farm. James Chaney had been brutal y beaten, so badly that a pathologist examining him
said he had "never witnessed bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high
speed accidents such as aeroplane crashes." Al three had been shot to death.29
In 1988 a film cal ed Mississippi Burning was seen throughout the country. It was the story of the FBI search for the murderers of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. It portrayed the
FBI as the heroes of the investigation that led to the discovery of the bodies and the
prosecution of a number of Neshoba County men. One of those prosecuted was Deputy
Sheriff Cecil Price, who had arrested them for speeding and then released them from jail in
a prearranged plan to have them murdered. Price and several others were found guilty,
spent a few years in prison.30
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Those of us who were involved in the Mississippi Summer were angered by the movie. We knew how the FBI, again and again, had failed to do its duty to enforce federal law where
the rights of black people in the South were at stake, how many times they had watched
bloody bearings and done nothing, how the law had been violated before their eyes and
they made no move. And we knew how outrageously they had behaved, along with the
entire federal government, when the three young men disappeared.
Mary King worked in the SNCC office in Atlanta in those tumultuous times. In her book
Freedom Song, she gives a detailed account, almost hour by hour, of the communications
between the Atlanta office of SNCC and the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the White
House. Mary was in charge of the Communications Office in Atlanta that Sunday, June 21,
1964, when the telephone cal came in that the three men were hours overdue on their
return from Philadelphia.
Her chronology makes clear how maddeningly cold and unresponsive were the FBI and the
Department of Justice in what was a matter of life and death for three men in the hands of
murderous racists. On hearing that Goodman, Chancy, and Schwerner were hours overdue,
she phoned every jail and detention center in the counties surrounding Philadelphia, phoned
the FBI and the Justice Department. She worked at this until 2:30 A.M. Monday, then was
relieved by another SNCC worker, Ron Carver, who kept phoning through the early hours,
until Mary arrived again at 8:00 A.M. She says;
An attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department … said quite
bluntly that he wasn't sure there was any federal violation and therefore
wouldn't investigate the matter … . A cal to John Doar (of the Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division) … resulted in this response: 'I have
invested the FBI with the power to look into this.' But FBI agent H.F. Helgesen
in Jackson denied there had been any word from John Doar … . He could do
nothing until contacted by the New Orleans FBI office… . An hour later … he
said he had cal ed New Orleans but had received no orders to investigate… .
We got in touch with an FBI agent named Mayner in New Orleans, who said
he had received no orders from Washington … . Between 1:45 P.M. and 2:45
P.M. on Monday, I attempted to contact John Doar and Burke Marshal
(Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division), but to no
avail… . The FBI agent in Meridian stil insisted that he had no orders to
initiate an investigation … . At 5:20 P.M. John Doar final y cal ed me back … .
But he did not specifical y address the question of whether the FBI was
investigating.
Mary King continues, "Final y, at 10:00 P.M. on Monday, June 22, thirty-seven hours after
they were last seen alive by a member of our staff, UPI carried a story that … the FBI was
being ordered into the case."31
It may wel be that there was no way of saving the lives of the three young men after their
disappearance. But there had certainly been a way of preventing what happened, if the
government had only met the movement's request that it station federal marshals in
Mississippi, to be on the spot, to accompany people into dangerous situations like Neshoba
County. Don't they send police to guard the payrol s of banks?
Most of al , the behavior of the FBI and the Justice Department in that situation tel s
something about the moral and emotional remoteness of liberal constitutional government
from the deepest grievances of its citizens. It tel s us how important is Frederick Douglass's
admonition that those who want the rain of freedom must themselves supply the thunder
and lightning.
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Later that same summer the Democratic party refused to seat a black delegation from Mississippi that claimed 40 percent of the seats (the percentage of blacks in the state).
Instead the Credentials Committee voted to give 100 percent of the Mississippi seats to the
official white delegates. It was representative government for whites, exclusion for blacks.
By 1965 it was clear that despite the Fifteenth Amendment, which said that citizens could
not be denied the right to vote on grounds of race, and despite the civil rights acts of 1957,
1960, and 1964, al concerned with voting in some way, blacks in the Deep South were stil
not being al owed to vote.
