Bob Dylan inquired, in “Blowin’ in the Wind”,
“Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
And how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take ‘til he knows
That too many people have died?”
The murders in Neshoba County, 60 years ago today, led Mississippians to conclude that too many people had died. Correction became compulsory.
Books such as William Bradford Huie’s “Three Lives for Mississippi,” Florence Mars’ “Witness in Philadelphia,” and Seth Cagin and Philip Dray’s “We Are Not Afraid” and the movie “Mississippi Burning” document the tragedy. Today’s anniversary offers opportunity for reflection. I spoke with Ridgeland attorney Bill Featherston whose father conducted the autopsies.
Dr. William Featherston was born in 1920, in Durham, North Carolina, where his dad was Assistant Chief of Police. Dr. Featherston was an undergraduate and medical student at Duke University. He became a Captain in the United States Army, pursuing pathology at Walter Reed Medical Center.
Pathology is a cornerstone of medicine — analyzing blood, tissue, and urine to diagnose disease and determining causes of death. Dr. Featherston’s domestic duties were essential to fighting fascism. He never served overseas. He subsequently transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Jackson; later entering private practice here.
No state medical examiner’s office existed then. Medicolegal autopsies were performed by private paathologists such as Dr. Featherston and his partner, Dr. Forrest Bratley. Both routinely arose at night, examining corpses — at $200 per autopsy — whenever criminality was considered; evidence being time-sensitive lest short passages of time compromise it.
The state medical examiner performs such autopsies today; the position being created to supersede private determination whether criminality caused death.
The FBI requested that Dr. Featherston perform James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner’s autopsies after their bodies were exhumed — on August 4, 1964 — from a dam on Olen Burrage’s Old Jolly Farm, on Highway 21, southwest of Philadelphia.
Sometime before the murders, Burrage remarked about the “invasion’ of Civil Rights workers coming to Mississippi. Burrage allegedly proclaimed that, “Hell, I’ve got a dam that’ll hold a hundred of them.”
The autopsies were performed at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Because bones were broken during burial inside a dam using a bulldozer — and, later, locating the bodies with a dragline — accusations alleged that Dr. Featherston colluded in a coverup with the Ku Klux Klan. The Chaney Family hired a New York pathologist to perform a second autopsy — which the pathologists’ code of conduct specifically prohibits. Conclusion that the three victims were dispatched by gunshot was deemed definitive.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote Dr. Featherston, on August 13, 1964, commending “the excellent work you did in connection with the autopsies.”
Unappreciated is extent to which the Klan and its confederates intimidated jurors and witnesses in the 1968 federal prosecution in Meridian of those violating Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner’s civil rights. The defendants were not tried for murder nor in Neshoba County. It was unclear whether state court jurors would return a murder conviction.
Dr. Featherston’s family was threatened with harm if he testified. Intimidation was ineffective given the Hippocratic Oath, Dr. Featherston’s military service, and his father’s law enforcement career.
Science was a lodestar for physicians and surgeons of the Greatest Generation. Nefarious forces could never compromise their forensic conclusions.
Bob Dylan’s “The Death of Emmett Till” ends,
“If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
… But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.”
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
