A Reporter Goes Home to a New South

I was one of the first two reporters to arrive in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964, on the day Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman went missing. I was there as Newsweek's main reporter on the Southern civil rights beat, and I went directly to the courthouse with Claude Sitton of the New York Times to question Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. They admitted arresting and jailing the three civil rights workers but insisted that they'd turned them loose and sent them on their way. We immediately believed the kids had been murdered and that Rainey and Price were involved; the guilt was all over them.

We went back to the courthouse the next morning, and this time Rainey said the kids were probably in Cuba by now and that the alleged disappearance was merely a hoax by the "Northern Jew communists" to make Mississippi look bad. When we passed through the courthouse lobby, we were confronted by an angry mob of Philadelphia citizens whose red-faced leader yelled that they wouldn't be having all this race trouble if it weren't for the "outside agitators" encouraged by members of the "nigger-loving, Jew-communist press."

He said we would be killed if we didn't leave town. Back at our motel, a car carrying four men armed with two shotguns and a quart of moonshine was parked in front of our rooms. We escaped by car to nearby Meridian with them in pursuit.

Forty-one years later, almost to the day, after Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were murdered, I went back to Philadelphia to look in on the trial of Edgar Ray (Preacher) Killen, the alleged Ku Klux Klan mastermind of the plot to kill the three civil rights workers, and to see what had changed. But this time, everyone was as nice as could be. Around the old courthouse, I chatted amiably with the local cops, including a black police officer and a female one, and they said everybody was getting along just fine. At the "media center" set up by the town, the smiling, self-described volunteer "den mother" to the 100 media people said that all they asked of the reporters was that they clean up after themselves. And, she said, local ladies were baking cookies for the reporters.

It could have been a mere performance, an example of surface-deep Southern hospitality masking the same old feelings -- but it wasn't. The truth is that the change in the South in the years since Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were killed has been profound. Not just in Philadelphia -- where Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter Tuesday -- but in Memphis, Nashville, Birmingham and the other Deep South cities I visited. A native Southerner myself, I find that the South today is so transformed that it's hard for most people to understand what it was once like.