Freedom Summer (4 page)

As a high school senior in Amherst, Massachusetts, Chris Williams would have understood the surfing metaphor, but he preferred rhythm and blues to the Beach Boys. Lean and wisecracking, with a rebellious streak and a lust for adventure, Chris welcomed any challenge to the status quo, especially the racial status quo. He had seen racism’s ugly face at an early age. While living in Washington, D.C., Chris had befriended the children of the maid who helped his mother care for his four younger siblings. Neighbors began throwing stones, shouting, “Nigger lover!” The Williams family soon moved north, but Chris never forgot. From the first headlines out of Montgomery, he was drawn to the civil rights movement. “You didn’t run into many situations where there was a clear right and wrong,” he remembered. “In this case, ‘right’ seemed very obvious.”

In the spring of 1964, Chris was of medium height, with a Boy Scout face but brown hair long enough—over his ears, even—to get him suspended from school. During his spring break, he had followed local ministers to Williamston, North Carolina, to picket a courthouse. A melee on Easter Sunday saw one man hit with a baseball bat; Chris was merely arrested. Finding jail more exhilarating than depressing, he whiled away three days listening to Top 40 radio and joking with fellow protesters, black teenagers who, amused by his hair, called him “Ringo.” Bailed out, Chris headed home, vowing to return. The opportunity was not long in coming. At nearby Smith College, he sat in on a civil rights rally that ended with two Yale students describing the Mississippi Summer Project.

Parental permission came readily. Chris’s father understood restlessness. Schafer Williams had dropped out of Harvard in 1928 to bum around America, working in sawmills and pipe gangs. When the adventure wore thin, he had returned to college, earning a Ph.D. in medieval history. Now, having grown skeptical of the generation he taught at the University of Massachusetts, he saw the summer project as a way for his son “to actually do something worthwhile.” Chris’s mother was more apprehensive. “The Birmingham church bombing had occurred the previous fall,” Chris remembered. “Medgar Evers had been assassinated—in Mississippi. She knew the danger.” Still, Jean Williams told local papers that too many Americans considered teenagers “do-nothings.” “American students have finally come around to support something that must be done.”

On fire with his summer plans, Chris did not wait to graduate. In early June, he got a crew cut, handed in his schoolbooks, and hitchhiked back to North Carolina. In Williamston, he passed out leaflets, sat in on boisterous church meetings, and ate collard greens with his host family. Then, as the training in Ohio approached, he stuck out his thumb and hitched west. Picked up by cops, he was questioned “like I was the nation’s most wanted criminal.” Forced to call home to prove he was not a runaway, he cited Thoreau in his journal—“That government which governs best is the government which governs least.” He crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, riding with farmers and soldiers, then waited hours while big, brawny cars roared past, leaving him in the twilight—alone, eighteen, and in love with the road. Somewhere along the way, he lost his wallet and was penniless. But finally, more rides came—from “a homosexual,” “a car full of hoods,” and two off-duty cops drinking beer and throwing the cans out the window. Through Appalachian hollows, across the rolling farmland of southern Ohio, he slowly made his way to the campus, “and the whole Mississippi adventure began.”

Like others at the training, Chris thought he had come solely for the summer. That fall, he expected to enter the University of Pennsylvania. He did not know that in the coming months he would be shot at, smell tear gas, and meet people who would forever become his measure of humanity. He did not know he would meet the woman he would marry. And although he signed up for just a few months, come September he would give up his slot in the Ivy League to continue organizing in rural Mississippi. “I realized Mississippi was more educational than anything I was going to get at Penn. There was a sense that this was not some crazy escapade—this was history in the making. This was going to be written down, talked about. This was a sea change in the United States.”

