Freedom Summer (7 page)

And the buses pulled away.

Across the cornfields of southern Ohio, where fugitive slaves had first tasted freedom, the singing continued. In the Cincinnati bus terminal, charter buses were exchanged for Greyhounds while students sang “Freedom Train.” Filled with song, two buses crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky. Volunteers stopped for dinner in Louisville, saw a livid red sun disappear behind the hills, and continued into Tennessee. Nashville, then through the warm night to Memphis. Looking out the bus window, Chris Williams spotted the “little guy” from
Life
and knew the press was still following. He tried to read but fell asleep. In the bus farther ahead, Muriel Tillinghast was wide awake. All her confidence, all her take-charge spirit, were beginning to wither. In the black southern night, she felt fear mounting. Leaving Memphis, Muriel’s bus was still rocking, singing. “We hit the Mississippi state line at midnight,” she recalled, “and the bus went
silent
. There was no turning back now.” Through windows, some volunteers spotted a billboard depicting an antebellum mansion, a sailboat, and a flowering magnolia beside tall pines. Above the bucolic scene were the words “Welcome to Mississippi.” Beyond the billboard, lined up along the highway, stood several highway patrol cars. A welcoming committee.

—William Alexander Percy,
Lanterns on the Levee

CHAPTER TWO

 

 

Shortly after rain clouds parted on a spring day in ’61, Confederate troops marched through downtown Jackson. Five thousand proud Rebels, their double-breasted topcoats starched, their Enfield rifles shouldered, their mustachioed faces as stiff as statues, tramped along the glistening streets. Brass bands blared out sparkling renditions of “Dixie,” and teeming crowds sang along. Women in long floral dresses blew kisses from beneath parasols. Boys could not take their eyes off the officers on horseback, the glint of bayonets, the unfurling stars and bars. Flanking the governor’s mansion, where the governor waved from between white pillars, the troops marched on in a rippling ribbon of gray. Confederate flags were everywhere, waving in defiance of the Union. The parade, said to be the largest in the history of Mississippi, continued for hours. Then everyone got in their cars and went home. For this Confederate glory, this celebration of Mississippi’s secession from the United States of America, took place not in 1861 but in 1961.

The old cliché about history—that it is “written by the winners”—has always been, as Henry Ford said of history itself, “more or less bunk.” Countries defeated in war always write their own versions of history, versions that turn defeat into a noble cause and suffering into martyrdom. These unofficial versions soothe consciences and salve war wounds, yet with tragic regularity, they lead to more violence. Consider Germany after World War I. France after its revolution. The Balkans. The South.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” Faulkner was not referring to the rest of America, where time gradually turned the butchery of the Civil War into a period piece. In the North, where a single town in Pennsylvania had seen the face of battle, the war was remembered in aging monuments, in daguerreotypes, in medals displayed on mantels but finally stored in attics. Yet across the former Confederacy, and especially in Mississippi, the War for Southern Independence was woven into the fabric of life. Every southern boy, Faulkner wrote, could easily summon the dreamlike moment at Gettysburg just before Pickett’s Charge, before the war became a slaughterhouse and defeat became inevitable. Faulkner wrote this in 1948, eighty-five years after Gettysburg. He wrote it in the present tense. And he wrote it in Mississippi, where the war, living on in laments, eulogized by sons and daughters of Confederate soldiers, still defined every reaction. Such was the century-long enshrinement of the Civil War in Mississippi, a state invaded, occupied, driven to its knees.

