Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events-especially the
lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey
Schwerner-stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights
movement. The infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just
the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer
Project. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans
challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that
during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and
other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black
bodies in Mississippi's swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has
evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers,
and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of
supposed Black bodies-never identified-has grown from five to more
than two dozen. In Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom
Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions:
Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking
claim only grown in the past several decades-despite evidence to
the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black
bodies claim do, and with what audiences? Houck's story begins in
the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of
the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964,
by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated
Organization's voter registration efforts in Mississippi leading up
to Freedom Summer. He considers the extent to which violence
generally and expectations about interracial violence, in
particular, serves as a critical context for the strategy and
rhetoric of the Summer Project. Houck then interrogates the
unnamed-Black-bodies claim from a historical and rhetorical
perspective, illustrating that the historicity of the bodies in
question is perhaps less the point than the critique of who we
remember from that summer and how we remember them. Houck examines
how different memory texts-filmic, landscape, presidential speech,
and museums-function both to bolster and question the centrality of
murdered white men in the legacy of Freedom Summer.
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