COMMENTARY
There's no forgetting the shame of 1964

By James Dannenberg

Nobody escapes the past.

Sometimes the passage of years can fool us, lulling us into thinking that what's done lacks any present consequence, that only an unencumbered present really matters.

Tell that to Edgar Ray Killen.

There are few images so indelibly and terribly etched in my memory as the hauling of that burned-out station wagon from a Neshoba County, Mississippi, swamp. Even though it would be another six weeks until their bodies were found, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, young civil rights workers, were surely dead. There was little room for hope.

I was just 19 and a week into my first fitful trip to Europe. For a bunch of reasons, it didn't seem like the right place to be in that "Freedom Summer," and I came home early.

Sheltered though I had been growing up in an affluent, all-white Milwaukee suburb, I wasn't blind to injustice even back then. My hometown was about as segregated as a northern city could be, and when my folks drove the family south to a Florida vacation, we kids saw firsthand the crushing poverty in black neighborhoods and the ever-present "Whites only" and "Colored only" signs outside restaurants and restrooms.

Had I realized that the forces behind these evil institutions generally felt the same way about Jews — about us — I would have been even more puzzled and frightened.

The earliest manifestations of the '60s weren't sex, drugs and rock-and-roll but instead folk music and civil rights, and I was attuned to both movements by the time I entered the University of Wisconsin in 1962. Most of us who sympathized with the civil rights movement in those days seemed content just to be on the "right side," but some tried to do a lot more.

The Freedom Rides of 1961, in which friends of mine suffered beatings in attempts to desegregate public accommodations in the South, gave way to Freedom Summer in 1964, a massive attempt to register southern black voters. It was for this cause that Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner — and others — gave their lives.

I could have participated in the Freedom Rides or Freedom Summer, though I was still a teenager. But I didn't. I didn't have the courage that some of my contemporaries exhibited, and I've always regretted my reticence.

Soon after the killings, I remember picketing then-unreconstructed racist George Wallace as he brought his first presidential campaign to an admiring — and hostile to us — audience on Milwaukee's South Side. Years later I would donate my fledgling legal services to the Black Panthers and other civil rights groups.

But I didn't go to Mississippi in 1964.

In fact, it wasn't until last summer that I decided to confront my old demons about the Deep South and visit Neshoba County and Philadelphia on a road trip that took me through all 48 contiguous states. This formerly forbidding territory turned out to have changed in 40 years as much as the rest of the country.

No hostile good old boys spitting tobacco on a dusty town square. No, indeed. They had been replaced by SUVs and upscale businesses and a friendly, integrated ethos.

Those demons had been vanquished.

Not that folks had forgotten the shame of 1964. There are memorials to the fallen, and the wheels of justice were still turning, however slowly.

So it was with some sense of relief that I greeted the news about Mr. Killen's convictions for the killing of those three brave, innocent young men. Time hadn't outrun justice, after all.

But I'll always know that I didn't go to Mississippi in 1964.

James Dannenberg is a District Court judge in Honolulu.