Dates: ca. 1919-1926; 1988; n.d.

Biography:

Florence Latimer Mars

Florence Latimer Mars was born in Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi, on January 1, 1923, the only child of Adam Longino Mars, an attorney, and Emily Geneva Johnson Mars, who worked in local offices, most notably at Philadelphia’s First United Methodist Church. Both were part of long-established, landowning Neshoba County families. Florence Mars graduated from Philadelphia High School in 1940 and attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, before transferring to the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Lafayette County. She graduated in 1944 with a degree in business.

Mars worked for Delta Airlines in Atlanta during World War II, moving back to Philadelphia at the war’s end. Over the next fifteen years, she built a cattle farm there on inherited land and bought a stockyard, the Neshoba County Livestock Sale. Mars lived for some of this time in New Orleans, where she established a freelance photography career. In 1956, she took an extended trip to Europe with an art class from the University of Alabama. After years of frequent moves between New Orleans and Philadelphia, Mars returned permanently to Philadelphia in late 1962. She soon became active in First United Methodist Church, leading multiple Bible study groups.

Mars’s interest in the Civil Rights Movement began as early as 1955, when she attended the trial of the men accused of lynching Emmett Till in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. She is most well known for her actions during the investigation of the Neshoba County murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights workers with the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. Mars was an informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the summer and in October testified before a federal grand jury in Biloxi, Harrison County, Mississippi, that was considering indictments of police brutality as part of the case.

The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan led a boycott against Mars’s stockyard, forcing her to sell it in February 1965. That August, Mars was arrested by Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey and held in jail overnight on spurious drunken driving charges. Rainey would later be tried for his alleged role in the conspiracy to murder the civil rights workers. Under pressure from congregation members, Mars resigned her church positions in April 1966. By that time, she was involved with the Philadelphia to Philadelphia Project, which promoted cross-cultural understanding between the Mississippi and Pennsylvania cities.

Mars attended daily the 1967 trial of those accused of the civil rights workers’ murders. Having sold her farm in 1965, she then primarily devoted her time to researching and writing a book about her experiences during the previous few years. She was especially encouraged to write by Rev. Clay Lee, then pastor of First United Methodist; and Turner Catledge, then an editor at the New York Times and a Neshoba County native. Catledge wrote the foreword for her book, Witness in Philadelphia, which was published in 1977 by Louisiana State University Press.

Mars later self-published three further books. The largely autobiographical The Bell Returns to Mt. Zion, which she considered a “sequel” to Witness in Philadelphia, was published in 1996, as was The Lake Place Burnside Family Story: A Neshoba County History. The Fair: A Personal History, published in 2001, contains personal and family remembrances and photographs of the Neshoba County Fair. Mars was in the courtroom in 2005 when Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter for the 1964 civil rights workers’ murders.

Florence L. Mars died of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2006, at her family home on Poplar Avenue in Philadelphia, after suffering from Bell’s palsy and diabetes. Her funeral was conducted by Rev. Lee, by then a retired Methodist bishop, and she was buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Philadelphia.

 

Scope and Content Note:

This collection consists primarily of a piece of handwritten sheet music entitled “Anna-belle Lee,” a musical setting of the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe (folder 1). The composition was written by Lida Oldham of Oxford, Lafayette County, Mississippi, the mother-in-law of writer William Faulkner. According to Florence Latimer Mars, her father Adam Longino Mars received the sheet music from Oldham while he was a student at the University of Mississippi from 1919 to 1921. Also included is correspondence between the Library of Congress and Florence Mars, sent and received in 1988 while she was researching the composition (folder 2). The other items in the collection are a photocopy of the text of “Annabel Lee” and the original folder in which the sheet music was stored, which has annotations by Florence Mars (folder 2).