Freedom Summer (17 page)

On Friday afternoon, Rita was in Philadelphia talking to FBI agents at the Delphia Courts Motel. Suddenly Sheriff Rainey pulled in to the concrete lot. Striding up to her, the tobacco chaw still in his cheek, Rainey barked, “What in the goddamn hell are you doin’ here?” Rita stood her ground. She would not leave until she saw the station wagon. As a menacing crowd gathered, Rainey invited Rita into his patrol car to talk. Sensing the woman’s mood, a highway patrol investigator warned Rita not to be too hard on the sheriff. His wife was in the hospital.

“Well, at least he still has a wife to be concerned about,” Rita said. “I ask him only to do me the courtesy of telling me where my husband is.”

“But the sheriff doesn’t know that.”

Rita persisted. “Sheriff Rainey, I feel that you know what happened. I’m going to find out if I can. If you don’t want me to find out, you’ll have to kill me.”

Rainey’s neck reddened. His fists clenched the steering wheel. “I’m very shocked,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you said that.” The sheriff then took Rita and Zellner to see the station wagon. While garage mechanics hooted Rebel yells, they eyed the blackened shell. Since the moment she heard the car had been found, Rita had known she would never see her husband again. Now she saw the proof. When she and Zellner left, a green pickup, the same one that had blocked the highway when they entered Philadelphia that morning, chased them out of town.

By week’s end, Mississippi had become a national obsession. Only weeks earlier, all civil rights news had come out of St. Augustine, Florida, where Martin Luther King and others were braving the Klan and white mobs to integrate public pools and beaches. But suddenly, TV, radio, and newspapers turned to the Magnolia State, reporting on its alarming poverty and backwoods violence. James Silver’s
Mississippi: The Closed Society
, calling the state “as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America,” hit best-seller lists. Folksingers from Judy Collins to Pete Seeger began scheduling summer concerts in Jackson, Greenville, and McComb. Dozens of doctors and lawyers signed up to spend July or August in Mississippi, and SNCC offices were flooded with calls from people hoping to volunteer, so many that Bob Moses spoke out: “A wave of untrained and unoriented volunteers into the project areas would serve only to disrupt what is now a well-controlled plan of operation throughout the state.” That afternoon in Chicago, a black man pulled his car over near the Calumet Express-way, took out a rifle, and shot himself in the head. A policeman found his note: “This is for the three in Philadelphia. They wouldn’t let me join the movement and I’m giving my brain this way.”

Under the national spotlight, Philadelphia was at a breaking point. Appalled by reporters and FBI “swarm[ing] upon our land like termites on old lumber,” people huddled on street corners, talking, whispering when strangers passed. Near the courthouse, a driver rammed a cameraman’s car. When the cameraman stepped out, so did the driver, clutching a hunting knife. Police intervened. Angry whites trailed
New York Times
reporter Claude Sitton, who sought safety through a chance connection. It happened that the small town making national news was the hometown of the
Times
’s managing editor. Learning how his town was behaving, Turner Catledge had written a friend, “Where, oh where, are those decent people I used to know? ” Now, as menacing whites approached Sitton, he and a
Newsweek
reporter ducked into the hardware store owned by Catledge’s uncle. “Be frank with you, Sitton,” the uncle said. “If you were a black man being whupped out here on the sidewalk, I might help you. But you got no business here. And I wouldn’t lift a finger if they was stomping the hell out of you.” As the two reporters drove toward their hotel, a car chased them to the county line.

