Nation: The Search

Gripping heavy wooden clubs to fend off water moccasins and rattlesnakes, 400 sailors sludged through eastern Mississippi swampland last week, poking and peering. From 14-ft. aluminum skiffs, equipped with walkie-talkies, search teams dipped grappling hooks into the sluggish, brown Pearl River. State highway patrolmen went back to knocking on doors, searching for a clue they might have missed. For the fourth time President Johnson dispatched new contingents of FBI agents, who set about quizzing every employee at the two principal manufacturing plants in nearby Philadelphia, Miss. But still there was no trace of the three young civil rights workers whose station wagon had been found charred and abandoned a week earlier.

For a time, attention turned to Sheriff Lawrence Rainey of Neshoba County, where the car was found. Rainey, it was learned, had killed two Negroes in the county in the past four years. Explaining it, he said: “The first had me down choking me, and the second was shooting at me.” Rainey still had not joined in the search.

There was a flurry of excitement when the mutilated body of a young white man was found at Oakland, Miss., about 100 miles from the search area. At first it appeared that it might be the body of Michael Schwerner, one of the missing trio. It was later identified as that of a carnival worker run over in a highway accident.

During the week, some 300 more volunteer civil rights workers—most of them white students—poured into Mississippi, and violence continued. In Hattiesburg, two white men fired shotgun blasts into student automobiles parked outside a civil rights headquarters. From rural southwestern Mississippi came muttered reports of militant white segregationists arming with automatic weapons and hand grenades.

Increasingly fearful, civil rights leaders in Mississippi got off letters to the parents of students already in the state, warning them of the potential danger. Then they announced that planned forays into rural areas had been delayed and, finally, that no more volunteers would be accepted for this summer’s “Mississippi project.”