Freedom Summer (6 page)

After lunch, an outdoor workshop beneath a bright blue sky taught volunteers how to take a beating. Near a tree pinned with a sign—“Courthouse”—students became a mob, shouting “Nigger!” and “Commie bastard!” swarming around their new friends, lashing out, knocking some to the ground. Volunteers learned to fall, roll in a ball, absorb the blows. “Your legs, your thighs, your buttocks, your kidneys, your back can take a kick or a billy club. So can your arms and your hands. Your head can’t. Your neck can’t. Your groin can’t.” Some students shuddered at the viciousness of the “mob.” One attacker, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, seemed to lose himself in the moment, shouting, screaming, then looking slightly sheepish at the anger within. Yet this faux Mississippi still seemed surreal—college kids playing at violence on a green lawn in Ohio. College kids who would be in Mississippi in just four days.

 

 

That Wednesday afternoon, a call came to SNCC’s campus office. The long-distance line was scratchy, but the voice had an unmistakable drawl. No one ever found out how the caller got the number. “I got me a twen’y foot pit out bay-ack,” the voice said. “Y’all just come on down.” SNCC did not tell volunteers about the call, but the following afternoon, staffers shared hate mail that had come to the campus. Phrases from one letter leaped out: “morally rotten outcasts of the White race. . . . ‘White Negroes’ are the rottenest of the race-mixing criminals. . . . it will be a long, hot, summer—but the ‘heat’ will be applied to the race-mixing TRASH by the
DECENT
people who do not believe in racial mongrelization through racial prostitution.”

Volunteers listened, sickened by the hatred. But for one black woman, the hate mail was just more information to be filed under “Survival.” Like other volunteers, Muriel Tillinghast had come to Ohio straight from another campus. Two weeks earlier, she had graduated from Howard University, where she had majored in sociology and political science but spent most of her time with NAG, Howard’s Non-Violent Action Group. “We were renegades,” Muriel recalled with pride. “Within the black community of Washington, D.C., we were an alienated group. We looked different, we talked differently, we hung together.” Centered around Stokely Carmichael, then a Howard philosophy student, NAG’s “Weekend Warriors” held endless late-night discussions, talking, passing a hat to send someone out for cold cuts, talking more. Protesting on weekends, NAG members kept pressure on segregated Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. In Cambridge, Maryland, Muriel had survived “NAG’s local Mississippi,” when marchers confronted the Maryland National Guard. With bayonets fixed, guardsmen laced the streets with tear gas, sending Muriel, Carmichael, and others coughing, vomiting, burning in retreat.

Savvy, street-smart, and fiercely independent, Muriel Tillinghast was the latest incarnation of the rock-solid women who helped generations survive slavery. When gripped by fear, she was sometimes overwhelmed, yet able to summon deep rivers within. When despair surfaced, a quick and sarcastic wit kept her going. And when these resources failed, she fell back on her family. “I did not come out of a family where you played the victim,” she said, “but from multi generations of people who fought back.” The Tillinghasts, intensely involved in the Lutheran church and “about eighty other groups,” had long been an “organizational family.” Even in 1964, they still shared the story of how, sometime around 1900, Muriel’s grandmother had left a Texas plantation and
walked
to Washington, D.C. There Gloria Carter had married a “race man.” Muriel’s grandfather was “no bigger than a match stick” but, widely traveled and defiantly self-educated, he shared a household where books were cherished, college was mandatory, and children “spent time in meetings from when we could walk.”

Growing up in D.C., Muriel rarely encountered the dark racism of the Deep South. But she remembered a visit to Florida where she was told not to even touch the clothes in a department store, and
never
to try them on. And closer to home, she had often met racism’s lighter-skinned cousin. Like the old spiritual turned into SNCC’s anthem, she had been “ ’buked and scorned” more times than she cared to count. Her sophomore class had been the first to integrate D.C.’s Roosevelt High School, facing down the hatred of the principal and student body. Each affront gave Muriel a steely strength hidden in a slight frame. By the time she reached Howard, meticulous and driven, she was a natural for NAG’s nonviolent protests. But as an urbanite who knew the Deep South only in legend and in Movement lore, was she ready for Mississippi? As a woman who had not yet learned to drive, was she prepared for harrowing chases down back roads? And as a black woman who chose not to straighten her hair, instead letting it grow into an Afro long before the style became popular, could she stand up to the relentless bigotry she was about to encounter?

