July 22, 1964 - Senator James Eastland (pictured), Democrat of Mississippi, charged today that the civil rights drive in Mississippi was backed by Communists. He suggested that the mysterious disappearance of three young rights workers there might have been a hoax.
In a Senate speech on “Communist participation and leadership” in the civil rights movement, Eastland named several persons working in Mississippi as pro-Communist.
He said there was a “Communist conspiracy to further or to participate in the invasion of Mississippi.” He lauded his home state’s citizens for “holding their tempers so well” under the circumstances.
Eastland, a foe of the civil rights bill that became law early this month, questioned whether Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York and James Chaney of Meridian, Miss., have been killed.
The three civil rights workers, part of a summer voter registration drive among Mississippi Negroes, have been missing since June 21.
He said an intensive, month-long investigation and search had failed to produce a “shred of evidence” that the three were victims of racial violence.
“Many people in our state assert that there is just as much evidence, as of today, that they are voluntarily missing as there is that they have been abducted,” the Senator said.
“No one wants to charge that a hoax has been perpetrated because there is too little evidence to show just what did happen. But as time goes on and the search continues, if some evidence of a crime is not produced, I think the people of America will be justified in considering other alternatives, more valid solutions to the mystery, instead of accepting as true the accusation of the agitators that a heinous crime has been committed.”
Eastland’s belief that the disappearance of the three rights workers may be a hoax is shared by many whites in Mississippi.
But Robert Moses, the director of the Mississippi summer project, said statements that the three young men may be safe in Chicago or Cuba points up “one of the problems in Mississippi — the refusal to be realistic.”
The FBI is said to believe that the three men met with violence. The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, said during a visit to Jackson, Miss., this month that they probably were murdered.
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