With Obama's run, town recalls racial history

Sylvia Campbell, 74, stood near Mount Zion United Methodist Church, which has a memorial honoring the three slain civil rights workers who registered blacks to vote. (MICHAEL E. PALMER/LOS ANGELES TIMES)

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Some places are defined by a single event. Roswell, N.M., will always be known for space aliens, Dallas for assassination. And this little town in the Piney Woods of Eastern Mississippi will forever be the site of one of the most brutal crimes of the civil rights era.

But Philadelphia, situated in a county once dubbed "Bloody Neshoba," can now add a footnote to its most nefarious chapter: The rural county where three men were murdered for trying to help black people vote has cast the majority of its ballots to put a black man in the White House.

Much has changed here since black citizens like Sylvia Campbell, now 74, were told they couldn't vote unless they correctly answered how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.

But much is the same. For all the excitement about Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and his history-making run for president, there is anxiety, too, because the present is still hostage to the past. Everything in this town of more than 80 churches is viewed through the lens of race. Obama's success makes some people as anxious as it makes others proud.

"It's just the impossibility of it," Campbell said.

She had just come from Mount Zion United Methodist, which the Ku Klux Klan once burned down.

"I know Mississippians," she said. "Barack Obama will never change the uneducated whites from the South. I don't care what he does. If he's made some of them millionaires, he'll never change them."

Obama's primary victory comes just as Philadelphia prepares to mark the 44th anniversary of the killings. Racial tensions are not as overt today; the slights are subtle, from the glance averted on the street to the job application that is never considered. With five months of presidential campaigning ahead - black against white - there is a sense that racial tensions are about to boil again.

"What happened all those years ago - that just keeps coming up," said Doris Gray, 81, who is white.

The presence of the media in her son's chili cafe not 24 hours after Obama cinched the nomination confirmed her fear that people are going to start poking around in matters better left be.

Around here, that always leads to June 21, 1964. Mount Zion lay in charred rubble, and three civil rights workers - two white and one black - came after that violence to register black people to vote.

The three were stopped by law-enforcement officers and jailed for speeding. Released that night, they were chased down a country road and shot, their bodies found six weeks later in an earthen dam outside town.

Seventeen reputed Klansmen were arrested, but only Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist preacher believed to have masterminded the plan, was charged with murder. An all-white jury deadlocked.

The story was fodder for the 1989 movie "Mississippi Burning," which played here at the old State Theatre. A new trial held in 2005 finally sent an 80-year-old Killen to prison.

With every turn of events, the media converged on Philadelphia, with a population of more than 7,000 - 55 percent white, 40 percent black.

The way it looked to some, everything boomeranged to the town's racist past. Ronald Reagan chose the county fair to announce his 1980 candidacy for president.

Now there's Obama, Philadelphia's most sensitive subject personified.

"I just wish he'd stop talking about race," said Taneil Long, 30, who owns a nail salon.

Many of Long's patrons are black. Ever since word got out seven years ago that she was dating a black man, many white clients deserted her. Her white landlady told her to move.

Long is biracial - part Vietnamese and part white. A Democrat, she likes what Obama has to say, but the subject of race repels her. It runs against the local grain to discuss the matter openly, and it's hard to avoid it when Obama comes on TV. She doesn't think an Obama presidency would change the minds of people who haven't changed their minds already.

"It's just unbelievable how hateful some people can be," she said. "If he goes in there and does a remarkable job, maybe some will say, 'Hey, maybe I didn't have the right feeling about that situation.' But as far as Neshoba County goes? You will never get nobody to admit it."

A stronger black leadership has stepped up to demand better police protection and community services, such as equal distribution of parks money, making sure the one in the black neighborhood doesn't get short shrift.

Just about any adult here has experienced racial prejudice. Steve Wilkerson, a white resident, worked for a service station with one bathroom for men, one for women, and one for "coloreds." The first two were cleaned daily; the third once a week.

Now Wilkerson, 55, owns Steve's on the Square, a clothing store. He is a member of a multiracial commission working to heal Philadelphia. The attorney general issued a formal apology, and Highway 19 now bears the names of the civil-rights activists who died there: Andrew Goodman, 20, a white college student from New York; Michael Schwerner, 24, a social worker from New York; and James Chaney, 21, a black man from nearby Meridian.

But Obama's strong performance in a county that is 65 percent white is less a sign of racial tolerance than of white flight to the Republican Party. Those voting on the Democratic side in the primary were mainly black or white liberals who tend to be progressive on racial issues.

Wilkerson predicted Obama will have a hard time winning Mississippi's white voters in November. Those who do support him will do so discreetly.

"They won't have bumper stickers and lawn signs. It would not be comfortable."

Margaret White, 54, stood outside Mount Zion. It was rebuilt in fire-resistant brick rather than wood. The old bell - all that was left - is in place, and a gray stone engraved with three names stands outside the sanctuary. But there are no high-fives or yelps of Obama's victory.

"Low-key is the way," the Rev. Willie Young tells his flock.