Freedom Summer (29 page)

As volunteers struggled to adapt, SNCC leaders were starting to wonder. Precisely what had Freedom Summer accomplished? Freedom Schools were overenrolled, bursting with enthusiasm. A dozen community centers were offering literacy workshops, health classes, day care, sewing lessons, story hours. . . . Yet SNCC’s larger purpose—voter registration—was treading water. Bob Moses had done the math. Despite all the Freedom Days, a SNCC report charted the dismal results: “Canton—Number of those who took the test—22; Number of those who passed—0. Hattiesburg: Number of those who took the test—70. Number of those who passed—5. Greenwood—Number of those who took the test—123. Number of those who passed—2.” In all, of the fifteen hundred blacks who had gone to courthouses, only a handful outside Panola County had successfully registered. If any political progress was to be made in the remaining month, it had to follow the only road left open—the Freedom Party road. This time, however, the stage would not be Mississippi but all of America. On July 19, Moses sent a ten-page memorandum to all staff and canvassers regarding the “high degree of probability that we will not be prepared for the national Democratic Convention.”

Since its founding in March, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had survived on dreams. Fannie Lou Hamer and three other MFDP candidates had run for Congress in the June primary, yet Atlantic City remained the party’s target. Now just over a month remained until the gavel at the Democratic National Convention. There, Freedom Democrats would challenge Mississippi’s all-white delegation. Before a national television audience, blacks could detail Mississippi’s brutal denial of democracy. And with enough support, perhaps even an outpouring of telegrams and phone calls, the MFDP could win a floor fight and be seated, sending Mississippi’s “official” delegation home in disgrace. But it would take names—Moses was still hoping for 400,000—names signed up as Freedom Democrats. At midsummer, Moses had tallied just 21,431 signatures on the parallel party’s roll sheet. At the present rate, just 60,000 would be enrolled when the convention began. It was not hard to imagine a challenge to the challenge—what about all the other blacks in Mississippi? They must not care about voting. Faced with failure, Moses now turned consensus into decree. There would be fewer Freedom Days, which cost too much in bail money and manpower. Instead, “
everyone
who is not working in Freedom Schools or Community Centers
must
devote all their time to organizing for the convention challenge.”

Moses lowered his sights to 200,000 signatures. Even by SNCC standards, it was a quixotic goal, but Moses, as usual, had thought things out. SNCC would flood black quarters with Freedom Registration Centers—in stores, bars, beauty parlors, barbershops, restaurants, pool halls, garages, and churches. Sound trucks would roam backstreets, blaring announcements of the campaign. Radio and newspaper ads would spread the word. “Big name” folksingers were already in Mississippi, holding concerts to promote the MFDP. More, including Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, were said to be on their way. Then there would be “canvassing, which you all know about.” And in a few days, Martin Luther King would tour Mississippi, putting his high profile behind the Freedom Democratic Party.

Moses’ midcourse correction shifted Freedom Summer into high gear. Freedom School teachers began canvassing on weekends. Rollicking mass meetings were now held night after night. Sunday-morning church became obligatory as volunteers—men in shirts and ties, women in stockings and heels—waited until deacons gathered collection plates, then stood to explain the Freedom Democratic Party. They would be outside after the service to sign up everyone. Everyone! The goal of 200,000 signatures—35,000 new names per week—also sent volunteers to the far reaches of each plantation and each day.

 

 

Even in late July, morning comes early to the Mississippi Delta. Above the pancake land, the spreading sky turns salmon pink by 5:00 a.m. Here in the summer of 1964, as they had for decades at that hour, buses roam the plantations surrounding Greenwood, stopping to pick up “hands” to chop cotton. Yet for the first time ever, white hands are among the black. Standing beside shacks glowing with kerosene lamps, volunteers make their pitch to tired men in overalls, to weary women in housedresses and bandannas.

No, there’s no danger in signing
this
paper.

Your name will not be listed in any newspaper.

The boss man will never know. Most whites don’t even know what the MFDP is. What is it? Here’s a brochure (and a flashlight): “The Democratic National Convention is a very big meeting in August. It is a very important meeting because people in the Democratic Party choose the person they want to run for President of the United States. . . . Mississippi sends a group of people to this national meeting. This summer we are going to send a Freedom group to the national meeting.”

