by Gail Collins
“THERE’S NO ANSWER, REALLY.”
The small, tightly knit Beloved Community of SNCC was evolving into a large, nationally famous organization that could no longer be run by endless meetings in search of consensus. Ruby Doris Smith had taken over the central office in Atlanta—less because she was interested in the job than because she realized how desperately SNCC needed someone to impose order. “She absolutely did not tolerate any nonsense,” said Stanley Wise, who worked with her.
Ruby Doris, who was still just 22, had gotten married in the summer of 1963 to Clifford Robinson, whose brother had married her sister. Robinson, who had not been involved in the movement, wound up working as a mechanic for SNCC, and the people who knew them both would debate whether they made a good couple. Many believed Clifford was no match for Ruby Doris, but Smith herself always claimed that she had finally found a man who was stronger than she was. What seemed clear, as Joyce Ladner said, was that her new husband “absolutely adored Ruby. He would just sit and look at her.” Soon, she was pregnant, but she stayed on the job until she went into labor. In the hospital where her son was born, friends found her on the floor doing exercises a few hours after the delivery, intent on getting back to work. Two weeks later, Ruby Doris appeared on her sister Catherine’s doorstep with her infant. When Catherine protested that she had no experience taking care of children, Ruby Doris said, “You’ll find out,” put the baby in Catherine’s arms, and went to work.
Since twenty-first-century America has not yet figured out exactly how a woman can handle the duties of both career and family, it’s not surprising that the women in the civil rights movement of the 1960s had trouble balancing husband, children, and an all-consuming cause that burned out many single, unattached people. “Well, I’ve found out there’s no answer, really, for a woman who works in a career and has children,” Ruby Doris told Josephine Carson, a writer who was collecting stories of black women in the South. “Like: my baby knows who his mother is, I think, but it’s his grandmother who’s giving him the food and that means something very special. He’s getting more of her… uh… nature than he is of mine. He’s learning to live with her, not me.”
In 1961 Diane Nash had married James Bevel, a divinity student and SNCC leader who was, depending on who you were talking to, either one of the most charismatic or one of the most eccentric members of the organization. “He’s crazy but he’s a genius,” said Ivanhoe Donaldson, a SNCC organizer who accepted both theories. “He’s overwhelming, and I think he just overwhelmed Diane. And so she faded into his background while his star was out there shining.” Nash in fact kept working, particularly on a voting-rights campaign in Alabama. When she was pregnant with her first child, she was sentenced to two years in jail for “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” (She had taught techniques for nonviolent civil disobedience to high schoolers.) Nash tried, unsuccessfully, to have the judge order her to serve the whole sentence. “Since my child will be a black child born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not he will be born in prison,” she said. Released, she simply went back to working for the cause. But soon, she had a second child and a foundering marriage. Bevel’s compulsive infidelity doomed the relationship; he ultimately failed even to provide support for his children. By the end of the decade, Nash would be a single mother living in Chicago. She had once told a reporter that the civil rights movement was what she intended to be “doing for the rest of my life.” But earning a living and raising her son and daughter left her limited time for anything else.
“I ASKED FOR VOLUNTEERS AND THEY SENT ME WHITE WOMEN.”
In 1964 SNCC invited about a thousand students, most of them Northern whites, to come to Mississippi to work on voter-registration projects during their summer vacations. It was a controversial idea—while the exhausted organizers needed fresh manpower, many doubted that inexperienced outsiders were the answer. But the architects of the plan also hoped that white Northern America would pay more attention to the vicious resistance to black voter registration in the South if some of the people being brutalized were white. The summer had barely begun when three male civil rights workers—one of them a new white recruit from the North—were murdered. By September, there had been eighty beatings, thirty-five shootings, thirty-five church burnings, and thirty bombings. Many of the volunteers were targets, but SNCC’s local black supporters suffered the most. “It was a beautiful experience until the summer of ’64, when there were just too many funerals,” said Taitt-Magubane.
SNCC would wind up marginalized within a few years and out of business by the end of the decade. There were endless reasons for its decline and fall. But the enormous influx of volunteers—mostly white and about 40 percent female—strained the already-existing fault lines until they cracked. The tensions between black and white women were particularly acute.
The story line was easy for everybody to discern: young black men, who had always been taught to regard white women as a forbidden—and extraordinarily dangerous—fruit, suddenly found themselves fussed over by white coeds while the black women watched from the sidelines. When Penny Patch, a longtime white organizer who was romantically involved with a black man, began to notice that the black female veterans were treating her coldly, she decided that the real cause was neither jealousy on their part nor indiscretion on hers, but history. “As the nearest and safest white women, some of us became vessels into which black women, if they chose to, could pour their accumulated anger—anger they had borne for hundreds of years…. It is slavery and oppression that created the distance between black women and white women, not the fact that white women slept with black men during the civil rights movement.”
