to its motive, which we can never know with assurance anyway, nor even according to its strict historical veracity, but according to its aspirations and to the sympathies it creates.114 Prophets make judgments about their audiences in times of crisis. Darsey states that, “The prophet is an accuser and judge; he is called into being when the law has been violated, a critical time. The prophet announces both the charges and the verdict of God or nature against the transgressors of the law.”115 Dennis’ remarks of condemnation deal directly with his audience’s lack of action, and do so in the traditional prophetic manner where the language of the address “reeks with vengeance, of the anger of betrayal.”116 Tension exists throughout Dennis’ speech-- a dynamic which straddles insinuations of black power and designs of religious salvation. The matter of eulogizing Chaney is in constant contrast to the need for inciting the crowd to leave its complacent

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responses. By continuously indicting the crowd Dennis is stressing the idea of salvation through physically registering or voting. Two sections of Dennis’ eulogy consistently receive attention in the few historical resources noting the funeral services. The section of the speech where Dennis points blame towards people in Washington, D.C. “on down to the state of Mississippi” is noted in the books by Dittmer, Branch, and Cagin and Dray.117 The portion most consistently highlighted within the twelve minute speech is the line “If you do go back home and sit down and take it, God damn your souls!”118 This is an extremely powerful phrase considering the context in which it was delivered, and in the audio recording the audience reacts, crying out in approval. Emotional and passionate eulogies were certainly not new to the Movement’s recent history. Roy Wilkins’ eulogy for Medgar Evers is marked with specific incidents from Evers’ struggle for civil rights, and recounts with adoring language the cause Evers sought.119 The funeral services for the four girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham the year before Freedom Summer was emotionally laden considering the victims and circumstances. It is the type of emotion Dennis expresses that stands out amongst the language used in previous eulogies. Dennis’s emotions are angry ones. There is an evident “gnashing of teeth” present in his language. He is livid and enraged, incensed, not about the death of James Chaney, but by the acculturated and premeditated reaction of the complacent black community. The scene is not unfamiliar for the South. A black man, speaking in a black church, trying to bring the audience along to a realization that change must be made.120 This time, though, Dennis asks in a different way—prophetically indicting. He sets down a challenge for his audience to act out in response. Dennis shows his audience how times have not really changed, there is a cycle to the system of oppression, and it is now time for a different approach to achieving Movement goals. Dennis knows how to reach out to the audience members in attendance; he is one of them. He is a black Southerner who lives and works under the same conditions as his audience. He has been harassed and undoubtedly faced some tough circumstances in his fight for justice. He saw his friends and co-workers face similar instances of beatings and arrests. He has even buried a few of his friends, namely Medgar Evers, James Earl

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Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It is understandable that Dennis nearly faints at the end of his speech, collapsing into the arms of Rev. King, who is waiting to speak next. Interestingly enough, Rev. King did not give his eulogy immediately following Dennis. King takes a moment, it seems, to calm the crowd and ease the tension created by some of the comments in Dennis’ speech.121 King asks the congregation to sing “Oh, Freedom,” and following the song King says a few phrases aimed at knitting the congregation back together. “We can understand when a family cries, but we are saying this summer, in the land of sorrow and sadness, that we are all one family.” King says this to unify the emotions of the audience, and the departure from the program is linked back on track. Another female soloist performs a few verses from “Soon Thy Will Be Done,” again in a trained voice with remarkable passion and reflection in the performance. The vibrato of the voice quivers with emotion, reverberating in the crowd. Amid audible weeping, sighs, and sobs, the white reverend from Vicksburg stepped into the pulpit.

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CHAPTER FOUR: “DO NOT LET YOUR ANGER DIE”

The tall and slender Methodist clergyman was no stranger to memorial services for individuals who championed civil rights. The native Mississippian from the southern region of the Delta developed a close relationship with Medgar Evers as the two helped organize efforts in the state’s capital to end segregation. Rev. King was almost eulogized himself on a few occasions, and literally embodies the scars from his personal struggle for equality.122 The speech Reverend Edwin King delivers at Chaney’s memorial service deviates from eulogistic discourse on several occasions, and extends beyond the propriety of generic constraint with combined political and religious undertones. Like Dennis’ speech which preceded it, King’s eulogy makes mention of the murdered civil rights worker, but mainly in the context of the three volunteers and the ideals for which they died. King’s address also makes an effort to dispel complacency, but generalizes this notion and extends it into the white Christian community of Mississippi. King tries to depict the hypocrisy of complacent white Christians, asserting that they are not truly free.123 At the beginning of King’s address he notes the passion and temperament of the speaker before him, and addresses the tone of the memorial: I’m glad Dave got angry tonight. Any of you who are not angry in your heart will not find the strength to go on. You have to hate this thing that has been done. And then have to somehow be able to forgive the people who have done it. But don’t start off by automatically forgiving. This initial acknowledgement of the crowd’s emotions helps King move the audience’s anger towards a productive outlet. He establishes a dichotomy for the feelings his audience may be experiencing. After the emotionally charged speech by Dennis, King rhetorically redirects the sentiments of the crowd towards eradicating the unjust system rather than focusing the anger at individuals. He goes on to mention that “Dave and I have been to several funerals together,” and he thinks he understands why Dennis feels so

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mad. King’s acknowledgement of the crowd’s feelings serves some eulogistic purpose in that it bonds the congregation together, giving the memorial a sense of unity. King, like Dennis, places some blame on the federal government for the murders. He understands there is a larger framework for the violence happening in Mississippi, and knows similar crimes are occurring across the nation. “You and I know, we’re probably not supposed to say it out loud, but these men would not be dead if the U.S. government cared,” pointing out that civil rights organizers had been warning the federal government violence was inevitable, and protection needed to be granted. By “saying it out loud” and making this statement, King textualizes the “unspoken.” He is telling secrets, and in sharing these secrets in front of the reporters and cameras, breaks taboos. King moves the blame down to the governor of Mississippi, “and the rest of the murderers who tolerate murder in this state,” extending the responsibility out into a broader sense of community. “And the American people must examine themselves for allowing a government to allow white Mississippians to kill black Mississippians at will, and now because white blood has been shed also our country is looking for the first time.” This statement could be interpreted as the fulfillment of the argument many SNCC organizers made about the necessity of bringing northern whites into Mississippi for the Freedom Summer Project. King does not need to issue many statements of ethos building for his audience, but does so anyway. He highlights the fact he is a native Mississippian, and the chaplain of Tougaloo College, an historically black college just north of Jackson. King embodies the refutation of the contention that many white Mississippians held towards the upheaval in black political organizing activities throughout the state; this refutation weighed against the notion that “outside agitators” were the cause for stirring up all the troubles in Mississippi. King represented a native white Christian working for equality from the inside. He reminds the crowd that he ran for lieutenant governor with Aaron Henry the previous fall, and that his wife is from Jackson. He notes that his parents lived in the state before they were forced to leave, “By the same kind of people who do this kind of thing and the silent people who I think are just as guilty and are more damned in their souls because they know it’s wrong.” Again King sets up a tension between the silent and the spoken, further emphasizing the pressure of taboos.

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King charges the audience with a duty to uphold. He gives them a role to play in rebuilding Mississippi: I come before you to try to say that my brothers have killed my brothers. My white brothers have killed my black brothers, and somehow you have the greater burden to be able to forgive the people who do this, and through your forgiveness bring salvation to them, for they are in a living hell and will not admit it. These phrases not only link King closer to his audience, but gives the listeners a means of reaction which has nothing to do with violence. There is a unifying theme to King’s address which is meant to bring about a productive channel by changing hate into forgiveness. King again reminds his audience of his own struggle in Mississippi: Someone tired to kill me this spring and it wasn’t the first time my white brothers had tried to kill me. They want to kill me because I am saying I have white brothers and I have black brothers, and I am a man, no more, no less, who would be Christian and still believes there is hope for America. For the first time bloody Neshoba has had the red blood of black men and the red blood of white men enrich its soil. I don’t think we will ever forget this. King is telling his audience that he is fully aware of the danger of standing up for equality, yet he stays steadfast in his resolve and determination. It is important that the audience recognizes this notion of sacrifice because it is a crucial aspect of Movement rhetoric. Attempts on King’s life were not made because of his race, but due to the rhetorical nature of his message. The physical attacks upon him were attempts to silence his rhetoric. King puts forth the rhetorical equation that if an individual is a Christian, white or black, with hope for America to change, than death is a near certainty for them in Mississippi. King shapes this rhetorical action by saying he is a man “who would be Christian”, symbolizing true Christianity in his eyes as a series of actions rather than a label or title. By never forgetting these murders hope will stay alive. There is similarity to the “Gettysburg Address” when King makes a comment consecrating the soil of Mississippi. “For the first time bloody Neshoba has had the red blood of black men and the red blood of white men enrich its soil.” No longer do blacks

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have to cry alone, “But we are now saying that no longer will a person die in Mississippi and the world not know it.” The rhetorical thrust is still generated by the tension between the silent and the spoken, enacting the unmentionable. The comment resonates like a challenge to the Klan, the world will no longer allow lynchings and deaths to stay underground. These murders have helped bring the attention of the nation, the world, and most importantly the outrage of the white community to bear upon Mississippi. “If we can die together in Mississippi surely we can find a way to live together.” King’s speech briefly takes on some aspects of eulogistic discourse. He notes that he met Goodman in Ohio, and wished he could have known him better. King talks about knowing Chaney a little more and comments: But here in Mississippi people like Edwin King from Vicksburg, and James Chaney from Meridian, are not supposed to be able to know each other as brothers. And people killed James Chaney so that we could not live in a society where white men and Negro men in Mississippi could know each other. More mentioning of the unmentionable by commenting on how things are “supposed to be” keeps the tension present in his speech. This statement is a linkage for his audience about segregation; segregation is always a matter of particular place and time, and how those elements affect one’s social position. By being specific with where each man is from, King links Mississippi’s practice of racial separation across the rhetorical landscape of the state. King then goes on to describe how invaluable Chaney was to Rita and Mickey Schwerner, how Chaney’s support was so crucial to the successes the Schwerners were achieving in Meridian. “James befriended them and worked with them and truly they were brothers.” King reads two letters Rita Schwerner wrote earlier in the spring of that year. King reveals that he received the letters from a newspaper the Monday after Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner went missing, “When you and I knew in our hearts what had happened but we couldn’t say it, we couldn’t say it, but we knew.” This is a different tension between silence and the spoken because here the silence is holding out for hope, but is still a recognition of the apprehension balanced between memory and knowledge.

