Gandhian socialist and member of India's parliament Ram Manohar Lohia taken into police custody for
refusing to leave whites-only Morrison's Cafeteria in Jackson, Mississippi, May 27, 1964.
Photo courtesy The Better India
Jackson police released PM Lohia without harm or charges. But the incident embarrassed the US State Department, which issued an apology to the Indian Embassy.
“They may go to hell,” Lohia told locals in Jackson.
He believed that what happened at the restaurant was not a political issue between two governments, but a moral issue America needed to deal with. Still, word came down from Washington to Jackson law enforcement. They were not to arrest any persons from India.
But some local police officers were also KKK members and they had their sights on Joan Mulholland and the lead organizer of Freedom Summer Ed King. Joan and Ed decided to attend a mass civil rights meeting in Canton, a
small town north of Jackson.
"Canton had been completely off-limits to whites in the Movement. It was such a
rough town. And it was under curfew," Joan remembered later. "It was Ed’s car, but we decided it would be better to let Hamid Kisselbash from Pakistan drive, swarthy white. And the meeting was over before the curfew, so people could get home."
As they left Canton, headed back to Jackson, they noticed their car was being followed. Ed, probably the most visible white activist in the Mississippi, had already been arrested and jailed, beaten, and even hospitalized with injuries related to an attempt on his life.
The pursuers boxed in their car, forcing them to stop. As Joan watched from the back seat, men got out and came toward them brandishing crowbars.
“We just knew we were going to die. We talked about it, and none of us were petrified. We just knew we were going to die that night.”
The attackers pried the door open and started beating Hamid, the driver. Ed started yelling.
“Don’t hit him! He’s a foreigner! He’s not part of—you know, we’re whites. We’re local. He’s a foreigner. He’s from India! He’s from India! Don’t hit him! He’s from India!”
Though dazed and bloody, Hamid managed, “I’m from Pakistan!”
“What’s that?” One of the men asked Ed.
“That’s his city in
India!” Ed said.
The man who seemed to be the leader, Joan assumed he had law enforcement connections, pulled off the attackers and the thugs drove
away.
Later an undercover Klan informer told Ed King he and Joan were supposed to die that night. And she never doubted it.
Less than three weeks later, the night of June 23, three young men registering black voters in Mississippi disappeared. Throughout July, investigators searched the woods, fields, swamps, and rivers of Mississippi,
eventually finding the remains of two other Black men, Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered.
But it was six weeks
before the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Micheal Schwerner were discovered buried in an earthen dam after a tip from an informant -- later identified as Mississippi Highway Patrol officer Maynard King.
