Black Bodies in the River by Davis W. Houck

Author:Davis W. Houck [Houck, Davis W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496840790
Publisher: UP of Mississippi
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

“… um, nine other bodies”

I first stumbled upon the story of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, by way of Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney, in 2006. As with most beginnings, it took me some time to understand it as such. The originating event, it turns out, was a documentary, Freedom Summer, directed by Marco Williams and aired on the History Channel. Not unlike many of its predecessors, the documentary highlighted the disappearance of the three civil rights workers early in the program. In the intervening forty-two years, that event had become The Defining Event of the Summer Project; its importance in collective American memory had been portended before white volunteers had even returned to their campuses. But then a curious thing occurred at the thirty-minute mark of the documentary: grainy black-and-white footage showed what appeared to be law enforcement personnel in small boats in rivers and swamps, obviously looking for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. CORE’s Dave Dennis, from the twenty-first century, contextualizes what we are seeing: “During the time that the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were missing, there were other bodies being found, alright. America did not—the press did not—pick it up. The press did not talk about it.” Williams then cuts to professor Gerald Gill, from Tufts University, who further elaborates on Dennis’s remarks: “When they were dredging up rivers and creeks in Mississippi, the navy had uncovered numerous other bodies, the bodies of Black men. There was one instance of a Black male torso being discovered wearing a CORE T-shirt. They came up with, um, nine other bodies of, um, unidentified Black males.” More on that CORE torso later.

I found Professor Gill’s statement shocking, one I’d never encountered before; quickly did I note his name and his university. Dennis then punctuates the segment: “Some of them [Black bodies] were on the side of the road, you know, some of them were in other areas, some were buried; the fact is that they found people, bodies strung up in trees, and things of that nature. And the amazing thing about it was, was that when they discovered that they were not one of the civil rights workers, there was like this sigh of relief.”180 I also noted a rather telling irony after the broadcast: both men refused to name any of the recovered Black bodies, or where the bodies were discovered. Weren’t these omissions symptomatic of the larger claims they were both advancing about racial erasure? Why perpetuate the historical claim, good intentions notwithstanding, that such Black bodies still—forty-two years later—had no name or place?

I emailed Dr. Gill at his Tufts address the following morning, curious to know more about these “nine other [Black] bodies” found during the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. He never wrote back.181 Whether his silence was a function of an overburdened inbox, an unwillingness to share information, or something else, my curiosity was only galvanized by the stunning claim. If in fact nine other Black bodies were discovered during the forty-four-day search, and if the

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