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The first letter, from March 30, to a friend of Rita’s in Vermont talks of the community center started in Meridian, providing insight into the local project. The need for more donations and supplies is mixed in with statements about the growth of the center. The library’s expansion and the educational classes are bringing in individuals from the community, and Rita feels this experience proves their efforts can work and make a difference. The second letter, from April 12, reveals more about the Schwerner’s mentality and approach to the work being done in Meridian. She expresses how they desired to return to social work back east when they are done in Mississippi, but they find it difficult to leave knowing so much work is still unfinished. “Life is so uncertain here in Mississippi that I wouldn’t even obligate myself to the care for a puppy let alone an infant,” she wrote to her friend. She even mentions the expectations of increased harassment as the summer approached, but hoped that change could still come against the system of segregation. “We can use people with specific skills, but most of all we want people in Mississippi with an overwhelming desire to get a nasty job done.” Rita’s letter seems to foreshadow the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. King finishes reading the letters and brings some eulogistic functions to his speech: The tragedy of a time like this is, like me, many of you realize you never came to know James Chaney. What a wonderful person he must have been. I wish I could have known him better. But I will remember James Chaney and I will remember his friends and I will remember what he gave his life for. James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner knew what they were facing when they went up to Neshoba, and Andrew Goodman probably knew when he went with them, and yet they did what had to do, a dirty job that had to be done. Working for freedom is never easy. King encourages the crowd to remember the individuals and the cause they were working towards by emphasizing the notion of memory. “I will remember,” links political aims with shaping the memories, and therefore the knowledge of the audience, of the deaths. He notes the workers knew what dangers were present, but they did their work regardless of the peril. These statements are more than just eulogistic discourse though; they take

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on a notion of duty for the immediate spectators, a responsibility and obligation to shoulder the toil necessary for freedom’s cause. King tells of an interaction between Rita Schwerner and Governor Paul Johnson at the governor’s mansion two days after Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were abducted. King and Rita tried to get an appointment to see the governor and were refused, so the two went up to the mansion to attempt an encounter. King highlights the fact that Mrs. Chaney would never have been able to see the governor about her son because of her race, “They probably would have jailed her and her grief.” By some coincidence Governor Wallace was meeting with Governor Johnson when King and Rita arrived: We walked up and Rita Schwerner was introduced as the wife of Mickey Schwerner to Governor Johnson of Mississippi who had just finished mouthing statements about how concerned he was and how hard he would work. And Governor Johnson said, “I have no time for her,” quickly stepped into the governor’s mansion and literally closed the door to the mansion of the governor of the state of Mississippi, shut the door in her face, and two armed policemen stepped in front of her with guns, and blocked her path. Our path to freedom does not lie through the door of the governor’s mansion. This story illustrates for the audience the hypocrisy representatives of the government operated under. King further describes the guilt he places on Johnson, “and I say murderer because I believe as a Christian he is morally responsible for murder.” King clearly labels Johnson as a Christian and therefore subject to the consequences of not fulfilling the title, again lashing out at the hypocritical white Christian community, firmly placing responsibility and guilt upon them as a burden they must bear. One of the few metaphors issued in either eulogy during the services comes as King says, “This state will either cease to be a state, or we will not tolerate that kind of man contaminating the office of governor in a free society in the United States.” Here King sees Johnson as a kind of virus or disease occupying the seat of governor and plaguing society. The focus of King’s address becomes crystallized in the remainder of his speech. All statements thus far have been pushing towards King’s next series of arguments.

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What the previous sections do is frame and place his contention in a manageable context for the audience to digest. King lets loose his most emotionally charged statements yet: The greatest tragedy that has occurred here is not just these deaths, but the failure in the white community that brought this about; that has brought this about, that has tolerated it. Many white people talk of being Christians. They are afraid of Christianity as much as they are afraid of you. And they are afraid of you. They are afraid because of a guilty conscience. Afraid that you would treat us as we have treated you. I don't believe it will be that way, but that is what they fear. So their fear allows a few men to commit murder. But it doesn't matter if a few men do the murders and burn the churches, the rest of the people are responsible. The white Christians of the city of Meridian who are not grieving with us tonight, here, need your prayers because God almighty sees them and knows in his eyes that every white Christian who did not come to this church is no Christian! As with Dennis’ speech, this last statement acts as prophetic discourse, a strong and clear accusation aimed at the complacent white community. Near the end of the section King is pointing out how white Christians in Mississippi engender sin through their culture. It is a notion of guilt by association, highlighting the responsibility one bears in relation to the culture’s collective will. King’s finger-pointing lies squarely on the hypocritical white Christians who need saving from themselves. King again attempts to embody the notions of Christianity into people’s everyday lives and actions. He also empowers his black audience in this section. King asks the crowd “to rededicate yourselves to helping them. Not just forgiving the people who beat and murdered our brothers, but our brothers who ran and hid from this.” It is the “brothers who ran and hid from this” that King lashes out at. He condemns the militantly complacent whites by illuminating their self-satisfying behaviors. King attacks the white community and the allegations labeling the murder of the civil rights workers as a ploy or trick to gain attention for the Movement. This labeling of the murders as a hoax is similar to the allegations surrounding the body of Emmett Till after it was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. King points out the real deception by turning the hoax on itself:

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What has happened to the white people of Mississippi who could say after seeing three broken mothers and a widow that this is a hoax? The only hoax is that these people think they have found the prize, the Christian way. That these people think that their religion, which is a religion based on white supremacy’s southern way of life first, and Americanism and Christianity second. This is the hoax. King scalds those whites who think their religion supports them, and who also think they are part of democracy in America. It is these whites who need the most help, and again King asks the congregation to try to forgive them. Yet he also advises the audience to be constructive with their emotions, to use their anger in a productive way. The future is uncertain for Mississippi but there are means for making it a better place for all as King evokes the rhetorical history of Jesus in the New Testament: Do not let your anger die. Make it the righteous anger of Jesus who turned over the evil things in the temple, and we may have to turn over everything in this state in the way Jesus did in the temple and that may be what faces us. We do not know yet if all of us try to vote that the American government will let us vote, and it is now the responsibility of the United States because Mississippi has proved it will not let us vote. We do not know what the future will hold. Here King calls out the specific institution of the federal government. He may be taking a jab at the legislation signed by President Johnson earlier in the summer. Throughout the entire speech King has gone through a systematic debunking of the white Christian community. He does this from a unique standpoint because he is a white Christian native to Mississippi: Please do not turn back, your white brothers need to be free. They need to be free to come before God and not try to pretend that they did not know what was going on, to try to say that every Negro I know is happy. Those of you who work in white homes, who meet white people, if you will tell them the truth. You may lose your job, but you will save their souls.

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King argues that these hypocritical whites need freedom too, a freedom arrived at through salvation and forgiveness from black Mississippians. The two-faced nature of complacent white Christians is so deceitful it endangers the freedom of all. “When freedom comes to one half of Mississippi it will bring freedom to the other half and we will be free not just to vote, just to have justice, we will be free to break bread together on our knees.” There is another instance of rhetorical enactment when King emphasizes the ability to express the prohibited by saying, “We will be free to kneel before the ruins of burned churches, bombed homes, and newly dug graves and hold hands, black and white together and say, ‘We are bothers in Christ despite all that there is to keep us from being brothers.’” The closing of King’s speech is a brave reclaiming of the cross. “The love of God can overcome even Mississippi,” he urges, instilling a sense of hope. He plainly states, “The symbol of white Mississippi today is a burning cross as it has always been,” and reveals the irony of destroying the symbol white Christians are supposedly upholding. The fact that white Mississippians strip the cross of its power by leaving it “only a charred ruin,” furthers the paradox. He closes by retrieving the cross and returning the symbol to its representation of salvation for all mankind: But our cross is not a burned cross, it is the one cross of Calvary that is stained with the blood of Jesus, God's son. God gave his son for all of us and this is the cross that we follow, the cross that means victory not emptiness and decay. The cross that means victory over death, but victory in this life. The cross that means we can forgive. God will help us to love. The cross that means we will have a new beginning, a new resurrection, a new birth. That over this blood which is mingled with the blood of the children of Birmingham, the people killed by the Klan in southwest Mississippi, of Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, and of Jesus Christ and of all whom have died for the love of their brothers in service to their brothers, this blood can free us all and we must share this freedom and forgiveness with the white people of Mississippi, and from Mississippi with all of America. This salvaging of the cross unites the congregation and provides an advisory function for action. The inclusion of the Klan and the other deaths help relate the blood of Christ to the blood of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, not to make the martyrs Christ-like, but to

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illustrate how Mississippi whites are following the wrong cross. It frames within political and religious understandings what King feels is the best approach. It emphasizes the Christian tradition of redemption, rebirth, and ever lasting life by virtue of Christ’s sacrifice, again employing prophetic tendencies.124 With these final statements King completes his speech, and the service is nearly finished. The memorial service closes with a prayer of benediction. As the final prayer is said the congregation sings “We Shall Overcome.” The singing continues as the crowd spreads into the streets and under the gaze of the police, sentinel-like as they wait for a potential riot to break out. The services reached a fever pitch, but the tide of emotions crested, rolling back into a challenge of forgiveness fueled by a righteous anger.

