Freedom Summer (39 page)

And in the care of another victim, it was okay not to say anything, not to feel anything, just to take deep breaths, to gather herself inside herself and begin the long night of suppression. Fran does not remember how she got home that evening, nor what Mrs. Garrett said about her late arrival. She remembers little of her remaining days in Mississippi. She only knows that she made a rock-firm decision not to tell anyone. She would not become an incident on a blackboard. She would not give newspapers another story. Hoping to recapture the warmth she had felt from her students, Fran kept quiet about her encounter with the Klan, quiet for twenty-five years while the terror of a quiet summer night crouched inside her. She would be leaving on August 17. She wrote home one last time, hiding her horror in vague language. She had decided not to go home through New Orleans, she told her parents. “After recent developments I don’t like the idea of traveling alone through southwest Mississippi. It’s always been the worst section and hasn’t improved this summer.” August 17. A Monday. Fran and her secret were also counting the days.

 

 

After a headline June, a lunatic July, and August’s endless lay-by time, Freedom Summer had arrived at its own crossroads. On the evening of August 19, three buses stood outside the COFO office on Lynch Street in Jackson. More than a hundred people stood around them, talking, singing, their faces reflected in bus windows beside the neon red signs of the Streamline Bar. At a press conference earlier that day, Bob Moses, though troubled by the word “success,” said the summer project had changed Mississippi. “The whole pattern of law enforcement of the past hundred years has been reversed,” he noted. “In some areas the police are offering protection where they never did before.” And Freedom Summer was not finished, Moses announced. Many volunteers were staying on to intensify voting drives in Panola and Tallahatchie counties, and to staff community centers, adult literacy programs, and mobile libraries in rural areas. But all that would only unfold after Freedom Democrats helped make Mississippi part of the U.S.A.

Since July 19, armies of canvassers had held Atlantic City aloft like some Promised Land. Now the Promised Land was just a bus ride away. Tallied in signatures alone, the Freedom Democrat drive had been disappointing. Moses had hoped for 400,000 names, then lowered his sights to 200,000, then 100,000. He had to settle for 63,000. But as delegates milled beside the buses, their hopes shone as brightly as that evening’s “We Shall Overcome,” belted out to the ring of a folksinger’s banjo. The Freedom Democrats would be on Atlantic City’s famous Boardwalk by Friday. They had followed Democratic Party rules explicitly. Papers had been filed. Affidavits and testimonies of terror were ready to be shared. After a summer of violence, could Americans deny that Mississippi was a blot on democracy? Could President Johnson, having signed the Civil Rights Act, turn them away? One by one, Freedom Democrats boarded the buses. Casey Hayden stood with a clipboard, checking off dozens of names. Arms waved out the window. Approaching the bus with his wife, Bob Moses was not as optimistic as the rest, but he was seen to smile.

At 10:00 p.m., the buses pulled out with a great cheer that broke into Freedom Songs. Instructions had been left in the COFO office—a delegate would call once the buses were safely out of Mississippi. Calculating the distance over winding roads, leaders said the call would come by 3:00 a.m. If no one checked in by 3:15, “begin action.” Singing, shouting out, marveling at the Promised Land where they were bound, delegates rolled north toward the Tennessee line. The call came at 3:02 a.m. The Freedom Democrats were on their way.

—Tennessee Williams

“The Stuff Democracy Is Made Of ”

 

 

All 5,200 delegates descending on the faded resort of Atlantic City at the end of Freedom Summer were Democrats, and all were in a mood to celebrate. With Lyndon Johnson heavily favored to win in November, they looked forward to a political convention without politics. In lieu of debate, there would be parties, dinners, and perhaps a little hijinks. For one rollicking week, democracy would become a showcase. But for sixty-seven Mississippians stepping off buses, blinking in the morning sun, inhaling the salty air, democracy was no showcase; it was a matter of life and death.

