“Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi)” by Norman Rockwell

Freedom Summer




Next week, June 21st to be exact, will mark the 48th anniversary of the day that civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi, as they participated in “Freedom Summer,” an initiative to expand the civil rights and civic possibilities of African Americans in the region through education and voter registration–combating a brutal and dehumanizing Jim Crow regime of terror and disenfranchisement.  


On the night they were killed, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had gone to Neshoba County, Mississippi to investigate a report of a church burning there.  When they failed to report back to their office of COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations), they were quickly reported missing, and a search was launched, with the FBI taking over the investigation.  It was six weeks before their bodies were found, buried in an earthen dam in the Bogue Chitto swamp.  Schwerner and Goodman had both died from single gunshot wounds.  Chaney had been beaten and shot.  None of them had yet turned 25.

Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman

As I started this post, I was still wrapping up last week’s posts. The transition was more than a little bit jarring.  We go from a song born out of the head of a creative genius that’s filled with mystery, danger, and romance, to a protest song based in a cold, hard, brutal, and real case of not only crime, but a shocking act of terror.  It’s a crime that captured the attention of a nation, and one that reflected not only some of the baser forces within our society, but that was also a violation of a large portion of American self-concept.  It should be noted, though, that it was one of many, many lynchings during that era and in the country’s history, and probably got the attention it did because two of the victims were white (as Schwerner’s widow has acknowledged.)


The gravity of this case gave me more than a little pause in deciding to go forward with discussing “Those Three Are On My Mind” as a musical response to it.  I suppose it speaks to the variety of the genre, but as fun and interesting as conducting the musical explorations in this blog can be, one gets sobered up good and strong by the events that inspired “Those Three Are On My Mind.”  I was thinking this was going to be a relatively simple and straightforward week.  It’s getting more complicated.

The station wagon the volunteers had been driving found shortly after their disappearance.

For the most part, the songs that we have discussed so far have been:


a) works of imagination;
b) based on events more than one hundred years old;
c) focused on crimes of passion within personal relationships; or
d) some combination of the three.  


“Those Three Are On My Mind” has evaded each of the first three categories, and the relevant differences have thrown me a bit.  As Shaleane pointed out, while “Deep Red Bells” by Neko Case is most likely about the Green River killer, Case’s talent for abstraction simultaneously makes the song more vivid emotionally, but less graphic in not referring to a particular victim.  Pat’s post about “Hiram Hubbard” represents a real historical case from the American Civil War, and its terrible events seem somewhat less immediate to most.  The crime behind “Those Three Are On My Mind”  killed three people, who would be in their late 60s to early 70s today.  I’m not sure exactly why the passage of time matters, but it does.  These men were of my parents’ generation.


Prior to my current career and well prior to developing this blog, I did a significant amount of research and writing on civil disobedience, nonviolent protest, and the ethics of democratic citizenship.  While I’m not a historian, I became pretty well immersed in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement through my academic work, my personal interests, and a professional opportunity or two.  I believe I’ve met people who knew these young men personally.  So, it’s not too far distant, and the subject has always been a compelling one for me.

Taylor Branch

I have to remind myself that the point of these discussions is about the interpretive experience through music, not directly about the events that inspire the music.  Covering the facts adequately is beyond my scope in a number of ways. Justice to the facts has been done in a number of contexts, including by Taylor Branch, in his Pillar of Fire:  America in the King Years, 1963-1965.  And, some justice to the facts has eventually been done by the courts.


Branch’s narrative does a spectacular job of portraying the urgency, chaos, heroism, and drama of that summer in both the local and national contexts.  In some ways, this murder was the story of the summer.  In other ways, the movement didn’t stop for it, and there was a lot going on otherwise.  At the same time President Johnson is managing the government response to the disappearance of these three young men, he is also managing a situation in the Gulf of Tonkin.   I’m not going to review the history here in detail, so I encourage you to read Branch’s account, or some other.  It’s an important episode in the history of democratic citizenship.


