The Return
by Thomas R. Smith

Unto Him all things return. –The Koran

Walking on the park road
early morning, summer solstice,
we came to a place in the still-
shaded cool where, looking
up a grassy hillside,
we could see, through a gap
in the trees, the rising sun.

Burning clear with all
heat and strength befitting
the day of its longest dominion,
the sun, boiling from that
high nest of foliage,
lit a silver swath
of sparkling, dew-bent

grasses all the way down
the drenched slope.
So brilliant was that carpet
of light the sun unrolled
down the hill to our feet,
we stopped where we were
and sat awhile in pure wonder.

And I remembered an old
secret promise, deemed
unwise to speak, though
who could deny it,
seeing these folk, humble
yet adorned, nodding together
on their way back to the sun?

And soon enough we got up
again and wandered on
into whatever we had to do
on that day, though not unchanged,
having accompanied a little distance
on the morning road of their return
those illuminated pilgrims.


"The Return" by Thomas R. Smith, from The Foot of the Rainbow. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1964 that the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were found in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. The activists, all in their 20s, had disappeared June 21. It was “Freedom Summer,” an effort to raise the dismal voter registration rate of southern Black Mississippians amid rampant violence and repression by the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the FBI it was Schwerner the Klan really wanted: a white New Yorker, he had been particularly active in registering voters and organizing boycotts of racist businesses. Five days before the men’s disappearance, Klan members got a tip that Schwerner would be at a meeting at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. When they arrived to find he wasn’t there, they beat the churchgoers and torched the building. Goodman, another white New Yorker, and Chaney, a Black Mississippian, traveled with Schwerner to investigate the arson. As they drove away from the church, their station wagon was pulled over – allegedly for speeding. They were jailed on the pretense that a justice of the peace needed to process the speeding fine. Shortly after 10 that night, a sheriff’s deputy released them, telling them to leave the county. The same deputy then alerted Edgar Ray Killen, a Baptist preacher and local leader of the KKK, who rallied other Klansmen to ambush and kill the young activists as they drove out of town.

Though Killen and 18 other men were indicted the following year on federal charges of violating the victims’ civil rights, only seven were convicted, and none served more than six years in prison. State officials didn’t pursue murder charges until decades later. On the 41^st anniversary of the killings, a Mississippi jury – citing insufficient evidence for a murder conviction – found Killen guilty of manslaughter. The killings helped galvanize support for the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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