Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck Julie Buckner Armstrong Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer. By Davis W. Houck. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Pp. xiv, 153. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4078-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4079-0.) Davis W. Houck’s small book raises big questions about Freedom Summer. Coming in at 127 pages, not counting notes, Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer examines two intersecting historical memories. One is the murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James E. Chaney, whose deaths became a touchstone for the 1964 summer when college students from across the country, most of them white, converged on Mississippi to register Black voters and work in Black communities. Another is the belief that, during the search for the three men after they disappeared, federal authorities discovered multiple unidentified Black bodies (more than two dozen in some accounts) in the state’s rivers, swamps, and bayous. Why, Houck asks, did the names “Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney” evolve into “the six syllables that today form something of an American civil rights anthem,” while two Black men whose bodies were found around the same time—Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee— wound up largely forgotten (p. 8)? And what are historians today to make of the unsubstantiated but persistent claims of books, films, songs, museums, and more that Mississippi’s waterways were awash with far more bodies than those of Moore and Dee? Houck structures his exploration of these questions in an unconventional manner: not by chapters but into sections headed by quotations from the events’ various actors. The book thus operates as a long essay or meditation on the myth, and meaning, of Freedom Summer. In the first half, Houck examines an important but less widely known precursor. The 1963 Freedom Vote set the stage for bringing white college students to Mississippi on a large-scale basis. Their presence was considered newsworthy, unlike Black residents’ grassroots organizing and the persistent violence their communities faced. Houck describes Freedom Summer as a tactic of leveraging racism against itself to create change. An unintended consequence of this tactic was how the students’ presence—along with the deaths of Goodman, Schwerner, and [End Page 388] Chaney (even though the latter was Black)—bolstered a white savior myth. Claims of multiple “Black bodies pulled out of rivers,” Houck explains, call into “question the centrality of murdered white men in the larger story of Freedom Summer” (pp. 71, 9). In the book’s second half, he explores how these claims originated in the deaths of Moore and Dee, killed by the Ku Klux Klan and discovered by two people fishing, not, as erroneously reported, in the search for the missing civil rights workers. The story took on a life of its own, erasing Moore’s and Dee’s names and expanding the number of bodies, first in folk songs and later through academic studies and documentary films about Mississippi and Freedom Summer, eventually making its way into historical markers and school curricula. Some readers might want more discussion of why figures such as historian John Dittmer and the creators of the documentary series Eyes on the Prize accepted without criticism claims not supported by evidence. Comparisons with other violent events that became fodder for urban legend might also provide broader context. Still, Houck provides an excellent case study of how historical facts coalesce into stories accepted as “truth.” Julie Buckner Armstrong University of South Florida Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association