On the fifth night of what everyone was now calling the “long hot summer,” Mississippi erupted. In town after town, volunteers were hounded by pickups, taunted by obscenities, arrested on trumped-up charges. Beer cans flew, and a SNCC car’s tires were slashed. In Hattiesburg, whites spread flyers through the black community warning: “Beware, good Negro citizens. When we come to get the agitators, stay away.” Near Jackson, someone broke into a church, doused the floor in kerosene, and tossed a match. In the midst of this mayhem, the most startling news came from the Delta. On Thursday, two volunteers had been abducted at gunpoint—“Want us to do to you what they did over in Philadelphia?”—and held at a gas station awaiting a bus to send them north. On the COFO log, it was just another in the lengthening list of incidents, but the following evening, the FBI arrested three white men in Itta Bena. SNCCs could barely believe the news. “You dig it?” a volunteer wrote home. “They are in a Southern jail!” That night, warned that a church would be bombed, Itta Bena cops surrounded it and kept all whites away.

 

 

Of all the Americans watching the news that week, none watched with greater alarm than the volunteers in Ohio, bound for Mississippi. SNCC structured its second training much like the first, yet volunteers found the mood on campus “like a funeral parlor.” From the first bulletins out of Neshoba County, frantic parents began calling, begging their children to come home. All week, psychiatrist Robert Coles met with anxious, terrified volunteers. Diagnosing panic, “near psychosis,” or just “character disorders,” Coles sent eight students home. But in the rest, he witnessed the power of idealism. “Suddenly hundreds of young Americans became charged with new energy and determination,” Coles wrote. “Suddenly I saw fear turn into toughness, vacillation into quiet conviction.” Many volunteers found their way to the chapel. Others crowded around TVs to watch Walter Cronkite, to see the car towed out of the swamp, to watch the ABC special
The Search in Mississippi
. When the program ended, volunteers joined hands and sang. “You know what we’re all doing,” one man told the group. “We’re moving the world.”

The first volunteers, trained for voter registration, had arrived with the confidence of young politicos. But this second group consisted of Freedom School teachers. Accustomed to working with children, they now faced the likelihood of being beaten, jailed, even murdered. All that week, they struggled to explain to terrified parents why they would not turn back.

On their last evening in the safe North, volunteers again filled the campus auditorium. A spectral déjà vu loomed over the meeting. The previous Friday night, the three missing men had sat in this same auditorium, sang these same songs, heard these same leaders. Now this second group would follow them down. First, however, they listened one last time to Bob Moses.

Sighing and starting in, Moses asked if anyone had read the book that was becoming trendy on campuses, Tolkien’s
Fellowship of the Ring
. It had much to say about good and evil, he said. Then pausing, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses, Moses said softly, “The kids are dead.” He hesitated, letting his words sink in. “When we heard the news at the beginning I knew they were dead. When we heard they had been arrested I knew there had been a frame-up. We didn’t say this earlier because of Rita, because she was really holding out for every hope. There may be more deaths. . . .” Across the auditorium, some looked at their feet, others remained riveted on the reluctant “Jesus of the movement.” “I justify myself because I’m taking risks myself,” Moses continued, “and I’m not asking people to do things I’m not willing to do. And the other thing is, people were being killed already, the Negroes of Mississippi, and I feel, anyway, responsible for their deaths. Herbert Lee killed, Louis Allen killed, five others killed this year. In some way you have to come to grips with that, know what it means. If you are going to do anything about it, other people are going to be killed.”

Moses knew what some were saying—that the summer project was “an attempt to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi.” Yet he saw a bigger, darker picture. “In our country we have some real evil, and the attempt to do something about it involves enormous effort . . . and therefore tremendous risks. If for any reason you’re hesitant about what you’re getting into, it’s better for you to leave. Because what has got to be done has to be done in a certain way, or otherwise it won’t get done.” Volunteers sat, some faces streaked with tears, others just shining on Moses, pinning their faith in America, in humanity, on his words.

“I would have gone anywhere,” one woman recalled. “I would have done anything he asked me to do, I trusted him so much.”

After a few more comments, Moses slowly walked out. No one said a word, no one took the stage. Volunteers sat in the stillness. Finally from the back of the auditorium, a lone woman sang:

Across the auditorium, people crossed arms, held hands, joined in.