The brochure goes on to explain democracy from the ground up. There will be precinct meetings all over the state, then county conventions, and finally a state convention in Jackson to choose delegates who will travel to Atlantic City. But as sharecroppers and canvassers board the bus, as it rumbles through the cotton fields, there is no time to go into all that. The pitch continues. With MFDP registration, there is no poll tax to pay. And no impossible tangle from the state constitution to interpret. Just fill in your name, address, and how long you’ve lived in Leflore County. The forms will be kept secret. No one will know. Sign here.

The pitch is as simple as the brochure, yet resistance remains.

“I got to think about it.”

“I’m too old to fool with it.”

“Not me. I’m the only one my children’s
got
. I’m all they
have
.”

Volunteers have not surrendered their summer just to take “I got to think about it” for an answer. Again and again they return to shacks, show up at church, ride the dawn buses, and wear down resistance. If it takes 35,000 new signatures each week, they will give their August as they have given their July. But the obstacles run far deeper than the fear.

No one doubts the convention in Atlantic City will be a show of party unity, nominating an incumbent president with a 70 percent approval rating. Yet the Freedom Democrat challenge threatens to splinter the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson has already enraged the South with his Civil Rights Act. If Democrats seat a black delegation from Mississippi and send whites home, can he win any states south of the Mason-Dixon line? Won’t a convention floor fight based on race make the GOP tussles in San Francisco look like playground spats? And won’t Barry Goldwater be the next president of the United States? News of the upcoming challenge is already salting old wounds, recalling 1948 when “Dixiecrats” stormed out of the Democratic convention in protest of the civil rights platform. The
Washington Post
warns of a “battle royal.” The
Los Angeles Times
predicts a “potentially explosive dilemma.” SNCC and the MFDP, however, are ready for a fight, a fair fight.

For the next five weeks, Freedom Democrats will carefully follow all the rules. They will sign every party form, obey every party bylaw, file every necessary paper. Armed with signatures, fired by the horror stories ready to be shared with America, backed by hundreds ready to rally on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk, they feel certain. They
will
be heard. They
will
be seated. They
will
represent Mississippi. With each new signature, they are still more confident. It just takes names. Sign here.

 

 

The making of a parallel political party took more than certitude. Organization and leadership were also vital, and for these, Freedom Democrats relied on SNCC project directors. During Freedom Summer’s opening weeks, a few, like Chris Williams’s “great leader” in Batesville, had to be replaced. A similar breakdown occurred in Vicksburg, where white volunteers rebelled against a young black leader they nicknamed “Papa Doc,” bringing Bob Moses to soothe tensions. But by late July, SNCC had replaced its weaker links, solidifying a corps of black men still in their early twenties yet coordinating manpower like five-star generals.

In Holly Springs, Ivanhoe Donaldson supervised one of Freedom Summer’s most energetic projects. Donaldson had first come south in 1962, leaving Michigan State to make dozens of runs in a truck carrying supplies for ravenous Delta sharecroppers. Thin and wiry, constantly on edge, this son of a New York cop suffered from migraines that sometimes had him lying on the couch in the project office, head in his hands. Tension sometimes led Donaldson to shout at volunteers, especially women. “He has trouble relating to white women,” many said. But no one questioned his dedication nor dared defy his rules. Anyone who broke a rule, Donaldson told volunteers on the first day of summer, “will have to pack his bag and get his ass out of town. We’re here to work! The time for bullshitting is past!” And there would be no surrender to fear. Early that summer when a black volunteer was arrested for “blocking traffic,” Donaldson ordered him back on the street. “We can’t let them think that we are afraid,” he said. “You know that. Go right back to the spot where you were arrested.” Like many other SNCCs, Donaldson had opposed the summer project, convinced it would destroy “the one thing where the Negro can stand first.” But once it began, he ran his project the same way he drove, one foot on the brake, the other on the accelerator, often topping one hundred miles per hour.

