412 ChaPter^8
In return, Mississippi Whites began a reign of terror. Even in a region with
horrid racial practices, Mississippi stood out for its racist cruelty–as the folk
singer Phil Ochs sang “underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines.”
Mississippi Whites burned 35 churches and bombed 30 buildings; shot 35
people, severely beat 80 others, and murdered 6, all with little national atten-
tion because the victims were African American. In August, however, when
Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, CORE workers from New York, along
with local activist James Chaney were found dead in a swamp near Philadelphia,
Mississippi, the media took notice, likely because Goodman and Schwerner
were Whites from the North. Again, the federal government had to act, and
the Justice Department sent the FBI to Mississippi to investigate the murders.
Even then, as Johnson went to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, he
was still doing little to help Blacks in Mississippi. A sharecropper, the young-
est of 20 children in her family, Fannie Lou Hamer was the leader of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative political group set up by
Blacks because the Democratic party itself was all-White and racist. But
Johnson refused to seat any blacks from Mississippi in the Democratic delega-
tion at the 1964 party convention, and interrupted Hamer’s impassioned
speech with a press conference so the televisions networks would switch away
from her to him. Still, Americans both Black and White perceived that
Johnson cared about civil rights and he won over 90 percent of the Black vote
in November. The relationship between mainstream Blacks and White liberals
was at its height.
In 1964, Blacks were encouraged by Johnson’s landslide victory, believing
that he now had extensive national support to follow through with his com-
mitment to desegregation and build on the success of the Civil Rights Act. At
the grassroots level, however, African Americans still were taking action in the
streets. In March 1965, King—who had just returned from Norway where he
had received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize— moved into Selma, Alabama to
work on a SNCC voter registration project. Blacks began a demonstration, but
Sheriff Jim Clark had called together a posse and Governor Wallace deployed
500 state troopers, all of whom met the black marchers at the Edmund Pettus
Bridge and beat them with clubs, cattle prods, and bullwhips while White
onlookers cheered the assault and television and radio announcers described
the White attacks in detail. The events on “Bloody Sunday,” as it became
known–and the subsequent murder of a while volunteer, Viola Liuzzo of