Many stayed up all night. A laundry room discussion lasted until 4:00 a.m. Others just wandered. A few stood in phone booths, arguing with parents. “If someone in Nazi Germany had done what we’re doing,” one woman shouted, “then your brother would still be alive!” A Long Island woman heard her father yell, “You’re killing your mother! Do you know what it takes to make a child?” But all Heather Tobis could think was, “Do you know what it takes to make a child in Mississippi?” The following evening, Tobis was on one of two buses heading south. Songs again paced the miles through Kentucky and into Tennessee. The buses reached Memphis at 5:00 a.m. Sunday. And there was Bob Moses to help them make connections to Greyhounds stopping in Clarksdale, Vicksburg, Ruleville. . . .

 

 

A hot, syrupy haze hung above a sea of knee-high cotton when, at 2:00 p.m., the Greyhound pulled into Ruleville. On that crawling Sunday, the Delta town of 2,000 slumbered, but when twenty volunteers stepped out with luggage, boxes, and bedrolls, Ruleville awoke in a foul mood. Across from the bus station, several brawny white men, beer cans in hand, stared down the newcomers. Seconds later, a woman wearing pink hair curlers drove past the bus and waved her middle finger. The sheriff’s pickup pulled up with a German shepherd in back, snarling, tearing at his cage. Next came the mayor, a short, jowly man stepping from his car, wearing a straw hat. When several black families drove up, another standoff looked likely, but then Fannie Lou Hamer strode onto the scene. The sturdy woman directed host families to take everyone to her house. There they met volunteers who had arrived the previous Sunday. All enjoyed an enormous lunch, then cooled off beneath the billowing pecan tree out front. Filling Hamer’s lawn, fanning themselves in the shade, newcomers learned that voter registration was under way. Canvassers had been chased out of the “tough town” of Drew, but some locals had already gone to the courthouse in Indianola. And fifty kids had signed up for Freedom School.

That evening, volunteers and locals gathered at the Williams Chapel, just around the corner from Hamer’s house. Four days earlier, a Molotov cocktail had charred the small church, but flames somehow missed plastic sacks of gasoline laid around the perimeter. The Ruleville fire department put out the blaze, leaving blackened concrete and a congregation feeling blessed. By the time Sunday’s mass meeting began, a hundred people were crammed into a single room. Bare bulbs cast thin shadows on a photo of Jesus and a banner reading “We Shall Overcome.”

“Be strong and of good courage,” the preacher urged. “God sometimes likes us to feel we can’t go any further . . .”

“Yes, yes.”

“That’s because God only helps us with the impossible things we can’t achieve by ourselves . . .”

“Yes, yes.”

When the preacher finished, a volunteer from Illinois announced the FBI arrests in Itta Bena. The FBI had not acted “because it wanted to,” he said. “They did it because they had to. . . . The whole nation is watching you and admiring you, and you must keep on and you must stand up.” Then came the songs, swelling and surging. Uplifted faces, black and white, glistened as they sang.

Nearly five hundred volunteers were now in Mississippi. A few would be gone within a week, leaving in terror or despair. The rest would stay on for what would be either a breakthrough summer or, as the
New York Times
now feared, a “racial holocaust.” That Sunday morning in Neshoba County, black parishioners prayed in makeshift pews beside the rubble of the Mt. Zion Church. FBI agents again piled into skiffs to drag the Pearl River. In Philadelphia, agents were preparing to question Sheriff Rainey. Posters with mug shots of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney below the words “Missing—Call FBI” were now posted all over the South. Rita Schwerner was on her way to meet President Johnson, while mayors throughout Mississippi talked of heading to Washington, D.C., to protest “the invasion.” At dusk, a candlelight vigil for the missing men marched in silence outside the White House. Back in Mississippi, a few more volunteers, having driven their own cars from Ohio, arrived in their towns. All the way down, one kept saying, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s still the United States of America.”