Freedom Summer (12 page)

With money and books coming in, planners solicited other materials they would need that summer—typewriters, mimeograph machines, blackboards, bulletin boards, and office supplies. “It would be very difficult for us to get too much of anything,” one appeal letter said. Next on the agenda was publicity. Though known as community organizers, SNCC staffers were also masters at public relations, or as they called it, “hooking people up.” Media targets, national and local, were pinpointed. Each new press release was sent to the AP, UPI, the
New York Times. . . .
Before heading for Ohio, volunteers were urged to contact hometown papers—“The mass media are always interested in local angles.” To ensure widespread publicity throughout the summer, each volunteer gave SNCC ten contacts likely to run news of a “local girl” or “area man” working in Mississippi. With publicity covered, SNCC then reached out to the power brokers of American culture.

In the year leading up to Freedom Summer, SNCC had convinced several celebrities to cancel appearances in Mississippi to protest its lockstep segregation. The “no-shows” were an eclectic group, including trumpeter Al Hirt, baseball player Stan Musial, the stars of
Bonanza
, and the entire lineup of ABC’s folk music show
Hootenanny
. Come spring, SNCC continued its celebrity outreach, sending summer project brochures to big names known for supporting civil rights: Sidney Poitier, Leonard Bernstein, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, the folksinger Odetta, Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Burt Lancaster, Van Cliburn, Lena Horne, Thelonious Monk. . . . Meanwhile COFO contacted more than a hundred professors and deans, “for we think it is important for the best minds in the country to know what is happening in Mississippi.” The “best minds” were invited to observe Freedom Schools or advise research projects. Among the invited: author Irving Howe,
Lonely Crowd
sociologist David Riesman, black historian John Hope Franklin, southern historian C. Vann Woodward, and noted intellectuals Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, Herbert Marcuse, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Harvard professor Henry Kissinger. None accepted the invitation, but SNCCs were accustomed to rejection. The outreach continued.

Early that spring, Bob Moses formed “Friends of Freedom in Mississippi.” The ad hoc group of civil rights leaders and celebrities soon wrote President Lyndon Johnson. Calling Mississippi “a virtual police state,” the Friends of Freedom warned of “a clear and present danger” of violence that summer, and urged federal protection for volunteers. Receiving no answer, SNCC took its appeal closer to the White House—within a few blocks.

On June 8, a distinguished panel gathered at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue. Seated beneath the glittering chandeliers of the stately old theater, the panel included authors Joseph Heller and Paul Goodman, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, and various educators. With grim faces, panelists listened to Fannie Lou Hamer recount her savage beating in jail. “I can say there will be a hot summer in Mississippi,” Hamer said, “and I don’t mean the weather.” Elizabeth Allen, widow of Louis Allen, told of the murders of her husband and Herbert Lee. Panelists were shocked. Hadn’t anyone been charged? “They don’t arrest white people in Mississippi,” Allen’s widow replied. “They arrest Negroes, but they don’t do anything to white people.” A stocky farmer named Hartman Turnbow charmed the group with his sweet Mississippi drawl, then told how his house in Tchula was firebombed after he tried to register. Again, wasn’t anyone arrested? “I was,” Turnbow replied. Police had charged him with arson. After the hearing, the panel wrote to LBJ describing “incidents of brutality and terror we scarcely believed could have happened in the United States. . . . children beaten . . . people shot . . . men murdered for no other offense than seeking to vote.” Citing threats to human life and to “the moral integrity of this country,” panelists urged the president to send federal marshals, to hold hearings, to enforce voting rights. The president did not respond. In private, LBJ’s special counsel mocked requests for protection, finding it “nearly incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their heads into the lion’s mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion.” Freedom Summer planners, having expected little from the president, turned to each other for support.

