Freedom's Children (16 page)

The tactics of violence in Mississippi were meant not only to punish a particular individual, but to intimidate other blacks. As one of Till's murderers said, “I like niggers in their place.... I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.” In 1955 several other Mississippi blacks were also killed. One of the victims was Reverend George Lee. Euvester Simpson was nine years old at the time, and Reverend Lee was her father's friend. “Everything just went crazy at my house when that happened. My father went to the funeral. People knew that Reverend Lee had been active in the NAACP. If they were thinking of doing anything, that put a stop o it. I felt scared.”

Until the beginning of the sixties, most civil rights activity in Mississippi had been under the auspices of the NAACP. By 1961, SNCC had its first field worker, Bob Moses, in Mississippi. This was the beginning of activism by large groups of young people.

Very few blacks in the state were allowed to vote. Sometimes they were physically intimidated and threatened to prevent them from registering. Often they were kept from registering by blatantly discriminatory rules. Applicants, for example, were required to pass literacy tests and interpret obscure sections of the state constitution. Blacks were almost always told they had failed the tests; whites, on the other hand, even if illiterate, were routinely registered.

Segregationists often tried to excuse the absence of black voters by arguing that black people weren't interested in voting. In 1962 the major civil rights groups, CORE, SNCC, NAACP, and SCLC, formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which began work on a major voter rights project. Throughout 1963 young people worked all over Mississippi trying to register black voters. They organized a Freedom Party open to anyone, regardless of race, and sponsored a Freedom Vote for governor and lieutenant governor. As a result of that effort, more than eighty thousand black Mississippians voted in the freedom election, giving the lie to the claim that they weren't interested. Kept out of regular Democratic Party politics in the state, civil rights workers then formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which enrolled thousands of disenfranchised blacks.

One of COFO's most ambitious projects was Freedom Summer, 1964. It was a plan to bring nearly a thousand students, mostly white, to Mississippi to work on a massive voter registration drive and other community projects. The young people set up freedom schools with classes in black history as well as regular school subjects. Meetings were held in churches, empty lots, homes, community centers—wherever space could be found. In the evenings there were training classes for adults for voter registration.

The freedom schools had a powerful impact on young people. Thelma Eubanks, for example, went every day in McComb.

The summer project, so successful in its outreach to Mississippi blacks, actually began in tragedy with the disappearance of three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. In 1963, Michael and Rita Schwerner, a white couple, moved from New York City to Meridian, Mississippi, to open a CORE center. Together with James Chaney, a black Mississippian, they set up programs for the area youth and organized voter registration projects. Their work angered local segregationists, who wanted them out of the county.

At the beginning of the summer of 1964, Schwerner and Chaney went to Ohio to train student volunteers for Freedom Summer. It was there they met Andrew Goodman, a white college student from New York. When the three young men returned to Mississippi, they went to investigate the burning of a black church in Longdale, near the town of Philadelphia. On their return trip to Meridian, they were arrested and later released by Neshoba County police officers. That was June 21. For the next six weeks no one could find a trace of them. Then on August 4, after a tip from an informant, FBI agents found their bullet-riddled bodies buried in an earthen dam a few miles from Philadelphia.

No one was ever tried for their murder. Three years later, eighteen men, many Klan members, were charged in federal court with conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Among them were Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price. Seven of the men were convicted, including Price. He was sentenced to six years in prison. Rainey was acquitted.

Freedom Summer went on, despite the disappearance and murder of the three young activists. Student workers from the North joined civil rights activists in the South. Together they set up hundreds of freedom schools for young people, worked with thousands of adults preparing for voter registration exams, and forged deep ties with one another. As Euvester Simpson says:

My father died when we were babies. We were five kids and my mama and my grandmother. My mother fixed hair downtown, and my grandmother had a little eating establishment right next door to the beauty parlor. It was called Calmese's Grill.

We lived across the street from the COFO office, right down in the heart of town [Meridian]. We were little kids running around down there, and one day we saw those white guys going up those stairs. They looked different, not like the ones you'd see around here all the time. They'd talk to us and tell us, “You guys, come over and play sometime.” So we started going up there. We used to go and just read. First time I ever saw so many books. All kinds.

I was eleven when Mickey Schwerner came. I spent lots of time with Mickey and Rita. They were funny, most always happy. He used to do a lot of magic tricks for us. He'd take Ping-Pong balls in his hands and say, “It's over here,” and pull it from somewhere else. It fascinated us. We had never seen that before. Rita and Frankie Wright taught us freedom songs. We used to sing “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.” Those were my favorites.

When James Chaney came on the scene, I learned what it was all about. James was a nice, easygoing fella, quiet most of the time. Come around with his hands in his overalls. He wore a blue T-shirt. He was real friendly. He was different from most black guys you'd see. Most guys would be hanging in the pool rooms, or hanging on the corner. But he was up there. He had his job to do. Always seemed to be happy and ready to work.

