Freedom Summer (22 page)

 

 

The week that opened with the revival of dying buildings closed with events equally unimaginable a month before. In June, it would have been easy to foresee the mob scene in Laurel when blacks tried to eat at a Burger Chef, or the brawl in Greenwood when Silas McGhee tried to integrate the Leflore Theater. But who would have predicted what occurred in Jackson on July 5? That Sunday afternoon, NAACP leaders flew to Mississippi to test the Civil Rights Act. Expecting to be arrested or beaten, they were met by police and escorted to the Heidelberg Hotel downtown. Joined by Jackson’s local heroes, the black men walked into the hotel, up to the desk—and checked in. A white bellboy took their bags. They ate lunch in the Green Room. “The food was good, the service was good, and the attitude was good,” said a Jackson minister whose home had been shot into just twelve days earlier. Other tests—at the Sun n’ Sand Motel and the King Edward Hotel—also went off without incident. “I think we can see helpful signs that Mississippi will get in step with the nation,” the minister said. The manager of the Sun n’ Sand summed up the grudging attitude of much of Mississippi: “We are just going to abide by the law.”

As a new week began, NAACP leaders set out to tour Mississippi and make more tests. Caught up in the same spirit, SNCC readied staffers to work in the Klan hotbed of McComb. And volunteers prepared for more canvassing and the opening of Freedom Schools across the state. Neither the NAACP, the volunteers, nor those well schooled in Mississippi violence had any notion that the holiday was over.

—Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues”

CHAPTER SIX

 

 

Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town along the Singing River near the Gulf of Mexico, had seen its share of turmoil that summer. Volunteers were in town only a few days when a meeting hall was firebombed and several were arrested. With tension rising, blacks and whites were buying guns, and one white was found carrying a grenade. Rumors of black children poisoned by candy had only been rumors, yet Moss Point remained a racial tripwire, taut, edgy, just waiting for something horrible to happen.

“Tonight the sickness struck,” a Moss Point volunteer wrote home on July 6. That Monday evening, three hundred people packed into the Knights of Pythias Hall, its front door still blackened from the Molotov cocktail. Speaking to the crowd, a stocky, bespectacled man was rising to a fever pitch. Lawrence Guyot, beaten along with Fannie Lou Hamer the year before, was furious. Like Greenville, his native Gulf Coast was known for relative tolerance, yet despite steady canvassing, few had come out to register. “What will it take to make you people move?” Guyot shouted. “A rape? A shooting? A murder? What will it take? ” Other speeches followed before Freedom Songs soothed tensions. Meanwhile in nearby Pascagoula, three men crammed into a small car. They barely had room for the rifle.

Back at the Knights Hall, the crowd had arrived at every meeting’s final song. Glowing, ecstatic faces sang together, arms clasped, swaying like lilies in the field. The lone cop on hand, concluding the meeting was over, drove away. Then as a final “We Shall Overcome” filled the hall, the car sped past. Three sharp cracks rang out. Near the window, a black woman crumpled to the floor. A fan toppled, its whirring blades slamming into the concrete like a machine gun firing. In the chaos, one volunteer saw the fallen woman “lying on the ground clutching her stomach. She was so still and looked like a statue with a tranquil smile on her face.” Several men bolted from the hall, hopped in a car, and chased the attackers into a gas station. But one white leveled the rifle, sending blacks scurrying. When police arrived, they arrested the blacks and let everyone else go. At Singing River Hospital, the woman was listed in “good” condition, but the shots sent notice that despite the hope, the singing, the new Civil Rights Act, this was still Mississippi, still the “long, hot summer,” and it was just July.

June had been a blanket, but July was an oven, melting, igniting, engulfing. Timeless patterns governed July in Mississippi. The first was the relentless humidity, the sultry nights never drying the earth before the sun rose again to turn on the steam. The second pattern was the cycle of heat and rain, heat and rain. Both patterns were ingrained in locals who knew when to get chores done, when a blazing sky made a nap seem in order, when thunderheads would hover on the horizon like anvils, and when marble-sized rain-drops would turn the red earth to mud, cooling the oven to a sticky 80 degrees or so. But volunteers were still learning the patterns. It was not unusual to find them alone on the street at noon. Chris Williams could not understand why no male in Mississippi wore shorts, and neither could he. Nor could volunteers swim anywhere, the rivers being muddy or snake-infested and the public pools off-limits to “invaders.” Day after day the heat mounted, turning skin into hot leather and tempers into fuses. With air-conditioning in only the richest homes, relief came solely when leaden clouds unleashed their fury, releasing a collective sigh from the people and the land. And as volunteers gradually learned the patterns, Mississippi unleashed its own fury.