Donaldson was known and respected in Holly Springs, but the Delta’s project director was known all over Mississippi and would soon be notorious across the nation. Tall and lanky, with huge eyes and a savage wit, Stokely Carmichael followed his intellect from his native Trinidad to the South Bronx, then on to Howard University. Like Bob Moses, Carmichael had majored in philosophy, and the two sometimes discussed Gödel’s theorems late into the night. Like Moses, Carmichael had won a full graduate scholarship to Harvard, though he turned it down to remain on the front lines. And like Moses, Carmichael seemed to be everywhere that summer—at every meeting, every rally, every protest. Volunteers struggled to keep up with his lightning-quick references to Frantz Fanon and other philosophers of black liberation. Based in the Greenwood office, where his charisma earned him the nickname “Stokely Starmichael,” Carmichael was more relaxed than his peers. He openly flirted with women, leading to speculation on how many he slept with. His constant jive kept the office as loose as his rules. Most project offices had code names on the CB network, names based on John—John Schwarz (Shaw); John August (Clarksdale), etc. But because Carmichael called everyone “Sweets,” he named his CB base “Greenwood Sweets.” Every week or so, when a package arrived at the office addressed to FASC, Carmichael would gather volunteers to share the latest gifts from the group he called “The Friends and Admirers of Stokely Carmichael.” “Young man,” he would say to a volunteer. “Tell FASC what you want and FASC will see to it.” Opening the package, he would pass out toothpaste, candy, insect repellent, and other goodies mailed from “friends and admirers” volunteers could only guess at. But Carmichael was also fearless to a fault. Everyone knew how many times he had been arrested, how he was on the picket lines on Freedom Day, and in the Greenwood jail right along with them. In the coming years, when his “Black Power!” chant terrified white America, when he led an all-black SNCC, some whites would feel rejected, but Greenwood volunteers would come to his defense. Stokely had been there for them.

In contrast to Donaldson and Carmichael, Hollis Watkins was modest and unassuming, with a sweet Mississippi drawl that melted into a beautiful tenor when Freedom Songs broke out. The twelfth child of Pike County sharecroppers, Watkins had left Mississippi for California before coming home hoping to join the Freedom Rides. He arrived too late—“the Riders,” including Carmichael, had been arrested in Jackson and sent to Parchman Farm. Instead of becoming a Freedom Rider, Watkins had joined Bob Moses in McComb. A SNCC staffer ever since, Watkins was known as a soulful presence, as smooth as molasses. Yet when put in charge of two dozen volunteers in Holmes County, he imposed Freedom Summer’s most ironclad rules. No going out at night unless to a mass meeting. No drinking—not even a beer. No one should even visit the little country store across Highway 49 in Mileston. Who knew what redneck might show up? “I felt personally responsible for the lives of everyone who worked on my project,” Watkins remembered. “These young people had come down here, and if they were serious and dedicated to the cause, they should be willing to make sacrifices.” Watkins’s final rule was the harshest—no dating. Period. The Holmes County project was just two days old when a female volunteer went out with a local white man. The next day, Watkins took her to Jackson and had her reassigned. Watkins’s friend and peer, the equally congenial Charlie Cobb, faced the same problem in Greenville. The Mississippi river town may have been moderate, but interracial dating remained taboo. When cops arrested a black man spotted hand in hand with a white volunteer, Cobb gave the couple a choice: dating or the summer project. “They both left together,” Cobb remembered. “I never saw them again.”

Dedicated, brilliant, determined, such was the staff Muriel Tillinghast joined in mid-July when she became SNCC’s only female project director in Mississippi. Three weeks earlier, Muriel had been afraid to leave the Greenville office. Now she was expected to run it. In turning over his command, Charlie Cobb had few reservations. “Muriel was tough, you could see that,” Cobb remembered. “And I knew her reputation at Howard. She was smart, and she had experience in the sit-in movement, which doesn’t tell you how she’s going to be as an organizer in rural Mississippi but it’s a good bet.” Before leaving to tour Freedom Schools, Cobb tested Muriel in Issaquena County. The snake-shaped, bayou-infested region ran along the Mississippi River just south of Greenville. Like some remote feudal fiefdom, Issaquena was desperately poor, patrolled by the shotgun and the pickup, and as brutal as any county in Mississippi. Blacks made up more than half the population, yet none were registered to vote. In early July, two white volunteers had risked their lives to “crack” this plantation stronghold. They were instantly spotted by their pace. “We had never seen anybody walk that fast in the summer in the Mississippi Delta,” sharecropper Unita Blackwell remembered.