Pillar of Fire (13 page)

Andrew Young reached Greenwood the same day Evers did, bringing a concession to James Bevel and Diane Nash: they could have a walking, substitute literacy school in the person of Annell Ponder, one of three experienced teachers from SCLC's Citizenship Education Program. On March 4, her first night in Greenwood, Ponder heard Bevel and Reverend Tucker urge the board members of Turner Chapel AME to open the church now to her literacy classes, and Ponder herself explained methods that her mentor, Septima Clark, had been developing nearly fifty years since World War I—teaching words from newspapers and the Bible, arithmetic mostly from simple, practical farm measures. With drills from basic civics—how to spell “freedom,” the basic duties of a sheriff—Clark needed only an intensive week's retreat to have most former illiterates proudly signing their names, writing letters, and lining up at the courthouse, able and inspired to register. Moreover, she taught the early signs of gifted illiterates, who might be trained quickly to teach
other
illiterates, plus leaders at the next level who might teach other teachers, and so on through a small-scale miracle of compressed evolution. With permission from the skittish Turner Chapel board, her disciple Ponder started the first church-based literacy classes in the Mississippi Delta, two nights a week. Within a month, she enrolled more than 150 sharecroppers in primary classes.

On the other side of Greenwood, white officials ended months of rancorous negotiations with federal representatives who argued that news stories on the willful starvation of disfranchised Negroes were embarrassing to U.S. leadership in the Free World. Leflore County supervisors defended their March 19 settlement as a strategic maneuver to spare Mississippi from an “invasion” of federal bureaucrats, but skeptical voters criticized them for spineless surrender. “Who is going to believe that Leflore County runs its own affairs now?” demanded the
Greenwood Commonwealth
. “This tends to prove that a naked political sword from the Kennedy arsenal in Washington has flashed into Leflore County to encourage the groups of racial agitators now operating here…. The power move by the Federal Government should have been resisted.”

Four nights later, arsonists set fire to the COFO office at the Camel Pressing Shop. Curtis Hayes noticed smoke when he drove by about midnight, but he was helpless against the flames. Word of the fire boosted attendance for Annell Ponder's first awards ceremony at the next night's mass meeting. Announcing that eight of twelve students had persisted through rigors of second-level training, she called forward all eight women, including Fannie Lou Hamer, to receive graduation certificates proclaiming them qualified to teach literacy and citizenship. The next evening, March 26, a shotgun blast ripped through the front of the much-admired Greene family—a son had applied to succeed James Meredith as the second Negro at Ole Miss—and nearly two hundred supporters gathered spontaneously outside Wesley Chapel the next morning to sing freedom songs. Bob Moses made occasional remarks from the sidewalk. SNCC's executive director, James Forman—who had rushed from Atlanta to investigate the office fire—suggested a march downtown, but squad cars soon converged on Wesley Chapel and officers with guns drawn waded in to arrest SNCC leaders they could recognize, including Forman, Moses, Willie Peacock, and Lawrence Guyot.

Sudden spasms opened and shut the Greenwood registration movement to the world like a fluttering lens. Dozens of reporters, including a CBS News camera crew, reached Greenwood before the next day, March 28, to observe one hundred Negroes who stood all morning in the registration line outside the courthouse, then marched two abreast toward Wesley Chapel once the registrar closed his office for an extended lunch hour. The orderly spectacle offended crowds of white citizens along the route, many of whom cheered “Sic 'em! Sic 'em!” when officers piled into the line behind police dogs. Negroes scattered in bedlam. Cleveland Jordan half dragged an injured Reverend Tucker in desperate retreat behind a young COFO staff member, Charlie Cobb. President Kennedy saw a photograph of a German shepherd biting Tucker in the next morning's
New York Times
, and sent word that Burke Marshall should do something about it. Medgar Evers earned thunderous ovation with a resettlement donation for an elderly minister evicted because he refused to withdraw his registration application. With Dick Gregory, James Bevel led audacious courthouse marches through barricades of fire trucks. When a week's national attention generated a question about Greenwood at the next White House press conference, President Kennedy said there did appear to be violations of federally protected rights, including the right to vote, but deflected judgment with an announcement that his Justice Department had just filed suit on the issue and “the court must decide.”

