Freedom Summer (47 page)

It took Fran O’Brien twenty-five years to exorcise the demons of that single summer night. In June 1965, still repressing the Klan beating, finding memories of Mississippi “rosier and rosier,” she had returned to Vicksburg. She found her old Community Center in rubble and her project running on a shoestring. Fran hoped to teach former students, but she had “stepped into a hornet’s nest.” The statewide power struggle over child care sent her from COFO to Head Start and back again. After four weeks, she went home to southern California. That fall, she entered grad school and, in 1967, began teaching in California’s central valley.

During her first spring in the classroom, Martin Luther King was killed. Overhearing kids say, “It’s a good thing they got that Communist,” Fran decided to speak to them. “I told them that Martin Luther King was not a Communist and I knew because I had met him.” She spoke about the civil rights movement as a veteran. She spoke as she would continue to speak to children all her life. But decades would pass before she could speak about
all
of what happened that summer.

As the terror buried itself deeper, any talk of civil rights gave Fran nightmares. When she watched slaves flogged during the TV miniseries
Roots
, she woke up screaming. But in 1989, after attending the first Freedom Summer reunion, she sat down to write and the horror came pouring out. “It had been a rather quiet summer in Vicksburg . . .” Writing about the beating allowed Fran to face down fear and humiliation, but after a lifetime of empathy, she could not bring herself to blame the Klan. “One might as well hold a skunk morally accountable for spraying or a rattlesnake for striking,” she wrote. Fran’s “Journey into Light” was later published in an anthology of writings about Freedom Summer.

Though she worked her entire life with children, Fran never married—“I never really had the time”—nor had children of her own. Before retiring, she taught for thirty-four years, usually in classrooms for physically or mentally handicapped kids. In her students’ struggle for acceptance, she found parallels to the civil rights movement. Over the years, she nurtured a devout Christian faith that she cannot imagine living without. This quiet, gentle woman lives alone in a small house on a hillside near Bakersfield, California. None of her neighbors suspects she was once part of the summer that changed even their own attitudes about race and freedom.

In his final nine months in Indianola, Fred Winn faced an explosive violence that escalated all winter and into the spring. Arrested five times, hounded by his draft board, targeted by local whites, Fred somehow survived, but relentless pressure led to drastic moves. In February 1965, suddenly classified 1-A and in no mood to fight for the country whose racism he was confronting, he took a female coworker to Greenville and married her. The wedding was a joke, with the “flowers” just grass yanked from outside the church, and a cold kiss. “Yes, I know it sounds a bit wild,” he wrote his father. “It was the only thing I could do to get out.” The marriage would be annulled later that year, but the wedding—and Fred’s arrest record
—
kept the draft at arm’s length. Nothing, however, could tamp down Indianola’s surging violence.

In March 1965, a Molotov cocktail burned the Freedom School to the ground. Several who had been living in the school crammed into Irene Magruder’s house, forcing Fred to sleep in her living room. All continued working on a new voting drive. Come April, the drive became a rush when Sunflower County was slapped with a federal injunction and three hundred blacks were registered. Many stood outside the courthouse, hugging and crying. “I was so glad I wanted to holler ‘Freedom,’ ” one old woman said. The payback came swiftly.

On May 1, Fred fell asleep on Irene Magruder’s couch. At 2:30 a.m., a woman came out of the kitchen screaming “Fire!” In the rush of smoke and panic, Fred grabbed a fire extinguisher but it was like a squirt gun against the flames. He helped Mrs. Magruder stagger from her burning home, then remembered what he had left inside. Racing into the blazing building, he grabbed the project’s account books and his father’s Bible. By the time he reached the lawn again, the house was engulfed. Firemen stood by, watching. Word soon came from down the street. “They got Giles!” Giles Penny Saver, a store frequented by volunteers, was also burning. Fred grabbed a bicycle and rode to find Oscar Giles spraying the flames with a hose. From off in the distance, he saw another orange glow, and another. Fred rode to visit each fire, then returned to the Freedom House to alert Fannie Lou Hamer.

