A Mississippi highway in the summer of 1964 could be a lonely place for Freedom Summer workers and volunteers.
Such was the case in mid-June of that year for five workers traveling from Ruleville to Atlanta, much of that trek along U.S. 82.
Charles McLaurin was one of the five, along with driver James Charles Black, Sam Block, Willie Peacock and James Jones.
They were about a quarter of the way through their journey, about 20 miles or so from the Mississippi/Alabama state line when they were stopped by a highway patrolman at Mayhew Junction in Lowndes County.
“The (Ku Klux) Klan had declared war on us,” McLaurin said. “They had planned to kill all of us.”
Less than a week after this incident, south Mississippi volunteers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney would go missing, their bodies discovered later that summer in an earthen dam in Neshoba County.
Already a veteran of voter registration drives in Sunflower County, McLaurin was helping that June to train dozens of Freedom Summer volunteers coming into the state from all over the country.
According to an affidavit that appears online signed by Black, the driver that day, the five men had in their possession, “Mrs. (Fannie Lou) Hamer’s campaign literature and Summer Project brochures.”
“The highway patrolman stopped us, and he took the driver out into the woods,” McLaurin said. “I guess he took him out there to kill him, but the guy he took out there was as big as he was.”
The patrolman later used traffic violations to justify the stop, allegations Black denied in his affidavit.
He also apparently confiscated the Freedom Summer campaign literature, according to the affidavit.
McLaurin said the man later recounted that the patrolman hit him, and the two ended up tussling over the patrolman’s gun.
“We’re standing on the highway out there with this white man in a business suit,” McLaurin said. “When the highway patrolman and my friend come back, they were both dusty, and my friend’s mouth was bloody.”
Eventually, McLaurin said, the five men were taken to the jail in Columbus.
“They took us out one-by-one and beat us up,” McLaurin said, later adding, “We lined up to get our beating.”
McLaurin’s turn eventually did come.
“The one that took me out there was a deputy sheriff,” McLaurin said. “He stood me against the wall. There’s a highway patrolman on my left, a deputy sheriff on my right and a deputy sheriff standing in front of me. He asked me why I had tried to run some white woman off the road. I said, ‘We haven’t seen any white woman.’”
McLaurin said he stared right at the deputy who was facing him.
That is when the first blow was struck.
“He hit me, and he said, ‘What are you looking at?’” McLaurin said. “You a ni**er ain’t you?”
McLaurin replied, “No.”
That’s when the other deputy hit him.
“He asked me again if I was a ni**er,” McLaurin said. “And I said no.”
The highway patrolman hit him from the left side, McLaurin said.
That is when one of the men pointed to the nearby Tombigbee River.
“He said, ‘That’s where you’re going to land, right there in that river,’” McLaurin said. “And he said, ‘Are you a ni**er?’ I looked at him, and I looked in his face. I looked at the guy over to my right. I looked at the guy over to my left, and I could see in their eyes they wanted me to hurry up and say it. They were anxious for me to say it.”
McLaurin finally relented and answered yes.
“He put his hand down and told me to go back to my cell,” McLaurin said.
The five men spent the night in jail, nursing their wounds. The next day was the trial, but it wasn’t a normal court setting, McLaurin said.
“They brought us way out into the woods, out to some hunting camp in Lowndes County,” McLaurin said. “They carried us out there, and I believe they took us out there to kill us.”
If that was the intent, the lawmen had not counted on one thing.
“We had set up a system where whenever we were traveling, we would notify the place where we were going to when we’re leaving where we are,” McLaurin said.
They had notified the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee headquarters in Atlanta when they departed from Ruleville that day.
“When we didn’t show up in Atlanta when we should have, they started to trace back from Ruleville where we might be,” McLaurin said. “They were able to get a hold of one of our SNCC people in Holly Springs who had contacts in Columbus.”
Those contacts were able to confirm the five men had been arrested there.
“The morning they took us out into the woods, phone calls started to come in to that room they took us into,” McLaurin said, adding that the calls appeared to be coming from Jackson, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
The five men were found guilty of minor traffic violations, and McLaurin said the fine totaled just about what the men had in their pockets when they were arrested.
“They carried us back to Columbus and dropped us off on the street,” McLaurin said. “They didn’t even carry us back to the jail. The car that we were in had been taken to a gas station in Columbus. We were kind of wandering around.”
McLaurin said that a Black man approached them on the street.
“He said, ‘I’m not going to stop. When I pass you, wait a few minutes and follow me up there and take a right,’” McLaurin recalled.
The man told them their car was at a service station, where there would be a charge of $85 to get the car back.
He also added that there would be a brown paper bag with money in it in a nearby church.
The man said, “Go back and pay it, get your car, and get out of here.”
The men did just that, McLaurin said, driving as quickly as they could to Atlanta.
While there, they filed a report with the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department.
“About three days later, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were killed,” McLaurin said. “We were in training when they were killed.”
The affidavit, which appeared to have been signed right after this incident, does not include many of the details McLaurin described. It was a shorter account, and many of the facts that Black, who was 18 at the time, included were consistent with McLaurin’s modern-day account.
It is not known exactly what would have happened to the five men had their SNCC counterparts not done their due diligence and traced them back to Lowndes County.
McLaurin had good reason to believe at the time their lives were in danger, and given the events that followed with the three missing and murdered Civil Rights workers that month, he feels confident those phone calls saved their lives.
“I think it’s the only reason we’re not dead,” McLaurin said.
The arrest shook the men, but it did not stop them. McLaurin would eventually return to Sunflower County, helping to lead the campaign here.
He is a veteran of Freedom Summer, and like many others who were arrested and beaten, he is a survivor of Freedom Summer.
