Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  As the one SNCC student who had lived continuously in Greenwood during the nine months of the registration project, Block had acquired a local reputation as a stubborn, lonely figure among the strange new breed of devout daredevils. He had handed out food to six hundred people on the day of the fire. For months he had accompanied the few would-be registrants to the courthouse, and for that he bore the brunt of official retaliations. His seventh arrest in Greenwood was a compelling topic of conversation while he stayed in jail over the weekend. Some people had been won over by his sheer persistence, others by his performances in the tiny mass meetings, where he led call-and-response spirituals in a distinctively jaunty tenor, marked by a hint of calypso syncopation. Something about his latest arrest caused an unprecedented phenomenon on Monday: more than a hundred Greenwood Negroes crowded into the police court for Sam Block’s trial.

  After finding him guilty, the judge offered to suspend sentence if the defendant agreed to stop working for the SNCC office, give up the voter registration project, and leave town. “Judge,” Block replied, “I ain’t gonna do none of that.” A murmur of awe passed through the crowd as Block accepted a sentence of six months plus a $500 fine, and that night a record 250 people jammed into the Greenwood mass meeting. Bob Moses held up both Block’s cheerful suffering and the relief food campaign as inspirations for those who wanted to be free. And the minimum requirement for being free, he added, was to be able to vote.

  Events and emotions had rolled over each other and swelled, with the result that Moses counted more than fifty of Greenwood’s poorest Negroes lined up outside the registrar’s office early in the morning. Another 150 joined them before the close of business. By delay and avoidance, the registrar managed to test only a handful, and most of these eventually would learn that they had been rejected, but nearly all of them held their ground even when the police told them to go home. Such assertiveness by Mississippi Negroes had been extinguished from reality, and largely from the imagination, for nearly a hundred years. The wonder of it moved Moses to write a letter to Chicago supporters the next day, February 27. “We don’t know this plateau at all…” he confided. “We were relieved at the absence of immediate violence at the courthouse, but who knows what’s to come next.”

  It was then that the VEP’s Randolph Blackwell arrived to investigate registration prospects in the Delta. On the night of February 28, he held a council in the Greenwood SNCC office. Although Blackwell was something of a dandy—a sociology professor in his mid-thirties, an author of textbooks on economics and business whom Branton had hired on the strength of his commanding personality and his spare degree in law—his formalities failed to deter the excited, grant-hungry registration workers, and their passion flushed out the daring conspirator in him. County by county, they discussed the needs of the associated projects deep into the night, until Jimmy Travis interrupted to warn that three white men were staking out the office from a Buick with no license plates.

  The response had become almost a drill. Moses announced that they had best break up the meeting so as not to be too concentrated a target. Then they scattered toward their home counties, with Blackwell accompanying Moses to his lodgings some forty miles away across Sunflower County. Travis, a twenty-year-old SNCC volunteer who was serving as a driver for Blackwell, had learned a great deal about traveling the Mississippi roads at night. With Blackwell and Moses beside him, he followed James Bevel’s car slowly out of town, watching closely for ambushes or police. Seeing the suspicious Buick in his rearview mirror, Travis first stopped at a gasoline station in hopes that it would pass by. When instead the car simply waited across the street for him to fill up, Travis turned off his headlights and pulled out a rear exit from the station into dark, unlit side streets. A few minutes’ evasive driving lost both the Buick and Bevel, who turned off toward his temporary quarters in Shaw.

  Travis made his way back to Highway 82, toward Sunflower County, and felt somewhat relieved until the Buick suddenly reappeared, headed in the opposite direction, and executed a sharp U-turn to fall in behind them again. Then Travis faced a breathless choice: he could try to outrun the Buick, slow down in the slim hope it would pass, or stop to confront the three men. He chose the middle course. The two cars moved in tandem until, some seven miles outside Greenwood, the Buick finally made a move to pass. Stabs of hope and fear were battling inside Travis and his two passengers when their car windows exploded.

  “I’m hit!” cried Travis. Letting go of the steering wheel, he slumped over into Moses’ lap. The car swerved off the highway.

  “Hit the brakes!” yelled Blackwell. “Hit the brakes!” Moses grabbed the steering wheel with one hand, held Travis with the other, and groped with his foot for the brake.

