Freedom Summer (20 page)

“I just can’t get my mind on all that. I just never voted and I’m too old now.”

“I don’t want to mess with that mess.”

“I can’t sign no paper.”

And if a volunteer said, “Negroes have to do something to—”

“I ain’t no Negro. I’m a nigger. The Boss Man, he don’t say nothing but ‘nigger girl’ to me. I’m just a nigger. I can’t sign no paper.”

On to the next shack. A black snake slithers across the road. A train whistle floats by. The sinking sun serves as both time clock and barometer of their mood. If one in twenty invite them in, only one in a hundred decide that voting is worth risking a job, a home, a life. Registering to vote had always carried grave risks in Mississippi, but Freedom Summer saw those risks stalk the streets. Canvassers were often followed by a police car, inching along, shotgun on display, tires popping the gravel. One look at a cop was enough to send weary bodies scurrying inside. Volunteers loathed the police on their tail, but a cop could ward off other dangers.

Outside Batesville, Jay Shetterly and Geoff Cowan were canvassing along the Tallahatchie River as it flowed past cotton fields. Speaking to field hands with hoes propped on their shoulders, the two wondered why the men just stared. Cowan talked about voting. The men stared. Shetterly talked about the need to unite. Nervous grins. Finally, the two turned around to see a pickup, a tight-lipped white man, a shotgun on the rack behind him, a pistol on the seat.

“Did that nigger invite you in here? ”

Cowan and Shetterly, both articulate Harvard students, said nothing.

“Did you know Mississippi law allows me to shoot trespassers? ”

No, they did not know.

“Are you gonna get off this plantation? ”

The men left without a word. The pickup roared off.

Numbers alone made the canvass worth the frustration. If a dozen teams went out for a dozen days in a dozen towns, even one out of a hundred added up to lines at courthouses. And all that first week of July, shack by shack, canvassers dragged the bottom of Mississippi and came up with just enough hope to keep them going. The lone exception to this harsh law of averages was in Panola County, where Chris Williams was the youngest canvasser in Mississippi.

During his two weeks in the state, Chris had grown confident, even brash. He had spent languid afternoons tracing lines of dirt across his skin. He had sat up nights reading the novels of Richard Wright. And most evenings he had canvassed with “a somewhat neurotic redhead” from the University of Michigan. Older volunteers were amused to hear this mere teenager, when angered by white Mississippi, spout a phrase common in his Massachusetts high school—“Goddamn motherfucker, pissed me right off!” Fellow volunteers found Chris “kind of goofy, kind of crazy—we could always depend on him to be funny.”

Chris and other Batesville canvassers had an advantage in going shack to shack. In 1961, the Panola County Voters League had filed suit, charging racial bias in registration. The case dragged on for two years before a judge ruled in favor of the county, but just a month before Freedom Summer, the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans overturned the decision. The court issued a one-year injunction suspending the requirement that registrants—black registrants, at least—interpret the state constitution. The injunction also voided the onerous poll tax, equal to a sharecropper’s daily wage, that had to be paid up for two years
before
one could vote. Suddenly, SNCC had twelve months to register as many as possible. Before the injunction, only one Panola County Negro was registered, and he had been on the books since 1892. Then, during the first week of summer, SNCC held nightly registration classes. Assistant Attorney General John Doar came from the Justice Department to check on things. Canvassers went door to door, and fifty blacks went to the courthouse. Forty-seven were registered. It was all changing, sure enough, that summer.

Chris was living with Mrs. Cornelia Robertson and her grown daughter, Pepper, in a two-room shack with no running water and bullet holes in the front screen. But both women rose early to work, so Chris made his own breakfast, showered in the sun beneath buckets of cold water, then hustled to the project office. The office had gotten off to a slow start. The man Chris called “our great leader” had spent most of his time talking to local girls. Then he was replaced by Claude Weaver, a black Harvard student with a serene face and a deft sense of humor. (Weaver also drew cartoons, circulated widely among project offices, featuring a humble black janitor who, when danger threatened, burst out of his overalls to become—ta-daa—Supersnick.)