The Freedom Democrats included two sons of slaves. Several were veterans—of World Wars I and II—and all were veterans of Mississippi. Many had bullet holes in their front doors, and one had them in his neck and shoulder. All bore the scars of Jim Crow—childhood memories of lynching, adulthoods rife with insults, lives trampled by constant intimidation. Their jobs, like their hometowns, were hardscrabble. Freedom Democrats were farmers and sharecroppers, barbers and undertakers, maids and cooks. Several were illiterate, but all had a seasoned wisdom no classroom could teach. Most were making their first trip out of Mississippi, some their first trips out of the counties where they had been born. Though more comfortable in overalls and housedresses, all had spent two nights on the bus in their Sunday clothes—suits and ties, porkpie hats, ironed skirts and blouses. Their faces were the colors of the mud from which they rose—Delta black and amber clay, brown loam and beige soil. And as proof that theirs was not a “nigger party,” four Freedom Democrats were as white as the Gulf Coast sands—one was a fisherman signed up by the White Folks Project in Biloxi.

Legally, they represented no one. The Freedom Democratic Party was not a legal party in Mississippi. Many expected to be arrested, or worse, when they went home. But morally, the Freedom Democrats represented the very idea of democracy. Their presence in Atlantic City challenged the most sacred American rhetoric. Was America a nation of “liberty and justice
for all
” ? Was voting a right or a privilege? Did democracy apply just to some, or did it extend from top to bottom, from mansions to shacks, from the halls of power to the broken porches of the powerless?

Their journey north had seemed eternal. Freedom Songs grew tiresome before the buses even reached the state line. Then, shortly after calling to say they were safely out of Mississippi, they were nearly ambushed in Tennessee. Spotting a Klan roadblock ahead—ten white hoods, ten men with rifles—passengers had ducked into the aisles. But a few were ready.

“They start anything, I have a gun,” Hartman Turnbow said. “And my wife—she got one, too. Baby, get out your gun.” Plump, moonfaced “Sweets” Turnbow reached in a paper bag and pulled out a pistol. “We gonna,” her husband drawled, “we gonna kill up a few of ’em.” The driver slowed, but a slim woman crept behind him, flicked a switchblade, and held it to his throat. “You better put your feet on the gas,” she said. At full speed, the buses scattered the Klansmen and rolled on. Being from Mississippi, Freedom Democrats had rammed through obstacles far more relentless than the Klan.

Many had been trying to “reddish” since the murder of Emmett Till. Only a few had succeeded. The rest had taken the parallel path to democracy. Five days before Freedom Summer began, all had been shut out of county conventions choosing Mississippi’s “official” Atlantic City delegation. Party leaders, alerted by the Sovereignty Commission’s Informant Y of “Negroes carefully picked and trained to crash the conventions,” had connived to exclude them. On June 16, blacks across Mississippi had arrived at designated halls to hear: the meeting is canceled; the meeting is over; the door is locked. “We can’t open the door! They called down and told us not to open the door! There are no precinct meetings here! We don’t know anything about precinct meetings!” In the few meetings they managed to “crash,” blacks saw jittery whites huddling, whispering, peeking around corners. The lily-white conventions chose a lily-white delegation of sixty-eight Democrats. Blacks were left to sign affidavits detailing their exclusion, affidavits they took to Atlantic City, where they would try to force democracy’s parallel paths to converge.

And so they had held their own conventions—in churches, community centers, under trees. Initially uncertain about regulations and rules of order, farmers and sharecroppers, maids and cooks had learned democracy by trial and error. Following SNCC’s instructions, they elected Freedom Party chairmen, secretaries, and delegates. These went on to a rousing state convention in Jackson. There, when Freedom Songs finally ended, when the Stars and Stripes and signs with county names stopped bobbing, 2,500 delegates heard from their lawyer that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party stood a good chance of being seated in Atlantic City. A summer of behind-the-scenes lobbying had gathered enough support to bring their challenge to the convention floor, and enough votes there to win. They could only be stopped by Lyndon Johnson, and he would not dare, not with the whole nation watching.

Following this good news, delegates listened to keynote speaker Ella Baker, who had been tirelessly working for Freedom Democrats in Washington, D.C. Her damp face uplifted, her finger pointing at the worn faces before her, SNCC’s founder praised this “assemblage of people who, yes, have come through the wilderness of tears, who, yes, have come through the beatings, the harassment, the brutalization. . . .” Turning to Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, whose bodies had been found two days earlier, Baker added, “Until the killing of black mothers’ sons is as important as the killing of white mothers’ sons, we must keep on.” The convention concluded by choosing five party leaders, forty delegates, and twenty-two alternates. As the votes were announced, a volunteer from Manhattan watched from the sidelines. “This,” Rita Koplowitz wrote home, “is the stuff democracy is made of.”

