Freedom Summer (11 page)

Soon they would get used to Mississippi, sooner than black Mississippi expected. College students would sit at tables piled with fried chicken, collards, even “chitlins”—spicy pig intestines—and eat their fill. A woman from Long Island would plunge her chigger-infested legs into a bucket of gasoline, and the nasty bugs would be gone. “And the outhouse that we had to use?” remembered Greenwood author Endesha Ida Mae Holland. “I was really surprised because I said, ‘Well, I know this white girl ain’t gonna go use this outhouse like everybody else.’ And the girl would use the outhouse like she was
born to it
and that made us all gang around them.” Soon volunteers would take evening “showers” out back with buckets of cold water and wake the next morning to the assault of sounds—roosters and barking dogs and a radio blaring down the block—and not even complain . . . much. But on that Sunday, everything was new, exciting, something to write home about.

Late that afternoon, Chris and other volunteers dropped in at Batesville’s two juke joints. Dimly lit bars festooned with beer signs and Christmas lights, each had a soda fountain and general store up front. On Saturday nights, there would be live music, but it was Sunday afternoon down at the Thomas Sundry, and even if it looked like the kind of place their parents warned them against, Chris and other volunteers passed beneath the neon Coca-Cola sign and were inside. Moving deeper into a room that reeked of barbecue sauce and kerosene, they found a bar, a pool table, and a jukebox with the best R & B selection Chris had ever seen. The volunteers were soon surrounded by dozens crowding in to meet “The Riders.” After a half hour, the crowd followed Chris and his new friends through the black section of Batesville—little more than a drugstore, beauty parlor, and gas station—to the H & H Café. There locals convinced Chris to try “some good old southern bourbon.” Eager to oblige, amazed to be served hometown hooch in the last dry state in America, the teenager had his first burning sip of moonshine. It was shaping up to be quite a summer.

 

 

No one is certain who dreamed up Freedom Summer. Some say Bob Moses, some say Allard Lowenstein. A quixotic academic and Pied Piper of young idealists, Lowenstein had brought Stanford and Yale students to the previous fall’s Freedom Election, then suggested a larger white influx the following summer. But this much is agreed upon: “Had Moses not wanted it to happen, it wouldn’ta happened.” And the summer project almost did not happen. Hotly debated throughout the winter of 1963, the idea had seemed to Stokely Carmichael “either an act of madness or a daring stroke of genius.” Carmichael had not been the only skeptic. Many SNCC veterans felt theirs was the rightful claim to any progress Mississippi might make.
They
had braved Mississippi when no one else would.
They
still bore the scars—bloody welts, broken bones, bullet wounds you could put your finger in. And now a bunch of white college kids with names like Pam and Geoff were being invited to Mississippi to gather headlines and plaudits for bravery. Mississippi natives had other reasons to oppose the project. “We had worked so hard trying to get local people to take initiative for their own movement,” Hollis Watkins recalled. “That process was beginning to take place. And I felt that bringing a large number down from the North would snatch the rug right from under the people in the local communities.”

Yet as Carmichael noted, “This was Bob Moses talking.” As the idea gained credence, several in SNCC tried to limit white involvement. Hadn’t those arrogant Stanford and Yale students “taken over the Jackson office”? Hadn’t it been impossible to maintain SNCC’s “beautiful community” when every office had “a bunch of Yalies running around in their Triumphs” ? But how could SNCC reject whites? “If we’re trying to break down the barrier of segregation,” Fannie Lou Hamer argued, “we can’t segregate ourselves.” Others disagreed. “We don’t have much to gain from Negroes meeting whites,” cautioned MacArthur Cotton, a Freedom Rider who had been hung by his thumbs in Parchman Farm Penitentiary. “We’ve got too much to lose if they come down here and create a disturbance in two or three months, and they’re gone.” Learning of the attempt to “get rid of the whites,” Moses flatly declared he would not be part of anything “all black.” Only when blacks in Mississippi were joined by whites, he argued, would civil rights be no longer a question of skin color but “a question of rational people against irrational people. . . . I always thought that the one thing we can do for the country that no one else could do is to be above the race issue.”

