Pillar of Fire (63 page)

 

D
OWN IN
H
ATTIESBURG
, Lawrence Guyot devised a unique way of emphasizing that the Freedom Summer projects should stick to themselves and leave segregated public places alone: a festive 4th of July picnic. After noon that Saturday (because Vernon Dahmer still demanded a full morning's work on holidays), the entire four hundred acres of Dahmer's farm became party ground for nearly two hundred movement workers, including the last few Freedom School teachers off the bus from a training course in Memphis. Northern volunteers who came steeped in mental preparation for terror and destitution walked instead into a celebration of fellowship—hayrides, games, music, a massive fish fry, and watermelons so abundant that Mississippians simply cracked them open to scoop out the sweet red meat with their hands. Some newcomers pitched in with joyful relief, while others hung back. Stanley Zibulsky of New York assumed his host Vernon Dahmer was a white man before learning otherwise, which scrambled his indoctrination about what was safe in Mississippi. Shaking hands, picking cautiously at what to him was a strange new fried fish called mullet, he stared blankly at the day's one incident of panic among movement veterans, when daredevil SNCC worker Doug Harris drove the hayride tractor outside the invisible refuge line of Dahmer property. Zibulsky slept on Victoria Gray's floor for his first night in Mississippi, eyeing a nearby sentry with a shotgun, so locked in fear that his bowels refused to move for the next thirteen days.

Hattiesburg's Freedom Schools, planned for about one hundred teenagers, overflowed on Monday with more than six hundred students ranging in age from eight to eighty-two, partly on the success of Victoria Gray's prior recruitments for Septima Clark's SCLC citizenship schools. The rush confounded the nervous summer volunteers, many of whom were classroom teachers experienced in traditional instruction. One of them wondered how to teach movement history when not a single student had heard of the
Brown
decision. Richard Kelly of Chicago and Paula Pace, daughter of Truman's Secretary of the Army, scrambled to keep ahead of their own assigned readings on African history. A course in basic civics faltered when the word “mayor” was understood as “mare,” and the youngest students of a Jewish volunteer would not listen until they could feel his head for the devil's horns that their preacher had assured them lay under his yarmulke.

The question, “Where do roads come from?”—which was meant to introduce the practicalities of citizenship and voting—evoked instead a one-word answer, “God,” and then a lengthy detour through theology. Discussion on any subject broke down walls, however, and some teachers abandoned lectures for song, theater, testimonial, and debate. One class used a Volkswagen bus to simulate tests of a white-only restaurant, with improvisations followed by critiques about how realistically Negro boys could play police officers, or whether personal trust in the summer volunteers was stable enough for them to play “roles” as segregationists. Meeting outdoors in the summer heat, other teachers rigged up a phonograph to play recitations of poetry by Countee Cullen, Margaret Walker, and Langston Hughes, which stimulated an outpouring of commentary and spontaneous verse. Volunteer Barrington Parker III, the austere son of a pioneer Negro judge, broke down in tribute to the untrained folk poets in his class, saying their expression “has so much more depth than what passes for culture in our society.”

Menacing cars occasionally glided by the five Hattiesburg Freedom Schools, and there were daily reports of incidents. In Moss Point, sixty miles to the southeast on the Gulf coast, Lawrence Guyot was addressing a voter registration rally on opening Monday, July 6, when shots rang out and young Jessie Mae Stallworth fell wounded by a sniper. (“I saw a woman lying on the ground clutching her stomach,” wrote a summer volunteer. “She was so still and looked like a statue with a tranquil smile on her face.”) Some sixty miles west of Hattiesburg, eight specially trained volunteers established the first movement presence in McComb since the Herbert Lee murder of 1961,
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and night riders bombed the group Freedom House on the night of July 8, knocking project leader Curtis Hayes unconscious and leaving Stanford volunteer Dennis Sweeney with a concussion. That same Wednesday in Hattiesburg, sheriff's deputies arrested Rev. Robert Beech on a technical charge that one of his small personal checks, though good for payment, had been “uncovered” briefly during its clearing process.