That week, a Confederate flag flew outside the elegant Robert E. Lee Hotel in Jackson. A sign in the door read, “Closed in Despair—Civil Rights Bill Unconstitutional.” (The hotel opened a few days later as a private club.) Across town, city officials fenced off a park after whites complained about black kids running through it shouting, “I’m free!” Elsewhere in Mississippi, pools and libraries closed. Restaurant owners drove blacks off at gunpoint. Governor Paul Johnson predicted more violence “unless these people get out of the state and go back to their own problems at home.” And a few hours after the Moss Point shooting, flames torched three more churches in Mississippi. The pattern was now heat and fire, heat and fire. But as this merciless climate descended, it could not smother those too innocent, too committed, to heed the mayhem all around them.

Warm, soft rains had greeted Fran O’Brien when a Greyhound bus left her on the bluffs above the Mississippi River in the Civil War siege site of Vicksburg. Being from southern California, where it never rains in summer, Fran immediately sensed Mississippi as exotic. Yet once inside COFO’s Freedom House, she felt right at home among her lifelong friends—children. A black woman named Bessie, her husband killed by the Klan, her house recently bombed, was living with her six children amid the boxes and clutter. While other volunteers roamed the Freedom House that Sunday afternoon, the children flocked around the newcomer with the pale face, dark, curly hair, and sweet smile, begging Fran to do
something
with them on a rainy day. And so, fresh from an Oregon campus and two long bus rides, twenty-one-year-old Fran O’Brien began her summer. In the next seven weeks, she would meet Martin Luther King. She would have a terrifying encounter with the Klan. She would turn the red clay of Mississippi into craft projects, and although too modest to claim the role, she would represent creativity in its ceaseless battle with destruction.

Fran cared little about the politics of Freedom Summer. Instead, she saw the project as a chance to test her Christian values, and to teach. Bashful around adults, Fran came alive with children. In high school and at Pacific University in Oregon, the slim, demure woman had helped out in classrooms, doing crafts and drama with minimal materials, precisely what was planned in Freedom Schools. Learning of the summer project from her United Campus Christian Fellowship, Fran took out an application, but could not make up her mind. Finally, a scene from the film
Judgment at Nuremberg
sent her south. When a judge asked a German housekeeper what
she
had done under Hitler, Fran asked herself how she would feel if, in thirty years, someone asked what she had done during the civil rights movement and she had to say, “Nothing.”

A long letter home to Whittier, California, surprised her parents. “I hope you’re not
too
upset,” Fran wrote. “I also hope our ceiling is still in tact.” Her father, a labor attorney, felt proud. Her mother, a former social worker, tried to be supportive but kept asking, “Are you sure this is what you want to do? ” Fran was sure. Her letter made it “clearly understood that this is my project.” She had saved $100 and, throwing in $57.30 from her tax return, insisted on paying her own expenses. After attending a wedding, she had boarded a Greyhound for Spokane, transferred again and again, and arrived at the Ohio campus on the Sunday the three men disappeared. Throughout that grim week, Fran had tried to concentrate on workshops, yet news from Mississippi kept interrupting.

On Monday morning, when Rita Schwerner had sent volunteers to write their congressmen, Fran had found a different way to face the danger. California’s was the training’s largest cohort, and Fran figured no one would miss her if she took care of other business. Her niece had a birthday in July, and “it occurred to me that I might not be around.” While alarm spread across campus, Fran walked into town and bought a toy teakettle, shipped it to California, then went back to the training, still determined to go to Mississippi. Vicksburg would be her site. She knew it only as a battlefield.