The debate had continued in grueling meetings that began with eloquent arguments, rose to righteous anger, and ended with hands clasped, songs sung, and no agreement. As 1964 began, the summer project remained in doubt. “How large a force of volunteer summer workers should we recruit? ” Moses asked in a memo. “100? 1,000? 2,000?” Had SNCC made this decision by consensus, the answer might have been zero. In late January, another meeting deadlocked. “Too difficult.” The “huge influx” would overwhelm SNCC. Why waste an entire summer on “sociological research” ? The turning point came a week later, prompted by another murder.

Nearly three years after Herbert Lee had been gunned down, the killing still tormented Moses. At Lee’s funeral, his wife had approached Moses, screaming, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” Following the funeral, Moses and fellow organizers had gone looking for witnesses. Knocking on doors at night, they met a burly logger named Louis Allen who had seen it all. Herbert Lee had not brandished a tire iron, Allen assured Moses. He had been killed in cold blood. Allen had only testified otherwise after coming home to find his living room filled with white men toting shotguns. Later Allen told the FBI the truth and agreed to testify if he could get federal protection. None was offered. When word leaked of what Allen knew, locals stopped buying his logs. His credit was cut off. A sheriff stopped him, repeated his FBI testimony word for word, then broke his jaw with a flashlight. Hounded and harassed, Allen made plans to flee Mississippi. He did not want to die, he told his wife, because “when you’re dead, you’re dead a long time.” On the evening of January 31, 1964, just hours before he was to leave for Milwaukee, Louis Allen pulled his pickup into his driveway and got out to open the barbed-wire gate. From inside his tarpaper shack, his wife heard three shots. The crack of a shotgun in Mississippi was nothing unusual, and Elizabeth Allen stayed inside watching TV while her husband lay in the driveway, clinging to life as the truck’s headlights slowly dimmed. Shortly after midnight, her son found the body. That morning, Moses got a phone call.

“For me, it was as if everything had come full circle,” he remembered. “I had started in Amite County, unable to offer protection or force the federal government to provide it. Herbert Lee had been killed; Louis Allen had witnessed it and now he was dead.” In 1961, the fledgling SNCC had no power to respond to Lee’s murder “other than to dedicate our own lives to what we were doing,” Moses said. “But Louis Allen’s murder happened at a moment in history when we had another option.” Moses threw his full influence and reputation behind the summer project. “The staff had been deadlocked, at loggerheads with each other; this decided it.”

The timing could not have been better. Nearly nine years had passed since the victorious Montgomery bus boycott had elevated Martin Luther King to national status and stirred so much hope. But by the spring of 1964, the civil rights movement was spinning its wheels. While lifting spirits and making headlines, the movement had changed few laws or customs. After years of foot dragging, John F. Kennedy had proposed his civil rights bill, but ten months later it remained stalled by a Senate filibuster. Few held out any hope that Lyndon Johnson, a southerner with no great track record on civil rights, would risk his reputation and power for the bill. “Whites Only” signs remained throughout the South, and Dixie politicians were getting attention and votes by denouncing integration in terms reminiscent of the Civil War. In the past year, shotguns and bombs had shaken the certainty of the most devoutly nonviolent. And the Klan was rising. Martin Luther King was soaring to new heights of eloquence, but for most whites outside the South, civil rights remained some distant struggle that concerned them little and their children even less. Freedom Summer, now that SNCC had finally made up its mind, would get everyone’s attention and get the civil rights movement rolling again.

