Freedom Summer (30 page)

The twentieth century came to Issaquena County the night the volunteers called a meeting at the Moon Lake Baptist Church in the county seat of Mayersville (pop. 700). Standing before rows of black faces, a pale man from Brooklyn spoke until it became clear that no one could understand a word he said. His counterpart from Virginia took over, telling locals of the movement, the summer project, their right to vote. At the back of the church, a terrified deacon sat moaning—“Oh Lord, Lord . . .” but Unita Blackwell felt “like a big drenching rain had finally come after a long dry spell.” Blackwell, a sturdy, towering woman who had worked her entire life in the cotton fields, soon went with SNCC to the courthouse. She “failed” the registration test and was instantly thrown off the plantation, never to pick another boll of cotton. The movement was her new job. Two weeks later, when Muriel Tillinghast came to Issaquena County, Blackwell became her pupil, her disciple, her friend.

Seated in Blackwell’s shack, surrounded by fields of waist-high cotton, Muriel found the voice of her ancestors. She began holding forth on voting rights, citizenship, and black history. “For someone so young and petite, she had a serene strength about her,” Blackwell remembered. When Muriel called herself a teacher, Blackwell assumed she taught school, yet “Muriel taught things more rare and precious.” Blackwell was soon gathering a dozen or more in her home or in church to hear Muriel talk about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and W. E. B. DuBois. Muriel read from black poetry and literature. She told them about her own family, the grandmother who had walked from Texas to D.C. and the proud generations since. “What Muriel Tillinghast really taught us was to have pride in ourselves,” Blackwell remembered. Though impressed by her knowledge and spark, locals were startled by Muriel’s hair. None had ever seen what would soon be called an “Afro.” Some women giggled behind Muriel’s back, and Blackwell constantly urged her to straighten her “nappy-headed” hair. “Okay, I’ll do that sometime,” Muriel would reply. Or “I’ve got to wash it.” But Muriel let her hair grow, and within a year, Blackwell and countless other African-American women were wearing theirs the same way.

Not long after Muriel arrived in Issaquena County, calls from Greenville to Jackson reported: “Things getting pretty tight in Issaquena—whites circling certain key houses, churches.” Yet Blackwell and others continued to take Muriel and her volunteers into their homes, feeding them, sheltering them, talking, learning, sharing strength. “They recognized we were in their hands,” Muriel remembered. “We couldn’t have lasted a single day without them.” On July 20, whites fired nine shots into a car parked outside a mass meeting. Neighboring Sharkey County, where Muriel was also working, was equally feudal, equally hotheaded. When a black volunteer’s car broke down there, a cop arrested the man and smashed his skull with a blackjack. “Go back to Greenville,” the cop said, “and tell all the niggers in Greenville that they beat a nigger’s ass in Sharkey County.” But by then, locals were talking about opening a Freedom School. And more and more blacks were signing Freedom Democrat forms, singing in church, and coming out to meet Muriel and her staff. A Freedom Democratic Party precinct meeting was scheduled at the Moon Lake Baptist Church for July 26, the day after Martin Luther King’s Mississippi tour would end. Unita Blackwell would be there, and so would her teacher, her friend, who now knew she could handle Mississippi.

 

 

Shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 21, Robert Kennedy phoned the White House. Another crisis in a summer of crises was pending. Martin Luther King was on a plane to Mississippi. “If he gets killed,” Kennedy told LBJ, “it creates all kinds of problems. Not just being dead, but also a lot of other kind of problems.” The president instantly phoned J. Edgar Hoover. Though the FBI director loathed King and was already bugging his hotel rooms, he recognized the danger. “There are threats that they’re going to kill him,” Hoover said. Johnson shuddered at the thought. “Talk to your man in Jackson,” the president said, “and tell him that we think that it would be the better part of wisdom, in the national interest, that they work out some arrangement where somebody’s in front of him and behind him when he goes over there. . . . So that we won’t find another burning car. It’s a hell of a lot easier to watch a situation like that before it happens than it is to call out the Navy after it happens.”

