Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  On his wedding anniversary, Kennedy invited Harry Belafonte out to his Hickory Hill home and asked him once again to use his considerable influence among the SNCC students to encourage voter registration. Belafonte promptly invited a delegation of Freedom Riders to visit him in Washington, where he was performing. On the eve of the latter meeting, Kennedy and Marshall advertised their ability to make things happen by generating a front-page article in The New York Times, “Negro Vote Surge Expected in South—Administration Experts Sure of a Political Breakthrough.” In effect, the article summarized Kennedy’s side of the private arguments. “The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the new militant movements—the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders—have come around to agree that the vote is the key,” it said. “…Confidence that the Government will do its best to protect those who try to register and vote also encourages Negroes to make the attempt.” Belafonte encouraged the students to dismiss as politics the article’s suggestion that “Negro apathy” and a bad “attitude” among Negro leaders had held back the voting revolution in the past. In the end, the students said they would be willing to convene the Freedom Riders to propose the voter registration plan. Belafonte gave them $10,000 of his own money to get started.

  Kennedy allowed no doubts to grow. By the end of July, the heads of all the major civil rights organizations were interested enough to attend an all-day meeting in New York, with Wofford and Burke Marshall representing the Administration. Farmer, just out of jail in Mississippi, had to be convinced that he was not abandoning CORE’s entire purpose at its moment of glory. Roy Wilkins had to be convinced that the NAACP would not appear to be abandoning its banner of school desegregation. These were among the least of the problems. Nevertheless, a month later these same people were back in the Fifth Avenue offices of the Taconic Foundation, this time with “working papers.” They divided the territory of the South and resolved acute differences over the proportional allocation of funds. They recruited the Field Foundation and the Stern Fund to supplement the Taconic Foundation’s money. They searched for administrators and conduits who were acceptable to all the various grantees, grantors, and intermediaries. They hammered out a hundred compromises. Within another month, foundation executives translated the deals into fuzzy language, and lawyers checked organizational flow charts against the tax code.*

  The Voter Education Project was created essentially by a forced march in the opposite direction from the Freedom Rides, in spirit if not in purpose. To accomplish the march that same summer of 1961, with the Freedom Rides still going on, was a tribute to the willfulness of the Kennedy Justice Department and a feat even more impressive than the bus order wrenched from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Both deeds had far-reaching implications for Southern politics. Insiders soon argued that these machinations were the significant events of the entire period, and dialectical disputes reminiscent of the Montgomery bus boycott arose as to whether the essential ingredient of progress was law or confrontation, reason or shock, decrees or changes of spirit.

  Down in Mississippi, a very different transformation was taking place among the Freedom Riders. For some of the prisoners, survival was a letdown. Having absorbed so many mob beatings, or stories of them, and having passed so many angry crowds and imaginary ambushes, the Freedom Riders hyperventilated with religious fervor, in a sense, so that a few of them seemed to collapse of disappointment when they passed unscathed into custody. Others tore anxiously at their hair. All of them, once they recovered in the lower-floor cell block of the Hinds County jail, began to sing. Hank Thomas led them in “We Shall Overcome,” so loudly that the female prisoners across the way took up the same song. They ran through the repertory of movement songs, and when the singing finally died down into conversation between the cells, James Bevel could be heard preaching out loud from Acts 16, about how God sent an earthquake to shake open the foundations of the jail holding Paul and Silas in Philippi, and how He would send a similar earthquake to Jackson, Mississippi, within two days to liberate the Freedom Riders.

