Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events--especially the
lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner--stand
out as a critical episode of the civil rights movement. The infamous
deaths of these activists dominate not just the history but also the
public memory of the Mississippi Summer Project.
Beginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans challenged this
central narrative with the shocking claim that during the search for
Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and other law enforcement
personnel discovered many unidentified Black bodies in Mississippi's
swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has evolved in subsequent years
as activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars have continued to
repeat it, and the number of supposed Black bodies--never
identified--has grown from five to more than two dozen.
In Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, author
Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions: Were Black bodies
discovered that summer? And why has the shocking claim only grown in the
past several decades--despite evidence to the contrary? In other words,
what rhetorical work does the Black bodies claim do, and with what
audiences?
Houck's story begins in the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River
and the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered
on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of
Federated Organization's voter registration efforts in Mississippi
leading up to Freedom Summer. He considers the extent to which violence
generally and expectations about interracial violence, in particular,
serve as a critical context for the strategy and rhetoric of the Summer
Project.
Houck then interrogates the unnamed-Black-bodies claim from a historical
and rhetorical perspective, illustrating that the historicity of the
bodies in question is perhaps less the point than the critique of who we
remember from that summer and how we remember them. Houck examines how
different memory texts--filmic, landscape, presidential speech, and
museums--function both to bolster and question the centrality of
murdered white men in the legacy of Freedom Summer.
