Murders Around Mississippi

Students share their talents at Sunday's memorial service. "Good for Business is Not Good Enough!" 


" ... a palpable sense of the killings"

Mississippi journalist and self-described "good ole boy," the late Willie Morris, known for speaking out on civil rights matters with passion and some candor, once wrote there was some feeling in Mississippi after the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner "that we hit the bottom of the barrel … and that the better people of the South and of Mississippi must, as Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, ‘Try to respond to the better angels of our nature.’"

Morris, a Yazoo City native, in a 1983 interview by author Studs Terkel talked about Florence Mars, a liberal white woman who served as his informant while covering the Philadelphia, Mississippi story:

"Her courage comes in strange packages. She was forty years old during The Troubles (they always called that period "The Troubles") and here she was one of the handful of human beings in the town who stood up to the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan controlled the police and a lot of the city government.

"In fact, it interested me that almost the only people in the town who stood up to the Klan were women. A few of them were the wives of Catholics who knew their husbands were not secretly members of the Klan because of the Klan’s traditional stance against the Pope."

Once visiting the spot where the three murders took place at sunset on Rock Cut Road, Morris wrote of experiencing a "palpable sense of these killings taking place in those red gullies…. The South and Mississippi could not stoop any lower."