Sunday, June 3, 2001

Each day, "Mississippi Journey" profiles someone the students met on their tour. Frances Rodman is a tour guide at Jackson's City Hall. She is white and moved from Chicago to Jackson in the early 1960s with her husband and 9-year-old daughter. Her husband was an FBI agent called in to investigate the Neshoba County murders of James Chaney, a Mississippi native, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two civil rights volunteers who came to the state during freedom summer. Rodman spoke with The Post-Standard staff writer Teri Weaver.

In 1964, my husband was with the FBI, and he was stationed in Chicago. He was one of the agents that was sent down here during all that ruckus. They had someone in the group infiltrate the Klan, and they found out where the corpses were buried.

It has changed so much here. When I came here, there were no African-Americans - well, they were called blacks then, or Negroes - there were no blacks on the police force, none on the fire (department), or blacks in stores, salespeople. Things have changed so much.

When we first came here, we had calls threatening us. When the welcome lady came, she said, "Why are you here? Where'd you come from?" I said, "We were stationed in Chicago." She said, "Well, there's plenty of crime there."

I noticed that my white neighbors ... I was used to in Chicago, they brought cakes and were just glad you were here. When we came to Mississippi, they didn't come over; they didn't talk to me. In fact, in the middle of the night, I would get phone calls. And they would say, "You better get out of town."

And this was kind of scary, but this was just part of it. I'd never been used to that. My husband would work 18, 20 hours a day. In fact, as one of my neighbors said, "I don't think there is a Mr. Rodman. For weeks, we never saw him." I never saw him either.

They had a bombing in a tire factory; I think it was in Natchez. This man had worked in the tire factory, and he was working the midnight shift when he went to get in his truck. And the engine, it blew up. He was killed. And my husband was sent there for four months to try and find out who did that. The amazing part was, you never knew any of this was going on when you read The Clarion-Ledger (a Jackson paper).

It went on into the 1970s. One day I was in church, my next door neighbor, who is a real estate agent, said to me, "Are you selling your home?" I said, "No, why do you ask?" She said, "Well, a pink Cadillac drove up and took a picture of your house." These were the kind of things the Klan did to try and threaten you to leave. But when I told my husband, he said, "Oh, yeah, that's the Klan."

So, that's the way it was.