King had not been to Mississippi since Medgar Evers’s funeral in June 1963. There he had kept a low profile, but when the procession threatened to break into a riot, he had hustled to the airport. King’s loyalists were terrified of Mississippi. “We tried to warn SNCC,” Andrew Young noted. “We were all Southerners and we knew the depth of the depravity of southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi.” In the thirteen months since he had fled Jackson, King had seen his fame soar. He had shared his dream with a quarter million people on the Washington mall and was about to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He had the highest approval ratings of any Negro in America. Yet to whites in Mississippi, he was “Martin Luther Coon.” Billboards along Mississippi highways showed King at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the caption reading “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” Mississippi newspapers wrote of “the unspeakable Martin Luther King,” and “The Reverend Dr. Extremist Agitator Martin Luther King Junior.”

King knew the risks in going to Mississippi. All that weekend before his departure, he wrestled with thoughts of dying. “I want to live a normal life,” he told an aide. After pleading with King not to go, his associates enlisted one of his former professors to tell him it would be “just suicidal for you to go there.” King accepted Bob Moses’ invitation anyway. He did not know that SNCCs sometimes mocked him as “de Lawd.” He had been warned that a “guerilla group” would try to kill him in Mississippi, but he considered SNCC’s summer project “the most creative thing happening today in civil rights.” And he knew the Freedom Democratic Party deserved his support. His first stop would be Greenwood.

Blacks in the volatile cotton capital could scarcely believe the news. The man whose photo graced so many walls in so many shacks was coming to be among them. Where would Dr. King speak in Greenwood? Where would he stay? On the day before King’s arrival, homes were dusted, mopped, swept. Women spent the afternoon in hot kitchens, pumping out fried chicken and cornbread, pies and cakes. Preachers argued over whose church the reverend should grace. The following morning, reporters swarmed all over the quarters. Arriving in Jackson on a flight from Atlanta, King spoke on the shimmering tarmac, saying he had come “to demonstrate the absolute support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for this summer project . . . [and] support the tremendous quest for the right to vote on the part of the people of the state of Mississippi in the midst of bombings, murders, and many other difficult experiences.” When King finished, an FBI agent stepped up, introduced himself, and remained with him, waiting while he met with SNCC and COFO leaders, then boarding his connecting flight.

Charcoal clouds loomed above the Delta as King, escorted by four FBI agents, began his stroll past the shakedown hovels, along the gravel roads, through the heart of the raw poverty and rising anger of black Greenwood. Trailing admirers and reporters, King stopped traffic, turned heads, and astonished those who had never heard him in person. As rain began to pelt down, his spine-tingling baritone rolled across streets lined with pool halls and juke joints. Standing on a bench outside the Savoy Café, he waved his arms above the crowd. “You must not allow anybody to make you feel you are not significant,” he said. “Every Negro has worth and dignity. Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person.” King delighted followers by stepping inside a pool hall and interrupting a game. “Gentlemen, I will be brief,” he said. While young men stood, cue sticks in hand, King spoke about the need to “make it clear to everybody in the world that Negroes desire to be free and to be a registered voter.” Moving back to the street, King urged people to sign Freedom Democratic Party papers, papers volunteers handed out in his wake.

That evening, King spoke at a small church, then headed for the Elks Hall. Waiting in the audience were Chris Williams, who had come with other Batesville volunteers, and Greenwood’s Freedom Day picketers, just released from six days behind bars. The picketers had been sentenced to $100 fines and thirty days in jail. Out on appeal, they broke their hunger strike with chicken and collards, then sat waiting for “de Lawd.” As the crowd swelled in anticipation, not even the worst cynic in SNCC could deny King’s appeal. When his entourage arrived at the Elks Hall, crowds swarmed the stage. Hundreds clapped and chanted, “We Want Free-dom! We Want Free-dom!” Stepping to the podium, King thrilled the audience that spilled out of the seats, lined the walls, peered in windows. If Negroes “mobilize the power of their souls,” he said, they could “turn this nation upside down in order to turn it right side up.” Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, King noted, had been “murdered by the silence and apathy of good people.” Barry Goldwater, he added, gave aid to segregationists. And the FBI—having seen its quick work in other cases, King found it hard to believe “that these same efficient FBI men cannot locate the missing workers.” King concluded with a rhythmic chant—“
Seat
the Freedom Democratic Party!
Seat
the Freedom Democratic Party!”