  Bevel preached lyrically and almost continuously, leaving those within earshot alternately inspired, amused, and worried over his growing expectation of a divine jailbreak. When the deadline passed and Bevel seemed to fall into despondency, James Farmer and others feared that he might be cracking up. Most of the Freedom Riders did not know Bevel well, and those who did, like his fellow seminarians John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, knew that he lived on the wispy edge between religious genius and lunacy. As it happened, a trusty left Bevel’s cell without fully locking the sliding steel door, and Bevel, seeing his chance, asked Lafayette to pray again for a sign that their cause would prevail. During the prayer, Bevel slipped quietly out of his cell to stand in front of Lafayette’s, and Lafayette, opening his eyes to this vision of freedom, shrieked in terror and dived headlong under his bunk. Bevel rejailed himself, laughing uproariously. He and Lafayette explained the shrieks and fits with various versions of the story, leaving their fellows in other parts of the cell block uncertain of their ballast. There was no question, however, that Bevel had moments of lucid practicality. When the jailers cut off cigarettes and snacks to the Freedom Riders because of their loud singing, he devised a clandestine exchange system with other parts of the jail.

  Other prisoners revealed themselves to be variously meek, truculent, stolid, or hysterical in adapting to jail life. Some pledged grandly to stay “until hell freezes over” but then bailed out after a few days behind bars. Those behind remained roughly two-thirds college students, three-quarters male, and more than half Negro, with Quakers and Jews, including several rabbis, represented disproportionately among the whites. James Lawson, whose experience a decade earlier made him the recognized expert on prison culture, gave them advice about how to get along with the thieves and drunkards in the jail, and warned them against getting too attached to anything except their own inner strengths, because all their routines were beyond their control. Very soon, jail authorities sorely tested them by transferring most of the Freedom Riders to the Hinds County prison farm, out in the country. There the young prisoners were crammed by the dozen into thirteen-by-fifteen-foot cells with stopped-up toilets. The food was bug-ridden. For their singing they were stuffed into claustrophobic “sweatboxes.” Their only consolation was that there were not nearly boxes to hold all the singers at once.

  Shortly after midnight on June 15—the day before their representatives were meeting with Attorney General Kennedy worlds away in Washington—guards herded forty-five of the male prisoners from their cells into closed truck trailers. The trucks lurched out of Jackson with the prisoners sealed in darkness. When finally they tumbled out blinking into the dawn light, they found themselves standing beneath an observation tower just inside the barbed-wire gate of an enormous compound, surrounded by guards with shotguns. The warden welcomed them to Parchman Penitentiary. “We have bad niggers here,” he warned. “Niggers on death row that’ll beat you up and cut you as soon as look at you.” He ordered them to follow him in a line of march to a cement-block processing building.

  As they moved out, the guards discovered two young white men from Chicago still lying in the back of a truck. “We refuse to cooperate, because we’ve been unjustly imprisoned,” said Terry Sullivan, in a speech that Lawson and the others had counseled him to shelve. The guards dumped the two Chicagoans out of the truck and dragged them by their feet through mud and grass and across concrete into the receiving room, where the prisoners were ordered to take off their clothes. When the two of them still did not move, guards shocked them with cattle prods until they writhed on the floor, screaming in pain. The guards finally tore off their clothes.

  The prisoners were left waiting there for what seemed like an eternity before being marched to shower rooms, where they bathed under the gaze of shotguns. More than one of them felt stabbing rushes of identification with the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Then they went on another naked march along cement corridor
s to the maximum-security wing, where, locked two to a cell, they endured another long wait before the guards brought their only prison clothes—a T-shirt and a pair of pea-green boxer shorts. Left alone at last, they shouted out their relief in complaints about the skimpy, ill-fitting garments. “What’s all this hang-up about clothes?” James Bevel cried out above the noise. “Gandhi wrapped a rag around his balls and brought the whole British Empire to its knees!”

  Their hymns, spirituals, and freedom songs once again became the principal issue of contention with the jail authorities, who, to regain control of the prison atmosphere, threatened to remove all the mattresses from the cells if the Freedom Riders did not fall silent. Hank Thomas soon exploded with zeal, rattling the bars as he shouted for the guards. “Come get my mattress!” he cried. “I’ll keep my soul!” The outburst inspired the entire cell block to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and one prisoner after another flung his mattress against the cell door for the guards to collect.

