Story originally printed in the Winona Daily News or online at www.winonadailynews.com

Published - Saturday, April 19, 2008

Still seeking justice: Civil rights worker returning to Mississippi after 44 years to help fight bigotry

Joe Morse, 64, of Winona, is surrounded by early 1960s-era pamphlets, photos and buttons from his three and a half years as a civil rights worker with the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Meridian, Miss. (Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News)

By Chris Hubbuch | Lee Newspapers

WINONA, Minn. — He went to Mississippi looking for justice. Now, he’s going back for the same reason.

Back then, he was a 20-year-old seminarian from Dakota, Minn. It was 1964, and Congress had just passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which desegregated schools and public places.

But that was little consolation to the black residents of Mississippi, who were largely disenfranchised by arbitrary literacy tests and barred from many jobs, positions of power and even restaurants, in spite of the new law.

He began reading about conditions in Mississippi and heard about a summer project to register black voters there.

Three weeks before he arrived in Meridian, Miss., James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three young civil rights workers, disappeared one night. Their bodies were later found buried in an earthen dam on a nearby farm.

Federal authorities prosecuted 19 men in connection with the murders. Seven were convicted and received sentences of three to 10 years. The case was dramatized in the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.”

In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was indicted and convicted by the state on manslaughter charges. Killen is the only person the state has charged in the murders.

Joe Morse hopes to change that.

In June, Morse will return to Mississippi to once again stare down hatred and bigotry while standing up for human dignity.

The 64-year-old Winona resident plans to bring along as many people as he can in order to learn about the history of the civil rights movement — and to continue to demand justice on behalf of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, as well as other civil rights workers killed in Mississippi.

“It’s hard for people anywhere to feel that the criminal justice system does anything,” he said.

A campaign of fear

Growing up in southeast Minnesota, Joe Morse had hardly even met a black person. But during 1963 he became increasingly interested in the struggles of Southern blacks. As a young man preparing for the priesthood, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which killed four young black girls, hit him particularly hard.

“It had a lot of meaning for me that that could happen to people in their church,” he said.

That year, Morse marched in his first demonstration — carrying a sign in Winona’s Central Park — and subscribed to the newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where he read about conditions in Mississippi and the organization’s summer project to register black voters there.

“This is really bad,” he thought. “I should go.”

Morse went. He ended up staying for more than three years.

In Meridian, they called him Minnesota Red. His job was to help black residents register to vote and to teach them the principles of local government.

“People knew virtually nothing” about the system, he said. “There was no democracy taught in black schools.“

George Smith was a hospital orderly in Meridian when he and his wife, Louise, started attending voter registration meetings. He was employee of the month. Then he participated in a march on a local grocery that wouldn’t hire blacks.

After that, he was fired. And evicted.

Smith became a project director for the Council of Federated Organizations, organizing civil rights efforts in five counties.

“I made up my mind,” said Smith, a 64-year-old retired auto worker living in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I had two small children, and I didn’t want them to grow up in those conditions.”

Smith had been a classmate of Chaney’s. He was in the office the night Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner left to look into the bombing of a black church.

He waited for the phone call that all the civil rights workers were trained to make. It never came.

Working and living alongside local black activists, Morse organized classes and went door to door. Some black folks welcomed the freedom workers. Others wouldn’t answer the door, probably out of fear.

But the whites did not welcome them. The Ku Klux Klan and local police waged a campaign of fear.

Morse keeps a sheaf of documents from his time in Meridian. He pulls out a sheet of paper, a typed letter the Klan slipped under his door.

Phones rang in the middle of the night.

Police cars crept past the homes where civil rights workers stayed, keeping tabs on their activities and sending a clear message: we know who you are.

Also in Morse’s file: two tickets, dated six days apart, he received in November 1966 for having an “invalid license.” He had signed his first name “Joe” instead of Joseph.

Morse was in a minor car crash. The Meridian Star newspaper ran a lengthy account of his trial. Morse was accused of running a red light, though most of the testimony — and the story — focused on establishing his connection to the Congress of Racial Equality.

He spent plenty of time in jail. And there were beatings.

“They put a whuppin’ on Joe,” Smith said. “I watched Joe get beat up many a day.”

But Morse didn’t let the fear campaign stop him. Nor did the Smiths.

“If I said I wasn’t afraid, I’d be lying,” George said. “We didn’t let our fear control us.”

In addition to registering black voters and organizing the new Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated challenger to the segregationist Democratic party, Morse and the other CORE workers tested compliance with the new Civil Rights Act’s public accommodations requirement.

Usually two white workers would go into a restaurant and order food. Once they were served, two black workers would come in. If the restaurant refused to serve them, they would file an affidavit with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Morse has a photo of George Smith and two other black men at an empty lunch counter. Smith sits sideways on his stool, his brow wrinkled, looking at the camera, or something beyond.

What the photo doesn’t show is that the restaurant was full of white diners when the black men walked in. As the shutter clicked, the white patrons were forming a mob outside.

“We was scared then,” he said.

More work to do

At the end of that first summer, Morse asked the seminary for a leave of absence.

“I realized there was more work to do and a risk to the local black people if we left,” he said.

The seminary told Morse if he wanted to be a priest, he was expected to return that fall.

Morse stayed. “They decided for me,” he said.

“Joe Morse was one of the best things to happen to Meridian,” Smith said. “He stayed after everybody left.”

He eventually moved to Chicago to marry a woman he had met in Meridian. She was black, and Mississippi’s antimiscegenation law had not yet been overturned.

The marriage didn’t last — Morse said the 1970s was a difficult time for a white man to live in a black world. He lived in Madison and Boston before returning to Winona in 1983.

Morse eventually went on to work in counseling and turned his attention to anti-violence programs aimed at preventing domestic abuse.

In 1994, Morse returned to Meridian for a civil rights worker reunion. He reconnected with old friends he hadn’t seen in years, such as Smith. Morse went back in 2005, and again the next year. Last year, he brought along some friends.

Angie Shores wasn’t born when Morse and Smith were in Mississippi, though as a black child of the 1970s, she reaped some of the benefits of their work. Shores, a substitute teacher who lives in Onalaska, Wis., started researching the civil rights movement on her own, asking questions of her elders.

“The more I found out, the more I wanted to know,” she said.

She met Morse at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Winona.

“He was there,” she said. “I just love the fact that we have a chance to see firsthand the people who were involved.”

Last month, Shores joined some University of Wisconsin-La Crosse students on a civil rights tour led by Professor Bob Krajewski. She visited museums in Memphis and Birmingham, Ala.

This summer, she plans to visit Mississippi with Morse.

Donna Buckbee is a retired social services worker and amateur historian who lives on a farm near Rushford, Minn. She also met Morse at an MLK event, where she was talking about her research on the underground railroad.

Buckbee had been to Mississippi as a college student to bring donations, but that was the extent of her civil rights work. “I was not one of the heroes like Joe,” she said.

She went with Morse last year. She visited James Chaney’s grave site. She stood on Rock Cut Road where Chaney and the other two were murdered. She was honored, she said, just “listening to the heroes of this country.”

This year, she’s going back.

Morse will too, until his work is done.

If you go

Civil rights worker Joe Morse will lead a trip to Meridian, Miss., in June. To find out more or reserve space, call Morse at (507) 452-8232 or Donna Buckbee at (507) 864-2632.

Chris Hubbuch can be reached at (608) 791-8217 or chubbuch@lacrossetribune.com.