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207 CHAPTER  “we must return to the dream” Meridian, 1965–68 In the memories of many outside of Mississippi, the 1964 murders of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman near Meridian marked the peak of white Mississippians’ resistance to the integration of their society and gave the state a well-deserved reputation as the most racist part of America in the mid-twentieth century. But while those murders received the greatest amount of attention then, as well as today, they represent neither the beginning, nor the end, nor even the peak of Klan violence in the state. It is also the case that the violence in no way represented the majority of white Mississippians. In the case of most of them, their sin was not violence but the failure to resist it. Duncan Gray was an exception to both these categories. As for the violence, a total of six black civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi between January and May 1964 as they were planning the summer project.1 But their deaths did not receive the kind of notice that the media and the nation gave to the June deaths in Neshoba County. By the end of the summer, in addition to the then nine murders, thirty homes occupied by African Americans had been bombed, thirty-seven black churches had been burned, and at least eighty civil rights workers, both black and white, had been beaten by Klan members and sympathizers. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan increased its membership in Mississippi from about three hundred to more than six thousand between February and October of 1964. But Klan membership would eventually rise to about seven thousand, and the scope of its violence in east central Mississippi would increase dramatically before it was finally brought to an end.2 Gray, however, knew a different Mississippi and a different Meridian from that portrayed in the news media, and he told a story to illustrate that difference. After the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was passed, the federal 208 “We Must Return to the Dream” government organized throughout the South what were known as community relations advisory committees to help implement the provisions of the law. Gray, along with the president of Tougaloo College and then Monsignor Bernard Law, were the only whites on Mississippi’s committee. After Gray announced his decision to go to St. Paul’s, he was contacted by the director of the closest community relations committee office, located in Memphis, Tennessee, eighty miles north of Oxford. The director told him, “Man, I’m glad you’re moving to Meridian! I’ll have at least one person I can talk to there.” Gray recalled his response: “Joe, I can give you at least one hundred names right now of people in Meridian who’d be glad to talk to you! And I don’t even live there yet. “My point was the people I knew in Meridian were really very open, very liberal, very committed to doing the right thing. And yet this guy, who was supposed to be an authority, feeling the pulse all over, he didn’t know that part of Meridian at all. All he knew was the Klan—which certainly was there, but I bet you the Klan in Meridian didn’t include a 150 people. They did control the city to a large degree at that time and that was certainly the image of Meridian, but it was not the Meridian that I knew.”3 Many of the people Gray had in mind when he spoke of “open, liberal” inhabitants of Meridian were members of St. Paul’s, the church that had welcomed Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, and other civil rights workers to worship with them when other churches turned them away. The congregation had a long history of tolerance and acceptance of those different from itself, even though not all of its members always conformed to that history. It first organized in 1901, and until it completed its own building in 1902, the group held its services at Meridian’s Temple Beth El, which that congregation made available to them rent-free. St. Paul’s returned the favor three years later while the synagogue was building a new facility.4 In 1950, the church’s Women’s Auxiliary sponsored a performance by soprano Leontyne Price, a native of nearby Laurel and later one of the first African Americans to become a world-famous opera star.5...

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