appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 27 June 2005

The Day the Sun Stood Still

Last Tuesday was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice -- a word with Latin roots “sun” and “cause to stand still.” In the South, where my family has lived since 1660, the sun can and often has stood still, stalled by the weight of the past. Time passes more slowly there, as both Harper Lee and William Faulkner variously suggest. Last Tuesday was the forty-first anniversary of the murders of three young men: James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner. Last Tuesday, 21 June 2005, a Neshoba County Mississippi jury -- nine whites, three blacks – found Edgar Ray Killen guilty of three counts of manslaughter.

Not murder. And the sun stood still.

I was 13 in the summer of 1964, brought up on stories of my great-and greater-grandfathers’ exploits before and after the War Between the States, and the terrific tale of one great-great-grandmother, Lindy Blalock, who cut off her hair and went with her husband to flight for the Confederacy. In our family’s mythic history, the past of great-great-granny’s adventures had nothing to do with the present events of the Civil Rights Movement. Not a thing.

Driving home from family hikes or weekend picnics, we sometimes saw Klan members in their white robes and peaked hoods marching around a flaming cross in someone’s plowed cornfield. My parents had little to say about the Klan itself, although we were given to understand that people who dressed up in cornfields were almost certainly “trashy” – that most damning of Southern adjectives. Yet my father, with his graduate degree in American history, told us wondrous bedtime stories of the deeds of the Knights of the White Rose, those gallant protectors of the rights of disenfranchised Southerners. (Think Ashley getting shot in Gone with the Wind, a film my mother didn’t think Yankees would be able to watch: they would surely feel too much guilt.)

The evening news served up current events as we ate dinner. We saw George Wallace blocking black students from the University of Alabama and knew it was wrong, even as we were lectured at breakfast on the evils of “forced” desegregation of our own schools. For my parents, “separate but equal” applied only, albeit absolutely, to grades 1 through 12. When Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were reported missing, my mother’s observation was that Yankees “shouldn’t come down here and try to change things overnight.” For her, theirs was a temporal sin – pushing time. And what of Chaney? He should have known better than to accompany pushy Yankees down dark roads.

“But what they were doing is just and right and necessary!” I learned in one flash the usefulness of a common language of ritual.

“It may be right,” said my father, “but that doesn’t make it wise.”

I talked with my father this morning, and he said exactly the same thing, 41 years later: “They had a right to be there; they may have been right to be there; but it wasn’t wise of them to be there.” While that perceived lack of wisdom doesn’t justify the killings, for many Southerners it does expiate the guilt of the killers. It isn’t wise to walk barefoot through a nest of rattlesnakes. There will always be rattlesnakes, and they will timelessly bite killingly.

And this brings us back to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the district attorney said to The New York Times: "it was asking a lot of a jury to convict a man based on testimony of people who they couldn't see. All they had were their words on paper." For the jury, the transcript of the 1967 federal trail of Killen and 17 others was somehow less powerful than the time that had passed, taking witnesses, Klansmen, and three young heroes with it.

The Constitution is words on paper. The Bible is words on paper. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics is words on paper. In Geneseo’s Humanities course, I teach 3000 years of words on paper, telling students that reading and discussing those words will help them articulate their own values and make their own choices in life. Even if Aristotle were still around for classroom visits, SUNY couldn’t afford his speaker’s fee.

Everyone, Southern and otherwise, has talked for 41 years about the murdered civil rights workers, but murder was a word that the jury couldn’t agree to put on paper. Trapped in a past that never truly passes, those twelve Southerners simply acknowledged that Killen could only be held to the standard of a rattlesnake, his deed a reptilian response rather than a considered act.

And I’m sure at least one juror said “oh law, all that was such a long time ago.” But, sadly, it isn’t.

Julia M. Walker
Professor of English and Women’s Studies, SUNY Geneseo
born in Maryville, Tennessee