Later that same day, April 3, John Doar visited Bob Moses and his fellow COFO leaders in the Leflore County jail. The prisoners were overjoyed to be the Justice Department's new clients in a legal action just announced on national television by the President of the United States himself. They had refused bail for eight days to maintain public leverage toward precisely this result, and Moses understood Doar's statutory jargon well enough to know this was a long-awaited “(b) suit.” Instead of undertaking to prove by tedious accumulation a “pattern” of voting preference that could be explained only by race, as in the long-standing “(a) suit” against Theron Lynd in Hattiesburg, a (b) suit alleged specific acts of unlawful “intimidation” by local officials against would-be voters. The government's burden of proof was higher in a (b) suit, but the enforcement sanctions were correspondingly greater: criminal injunctions, federal arrest, and in extreme cases court-ordered replacement of offending registrars with federal substitutes.

Guards unexpectedly threw open the jail doors the next morning for the blinking COFO prisoners, who were slow to accept the good news of freedom. All charges dropped. No bail. Free to go. When they observed no tricks, high spirits spilled over into dancing and tears. At long last they felt the decisive intervention of the federal government behind the voting movement, but Moses intuited something amiss. He hung back apprehensively from the celebrations in Negro Greenwood until a wordless exchange of looks with John Doar killed any trace of euphoria that same day.

The moment was no better for Doar. He had made his arguments for the (b) suit inside the Justice Department, but Burke Marshall and Robert Kennedy went against him in a close decision governed less by risk of losing than by fear of winning. A (b) suit victory against Mississippi officials raised for them a “Meredith problem” of contempt on a potentially open-ended scale, causing a vacuum of public order that the U.S. government might be obliged to fill with soldiers and bureaucrats in numbers not seen since Reconstruction. This prospect was so grim that Kennedy and Marshall bargained instead to drop the (b) suit in exchange for release of the COFO leaders. For good measure, the federal government agreed to pay local distribution costs for the surplus food, which allowed county officials to say honestly that not a dime of local tax money supported protesting sharecroppers.

The overnight truce removed the two most inflammatory public conflicts between the federal and Mississippi governments, but Doar faced vigorous dissent from his own staff lawyers. Several of them had pushed to the point of rebellion once before, when the Kennedy Justice Department declined to file (b) suits in response to the forceful repressions that drove Moses from his original McComb project in 1961. This was politics again, the dissenting lawyers argued—a Democratic administration did not want to punish Democratic officeholders—to which Doar replied that in barely two years the administration had turned the South from a bastion of Democratic support into a region where the Kennedy name was heard most often as an epithet, largely because of Robert Kennedy's positions on civil rights. This was hardly a record of pure expediency, said Doar, who argued stoically for loyal duty in the chain of command.

First sight of Moses—only hours out of jail—made Doar swallow his planned explanations, knowing how conscientiously Moses had followed advice to build his work around voting rather than sit-ins, how steadfastly he had relied upon assurances that voting was the firmest ground of national authority in race relations. What the governments saw as a trade-off, the forlorn Moses saw as a catastrophe. Having sacrificed willingly and purposefully toward the goal of federally protected voting rights, he realized that the government surrendered that leverage to reduce public pressure. Worse, the deal punctured a Greenwood movement that had taken a year to build from nothing. It receded swiftly from that April 4, the same day Esther James won her libel judgment against Adam Clayton Powell far away in New York. Reporters evacuated Greenwood within a week, and previous conditions were restored in many respects. Local officials prudently supplied a courtesy bus between Wesley Chapel and the courthouse, so voting applicants could obtain rejections with less public friction.

