Freedom Summer (5 page)

Before he came to Mississippi, there was little in Robert Parris Moses’ life that suggested he would be a leader, let alone a legend. Raised in Harlem, one of three sons of a hardworking janitor, he had excelled in school, earning scholarships to Stuyvesant High, Hamilton College, and finally a doctoral program at Harvard. There he studied mathematical logic, earning his master’s in 1957. The following year, however, his mother died of cancer, and his father, overcome with grief, wound up in a mental institution. Moses left Harvard and went home, taking odd jobs to support the family and his father’s eventual recovery. One job, tutoring the teen crooner Frankie Lymon (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”), took Moses to ghettos around the country, where he pondered the fate of blacks who had fled the South for “the promised land.” Feeling the hopelessness Harvard had helped him escape, he began seeking answers. Then on February 1, 1960, four black men took seats at an all-white lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Moses studied newspaper photos of that first sit-in, studied them for weeks. Seated at the counter, the four seemed so serene, so confident. “Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing,” he recalled. “This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life. . . . This was the answer.” While in college, Moses had worked in Quaker summer camps in Europe and Japan, building housing for the poor, talking with new friends about pacifism and its power. His favorite author was Albert Camus, whose novels portrayed ordinary men ennobled by their opposition to evil, whose essays convinced him that “words are more powerful than munitions.” Four months after the Greensboro sit-ins, Moses, then twenty-four, put Camus’s philosophy and his own to the test, heading south.

While visiting his uncle, an architect in Virginia, Moses picketed in Newport News. The simple protest brought him great relief. After a lifetime of stifling resentment, of “playing it cool,” he was finally, as Camus would have said,
engagé
. Heading on to Atlanta, he worked for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), stuffing envelopes at an old desk and discussing Kant with a coworker. The intense newcomer unnerved some in the SCLC office. Julian Bond recalled many thinking the somber, intellectual Moses had to be a Communist. “We were immensely suspicious of him,” Bond remembered. “We had tunnel vision. . . . Bob Moses, on the other hand, had already begun to project a systematic analysis; not just of the South, but of the country, the world.” When SNCC needed someone to go to Mississippi to recruit for a conference, Moses volunteered, paying for his own bus ticket. Armed only with his passport and the names of local NAACP leaders, he crossed Alabama and headed for America’s poorest region, the land of sprawling cotton fields flanked by sharecroppers’ shacks, the land whose sorrows birthed the blues, the land known simply as the Delta.

In the flat, sun-baked town of Cleveland, Mississippi, Moses met NAACP organizer Amzie Moore. The Harvard Ph.D. candidate and the owner of a Delta gas station became instant friends. Moore saw in Moses the quiet courage black Mississippi needed to “uncover what is covered.” And to Moses, the stout, stocky Moore suggested the old spiritual, “a tree beside the water” that would not be moved. Amzie Moore wasn’t interested in sit-ins, Moses learned. Sharecroppers earning $500 a year could not afford to eat at lunch counters. Voting, Moore said, was the key to change in Mississippi. Blacks outnumbered whites two to one in the Delta, but only 3 percent could vote. Since World War II, even the smallest registration campaigns had sparked shattering violence. As they talked in the fading light, Moses noticed the loaded rifle Moore kept at his side and the bright lights outside protecting him from the drive-by shooting, the sniper, the firestorm in the night. And as they talked, Moses drafted a plan for voter registration to begin the following summer. Moore soon drove his young protégé around the Delta, talking of local politics, explaining how a burdened people moved and survived—a black ocean, deep and serene, encircling human volcanoes. Moore had Moses speak to church groups, watching to see how Delta folk responded. “There’s something coming,” Moses told the tired faces in each tiny church. “Get ready. It’s inevitably coming your way whether you like it or not. It sent me to tell you that.” Most people lowered their eyes, but some softly said, “Amen.” With these few, a handful of seeds in each terrified town, Moses and SNCC would sow the Movement in Mississippi.

Reluctantly, Moses returned to New York for a final year in his teaching contract. In the summer of 1961, he headed south again. He would stay in Mississippi nearly four years. By the time he left, embittered, exhausted, but somehow still alive, Mississippi would be swarming with voting campaigns, Freedom Schools, and change that had been centuries in coming.

