Sherry Chandler

Time for an accounting

Bill Bishop has written a must-read article at The Daily Yonder concerning the Neshoba (Mississippi) Democrat and its work the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia in 1964. The Democrat was recently awarded the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. Here is part of what Bishop has to say:

Jim Prince was a mid-20s reporter in Alabama in 1989 when he received his mailed edition of his hometown weekly newspaper, the Neshoba Democrat from Philadelphia, Mississippi. This edition was a special one. It contained a long interview with Dr. Carolyn Goodman, the mother of a young civil rights worker who was murdered in Philadelphia just a few months after Jim Prince was born in 1964.
The Democrat’s editor, Stanley Dearman, conducted the interview with Dr. Goodman at her apartment in New York city. Prince had heard about the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner from his first memories — how the three had been pulled over by a local law enforcement officer in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964, tossed in the Neshoba County jail, released and never heard from again. He knew that the car the three young men were driving was found a few days later, abandoned and burned, and that in early August of that year the bodies of the three — two white and one black — were eventually dug out of a earthen dam. He knew that seven men were eventually convicted on federal conspiracy charges, but none had served more than six years in prison. And he knew that the state had never prosecuted a soul for the killings.

It was Dearman’s interview with Goodman, however, that “put a face on them for me,” Prince said of the three slain civil rights workers. “I wasn’t much older than Andy at the time I was reading the article. I was moved by the way his mother described him. He was athletic. He loved dramatic arts. He was a peaceful person who cared about people. That was a turning point for me, and I decided I had to be in Philadelphia for the (25th anniversary) memorial service.” Prince left his job at the daily paper in Alabama and came home to work that summer for the Democrat.

…

Dearman bought the paper two years after the three civil rights workers were murdered. He brought to the paper a determined kind of journalism. For example, Dearman exposed a bootlegging ring that brought in booze from Missouri to the dry county and used the local grand jury and constabulary to drive out competitors.

From the time Dearman first came to Philadelphia, he was haunted by the killings of the three civil rights workers and by the failure of the state ever to bring the murderers to justice. Dearman also knew that the town had never come to terms with the murders, in part because the town had never been confronted with the young lives that ended on the back roads of Neshoba County.

Here is what Al Cross says of the award at The Rural Blog:

For its 40 years of community leadership, especially on civil rights and reconciliation, The Neshoba Democrat, a weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Miss., is this year’s winner of the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The Institute established the award to honor the couple who have published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 51 years. The Gishes were the first recipients of the award…

The centerpiece of the newspaper’s work in civil rights and community reconciliation was its effort to bring to justice all the killers of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, civil-rights workers who were murdered in Neshoba County in July 1964. Though seven men allied with the Ku Klux Klan were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, none served more than six years, 11 others went free, and the case was never prosecuted by the State of Mississippi until Stanley Dearman, Jim Prince and others called and worked for action.

By the way, Bill Bishop will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers here in Lexington tonight reading from his book The Big Sort.

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