Roots of Hatred

I was 11 years old when three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1964. I don't remember where I was or what was going on in my safe, privileged life when I heard about it. Like many childhood memories, it's recalled as a story--something woven over time. I do know that to me, at that age, it was part of a fabric of hatred that I didn't understand but was asked to look at, in much the same way that children are informed of other dangers in the world.

My father, Ronald Reagan, believed in educating his children. He felt that knowledge was power. We knew about the Holocaust; we knew about the "strange fruit" Billie Holiday sang of--lynched black men and boys swinging from the branches of trees simply because they were black. There were personal anecdotes: my father in college bringing a black football player back to his parents' house to sleep there because the local hotel wouldn't take him. My father's father had taught him to never tolerate racism in any form. It was a lesson to be handed down from one generation to another and my father took the obligation seriously.

He couldn't answer, though, the question that children always ask: Why? I think he said something about people learning to hate and getting swept up in those flames, but the truth is, he didn't know either.

I thought a lot about hatred yesterday when Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter for the deaths of those three men who were murdered 41 years ago. I watched Killen's face on television as the jury was polled and the verdicts were read. I felt stirrings of hatred for him deep within me, and I paid attention to that. I'm looking at the face of a killer, I thought, and I have no compassion for his age or his infirmities. I felt no pity for his wife, who wept and hugged him. She had to know. She had fallen in love with, and spent years with a man who was a leader in the Klu Klux Klan, who hated people because of the color of their skin. Who organized the mob that murdered three men who were simply trying to make it possible for black men and women to vote in Mississippi.

And I'm left with another question: Is this how hatred always starts? With a tiny flame deep inside ... one that takes over if you don't look at it and choose to put it out? I don't embrace what I felt watching Edgar Ray Killen. I don't want to hate anyone. But maybe it's naive to assume that feeling will never come up in us. Maybe the best we can do is make a conscious choice to not surrender to it. Because there are many people in the world who don't do that--who let it consume them. Edgar Ray Killen is just one.

So I choose, instead, to remember the names and lives of three men who died brutal deaths. It was June 1964 in Mississippi. The weather must have been stifling--hot and humid. But Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman wanted to be there. They were going to help the black citizens of one of the most segregated states in the union vote. Michael Schwerner was routinely called "Jewboy" by men who donned white hoods in the dead of night and went looking for men to beat and kill.

A group of those men, Klu Klux Klansmen, burned the Mount Zion Church and the three civil-rights workers drove out to survey the wreckage. The three men were arrested, then released late at night. It was a setup. They were taken on a dark road in Neshoba County; they were beaten, shot and dumped into the earth at Old Jolly Farm. Their bodies were found a month later.

Of the 19 men who were ultimately arrested in connection with this case, many walked free. Two who didn't--who were imprisoned--were beaten by black inmates. This is the lesson of hatred, I think--the roots of it, how it just grows and feeds on pain and anger. Maybe the best each of us can do is get a grip on our hearts--on everything that is good and hopeful there--and refuse to hate someone like Edgar Ray Killen. Punish, yes. Be thankful that some justice has been done, obviously. But the final victory over the legacy he was part of is to look at the hatred in his eyes with no hatred in our own.