From a makeshift barracks in the back of J. C. Fairley's television repair shop, with floor mattresses and a hose-rigged shower, Beech supervised the pilgrim clergy who had maintained a continuous weekly rotation since the Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January. On Friday, July 10, segregationists ambushed one of Beech's volunteers with fists and a lead pipe as he walked with voter registration canvassers toward lunch at a Negro church. Arthur Lelyveld, the fifty-one-year-old rabbi of Fairmount Temple in Cleveland, fled bleeding along a railroad track only to be intercepted a second time when the attackers doubled back in their truck. Lelyveld wound up hospitalized along with two summer volunteers from Stanford, one with a broken arm. The assailants later drew suspended sentences and a fine, with local white newspapers emphasizing that they lived outside Hattiesburg in Collins, across the county line.

In southern Mississippi, the spiral of persecution and summer projects continued to rise without tests of the new civil rights law. The McComb project survived to open a Freedom School with thirty-five students, which grew in spite of the destruction of Mount Zion Hill Baptist and two other Negro churches within a week. (“75 students on the lawn in front of the second church bombed in two days, while the children play in the ruins,” recorded a volunteer. “Everywhere there is enthusiasm….”) Volunteer Dennis Sweeney, along with a visiting white minister from the National Council of Churches, tried to make contact with white McComb, but he succeeded only in ripping out the social roots of the one local couple who agreed apprehensively to listen. Neighbors from a local militia called Help, Inc. surrounded the home of Malva and “Red” Heffner to abort their fleeting introduction to Sweeney on July 17, then stalked and harassed the Heffners, poisoned Falstaff, their dachshund, and orchestrated such a merciless ostracism that the Heffners abandoned their Mississippi home for good on September 5. By then, Red had fallen from 1963 Lincoln Life Salesman of the Year nearly to bankruptcy, and Malva already had lost more than her prestige as the daughter of the governor's old law partner and mother of the reigning Miss Mississippi. “When I'd go downtown,” she lamented, “people I had known all my life would treat me like I had leprosy.”

North of McComb in Greenwood, where Red Heffner had grown up a classmate of arch-segregationist Byron de la Beckwith, Stokely Carmichael reenacted his latest arrest for the mass meeting of July 15. “I said, ‘That's right, niggers don't do nothin' but gamble and drink wine, but who taught us how?'” he declared impishly, recalling how he had preempted the word “nigger” to neutralize the sting of an arresting officer's insults. He convulsed his audience with laughter, exhorting and emboldening them to join Greenwood's fourth Freedom Day the next morning, but then suddenly turned somber about the dangers. “Now I don't want any funny business here!” he shouted. One by one, names were called out of those assigned to the voter registration picket line, so they could make preparations for jail. Carmichael teased eager newcomers who welcomed the task as an honor—“
I
ain't goin',” he said—but when tension actually gave way to outrage and inspiration at the courthouse the next day, movement leaders joined an improvised call to fill the jails. Greenwood police tore up “One Man/One Vote” signs as they hauled away 111 pickets, including Carmichael and thirteen summer volunteers.

Silas McGhee watched the Freedom Day drama from across the street, still pondering his quirky notion to sit through a movie at the Leflore Theater. He was recognizable enough in a small town for three Klansmen to surprise him on his solitary walk home and abduct him at gunpoint in their truck. Vowing to teach him a lesson, they surrounded him with shovels and a two-by-four inside a construction shed. In blind panic, McGhee tackled one of them, who grabbed his ankle and shouted, “Hit him in the head!” to the other two. They clubbed McGhee until he stomped his way loose with his free foot and ran all the way back downtown to the elevator of a temporary FBI office on Washington Street, where he collapsed. Agents followed his lead to arrest the three Klansmen under the new civil rights law—the first such case in Mississippi—and the new Silas McGhee incident became an extra rallying tale that night at the Greenwood Elks Hall.

Excitement died down into a staff meeting that wrestled toward morning over what to do now, with precious manpower locked up and a further diversion of time and effort required to arrange bail. (It would take six days.) “James Bevel, the wonderful reverend who wears a skull cap…was there,” a mesmerized volunteer wrote home. “He is King's right hand man, and is 10 times as good.” Bevel reminded the staff of COFO policy that jail marches in Mississippi amounted to aimless self-punishment—“just run up your bail a few thousand dollars”—and he managed to make retreat sound audacious. They should take their dilemma directly to the people, he said, and urge them to keep supporters out of jail to work hard on the summer projects. “Bevel came up with the best thing I have heard for a long time,” the volunteer concluded.