Two days after the D.C. hearing, on a sweltering evening in Atlanta, SNCC convened a final meeting to discuss the looming summer. Everything seemed set. Money had come in and rolled out. Books were stacked up, ready to fill Freedom Schools. The “Sojourner Motor Fleet,” dozens of beat-up old cars and a handful of new white Plymouths, was ready to drive volunteers from site to site. SNCC, COFO, and CORE, though they would quarrel over details all summer, had their territories—who would coordinate what in which region. (Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference approved of the summer project but was not involved. The NAACP still disapproved, its leader saying, “We’re sitting this one out.”) And despite threats of retaliation, hundreds of blacks across Mississippi had agreed to open their homes to volunteers. Now, two dozen people crammed into a basement around a table strewn with papers and pitchers of iced tea. For the next several hours, SNCCs wrestled lingering doubts to one last draw.

Faces at the table were anxious, worn, weighted with thoughts of mortality. This was new ground. The summer project was far scarier than anything SNCC had ever dared. What might go wrong? What had they not anticipated? Should they send volunteers to southwest Mississippi, where the Klan was most vicious? The danger had to be weighed against the “danger to local Negroes if we don’t work there.” Perhaps Natchez, they decided, but definitely not McComb. Not yet. Talk then turned to nonviolence. SNCC’s founding faith—“through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate”—was breaking down. The Greenwood SNCC office, Bob Moses now learned, had a few guns. No one was preaching violence, but shouldn’t an office firebombed and sprayed with bullets be able to defend itself? The argument lasted nearly an hour. Mississippi was explosive—blacks arming themselves, whites “more convinced than ever that they can kill a Negro and get away with it.” Wasn’t it time to fight back? How long would SNCC “lead people into the fire, then ask them to sing a song and return to church? ” Long silences brought only one consensus—death would hover over Mississippi all summer.

Finally, a deeply religious woman many times jailed and once shot spoke up. All heads turned to the slight, somber Prathia Hall. “No one can be rational about death,” Hall began. “For the first time we are facing that this may be the last time. We are fighting because we want life to be worth living. . . . When the kids in Birmingham were killed, I wanted to pick up a gun until I realized that by destroying lives we don’t preserve them.” The answer, Hall said, lay not just in nonviolence but in national awareness. “We must bring the reality of our situation to the nation. Bring our blood onto the White House door. If we die here, it’s the whole society which has pulled the trigger by its silence.” Consensus was finally reached. SNCC would not discourage locals from self-defense, which, Moses said, “is so deeply ingrained in rural southern America that we as a small group can’t affect it.” But SNCC staffers “have committed ourselves not to carry guns.” Weapons in the Greenwood office would be removed. No SNCCs would be armed that summer.

The meeting lasted until early morning. Race proved the thorniest issue. Would white volunteers take over from locals? Should they be allowed any authority at all? “When whites come into a project,” one man said, “the ego of Negroes is destroyed.” But Ella Baker objected. Since forming SNCC in 1960, Baker had seen her lifelong ideals taken up by the young organizers she often called “the kids.” But the kids were quarreling now, arguing over black and white. Believing in consensus, Baker usually let her protégés argue on, but now she spoke up. Might it be time, she suggested, “to take the revolution one step further?” “We have a responsibility to live up to an agreement,” she added. “The agreement is not that the white volunteers are coming as emissaries to the white community. One of the reasons we’re going into Mississippi is that the rest of the United States has never felt much responsibility for what happens in the Deep South. If we can simply let the concept that the rest of the nation bears responsibility for what happens in Mississippi sink in, then we will have accomplished something.” The meeting concluded with a financial report. SNCC had $11,600 in the bank. Bills totaled $17,600. Everything—money, time, energy, and spirit—had been spent on the summer project. Eleven days later, on the first day of summer, volunteers had been welcomed beyond all expectation. Yet no amount of spending, planning, or caution could stop the night from coming.

 

 

Evening came late on the longest day of the year. Adults rose from porches. Children were called home from their games. Twilight lingered as if, like the old blues lyric, it hated “to see that evenin’ sun go down.” Finally just after 8:00 p.m., the last pink filaments faded over the Mississippi River, taking with them the last welcomes of the day. Fireflies startled volunteers from out west who had never seen whole fields glitter. Despite such magic, fear crept over volunteers’ host homes and over their souls. Night had come to Mississippi. Night so far south and so rural was darker than any the volunteers had seen, darker and warmer—a muggy greenhouse heat that stifled any hope of a breeze. And then there was the symphony of a southern night, bullfrogs throat-singing and crickets humming as if 10,000 volts pulsed through the trees. The constant
screeee
of cicadas blasted like a referee’s whistle until a low
whoo-whoo
interrupted. And then the crickets again, and the whistle and the frogs and the heat—on into the night.

