FBI's Mississippi Myopia

[MountainLaurel]

The nation watched this month as the trial of Klansman Edgar Ray Killen forced the white citizens of Philadelphia, Miss., to come to terms with their history. But Killen's manslaughter conviction in the 1964 killing of three young civil rights workers should be a time for all Americans to confront our complicity in Southern-style segregation.

For generations too young to remember the actual events, the film "Mississippi Burning" recounted a version of the lynchings. Produced in 1988, the film is still widely shown on cable. But the filmmakers got the story only half right: The movie whitewashed the FBI. I know, because I dealt with the FBI during the hours leading up to the murders, when a simple intervention might have saved three lives.

As an 18-year-old volunteer at the Atlanta headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I had been assigned to staff the telephone lines from Mississippi during the evening shift on June 21, 1964.

snip

But the movie's portrayal of an FBI agent as a hero distorts the truth of this story. When the three activists failed to return to their Meridian, Miss., headquarters on schedule, we launched a well-established procedure. We had enough experience with both vigilante and police repression to know that their missed deadline was not a simple oversight and that the young men were probably in grave danger. I began calling area jails, hospitals and the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. When I spoke to the wife of the jailer in Philadelphia, she told me -- falsely, we later learned -- that Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were not there.

My calls to FBI agents in their Meridian and Jackson offices brought a practiced mantra from that era: "The Bureau is not a law enforcement agency." If we could supply proof that a federal law had been broken, they told us, they would investigate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202013.html

[Frances]

1. Very interesting

Back in the 60s, I met a former FBI agent who told me that every time a human relations club(composed of professors from Auburn University and Tuskegee Institute) met, someone would call the FBI and say that the communists were at it again. (The caller would be a segregationist outraged that whites and blacks were meeting as humans rather than as superior and inferior races.) The former agent told me that the FBI would send someone to the meeting to write down the tag numbers of the cars parked outside the meeting place.