A little-noticed clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2, says that if citizens are
unfairly denied the right to vote, the representation in Congress of that state can be
reduced. This would be the job of the president, who official y gets the census and decides
on the number of representatives from each state. But no president, liberal or conservative,
Republican or Democrat, had ever invoked this part of the Constitution—although it would
have been a powerful weapon against racial discrimination in voting.
In the spring of 1965 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a campaign for
voting rights in Selma, Alabama, around the same time that President Lyndon Johnson was
discussing with Congress a new voting rights bil . Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Selma to
join the action.
On March 7, later cal ed "Bloody Sunday," a column of civil rights activists, beginning the long walk from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, was confronted by state troopers
demanding they turn back. They continued to walk, and the troopers set on them with
clubs, beating them viciously, until they were dispersed and the bridge was splattered with
blood.
During that campaign in Selma, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black man, was shot in the stomach
by a state trooper and died hours later. James Reeb, a white minister from the North, was
clubbed to death by angry whites as he walked down the street.
News of the violence occurring in Selma was carried across the nation and around the
world. One of the incidents, described by a reporter for United Press International, conveys
the atmosphere. The fact that it appeared in the Washington Post suggests that the
government could not be oblivious to what was going on:
Club-swinging state troopers waded into Negro demonstrators tonight when
they marched out of a church to protest voter registration practices. At least
10 Negroes were beaten bloody. Troopers stood by while bystanders beat up
cameramen.32
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for the first time, took the registration of blacks out of the
hands of racist re
gistrars in areas with a record of discrimination and put the force of the
federal government behind the right to vote. David Garrow, in his book Protest at Selma,
cal s the new law "a legislative enactment that was to stimulate as great a change in
American politics as any one law ever has."33 It resulted in a dramatic increase in black
voters and the election of black officials al through the Deep South.
What is clear from Garrow's careful study is how the protest movement in Selma was crucial
in bringing about the Voting Rights Act. He gives some credit to the federal courts, but he
says, "black southerners were unable to experience truly substantial gains in voting rights
until, through their own actions, they were able to activate the federal executive and
Congress." Furthermore, "the national consensus in favor of that bil … was primarily the result of the very skil ful actions of the SCLC in Selma."34
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Voting brought some black Americans into political office. It gave many more the feeling that they now had political rights equal to that of whites. They were now represented in
local government and in Congress, at least more than before.
But there were limits to what such representation could bring. It could not change the facts
of black poverty or destroy the black ghetto. After al , black people in Harlem or the South
Side of Chicago had the right to vote long ago; they stil lived in Harlem or the South Side,
in broken-down tenements, amid rats and garbage. Thirty to 40 percent of young blacks
were unemployed. Crime and drugs are inevitable in that atmosphere.
So it is not surprising that almost exactly at the time the Voting Rights Act was being
enacted in 1965, the black ghetto of Watts, Los Angeles, erupted in a great riot. Or that in
1967 there were disorders, outbreaks, and uprisings in over a hundred cities, leaving
eighty-three people dead, almost al blacks. And in 1968, after Martin Luther King was
assassinated, there were more outbreaks in cities al over the country, with thirty-nine
people kil ed, thirty-five of them black.35
But riots are not the same as revolution. The New York Times reported in early 1978: "The places that experienced urban riots in the 1960s have, with a few exceptions, changed little,
and the conditions of poverty have spread in most cities."
The constitutional system set up by the Founding Fathers, a system of representation and
checks and balances, was a defense in depth of the existing distribution of wealth and
power. By arduous struggle and sacrifice, blacks might compel it to take down its "whites
only" signs here and there. But poverty remained as the most powerful barrier to equality.
That is the barrier Madison spoke of when he said the system being set up in the new
United States of America would prevent "an equal division of property or any other improper
or wicked object." It is the fact of class, however disguised it is by the procedures of modern liberal societies.
Representative government does not solve the problem of race. It does not solve the
problem of class. The very principle of representation is flawed, as Jean Jacques Rousseau, living in pre-Revolutionary France in the mid-eighteenth century, pointed out. His book The
Social Contract was a confusing, contradictory, difficult search for a more direct democracy, in which a majority could not vote a minority into slavery or poverty. "How have a hundred
men who wish for a master the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not?"