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CONCLUSION: NOT TO PRAISE BUT TO BURY

Eulogies are memorials in and of themselves, an idea expressed by Amos Kiewe when he states that, “Eulogies are temporal discourses meant to construct timeless memories and consequently seek to construct future space for such memories.”125 Some eulogies are obviously more memorable than others. Robert F. Kennedy’s eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. may have been improvised, but it is this unrehearsed quality which marks the speech with such a personal tone of commemoration that it enables Kennedy to closely sympathize with his immediate audience. Memorable eulogies do not seem to limit themselves. Recall Ann Richardson’s use of humor in her eulogy for Barbara Jordan; this incorporation of humor has a significant consequence in regards to the speech’s lasting memory. If the eulogies delivered by Dave Dennis and Rev. Edwin King are viewed as a single “speech act”, a more traditional framing of eulogistic discourse is fulfilled rather than violated. By viewing the two speeches as a “set,” or companions with one another, they become more representative of traditional eulogies and lend themselves to function as a memorable eulogy for James Chaney. Rev. King’s eulogy can therefore be understood as an extension of Dennis’ speech, further satisfying the generic propriety of eulogistic discourse. The attempt at shaping memory in a public environment, similar to these specific eulogies, becomes rhetorically attractive. It is the memories these eulogies are meant to shape which has such significant meaning. The link between memory and meaning is an interesting connection maintained within the public sphere. “Public memory is a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.”126 Public memory then becomes a subject “that could link the small realms of ordinary people to the larger world of political structures.”127 The intent is to understand the issues that memories and monuments address, or, in the case of Mississippi, fail to address. It becomes a matter of interpreting reality and publicly mediating the statements, or restatements, expressed in public monuments and memories.

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There are two official state monuments marking the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. One is a sign off Highway 16, the other is a statue in Jackson. Outside the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where the Emmett Till trial was held, there is a monument commemorating fallen confederate soldiers. Even the landscape of Mississippi reflects the underlying tension of memory against knowledge, and the influence one has over the other. This tension shapes the public memory of people. The appearance in public spaces of monuments and memorials profile more than the people, places, or times monuments are meant to remember. From these monuments emerges a cultural power of veneration, an extension for regarding the “appropriate” memory. Charles E. Scott states, “Public memory happens in and as appearing,” and continues that, “public memory occurs as an appearing event.”128 Scott views the understanding of public memory as not strictly the content of those memories, but “as to their appearing enactment.” The focus for Scott is the cultural ratification and endorsing influence these memories have upon our public memories. Public monuments and memorials are cultural artifacts and like culture itself they develop and transmit certain knowledge and beliefs. “For when we bring together culture and care, we arrive at a basic meaning that is found in the word memory, which connotes returning to something vital for people.”129 So what can be said for the monuments on Mississippi’s rhetorical landscape? Outside of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, there is a column in a private graveyard. The top of the column is broken off, purposely signifying a life cut short. The column marks the gravesite of John Prentiss Matthews, a Republican during the Reconstruction era.130 Matthews formed an independent party of blacks and whites in Copiah County, one of the few counties not controlled by Democrats after the 1875 elections, when violence and threats had kept most white Republicans and black voters away from the polls. The night before the 1883 elections Matthews received a letter from white leaders in Hazlehurst to “absent himself from the polls on election.”131 The next day as Matthews presented his ballot to an election official, precinct captain Ras Wheeler fired two loads of buckshot from his double-barreled shotgun, killing Matthews on the site. The younger Matthews was appointed postmaster by Benjamin Harrison and was as politically unpopular as his father. On Christmas Day 1890, Matthews’ son was shot on the streets of Carrollton.

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The broken column marks the slain Matthews and his son, but also signifies the violent ending of Reconstruction in Mississippi. On the campus of Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU), like other colleges across the nation, buildings are named for individuals. It just so happens a few buildings on the historically black college are named for well known racists. Walter Sillers Jr. and Fielding Wright represent two of the most racist white leaders in the history of Mississippi, and each have buildings named in their “honor” on the campus of MVSU. During Sillers’ tenure as Speaker of the House in the state legislature from1916 to 1944 not a single progressive initiative was sponsored by Sillers.132 Sillers’ father was a member of the Red Shirts, Klan-like groups that intimidated black voters away from the polls in 1875. Fielding Wright was Strom Thurmond’s running mate on the Dixiecrat ticket during the 1948 presidential election; instead of fading away into oblivion like the Dixiecrat party, Wright’s name is on the second largest building on MVSU campus.133 Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer each lived within twenty-five miles of the campus, yet no buildings bear their names. B.B. King grew up in the town of Itta Bena where MVSU campus is located, but no music hall or building on campus boasts his legendary status amongst bluesmen the world over.134 If one drives east out of Philadelphia, Mississippi, for eight miles on Highway 16, and then turns left onto a county road heading north for two more miles they will encounter one of two official state markers commemorating slain civil rights champions.135 A standard historical state road sign on County Road 747 reads: FREEDOM SUMMER MURDERS On June 21, 1964, voting rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had come here to investigate the burning of Mt. Zion Church, were murdered. Victims of a Klan conspiracy, their deaths provoked national outrage and led to the first successful federal prosecution of a civil rights case in Mississippi. The marker is ornamented with a magnolia blossom at the top, and is otherwise a fairly plain sign.

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Outside of a library at 4215 Medgar Evers Boulevard in Jackson, Mississippi, stands a life-sized bronzed statue of Medgar Evers.136 The inscription reads, “Dedicated to everyone who believes in peace, love and nonviolence. Let’s keep the torch burning.” The road sign near Mt. Zion and the statue in Jackson, are the only official state sponsored monuments, and they mark only four of the known twenty-five civil rights murders in the state of Mississippi. More goes unnamed, and therefore not publicly remembered in Mississippi. As Navy sailors, FBI men, state police, and civil rights workers alike searched the landscape for the missing bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, other black bodies were discovered. On July 13, 1964, the decapitated body of Henry Dee was found in the Mississippi River by a local fisherman, and the day before authorities had recovered the body of Charles Moore not far from where Dee’s corpse was found.137 The two Meadville blacks in their early twenties had been missing since April, and neither were noted for being particularly active in the campaign for civil rights. Their killers were arrested, posted bail, and escaped prosecution. A few weeks after the bodies of Moore and Dee were found, another body surfaced from the secret depths of Mississippi’s waterways. From the Big Black River the body of Herbert Oarsby was reclaimed.138 Oarsby’s body still bore the CORE T-shirt he wore when he was abducted. What makes Oarsby’s story all the more appalling is his age: like Emmett Till he was fourteen years old when he was murdered. Unlike Till’s story, Oarsby remains little more than a footnote in the history of Freedom Summer. In Cagin and Dray’s book on Freedom Summer, Oarsby is never named, but rather remains “the body of a never-identified boy, about fourteen.”139 Dittmer makes a similar reference to Oarsby noting, “The body of a black teenager, never identified, was also found floating in the Big Black River.”140 In Branch’s Pillar of Fire, not even Oarsby’s unidentified body is mentioned, and the bodies of Moore and Dee are barely noted amongst the detailed narrative.141 At least Moore and Dee are identified by these works. Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom completely ignores the discovery of Moore’s and Dee’s bodies, let alone Oarsby’s. The Klan also meant to deny Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner their final memory on Earth. The Klan could not legally repel the oncoming “invaders” expected in

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the summer of 1964, so to protect the society founded on white supremacy, they committed murder. The murders would do two things: first, they would discourage local blacks from getting involved, and second, they would stop the flood of northern white college students from pouring over the state line. It never worked out the way the Klan had planned. The Freedom Summer Project went forward, and no more civil rights murders happened in Mississippi the rest of the summer. Every year since Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered, the congregation of Mt. Zion in Longdale holds a memorial service for the three young men. This last summer was the fortieth anniversary, and on June 20, 2004, Governor Haley Barbour, Congressmen John Lewis, Congressmen Chip Pickering, and Carolyn Goodman (Andrew’s mother) observed the Sunday services at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, laying a wreath on the granite marker outside the church.142 The event was sponsored for the first time by a multi-racial coalition, a slight indication of a community coming to recognize the troubles of its past and the lingering influence those problems have on the present day. The Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has a memorial on campus for the three civil rights workers who stayed there briefly during the early summer of 1964. The monument itself is a natural hillside near Kumler Chapel on Miami’s campus. A plaque was placed in Peabody Hall to commemorate the efforts of the rights activists. In Montgomery, Alabama, a Maya Lin-designed memorial of black granite holds the names of forty people murdered in the struggle for civil rights.143 “It is an important cultural marker not only because of the attention it has received, but also because of its rhetoric-- its representations and enactments of racial dynamics of the past, present, and future.”144 The names appear in the chronological order of their deaths, from Rev. George Lee to Martin Luther King Jr. Just after the names of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekia Dee appear the names of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. Herbert Oarsby goes unnamed, and eludes his place in public memory, remaining in the vast limbo of perceived cultural consciousness. The dead do not remember. When the Klan killed Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner they tried to kill them twice. They first killed the civil rights workers out on Rock Cut Road when they executed the trio in the middle of the night. Then they tried to

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kill the memory of the three martyrs, by hiding the bodies of the three young men in an unmarked grave. The attempt to deny Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner their place in public memory failed, but other bodies like Oarsby’s still go unnamed in our discourse about the history of our country’s struggle for equality. When will we recognize the duty Oarsby represented? When will we eulogize him in our public memories as we have remembered the likes of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner? All fallen soldiers deserve a resting place in memory, not only for their personal remembrance, but for our cultural recollection. The cognitive and communication processes involved with eulogies and public memory really have little to do with the past. The method of conveying and understanding important issues of the present are what is actually being addressed in these moments and messages. These are serious consequences and matters of power and control, not simply funeral orations or hollow marble and granite structures, which continue to impart lessons. “Let us continue” to search for Herbert Oarsby.