  The Buick was gone by the time Moses brought the car to a stop. The terrifying din of gunfire and squealing tires gave way to the crunch of broken glass as they squirmed to check themselves for wounds. The windshield and all the windows lay shattered in thousands of pieces. Travis had been shot twice, once in the shoulder and once in the back of his neck. When they had laid him gingerly across the backseat, Moses drove the open-air car in search of a hospital that would treat an injured pariah Negro. Two days later, in Jackson, doctors removed a .45-caliber bullet from Travis’ neck.

  The shooting of Jimmy Travis touched off a chain reaction. The SNCC staff voted to converge on Greenwood so as to prove that terror could not dislodge the registration project. They also decided that the miraculous new courage of illiterate Negroes cried out for citizenship classes. An appeal to Bernice Robinson, Septima Clark’s original teaching partner at Highlander, brought her into Mississippi. Although Andrew Young rejected as suicidal a proposal to establish another SCLC citizenship training center in Mississippi,* he did agree to allow Annell Ponder, a newly trained assistant to Septima Clark at Dorchester, to take up residence in Greenwood. She arrived within a week of the shooting, just as Negro churches in the Delta first opened their doors to registration classes, and James Bevel soon went to Dorchester with the first busload of Greenwood citizens who, having learned basic reading in a week, signed up for a week of “advanced” teacher training.

  Greenwood burst upon the front pages of Negro newspapers across the country, and The New York Times published excerpts from Wiley Branton’s telegram to President Kennedy. “This can no longer be tolerated,” Branton declared. “We are accordingly today announcing a concentrated, saturation campaign to register every qualified Negro in LeFlore County.” Branton also sent appeals to Attorney General Kennedy and to John Hannah of the Civil Rights Commission, touching sore points within the government. Hannah risked an open feud with Robert Kennedy by hastening preparation of a Mississippi report. Kennedy sent lawyers into Greenwood to investigate the local suspension of food relief, which he considered the immediate cause of the flare-up.

  News from Greenwood echoed not only through the Kennedy Administration but also through the growing civil rights subculture. From the New York coffeehouses, folk singer Pete Seeger soon took Bob Dylan on his first pilgrimage to the South. By then, Birmingham and a hundred other cities would have erupted in demonstrations, but Dylan appeared only before a small Negro crowd in Greenwood, singing his “Blowin’ in the Wind.” This song, as recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, had just displaced puppy love atop the pop charts.

  From the beginning, the white authorities of LeFlore County denounced the outside attention. Under pressure from the FBI, they arrested three well-known whites for shooting Travis, but they postponed trial indefinitely in the face of vociferous local support for the vigilantes. Officials remained steadfastly hostile to the registration project. With Negroes outnumbering whites three to two, anything approaching fair registration raised at least the threat of a Negro “swing” vote, and possibly even the Reconstruction specter of Negro political control. A white voter explained his gut appraisal to reporters: “We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country, and now they want us to give it away to t
he niggers.”

  Greenwood politicians, while accommodating the white vigilantes who kept them in office, also tried to project an image of sovereign control. Their dissimulations toward this impossible goal reached the level of blatant contortion, of a kind that would be seen from afar as the trademark of ignorant Southern racists. When night riders fired a shotgun into a car occupied by Sam Block and Willie Peacock on March 6, Mayor Charles Sampson of Greenwood condemned both the shooting and the Negroes in the only way he could: he suggested that SNCC must have shot at its own workers to stimulate more publicity. He maintained this double-jointed conspiracy theory as the violence escalated through March. Arsonists destroyed the Greenwood SNCC office on March 24.* Two nights later, attackers fired a shotgun at Dewey Greene, Sr., just as he was entering his home.

  A sturdy, middle-aged paperhanger, Greene was a volunteer in the daily registration lines, and his son had applied to succeed James Meredith as the second Negro student at Ole Miss. Feelings for him ran so deep among Greenwood Negroes that a large crowd gathered outside Wesley Chapel early the next morning. “We sang and we sang and we sang,” Moses recalled. Finally, they all gathered in a huge circle to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and then Moses addressed them. “We are not stopping now,” he said. “We had a mass meeting last night and it was packed.” For the quiet-spoken Moses, this was tantamount to a tirade. He told the crowd that since they were all there anyway, they might as well honor Dewey Greene by walking as a group to see the county registrar down at the courthouse. Some 150 people fell in behind him.