Patch was right about the history. While white and black women had worked together and forged friendships in America since the seventeenth century, the more common relationship was the uneasy one of employer-employee. Some of the black women in the movement had mothers who worked as domestics and had bitter memories of the way white women had treated them. But the sex part most definitely did matter. Black women who had already suffered because their features didn’t look sufficiently “white” could not possibly be thrilled when hundreds of white women arrived on the scene and started pairing off with black men. They had been putting their lives on the line, but many of their male comrades seemed to prefer the attention of the newcomers. “Our skills and abilities were recognized and respected, but that seemed to place us in some category other than female,” said Cynthia Washington, who was working as a project director in one of the most dangerous areas of the South. Things weren’t helped by the fact that SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, who was married to a black woman, was having an affair with a white staff member. “There is the movement. And everybody is, like, we are a family, we are together as brothers and sisters,” said Josie Bass, thinking about her days fighting for civil rights in Chicago. “But it was a fight in the back room every day about the brothers not being with the sisters while we were together in this movement. And that is the part that I don’t hear people talking about anymore, but it was so real and raw.”
The volunteers were all well-intentioned, and most bent over backward not to offend the black people they were working with. Nevertheless, some of the recruits had a Lady Bountiful attitude toward the people they were there to help. Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who studied the way white women adjusted to the demands of Freedom Summer, said one of them told him she felt like “the master’s child come to free the slaves.” Others failed to understand how easily they could put black men in danger. Chuck McDew, a black organizer, was being kept incommunicado in a Mississippi jail when one of the white female volunteers had the bright idea of getting in to see him by passing herself off as his wife. The guards, who had not been particularly antagonistic toward their prisoner, changed overnight and began beating him brutally, saying, “Son of a bitch, that’s what you get for marrying a white woman.” The badly injured McDew, when he got out, threatened to kill the volunteer himself.
Freedom Summer was a huge success in the way SNCC had intended, drawing far more national attention to the brutality of Southern resistance to civil rights. But that very fact was as irritating as it was welcome. How could the veteran organizers not be offended to see the TV crews grow excited over the news that two bodies had been found in the Mississippi River and then quickly lose interest when they discovered the victims were black men, not white students? The white volunteers themselves were embarrassed that stories such as “They Walk in Fear but They Won’t Give Up” talked all about them and failed to mention the heroic local blacks or the indomitable SNCC workers.
The white women were assigned to jobs where they would have the least contact with the white population, such as teaching in the Freedom Schools, where local youngsters were prepared to register to vote. Going out to actually register people in the community—the highest-prestige job, and the most exciting—was almost always delegated to men. Although most of the women did not complain, they certainly did notice that the male volunteers were, as one Freedom School teacher remembered, “running out… being macho men… you know, ‘we’re going to go out and get our heads busted and we’ll come back to here where you nurse us… and otherwise service us and send us back out again.’ ” One of the few young white women who was able to get a field-organizing job was Jo Freeman, thanks to the hand-cranked mimeograph machine that was sent to her by friends. “Until you’ve written out three hundred mass-meeting leaflets by hand, you don’t know how valuable this was to any project director,” she said. “And I went with the machine.”
Many of the new arrivals felt the coolness from the start. The summer volunteers were “often viewed as a kind of disposable labor and public relations source,” said Elaine DeLott Baker, an experienced organizer from Ohio who had gone to Mississippi to stay but still felt she had “arrived too late to be incorporated into the culture of trust that was the hallmark of… the Beloved Community.” Susan Brownmiller, a white New Yorker who went with a friend to work in Mississippi, reported to a black organizer, who said with annoyance, “I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women.”
“IT HAD THE APPEARANCES OF A NECKING PARTY.”
The Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, honors “40 Lives for Freedom”—the men and women “who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern civil rights movement” from 1954 to 1968. Among them are Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, remembered as the “four little girls” who were getting ready for a service at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham when a bomb exploded. Johnnie Mae Chappell, who was walking down a road in Jacksonville when she was killed by white men who simply wanted to shoot a black person, was later added to the list in honor of the victims of “random racist violence” during the era.
The only other woman on the list—and the only woman to be killed during a civil rights protest—was white. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old Detroit housewife and college student, was shot by members of the Ku Klux Klan while she and a black volunteer were driving between Selma and Montgomery after the Selma march of 1965. Liuzzo was a solitary figure, and the civil rights movement seemed unsure exactly what to do with her when she was suddenly thrust upon them as a martyr. Her participation had mainly involved marching in a few demonstrations in Michigan, and she had driven down to Selma alone. She seemed less like a classic civil rights worker than one of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique heroines, looking for a commitment to something larger than her home and family.
