Civil rights activist’s death re-examined a half-century later

Almost a half-century ago, Paul Morganstern, a Brien McMahon High School grad and law student, went to work in Mississippi to crusade for civil rights. He was killed in a late-night car crash, and many have wondered since whether or not it was an accident. A group of friends and relatives recently visited the town where he died seeking clarity.

NORWALK — Paul Morganstern was cool, the kind of guy who could wear white loafers and pull it off. Hailing from Village Creek in Norwalk, Morganstern joined the NAACP as a Brien McMahon High School student in the 1960s. He had met Martin Luther King Jr. — literally run into him at the reflecting pool during the historic March on Washington — and had a picture to prove it. He had sworn to protect the reverend from violence, though he never had the chance. Instead, upon graduating from Boston University, he enrolled in law school at Howard University, a lanky white Jewish boy in a historically black college, to fight for civil rights.

He encouraged others to do the same. When 51 male students at Brien McMahon were suspended in 1968 for wearing their hair long, Morganstern’s brother filed for a temporary injunction that would allow the students to continue going to school while the courts mulled the case over. Morganstern came back home from law school to offer his support (they lost). Their effort was part of a larger movement against racial injustice, the Vietnam War, gender inequality and a host of other types of repression (Norwalk’s city council believed the boys were being punished because “they refused to submit to authority and control”). Students across the country felt an urgency to take a stand for a cause.

So it was no surprise to anyone when Morganstern applied and was accepted to the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, an organization that placed law students from around the country in the Deep South to advocate for civil rights. As summer days grew long, he packed his bags and headed to Jackson, Miss.

That summer followed King’s assassination in Tennessee. Though President Lyndon B. Johnson had just signed the Civil Rights Act into law that May, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Jewish synagogue less than 100 miles from Jackson for supporting black churches. When Morganstern arrived in Mississippi, he witnessed a white defendant tell a jury he had beat a black man — then walk out of the courthouse with a not-guilty verdict for assault.

Morganstern went to work. He investigated police brutality and aided students who had been expelled from college without due process. He looked into discriminatory hiring practices and swimming pools that banned black kids, and, in his free time, he taught neighborhood kids how to swim. As part of his internship he collected sworn statements proving that black citizens were being denied their right to register to vote.

That was what he had been doing in Sunflower County late into the night on Aug. 17, 1968. Around midnight, as he drove back from assignment, a car struck Morganstern’s head-on. His new red Chevrolet was so badly mangled it had to be pulled apart to free his body. The next day, his ashes were shipped back to Norwalk.

When Tito Craige, a friend of Morganstern’s cousin, Warren Mersereau, heard of Morganstern’s death, he felt it couldn’t have been an accident. During Morganstern’s time in Mississippi, the FBI had foiled a KKK plot to bomb a Jewish businessman’s home there; a young civil rights activist from the North was sure to have drawn the wrong kind of attention.

But Morganstern’s family did not have the means to investigate. Time passed, and the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, where he worked, eventually dissolved. Civil rights progressed and students at Brien McMahon gradually began being able to wear their hair long after all, until that trend passed as well.

It wasn’t until 49 years later, when Craige was working as a civics teacher at Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina, that he received a call from his old college friend.

“Hey, why don’t we go down to Mississippi and find out what happened to Paul?” Mersereau asked.

Honoring a Norwalk civil rights activist

What remains half a century after a life has ended?

Newspaper articles, letters, memos and the memories of contemporaries who are still alive provide a place to begin.

As Craige searched through archives and called Morganstern’s former colleagues, it increasingly appeared the activist’s death had been an accident. Newspaper articles at the time suggested Morganstern had been hit by an approaching car that had drifted out of its lane. Morganstern had left vivid notes of his experiences at the internship that summer, including his time playing with neighborhood children and people beat with wrenches by police.

As they drove down to Jackson, Craige and five members of Morganstern’s family — including Mersereau and Morganstern’s sister, Barbara Morganstern Sammons — went on a civil rights tour of the South. They visited the church where King was once a pastor in Atlanta and the hotel in Memphis where the leader was shot, and they stopped at markers of others who were killed in the fight for civil rights.

Finally, they arrived in Jackson, the last stop of their tour, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

That morning over their hotel breakfasts, they badgered one another to contact their loved ones and drove to the Yazoo Sheriff’s Department, which had responded to Morganstern’s accident decades before.

To Craige’s surprise, every officer he saw in the formerly all-white office was black. After the group explained who they were, Sheriff Jacob Sheriff said, “If it weren’t for people like Paul, none of us would be in the sheriff’s office.” Craige didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The group was told there was no documentation of the accident, neither with the police or with the medical examiner, but all of the details — the place, the towing company, the funeral home — were familiar to the officers. Sheriff and Chief Deputy Joseph Head offered to take them to the crash site.

Craige glanced at Morganstern Sammons, who had previously said revisiting the site would be too much. But she nodded, and the group filed after Sheriff and Head into two police cars to head to a steep stretch of former highway known as “Kill Hill.”

The road was abandoned when a newer, safer highway was built to replace it, and it was strangely empty under the bright midday sun as they got out of the car.

They walked down the middle of the street and stopped at a pine tree covered in ivy, where Morganstern Sammons laid down a stone carved with the words: “Paul Morganstern Jr. Advocate.”

Sheriff assured them he would come back to place a cross at the site, and Craig recalled him telling the family that those who die for others live a longer than normal life.

As the eight of them drove back to the station, Sheriff turned up the radio. Brent Jones’s “Midnite” was playing.

“Hello, my child

See you on your knees

It must be midnight

I know you’re sad

But I’m so glad

You took the time out to call me.”

Back in Jackson, Craige and Morganstern’s family headed to a hip southern diner, Hal and Mal’s, to meet up with a writer they had encountered through their research.

That night, a live band was playing, and the writer knew the banjo player, who happened to be a civil rights lawyer by day. She waved him over to hear Morganstern’s story.

When he learned who the group was, the banjo player looked as though he had discovered a lost relative — he had had the exact same internship as Morganstern two years later. He put his arms around Craige and told him how happy he was they had come. Sheriff had been right.

“Everybody, listen,” the banjo-playing lawyer called out. “This song is for Paul.”

Read Craige’s account of Morganstern’s life and work at; @raschuetz