  Before they could leave, James Forman intervened to suggest that first they march to city hall to protest the absence of basic police protections. The crowd cheered Forman’s idea too, which precipitated a brief leadership huddle. Moses saw Forman’s protest march as a diversion from the singleminded business of registration, as well as a provocation that Greenwood’s white authorities would not fail to meet. Forman replied that the people must be allowed an outlet for their grievances over the violence. Under pressure of the hundreds of moving feet, Moses and Forman engineered a hasty compromise: they would walk by city hall on the way to the county courthouse. Rumor raced ahead of them, so that when the column approached city hall, Mayor Sampson and a dozen policemen came outside to square off against them. One of the policemen held a German shepherd on a taut leash. Mayor Sampson shouted out to the crowd that they must go home at once. “If you don’t,” he said, “we are going to turn the dog loose.”

  When Moses called out that he wanted to talk with the police chief, there was no reply except an order to move forward in a line. As the policemen surged into the crowd of marchers, the German shepherd snapped and tore at Moses’ pants leg, ripping it to the thigh. The dog next seized the leg of a marcher named Matthew Hughes, tearing the flesh badly enough that Hughes had to be hospitalized. By then, the crowd was retreating in bedlam. One woman later remembered that a policeman kept shouting “Kennedy is your God!” The leaders shouted out that they must not run, that they must go about their business at the courthouse.

  Moses helped turn the retreat back to Wesley Chapel. Singing broke out again. As mass relief bathed their determination, the SNCC staff leaders began helping people into cars for a less vulnerable trip down to the registrar’s line at the courthouse. But the police, who had followed the retreat all the way to the church, countered this move by wading into the crowd to arrest Moses and seven others whom they recognized as workers in the Delta registration project. Soon they were all reunited in cells of the Greenwood city jail, where Forman talked excitedly about having smuggled a roll of film to one of his confederates. The whole world would see that snarling police dog, he said.

  Word of the morning police attack flew so fast on the phone wires that Claude Sitton of The New York Times rushed into the state in time to file from Greenwood that same day. Other national reporters joined him on the hunch that the story promised something big. Their instincts were rewarded the next day when the police—reinforced by more dogs and by nearly a hundred lawmen from surrounding counties—confronted a line of forty-two Negroes as they marched back to Wesley Chapel from the courthouse. As white bystanders shouted “Sic ’em! Sic ’em!” a dog bounded into the column in full view of a half-dozen photographers and bit the pastor of the Wesley Chapel, drawing blood. Some of the marchers carried him away while others scattered in terror. Officers confiscated the film of a CBS cameraman and otherwise menaced the astonished assembly of reporters, who soon cornered Mayor Sampson to ask why the police had attacked unarmed Negroes who were on their way home. “They had a report up there that them niggers was going to the Alice Café for a sit-in,” the mayor replied. It seemed more likely that the Greenwood police, having called in their colleagues as reserves against an enormous threat of insurrection, simply could not allow the quiet insult of a registration attempt to go unpunished.

  By morning Greenwood was a crossover news flash, playing that Friday on the front pages of both white and Negro newspapers. The Chicago Defender rolled out a Pearl Harbor typeface for a two-tier proclamation: DOGS AGAIN ROUT VOTERS IN MISS. CITY, BITE PASTOR. Somewhat more restrained, the front-page headline in The New York Times read “Police Loose a Dog on Negroes’ Group, Minister Is Bitten,” but the Times also published a photograph of the Greenwood policemen charging behind their dog. Worse, from the standpoint of the Kennedy Administration, the picture of the dog ran just below a shot of the entire Republican leadership in Congress, assembled to promote their own new package of strong civil rights legislation. Senator Jacob Javits of New York said the Republicans no longer could wait for leadership from President Kennedy.

