Freedom Summer (43 page)

On Wednesday night, all chairs marked “Mississippi” were removed from the convention floor, but several Freedom Democrats were allowed to stand. And throughout Thursday night’s long tribute to JFK, Bob Moses and others stood in a silent circle, holding hands. No one inside the convention hall seemed to care. The Mississippi challenge now seemed as dated as the huge photos of FDR and Harry Truman looming above the platform. That night, an ebullient Lyndon Johnson came to Atlantic City to accept his party’s nomination. He and Hubert Humphrey linked hands in triumph. Fireworks blazed above the Boardwalk, some even forming a portrait of LBJ. With all the noise, Fannie Lou Hamer needed a microphone to be heard as she stood before exhausted Freedom Democrats and their supporters, belting out one last chorus of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” As always, Hamer’s eyes looked skyward, numbed by fatigue but swept up in song and spirit.

 

 

The following morning, sixty-seven Freedom Democrats filed onto buses. Perhaps a few took final glances at the pale blue above the shoreline, at the ghetto surrounding their hotel, at the Ferris wheel spinning slowly in the distance. Then the buses pulled out. Across America, the compromise was being hailed in the press—“a significant moral and political victory” (
Los Angeles Times
); “a triumph of Moral force” (
New York Times
); “nothing short of heroic” (
Washington Post
). But Freedom Democrats did not feel victorious. They were headed back to Mississippi, where sharecroppers would soon return to the fields and volunteers would be gone, taking with them the nation’s attention. “You don’t know how they goin’ to do us!” a black man in Greenwood said. “It’s goin’ to be hell when you leave!” The Freedom Democrats continued their long, sad return, west across Pennsylvania and Ohio, then south through Kentucky and Tennessee, heading home.

The last departing volunteers also went home that weekend. The summer of solidarity, of songs sung with hands clasped, heads swaying, ended with young men and women, battered and exhausted, slipping one by one out of the state. Most left unnoticed, but one was spotted on a bus out of Clarksdale. A woman seated beside her noticed her midwestern accent and asked if she had been part of the summer project. When the volunteer nodded, the Mississippi native turned somber. “I just want you to know,” the woman said, “that some of us have really done our best, and we’ve educated the people who have worked for us and have lived with us, and we care about them.” Then the bus crossed the Mississippi line.

 

 

Sometime during that final week of Freedom Summer, a Sovereignty Commission investigator went to Batesville to check out voter registration in Panola County. Parking behind the courthouse, the man spotted several black women beside a young white man. All were discussing how to register.

Stepping inside the courthouse, the investigator found his way to the registrar’s office and asked how the voting drive was progressing.

“Fine,” the registrar answered.

And how many Negroes had been registered that summer?

“Something over seven hundred.”

The investigator was shocked. “My country man!” he said. “What has happened that could justify that many Negroes qualifying in the last sixty days to vote in this county? ”

“Well, you know, I’m under an injunction.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that but I still can’t see how that many could qualify in so short a period of time.”

The registrar wearily explained. It seemed some clerks had taken the federal injunction very seriously. They were actually
helping
Negroes fill out forms. Pointing out mistakes. Allowing them to be corrected. The investigator tried to contain his anger. This was not what the injunction intended, he said. But the registrar insisted—he did not want to be subpoenaed again. Another trip to federal court might bring an even harsher ruling.

Shaking his head, the investigator walked down the hall. In the district attorney’s office, he heard worse news. The COFO drive had “snowballed,” the DA said. It had gone “completely out of control.” Negroes were coming in from all over the county. Nothing seemed to stop them. They just kept filling out forms, dozens each week, all passing without a test, all approved as voters. This was bound to spread to the whole Delta. Tallahatchie was already under an injunction, and more would surely come. What could be done? The investigator said he would take up the matter with the state attorney general. He would be back on Friday. On his way out, he saw more blacks coming, walking up the steps, out of the heat, into the coolness of the courthouse.

