Mississippi Funeral.

One of the strangest funerals I have ever attended was one that took place in a rural black Baptist Church in southeast Mississippi in the winter of 1967. This was the winter before the asassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and there was great racial tension throughout the south.

I was a member of a Marine Corp Honor detail from the Marine Schools Detachment at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama, and we buried fallen Marine and Naval personnel at locations throughout Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. We had one black Marine on our pall bearer detail and the rest of us were white. We entered this small church and as was tradition we were seated in the front pew nearest a side exit door and when we entered the church, the hatred that the congregation of that church felt for us was so thick it could be cut with a knife. Each and every face I beheld seemed to reflect animosity towards us to degree that I had to restrain myself to not run from the church and leave the area.

With traditional Marine stoicism each of us in the detail sat in the pew in an erect position facing straight ahead during the funeral services, while we were forced to endure one of the most hate filled, prejudicial sermons that it has ever been my displeasure to endure.

The sermon started off fairly mild, but towards the last of the sermon it was obvious that the preacher was fanning the racial hatred fires amongst the congregation to the point that we all feared that we might be physically attacked. Women in the congregation began screaming and throwing their purses in the air and then fell to the floor of the church in a swoon. Men shook their fists at us and made mock charges towards where we were seated, all the while we were forced to stay seated and act as though nothing was wrong. The preacher never said much about the deceased, but seemed more concerned about scorning the government for his death. This seemed odd because we were told that he had died as the result of injuries sustained in a civilian vehicle on a roadway in Hawaii. The government was burying this Marine at it's expense.

Finally after an hour of enduring this harangue by the preacher, mostly directed at us, he ended the service with prayer. Instantly we were on our feet, the pall bearers grabbed the casket and removed the body from the church to the back of a waiting hearse and we then set out towards the nearby cemetary, vastly releaved to have made it outside of the church with our lives.

The area around the cemetary was grown up in brush to the point that we could not see the actual grave site. The pall bearers were forced to carry the body through the heavy brush, down into the bottom of a deep ravine where they lost the casket and it rolled to the bottom, they re-covered the casket with the flag and then pulled it up the other side pf the ravine where they were able to reach the grave site located a short distance away from the ravine's edge.

The funeral director told the pall bearers in an unfriendly fashion to place the casket on the lowering device, and when they did so he tripped the switch and the casket began to be lowered into the open grave before the American flag could be removed. One Marine went down to his knees in the moist soil surrounding the grave and managed to grab the flag before it was soiled, and pull it up out of the grave. The pall bearers then folded the flag neatly and presented it to the funeral director who then unceremoniously threw it into the back of the hearse in a surly manner.

Without further ceremony the funeral director and his crew started shoveling dirt over the casket and filling in the grave, there was no grave side service and I do not know if the boy's mother ever received the flag that she was due. We all literally fled the area, climbed back down through the ravine and back to our waiting vehicles and left the area as quickly as possible, vastly relieved to have lived through the ordeal. The entire trip back to Hunstville we discussed the hatred that we all felt that was directed towards, us and marveled that we were able to survive it. Dr. King was assassinated the following spring and that is another story.