At the Ohio training, volunteers quickly recognized Moses’ inner strength, and some tried to copy him, walking and speaking slowly, wearing bib overalls. But because he was too self-effacing to share his own tales of terror, few yet knew them. Later they would learn how, in August 1961, Moses had set up voter registration classes in the backwoods hill country of southwest Mississippi, a place he described as so “rural, impoverished, brutal that [it] hardly seemed a part of America.” They would hear of him leading blacks to courthouses, walking right up to sour-faced registrars, answering their hatred with gentle words. And how curious clerks had dropped into one registrar’s office to see this “New York nigger,” and how a highway patrolman had pulled him over on his way out of town.

“You the nigger that came down from New York to stir up a lot of trouble? ”

“I’m the Negro who came down from New York to instruct people in voter registration,” Moses corrected. Then he began to take down the cop’s badge number.

“Get in the car, nigger!”

Taken to the police station, Moses was allowed the customary phone call. Cops listened as he asked the operator to call the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Collect. He then detailed the violations of civil rights laws in Amite County. Startled cops asked Moses to pay just five dollars in court costs. He refused and spent two days in jail. The NAACP finally bailed him out, but not before a local asked him, “Boy, are you sure you know what you’re about?”

Within weeks, word spread. Blacks heard that “Dr. King and some other big people” were in the area. Teenagers Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes went searching for King, found Moses, and joined SNCC. Meanwhile, whites heard that some “nigger from New York” was stirring up trouble, and the name Bob Moses soon topped a Klan hit list. The hit was not long in coming. In late August, as Moses led three people to the squat brick courthouse in Liberty, a man pounced, smashing his head with a knife handle. With blood streaming down his face, Moses led the trembling applicants up the courthouse steps. The registrar’s office was closed. After getting nine stitches, Moses then did another thing blacks simply did not do in Mississippi in 1961—he pressed charges. Before a courtroom packed with shotgun-toting farmers, Moses coolly testified about the beating, then let the sheriff escort him to city limits. His assailant was acquitted—self-defense. The terror soon escalated, culminating in the murder of Herbert Lee. Fear crippled the Movement, and SNCC pulled out of southwest Mississippi, but stories about Bob Moses inspired more to join him in SNCC’s new beachhead—the Delta. By 1964, Moses was little known outside civil rights circles but a legend within. Still, those few volunteers who had heard of him must have been surprised when they heard him speak.

In a voice as soft as silk, Moses spoke briefly on Sunday night, then periodically throughout the week. He broke every rule of elocution. He often looked at his feet. He never repeated himself, rarely told stories, never smiled. And yet, because in the timeless tradition of genuine leaders he spoke truth to power, he had everyone’s attention.

“No administration in this country is going to commit political suicide over the rights of Negroes,” Moses told volunteers. “This is part of what we are doing . . . getting the country involved through yourselves.” Convinced that only a bold move would change Mississippi, Moses had lobbied heavily for the summer project, overcoming strong objections by Movement veterans. But now he did not seem so sure: “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi Negro,” he told volunteers. “Only come if you understand, really understand, that his freedom and yours are one. Maybe we’re not going to get very many people registered this summer. Maybe, even, we’re not going to get very many people into Freedom Schools. Maybe all we’re going to do is live through this summer. In Mississippi, that will be so much.”

Sighing as if the world were on his shoulders, Moses told volunteers about the murder of Herbert Lee. But he did not tell them about his nagging concerns. By Tuesday afternoon, he was very worried. Despite all the “hairy stories,” no one had gone home. In long, soul-searching discussions, volunteers had aired their doubts. Weren’t they being egocentric? Masochistic? Did they have Messiah complexes? As whites raised in America, weren’t they also steeped in racism? Volunteers quoted Gandhi, Tolstoy, and James Baldwin, yet none took the commonsense option of leaving. Moses’ concern was shared by other SNCCs.