—Victoria Gray Adams

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

For the rest of the twentieth century, Mississippi struggled to put the past in its proper place. The lessons were bitter, and some refused to learn them. In the years following Freedom Summer, rancor and hatred reigned. Torn between nonviolence and a surging militance, blacks split into factions, arguing about everything, even funding for child care. Marches continued, and cops continued roughing up marchers. The Klan rallied in public, plotted in private, and made a last-ditch stand for its ludicrous lost cause of white supremacy. But with time, the state haunted by the Civil War surrendered to the inevitable future. Old customs died out with old people, and new generations found neither the energy nor the hatred needed to prop up Jim Crow. The past, in defiance of William Faulkner’s cautionary adage, came to be past. Like some cantankerous grandfather, Mississippi’s cruel legacy of war and Reconstruction, segregation and lynching, night riding and shotgun justice, was relegated from the kitchen table to the back porch. There it no longer required constant vigilance, let alone violence.

Even as Mississippi shed timeworn ways, life remained hard. Air-conditioning tamed the savage summers, while industry drew thousands from the land. New highways—asphalt and electronic—linked remote hamlets, bringing fresh faces and ideas, yet Mississippi remained America’s poorest state. Touring the Delta in 1967, Robert Kennedy visited sharecroppers’ shacks, reached out to touch starving children, and came away stunned. “My God,” he said, “I did not know this kind of thing existed. How can a country like this allow it?” More machines picked cotton and more field hands fled, leaving the land dotted by empty shacks. Hurricane Camille splintered the Gulf Coast. The river rose and fell, but the price of cotton never returned to what it had been. And through it all, decade by decade, a halting progress accumulated until by the new century, Mississippi had achieved a racial reconciliation few states or countries can match. But the first steps came on a minefield.

By mid-September 1964, another “lay-by time” was over. August’s gauze lifted, leaving a stark and flaxen beauty across the land. Crisp air smelled of smoldering leaves. Even the swamps seemed magical, tinged in gold and green. Black schools in the Delta closed, sending students and their parents back into the fields. To whites, the field hands in their cloth caps and overalls seemed as perennial as the goldenrod blooming beside the roads. So it had been for more than a century, but it would not be so for long.

Autumn soothed the scars of summer, yet ten weeks of tension had frayed nerves to a nub. Many volunteers had thought they were used to the stress, but when they returned home, they discovered that they would never return home. Not for the rest of their lives.

Among SNCC staff, bitterness over Atlantic City mixed with relief. “The longest nightmare I have ever had,” as Cleveland Sellers called Freedom Summer, was over. Some eighty volunteers were staying on, but with the rest gone, SNCCs could go back to helping locals shine their own lights. Or could they? “At the end of summer, I knew I had been right in opposing the project,” Hollis Watkins remembered. “Trying to reactivate and get people motivated was much, much harder.” And along with enervating blacks, Freedom Summer left white Mississippi filled with shock, shame, and outrage.

In September, six more churches went up in flames. Another black body was pulled from a river. South of Jackson, the Klan went on a rampage, bombing the mayor’s home in Natchez and the Vicksburg Freedom House where Fran O’Brien had taught. And in McComb?

On September 9, McComb COFO director Jesse Harris wrote the Justice Department: “If the present increase in violence is not halted, it is almost certain that within the coming weeks there will be a civil rights worker killed in Pike County.” No protection was offered. Whenever COFO called the FBI to complain about police harassment, they were told that McComb cops “are very fine people and you shouldn’t criticize them.” Free to strike at will, the Klan terrorized the city. Bombs hit another church and a preacher’s home. Thugs beat volunteers in broad daylight. Pickups circled the Freedom House nightly, while police set up roadblocks, arresting dozens of blacks on charges of “criminal syndicalism.” And there were more bombs, midnight explosions splintering homes, spreading terror, steeling the black community.