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APPENDIX A

Eulogy for James Chaney August 7, 1964 by Dave Dennis

I'm not here to do the traditional thing most of us do at such a gathering. And that is to tell of what a great person the individual was and some of the great works the person was involved in and etc. I think we all know because he walked these dusty streets of Meridian and around here before I came here. With you and around you. Played with your kids and he talked to all of them. And what I want to talk about is really what I really grieve about. I don't grieve for Chaney because the fact I feel that he lived a fuller life than many of us will ever live. I feel that he's got his freedom and we are still fighting for it. But what I want to talk about right now is the living dead that we have right among our midst, not only in the state of Mississippi but throughout the nation. Those are the people who don't care, those who do care but don't have the guts enough to stand up for it, and those people who are busy up in Washington and in other places using my freedom and my life to play politics with. That includes the President on down to the government of the state of Mississippi, you see. In my opinion, as I stand here, I not only blame the people who pulled the trigger or did the beating or dug the hole with the shovel. I bury the people…not bury, sorry. But I blame the people in Washington D.C. and on down in the state of Mississippi for what happened just as much as I blame those who pulled the trigger. Because I feel that a hundred years ago, if the proper thing had been done by the federal government of this particular country and by the other people, responsible people or irresponsible across the nation, we wouldn't be here today to mourn the death of a brave young man like James Cheney, you see. As I stand here a lot of things pass through my mind. I can remember the Emmett Till case, what happened to him, and what happened to the people who killed him. They're walking the streets right now and the brother of one is a police officer in a place called

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Rulesville, Mississippi. I remember back down here, right below us here, a man by the name of Mack Parker and exactly what happened to him and what happened to the people who beat, killed him, and drug him down the streets and threw him in the river. I know that those people were caught, but they were never brought to trial. I can remember back in Birmingham of the four young kids who were bombed in the church and had just went to service and I know what has happened to the people who killed them--nothing. Remember the little thirteen year old kid who was riding a bicycle and who was shot in the back? And the youth who shot him, who was a white guy from Birmingham, got off with three months. I can remember all of that right now. Or I can remember the Medgar Evers case in Beckwith. The person who was governor of the state at that particular time going up and shaking his hand when the jury said that it could not come to a verdict. I can remember all of that. And I can remember down in the southwest area where you had six Negroes who'd been killed, and I can remember the Lees and all these particular people who know what has happened to those who have been killing them. I know what is happening to the people that are bombing the churches, who've been bombing the homes, who are doing the beatings around this entire state and country. Well I'm getting sick and tired! I'm sick and tired of going to memorials! I'm sick and tired of going to funerals! I've got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight! And I'm sick and tired and can't help but feel bitter, you see, deep down inside and I'm not going to stand here and ask anybody here not to be angry tonight. Yeah, we have love in our hearts, and we've had it for years and years in this country. We've died on the battlefield to protect the people in this country. We've gone out in World War I and in 1942 millions of us died too, you see. Meanwhile you understand there are people in this country with no eyes, without a leg, without an arm, to defend this country and to come back to do what? To live as slaves you see, and I'm sick and tired of that. Yeah, I'm probably supposed to stand here…got a lot more I want to say. You see, we're all tired. You see, I know what's gonna happen! I feel it deep in my heart! When they find the people who killed these guys in Neshoba County, you've got to come back to the state of Mississippi and have a jury of their cousins, their aunts and their uncles. And I know what they're going to say--not guilty. Because no one saw them pull the trigger. I'm tired of that!

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See another thing that makes me even tireder though, and that is the fact that we as people here in this state and the country are allowing this to continue to happen. Even us as black folk. So I look at the young kids here--that's something else that I grieve about. For little Ben Cheney here and the other ones like him around in this audience and around on the streets. I grieve because sometimes they make me feel that, maybe, they have to go through the same thing, you see. And they are gonna have to go through the same thing! Unless we as individuals begin to stand up and demand our rights and a change in this dad-blasted country, you see. We have to stand and demand it because tomorrow, baby, it could be you or your child. And one thing that I'm worried about is just exactly what are we going to do as people as a result of what happened, for what this guy died for and the other people died for. We're going to come to this memorial here, say, “Oh, what a shame,” go back home and pray to the Lord as we've done for years. We go back to work in some white folks' kitchen tomorrow, and forget about the whole God-blasted thing, you see. Don't applaud! Don't applaud! Don't get your frustrations out by clapping your hands. Each and every one of us as individuals is going to have to take it upon ourself to become leaders in our community. Block by block, house by house, city by city, county by county, state by state throughout this entire country. Taking our black brothers by the hand, one at a time, stepping across with our feet through the mighty oceans to the mighty country of Africa. Holding our hands up high, telling them that if they're not ready for us, “Too bad, baby, 'cause we're coming anyway.” So we have to do as people. We can't take it any longer and be wiped off of the face of the earth. I look at the people of grey hair down here, the tiredness in the face and I think about the millions of bolls of cotton that you picked, the millions of actions it took to chop it for $10 a week, $25 a week, or whatever you could get to eat. I watch the people here who go out there and wash dishes and you cook for them. For the whites in the community and those same ones you cook for, wash and iron for, who come right out and say, “I can't sit down and eat beside a nigger,” or anything like that. I'm tired of that, you see. I'm tired of him talking about how much he hates me and he can't stand for me to go to school with his children and all of that. But yet, when he wants someone to baby-sit for him, he gets my black mammy to hold that baby! And as long as he can do that, he can sit down beside me, he can watch

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me go up there and register to vote, he can watch me take some type of public office in this state, and he can sit down as I rule over him just as he's ruled over me for years, you see. This is our country too. We didn't ask to come here when they brought us over here, and I hear the old statement over and over again about me to go back to Africa. Well, I'm ready to go back to Africa, baby, when all the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and they all go back to their country where they came from too, you see. And they have to remember that they took this land from the Indians. And just as much as it's theirs, it's ours too now. We've got to stand up. The best thing that we can do for Mr. Chaney, for Mickey Schwerner, for Andrew Goodman is stand up and demand our rights. All these people here who are not registered voters should be in line Monday morning from one corner of this county to the next, demanding, don’t ask if I can become a registered voter. Demand! Say, “Baby, I'm here!” People, you've got relatives in places like Neshoba County, talk to them. They're at a disadvantage. They only have 12% of the population that's black over there. So that man thinks he's going to run over us over there. But we're going in there, baby! We're going to organize in there, and we're going to get those people registered to vote and organized. I don't care if we are just 12%, because that 12% is part of the almost 50% of this whole entire state you see. Don't just look at me and the people here and go back and say that you've been to a nice service, a lot of people came, there were a lot of hot-blasted newsmen around, anything like that. But your work is just beginning. I'm going to tell you deep down in my heart what I feel right now. If you do go back home and sit down and take it, God damn your souls! Stand up! Your neighbors down there who were too afraid to come to this memorial, take them to another memorial. Take them up and take them down there. Make them register to vote and you register to vote. I doubt if one fourth of this house is registered. Go down there and do it. (Pause) Don't bow down anymore! Hold your heads up! (Pause)

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We want our freedom now! I don’t want to have to go to another memorial. I’m tired of funerals, tired of ‘em! We’ve got to stand up.