Muriel knew Mississippi only as “a distant well of human woe,” yet human woe had been beckoning. During the winter of 1963, when Delta officials cut off federal food allotments, she had collected enough clothes and food to fill half a semitruck, then found a teamster willing to arm himself and drive it to Leflore County. A year later, she had again reached out to Mississippi when NAG members began calling isolated SNCCs there, offering solidarity, friendship, human contact. Muriel recognized one name on the list—Charlie Cobb in Greenville. Cobb had been a fellow Howard student and NAG member. His aunt had also been Muriel’s fifth-grade teacher, so she called him up unannounced. Cobb soon became her “Sunday call.” “He would tell me about what they were doing, their daily work which was mostly staying alive.” As plans for the summer solidified, Cobb began telling this kind female voice on the phone about the upcoming project.

Some volunteers had agonized about going to Mississippi. Others had leaped at the chance. For Muriel, Mississippi was simply the next logical step. Her mother, having taught school in Mississippi, was “beside herself” over her daughter’s decision, but Muriel did not consider it a decision. “At NAG meetings, I was informed around February that something was going on in Mississippi that summer and the attitude was, ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’ As we got into May, it was, ‘The bus is leaving at such and such a time—you’re going to be on it, right?’ ” On June 12, NAG members left Washington, D.C., for Ohio. Seated beside her battered blue suitcase filled with more books than clothes, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Tillinghast was on the bus.

Once on the Ohio campus, Muriel did not concern herself with the tension between staff and recruits. As she had all her life, she got down to business. Her experience with NAG immediately moved her from volunteer to SNCC staffer, privy to all the endless meetings, strategies, and concerns. Becoming “a sponge” of information, she pestered Charlie Cobb and other veterans for survival tips. She learned how she would have to walk in Mississippi—a slow rural pace that did not call attention to her. She learned how she would have to address people, and how she could organize small, quarreling communities into cohesive armies united in the fight. SNCC’s horror stories “brought us to the stark reality that some of us were not going to come back,” but Muriel tried not to think about that. Instead, she called on her inherited strength, her organizational skills, the solidarity she had learned at Howard, and prepared to take them south. Courage had nothing to do with it. “It was
esprit de corps
. These were my friends and they were going and I was going with them.”

 

 

Suddenly there were just two days till departure. Volunteers wrote to President Lyndon Johnson, asking, “As we depart for that troubled state, to hear your voice in support of those principles to which Americans have dedicated and sacrificed themselves.” Bob Moses had already written LBJ requesting federal protection for the project. Neither Moses nor volunteers heard from the president.

Buses would head south on Saturday afternoon, entering Mississippi on Sunday under cover of darkness. As if to highlight the danger, the media began to swarm over the campus. Final workshops unfolded before TV cameras. Volunteers were interviewed again and again. “Are you scared?” “Do you really think it will do any good?” “You
are
scared, aren’t you?” Besieged by reporters, volunteers tried to explain their motives. “Part of it is the American dream, you know, and part is shame,” one told the
Saturday Evening Post.
“I feel a very real sense of guilt. But I hope I’m not going down there to get my little red badge of liberalism.” Berkeley student Mario Savio told the
Los Angeles Times
, “The injustices to the Negro in Mississippi are also an infringement upon my rights.” Newspapers alerted the country—Mississippi was in for “a long, hot summer,” a “racial explosion.” Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop feared “guerilla war.”

Muriel Tillinghast barely noticed the media, but Chris Williams was incensed. “The guy from
Life
was a real jerk,” he wrote in his journal. “The TV men were a pain in the neck as well with their big grinding cameras. They loved Non-Violent Workshops because that was where the action was. It was the closest thing to actual violence they could find. Sadists!” Volunteers wrote to parents, telling Mom and Dad to look for them in print or on TV. “
Look
magazine is searching for the ideal naïve northern middle-class white girl,” one wrote. “For the national press, that’s the big story. And when one of us gets killed, the story will be even bigger.” Two days left.

