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At the Neshoba County courthouse, King found a porcine policeman blocking the sidewalk. He turned out to be Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who, along with 15 other local whites, last week was ordered to stand trial in a federal court on Sept. 26 in connection with the killing of the three rights workers. "Oh, yes," said King, "you're the one who had Schwerner and the other fel lows in jail?" "Yes, sir," said Price with a touch of pride.
Barred from the sidewalk, King held a memorial service in the street. "We all know this county, where Andrew Goodman, James Chancy and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered," he began. Turning halfway toward Price, he said: "And I believe in my heart that the murderers are some where around me at this moment." "They're right behind you," chuckled a white onlooker, to roars of delight from fellow townsmen. Said King, "I'm not afraid of any man. Before I will be a slave, I will be dead in my grave." Shouted a chorus of whites: "We'll help you!"
Bedlam broke loose when the group began to march off. A rock crashed into one Negro's chest. Pop bottles and cherry bombs filled the air. Scores of whites surged off the sidewalks and waded into the column with clubs, knives and fists. When some young Negroes began hitting back, the local cops, until then languid spectators, broke it up. "We got to go back," said a shaken King afterward. "This is the meanest town in the country." The marchers did return under heavy police guard, but they also learned that Mississippi had another town to rival Philadelphia for meanness.
Measured Malevolence. When some 3,000 Negroes trooped into Canton and began pitching circus-style tents on the grassy grounds of an all-Negro elementary school, more than 100 armed state-highway patrolmen, county deputies and local cops assembled near by. "You will not be allowed to pitch those tents," Canton City Attorney Robert Goza told the marchers. The tents rose anyway. "If necessary," preached King, "we're willing to fill up all the jails in Mississippi." The only reply was the clicking of rifle bolts as the cops advanced. Ten yards from the marchers, they halted, donned gas masks. There was a pop, a thud, a flash of orange, then a smoky cloud. Soon, dozens of red, white and blue canisters loaded with tear gas and an antiriot irritant were sailing smack into the mob. Marchers scattered in confusion and pain.
Dazed, a young girl in a pink dress crawled through the smoke and collapsed at the feet of a trooper; he hardly had to shift position to kick her in the side. A large group of Negroes clustered in terror alongside the brick school building; with measured malevolence, three troopers lobbed three canisters of gas in their midst. At one point, an eerie silence enveloped the field, punctuated only by what sounded like men kicking footballs; it was the hollow clunk of cops kicking and clubbing fallen marchers. A white woman, her blue dress streaked with mud and grass stains, stumbled over to a platoon of blue-shirted city cops. "How could you be so cruel?" she sobbed. "Don't you know I'm a human being?" "Lady," snickered one of them, "I wouldn't be so sure." In all, close to 50 marchers were injured.