Early in life Viola Liuzzo had made bad choices that haunted her—quitting school at 14, marrying and divorcing by the time she was 16. Then she turned things around, and by the early 1960s she was living a proper middle-class life in Detroit with her husband, Jim, a teamsters official, and five children. By all accounts she was a devoted mother. But she had no interest in either housekeeping or neighborhood social life. Trying to explain Liuzzo’s decision to go South, her only close friend, a black woman named Sarah Evans, said she was “searching, looking for something.” Her husband and children simply said that she had a huge heart.
The march from Selma to Montgomery was a follow-up to Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama law officers had attacked six hundred people marching for voting rights. Americans saw television reports of the attack, and thousands drove to Selma to be part of the great protest being held in response. Liuzzo apparently intended to drive down with other students from Wayne State University, where she was attending classes. But in the way of college students everywhere, her companions fell by the wayside when it was time to get organized and go. Viola left by herself, driving a thousand miles in three days. When she arrived, she was assigned the unmemorable job of working at a hospitality desk and then later at a first-aid station. She stayed with a local volunteer, Mrs. Willie Lee Jackson, and befriended her daughter, an unmarried high school dropout with a new baby. Perhaps thinking of her own much-regretted decision to leave school, Liuzzo invited the girl to come to Detroit to live with her family, so she could go back to high school and get a new start.
While she was working at the hospitality desk, she loaned her car to the Transportation Committee, which was headed by Leroy Moton, a black volunteer who stood well over six feet tall but weighed less than 140 pounds, and whose slight build and big glasses made him look younger than his 19 years. Moton, who dreamed of being a barber someday, carried an American flag in the march, and people noticed him beaming with pride, occasionally bursting into a few verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After it was all over, Liuzzo met up with Moton and got behind the wheel herself to ferry him and five other passengers back to Selma. The two of them were returning to Montgomery down Highway 80 when they were spotted by a carful of Ku Klux Klan members, who gave chase. “We got pretty much even with the car, and the lady just turned her head solid all the way around and looked at us,” said an FBI informant who was with the assailants. “I will never forget it in my lifetime, and her mouth flew open like she—in my heart I’ve always said she was saying ‘Oh God’ or something like that.” Liuzzo was shot to death. Moton miraculously survived as the car plunged, uncontrolled, into a field.
For Liuzzo and Moton to be in the same car was a terrible error, one many members of the black community could not conceive of making. Unita Blackwell was also on her way home from Montgomery that day, just ahead of Liuzzo and Moton. Her passengers included one white woman who the others kept covered with a bed sheet. “Merely seeing blacks and whites together in any kind of equal situation was enough to send white law-enforcement officials and some in the general public into a frenzy, and anything might happen,” Blackwell said.
Virginia Durr—whose white Southern roots did not keep her from playing a leading role in the Montgomery civil rights movement—said that in the end the violent paranoia about integration in the South “always got down to sexual relations between a black man and a white woman.” The obsession with “race-mixing” comes up endlessly in antiblack rhetoric, and for Southern racists, that mixing occurred in only one direction. White men could prey on black women at their pleasure, but let a black man touch a white woman, and civilization fell. The Alabama state legislature, in a resolution denouncing the Selma march, claimed, “There is evidence of much fornication, and young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.” In Washington, the congressman who represented Montgomery said that the marchers were “rabble hired to march for ten dollars a day… and all the sex they wanted.” The theme was not confined to Southerners. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, briefing the attorney general on Liuzzo’s death, told him “that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearances of a necking party.”
At the first trial of Collie Wilkins, the Klansman who shot Liuzzo, defense attorney Matt Murphy launched into a tirade about the mixing of the races: “Integration breaks every moral law God wrote…. No white
woman can marry a descendant of Ham. That’s God’s law…. I don’t care what Lyndon Johnson or anybody else says.” Questioning Leroy Moton, he demanded to know if the young man “had relations” with Viola Liuzzo. When Moton denied it vehemently, the lawyer wanted to know what other reason there could be for a white woman from Detroit to “desert her husband and children to ride around with a black man.” Finally, after suggesting that Moton was a drug addict, Murphy claimed that Liuzzo “was in the car with three black niggers. One white woman and three black niggers. Black nigger Communists who want to take us over!” Wilkins was freed after the jury deadlocked, repeatedly voting 10 to 2 to convict on a lesser charge of manslaughter. Murphy assured a reporter that there would undoubtedly be an acquittal on retrial: “All I need to use is the fact that Mrs. Liuzzo was in the car with a nigger man” and, he added bizarrely, that “she wore no underpants.” Murphy and the other men accused of Liuzzo’s murder then embarked on a fund-raising tour for the Klan, during which Wilkins was repeatedly introduced as “the triggerman” and honored with a parade in Atlanta. (Wilkins was indeed acquitted at his second trial. Later, all three of the Klansmen implicated in Liuzzo’s death were convicted in a federal trial of violating her civil rights and were sentenced to ten years in prison.)