  Not all the Freedom Riders willingly accepted the sacrifice. One of them had to be pried away from his mattress by the guards. Nor did all share the religious ethos of the cell block. Stokely Carmichael, among others, remained aloof from the religious devotionals, and many of the Freedom Riders envied or resented the advanced Gandhism of the Nashville students. There were abstruse Gandhian arguments about whether the decision to fast in jail should be determined by the inner convictions of the prisoner or by the political effects upon the outside world. There were also less lofty disputes, such as fistfights through the bars when non-fasting prisoners aggressively slurped their food in front of those trying not to eat.

  For all the frictions, the Freedom Riders maintained an astonishing esprit as their number swelled in Parchman Penitentiary. Only a few asked to have their mattresses back. They lay on the steel springs at night, and they sang steadfastly through all the punishments devised to break them. When normal prison intimidations failed to work, frustrated authorities tried dousing them with fire hoses and then chilling them at night with giant fans. They also tried closing all the windows to bake them in the Mississippi summer heat. None of these sanctions had the desired effect, and many of them backfired. When the original group of Freedom Riders bailed out for appeal on July 7, they nearly floated out of the cells in the knowledge that they had gone into the heart of the beast and survived.

  From the Montgomery bus boycott to the confrontations of the sit-ins, then on to the Rock Hill jail-in and now to the mass assault on the Mississippi prisons, there was a “movement” in both senses of the word—a moving spiritual experience, and a steady expansion of scope. The theater was spreading through the entire South. One isolated battle had given way to many scattered ones, and now in the Mississippi jails they were moving from similar experiences to a common experience. Students began to think of the movement as a vocation in itself. From jail, John Lewis notified the Quakers by letter that he was withdrawing from the India program because he wanted to work full time in the South.

  When James Farmer flew home to New York, he was met at the airport by television cameras and crowds of admiring CORE supporters chanting “Farmer is our leader!” This reception was not so surprising, inasmuch as Farmer’s role in the Freedom Rides had placed him instantly on the covers of Negro magazines as a national leader. More surprising by far were the similar greetings for those who went home to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and small towns scattered in between. The usual small gatherings of the faithful were overrun by strangers who came out in huge numbers to pay tribute to a Freedom Rider—any Freedom Rider.

  The emotional wave of the Freedom Rides collided with the Kennedy registration plan. At a SNCC meeting exactly one week after their release from Parchman, student Freedom Riders were shocked to hear some of their colleagues propose that SNCC adopt as its “top priority” the voter registration drive being discussed with Harry Belafonte. They were talking of a mammoth operation of some 200,000 student workers—a force a thousand times larger than the Freedom Riders. Passionate arguments erupted. Those just out of prison objected that there was nothing Gandhian about voter registration, which they saw as conventional, political, and very probably a tool of the Kennedy Administration for getting “direct action” demonstrators off the streets. Voter registration advocates replied that they were ready to undertake the drudgery of registration work, intimating that the Freedom Riders had been seduced by the allure of martyrdom. In the end, the factions could agree only to postpone the fateful decision until a showdown conference at Highlander Folk School a month later. “In a very real sense, this is an emergency call and we are expecting representatives from each state,” field secretary Charles Sherrod wrote in his convening circular. “The outcome of this meeting may determine the direction of the civil rights fight for years to come!”

  As it happened, Bob Moses was on his way to Mississippi that month to begin a new life. As the Harvard-trained philosopher who had undertaken SNCC’s first recruiting trip into the Deep South and then volunteered to spend “two or three years” working for SNCC in the forbidding state of Mississippi, Moses had become a minor celebrity in SNCC circles before the Freedom Rides. Because the work he planned was known to center on voter registration, SNCC chairman Charles McDew, Charles Jones, Tim Jenkins, and other leaders of the registration faction sought his endorsement for their side in the internal struggle. Baffled by the intrigue, Moses said his own voter registration plans had nothing to do with grand schemes or philosophy. They were simply a response to Amzie Moore’s analysis of what would work best in Mississippi. Moses declined to attend the Highlander meeting or otherwise take part in the dispute, but he did ask the SNCC leaders to include his Mississippi registration project in any recruitment programs they developed. McDew and the others were happy to provide him with John Doar’s private telephone number at the Justice Department. After Moses had gone, Jenkins remarked that he seemed far too meekly intellectual to have the slightest chance against Mississippi segregationists.