Come early July, when Chris walked each morning past shacks and juke joints, waving, nodding to locals, he arrived at a frenetic office. Parked outside were a white Plymouth from SNCC’s “Sojourner Motor Fleet,” plus one volunteer’s VW and another’s Pontiac GTO. Inside, posters proclaimed “Freedom Now!” and “There is a street in Itta Bena called Freedom . . .” The radio blared a Memphis soul station. Aretha Franklin. Wilson Pickett. Marvin Gaye. Scurrying around the office were students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and the University of Chicago working on communications, legal affairs, and canvassing. Most days Chris studied canvassing routes or ran errands. Most evenings, after sharecroppers came home from the fields, he met them on their porches. Once a week, he went to the courthouse.

One afternoon, Chris sat in the cool, echoing corridor outside the Panola County registrar’s office. A few days earlier, he had canvassed Mrs. Gladys Toliver, convincing her to take the risk. Now he sat with the old woman and three other would-be voters on a hardwood bench. As the wait dragged on, Mrs. Toliver confided in the nice crew-cut white boy beside her. She didn’t think she could pass the test. All those questions, all those laws. Chris took out a copy of the registration form and was reviewing it with her when footsteps clicked down the hall. Chris looked up to see a short, beer-bellied man with horn-rimmed glasses, a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip. Sheriff Earl Hubbard.

The sheriff began ranting. Volunteers were “agitators . . . come to Mississippi to cause trouble.” Chris sat seething, stifling sarcastic replies. Finally, the sheriff told Chris to get out. A courthouse was no place for voting classes. “Did you hear me, boy? I said ‘Get out.’ ” Muttering “Goddamn motherfucker, pissed me right off!” Chris walked down the corridor past the “Whites Only” drinking fountain and stepped outside. Scalding air slammed him in the face. Alone on the steps, his confidence wavered. SNCC lore was full of attacks in such a setting. Bob Moses beaten at the courthouse in Liberty. Several struck down in Greenwood. Any minute now. . . . Finally, his friends emerged, followed by the sheriff, still ranting. “He said they ought to send me home and let my parents teach me how to behave,” Chris wrote home. “I just looked him in the eye and said nothing. He’s only a stupid old man.” Sheriff Hubbard gave the SNCC car a parking ticket. Back at the Mileses’ house, Chris enjoyed a big meal. “I have developed a real taste for Southern cooking,” he told his parents. That evening, the shotguns again came out as blacks stood guard. Some things were a long way from changing.

 

 

On Thursday, July 2, the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney spread to the Alabama border. Afternoon downpours continued to curtail the hunt. Rumors revived with word that a gas station attendant in Kosciusko had seen the three. Back in Philadelphia, agents were growing suspicious about Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. A middle-aged man with an eighth-grade education, standing six-two, weighing 240, Rainey was known as hard-drinking and “hard on the Negroes.” Everyone knew the sheriff had even killed two blacks, both while he was on duty, both unarmed. Mississippi sheriffs had enormous power—each was his county’s tax collector, prohibition agent, and, in some Klan-ridden counties, a proud member of the klavern. But Rainey claimed even more power. Once after pulling over a driver, he asked, “Nigger, do you know who’s running this county? Lawrence A. Rainey is running this county.” When the man mentioned the mayor, Rainey shot back, “Nigger, don’t come talking about no mayor, ’cause I’m the sheriff in this county.” Now the sheriff was becoming a suspect. The FBI had a list of seven names, submitted by a highway patrolman from Meridian. “I have no proof,” the man told agents, “but I bet you every one of these men was involved in this.” Among the names were Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. The FBI had already learned that Rainey had been in the pack that stormed the Mt. Zion Church meeting and beat Junior Cole unconscious. Reporters were asking Rainey about rumors that a white mob, waiting outside the jail, had abducted Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. He flatly denied them. On July 2, the FBI called the sheriff in for questioning.