While McComb approached a state of siege, Americans inspired by Freedom Summer shone their own lights on Mississippi. Volunteers’ parents continued to meet, raise funds, and send them south. Pharmaceutical companies shipped vitamins and first aid kits. Public schools across America adopted Freedom Schools, sending books and supplies. And with nearly three dozen churches destroyed, congregations responded to a “Committee of Concern.” Formed by Mississippi clergy, black and white, the committee
’
s campaign collected $10,000 in its first week, enough to begin building. The title of the committee’s campaign, “Beauty for Ashes,” came from the biblical book of Isaiah: “The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek . . . to give unto them beauty for ashes. . . .” By Christmas, college students were giving up their vacations to build churches in Mississippi.

But Freedom Summer’s wounds could not be confined to Mississippi. Back at her Oregon college, Fran O’Brien was restless and angry. The once demure teacher now argued with old friends who seemed to have become bigots. No one understood what Fran had been through, but no one failed to notice her testiness. “I didn’t realize yet that it was because
I
was a different person, so my whole senior year was confusing,” she remembered. Fran talked about the children of Mississippi but told no one about being beaten by Klansmen. She did not even tell herself. And so the horror festered, leaving her alone, aloof, and strangest of all, dreaming of returning to Mississippi the following summer. A similar estrangement could be found at colleges around the country.

In Chicago, Len Edwards, the congressman’s son, was back at law school. One evening at a bar, friends were talking about the Cubs, about “girls,” about the Johnson-Goldwater race, when someone asked, “Well, what was happening down there in Mississippi?” Edwards managed to get out two sentences, “and I started crying, I just burst out crying.” In North Hanover, Massachusetts, Linda Wetmore found “everything was awful.” Wetmore’s arrest during Greenwood’s Freedom Day had been on the front page of the
Boston Globe
. Back home she found herself notorious. At church, someone asked her, “You’re telling me you’d want to live next door to a nigger?” Her boyfriend came over to say, “I could never kiss anybody who’d kiss a black man.” Wetmore had not kissed any black men, but she replied, “Then I guess we can’t go out anymore.”

Studying returned volunteers, psychiatrist Robert Coles saw signs of “battle fatigue . . . exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration and rage.” Many volunteers wanted to talk about Mississippi, but how could they describe a sharecropper’s shack? A Mississippi jail? Madhouse summer nights of pickups and shotguns and flaming crosses? Some spoke to service clubs, but many more refused to talk to anyone. First in hometowns, then back on campus, their white world seemed so isolated, so pointless. Summer had immersed them in a movement, swarming with people, anointed in spirit, struggling for others. And now they were asked to resume their studies, to go to parties, to focus on careers. There was simply no way to explain this to friends, to parents. One mother lamented, “Our very normal, bright young child has changed.”

Many spent long hours in their rooms. Guilt over leaving Mississippi blacks—“the best people I ever met”—overwhelmed them. When they went out, they found themselves dodging whites and drawn to any passing black face. Politics was a distant drone from an America whose talk of equality seemed laughable. “I went from being a liberal Peace Corps-type Democrat to a raging, maniacal lefty,” one volunteer recalled. Decades later, sociologist Doug McAdam, surveying some 250 volunteers, found that Freedom Summer had moved two-thirds leftward and crippled respect for authority. In just ten weeks, 42 percent lowered their estimation of the president, 40 percent lost esteem for Congress, half for the Justice Department, and nearly three-quarters for the FBI. In the fall of 1964, this sea change spearheaded a generational challenge to America, a challenge that began on a single campus.

On October 1, a crowd at the University of California at Berkeley surrounded a police car holding a student arrested for handing out CORE leaflets. For the next thirty-two hours, the car sat trapped by swarms of students, many singing Freedom Songs, while one after another jumped on its roof and spoke about free speech. The most eloquent speaker, the one who would speak throughout that fall about the connections between Mississippi and Berkeley, had just returned from McComb. Before the summer, Mario Savio had impressed a SNCC interviewer as “not a very creative guy . . . [who] did not play much of a leadership role.” But back at Berkeley, Savio was on fire with summer memories. He remembered staying up late in Ohio talking about Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. He recalled being chased by angry whites in Jackson, hearing the bombs in McComb, talking in sharecropper shacks. “Can I now forget Mississippi?” he wondered. “In other words, was that my summer job? ”