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Tribune reporter Chris Hubbuch told how Morse, then a 20-year-old seminarian from Dakota, Minn., traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to help register black people for the vote.
Morse’s story underscores what often is forgotten today in the study of civil rights: How dangerous it was to work on behalf of even basic rights like the right to vote.
Even though Congress has passed a voting rights act, there were plenty of local governments that sought to put up barriers to the right to vote for people of color. Just three weeks before Morse arrived in Mississippi, three civil rights workers disappeared. Their bodies were found later, buried in an earthen dam. That’s how dangerous it was to work for basic civil rights.
Nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., were attacked by police who used fire hoses and unleashed dogs against the demonstrators.
Morse talked about having police cars circle the houses in which they were staying — to make sure the civil rights workers knew they were being watched.
Racists blew up a black church in Birmingham, killing four young girls.
Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution wrote of the aftermath of that bombing in 1963: “A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.”
Think back to school desegregation, voting rights drives, civil rights marches and other demonstrations. These activities routinely were denounced by political and community leaders as the work of “outside agitators,” “communists” or worse.
Today, nearly everyone speaks respectfully of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. But that wasn’t true during the time that Morse spent in the South.
Morse never returned to the seminary, and never became a priest as he once planned. Instead, he worked in counseling and on programs designed to prevent domestic violence. But he hasn’t forgotten his experiences in the South, and plans to return there this year.
It took real courage to work on behalf of civil rights. It was a dangerous and heroic undertaking. We never should forget that.
