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Authors: Bruce W. Watson

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Freedom Summer

BOOK: Freedom Summer
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Table of Contents
 
 
 
ALSO BY BRUCE WATSON
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream
The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
 
 
First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
 
 
 
Copyright © Bruce Watson, 2010 All rights reserved
 
 
Page 370 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Watson, Bruce, date.
Freedom summer : the savage summer that made Mississippi burn and made America a democracy / Bruce Watson. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-19018-0
1. African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History—20th century. 2. African Americans—Suffrage—Mississippi—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. 4. Civil rights workers—Mississippi—History—20th century. 5. Mississippi—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title.
E185.93.M6W285 2010
323.1196’0730762—dc22 2009047211
 
 
Set in Times New Roman
 
 
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 
 
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For all the teachers and the volunteers giving of their time, compassion, and spirit
A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know;
I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if
it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But
if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it.
—William Faulkner, “An Odor of Verbena”
By the summer of 1961, Herbert Lee was a wealthy man by local standards—local black standards. After thirty years of farming in the deepest corner of the Deep South, Lee had a small dairy farm, a modest home, nine children, and a road or two that did not seem like a dead end. So one day that scorching summer, when a young, bespectacled black man from New York showed up on his porch wearing bib overalls and speaking softly about his right to vote, Lee decided he could take a few risks. He agreed to drive the stranger around Amite County. To friends and family, Lee’s decision suggested a death wish.
Blacks did not vote in Mississippi—never had as long as anyone could remember. “Niggers down here don’t need to vote,” one cop said. “Ain’t supposed to vote.” Entire counties where black faces far outnumbered white had not a single black voter. Seventy-some years had passed since Mississippi had crafted a clever combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other legalistic voodoo that, within a decade, slashed black voting rolls from 190,000 to just 2,000. Ever since, whenever a Negro had dared to register, terror had taken care of him. A trip to the courthouse registrar landed his name in the newspaper. Soon the “uppity nigger” was beaten, fired, thrown off a plantation, or left trembling in the night by a shotgun fired into his shack. Herbert Lee knew the risks, but when he decided to face them, he did not know he was risking his life.
On the morning of September 25, 1961, Lee was rattling along dusty back roads toward the tiny town of Liberty, Mississippi. Looking in the rearview mirror of his old pickup, he saw a newer truck. Lee pulled into the parking lot of a cotton gin. The other pickup, its tires popping the gravel, pulled alongside. Lee recognized the driver, a burly white man with jug ears and a broad, shiny forehead, pink from the summer sun. Lee had known “Mister Hurst” all his life, had even played with him as a boy. The two men’s farms were not far apart. Perhaps Mister Hurst just wanted to talk. Then Lee spotted the .38 in his neighbor’s hand.
Through the window of his pickup, Lee shouted, “I’m not going to talk to you until you put the gun down!” Hurst said nothing, just bolted out of his truck. Lee frantically slid across his seat and scrambled out the passenger door. Hurst circled, gun waving.
“I’m not playing with you this morning!” the hulking white man said. Before Lee could run two steps, Hurst put a bullet in his left temple. Lee fell facedown in the gravel. The new pickup sped away. The parking lot fell silent. The body, encircled by onlookers, lay in a pool of blood for hours beneath the sizzling sun. Blacks were afraid to move it, and whites refused.
No one knew how many black men were murdered in Mississippi in 1961. No one could remember the Magnolia State ever convicting a white man of killing a black man. At the coroner’s inquest, Hurst spun a story about a tire iron Herbert Lee had brandished. His gun, Hurst said, had gone off by accident. A witness was coerced into swearing he saw the tire iron, too, the same one “ found” under Herbert Lee’s body. State legislator E. H. Hurst never went to trial. But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of fire-crackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring, that it redefined freedom in America.
BOOK ONE
Crossroads
And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard.
What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so
steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What
kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this hate
come to be?
—Richard Wright,
Black Boy
Prologue
In the fall of 1963, America was suffused with an unbearable whiteness of being. Confident and assertive, the nation rode an unprecedented wave of prosperity. The engines of the American economy were at full bore; the young, handsome president was well liked and respected. The enemy was unmistakable—a mushroom cloud, a bald bully banging his shoe at the United Nations, a worldwide threat that had to be contained. Americans drove two-thirds of the world’s cars and held half the world’s wealth. Cars were big and beefy, with fins, flamboyant taillights, and loud engines under expansive hoods. Jars of Miracle Whip and loaves of Wonder Bread were in most kitchens; Marlboros and Kents were advertised on TV, and half of all adults smoked a pack or more a day. Only one or two cities had enclosed malls. Ninety-nine percent of homes had TVs—almost all black and white—yet none received more than seven channels. These featured “a vast wasteland” of Westerns, medical shows, and silly sitcoms. Not a single program showed a dark face in any but the most subservient role. In the halls of Congress and in city halls across the nation, all but a few politicians were as white as the ballots that elected them. Yet from this ivory tower, the future could be spotted.
That fall in Southeast Asia, American advisers sent back discouraging reports, causing President Kennedy to consider ending involvement in Vietnam. College students strummed folk songs, their younger siblings danced to syrupy pop music, but off in England a shaggy-haired rock band was riding a wave of frenzy that would soon sweep across the Atlantic and sweep away old mores. Across the South, blacks were marching into police dogs and fire hoses, demanding decency and human rights. But the most significant signpost in the autumn of 1963 arose in the nation’s poorest state. There, on a November weekend shortly before events in Dallas began to change everything, thousands of bone-poor citizens gave America a long-overdue lesson in democracy.
Mississippi’s official ballot listed Republican and Democratic candidates for governor. Yet in a southern state still voting as if Lincoln headed the GOP, the election was never in doubt. Everyone knew Democrat Paul B. Johnson, following in his father’s footsteps, would be the next governor. White voters admired how, as lieutenant governor, “Paul Stood Tall Last Fall,” blocking a black man’s entry to the state university. White voters relished Johnson’s sneers at the most hated politicians in Mississippi, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, whose federal troops, so the story went, had incited the integration riots at “Ole Miss.” White voters sniggered at Johnson’s joke that NAACP stood for “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums.” And on November 5, white voters comfortably elected “Tall Paul.” But that Tuesday, whites were not the only voters in Mississippi.
From the buff sands of the Gulf Coast to the cotton fields of the Delta, a parallel election was held, a black election, a “Freedom Election.” In little wooden churches with majestic names, whole congregations rose from the pews. While gospel choirs chanted—“We-ee shall not, we shall not be moved”—men and women slipped “Freedom Ballots” into wooden boxes. In cafés sweetened by the smell of cornbread, withered hands marked Xs beside “Aaron Henry—Governor” and “Reverend Edwin King—Lt. Governor.” On teetering porches, black men in overalls and black women in gingham spoke with students from Yale and Stanford recruited for this prelude to “Freedom Summer.” Nodding politely, calling their clean-cut guests “sir,” lifelong sharecroppers learned that voting did not have to remain “white folks’ business.” And thousands, forging raw democracy out of Mississippi’s red clay, cast “Freedom Votes” in beauty parlors and grocery stores, in barbershops and pool halls. Yet thousands more were far too terrified to risk anything so dangerous as voting.
BOOK: Freedom Summer
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