 

 

When the singing ended that Sunday night, SNCC staff stayed up late. Released from Mississippi’s constant terror, some drank, others debated. Many were already anxious about the volunteers. These “kids” seemed so naive, so vulnerable, so maddeningly certain of themselves. The thought of throwing them into the hellhole of Mississippi terrified those who bore its bruises and bullet wounds. How much truth should the kids be told? Could Yale and Harvard students feel the agony of Mississippi? Could they understand what it was like to drive on a dark road and suddenly see headlights flash in the rearview mirror, see a car coming up fast, ramming your bumper at sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour? Could they know what it was like to hit the floor if the car pulled around and passed? To know that when terror loomed, when a mob gathered, when a sheriff took you in, there was no one to call? Not the cops who would watch as some “good ol’ boy” knocked your teeth out. Not the Justice Department, who cared little. Not the FBI, who cared less. In six days, 250 students would leave for places like McComb, Mississippi, where five black men had been killed and fifty flogged since the first of the year. Would they panic? Flaunt their northern superiority? Could they meet violence with nonviolence? The time had come, as Chris Williams noted in his journal, for “the hairy stories.”

On Monday morning, as students talked and joked in a spacious auditorium, a white man in a minister’s collar stepped before them. The previous evening, the Reverend Edwin King had conducted a memorial for Medgar Evers. From throughout the hall, volunteers had seen the large white bandage on King’s jaw, which had been shattered in a car crash when he was run off the road near Jackson. Now the minister called Mississippi a “police state.” Every institution, he told volunteers, would be against them. The government, the courts, the newspapers, the cops, the wealthy businessmen, the small merchants, and especially the poor whites would stop at nothing—not arson, torture, not even murder—to keep Negroes “in their place.” King described the relentless intimidation, the routine police brutality, the “disappearance” of black men, and the juries that acquitted murderers in less than an hour.

But the reverend’s scenario was tepid compared to stories that followed. One by one, black men in their denim and T-shirts described terrors witnessed or endured. Some told of the notorious prison called Parchman Farm, where they were drenched with water on cold nights, left to swelter in the “hot box” on blistering afternoons. Others described the police dog unleashed on marchers in Greenwood, recent beatings in Canton and Natchez, shotguns fired into black homes in almost every town. Volunteers raised to believe that “the policeman is your friend” now heard about cops in Mississippi. “When you go down those cold stairs at the police station,” said Willie Peacock, beaten in police custody just the week before, “you don’t know if you’re going to come back or not. You don’t know if you can take those licks without fighting back because you might decide to fight back. It all depends on how you wanna die.” One tall SNCC staffer did not have to say anything. The bullet holes in his neck were clearly visible above his white T-shirt. Finally, the same stout woman whose singing had lifted the congregation on Sunday evening described a June night in 1963. Ordered away from a whites-only lunch counter, Fannie Lou Hamer had been led to a cell and forced to lie down as guards handed an inmate a blackjack. “That man beat me till he give out.” The blows had smashed her head, her back, her bare feet. Hamer’s booming voice now chilled the volunteers. “Don’t beat me no more! Don’t beat me no more!” Across the crowded auditorium, hands went to mouths, eyes were averted, tears held back. This was Mississippi—where they would be on Sunday.

At dinner that second evening, the mood on campus resembled that of a prison camp more than a summer camp. Over food that now seemed tasteless, students imagined being battered, shot, killed. White faces seemed whiter somehow. Smiles were gone. Freedom Songs were forgotten. “It just scared the crap out of us,” Chris Williams wrote. Some vented their fears in letters home.

Chris found another way of coping. At midnight on Monday, he donned gym shorts and went for a shirtless, barefoot run. Across dewy lawns, beside softly lit dorms, past SNCCs partying in their office, he ran and ran, reconsidering his “Mississippi adventure.” “I just ran until I was really tired and then I wasn’t scared anymore.”

Throughout Tuesday, as workshops focused on Mississippi politics, geography, and history, tensions between the two groups tightened. Some students felt lectured; others lamented the racial divide: “We don’t know what it is to be a Negro, and even if we did, the Negroes here would not accept us. . . . In their eyes we’re rich middle or upper-class whites who’ve taken off a summer to help the Negro.” Yet many were beginning to idolize the Mississippi veterans.

