On November 2, 2022, Davis Houck discussed his new book Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer as part of the History Is Lunch series.
The 1964 murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were a critical episode in the Civil Rights Movement. “In the late 1970s, movement veterans began to make the shocking claim that during the search for the three men the FBI discovered other bodies in Mississippi’s swamps, rivers, and bayous,” said Houck. “As this has been repeated, the number of Black bodies—never identified—has grown from five to more than two dozen.”
The book begins in the backwaters of the Mississippi River with the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who were murdered on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. “Their deaths proved what Bob Moses and the Freedom Summer organizers already knew,” said Houck. “Black lives mattered far less to the country than young, white, and upwardly mobile college-educated lives.”
Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp wrote that “Black Bodies in the River is an extraordinary and riveting look at one of the most awakening moments in civil rights history that shocked a nation. Separating fact from fiction, Houck’s rhetorical analysis of a widely spread urban legend that surrounds Freedom Summer is a tour de force to be reckoned with. Readers will be captivated and enlightened as the inconvenient truth unfolds.”
Davis W. Houck is Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies and founder of the Emmett Till Archive at Florida State University. He earned his BA in communications from the College of Wooster, his MA in rhetoric and communication from the University of California, and his PhD in speech communication from Penn State University. Houck is co-author of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press and coeditor of Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 and The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