Once deciding on the project, SNCC was consumed by it. Meetings wore down even the most tireless talkers. SNCC staffers, like the grad students many later became, churned out reports: “Notes on Teaching in Mississippi”; “Techniques for Field Work—Voter Registration”; “The General Condition of the Mississippi Negro.” SNCC staff in Atlanta turned much of their energy to Mississippi. The cautious NAACP warned that a summer of racial unrest in Mississippi might cause a white “backlash,” putting Barry Goldwater in the White House, yet SNCC forged ahead. Bob Moses fought off a power play by Allard Lowenstein. After recruiting students across the country, Lowenstein tried to put Stanford- and Boston-area volunteers under his aegis, then, fearing SNCC had been infiltrated by Communists, abruptly left the project, leaving Moses with precious little time to prepare. Working with staffers, Moses defined four strict jobs for summer volunteers: registering voters, teaching in Freedom Schools, running community centers (often called Freedom Houses), and a fourth task that would take Freedom Summer to the national stage.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed that spring, would be the beacon of Freedom Summer. Like the Freedom Election the previous autumn, the MFDP was an exercise in parallel democracy. Summer volunteers, SNCCs decided, would register as many voters as Mississippi’s closed system might allow, but blacks unwilling to take the risk could safely register as Freedom Democrats just by signing a form. Moses envisioned 400,000 names on MFDP rolls, a massive outpouring that would prove that blacks were desperate to vote in Mississippi. Armed with these names, and their own delegates to be chosen that summer, Freedom Democrats would go to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City at the end of August. There they would plead their case—perhaps even on TV—telling the nation of beatings, drive-by shootings, and other outrages denying blacks the vote. With enough support, Freedom Democrats might even unseat Mississippi’s all-white delegates and become the state’s official delegation. But all that was for later in the summer. Throughout that spring, SNCC staff remained focused on the one ingredient—aside from idealism—essential to the coming summer.

Money was not merely the name of the Mississippi hamlet where Emmett Till had been killed. Money was the lifeblood of the summer project. Calculating a cost of $200,000, SNCC began fund-raising in February with a full-page ad in the
New York Times
. Campus-based “Friends of SNCC” chapters around the country held benefits. A speaker’s bureau visited campuses from Smith to Stanford. Dick Gregory gave benefit performances, while the SNCC Freedom Singers drove an old station wagon from concert to concert, earning $5,000 a week. James Baldwin, then the most highly touted black writer in America, sent out a personal appeal to thousands, and the National Council of Churches agreed to bankroll two training sessions in Ohio. By the end of March, SNCC had raised $97,000. Yet some staffers were still going weeks without pay. More mailings were needed. More fund-raisers. More money.

SNCC’s
New York Times
ad drew hate mail—“Niggers . . . Beatnicks . . . NIGGER LOVERS”—but it also tapped America’s rising concern about a state long neglected or dismissed. For several years after the uproar over Emmett Till’s lynching, hardly any news had come from Mississippi. But the bloody riots at Ole Miss, the shocking assassination of Medgar Evers, and the daring of the summer project had turned Mississippi into America’s hotbed of civil rights. Even if most Americans felt Mississippi’s problems were not their business, hundreds responded to SNCC’s appeal. An interracial women’s group in Harvey, Illinois, sent $25. A California woman sent a box of pencils, asking, “Would you please give these to Negro children under 10. . . . Tell them each one was touched with love and understanding.” A Manhattan lawyer gave $25 “for the good work that you are doing.” A clergyman from Yazoo City, a Mississippi town SNCC thought too dangerous to organize, sent five dollars. Those who could not give money sent books.

The previous October, a
Harper’s
article on SNCC asked readers to send used books to “Robert Moses, 708 Avenue N, Greenwood, Mississippi.” Within three months, enough arrived to open Freedom House libraries in Greenwood and Meridian. In the latter city, New Yorker Rita Schwerner and her husband, Mickey, working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were managing a library of ten thousand books. Kids were checking out fifty a day, Rita reported. Now, with more than two dozen Freedom Schools planned for summer, more books were needed. When another call went out, boxes of tattered books were shipped to Mississippi. A New Hampshire woman sent forty-five cartons, mostly histories and dog-eared copies of
Reader’s Digest
. She also sent two dollars and an apology: “I’m sorry it isn’t more but a relatively poor school teacher doesn’t have too much.” At the University of Minnesota, a teaching assistant persuaded his class to turn in their texts at term’s end, then sent multiple copies of
Black Like Me
and
The Other America
. School committees in California, Arkansas, and the Bronx held book drives and sent the collections to Mississippi. By June, project offices overflowed with books, enough to fill every Freedom School library, assuming school buildings could be found. SNCC staffers began combing black communities for Freedom School sites, convincing church deacons to offer their small rectories or locating abandoned shacks that eager volunteers could refurbish into classrooms.