 

B
EFORE THE LEADERS
made their way out of Greenwood by bus and carpool over the weekend of April 12, young June Johnson boldly told Moses that she would run away from home unless he found a way for her to attend SNCC's annual conference. Mesmerized through the upheaval, she fixed upon the notion that in Atlanta she might learn where these movement Negroes came from, and pestered Moses until he agreed to visit her mother. When she tried to sidestep the undertow by insisting that her daughter must have a suitable female chaperone, Johnson soon returned unfazed with Moses and the impeccable Annell Ponder, who offered to keep June in an apartment she retained from her college teaching days. Distress pulled Belle Johnson between the ominous comments she picked up as a maid in the homes of white families and the novel pleas of upstanding strangers on behalf of her headstrong daughter. When she finally relented, an ecstatic June Johnson made her first trip out of Mississippi.

Greenwood supplied sixty of some 350 students who gathered at Gammon Theological Seminary on the campus of Atlanta University. Some veterans from scattered outposts already displayed symptoms of nonviolent combat fatigue. These were heroes made suddenly fragile and young. Intensity spilled in all directions—between self-hatred and messianic pride, utopianism and fresh disillusionment, cynicism and psalms, race as a tissue of irrational fiction or a huge chamber of primary stuff. Remarkably, students wrestled openly with issues that for many generations baffled elders into avoidance. “It's still not clear to my mind, even on the voting issue, that Negroes will gain the vote rapidly enough,” Moses told the conference. “The squeeze is always the automation of the cotton crops, the inability of the Negro with his poor education to adapt to new technology, the unwillingness of the white people to train them, and the programs of the Citizens Council to move them out.” Against this tide of misery and oppression, there was little solace in the movement's distant goal of voting rights for the tiny minority of educated Negroes. Only a suffrage without slippery qualifications offered hope, said Moses, taking up the slogan of the African anticolonial movements: “one man, one vote.” Thinking out loud, he urged the students not to minimize the political cost of this demand to white Southerners, who would face a new electorate in which the controlling, marginal voter would be a Negro unable to read or write. No other Americans faced such a prospect, including those most attached to the image of potbellied, ignorant Southerners.

Moses told the conference that Greenwood had glimpsed a miracle when five hundred sharecroppers tried to register instead of five. “For us that's a big number,” he said. “That's a big breakthrough.” Nevertheless, he speculated that they needed “not five hundred but five thousand going down.” Even then, no one could predict the result nor be sure even where to look for guiding clues—in courtrooms, cotton prices, national news stories, churches full of fresh courage, or in the eyes of white policemen.

Back in Greenwood, Annell Ponder lost no time gathering up applicants for advanced citizenship training from Septima Clark. Belle Johnson flatly refused to allow her daughter June to make another long trip—at least until the end of the school year—but Fannie Lou Hamer signed up for the April workshop. In Hattiesburg, Victoria Gray learned of the teacher classes from Vernon Dahmer, who passed along what he heard from Hollis Watkins. With her brother and J. C. Fairley of the NAACP, Gray recently visited the Clyde Kennard home to gather supporting facts for a clemency petition, only to be stunned by the skeletal visage of Kennard himself in his mother's rocker. Without notice or announcement, Governor Barnett had “indefinitely suspended” his sentence, almost certainly to avoid the minor embarrassment of having Kennard die in state custody. Of all the colliding shocks the visitors absorbed—the joy of unexpected freedom, the horror of a young man eaten with cancer—what transfixed Victoria Gray was his gentle recollections of outrages committed against him. His unnatural lack of bitterness disturbed her to the point that she remarked on it with a hint of criticism. “No, I'm not angry,” Kennard replied. “Not anymore. I'm just very, very thankful to be home.” Afterward, Gray could not decide whether this was the serenity of approaching death or something else beyond hatred and fear. It reminded her of the strangely clear energy from young Hollis Watkins at her first mass meeting. A nagging attraction sealed her resolve to let Beauty Queen run itself for a week, and when no one else from southern Mississippi would go, she hitched a ride alone north to Greenwood and, with Fannie Lou Hamer, boarded Annell Ponder's bus bound for SCLC's retreat near Savannah.