In the thirteen days between their state convention and their departure for Atlantic City, Freedom Democrats met further obstacles. Radio stations refused to run their ads. Mississippi’s attorney general denied their charter, denied them the use of the name “Democratic,” and issued an injunction barring them from leaving the state. Freedom Democrats were also firebombed in Hattiesburg, arrested in Greenwood, and beaten by Klansmen near Vicksburg. By the time they stepped off their chartered buses after their long ride north, they doubted the Democratic Party could treat them worse than Mississippi had throughout their weary lives.

Stretching stiff limbs, smiling in the cool breeze, delegates sat beside piles of luggage and waited to check in to the Gem Hotel. The Gem, like its neighborhood, had seen better days. In their last mile on the bus, Freedom Democrats had been stunned into silence. They had heard stories of blacks “caged” in northern ghettoes, but now they saw them. Shirtless men walking crumbling streets. Brick row houses sadder than sharecroppers’ shacks. Breezes blowing litter through Atlantic City’s “Negro Northside,” just a few blocks away, yet so far removed from the tacky glitz of the Boardwalk.

But all of Atlantic City had seen better days. By 1964, it was New Jersey’s poorest town and a generation beyond its heyday, when summer weekends had brought millions to the shore. Carny rides still whirled, and a Ferris wheel and humpback roller coaster still rose above the clutter, but somehow they seemed smaller than before. And the crowds were smaller, much smaller. Only the Boardwalk retained its stature—six miles long and sixty feet wide, stretching from pier to pier along the white sand. Flat-roofed jitneys, like lost golf carts, still careened past sunburned tourists sampling the kitsch that clung to life. At the Steel Pier, horses and their riders still dove headlong into a pool. Nearby, a flagpole sitter sat atop her perch. Pitchmen beckoned the bored into parlors to play skee-ball or pokerino. And on Pacific Avenue, not far from the Gem Hotel, Sally Rand still did her fan dance, though at the age of sixty, she drew smaller audiences.

This year, however, the tourist season usually highlighted by the Miss America Pageant had bigger events in store. On August 30, the convention hall fronting the Boardwalk, a huge, Quonset-shaped building, would host the Beatles. And a week before the concert, the same hall was hosting the Democratic National Convention. The president would arrive that Thursday for what the press was touting as “a coronation.” Posters featuring a kicking donkey welcomed Democrats to sadly neglected hotels—the Deauville, the Shelburne, the Seaside. Checking in, delegates traded Goldwater jokes and spoke of celebrities due to join them—Carol Channing, Milton Berle, and, rumor had it, Jacqueline Kennedy. On the Boardwalk, they strolled past arcades, bought ashtrays, Beatles dolls, and T-shirts proclaiming “All the Way with LBJ.” Above heads bobbing in the surf, small planes towed banners for Coppertone Lotion. Amid the laughter, the squealing children, the couples arm in arm, no one paid much attention to the Freedom Democrats. No one, that is, except the president.

Depending on the poll, LBJ led Goldwater in the popular vote by 59-31, or even 67-28, percent. But with the convention not even begun, already the president’s nightmare was unfolding. And Mississippi was not his only problem. Alabama delegates, asked to pledge their loyalty to the party ticket, were threatening a walkout. Incensed by the Civil Rights Act, Alabama governor George Wallace was ranting about the Democrats’ “alien philosophy,” invoking the ghosts of Reconstruction and predicting a southern uprising, possibly even a third-party run in November. Wallace, Mississippi’s Governor Johnson, and two other southern governors had refused LBJ’s invitation to dine at the White House. And twenty-five Democratic congressmen had just urged their party to seat the Freedom Democrats. The press was predicting a floor fight, and Texas governor John Connally was telling the president where that would lead: “If you seat those black buggers the whole South will walk out!” The president sat in the White House, brooding about the spoiling of his “coronation.”

As Freedom Democrats stood singing in the cramped confines of the Union Temple Baptist Church, they had little idea of the forces mounting against them. Here they were sleeping five to a room, still finishing the baloney sandwiches they had brought for their bus trip, still pinching themselves to make sure they were really here—out of Mississippi, at a
national
convention. Who could possibly regard them as a threat to the president?