“Mississippi Reckoning,” by Mitchell Zimmerman (Palo Alto: Hunts Point Press) is a crime thriller for those who don’t like to read history, as one of his co-activists in the civil rights movement put it.
Zimmerman’s tale reflects his life of fighting for the marginalized as an activist and later as an attorney. “Reckoning” begins with a crushing demoralizing failure for crusading attorney Gideon Roth, and then takes the reader on a tautly-written journey across America as he decides to seek revenge against a former Klansman who coordinated the death of three civil rights workers in 1964.
Roth’s personal odyssey starts with his inability to block the gas-chamber execution of his client, convicted murderer Charles “Kareem” Jackson, who has been sitting on Death Row in San Quentin. Watching Jackson die in the gas-chamber surfaces feelings of failure and guilt after 14 years of non-stop legal battling. (In reality, Zimmerman actually waged an agonizing but ultimately successful 22-year struggle to save the life of a man sitting on San Quentin’s Death Row).
Making the execution acutely difficult for Roth is his discovery of how Kareem’s intensely trouble life was shaped by likely brain damage caused by pre-natal beatings of his mother by his petty criminal father, and as a victim of sexual assault at home, foster homes and juvenile detention facilities.
But hanging over all of this is the longstanding shadow cast by the excruciating burning and lynching of his grandfather in Mississippi. His grandfather was a World War II hero who simply expected better treatment on his return to Mississippi, but his measured assertiveness proves too much for local racists, with a horrifying outcome.
For Roth, the defeat of his efforts to save Kareem’s life—whose own story marks the deep, lasting imprint of racism in America—is translated into a profound sense of failure in his personal quest for a more just society. With Gideon depressed and demoralized, his long-neglected wife leaves him because he cannot shake his obsession with Kareem’s case. His law firm pushes him out because his work has deteriorated so severely.
Preoccupied by his failure to save Kareen and cut off from the stabilizing forces in his life, Gideon Roth finds himself adrift. He becomes transformed from the nonviolent civil rights worker of his youth to a man who envisions himself an avenging angel. Roth becomes single-mindedly transfixed with wreaking vengeance on Sheriff Cecil Price, one of the men central to the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers — two Jewish, one black — in Mississippi.
Reckoning allows Zimmerman to share the two most profound episodes in his life. Zimmerman directly worked on a voter registration drive with disenfranchised blacks in Mississippi. It was an environment wracked by church burnings, firebombing of the homes, sadistic beatings, death threats, and other terror waged by both local law enforcement and the Klan, vividly depicted by Zimmerman,
When voting-rights volunteers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman fail to return on time after visiting a burned-out black church in the hamlet of Philadelphia, Miss., other activists are already on full alert. They immediately contact the FBI’s Civil Rights Division director at his Washington office and later at home. The FBI official works urgently to mobilize local FBI agents to respond to the men’s disappearance. But the Mississippi FBI staff flatly refuses to act, leaving the three civil rights workers in the hands of Klansmen. (The much-acclaimed 1988 film, “Mississippi Burning,” utterly neglects this discomfiting reality about the FBI. (For a first-hand account of the actual circumstances, see “The FBI’s Mississippi Myopia,” by Ron Carver in the Washington Post June 23, 2005.)
With Neshoba County Sheriff Cecil Price planning the operation with local Klansmen and the local FBI unwilling to investigate, the three civil rights workers are abducted, severely beaten, and ultimately murdered. Price served just four years for his role in coordinating the three killings.
Still outraged by the light treatment given to Price and his fellow perpetrators, Roth anonymously buys several pistols at gun shows — exploiting the background-check loophole — for an eventual showdown with Cecil Price. He sets off on a long, solitary trip from California to Mississippi. Along the way, he feels compulsively driven to repeatedly make hang-up phone calls to Price and instill a sense of dread that something bad will soon be happening to the murderous former lawman.
But those phone calls also alert local police authorities that a sinister force is headed to their town, and a manhunt is triggered as Roth draws closer to Price’s hometown. This sets the stage for Roth’s eventual showdown with Price which offers a powerful, satisfying end to the story.
My only disappointment with the book is that it misses the opportunity to have Roth engage with an America transformed by Donald Trump as he engages with people in diners, truck stops, and gas station. Roth’s potential encounters with the increasing open expressions of racism, would have been fascinating.
But “Reckoning” remains a powerful reading experience with its compelling story of a lifelong activist’s emotional evolution and the lasting, lacerating impact of racism on black people in America 400 years after slaves were first hauled to America in chains.
To read an excerpt from “Mississippi Reckoning,” and for information, see www.mississippi-reckoning.com.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based labor studies instructor and longtime progressive activist and writer who edited the Racine Labor weekly for 14 years. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2019
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