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APPENDIX B

Eulogy for James Chaney August 7, 1964 by Reverend Edwin King

I'm glad Dave got angry tonight. Any of you who are not angry in your heart will not find the strength to go on. You have to hate this thing that has been done. And then have to somehow be able to forgive the people who have done it. But I don't think we start off by automatically forgiving. If we cannot admit when we feel pain, when we feel anger, when we feel hate then we are not using the feelings that God gave us. Our hatred should be to destroy the system, but is destroying the souls and the bodies of men. Dave and I have been to several funerals together. I think I know how Dave feels. I don't know that I can know fully ever how another brother feels. What Dave did not say I must say as we begin. We're not here talking about a crime that has just been committed in Mississippi. We are not here to talk about the love for one who will not walk again in our midst in this life. This murder was not just done by sick white Mississippians. You and I know, and we're probably not supposed to say it out loud, but these men would not be dead if the U.S. government cared. The government may care now, the lives of other people may be protected because of this sacrifice, but if the Justice Department and the FBI had done the minimum that we requested, going to Philadelphia when we first asked them, these men might not have died. Of course, people are killed frequently in Mississippi and we do not say that our government could protect every person who believes in democracy from being murdered by those who don't. But the U.S. government must bear part of the responsibility along with the murderer who sits in the governor's mansion in Jackson, and the rest of the murderers who tolerate murder in this state. And the American people must examine themselves for allowing a government to allow white Mississippians to kill black Mississippians at will, and now because white blood has been shed also our country is looking for the first time. I come before you now, some of you know me, some of you don't. I’m a Mississippian. I'm the chaplain out of Tougaloo College. I ran for lieutenant governor with 60

Aaron Henry last fall. My wife is from Jackson, Mississippi. My parents used to live in Mississippi before they were run out of Mississippi. By the same kind of people who do this kind of thing, and the silent people who I think are just as guilty and are more damned in their souls because they know it's wrong. But I've said enough about the country, we'll just talk about Mississippi. I come before you to try to say that my brothers have killed my brothers. My white brothers have killed my black brothers, and somehow you have the greater burden to be able to forgive the people who do this and through your forgiveness bring salvation to them, for they are in a living hell and will not admit it. Their souls are being destroyed by the hate and fear they bear towards all of us. I was not surprised when black man and white man fell together this summer because in the past five or six months many black men and women have been murdered in this state, and as the spring wore on we began to have a tax on the people at Tougaloo, white people and black people. Someone tried to kill me this spring and it wasn’t the first time my white brothers had tried to kill me. They want to kill me because I am saying that I have white brothers and I have black brothers and I am a man, no more no less, who would be Christian and still believes there is hope for America. For the first time bloody Neshoba has had the red blood of black men and the red blood of white men enrich its soil. I don't think we will ever forget this. Too often in Mississippi in these last 300 years Negro mothers, Negro wives, Negro brothers and sisters have had to cry alone, have had to go into the white kitchen and wipe away the tears so that nobody would know it mattered when a person died. But we are now saying that no longer will a person die in Mississippi and the world not know it, and this country and the people of this world not grieve with us. If we can die together in Mississippi surely we can find a way to live together, to grow together, to learn together, to love together. This will take great strength, great courage that God alone can give. I met Andrew Goodman only in Ohio. I remember him as a person who seemed to be full of love for himself and for his fellow man. A quiet, easy-going, friendly fellow--I wish I could have known him better. I know James Chaney a little better. But here in Mississippi people like Edwin King from Vicksburg, and James Chaney from Meridian, are not supposed to be able to know each other as brothers. And people killed James Chaney so that we could not live in a

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society where white men and Negro men in Mississippi could know each other. I had met James when he was with the Schwerners. I had heard Mickey Schwerner say wonderful things about James Chaney. I have heard Rita Schwerner this summer say wonderful things about James Chaney. James Chaney helped support the Schwerners to give them strength when they came as strangers to this community, but full of love for this community. James befriended them and worked with them and truly, they were brothers. Rita has often talked this summer of how important James was to this project. She said he was willing, just as Mickey was willing, just as she was willing to give all to this project, for this freedom. I’d like to read several things to you tonight before we close. They’re not from the Holy Scriptures because I believe God can speak through men and women who are writing and revealing and living his word today. Monday morning after they first disappeared, when you and I already knew in our hearts what had happened but we couldn’t say it, we couldn’t say it, but we knew, we tried to pretend and this kind of pretending is hope, and hope is good. I’ve got a newspaper from a peace organization which had two letters in it from Rita Schwerner and although this is a funeral to memorialize James Chaney tonight I knew you people from Meridian would appreciate tonight these letters from Rita written after she and Mickey, the both of them, came to the community. It was strange I got them on the day I knew Mickey was dead. The first is written from Meridian on March 30, to a friend in Vermont: “The community center is growing beautifully. We started a new program about two weeks ago,” and then she describes the programs that went on in the community center. She says, “Now we’ve run out of material, I’ve been begging for more. The need seems so great that I don’t know if our contacts up North are going to be able to keep us supplied, but down here we just keep begging. I’ve lost all feelings of personal pride about begging because the need is so very great, and some people don’t seem to do anything until you plead with them. At any rate the program is truly exciting and there are tangible results. The library continues to grow, more and more people hear about it and send what they can. We’ve been able to get an old phonograph to play records on and children are coming in for classes, and adults are starting to overcome their fear about registering to vote. I believe our experiences are showing that a community center can work, and that people do want this project.”

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And the second letter written in April 12, she says a little more about what she and Mickey were thinking: “I tend to think a lot of projects which never go beyond the thought stage in my brain. When the two of us, Mickey and me, came down to Mississippi we said we would leave and return to social work in New York in the fall, we still want to, yet our feelings are ambivalent. It’s hard to leave Mississippi. There’s so much to do here and there’s so few people to do it, that leaving seems like deserting it. Still, there’s no way to live a normal life while living and working in the Movement. Life is so uncertain here in Mississippi that I wouldn’t even obligate myself to the care of a puppy let alone an infant. There is little more that I can tell you about the Freedom Summer except that preparations are underway. Workers all over the state are busy looking for housing. The Negros will open their homes to white men this summer. We will try to establish meaningful programs. Here in Meridian we hope to have a number of people in the Freedom Schools and an intensified voter registration campaign we will go into the surrounding tough counties.” I wonder if she even knew the name Neshoba back in April? “We anticipate increased police harassment throughout the state, but we also hope for the chance to drive a meaningful wedge into the system of segregation. We can use people with specific skills, but most of all we want people in Mississippi with an overwhelming desire to get a nasty job done. From Mickey and Rita Schwerner in Meridian Mississippi.” Rita has lost a husband. People here have lost a son that they had known through 20 years. You have lost a friend. The tragedy of a time like this is, that like me many of you realize I never came to know James Chaney. What a wonderful person he must have been. I wish I could have known him better. But I will remember James Chaney and I will remember his friends, and I will remember what he gave his life for. James Chaney and Michael Schwerner knew what they were facing when they went up to Neshoba, and Andrew Goodman probably knew when he went with them, and yet they did what they had to do; a dirty job that had to be done. Working for freedom is never easy. “Freedom is never free,” as we said yesterday at our convention in Jackson. Two days after our friends disappeared Rita came to Jackson to plead the cause for all three men. Now I met Rita and went with Rita to the Governor’s mansion. We tried to see the governor in his office and they would not give Rita Schwerner an appointment. You can imagine what they would have done if Mrs. Chaney had tried to see the governor of

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Mississippi about her son. They would probably have jailed her and her grief. They did not dare lay a hand on Rita, but they all most did. We went to the governor’s mansion; they had been told we were coming, and by coincidence the governor of Mississippi and Governor Wallace, who helped perpetrate the murder of children in a church, were talking on the front porch of the Governors mansion, we did not know they would be there. We walked up and Rita Schwerner was introduced as the wife of Mickey Schwerner to Governor Johnson of Mississippi who had just finished mouthing statements about how concerned he was and how hard he would work. And Governor Johnson said, “I have no time for her,” quickly stepped into the governor’s mansion and literally closed the door of the mansion of the governor of the sate of Mississippi, shut the door in her face, and two armed policemen stepped in front of her with guns, and blocked her path. Our path to freedom does not lie through the door of the governor’s mansion, although one day soon, and I say within four years the next Governor of Mississippi, if he is not a Negro, will be a white man elected because he believes in the things that you and I believe in. We will not tolerate another racist murderer like Paul Johnson. And I say murderer because I believe as a Christian he is morally responsible for murder. This state will either cease to be a state, or we will not tolerate that kind of man contaminating the office of governor in a free society in the United States. The greatest tragedy that has occurred here is not just these deaths, but the failure in the white community that brought this about; that has brought this about, that has tolerated it. Many white people talk of being Christians. They are afraid of Christianity as much as they are afraid of you. And they are afraid of you. They are afraid because of a guilty conscience. Afraid that you would treat us as we have treated you. I don't believe it will be that way, but that is what they fear. So their fear allows a few men to commit murder. But it doesn't matter if a few men do the murders and burn the churches, the rest of the people are responsible. The white Christians of the city of Meridian who are not grieving with us tonight, here, need your prayers because God almighty sees them and knows in his eyes that every white Christian who did not come to this church is no Christian! You can help save them. You must try to rededicate yourselves to helping them. Not just forgiving the people who beat and murdered our brothers, but our other brothers who ran and hid from this. I know so many people who said “that is a hoax.” Ask Mrs.

