A Forgotten Eyewitness to Civil-Rights-Era Mississippi

The F.B.I. arrived en masse, along with sailors from a naval airbase. They found the station wagon empty and torched. After six weeks of searching, and using a tip from a confidential informant, the men’s bodies were found buried in an earthen dam, near where Mississippi’s power brokers were about to gather for the annual Neshoba County Fair. Investigators determined that Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been shot, but locals went on abiding conspiracy theories, suggesting that the murders had been carried out by the civil-rights movement, to make Mississippi look bad.

The state declined to prosecute anyone. The Justice Department used Reconstruction-era statutes to charge eighteen men with having deprived the victims of their civil rights, which, as one reporter later wrote in the Oxford American, was “as close to a murder trial as you were apt to get in the 1960s South when few juries were willing to prosecute a white person for any crime against a black man, much less the crime of murder.” The defendants included the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, and other members of law enforcement. Seven were convicted.

Mars had recoiled from the “furious conformity” that enveloped Neshoba County during the investigation. “Only a tiny handful among white townspeople spoke out, braving social ostracism and threats of violence to denounce the murders and decry the climate of fear and intimidation that had overtaken their community,” Campbell writes. “Few did so more openly and courageously than Florence Mars.” Mars visited the civil-rights workers’ office in Meridian, coöperated with the F.B.I., and agreed to testify before a federal grand jury about past treatment of Black people at the hands of violent local authorities. She launched a fund-raiser to help rebuild Mount Zion, and tried to start a “Philadelphia-to-Philadelphia” youth exchange, which would link her home town to the city in Pennsylvania.

She was labelled a snitch and a spy. Local law-enforcement officers surveilled her; anonymous callers threatened her. The sheriff threw her in the “drunk tank,” which Campbell describes as “an act that scandalized some townspeople more than the murders themselves.” Mars’s church forced her out of her teaching positions—the white congregation disapproved of her “dangerous beliefs.” The Klan organized a boycott of her stockyard, forcing the business to close.

After 1964, Mars largely stopped taking photos but remained obsessed with the murders. Campbell notes that she appeared to be asking herself, “How do ordinary people become complicit in grave injustice? And how, in such fevered circumstances, do a few people find the courage to resist, to recognize evil and call it by its name?” On the second anniversary of the killings, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil-rights leaders marched in Philadelphia’s town square, where they were confronted by a white mob. “King later described the episode as one of the two most terrifying experiences of his life,” Campbell writes, adding that King understandably may have missed the sight of “the small woman standing silently on the square’s elevated sidewalk, holding aloft an American flag in greeting.”

Confederate monument, Philadelphia town square.

In 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, about sixty-seven per cent of eligible Black Mississippians were registered to vote. Between then and 1876, at least two hundred and twenty-six Black residents were elected to office, including state senators and a lieutenant governor. “For a limited time, black Mississippians were able to engage in the government and shape political outcomes,” the University of Mississippi’s branch of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which focusses on civil rights and voting, has noted.

Once federal troops left the South, influential white Mississippians, realizing that they were outnumbered by freedmen, got busy intimidating, killing, gerrymandering, and otherwise cheating their way back to absolute power. J. B. Chrisman, a judge who had participated in the state’s constitutional convention of 1890, declared that it was “no secret that there has not been a full vote and a fair count in Mississippi since 1875—that we have been preserving the ascendency of the white people by revolutionary methods. In plain words, we have been stuffing ballot-boxes, committing perjury and here and there in the state carrying the elections by fraud and violence.” By the sixties, as few as six per cent of the state’s eligible Black voters were registered.

A man and his grandchildren, outside Sipsey Church.

Half a century later, the number has rebounded to more than seventy-two per cent. Still, turnout remains low in Mississippi, which, according to the Center for Public Integrity, “has rejected most of the policies known to level the playing field of voting access to lower-income voters and people of color.” Mississippi doesn’t offer early voting or online voter registration, and it imposes a lifetime voting ban on people found guilty of a number of felonies, a policy that disproportionately disenfranchises Black voters. Mississippi has more Black elected officials than any other state, but most hold local office—the state has never elected a Black governor, and only five Black candidates have made it to Congress, despite the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state in the country. For more than thirty years, the governor has designated April as Confederate Heritage Month.

Mars’s memoir, “Witness in Philadelphia,” was published in 1977, and focussed on the killing of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. It never found a wide audience but sold well at the bookstore on the Philadelphia town square. “Mars was particularly gratified by the interest of young people, many of whom had heard little or nothing about the murders or their aftermath from their parents,” Campbell writes. Generations of Mississippi textbooks glorified the Lost Cause and omitted mention of civil-rights heroes. In those books, Klansmen were the “patriots.”

Mars died in the spring of 2006, at the age of eighty-three, in Philadelphia. She did not live to see Mississippians make one positive but superficial change: in 2020, they voted to replace the old state flag, which included the Confederate flag, with one that features a magnolia. Nor did Mars live to see the publication of more than one or two of her photos. On Campbell and Owens’s request, the proceeds from “Mississippi Witness” go to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, in Jackson.

My favorite portrait in the book shows a woman in a polka-dot dress and an apron. Substantial and unsmiling, she stands directly in front of Mars, facing the sun, hands on hips, shoulders squared. Self-help types sometimes counsel us women to privately strike that Wonder Woman pose before we have to do or say something that requires courage. The woman in the photo did it naturally. Behind her, you can almost make out the shadow of Mars, her camera raised.

Mars submitted this undated and unidentified photo to Life, captioned “I done my do.”