While rain tapped on windows of the Freedom House that Sunday, Fran sat at a broken-down piano, playing all the songs the kids knew. Other volunteers ventured into neighboring streets, but Fran spent all afternoon singing, inventing games, spinning stories. That same day in the black section of Vicksburg, three kids playing in a field found a dead body. In the coming week, a volunteer’s car windshield would be shattered, Freedom School students would be struck by stones, and a nearby church would go up in flames. Fran O’Brien would only hear of each incident. She did not bother about what adults did to other adults. There were children present.

The day after Fran’s arrival, volunteers spruced up the Vicksburg Community Center. All day, kids came up the long, potholed driveway to flock around the newcomers, begging to help but mostly getting in the way. Fran’s classes would not start until the following Monday. In the meantime, she struggled to settle into her host home. The elderly woman who had taken her in seemed to want nothing to do with her. If Fran or her roommate took a seat in the living room, the woman moved to the kitchen. If they followed, the woman went back to the living room. “It was just the way she’d grown up,” Fran remembered. “You don’t sit down in the parlor with white folks; that’s being uppity.” Feeling as if she were chasing the woman around her own house, Fran stayed in her room as much as possible. On the evening President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, she was at the Freedom House. The building was crammed with volunteers and neighbors who did not have televisions. “He’s signing!” someone shouted and everyone ran to the blue-lit TV, cheered, sang “We Shall Overcome” and then, for fun, “We Have Overcome.”

Four days later, Fran began classes in the refurbished community center. The building still had no plumbing or electricity. Dappled light filtered through windows as Fran helped kids weave on cardboard looms. Later the class crowded close as she read stories, her serene face and California accent riveting each child. That afternoon, as a mob in Neshoba County menaced touring NAACP leaders, Fran played outdoor games with the children. After dinner, while shots rang out in Moss Point, she and other teachers planned the coming week. Just before going to bed, Fran wrote her mother.

By the second week of July, everyone assumed Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were dead—everyone, that is, except their mothers. In her Manhattan apartment, Carolyn Goodman found herself drawn to her son’s room. Silent and sorrowful, she sat staring at clothes, books, folk music LPs, wondering what Andy had thought of each, fighting the thought that she would never know. One afternoon, a man called, saying he had Andy in a Brooklyn hotel and would return him for $15,000. The man grew enraged when asked to provide proof and never called again. Since the disappearance, the Goodmans had received scores of letters offering prayers, condolences, even a $500 check “which will help you discover the killer of your beautiful Andy.” A ten-year-old girl had written to say she had named her cat Andrew Goodman because “I think Andrew Goodman is a heroe [
sic
] and I think something should be named after him.” Of all the letters, the Goodmans were especially comforted by one from a mother in Meridian, Mississippi. Apologizing for her state, the woman asked, “Who are these fiends and where do they live who would come out of the darkness and kill? ”

A thousand miles south, Fannie Lee Chaney had taken to pacing outside her home in Meridian. Each night she walked until the sky lightened, circling the house, wearing a path in the grass, humming “Rock of Ages” or some other spiritual. Each evening after work, she cleaned obsessively, mop-ping the kitchen floor three or four times, washing the dishes, drying them, washing them again. She refused to let twelve-year-old Ben go down the street to play ball. One evening she got a call from a young woman who told of recently giving birth to “J. E.’s” daughter. Skeptical, she had mother and child take a taxi to her house. One look at the baby, and Fannie Lee Chaney knew she was a grandmother. She took the baby in her arms, wishing she could do the same with her own son.

And still there was no trace of the men. Mississippi’s raw, rugged land could not have been better suited for hiding a body. Murky rivers gave up nothing to the grappling hook. Swamps kept their secrets behind protruding trees, beneath black waters. Tangled vineroot defied anyone to tear through it. No trace. The FBI lab in New Orleans examined items from the burned station wagon—dirt and debris, keys, a charred wristwatch stopped at 12:45—but found “no evidence of human remains.” The latest lead, a grave along the Chunky River south of Neshoba County, turned out to contain a dead horse. With hope disappearing, America’s obsession with Mississippi was turning to other concerns—to the mounting crisis in Vietnam, to the upcoming Republican National Convention, to the topless swimsuit craze. No longer in the media spotlight, some in Mississippi again felt the impunity of “the good ol’ days” when what happened in Mississippi stayed there. And the effort to stop Freedom Summer, to drive the “invaders” out, to preserve “our way of life,” exploded with a vengeance.