As King spoke, a small plane with its navigation lights off buzzed the Elks Hall. On its second pass, a white cloud of leaflets fluttered to the ground. This latest issue of
The Klansman
denounced “the Right Rev. Riot Inciter, Martin Luther King, Jr.” come to “bring riot, strife, and turmoil to . . . Greenwood, Mississippi [and] to milk all available cash from the local niggers.” At dawn the next day, volunteers again rode buses among field hands, finding them more willing to sign their names. That morning’s
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
headline read “Small Crowd Greets King at Greenwood.” At 8:23 a.m., King’s flight left for Jackson.

 

 

With the movement’s leading light touring Mississippi, with volunteers refusing to cower in the face of violence, those determined to derail Freedom Summer made their own midcourse correction. Rank violence and vile hatred were not enough to end the invasion. Across America, Mississippi’s image had sunk so low that residents traveling to the New York World’s Fair were changing their license plates to out-of-state tags. Someone had to stand up for Mississippi.

Lawrence Rainey stood up first. The Neshoba County sheriff filed a $1 million libel suit against NBC, charging that a
Huntley-Brinkley News
interview had implicated him in the disappearance. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) Three days later, Mississippi newspapers reprinted a letter to NBC’s
Today
show, whose host had criticized the state. “It is a known fact,” a Hattiesburg man wrote, “that more violence has occurred in one subway in the city of New York in the last three months than in the whole state of Mississippi in the last year.” Next, with riots raging in Harlem, whites gloated. “It is a sad commentary,” a Mississippi congressman said on Capitol Hill, “that while mobs stalk the streets of New York . . . some 1,500 so-called civil rights workers and troublemakers are in Mississippi—a state with the nation’s lowest crime rate—subjecting innocent, law abiding people to insult, national scorn and creating trouble.” Mississippi newspapers, known for plastering northern crime stories on front pages, delighted in the Harlem riots. “Latest Wave of Invaders Badly Needed in New York Area Today,” the
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
sneered. Batesville’s weekly
Panolian,
noting the tension caused by summer volunteers, concluded, “Happily, the inclination toward violence is less in Mississippi than in New York. Otherwise there could have been a holocaust.” But in Mississippi’s propaganda arsenal, the strongest weapon was the oldest.

Accusations of communism in the civil rights movement dated to the
Brown
decision, handed down in the waning days of McCarthyism. Kneejerk red-baiting did not die with McCarthy, however. It just moved south. Into the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover fanned Cold War suspicions—“We do know that Communist influence does exist in the Negro movement and it is this influence which is vitally important.” Hoover’s charges, constantly invoked by southern congressmen, were woven into the fabric of the white South—anyone who worked for civil rights had to be a Communist. SNCCs had heard the red-baiting so often they could joke about it. “Hey, you don’t worry about the communists,” Stokely Carmichael often told the press. “Worry about SNCC. We way more dangerous, Jack.” Just as the red-baiting was growing stale, Freedom Summer brought hordes of “Communists” to Mississippi. All summer, volunteers heard “the usual” taunts. Cops and sheriffs asked them whether they (1) believed in Jesus; (2) believed in God; and (3) were Communists. A Batesville volunteer was stopped on the street and asked to say something in Russian because “all communists speak Russian.” But now, with Mississippi in disgrace, it was time to name names.

On July 22, as Martin Luther King toured Jackson, Senator James Eastland charged that the “mass invasion of Mississippi by demonstrators, agitators, agents of provocation, and inciters to mob violence” was a Communist conspiracy. Eastland spoke on the Senate floor for an hour, citing J. Edgar Hoover, and producing a long list of names. According to the senator, volunteer Larry Rubin had cochaired the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Antioch College in Ohio. When arrested in Holly Springs, Eastland said, Rubin had an address book containing names of known Communists. Eastland’s list of Communist “stooges and pawns” went on. A Moss Point volunteer had been thrown out of Costa Rica for distributing Communist literature. The National Lawyers Guild, notorious since the 1930s for defending Communists, was working with SNCC in Mississippi. And attorney Martin Popper, representing Andrew Goodman’s family, was “a long-time Communist legal eagle.” Rising to a fist-flailing righteousness, the senator charged that the summer invasion had subjected Mississippi to “a degree of vilification . . . unequaled since the black days of Reconstruction.” Mississippians, he concluded, deserved “everlasting credit [for] holding their tempers so well.”