Red and Malva Heffner

In the summer of 1964, life seemed promising for Albert and Mary Alva Heffner. Red and Malva, as they were called, along with their daughters, Jan and Carla, lived in McComb. None was a native of that southwestern Mississippi town of eleven thousand residents, but all were Mississippians. They had lived in McComb for more than a decade. Red sold insurance, and Red and Malva had both attended the University of Mississippi. They were active in their local Episcopal congregation and in McComb’s civic and social life. Red had been recognized as an “outstanding young man” by several organizations, and Malva was a member of the Junior Auxiliary. Jan Nave, twenty-one, Malva’s daughter from her first marriage—her husband had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge—was a college student who was completing her one-year reign as Miss Mississippi. Carla, seventeen, was a rising senior at McComb High School. Then everything changed.

That year, McComb, like other Mississippi towns, experienced voter registration efforts and other civil rights work. Some McComb residents responded with sustained violence, including a wave of terrorist bombings. While neither Red nor Malva were activists, both were concerned about the tensions and violence in the town that they considered home. In July, the Heffners invited two white civil rights workers, one a minister, into their home on Shannon Drive to learn more about the movement and to exchange points of view. That decision cost the Heffner family substantial psychological torment, the loss of status and employment, and, eventually, exile from the town.

The Heffners were driven from McComb not by a hooded mob, but instead by their neighbors and the people they had considered their friends. On the evening of 17 July 1964, the evening on which they hosted the civil rights workers in their home, they realized people were watching them. Phone calls from strangers and concerned friends began that night. Within days, those calls, later chiefly anonymous, would increase in vulgarity and in frequency (over three hundred of them, Malva later recalled). They observed cars circling their block. People whom the Heffners had known for years began shunning them. Their dachshund, Falstaff, was poisoned. Eventually, the man who rented Red office space informed him that his lease would not be renewed.

Initially, the Heffners, especially Red, who had a reputation for speaking his mind, were determined to defend themselves. Red reached out to George Guy, the McComb police chief, telling him that their main goal in speaking with the civil rights workers was to try to assess and perhaps calm the situation in town. Red’s call to the police did little good, and no one spoke out on their behalf for fear of being similarly attacked or because they believed that the Heffners brought the matter on themselves. Ostracized and threatened, Red and his family left McComb in early September 1964 and never returned.

The Heffners relocated briefly to Jackson, then moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, where Red and Malva, assisted by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, took jobs with the federal government. Within a year, those jobs were terminated, with some press reports blaming civil rights opponents for the continued harassment of their family. Red then worked until his retirement with what became the Department of Health and Human Services. Malva worked as an information officer for the Embassy of Japan. Carla earned a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, then moved to England, where she married Kenneth Carlisle, a Member of Parliament for nearly two decades. There, Carla Heffner Carlisle continues to live and write. Jan Nave Barnes lives with her husband, Tom, in Leonardtown, Maryland. Red and Malva eventually settled in Columbia, Maryland, where they welcomed many civil rights activists into their house over the years. Malva died in 1995, and Red died in 1997 at Carla’s home in England.

The family’s story demonstrates something fundamental about how community dynamics supported the racial order in Mississippi during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Heffners violated no laws. They were motivated not by the desire to change social conditions but instead simply to understand what was happening in their hometown. In what would have seemed an instant, their standing in that town was destroyed. The bonds that they felt had tied them to the community could not survive a perceived challenge to what most local white people considered their way of life. And yet, as their daughter Carla recalls, “They never had a moment of regret,” believing instead that “once they emerged from the abyss, they had richer, wider, and freer lives.” No official apology, no historical marker, and no public commemoration or remembrance has marked the fate of the Heffners in McComb.