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Chaney what mother would want her son to have a hoax. Ask Mrs. Goodman and Mrs. Schwerner in New York, you saw all three of these mothers on television and the news. What has happened to the white people of Mississippi who could say after seeing three broken mothers and a widow that this is a hoax? The only hoax is that these people think they have found the prize, the Christian way. That these people think that their religion, which is a religion based on white supremacy’s southern way of life first, and Americanism and Christianity second. This is the hoax. That these people think they have a faith that can support them, that these people think that they are part of a democracy, that these people call us communists, but please I beg you try to forgive. Do not let your anger die. Make it the righteous anger of Jesus who turned over the evil things in the temple, and we may have to turn over everything in this state in the way Jesus did in the temple, and that may be what faces us. We do not know yet if all of us try to vote that the American government will let us vote, and it is now the responsibility of the United States because Mississippi has proved it will not let us vote. We do not know what the future will hold. Please do not turn back, your white brothers need to be free. They need to be free to come before God and not try to pretend that they did not know what was going on, to try to say that every Negro I know is happy. Those of you who work in white homes, who meet white people, if you will tell them the truth. You may lose your job, but you will help save their souls. God has placed a great burden on you, the burden of grief on a few, the burden of the pain of not seeing John [James] Chaney, of not seeing Mickey Schwerner, of not having Andrew Goodman return home alive from Mississippi. This is a pain I cannot know. You cannot really enter into this mother’s pain, this family’s pain, but let us say we will try to take all the sorrow, all the pain of this family, and of the families of those who did the murder, and of the families of those white Christians who wanted to be here but were afraid. Some afraid that they would be murdered, but others afraid that someone would not speak to them. They need freedom. When freedom comes to one half of Mississippi it will bring freedom to the other half and we will not be free just to vote, just to have justice, we will be free to break bread together on our knees. We will be free to kneel before the ruins of burned churches, bombed homes, and newly dug graves and hold hands, black and white together and say,

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“We are brothers in Christ despite all that there is to keep us from being brothers.” The love of God can overcome even Mississippi. The symbol of white Mississippi today is a burning cross as it has always been. A symbol of destruction of the Christian faith. A symbol of destroying the thing they say they are upholding, and it is very interesting that they must burn the cross and leave it only a charred ruin, a thing with no power. But our cross is not a burned cross, it is the one cross of Calvary that is stained with the blood of Jesus, God's son. God gave his son for all of us and this is the cross that we follow, the cross that means victory not emptiness and decay. The cross that means victory over death, but victory in this life. The cross that means we can forgive. God will help us to love. The cross that means we will have a new beginning, a new resurrection, a new birth. That over this blood which is mingled with the blood of the children of Birmingham, the people killed by the Klan in southwest Mississippi, of Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, and of Jesus Christ and all whom have died for the love of their brothers in service to their brothers, this blood can free us all and we must share this freedom and forgiveness with the white people of Mississippi, and from Mississippi with all of America.

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NOTES

1 Gordon S. White, “Bunning Pitches a Perfect Game; Mets Are Perfect Victims, 6 to 0,” The New York Times (22 June, 1964): 1. 2 There are several excellent sources that cover not only the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner but also provide historical background and analysis to the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In no particular order they are: Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1988); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters (New York: Touchstone, 1988); Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America In the King Years 1963-64 (New York: Touchstone, 1998); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi ( New York: W.C.C. Books, 1965). 3 Townsend Davis, Weary Feet, Rested Souls (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1998), 286-288. This book reads like a travel-log, moving from state to state focusing on relevant people, places, and historical events. 4 Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Generic Constrains and the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 167. 5 Jamieson, “Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation,” 168. 6 Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 366. 7 S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed are the Peacemakers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); J. Robert Cox, “The Fulfillment of Time: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech,” in Texts in Context ed. Michael Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis: Hermagoras, 1989), 181-205. 8 Martin J. Medhurst, “Eisenhower, Little Rock, and the Rhetoric of Crisis,” in The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric ed. Amos Kiewe (Westport: Praeger, 1994); Steven Goldzwig and George Dionisopoulos, “John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Discourse: The Evolution from ‘Principled Bystander’ to Public Advocate,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 179-198; David Zarefsky, “Subordinating the Civil Rights Issue: Lyndon Johnson in 1964,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 48 (1983): 103-118. 9 Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, “’Your Tools are Really the People’: The Rhetoric of Robert Parris Moses,” Communication Monographs 65 (1998):126-140; Pat Jefferson, “’Stokely’s Cool’: Style,” Today’s Speech 16 (1968): 19-24; Charles Stewart, “The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 429-446. 10 Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 371. 11 This title is borrowed from a poem of the same name by Elizabeth Sewell. Her poem is dedicated to the Neshoba martyrs and appears in her book Signs and Cities (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 18. 12 Stephen Lucas, “The Schism In Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (1981): 20. Lucas’ article supports the notion that the text itself- its identity, how it functions- is intricately woven with its world, and to divorce the historical from the rhetorical would do harm to the critic’s analysis. 13 Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, 54. The day of the decision became known in many Southern regions as “Black Monday.” 14 Mississippi led all states in the number of lynchings. “Host to more black lynchings (at least five hundred) and civil rights murders (twenty-five) than any state in the Union, old Mississippi, dead last in so many indexes of American life, seemed an appropriate birthplace for the blues.” Jim Carrier, A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Harcourt Inc., 2004), 257. 15 Dittmer, Local People, 54. 16 Dittmer, Local People, 55. 17 Several sources can be found that focus on the Till story. Stephen J. Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988), is the first scholarly work to cover the case. Whitfield uses an unpublished master’s thesis by Hugh Stephen Whitaker from Florida State University, 1963. Whitaker is a native of Tallahatchie County and had unhindered access to the jury members and trial lawyers for the defense and prosecution. Since all court records surrounding the case are “missing or lost,”

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Whitaker’s thesis is as close to a primary source as possible. William Bradford Huie’s pieces, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi” Look 20 (24 January, 1956): 46-49; and “What’s Happened to the Emmett Till Killers,” Look 21 (22 January, 1957): 63-68; published the confession of Milam and Bryant to killing Till, and covered the local community’s reaction a year after the trial. Both articles were later republished in an early (and out of print) collection of Huie’s work Wolf Whistle: And Other Stories. A concise retelling of the Till story that remains true to the magnitude of the case can be found in the introduction to Paul Hendrickson’s Sons of Mississippi (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Mammie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, co-authored a book with Christopher Benson on her account of the time surrounding her son’s abduction. In the text of Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003), she describes examining her son’s body at the morgue, moving slowly from Emmett’s feet to his head the mother’s identification of the body is particularly moving and powerful. 18 Dittmer, Local People, 55. 19 David Halberstam, “Tallahatchie County Acquits a Peckerwood,” The Reporter (19 April, 1956): 26-30. 20 Dittmer, Local People, 80. 21 Branch, Parting the Waters, 344. 22 Branch, Parting the Waters, 257. 23 Dittmer, Local People, 83. 24 Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, 252. Frances Culbertson, a black woman, claimed to have seen Rainey pull the trigger. A few weeks later she was jailed and alleged that Rainey “roughed her up.” 25 Dittmer, Local People, 79. 26 And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi (New York: New York University Press, 1994), is an excellent biography of Bob Moses and his involvement with SNNC’s struggle for civil rights. 27 Dittmer, Local People, 102. 28 Branch, Parting the Waters, 330. 29 Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, ed Julian Bond and Andrew Lewis (Mason: Thompson Learning Publishing, 2002): 491-502. 30 Dittmer, Local People, 105. 31 Dittmer, Local People, 106. 32 Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, 152. 33 Branch, Parting the Waters, 510. Hurst was driving a pickup that belonged to Billy Caston. Lee’s widow blamed Moses for her husband’s death. At the funeral she openly accused Moses and shouted “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” 34 Dittmer, Local People, 109. 35 Dittmer, Local People, 141. For a more complete and thorough retelling of Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss refer to William Doyle’s An American Insurrection (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), which gives accounts from the Oval Office, the Mississippi Governor’s office, and testimonies from participants on both sides of the riot. 36 There were two fatalities as a result of the riot at Ole Miss. “A reporter for the London Dailey Sketch, whose name is Paul Guihard, was killed in Oxford. His body was found with a bullet in the back,” Branch, Parting the Waters, 668. A local jukebox repairman was also found dead from a gun shot wound. Both deaths were presumed a matter of being at the wrong place, at the wrong time. 37 Dittmer, Local People, 152. 38 Dittmer, Local People, 161. 39 Dittmer, Local People, 166. 40 Branch, Parting the Waters, 824-825. The bullet from the .30’06 tore through Ever’s body, continued through the living room window, and stopped in the refrigerator in the kitchen. 41 Dittmer, Local People, 202. 42 Dittmer, Local People, 206-207. 43 Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, 224-227. Moses is quoted as stating at one strategy meeting, “The one thing we can do for the country is to be above the race issue.” 44 In Howard Zinn’s book SNCC:The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), an entire chapter is dedicated the days leading up to and following the Hattiesburg Freedom Day. Zinn’s chapter is especially unique due to the insight he was able to attain as a participant-observer. The Sunday after Freedom Day 68

