As a youth leader in the 1964 Freedom Summer civil rights project, Roscoe Jones Sr. told three fellow activists he would travel with them to Philadelphia, Miss. Then he remembered that he'd also agreed to speak the same night to a youth group in Meridian, Miss. Jones went to the youth meeting. The activists -- Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- never arrived at their destination. Forty-four days later, they were found murdered by Klansmen.
Fueled by the memory of his fallen friends, Jones became one of the first black students to attend a white high school in Meridian that fall and the local junior college a year later. "I knew what commitment we had," he says.
While Jones made history, his son is uncovering it. Roscoe Jones Jr., a Stanford senior, is writing an honors thesis on the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded group that spied on civil rights workers from 1956 to 1973. He has tracked down FBI files and previously sealed records in Mississippi, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. He could write a book about the commission, he says, but instead plans to attend law school and pursue a career in national politics.
Roscoe Sr. is encouraged by his son's work. "It's going to take young people to realize where we've come from and where we're going," he says. "He's the future."