With his host home and school in ashes, Fred could no longer joke about Mississippi mud between his toes. Relations in the SNCC office were also smoldering, and Fred had thrown his own match by falling for another black girl. Janell was seventeen years old but told Fred she was eighteen. A few days after the fires, the bespectacled, mustachioed carpenter and his girlfriend began talking about leaving. They could get an apartment in San Francisco. They could get jobs, go to school, walk down the street holding hands, and no one would care. “Janell and I are coming home,” Fred wrote his father. “Yes, I know we had planned to stay until July, but I am tired. You might recall what battle fatigue was like during the war.” A week later, the couple took a bus to Memphis and a train to San Francisco.

Fred and Janell hoped to continue working for civil rights, but when they volunteered at a San Francisco agency, five black men listened to Fred’s tales from Freedom Summer, then said, “We don’t need you.” Fred was devastated. A fixture in Indianola’s black community, he now found himself an invader in his own city, isolated by rising black separatism. It was not long before blacks on his street would talk to Janell but not to him. Sensing the drift, he found work as a longshoreman. Janell got a job with the Economic Opportunity Commission. They moved to the Haight-Ashbury district but, separated by background and skin color, Janell “fell in with another crowd.” Feeling rejected not just by a woman but by the race he had befriended, Fred was crushed. “The fact that I went into dope and became a hippie doesn’t surprise me,” he remembered.

After studying education at San Francisco State, Fred found teaching jobs scarce, so he “took some time to fuck off.” He followed the culture and cannabis trail, bumming around Europe and Morocco, Colombia and Ecuador. When he finally returned to San Francisco, he took up the trade he had practiced in Mississippi—plumbing. He dropped “Fred” and began using his middle name, “Bright.” After serving his apprenticeship, Bright Winn set up his own business and has been a highly articulate plumber ever since. Twice married and twice divorced, a father of two, he still speaks regularly with the half sister whose birth split his family and sent him to Mississippi. His work during Freedom Summer cemented his relationship with the father he had barely known before 1964. And more than forty years after signing his letters “We Shall Overcome,” Bright Winn remains devoted to civil rights. “Someone asked me if I’m still active in the movement,” he remembered. “I said, ‘I hire people of color. I raised my children with certain strong beliefs about integration. I live the movement.’ ”

Muriel Tillinghast left Mississippi in 1965 but stayed with SNCC, working in Atlanta. In the fall of 1967, she returned to Howard University, doing grad studies in Mexican and Chinese history, but after Mississippi, she found Howard “too containing.” She moved on to Manhattan, working for SNCC and in various social programs. For years, she organized in Appalachia, eventually serving there as a presidential appointee under Jimmy Carter. Returning to Manhattan, she continued to apply the lessons of Mississippi throughout her life. “I was born with a fighting nature,” she says. “Even when I try not to be a fighter, the fight comes out. But I try to be earnest and honest. I’ve worked in prisons, Head Start, for immigrants, health rights—pretty much of everything.” In 1996, Muriel turned to politics, running as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential candidate for the Green Party in New York. In 2004, she tapped her religious roots, becoming the manager of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Brooklyn. She currently lives in Brooklyn with two cats, a dog, and a turtle. Raising two daughters, she has spoken of Mississippi whenever possible. “It was like going to war,” she remembered. “A lot of veterans will tell you they don’t discuss war stories. But sometimes you have to—to let your children know, ‘That’s why we don’t do this in this family.’ Because of the way things were in Mississippi.”

During Chris Williams’s final months in Mississippi, the luck that got him through the summer ran out. In November, while canvassing a Panola County plantation, he was surrounded by raging whites threatening to throw him in the Tallahatchie River. The men settled for having Chris arrested. After two days in jail, he went right back to work. Throughout that fall and winter, Chris drove muddy backroads, spoke in churches, called registration meetings, and helped organize a co-op that earned farmers higher prices for okra. And in his spare time, he fell in love.