Night had a reputation in Mississippi. Volunteers had heard much about it, and none of what they heard was comforting. Night was when “things happened” here, when “riders” meant not Freedom Riders but night riders, no longer on horseback but in pickups, yet still seeding the darkness with terror. SNCC’s safety handbook was explicit about night: “Do not stand in doorways
at night. . . .
No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not
at night.
” None were likely to flout these rules, but the Mississippi night could easily enter their new homes, their “safe” homes, where streets were pitch-black, where their mere presence put a bull’s-eye on each house. Night had come, all the welcoming people were off the streets, and who knew what type of people were out, fired by a century-old rage.

Across Mississippi, in villages dotting the darkening landscape, locals cleaned up from Father’s Day suppers, then settled in to watch TV—
The Ed Sullivan Show
,
Bonanza
,
Candid Camera
. In Batesville, Chris Williams and others were in the Miles backyard, arms linked, singing Freedom Songs. “Get on Board, Children” and “We’ll Never Turn Back” kept fear at bay, yet when the songs were done, Robert Miles and “Junior” went inside and came out with shotguns. Mounting a flatbed truck, they sat, ready to fire at any car entering the driveway without giving the signal—headlights blinked three times. The scene was mirrored in host homes across Mississippi—dark-skinned men with guns sitting in driveways, on porches, standing guard beneath a sparkling blanket of stars. From inside, volunteers parted curtains and peered into the blackness. Then, weary from the amazing day, they went to bed and tried, for all the mosquitoes, all the sticky heat, all the shrill sounds of night, to get a little sleep.

Night found Muriel Tillinghast upstairs in the project office in Greenville—alone. She was just eight blocks from the Mississippi River, but so far from home and so far south that it made her tremble. Since she had crossed into Mississippi on the midnight bus that turned from singing to silence, the quaking in her stomach had worsened. Riding south along Highway 61, the blues highway whose escape route she was traveling in reverse, she had watched others step off the bus and into the early morning. Town by town, winding through the Delta, she had said good-bye to old friends from Howard and new ones from Ohio. “It was so quick,” she recalled. “Bye, see you later. Ummm, I hope I
will
see you later.” Shortly after 8:00 a.m., her turn had come. The bus rattled through the empty streets of downtown Greenville, past churches and cafés, drugstores and parks, before reaching the “colored” section. As if she had crossed into another country, Muriel saw sidewalks cracked and broken, houses suddenly smaller, and a slipshod sadness pervading the streets. When she and a half dozen others were dropped off at 901½ Nelson Street, sheer terror sent Muriel straight upstairs into the office. There she stayed, in cluttered rooms above a dry cleaner’s—all day. While other volunteers were welcomed into homes, Muriel huddled inside, terrified by just being in “the black hole” of Mississippi.

White Greenville, a mile south along the mounded levee, was a thriving city, but black Greenville was like no place Muriel had ever seen. Decades earlier, Nelson Street had been the living, pulsing heart of the black community, attracting top blues singers and inspiring a song, the “Nelson Street Blues.” But by 1964 the street was just a shadow of itself, with just a drugstore, a few juke joints, and some boarded-up blues clubs clinging to life. To a young woman from Washington, D.C., Nelson Street looked like a one-horse town from an old Western movie. Muriel had seen poverty before. As part of a Lutheran mission to Guyana, she had traveled into “the bush,” met descendants of slaves living in bamboo huts, saw a child die of malnutrition. But that was another country; this was her own. All her life she had heard about the Mississippi her mother had fled, and now she was there. Gone were the idealism, the solidarity that had sent her south. In their place was a primal dread that recalled every tale of lynching she had ever read, every southern horror she had ever heard. Greenville project director Charlie Cobb, the man she had called each Sunday throughout the spring, might have calmed her, but he was still in Ohio, preparing for the second training. And nothing any fresh-faced volunteer said could convince Muriel to leave the office. “I was petrified,” she recalled.