By Peter Berger
The black-and-white photograph is a glimpse of American life. These are working-class men, smirking and smiling, seated in rows like they’re watching a show. Up front, the most prominent slouches in his chair with one leg crossed over the other so his pants come a few inches shy of his boot. He’s reaching into his Red Man for another pinch.
It is for certain a glimpse of American life. Except it isn’t a show. It’s a trial. These are the men who murdered three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964. The grinning man with the chewing tobacco is the county sheriff. The Klansman sitting beside him is his deputy.
The state of Mississippi refused to indict the murderers. They were prosecuted under an 1870 federal law for violating the dead men’s civil rights by killing them.
The all-white jury acquitted the sheriff and eight other defendants but in a surprising civil rights victory convicted seven, including the deputy. The judge sentenced him to six years in prison.
When questioned about the light sentences he handed down, the judge replied, “They killed one n*****, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.”
The judge’s defiance and the old photograph offer perspective. Racist violence is still a feature of American life. But over decades of grief and injustice, outrageous words and attitudes that were once unabashed and commonplace, like the judge’s bigotry and the Klansmen’s smug impunity, had until recent years grown rarer, or at least been compelled by public censure to recede from public view.
In 2005, forty years after his acquittal for violating the dead men’s civil rights, the local preacher, who’d also been a Klan leader, was tried for murder and convicted. He died in prison.
Four girls died when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Fourteen years later, the local Klan leader was tried and convicted. Two additional bombers were convicted in 2001 and 2002. All three died in prison.
The year the church was bombed, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot in the back in his driveway. The governor of Mississippi appeared at the trial to publicly shake the murderer’s hand. After two all-white jury mistrials and thirty-one years at liberty, the murderer, a founder of Mississippi’s White Citizens Council, was successfully prosecuted. He died in prison.
Native Americans suffered along a continental Trail of Tears. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act fifty years before Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of German citizenship.
For freed slaves, Reconstruction was a terror-punctuated interval between slave codes that harshly restricted the rights of slaves, and black codes that nearly as harshly restricted the rights of freed slaves and their descendants.
Dred Scott was a slave who claimed he was free after he’d traveled with his owner to a free territory. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that he was property and still a slave, that black people couldn’t be citizens, and that he therefore couldn’t sue in federal court.
Homer Plessy was arrested when he tried to ride in a white train car. He asserted that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1896 the Supreme Court considered Mr. Plessy’s suit but ruled that segregated “separate but equal” facilities were legal.
In 1954 the Supreme Court heard a suit brought by a black father on behalf of his twelve-year-old daughter. Oliver Brown asserted that segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled unanimously that segregated schools are unconstitutional and that separate facilities are “inherently unequal.”
The struggle from Scott to Plessy to Brown took a century. No one can gainsay the blood spilled over those hundred years. Neither can anyone gainsay the progress.
Sometimes progress consists of replacing an injustice with something less unjust.
Making progress is the point.
We reverse that progress at our peril.
Four years of a race-baiting President have roused and given voice to the worst in us. Trump’s “stolen election” lie, the insurrection he incited, and Republican political interests have spawned legislation that threatens minority voting rights.
Asian-Americans are the victims of a wave of hate and violence.
New Republican-sponsored “anti-riot” laws target peaceful protests.
Republican politicians are stoking rumors of a nonexistent “great replacement” plot where non-white immigrants replace “national-born Americans.” Trumpists have raised the banner and specter of “America First” and our “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” longstanding Klan code for white supremacy.
Only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were eligible for Klan membership. Organizations like the 1920s Anglo-Saxon Clubs opposed immigration from anywhere except northern Europe.
A recruiting leaflet distributed in Mississippi the year the three men were murdered excludes Jews, Catholics, Orientals, and Negroes from Klan membership. It declares that republics uniquely exist “only where Anglo-Saxons control the Governmental Machinery.” That’s why “true American Anglo-Saxons” must employ “every means at their command” in what has “become a Life and Death matter.”
Behold our Anglo-Saxon “tradition.”
Today the photographs that grieve us come from cellphones and dashboard cameras, and we’ve seen too many. Even worse are the demagogues who exploit our fears. But the malignancy in the old courtroom image lies in what that grinning sheriff knows about his community – their broad acquiescence and complicity in his evil, whether expressed in their silent consent, their words, or their deeds.
We are marked and known by the evil we condone.
And the sheriff is back.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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