  Arriving at last at Amzie Moore’s house in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moses found his host in an unusually distracted state. All Mississippi was agitated by the Freedom Rider arrests going on down in Jackson, Moore said, and this was not the best time to begin registration work. His reasons for delay stretched out daily before giving way to avoidance, and Moses, while not wishing to question the judgment of his mentor as to the local chemistry of race, did not wish to sit indefinitely in Moore’s spare room. Moore finally suggested a way out of the awkwardness growing up between them. An NAACP leader from McComb, a small town near the southern border of the state, had written him after seeing a report in the Negro press, wanting to know if Moore would send a few of his “teams of students” to register voters in McComb. Moore suggested to Moses that things were not as tight—not as touchy—in McComb as they were in the Delta towns nearby. Perhaps he should get started down there. Moses painfully took his leave. A bus ride of nearly two hundred miles due south put him in McComb, where he explained to NAACP leader C. C. Bryant that he alone was the first team.

  At Highlander, three days of rancorous debate produced nothing more than a deadlock among the state delegations within SNCC. Charles McDew announced dramatically that he was going to break the tie by casting the chairman’s vote in favor of the voter registration plan. Several direct-action advocates stalked out in anger. Ella Baker, trying desperately to keep her prized students from surrendering to the leadership preoccupations that had so vexed her at the NAACP and the SCLC, proposed that SNCC operate for a time as two cooperating wings—direct action under Diane Nash and voter registration under Charles Jones. Her compromise won grudging acceptance from everyone except a few direct-action diehards. Bernard Lee left SNCC permanently, as did the former leader of the Atlanta sit-in movement, Lonnie King. By the end of the conference, a grim joke went around that SNCC should have two doors for its dingy office, so that the rivals would not cross each other’s path.

  Neither side’s project began sm
oothly. The direct-action wing adopted a proposal called “Move on Mississippi,” authored by the Nashville student-preacher Paul Brooks. It envisioned a protracted nonviolent assault beginning in the capital city of Jackson, which, like Montgomery, had a Negro college and a large portion of the state’s middle-class Negro citizens. James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette did manage to find some local students willing to demonstrate, but city police countered them shrewdly. Instead of arresting the demonstrators, they arrested the SNCC leaders for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” by urging students under eighteen to break the segregation laws of Mississippi. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to up to three years, they bailed out on appeal and visited Amzie Moore in Cleveland to regroup. These sentences, by far the harshest yet meted out to students in the movement, were among the signs of rising white anger that were making Amzie Moore jittery.

  As for voter registration, SNCC leaders went directly to the Justice Department for discussions on targeting, demographics, law, and strategy. From a map on the wall in John Doar’s office, they noted pins stuck into the Southern counties judged most ripe for registration lawsuits. By Doar’s reckoning, two of the most promising areas were Dallas County, Alabama (Selma), and Terrell County, Georgia, where the Eisenhower Administration had won the first voting rights suit under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Charles Sherrod migrated to Georgia to begin a pilot project in Terrell County, but he soon discovered that most of the Negroes there were fearfully mistrustful of anyone who discussed civil rights. When he dared to propose demonstrations and registration drives, even his few hard-won acquaintances refused to talk with him. Sherrod was obliged to retreat to the nearby city of Albany and start over.

  These troubled beginnings went almost unnoticed even within the magnified vision of the civil rights network. There were too many layers of activity. Sherrod was talking with Doar and a hundred others; Moses and Bevel were at work in Mississippi; the Freedom Rides were still going on. Students were hearing about beatings administered to friends and relatives in Parchman Penitentiary. Millions of dollars were being discussed in foundations even as tears of grief and inspiration were flowing. In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state.