Rousseau was typical of many political philosophers, in that no one could be sure what he
meant. As one commentator notes: "Robespierre … the great revolutionary, always
expressed love and admiration for the philosopher… . Marie Antoinette, whom Robespierre
guil otined, loved and admired Rousseau. The Thermidorians, who guil otined Robespierre,
loved and admired Rousseau."36 Despite the confusion, Rousseau provokes us to think
critical y about the whole idea of representation. It is an idea that we grew up to accept
without question because it was an advance over monarchy and is today much preferable to
dictatorship.
But it has serious problems. No representative can adequately represent another's needs;
the representative tends to become a member of a special elite; he has privileges that
weaken his sense of concern over his constituents' grievances. The anger of the aggrieved
loses force as it is filtered through the representative system (something Madison saw as an
advantage in Federalist #10). The elected official develops an expertise that tends towards its own perpetuation. Representatives spend more time with one another then with their
constituents, become an exclusive club, and develop what Robert Michels cal ed "a mutual
insurance contract" against the rest of society.37
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We can see the difficulties in the United States, which has one of the most praised systems of representative government in the world. People have the right to vote, but the choices
before them are so limited, they see so little difference between the candidates, they so
despair of their vote having any meaning, or they are so alienated from society in general
because of their own misery that roughly 50 percent of those eligible to vote do not vote in
presidential elections and over 60 percent do not vote in local elections.38
Money dominates the election process. The candidate for national office either has to have
mil ions of dol ars or have access to mil ions of dol ars. (In 1982 a senator from Minnesota
spent $7 mil ion on his campaign.) Money buys advertising, prime time on television, a
public image. The candidates then have a certain obligation to those with money who
supported them. They must look good to the people who voted for them, but be good to those who financed them.39
always understood this. As with Rousseau, we might not be sure of their solutions, but their
critique is to the point. Emma Goldman, talking to women about their campaign for
women's suffrage, was not opposed to the vote for women, but did want to warn against
excessive expectations:
Our modern fetish is universal suffrage … . I see neither physical,
psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal
right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd
notion that woman wil accomplish that wherein man has failed … . The
history of the political activities of men proves that they have given him
absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less
costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he
has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-
assertion, and not through suffrage.40
Helen Kel er, who achieved fame for overcoming her blindness and deafness and displaying
extraordinary talents, was also a socialist, and wrote the fol owing in a letter to a woman
suffragist in England:
Are not the dominant parties managed by the ruling classes, that is, the
propertied classes, solely for the profit and privilege of the few? They use us
mil ions to help them into power. They tel us, like so many children, that our
safety lies in voting for them. They toss us crumbs of concession to make us
believe that they are working in our interest. Then they exploit the resource
s
of the nation not for us, but for the interests which they represent and
uphold… . We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between
two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.41
In Chapter 6 I noted how the vote for president means so little in matters of foreign policy;
after the president is elected he does as he likes. We should also note that voting for
members of Congress is meaningless for the most important issues of life and death. That is
not just because it is impossible to tel at election time how your representative wil vote in
a future foreign policy crisis. It is also because Congress is a feeble, often nonexistent factor
in decisions on war and peace, usual y fol owing helplessly along with whatever the
president decides. That fact makes a shambles of "representative" government.
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One of the more creative political philosophers of this century, Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem), aware of the flaws in representative
government, argued in her book On Revolution for something cal ed the "council system" of government. Its basis was not voting, but neighborhood councils al over, with anyone who
wanted to join the discussion invited to do so, and then these councils would form a kind of
federation to make regional and national decisions.42
At various points in history there have been brief experiences with this direct democracy. In
ancient Athens (except that women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded) al citizens had a
chance to participate in decision making. For three months in Paris in 1871, while the
elected Commune of Paris met constantly, there were also continuous meetings of people al
over the city to discuss issues and then register their views with the Commune. On the eve
of the Russian revolution, there were Soviets (councils) of workers, peasants, and soldiers—
whoever wanted to join the discussion—but the Soviets were replaced by the rule of the
Communist party and the new Soviet Constitution provided for elections to a legislative
body.
Direct democracy is possible in smal groups, and a wonderful idea for town meetings and
neighborhood meetings. There could be discussions in offices and factories, a workplace