The point I hope to pursue, if not in this post, then in one later this week, is how this song taps into our genre, and how the artist takes a tragedy and moves it into protest.  What work does the song do on the hearts and souls of listeners, and how are they motivated to act differently?  Are they motivated to act differently at all?  What kind of meaning gets made by the artist, and how does that lead us to any kind of change?

The Song 

Pete Seeger also went to Mississippi during Freedom Summer.  He was in the state when the men’s bodies were found.  We’ll learn more about his experience in the next post.


The murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman inspired Frances Parker to write the lyrics for “Those Three Are On My Mind.”  Pete Seeger put them to music.   The song was released by Pete on Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs in 1967 (reissued on CD in 1994).


“Those Three Are On My Mind,” by Pete Seeger (Spotify)  (Lyrics) 


The song was also performed by Harry Belafonte, on his 1967 album Belafonte on Campus.

“Those Three Are On My Mind” performed by Harry Belafonte (Spotify)

The version that I first heard was by Kim and Reggie Harris and Magpie on Where Have All the Flowers Gone:  The Songs of Pete Seeger, a double tribute album released in 1998.  Artistically, I think it’s probably the most successful of the three, but, then again, it did set the bar for me by being the first one I heard.


“Those Three Are On My Mind” performed by Kim and Reggie Harris and Magpie (Spotify)
(The track is actually mislabeled on Spotify, beginning with “These” instead of “Those,” but there is another version with the correct title.)

Reggie and Kim Harris

Murder Ballad?


It’s worth noting before moving on to further posts that one of the things that’s interesting about this song, relative to our on-going discussion, is how voiceless the killers are.  Often, the killer has a voice to express his or her intent or, later, his or her remorse.  Not so here.  There’s little room for sympathy for the murderers in this song, although their potential for a guilty conscience is appealed to repeatedly.  All the narrative elements of the song are brief, heart-tugging glimpses of the lives of the victims.  It doesn’t tell a full story.  So, it’s not properly a ballad, but much like many other murder ballads we’ve listened to, it does invite the singer and the listener to reflect on their own feelings of responsibility and perhaps guilt.  There are a few differences, I think, which I’ll need to devote a little more time to later.


All three of these activist-victims were trained in the philosophy and tactics of nonviolence–Mickey Schwerner, perhaps, most of all.  A significant component of the philosophy underlying this mode of political action is to love one’s opponents, one’s oppressors, or to find a point of human commonality with them.  According to a variety of accounts, this discipline carried through to the last.  Here is Branch’s narration of how Mickey Schwerner’s last words came out at trial:


“Of a thousand details to the hasty lynching, such as securing a spare key to the bulldozer, only Schwerner’s last words confounded the Klansmen themselves.  Jordan and others preserved them verbatim for agents who passed them to Inspector Sullivan as indellible signs.  The Klansmen heard nothing fearful or defiant, nor anything practical to escape the moment of terror, but they could not forget the spark of supremely disciplined faith that reached across the last human barrier.  Alton Wayne Roberts exploded past more hesitant Klansmen to yank Schwerner from the cruiser next to a ditch.  He jammed a pistol into his ribs and screamed from a face of animal hatred, ‘Are you that [n—-r] lover?’ Schwerner had an instant to reply, ‘Sir, I know just how you feel.'” * 

Upcoming Posts

I was thinking this was going to be a relatively simple and straightforward week, but it has been a little more complicated wrapping my thoughts around this song than I anticipated.  I hope in some upcoming posts to put it in a couple different kinds of context–one driven by Seeger’s experience of performing for movement workers, and another related to other artists’ attempts to craft a song out of the facts of this case.  In a later post, I want to think a bit about how the song functions artistically relative to its protest or political function, and think (apropos of our genre) how themes of guilt and responsibility play out in singing it and listening to it. 




*Branch didn’t pull the punch on the epithet.