I was listening to what they were talking about. About how the white man was treating the blacks so bad, couldn't get decent jobs, had to drink out of a certain water fountain, and things like that. And I said to myself, I think that's right to fight against that ‘cause a man is a man. I don't have some business about somebody because of what color they are. Ever since I was a little bitty boy, I felt like that.

 

We'd go to the COFO office every day and stay until night. They never told us to go home. They let us stay and play as long as we wanted to. We'd read and talk and play games. I wanted to be in the demonstrations. I wanted to be a part of it. At the airport, for instance, they wouldn't serve blacks. I remember Mickey, Preston, James Chaney, and, I believe, Ben [James's eleven-year-old brother], we all went out one day to eat. We all ordered apple pie. The lady served us, but she put salt on the pie. We ate it.

We also went uptown to Kress's. They had a certain side for blacks to eat on. Mickey said, “Well, we're going to change that.” So we went up there to eat dinner, and we all sat on the white side. They served us. They didn't really want to do it, but they served us. Me and Ben Chaney were the youngest in most everything we did.

I was arrested a couple of times. Once when we were boycotting Kress‘s, like always, the policemen came and put us all in the paddy wagon. They kept me and Ben, and then let us go. They'd take us to scare us, talk to us real mean, tell us to go on. But the older men, they kept them. We went back to tell Rita at the COFO office what happened.

At the time, I knew there weren't black people voting, and we needed those votes so we could get people in office that we thought would do a good job. My mama and grandmother got registered when COFO came. They used to have those big rallies and meetings. We went to different churches here, getting people registered o vote.

I remember Mickey saying if we get the vote, we can make a change. That sounded about right to me. We started passing out leaflets saying there was going to be a meeting. We'd walk for miles a day passing out pamphlets, trying to get people registered. We weren't out there shooting basketball or playing marbles. A lot of times I didn't even go swimming. I'd rather pass out leaflets, sit-in, or something. I enjoyed doing what I was doing. I felt it was right.

My mama didn't worry about us when we were at the office ‘cause she knew we was with Mickey, and we were in good hands. My grandmother would cook the meals at the restaurant, and they'd come and eat, Mickey and Rita, Frank and Judy Wright. They were the very first whites that ate there. That's where all the people from the COFO office would come. She'd fix them a big dinner free.

Before COFO, I didn't really come in contact with white people at all. School was all black, teachers were all black, principal was black. Stores had white people. We'd buy tennis shoes, or candy, but as far as talking with them, or communicating with them, we didn't do that. They were very mean in those days. They would not give you money in your hand. They'd throw it down. They'd watch you real hard when you were going out, as if you were going to steal something. I didn't like that. I've never been a thief, and it made you feel bad.

The Klan were hateful, rednecks you call them nowadays. Just real coldhearted to black people. They were young guys, middle-aged, and old men. Like the guy that owned this electric company. He was an old man, and he didn't like nobody black. I mean just for nothing. We'd walk by and he'd come out and try and make us get off the sidewalk. “Get off the sidewalk, get in the streets!” he'd yell.

And the people at the laundry right down the street from the COFO office, we saw them loading the sheets up in there one Saturday night. And the laundry wasn't open at night. They had a lot of Klansmen there.

We had some mean policemen. They were so mean, you'd know them by name. We had one who became a judge. He finally got voted out. He tried to change his image, but he didn't change his heart.

 

When the policemen used to see us just walking together, black and white, they'd stop us for nothing, and take the men to jail. That's what happened with Freeman Corcroft. He was white, and he used to come down every summer just to work with the kids. He'd take us to the black pool over in the East End. They had a white pool, but we couldn't get in that one. He went in the black pool. Nobody tried to stop him there. We weren't like that.

One day he had taken us swimming. We were walking back, and the policeman stopped him because he was white and with us. It was very unusual for a white guy to be leading a group of black kids. The policeman asked him what he was doing with all these children. He said, “These are my friends, and we're just coming back from swimming.” They didn't believe him. They thought he was doing something else, but he wasn't. He was just always with us. They took him to jail, and we were really mad. We went up to tell Mickey what happened. They went and got him, paid the fine.

Mickey and the others had told us there was going to be a lot of people coming down for the summer. People were coming from everywhere, black and white, to work with us, give us help and support. We was glad. We needed it. Mississippi, ooh it got really rough down here, especially back in the sixties. Black man didn't hardly stand a chance. I remember about Medgar Evers [field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi]. He was in the same field of work as Mickey and Chaney, and he'd lost his life in it.

 

Mickey and them were saying that they had to go to Philadelphia [Mississippi] where the black church had been burned. They were going to check things out and see what was going on. We knew they were going up there early Sunday morning. Andrew Goodman was here just that one day. He got here that Saturday, and they left that Sunday morning. I didn't get to know him good.