One Mississippi, Two Mississippi

In Neshoba County, Mississippi, the small town of Philadelphia takes its place alongside locations etched in civil rights memory, like Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, and Little Rock. In 1964 three young civil rights activists-two white, one black-were brutally murdered by lawmen and a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob in Philadelphia. For forty one days, as residents maintained a resolute silence, their bodies went undiscovered. Three years after the murders, seven of the perpetrators would go to prison for violating the young men's civil rights, but the chief conspirator in the crime was not brought to justice until 2005, when "a Mississippi jury, in a Mississippi town, convicted a Mississippi resident" of the murders of the three men. Carol George offers a micro-history of a place that has decided to break its silence and confront its past. Mississippi began to open its window to the past in the late 1980s, taking its first, stumbling steps toward racial justice. In 1999 the political decision was made to open the records of the state Sovereignty Commission, making public a sordid history of the state spying on civil rights activism. Perhaps the most profound change came when the United Methodist Church in the state welcomed in its black members to conferences, and apologized for its past racism. Faced with secessions and internal chaos, the Methodist denomination had played a central role in the struggle between good and evil, and frequently seemed disconnected from its own moral compass. George draws heavily on interviews with residents of Longdale-the site of the Methodist church burning that brought the three activists to the area-as well as people from Philadelphia, in positions of Methodist leadership, as well as civil rights activists. George's sources, printed, oral, and material, offer a compelling account of the way in which residents of a place long reviled as "Bloody Neshoba" have taken up the task of truth-telling in a world often uncomfortable with historical truth.