was Moses’ trial date and was the first instance of an integrated courtroom when whites and blacks refused to separate themselves. 45 Dittmer, Local People, 215-216. 46 Branch, Parting the Waters, 921. 47 Dittmer, Local People, 246. 48Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 49Claude Sitton, “Mississippi is Gripped by Fear of Violence in Civil Rights Drive,” The New York Times, (30 May, 1964): 1. 50 Dittmer, Local People, 247. The burning of Mount Zion was reported as a side note in the article “Mississippi Tense Over Voter Drive,” in The New York Times (21 June, 1964). 51 R. W. Apple, “2 of Missing Men Feared for Lives,” The New York Times (25 June, 1964): 18. James Chaney had remarked to Sue Brown at the Meridian office that “there’s likely to be trouble.” 52 Claude Sitton broke the story for The New York Times on (23 June, 1964), in his piece “3 in Rights Drive Reported Missing.” The article was on the front page and even has a quote from Deputy Price, “I told them to leave the county.” 53 Claude Sitton, “Mississippi Drags River in Search for Rights Aides,” The New York Times (28 June, 1964): 1. More details are found about the ongoing search effort in Sitton’s “400 Sailors Hunt 3 in Mississippi,” The New York Times (1 July, 1964): 23. 54 Dittmer, Local People, 250. In an article “Hoover to Go to Mississippi Today In Civil Rights Case” with no author’s name for The New York Times claims the field office will be the largest the FBI has in the South. 55 Claude Sitton, “Tip Leads to Auto,” The New York Times (24 June, 1964): 1. 56 John Rachal, “’The Long, Hot Summer’: The Mississippi Response to Freedom Summer, 1964,” Journal of Negro History 34 (1992): 320. Legislation varied from targeting picketing, outlawed protests near public buildings, made it illegal to distribute literature, and even outlawed political organizing among groups deemed subversive. 57 Len Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1965), 107. Some movement veterans referred to the Freedom Schools as “The Temples of Questions.” 58 Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi, 160. 59 Charles Moore and Michael Durham, Powerful Days (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1991), 94- 95. Powerful Days is collection of Moore’s photography during the Civil Rights Movement from Montgomery in 1958 to the Selma March in 1965. 60 The Moses Moon Collection held at the National History Building of the Smithsonian Institute is a collection of recordings from civil rights meetings that occurred in the south during the sixties. 61 Robert L. Scott, “Against Rhetorical Theory: Tripping to Serendip,” in Texts in Context ed. Michael Leff and Fred Kauffeld (Davis: Hermagoras, 1989): 4. 62 Davis W. Houck, Rhetoric As Currency (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 11. “This approach, so persuasive in critical circles, offers a faster, less complicated, and safer route to a given destination. Moreover, the destination is already known well in advance, and the travel time is predictable. Most interstate criticism is extremely boring, the view is lousy, and the food is bland.” 63 Scott, “Against Rhetorical Theory: Tripping to Serendip” in Texts in Context, 9. 64 Herbert Simons, “Patterns of Persuasion in the Civil Rights Struggle,” Today’s Speech 15 (1967) 1: 25- 27; and David M. Jabusch, “The Rhetoric of Civil Rights,” Western Speech 30 (1966) 3:176-184. 65 Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttelsworth (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999); Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 66 African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook ed. Richard W. Leeman (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996) is an encouraging collection of black rhetors but functions more in the vane the title refers to as a biographical reference tool rather than scholarship which engages the rhetorical methods of individual orators within specific texts. Several prominent orators like the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, James Lawson, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Bevel, and Wyatt T. Walker (to name a few) do not make the book. 67 Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges to the Rhetorical Renaissance,” in Texts in Context ed. Michael Leff and Fred Kauffeld (Davis: Hermagoras, 1989), 40-42. Medhurst suggests producing criticism and analysis that: 1) involves any “investigation of symbolic 69

inducement,” 2) adds to the collection of rhetorical masterpieces, 3) addresses a public campaign, 4) approaches a rhetorical biography, and/or 5) represents a study “of matters textual.” 68 Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges to the Rhetorical Renaissance” in Texts in Context, 42. 69 Robert Ivie, “Where Are We Headed,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993). As editor for QJS Ivie wrote a series of nine editorials from 1993 to 1995 dealing with questions and issues that are problematic for rhetorical scholars. 70 Ivie, “Criticizing Rhetorical Architecture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994). 71 Herbert A. Wichelns, “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 22. 72 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965): 72. This notion is important to maintain since the eulogies under analysis seem to move from epidictic discourse to cross over into deliberative discourse, imparting a sense of course of action for, in the word’s of Black, the “desired response from the hearers.” 73 Black, Rhetorical Criticism, 9. 74 Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson, “Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 6 (1973): 163. 75 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 403. 76 Kathleen M. Jamieson, “Antecedent Genre As Rhetorical Constraint,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 415. 77 Jamieson, “Antecedent Genre As Rhetorical Constraint,” 414. 78 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA.: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 402. 79 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 157. 80 Kathleen M. Jamieson, Critical Anthology of Public Speeches (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1978), 42. Jamieson’s Critical Anthology contains a collection of varied speeches, including four eulogies: Charles Percy’s eulogy for Robert Kennedy, John Brademas’ eulogy for Robert Kennedy, Rabbi Morris Kosman’s eulogy for Irving Wolberg, and a eulogy delivered by an American Indian chief. 81 Jamieson, Critical Anthology of Public Speeches, 40. 82 Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre As Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 158. Miller also comes to understand exigence as a sort of social knowledge and therefore a type of cultural power. 83 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 403. 84 Karen A. Foss, “John Lennon and the Advisory Function of Eulogies,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 193. 85 Ronald H. Carpenter and Robert V. Seltzer, “Situational Style and the Rotunda Eulogies,” Central States Speech Journal 22 (1971): 12. 86 Carpenter and Seltzer, “Situational Style and the Rotunda Eulogies,” 14. 87 Paul C. Brownlow and Beth Davis, “’A Certainty of Honor’: The Eulogies of Adlai Stevenson,” Central States Speech Journal 25 (1974): 219. 88 Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 518. 89 Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 522. 90 Hermann Stelzner, “’War Message,’ December 8, 1941: An Approach to Language,” Speech Monographs 32 (1966): 434. Emphasis in original. 91 Steven R. Goldzwig, “Multiculturalism, Rhetoric, and the Twenty-first Century,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 277. 92 Goldzwig, “Multiculturalism, Rhetoric, and the Twenty-first Century,” 279. 93 Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 366. 94 Goldzwig, “Multiculturalism, Rhetoric, and the Twenty-first Century,” 276. 70

95 Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 371. 96 David Zarefsky, “Civil Rights and Civil Conflict: Presidential Communication in Crisis,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 59-66; Garth E. Pauley, “Presidential Rhetoric and Interest Group Politics: Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” The Southern Communication Journal 64 (1998) 1:1-19; and John M. Murphy, “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides,” Communication Monographs 59 (1992): 61-78. 97 The following list of articles appear in order in Policy Studies Journal 21 (1993): Donald W. Jackson, “The American Presidency and Civil Rights Policy: Some Introductory Comments,” 508-513; Jeffrey E. Cohen, “The Dynamics and Interactions Between the President’s and the Public’s Civil Rights Agendas: A Study in Presidential Leadership and Representation,” 514-521; Steven A. Shull and Albert C Ringelstein, “Assessing Presidential Communications in Civil Rights Policymaking,” 522-534; Ronald Brown, “Racial Stratification, Intellectual History, and Presidential Action in the Civil Rights Domain,” 535-543; James D. King, and James W. Riddlesperger Jr., “Presidential Leadership of Congressional Civil Rights Voting: The Cases of Eisenhower and Johnson,” 544-555; and Mark Stern, “Eisenhower and Kennedy: A Comparison of Confrontations at Little Rock and Ole Miss,” 575-588. 98 Karl W. Anatol and John R. Bittner, “Kennedy on King: The Rhetoric of Control,” Today’s Speech 16 (1968): 31-34; and John J. Makay, “The Rhetoric of George C. Wallace and the 1964 Civil Rights Law,” Today’s Speech 18 (1970): 26-33; are excellent indicators that the field of rhetoric looks beyond the president’s office to figures like Robert Kennedy and Governor Wallace. Biographies like Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Laurel, 1968); Cleveland Seller and Robert Terrell River of No Return: Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: Morrow, 1973); and James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1972), function as excellent sources for “insider” perspectives to the Movement. There are four pieces in Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld’s Text In Context (1989) which respond to two specific speeches of Martin Luther King’s: Michael Osborn, “’I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’: The Critic as Participant,” 149- 165; Joseph W. Wenzel, “’A Dangerous Unselfishness’: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Speech at Memphis, April 3, 1968: A Response to Osborn,” 167-179; J. Robert Cox, “The Fulfillment of Time: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech,” 181-203; and Robert Hariman, “Time and the Reconstruction of Gradualism in King’s Address: A Response to Cox,” 205-217. These pieces show that not only is the “great orator” focused on, but that rhetorical scholars contribute to the intradisciplinary cycle of criticism-response. 99 Looking at Malcolm X specifically there are several works dedicated to the man and his message. Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1964); John Illo, “The Rhetoric of Malcolm X,” Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 505-578; Thomas W. Benson, “Rhetoric and Autobiography: The Case of Malcolm X,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 1-13; Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, “Malcolm X and the Limits of the Rhetoric of Revolutionary Dissent,” Journal of Black Studies 23 (1993): 291-313; Davis W. Houck, “’By Any Means Necessary’: Re-Reading Malcolm X’s Mecca Conversion,” Communication Studies 44 (1993): 285-298; Robert James Branham, “’I Was Gone on Debating’: Malcolm X’s Prison Debates and Public Confrontations,” Argumentation and Advocacy 31 (1995): 117-137; and Bernard J. Armada, “’An Important Piece of American History:’ Memory, Malcolm X and African American Collective Identity,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 18 (1996): 421-431. These selections depict how rhetorical scholars can diversely cover a single rhetor and focus on multiple facets of an individual rhetor’s rhetoric. 100 Susan Dente Ross, “’Their Rising Voices’: A Study of Civil Rights, Social Movements, and Advertising in the New York Times,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (1998): 518-534; Vanessa D. Murphree, “The Selling of Civil Rights: The Communication Section of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” Journalism History 29 (2003): 21-31; Mary Aickin Rothschild, “The Volunteers and the Freedom School: Education for Social Change in Mississippi,” History of Education Quarterly (1982): 401-420; and Susan Brinson, “The Myth of White Superiority in Mississippi Burning,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 211-221. 101 John H Thurber and John L Petelle, “The Negro Pulpit and Civil Rights,” Central States Speech Journal (1968): 273-278; Jenny Irons, “The Shaping of Activist Recruitment and Participation: A Study of Women in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” Gender & Society 12 (1998): 692-709; and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Democracy and Civil Rights: The Universalizing Influence of Public Argumentation,” Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 1-18. 71