From the moment Northern troops crossed its border in 1862, Mississippi spearheaded Confederate suffering. It was the first Confederate state to be looted and burned, the first under siege, the first to see its capital destroyed. Northerners could not deny Mississippi’s bravery. “Mississippians,” one said, “don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender.” After routing Grant at Holly Springs, Mississippi soldiers defeated Sherman at Chickasaw Bluffs. At Vicksburg, they held off Grant again, making the entire South salute. But after a forty-eight-day siege that saw townspeople burrow into caves and survive on dead dogs and rats, Vicksburg fell, and total war swept across the land. William Tecumseh Sherman, before he cut his famous path through Georgia, practiced his savagery on Mississippi, where his men burned mansions and cotton fields, sacked small towns, and tortured the earth. After tearing up Meridian, Sherman boasted, “Meridian, with its depots, store-houses, arsenal, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonment, no longer exists.” Battleground Mississippi saw its rivers patrolled by Union gunboats, its railroad depots crammed with rotting corpses, and its capital so devastated that survivors called it “Chimneyville.” The day Vicksburg fell, news came from Gettysburg, where the proud Mississippi Greys, 103 students from Ole Miss, had led Pickett’s Charge. Every last one had been killed. And when the war was over, Mississippi had achieved another first. Its 78,000 soldiers—the Benita Sharpshooters, the Oktibbeha Ploughboys, the Tullahoma Hardshells, and others—had suffered 28,000 dead and 31,000 wounded, the highest per capita casualty rate in either South or North. In 1866, one-third of Mississippi’s budget was spent on artificial limbs.

Before the war, Mississippi had been America’s fifth wealthiest state—although most of that wealth was measured in muscle, the monetary value of 436,631 slaves, more than half the state’s population. In the wake of the war Mississippi became, and has been ever since, the nation’s poorest state. Rising from the ashes of Carthaginian destruction, Mississippians made a vow—
never
to forget. Yet for every Civil War horror, more painful memories followed. Wartime battles had been brief compared to the struggle to repel the occupation historians term Reconstruction and Mississippians came to call “The Tragic Era.” Here, too, Mississippi led the South—in resistance. Ranging from simple election fraud to a full-blown race war, the reaction tainted American democracy right through to Freedom Summer. Following four years of total war and a dozen of occupation and guerilla fighting, moderation in Mississippi became like snow, something occasionally in the air, especially farther north, but which vanished whenever the heat was turned up. As one freed slave observed, “Things was hurt by Mr. Lincoln gettin’ kilt.”

Lincoln was barely in his grave when the power struggle began. Four months after Appomattox, Mississippi crafted a constitution that would earn readmittance to the Union. But the hastily drawn accord, coupled with “Black Codes” denying freed slaves any vestige of citizenship, did not fool Congress. Refused statehood, Mississippi was occupied as part of the Fourth Military District. Only in 1870 did the Magnolia State again become a state. With former slaves voting freely, Mississippi sent America’s first black senator to Washington, D.C. Freedmen never dominated Mississippi politics, but an ex-slave was elected mayor of Natchez, another became police chief in Vicksburg, and still others served as judges, sheriffs, even secretary of state. At one point, nearly half the legislature was black. In less than a decade, the social system of an entire state had been plowed up, turned over, and replanted with the flimsiest of roots. The uprooting was soon termed “redemption,” and like the war, its ennobled savagery would scar Mississippi for a full century.

In Mississippi, redemption began in 1871, when members of the upstart Ku Klux Klan turned the streets of Meridian into a shooting gallery. After killing two black politicians, whites roamed the countryside, hunting and lynching Negroes. Thirty were racked up before federal troops arrived. The Meridian riot inspired congressional “Ku Klux” laws. Seven hundred Mississippi Klansmen were indicted, yet in a state whose remote jungle landscape gave it a Wild West lawlessness, rebellion was not confined beneath white hoods.

Over the next four years, raw violence “redeemed” Mississippi. The battles of Reconstruction were not as costly as those of the war, but they were battles nonetheless. The Second Battle of Vicksburg started on July 4, 1874, with gunshots in the streets. Enraged by a recent interracial marriage, whites took over the town and began slogging through alligator-infested bayous to hunt down terrified blacks. During elections that August, terror kept blacks from voting, allowing whites to rule unopposed. The taking of Vicksburg turned the coming election year into a vigilante campaign to slaughter democracy. Pitched fighting between black and white broke out in Clinton, Yazoo City, Clarksdale. . . . Fearing “a war of races,” Governor Adelbert Ames, a former Union officer whites despised as a “carpetbagger,” begged President Grant to send troops. This time Grant refused. “The whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South,” the president wrote back. “The great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”

Come Election Day in 1875, the shotgun, the noose, and the mob ended black political power in Mississippi. “Democrats Standing Manfully by Their Guns!” the
Atlanta Constitution
boasted. “Mississippi Redeemed at Last!” Governor Ames, impeached and driven from the state, lamented: “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” Over the next two years, inspired by “the Mississippi plan,” other southern states wore down northern will to fight for the Negro and brokered a deal that removed federal troops from the South.