Wearing his cowboy hat, his chaw in his cheek, his gun on his hip, the sheriff swaggered into Room 18 of the Delphia Courts Motel. With him was a county attorney, ready to rise to his defense. Rainey was shown pictures—the goateed Schwerner, the kindly Chaney, the doe-eyed Goodman. Never seen the men before, the sheriff said. Then, punctuating his answers by spitting tobacco juice, he detailed his whereabouts on the night of June 21. He had visited his wife in the hospital, then had dinner with relatives. After dropping by his office to pick up clean shirts, he had returned to relatives, watched
Candid Camera
and
Bonanza
, then made it back to Philadelphia before midnight. Stopping at the jail, he had learned about the arrest and release of the three. Then he went home. Agents listened. Agents took notes. Then one asked Rainey if he was a Klansman. He denied it, then denied that Neshoba County even had a Klan. Listening to the sheriff, the attorney found his denial strange and incredible. Hadn’t a Klan recruitment flier, earlier that spring, been posted down the hall from Rainey’s office for days on end? The back-and-forth continued until an agent blurted out, “Now come on sheriff and tell us what you did with those people.” The sheriff said nothing and was allowed to leave. Agents began checking his story. Rainey was shocked that the FBI even called his wife in the hospital. Two days later, the attorney, still stunned by what he had heard during the interrogation, told agents that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey should be their “number one suspect.”

Agents were also suspicious about Deputy Price. A high school dropout like his boss, Price hid a dull rage behind a goofy demeanor. When first approached by the FBI, he had shrugged off all accusations, then popped the trunk of his patrol car and offered the agent a swig of moonshine. Agents had since investigated Price’s story about June 21—the arrest, the release, the taillights disappearing. Much of it checked out, but his whereabouts from 10:40 to 11:30 p.m. could not be confirmed. Adding to their suspicions, the Neshoba County jailer said she normally received the car keys of suspects in jail. But Price had given her no keys for the three. Nor were keys ever mentioned. Agents also found it unusual that local cops, like the sheriff, refused to be questioned without an attorney present.

While the FBI questioned Price and Rainey, the first two Freedom Schools opened. In Clarksdale, students listened as a white woman read from James Baldwin’s “Talk to Teachers”: “Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets . . . I would try to make them know—that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him.”

As if such frankness were not startling enough, the teacher then encouraged students to talk. Sparked by Baldwin’s fire, they opened up on Mississippi, discussing cops, a recent shooting, and why one student no longer ate watermelon because it was “nigger food.” After a rousing chorus of Freedom Songs, students headed home. It was a start. That same afternoon in Holly Springs, students met under the low, leafy branches of a sweetgum tree to hear a teacher call them the “leaders of tomorrow.” And that evening, tomorrow came early.

Shortly after 7:00 p.m., all network programming was interrupted. In living rooms across the nation, President Johnson urged Americans to “close the springs of racial poison.” Then the president began signing the Civil Rights Act, using seventy-two different pens, handing them to congressmen and to Martin Luther King, standing behind him. The first major civil rights bill since Reconstruction had been introduced by John F. Kennedy just hours before Medgar Evers was killed. The bill had survived massive resistance, including southern senators droning through the longest filibuster in congressional history. LBJ had thrown his enormous powers of persuasion behind the bill, finally twisting enough arms to end the filibuster and win approval. Now came what the president called the “time of testing.” Johnson had barely given away the last pen when a blazing cross lit the sky in central Mississippi. The town’s name—Harmony.

All that holiday weekend, the testing continued. Blacks sat beside whites at lunch counters in Montgomery, Alabama, but were beaten with baseball bats in Bessemer. Blacks integrated hotels and theaters in Birmingham, but three attempting a “wade-in” at Lake Texarkana were shot. “Occupied Mississippi” braced for the worst. The Jackson Chamber of Commerce urged businesses to comply with the law, but the
Clarion-Ledger
advertised “tear gas pen guns,” and Governor Paul Johnson predicted “civil strife and chaotic conditions.” Across the state, whites swore “Never!,” blacks tried to be hopeful, and volunteers bore witness. “People here in Clarksdale know all about that bill,” one volunteer wrote home, “but tomorrow and Saturday, the 4th of July, they will still be in the cotton fields making three dollars a day. . . . They’ll still be starving and afraid.” SNCCs had decided against testing the law and had to talk locals out of open confrontation. A Greenwood woman kept saying, “Ah’m going swimmin’ in that pool. Ah’ve waited a long time.” Several convinced her to wait a little longer. The long holiday weekend was just beginning.