102 John P. O’Grady, Pilgrims to the Wild (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), preface xii. O’Grady openly admits that this approach puts any scholarship using a bricoleur perspective “right on the limen…. But I have been out gathering, and this is what I have brought back.” 103 Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 525. 104 David Zarefsky, “The State of the Art in Public Address Scholarship,” in Texts in Context ed. Michael Leff and Fred Kauffeld (Davis: Hermagoras, 1989), 25. 105 Claude Sitton, “Mississippi Rights Slaying is Being Reconstructed- Arrests Awaited,” The New York Times (7 August, 1964): 1. 106 John Herbers, “Speakers Pour Out Bitterness At Chaney Memorial Service,” The New York Times (8 August, 1964): 7. 107 All excerpts from the funeral service, including Dave Dennis and Reverend Edwin King’s eulogies, for James Chaney come from a live recording Pacifica Radio made during the services. The recording is an hour and fourteen minuets long, containing the entire service from opening remarks to the final verse of “We Shall Overcome.” All punctuation is the author’s interpretation since there is no surviving original manuscript of the speeches currently in print. 108 Dave Dennis interview from the Tom Dent Oral Histories Collection, Amistad Research Center. “I sort of divorced myself, I guess, from the movement as a whole; I started just moving out. All this crap, with people dying and taking anybody with them was really just a waste of good lives. ‘Don’t use your guns, nonviolence is the way,’ just went totally out the window from then on. You have to put some injury on your enemy to get respect. A lot of people were hurt or killed because, indirectly, Bob Moses and I would say go do this and go do that….So you don’t get over that stuff. It happens. It is part of the ball game. But the thing that hurts more than anything else is the question that you can’t answer: it is whether or not it was worth it for the gains that you get at the time.” 109 Dittmer, Local People, 284. 110 “I had been approached by the people of my national office of CORE and other to make sure that the speech that’s given is calm they don’t want a lot of, you know, things stirred up and everything else like that and I agreed to do that, and I said okay, fine that ‘s good. Then when I got up there and I looked out there and I saw little Ben Chaney, things just sort of snapped and I, I was in a fantasy world, to be sitting up here talking about things gonna get better and we should do it in an easy manner and nonviolence and stuff like that. It’s because this country you cannot make a man change by speaking a foreign language, he has to understand what you’re talking about. This country operates, operated then and still operates on violence. I mean if you said, eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth, that’s what we respect.” 111 Dittmer includes a little snippet of Dennis’ eulogy which badly misrepresents the entire speech. On page 284 of Local People the section that is printed is not in the proper chronological order, skipping from beginning to middle, then back to the beginning of the address. There is also extra phrasing that does not exist in the speech Dennis delivered. Dittmer quotes Dennis as saying, “I sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men. I’ve got a vengeance in my heart tonight, and I ask you to feel angry with me.” According to the recording from Pacifica Radio Dennis is actually heard saying, “I’m sick and tired of going to funerals. I’ve got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight, and I’m sick and tired and cant’ help but feel bitter, you see, deep down inside and I’m not going to stand here and ask anybody here not to be angry tonight.” 112 In Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Black Belt Press, 1999) an incomplete transcription of Dennis’ eulogy is printed from pages 360 to 363. The printed version cuts out several phrases and ending statements that add to the volcanic emotions of Dennis’ delivery. 113 James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 16. 114 Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America , 34. 115 Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America , 24. 116 Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America , 25. 117 Branch, Pillar of Fire, 441; Cagin and Drey, We Are Not Afraid, 409; Dittmer, Local People, 284. 118 In all three of these sources this line is the last one to be quoted. Branch, Pillar of Fire, 441; Cagin and Drey, We Are Not Afraid, 410; Dittmer, Local People, 284. 119 Roy Wilkins, eulogy for Medgar Evers, Library of Congress Collections of the Manuscript Division, NAACP Papers 1956-1965. “Medgar Evers was the symbol of our victory and of their defeat. Contrary to 72

the view of a Jackson city official, Medgar was more than just an opponent. In life he was a constant threat to the system, particularly in his great voter registration work. In the manner of his death he was the victor over it. The bullet that tore away his life four days ago tore away at the system and helped to signal its end. They can fiddle and they can throw a few more victims to the lions of repression and persecution, but Rome is burning and a new day is just over yonder.” 120 It is important to note that Dennis and Rev. King share the same immediate audience, but have also have different extended audiences they are attempting to communicate with. Kenneth Burke’s dramatic pentab of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose comes to play upon each individual rhetor’s text. It is possible that the only term which stays consistent for both Dennis and Rev. King is the “scene.” Aside from the where and when of the funeral services for James Chaney, the rest of the pentab shifts and varies for each individual rhetor and their repesctive text. 121 King’s comments before “Oh, Freedom”: At Medgar’s funeral last summer we sang “Oh, Freedom.” At the funerals over in Birmingham we sang “Oh, Freedom.” When our brother John Kennedy died and the students at Tougaloo heard we sang “Oh, Freedom,” and I think this is a time we should sing “Oh, Freedom.” The lyrics and music for “Oh, Freedom,” along with many other Movement songs can be found in Peter Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Prictures (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). 122 The opening paragraphs of Davis W. Houck’s book review essay “Ed King’s Jaw: Or Reading, Writing, and Embodying Civil Rights,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7 (2004), describe the ability for accounts from the Civil Rights Movement to still speak to us. Houck views the scars on the right side of King’s face as a sign of bravery that “can speak with a mute voice.” John Salter was with Ed King when the incident which resulted in the scars occurred and recounts it in a letter on his webpage “owlhead.org:” “At 11:30 A.M. on Tuesday, June 18, 1963, on Hanging Moss Road on the north end of Jackson, Mississippi, the Reverend Ed King and I were heading back to Tougaloo College following a meeting with one of our lawyers, Jack Young. He had told us matter-of-factly that we were both being indicted by the Hinds County Grand Jury on inciting to riot charges. I was driving my little blue ’61 Rambler and we were passing through the white area in fairly steady both ways traffic. Police had been following us as we headed north but now, suddenly and inexplicably, they disappeared. Suddenly, from a side street on my left came a car driven by a young white. He drove right through the stop sign and forced a large, heavy oncoming third car directly into our path. We hit head on. When I regained consciousness, my car was destroyed. The windshield was smashed and part of Ed King’s face clung to it. We were both blood drenched and Ed was still unconscious. Standing all around us was a growing crowd of grinning and laughing whites. The white police were standing with them.” The white youth was the son of a Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission official. 123 Of the resources that mention the memorial service held for James Chaney few mention Rev. King’s address. Dittmer notes in Local People that “Reverend King, also on the program, recalled that…..” but fails to make any reference to the speech that King delivered. The only source as of yet to mention King’s speech and include excerpts or quotes is Charles Marsh’s God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 144-145. Marsh’s book is a biographical account of five individuals in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Fannie Lou Hamer, Sam Bowers, Douglas Hudgins, Edwin King, and Cleveland Sellers come to represent the stories of people inside the Movement and of people trying to stop the Movement. 124 Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America , 29. “Applied to the prophet, rebirth is a mechanism for overcoming the anxiety of chaos by the complete subordination of the self to the divine will; the prophet exchanges self for certitude, the absolute negation of chaos.” 125 Amos Kiewe, “Framing Memory Through Eulogy: Ronald Reagan’s Long Good-bye,” in Framing Public Memory ed. Kendall Philips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 249. 126 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15. 127 Bodnar, Remaking America, xii. 128 Charles E. Scott, “The Appearance of Public Memory,” in Framing Public Memory ed. Kendall Philips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 149. 129 Scott, “The Appearance of Public Memory,” Framing Public Memory, 150. 130 James W. Lowen, Lies Across America (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 231. 131 Lowen, Lies Across America, 232. 73

132 Lowen, Lies Across America, 236. 133 Lowen, Lies Across America, 237. 134 Lowen, Lies Across America, 238. 135 Jim Carrier, A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 284. 136 Carrier, A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement, 276. 137 John Herbers, “A 2D Body Is Found In The Mississippi,” The New York Times (July 14, 1964): 16. Authorities found only the lower half of Moore’s body but were able to identify it from a key in the jean’s pocket which fit into Moore’s dorm room at nearby Alcorn State. 138 Carrier, A Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement, 285. In an interview over the phone Carrier related to the author of this essay that he had come across Oarsby’s name in a local Mississippi newspaper clipping which had been covering the discovery of the bodies. 139 Cagin and Drey, We Are Not Afraid, 372. 140 Dittmer, Local People, 251-252. 141 Branch, Pillar of Fire, 399. 142 Jerry Mitchell, “Neshoba Marks ‘Day of Liberation,’” The Clarion Ledger (21 June, 2004). 143 It is interesting to note the names that do not appear on the list, most notably missing is Malcolm X. 142 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorical,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 31.

74

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PRIMARY SOURCES

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Hamer, Fannie Lou. Speech at Indianola, Mississippi, from Freedom Summer 1964. Moses Moon Collection, Smithsonian Archives. Tape N77.

King, Edwin. Eulogy for James Chaney. Recorded by Pacifica Radio, 7 August, 1964.

-----. Interview with author. Jackson, Mississippi, 22-23 June, 2004.

Wilkins, Roy. Eulogy for Medgar Evers. NAACP Papers 1956-1965, Library of Congress, Collections of the Manuscript Division. Group III, Box A304.

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-----. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-64. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

I am a Texan, originally from Fort Worth, and I hope to return one day to the Lone Star State. I earned my bachelor’s degree in rhetoric and speech in 2002 from Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. While at Simpson I enjoyed being in many Theatre Simpson productions, including the roles of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Feste in Shakespear’s Twelfth Night. My favorite beverage is an ice cold bourbon and lemonade, and please cook my steak medium rare. One day the years of being an undaunted, die hard, loyal Chicago Cubs fan just might pay off, until then I will be in the bleachers savoring each prophetic lose with a shagrin on my face and an Old Style in hand.

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