 

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
returned to St. Augustine that same night of July 16, and recalled his departure seventeen days earlier with a tinge of regret. “The businessmen said before we left that they would comply with the civil rights bill and we were very happy about this,” he told a mass meeting. “It represented a degree of progress, and I said to myself maybe St. Augustine is coming to terms with its conscience.” He called the subsequent record a trail of violent setbacks and mixed results. Three days earlier, when postman Henry Twine tried to discuss integration with the manager of the Palms Motor Lodge, near the Fountain of Youth, a small mob of shirtless young men surrounded Twine's car and beat him through the window, straining to drag him outside while Twine crooked his elbow around the steering wheel to resist.
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Chicago Bears football star “Galloping” Willie Galimore, Lincolnville's most treasured native son, achieved unpublicized, luxury integration by checking into a suite at the Ponce de León Hotel. Beyond the reach of Klan picketers, he celebrated with room service champagne for his friends.
†

At the Monson Motor Lodge, owner James Brock was refusing all Negroes. (“Don't look back,” he warned a group of testers on July 16. “There are four Klansmen in a truck passing now.”) By resegregating, Brock obtained a truce agreement from Hoss Manucy, but out-of-state Klansmen firebombed the Monson anyway, and U.S. Judge Bryan Simpson soon ordered Brock to integrate again regardless of threats. At Pappy's Seafood Restaurant, angry white customers fell upon a team of four testers. “One of the Negro integrators ran from Pappy's into the woods,” FBI agents wired headquarters, “and was missing for about two hours until located by the Florida Highway Patrol.”

King sent SCLC lawyers back into Judge Simpson's court for relief under the new law. He expressed hope for continued negotiations, but promised renewed marches under Hosea Williams if necessary. “We have gone too far to turn back,” he said. Even so, King's attention was fixed upon national politics. He told his St. Augustine crowds how much he would cherish the pen President Johnson gave him on July 2. “It was a great moment,” said King. “It was like standing amid a new Emancipation experience…something like the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.” But he perceived one historical turning point to be imperiled by another, and most of his remarks in St. Augustine addressed the nomination that very day of Senator Barry Goldwater. “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist,” King declared. “His candidacy and philosophy will serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes will stand.”

 

T
REMORS SHOOK
American politics along the color line. King had come to St. Augustine from the Republican National Convention in California, where he reviewed for the platform committee “profound and revolutionary changes” since his testimony before the same committee four years earlier. He warned Republicans of “national disaster and discord” if either political party backed away from the bipartisan affirmation of the freedom movement: “It would be a tragedy and an irony of history if the Party of Lincoln should now, some 100 years after the Proclamation of Emancipation, omit from its platform a strong declaration of commitment to the enforcement of all sections of the civil rights bill.” King made two further points. He urged Republicans to support effective protections against terror for those who sought to exercise fundamental rights such as voting, and he proposed as a “test for the next decade” a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, comparable to the GI Bill, designed to help the poor of all races overcome the combined weight of bigotry and automation.

FBI agents again bugged King's hotel room that week, and officials at headquarters recommended adding four new wiretaps to the three already installed at his office. Director Hoover, yielding to the elaborate cajolements from the White House, flew aboard President Johnson's jet to open a permanent FBI mission in Mississippi. He arrived on July 10 to a legend's frenzied press reception, at which he complimented Mississippians on their generally low crime rate and described the new FBI presence as a small administrative adjustment. While he and state officials agreed privately to undertake limited cooperation against Klan-sponsored violence, they publicly danced a minuet of friendship without mentioning racial discord. Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson welcomed Hoover effusively, saying, “I'm mighty glad you're here!” and Governor Johnson tried to make him feel at home by pointing out the motto (“Dieu et les Dames”—God and the Ladies) of Hoover's old college fraternity, Kappa Alpha, painted on the Capitol ceiling. When a reporter asked about the summer project, local newspapers headlined Hoover's pinched statement that his Bureau “most certainly does not and will not give protection to civil rights workers.” The
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
noted with approval that “Hoover would not criticize statements of Gov. Johnson that the state should refuse to comply with the new Civil Rights Law.”