“It’s not working,” said Charles McLaurin, still nursing bruises from a recent beating. “It’s really not working. They’re really not getting through to each other.” Sitting through sessions that ranged from the character of southern whites to the history of slavery, volunteers seemed studious, solemn. But when released from workshops, they played touch football or strummed “Blowin’ in the Wind,” acting as if headed for summer at the seashore. Students read SNCC’s security handbook: “No one should go
anywhere
alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night. . . . Try not to sleep near open windows; try to sleep at the back of the house. . . . Do not stand in doorways at night with the light at your back.” But just as Mississippi’s strange savagery was sinking in, the naïveté resurfaced. During a frank discussion on sex, one woman asked, “We have talked about interracial dating. Is there a policy you’d like for us to follow? ” SNCC staffers were incredulous. A
policy
? Had anyone heard of Emmett Till? Beaten to a pulp, shot in the head, tied to a fan, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River for just whistling at a white woman? Emmett Till was fourteen years old. It wasn’t working. Further proof came Tuesday night.

After dinner, volunteers watched
Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment
. The CBS documentary detailed how the Magnolia State had defied the Constitution by disenfranchising its black populace. The federal government had filed lawsuits, but Mississippi judges had stonewalled, nitpicked, thrown most out of court. Volunteers seethed or sat disgusted. But then the camera fell on a hideously fat man in a white shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. Laughter rippled through the auditorium. SNCC staffers fumed. This was no comical stereotype. This was Theron Lynd, registrar in Forrest County, who had never registered a Negro until hit by a lawsuit. The audience quieted as a black man onscreen told of a shotgun fired into his home, wounding two little girls, but when his wife came on in a funny hat, some giggled. Several SNCCs stormed out. When the documentary ended, another jumped onstage. “You should be ashamed! You could laugh at that film!”

“The flash point,” as one volunteer called it, had arrived. Across the auditorium, whispers and stares punctuated an aching silence. A few volunteers stood and spoke, calling SNCC staffers distant, arrogant, patronizing. They acted superior to anyone who had not shared their suffering. In one corner, Bob Moses stood with his arm around his wife, Dona, a recent University of Chicago philosophy grad. Both were stone-faced. Other SNCCs let the tension linger, as in their own meetings, before finally lifting it. They told of the fat registrar—“We know that bastard.” The previous January, Theron Lynd had been the target of Hattiesburg’s Freedom Day. Hundreds had picketed in the rain. Moses was arrested, one marcher was beaten in jail, and here these kids were, safe in Ohio, laughing. Another SNCC erupted: “Ask Jimmie over there what he thinks about Mississippi. He has six slugs in him, man, and the last one went right through the back of his neck. . . . Ask Jesse here—he’s been beaten so we couldn’t recognize him, time and time and time and time again. If you don’t get scared, pack up and get the hell out of here because we don’t need any people who don’t know what they’re doing.” The confrontation went on until 2:00 a.m. When it was over, everyone joined hands and sang SNCC’s mournful anthem, “Never Turn Back,” written in memory of Herbert Lee. Volunteers slowly filed back to their dorms, but staff again stayed up, talking, drinking, more worried than ever. Bob Moses and his wife were near tears, but one volunteer, crying as he wrote home, noted: “The crisis is past, I think.”

 

 

On Wednesday, a workshop turned into a heated debate. The Reverend James Lawson, who had written SNCC’s lofty mission statement on nonviolence, argued with Stokely Carmichael, who would later take SNCC into the realm of Black Power. As rapt volunteers watched, the tall, gangly Carmichael said nonviolence had once worked because it was new and made news. But having been beaten in jail and tortured in Parchman Farm, he considered nonviolence useless against vicious racists. Lawson admitted goodness had its price. “When you turn the other cheek,” he said, “you must accept the fact that you will get clobbered on it.” Many volunteers remained uncertain. Wasn’t violence sometimes justified? In self-defense? Finally, one of the few white SNCC staffers spoke up. Alabaman Bob Zellner had been the lone white in a peaceful protest in McComb in 1961. Singled out by a mob, he was clubbed, beaten, and had his eyes gouged while he gripped a railing, holding on for his life. “You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer,” Zellner told the group. “If you can’t accept this, please don’t come with us.” Again, no one left.