Two years older than Chris, Penny Patch had left Swarthmore College to work in Georgia, the first white female SNCC in the Deep South. She had come to Mississippi in January 1964 to run COFO’s book drive. In September, she moved to Batesville, where she began working on the farm co-op and discussing birth control with black women eager to avoid having child after child after child. Chris was not immediately smitten by the petite, short-haired brunette. He and Penny spent the fall in mutual avoidance, but by December, they noticed each other noticing each other and by the new year, they were inseparable. Walking together to host homes, returning together in the morning, they were soon known to locals as “Chrisnpenny.” It wasn’t long before they were talking about leaving Mississippi . . . someday . . . together. But neither felt like going home—to Massachusetts or New Jersey. Where would they go? And when? Mississippi answered the latter question for them.

One day in March, Chris and Penny sat in a car outside the courthouse in Batesville. The town’s first sit-in had whites in an uproar. Pickups circled the town square, their drivers waving guns, ax handles, and baseball bats. Suddenly several people spotted the clean-cut white couple. As they rushed the car, Penny frantically locked the doors. A snarling, screaming mob began rocking the old Pontiac. This was no college stunt, Chris realized. These people wanted to flip the car and drag them out. He gunned the engine but the car was trapped between pickups. The rocking continued, lifting the hood higher and higher. Finally, the pickup in front pulled away and Chris hit the accelerator.

A few days later, Chris was sitting downtown when four men bolted from a pickup. He barely had time to roll into a ball before they began kicking him. Robert Miles decked one man with a haymaker punch, sending the attackers fleeing, leaving Chris with a three-inch gash in his forehead. The next evening, Chris and Penny were in Miles’s living room, watching TV, breathing again. Suddenly the front window shattered. Chris shoved Penny to the floor as buckshot lodged in the wall. Chris was soon taking his turn on the Mileses’ all-night vigil, holding a rifle.

The mob, the beating, the shooting, left Chris more shaken than hurt, but Mississippi was no longer an “adventure.” “I felt I’d given it a good shot,” he remembered. “I had been involved in lot of different parts of it, I’d met extraordinary people, and maybe this was as far as it went.” Late that summer, Chris and Penny got a ride in a VW bus taking them out of Mississippi, but they did not head north. This was a different America, seemingly a different decade, and they wanted to be at the heart of it. By the fall of 1965, they were living in Berkeley. Penny, feeling “ragged and lost,” certain her years in the civil rights movement had come to nothing, took classes while Chris worked as a carpenter. He later studied agriculture at UC Davis and worked with César Chávez and the United Farmworkers of America. But before he could finish a degree, he and Penny heard the sixties’ next call.

In the spring of 1967, the couple moved “back to the land.” In Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where they had purchased one hundred acres, Chris, Penny, and other civil rights veterans built a house, planted gardens, and lived far removed from the America they had given up on. But white-out winters made close quarters seem even closer. Although Chris and Penny married and had a son, the commitments that had brought them together in Mississippi could not keep them together. They split up in 1970, setting Chris adrift again. To Jamaica. To Manhattan. To the edge of despair. Wherever he went, he kept designing, building, and in 1974, he began studying architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Married again and with two kids, Chris spent the 1980s as an architect in Manhattan. Then in 1989, he became director of architectural services at Williams College in western Massachusetts. Twenty-five years after hitch-hiking south, he had come home. And there he remains. Every now and then, as he looks toward retirement, Chris finds himself checking on the Internet for houses in Panola County. He wonders what it would be like to live there—“Mississippi without fear”—if only for a few years. Mississippi is a part of him in ways he could never have expected when he left high school to spend a summer there. “Other people went to Vietnam and that impacted their lives,” he said, “but Mississippi was the thing in my life that has resonated down through the years. I’m very clear that the person who got the most out of it was me. I feel grateful every day to have been part of it.”

Individual cameos vary, but taken as a group, Freedom Summer volunteers appear, as they did on arrival in Ohio, as a group portrait of American idealism. Almost without exception, the lives they led after their Mississippi summer have been as principled as the season itself. Whether they steered the sixties or were steered by them, a majority remained involved in social causes. Freedom School teachers continued to teach—many in college. Dozens of volunteers, having seen Jim Crow justice, became attorneys fighting for the poor. Others became full-time activists, running nonprofit agencies. And several became writers, including feminist Susan Brownmiller,
Mother Jones
cofounder Adam Hochschild, memoirist Sally Belfrage, and
Village Voice
reporter Paul Cowan and his brother Geoff.