Wherever students met on campus, stories circulated about this organization called SNCC (pronounced “Snick”). How in 1960, a brave and brilliant black woman named Ella Baker, active in civil rights since the 1930s, had gathered dozens of college students fresh from the “sit-ins” that had sprung up at lunch counters in southern cities. How Baker had forged them into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a political force designed to earn blacks “more than a hamburger.” How SNCC soon had chapters on campuses across the country and how its members had kept the Freedom Rides going. (In May 1961, thirteen Freedom Riders—seven blacks and six whites—rode buses into the South, daring the federal government to enforce laws desegregating interstate travel. Freedom Riders were arrested in North Carolina, beaten by mobs in South Carolina, and saw their bus fire-bombed in Alabama. Unprotected by police, they abandoned their ride in Birmingham. But SNCC members soon came from Nashville to continue the Freedom Rides into Mississippi, where they were rounded up in Jackson and sent to Parchman Farm Prison.) The Freedom Rides made SNCC the “shock troops” of the Movement, its members pitting Gandhian pacifism against kneejerk brutality, singing through weeks of “jail—no bail,” surviving on spaghetti and hamburgers, talking into the night about love, compassion, and nonviolence. In small projects from Georgia to Arkansas, SNCC members met poor blacks on their porches, slept on cots or floors, ventured into Klan territory, all for a salary of $9.64 a week, after taxes.

Even among daring civil rights workers, SNCC staffers—often just called “SNCCs”—stood out. SNCCs were cooler, braver, feisty to a fault. “They would argue with a signpost,” member Joyce Ladner recalled. Though they waxed eloquent about creating a “beautiful community,” “a circle of trust,” SNCC jargon made the Movement sound like World War II. They spoke of “cracking Mississippi,” of establishing “beachheads,” of working “behind enemy lines.” Historian Howard Zinn, who traveled with SNCC, wrote: “To be with them, walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Mississippi . . . to see them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in Selma, Alabama, or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting in the Delta—is to feel the presence of greatness.” And in their presence in Ohio, most volunteers were in awe. The training changed her life, one later said, “because I met those SNCC people and my mouth fell open.”

Disdaining the celebrity status of Martin Luther King, SNCC fostered “group-centered leadership,” no member more important than another, all decisions made by consensus hammered out in meetings that seemed to last for days. SNCC became its own university as members shared books or talked in jail cells—about overcoming fear, about philosophy, mathematics, or sometimes just about women. Seeing themselves not as leaders but as organizers, SNCCs empowered locals to stifle fear and organize the Movement in their own communities. Group-centered leadership meant that while every volunteer in Ohio knew of Dr. King, few recognized the pantheon of future civil rights icons in their midst. In one corner stood James Forman, the suave, pipe-smoking air force veteran who had grown up in Mississippi so poor he had sometimes tried to eat dirt, but who returned from college to forge SNCC’s ragtag revolutionaries into a white-hot force. Elsewhere was John Lewis, the shy son of Alabama sharecroppers who was SNCC’s chairman and would later serve in Congress. Also on campus were other future leaders of this brave new generation of African Americans—Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, Victoria Gray, Marion Barry. . . . But even in this remarkable gathering, one SNCC stood out, no matter how hard he tried not to.

With his bib overalls, glasses, and thick, furrowed brow, he looked like a wise sharecropper, and his small stature helped him slip unnoticed through crowds. But when he spoke, he gave himself away. “He is more or less the Jesus of the whole project,” one volunteer noted. This was the man the press recognized as the mastermind, the Negro with “the Masters’ degree from Harvard.” Who left a cushy job teaching math at a New York prep school. Who went to Mississippi in 1960, when no other civil rights leader dared to. Who went there alone. Frequently arrested and attacked, he had developed an icy calm that astounded everyone in his presence. How could one comprehend the courage it took to enter an office just ransacked by a mob, set up a cot, and take a nap? And his name, as if chosen by more than chance, came straight from the Freedom Song they had sung the night before. This was Moses. Bob Moses.