  For Burke Marshall at the Justice Department, March 29 was a miserable Friday. President Kennedy already had asked what could be done about the dogs in Mississippi. Marshall bargained ceaselessly for a truce. He threatened to bring suit for a federal injunction ordering Greenwood officials to respect the basic constitutional protections due the would-be voters, but his leverage was reduced because he was running a bluff. Marshall knew the suit would not succeed, at least initially, because it would go before a federal judge in Mississippi whom Marshall already had described to Robert Kennedy as an unscrupulous segregationist. And even if the suit could be won, Marshall and Kennedy did not want responsibility for effecting a revolution in race relations with military or police power. This was their political lesson from the Freedom Rides and Ole Miss. It was one reason they had reacted so icily to the Moses lawsuit asking them to do just that.

  Marshall was hit by a simultaneous rearguard action from the Civil Rights Commission, whose members sent word that they must issue an immediate statement on Mississippi. The six commissioners were incensed that their silent submission to the Administration had stretched into a shameful record of complicity. It was all Marshall could do to extract a promise that the commissioners would do nothing publicly without giving the President another chance to meet with them in the White House. “At least four members are very doubtful, however, for the long pull,” he wrote Robert Kennedy that night, “and we may at some point have to face resignations from [John] Hannah, [Theodore] Hesburgh, [Erwin] Griswold, and [Robert] Storey.”

  Civil rights leaders poured into Greenwood all weekend—Medgar Evers of the NAACP, James Farmer and David Dennis of CORE, Charles McDew of SNCC. Wiley Branton flew in from Atlanta to represent Moses, Forman, and six other SNCC registration workers at their trial that Friday. When all eight were quickly convicted of disorderly conduct and given the maximum sentence of four months, Branton announced to the court that his clients elected to serve the time rather than appeal. By their continued presence in jail, the eight prisoners maintained a focal point for pressure on the federal government to bring elemental justice to Greenwood. Moses felt the buzz reaching into his jail cell, and the potential of all this clashing power moved him begrudgingly toward the view that the federal government responded more readily to discomfort than to cooperation, law, or logic.

&nbs
p; On Tuesday, April 2, comedian Dick Gregory joined the fifth consecutive business day of registration marches in Greenwood. “I can’t tell you how heartbroken I was last week as I sat in New York City and read the reports coming out of Greenwood,” he told a pre-march mass meeting in Wesley Chapel. “If Russia aggravated West Berlin half as much as you was aggravated last week,” he joked, “we would be there.” Three times that day he walked to the courthouse, only to be forcibly driven away by police. As the first nationally known celebrity to march in Greenwood, he turned each confrontation into a performance with commentaries so daring as to be touched by madness or sublime inspiration. “There’s your story!” he shouted to the national reporters. “Guns and sticks for old women who want to register!” He waved his hands toward the motley squad of police who were pushing the Negroes away from the courthouse. “Look at them,” he said loudly. “A bunch of illiterate whites who couldn’t even pass the test themselves.” Later, when Mayor Sampson was holding forth gravely on the character deficiencies that made the Negroes unqualified to vote, Gregory pushed through the reporters on the sidewalk. “Well, now, Mr. Mayor,” he interrupted with a beaming smile. “You really took your nigger pills last night, didn’t you?” His utter lack of inhibition amazed the LeFlore County Negroes, as did the passive response of the white officials. Such effrontery was unheard of—no local Negro could get away with it—but Gregory’s star quality seemed to make him untouchable. He drew thunderous applause that night for a short speech of earnest passion laced with humor. “We will march through your dogs!” he cried. “And if you get some elephants, we’ll march through them. And bring on your tigers and we’ll march through them!”

  Three days of Gregory publicity pushed the Justice Department forward. John Doar visited Moses and the other prisoners the next morning, on their eighth day in the Greenwood jail. He announced that they must look their best the next day for a hearing in the courtroom of federal judge Claude Clayton. Doar was about to ask for an injunction ordering Greenwood officials to do three things: (1) vacate the convictions of the eight SNCC leaders as illegal interferences with the right to vote; (2) cease harassing or intimidating Negro citizens wishing to register; and (3) provide fair and adequate police protection at the courthouse registration office. Failure to obey such an order inevitably would bring in the U.S. marshals, and Doar expressed confidence that he could win in a higher court, though not from Judge Clayton.