Reconstruction was over—a mistake in the eyes of all but ex-slaves, who had tasted political power only to have it stolen by mob rule. Mississippi’s second black senator lost the next election. He was the last African American in the U.S. Senate until 1966. In 1890, as black laborers cleared the Delta of bears, wildcats, and snake-infested canebrake taller than a man, Mississippi’s new constitution legalized what mobs had set in motion. Literacy tests and poll taxes, fully sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, ended black voting. By 1900, blacks comprised 62 percent of Mississippi, the highest percentage in the nation. Yet the state had not one black elected official. Meanwhile, the sharecropping system, under which ex-slaves picked cotton and harvested mounting debt to “the boss man,” kept 90 percent of Mississippi blacks mired in the “era of second slavery.” Ex-slaves were free, all right—free to pick cotton from “kin to cain’t,” free to live in tarpaper shacks, free to send their children to decaying schools where “we could study the earth through the floor and the stars through the roof.” Jim Crow had settled in to stay, tamping down an entire people. Black subjugation was ingrained at all levels, from the all-white university to “Whites Only” signs to the very nursery rhymes children sang:

From top to bottom, segregation was enforced by custom as much as law. And custom—imposed whenever blacks stepped off the sidewalk as a white approached, whenever a black man was called “boy,” whenever “Nigger!” was spit into the face of a child—made Mississippi, as one Delta woman noted, “jus’ as different here from other places as tar from biscuit dough.”

Having redeemed its politics, Mississippi set about redeeming its honor. History written by the defeated does not often become the official version, yet as an American apartheid spread from Texas to the Mason-Dixon line, historians rewrote Reconstruction. In an era of minstrel shows, weekly lynchings, and calls to “Take up the White Man’s Burden,” North and South suddenly agreed: freed slaves had been slothful politicians, Klansmen were liberators, and vigilantes had been not white but black. Popular books such as
The Clansman
and
The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization
sold white supremacy to the whole nation. Northerners, the
New York Times
noted in 1900, no longer denounced the suppression of black voting because “the necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized.” Reconstruction soon became “The Tragic Era.”

The nationwide best seller by that name recounted “the darkest days in Mississippi,” when the legislature was “one of the most grotesque bodies that ever assembled. A mulatto was Speaker of the House, a darker man was Lt. Governor.” Evil carpetbaggers and traitorous scalawags had labored to “inflame the Negroes,” causing them to attack white women. “Rape,”
The Tragic Era
noted, “is the foul daughter of Reconstruction.” Riding to the rescue, as Klansmen did in the popular film
Birth of a Nation
, the Klan “was organized for the protection of women, property, civilization itself.” Revisionism did more than justify Jim Crow—it pacified the North and solidified the South. In his landmark study of race,
An American Dilemma
, Gunnar Myrdal observed, “The South needs to believe that when the Negro voted, life was unbearable.”

The generations came and went. The price of cotton rose and fell. The Mississippi River did likewise. Through sweltering summers and gray, bone-chilling winters, descendants of Confederates and descendants of slaves shared a volatile truce. Segregated yet strangely intertwined, the two cultures coexisted—tar and biscuit dough, cordial, edgy, neither separate nor equal. White folks had their side of town and all the twentieth century could add—fine and finer homes, Model Ts, shopping trips to Memphis or New Orleans. And black folks had their side of town and what little they could scrape together—a few barnyard animals, perhaps a mule, and a shack barely big enough for two, let alone the eight or ten crammed inside. Life in white Mississippi was intensely social, based on kinship and the camaraderie of cotillions and hunting trips. But life in black Mississippi was more hopeless than any other in America. In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Among the “colored” of Mississippi, the problem was Mississippi itself, where “Mr. Charlie” cheated sharecroppers at annual “settlements,” where dresses had to be made out of flour sacks, where submission was ground into the soul.