On Thursday, volunteers learned of their legal rights and how little they would mean that summer. Chris met attorney William Kunstler, later famous for defending the Chicago Seven, who was handling his case in North Carolina. Kunstler’s daughter, Karin, was among the volunteers. That morning, a graying man puffing a cigar stepped before the group. Jess Brown, one of four black lawyers in Mississippi, pointed a bony finger at the sweep of faces before him. “Now get this in your heads and remember what I am going to say!” Brown began. Mississippi sheriffs, cops, and highway patrolmen already knew their names, their hometowns, their full descriptions. “All I can do is give you some pointers on how to stay alive. If you are riding down the highway—say, on Highway 80 near Bolton, Mississippi—and the police stop you and arrest you, don’t get out and argue with the cops and say, ‘I know my rights.’ You may invite that club on your head. There ain’t no point in standing there trying to teach them some constitutional law at twelve o’clock at night. Go to jail and wait for your lawyer.” In Mississippi, Brown warned, they would be classified into two groups—“niggers and nigger-lovers. And they’re tougher on nigger-lovers.” That night, Muriel Tillinghast gathered more survival tips; Chris Williams took another midnight run.

On Friday morning, volunteers heard from the Department of Justice. In the field of civil rights, John Doar was as close to a hero as anyone at the federal level. As assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Doar had filed lawsuits against the fat registrar in Forrest County and elsewhere. He had worked closely with Bob Moses, taking his collect call from jail in Liberty, coming to Amite County to investigate threats against Herbert Lee, only to learn back in D.C. of his murder. At Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson, Doar had helped calm angry marchers, averting a riot. Now he praised the volunteers as “real heroes.” But when someone asked, “What are you going to do to enable us to see the fall?” Doar answered, “Nothing. There is no federal police force. The responsibility for protection is that of the local police.” Boos filled the auditorium. Shouts erupted. “We can protect the Vietnamese, but not the Americans, is that right? ” Finally, Moses stepped beside his friend. “We don’t do that,” he cautioned. The room fell silent. Doar was just being honest, Moses said. The session left volunteers feeling more vulnerable than ever. Back in Massachusetts, Jean Williams felt her son’s fears in a letter arriving that afternoon.

On the last night in “the Safe, Safe North,” the singing again began after dinner. Crossing arms and holding hands, volunteers sang the songs they now knew well, songs of jail, of picket lines, of endurance. Despite all the truth told about Mississippi, idealism still trumped fear. SNCC staffers had a term for such spirit—“freedom high”—and it kept the singing going till midnight. Between songs, some shared the news they had just heard on the radio. LBJ’s civil rights bill had finally passed the Senate. Now the South would be forced to desegregate. And they would be in Mississippi to see history happen. After midnight, most volunteers tried to sleep. A few stayed up drinking beer, talking, trying to imagine the mysterious places they were headed—Tchula, Mississippi. Moss Point. Itta Bena. At 3:00 a.m., a station wagon crammed with two trainers and six volunteers left for Mississippi to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. No one saw them drive away.

Saturday: packing, a lingering lunch, long good-byes. At makeshift barbers’ chairs, lines were three deep as men had hair trimmed, beards shaved. “Before You Leave Oxford,” a sign announced, “Write Your Congressmen Asking Them to Act to Insure Your Safety.” The afternoon was as bright and sunny as the day the students had arrived. Beside green lawns, two rattletrap charter buses waited, but no one seemed eager to board. Encircled by TV cameras and reporters, volunteers and staffers again joined hands and sang. They had been two groups when they arrived; they were one now.

Finally, the call came to depart. Black and white sang one last chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” Then volunteers piled duffel bags, suitcases, and guitars in the back of each bus and crammed into seats. Some hung out windows to clasp hands with staffers who were staying to train the next group. Others just stared blankly, eyes fixed straight ahead. From inside the buses came sad voices singing SNCC’s woeful anthem, “We’ll Never Turn Back”: