Pillar of Fire (11 page)

Not until the end of summer did Watkins find a weak spot in Reverend Willard's control of the Negro churches. It was the Methodists, a few of whom insisted that no Baptist ran their affairs. Watkins tugged at this sensitivity, emphasizing that he needed a site not for an NAACP meeting, as Reverend Willard so heatedly charged, but merely to discuss the right to vote, and the first open meeting took place at the tiny St. James CME Church off Mobile Street in downtown Hattiesburg. There was considerable advance controversy, including an incident in which Vernon Dahmer and his sons ran out of their house one night after a phone call and fired rifles into the air just to let potential attackers know they were ready. They refused to discuss the phone call or their interpretations with the baffled Watkins, on the theory that he had more than enough to worry about already as a twenty-year-old expected to run the meeting.

Watkins nearly burst with joy when two dozen people arrived. By way of welcome, he told them that he and Curtis Hayes had sung freedom songs for as few as one person in houses all through Hattiesburg and well out into the surrounding farm counties. Between songs, he talked to them about the new hopes since the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, about the mechanics of the voting tests, and how he had escorted small groups of two and three into Theron Lynd's office, where the registrar always demanded to know what he was doing in the courthouse. “I turned the question around on him,” Watkins announced. “I asked him, ‘Am I breaking any law?'” This was daring enough for the first meeting. Before the last song, Vernon Dahmer rose to say they should all pitch in to support this voting work, and a special collection raised money to buy two or three reams of paper for leaflets.

St. James rested awhile. The next step—a “citizenship” meeting advertised in advance—posed greater risk because leaflets would make it impossible to disguise the event as a spontaneous prayer gathering. Eventually, the pastor and female board members arranged to open St. John Methodist Church in Palmer's Crossing, a hamlet on the opposite side of Hattiesburg from Kelly Settlement. Only a dozen people attended. This time, after his songs and testimonials, Hollis Watkins announced that he needed new volunteers to go with him to see Theron Lynd. “Who will meet me tomorrow morning down at the courthouse?” he asked. There was a long stillness before the hand of a visiting country preacher named Rev. L. P. Ponder went up.

Registrar Lynd failed Reverend Ponder and the four people who kept their promise to join Watkins at the registration test: two school bus drivers, a “sanctified” traveling preacher known as Aunt Virja, and a pioneer businesswoman named Victoria Gray. Gray had been a schoolteacher until an Army marriage exposed her to the door-to-door cosmetics industry, with a striking sales uniform of white trimmed in pink, after which she persisted to become Beauty Queen's first franchise entrepreneur in the South. Her brother owned a television repair shop with J. C. Fairley, the new NAACP chapter president, and while Victoria Gray never took part in NAACP work herself, she had heard enough to make sure that St. James was not the only Methodist church willing to hear young Watkins.

When John Doar arrived in Hattiesburg on September 17, 1962, for the latest trial of
United States v. Lynd
, he had no time to get acquainted with Gray or any of the hundred people subpoenaed there sight unseen. He went straight into court as his colleague Robert Owen hurriedly funneled witnesses inside to the stand, alternately white and Negro, for Doar to question off shorthand cover notes. The pell-mell witness selection system was one of many adaptations by the twenty lawyers of the Civil Rights Division, who, already overwhelmed by an avalanche of brutality complaints and a glacial crisis of school litigation, had a dozen voting rights cases in the courts with more than forty others just behind in gestation. Federal law required them to proceed county by county on voting, starting each time anew like Sisyphus. Harold Cox, the federal district judge assigned to
Lynd
, was so ardent a segregationist that he had dismissed the discovery portion of the action unaccountably as “abandoned.” To bypass Cox, Doar's lawyers convinced the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to resurrect the case as though it were lost, and further, to issue a newly invented device called an “injunction pending appeal,” which in effect ordered Lynd to register Negroes equitably through interim proceedings. Lynd ignored that order among others, and presiding Judge Cox again scheduled no proceedings on noncompliance. Then, behind a thin facade of normalcy, in further detour before any trial on the merits of voting, a panel of 5th Circuit judges conducted a one-week contempt trial in Cox's place.

Doar had come almost to expect new witnesses to materialize against all practicality, just as he expected daring new acts of resistance from the segregationist powers. For Victoria Gray, a lifelong belief in simple choices and natural turning points calmed nerves through swift, bizarre consequences of raising her hand at St. John Methodist, such as explaining the early success of Beauty Queen to not one but three judges ranked just below the U.S. Supreme Court. Her brother's partner, J. C. Fairley, sat every day in court next to Vernon and Ellie Dahmer, who thought it important to have their young daughter Betty beside them even though the marshals were strict about not letting her sleep.

Late on the third night of the contempt trial, Tally Riddell suffered a heart attack during an interminable meeting of the university trustees in Jackson. Riddell was one of a small minority who favored compliance with the 5th Circuit's order to admit James Meredith to Ole Miss in a sensational marathon case running parallel with
Lynd
. The state's largest newspaper led a chorus of sovereign fervor with headlines such as “On Your Guard—Commies Using Negro as Tool” and “Thousands Said Ready to Fight for Mississippi.” At least three Mississippi judges ordered Meredith arrested instead of admitted to college, and the legislature passed what amounted to a bill of attainder making him a criminal ineligible for classes. The three
Lynd
case judges promptly moved from Hattiesburg to New Orleans for emergency hearings on Governor Ross Barnett's contempt in the Meredith case. Doar argued Meredith's side through bristling drama that absorbed full attention in Washington. Even as President Kennedy announced a peaceful resolution on national television, students and beer-cooler vigilantes erupted in an all-night riot that killed three bystanders and wounded 160 U.S. marshals—twenty-eight by gunfire. A bivouac of some 23,000 soldiers safeguarded Meredith's academic debut during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October. Army units searched Ole Miss dormitory rooms at bayonet point on reports that white students were distributing cherry bombs from Mayes Hall.

The trauma of Ole Miss was so severe as to muffle celebration among Negroes in the state. There was no rush of students to follow Meredith, whose battered success made the continued suffering of Clyde Kennard all the more poignant, especially around Hattiesburg. In consultation with Vernon Dahmer and Medgar Evers, J. C. Fairley volunteered to accompany Kennard's mother into Parchman Penitentiary along with
Jet
reporter Larry Still, posing as visitors with the announced purpose of making a family portrait. In addition to a large flash camera, which he knew would be confiscated at the gate, reporter Still carried a small camera taped to his ankle. This was a dangerous mission. For Negroes to infiltrate Parchman for political purposes was to risk joining Kennard rather than helping him. Once they made it out safely,
Jet
's photographs of the emaciated prisoner contradicted Mississippi's official position that Kennard was a healthy but undeserving thief of chicken feed. Prison authorities transported him under guard to a hospital for medical evaluation, which opened Governor Barnett to two accusations in the supercharged racial politics of Mississippi: that he admitted factual errors alleged by Negro critics, or was guilty of humanitarian sentiment for Kennard. He finessed both problems with a brazen statement that if Kennard was sick, Barnett had not realized it when he authorized a routine hospital visit. Anyway, reported the
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
, “the negro is not nearly so bad off, prison doctors think, as news stories have pictured.”

At the Dahmer farm, a runaway yearling calf eclipsed chores and the latest Kennard news late one afternoon. Just as the Dahmers decided with practiced eyes that pursuit was fruitless, and were calculating the loss, Hollis Watkins sprinted headlong into the distant pasture. Hired hands trailed halfheartedly behind, joking that even if Watkins did prove fleet-footed he would not know what to do with a hard-muscled young steer that weighed three times his 140 pounds. Spurred on, Watkins got close enough to fling an arm around the neck and throw the yearling to the earth rodeo-style. By the time the Dahmers arrived, their teasing had a fresh tone of affection.

There was a kind of family loss on both sides when Bob Moses pulled Watkins out of Hattiesburg to the hard-pressed Delta project nearly two hundred miles north. Only seven new Negro voters had registered successfully during the nine-month stay with the Dahmers, adding to the minuscule total of twelve Negroes eligible to vote in the 1960 election. Still, more than fifty had tried, many of them solid witnesses in the federal lawsuit, like Victoria Gray, and the ordeal of Negroes at the courthouse had once attracted network news cameras. The overall record put Hattiesburg ahead of Greenwood, where Watkins withdrew.

 

B
ERNARD
“L
ITTLE
G
ANDHI
” L
AFAYETTE
was setting off alone that fall to revive a project in Selma, Alabama, where the Kennedy Justice Department had filed its first original voting suit in April of 1961. He knew Selma mostly as a point on the map at the heart of Alabama's Black Belt. Its chief attraction was that no other SNCC worker wanted to go there since a pioneer had been run out of town the year before, and Lafayette sought to duplicate what Moses had begun alone in Mississippi: gain a toehold in strategic new territory. Less than two hundred of fifteen thousand voting-age Negroes were registered in Selma's Dallas County, and only seventy-five even tried to register during the entire decade since 1952—all rejected, including twenty-eight college graduates. On the wall of their Selma insurance office, Sam and Amelia Boynton posted the names of all seventy-five rejected applicants as an honor roll of the brave.

In Selma, as in Hattiesburg and Greenwood, outside movement workers followed the Justice Department to veteran local stalwarts like Dahmer and the Boyntons, then converged upon the registrar's office from above and below, each side willing to spend months for an applicant or court ruling that amounted to a snowflake in the hand. Into the spring of 1963, there were few hints of looming history at the three sites.

The survivors on the Boynton honor roll were prospective witnesses to Doar and contacts to Lafayette, but with sadly tattered potential. After the
Brown
decision of 1954, a number of prominent Negroes, including professors at Selma University, had followed NAACP instructions to petition for their children to attend the white schools—only to be crushed by retaliation against school budgets, bank loans, and other middle-class vulnerabilities until every name was withdrawn from the petition and the local NAACP disbanded. Even the Boyntons admitted that leading Negroes were fearful, protective, and escapist—more likely to take private flying lessons than visit the courthouse.

Lafayette was marked as a Freedom Rider within hours of his arrival in Selma, and diligent sponsorship of the Boyntons gained no early ground for his voting project. Only one intrepid female schoolteacher agreed to provide boarding. A medical technician named Marie Foster did soon teach nighttime literacy classes, but her lone pupil was a man in his seventies and she knew better than to think that literacy itself could open the voting booth. Foster and her brother, Selma's only Negro dentist, were among those rejected at the courthouse in spite of advanced education. Father Maurice Ouellette, a white Catholic priest who ran a missionary outpost for the Fathers of St. Edmund, allowed workshops in his rooms at considerable risk to the Edmundites. Lafayette started slowly with Bible lessons and freedom songs, but he could not expand beyond a core group of students without access to a mainstream Negro church. His best hope, Tabernacle Baptist, was heavily freighted with history and pulpit politics.

During the era of Franklin Roosevelt, Tabernacle of Selma had been renowned among Negro Baptists, on a par with FDR's Little White House at Warm Springs. Its pastor, Rev. D. V. Jemison, ruled the National Baptist Convention for more than twenty years before J. H. Jackson, hanging on to power by tenacious entrenchment long after the northward migrations reduced Tabernacle to a shell of its former glory. Selma's children remembered how the august Jemison always carried a pocketful of pennies for those who could pass his stern Bible quizzes on street corners, how limousines pulled up to Tabernacle with kinglike preachers from afar and even the local white people treated “Dr. Jemison” with respect. Not a few of the Tabernacle deacons and trustees had swelled through decades of partnership with such a pastor, to the point that they looked down upon his replacement as a shriveling agent of decline.

Rev. L. L. Anderson arrived just as the celebrated bus boycott broke out in Montgomery, fifty miles east of Selma, and several Tabernacle officers promptly claimed the prerogative to decide whether the new pastor should speak on that controversy. Some said Anderson lacked the experience to care for Tabernacle's reputation, others that he belonged at a church nearer his native Ohio. Enmity festered until some of Tabernacle's deacons produced the affidavit of an unmarried woman in Montgomery that Anderson was the father of her child. Anderson denounced the affidavit publicly as a fraud, whereupon some Tabernacle officers tried to get a court order banning him from the pulpit. Finally, one wealthy deacon stood to interrupt a worship service. “That little nigger has got to go,” he declared, pointing his finger dramatically at Anderson. “Money talks. He can't stay here.”