… I married in 1944 and stayed on the plantation until 1962, when I went down to the courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. That happened because I went to a mass meeting one night.
Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote. Bob Moses, Reggie Robinson, Jim Bevel, and James Forman were some of the SNCC workers who ran that meeting. When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it up high as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared. The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.
… Well, there was eighteen of us who went down to the courthouse that day and all of us were arrested. Police said the bus was painted the wrong color—said it was too yellow. After I got bailed out I went back to the plantation where Pap and I had lived for eighteen years. My oldest girl met me and told me that Mr. Marlow, the plantation owner, was mad and raising sand. He had heard that I had tried to register. That night he called on us and said, “We’re not going to have this in Mississippi and you will have to withdraw. I am looking for your answer, yea or nay?” I just looked. He said, “I will give you until tomorrow morning. And if you don’t withdraw, you will have to leave. If you do go withdraw, it’s only how I feel, you might still have to leave.” So I left that same night. Pap had to stay on till work on the plantation was through. Ten days later they fired into Mrs. Tucker’s house where I was staying. They also shot two girls at Mr. Sissel’s.
… What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country will have to upset this applecart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is NOT the “… and of the free and the home of the brave.” I used to question this for years—what did our kids actually fight for? They would go in the service and go through all of that and come right out to be drowned in the river in Mississippi.
… I’ve worked on voter registration here ever since I went to that first mass meeting. In 1964, we registered 63,000 black people from Mississippi into the Freedom Democratic Party. We formed our own party because the whites wouldn’t even let us register. We decided to challenge the white Mississippi Democratic Party at the National Convention. We followed all the laws the white people themselves made. We tried to attend the precinct meetings and they locked the doors on us or moved the meetings and that’s against the law they made for their own selves. So we were the ones that held the real precinct meetings. At all these meetings across the state we elected our representatives to go to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the law and all the righteousness on our side, that white man is not going to give up his power to us.
We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black people … The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs—if the white man gives you anything—just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
… I went to Africa in 1964 and I learned that I sure didn’t have anything to be ashamed of from being black. Being from the South we never was taught much about our African heritage. The way everybody talked to us, everybody in Africa was savages and really stupid people. But I’ve seen more savage white folks here in America than I seen in Africa. I saw black men flying the airplanes, driving buses, sitting behind the big desks in the bank and just doing everything that I was used to seeing white people do. I saw, for the first time in my life, a black stewardess walking through the plane and that was quite an inspiration for me.
… I was treated much better in Africa than I was treated in America. I often get letters that say, “Go back to Africa.” Now I have just as much if not more right to stay in America as whoever wrote those letters … It is our right to stay here and we stay and fight for what belongs to us.
This excerpt is from To Praise Our Bridges, the autobiography of Fannie Lou Hamer.
Several months later, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party raised the issue of voting rights once again. When Congress reconvened in January, the MFDP went to Washington to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s five-member, all-white congressional delegation. The MFDP candidates found some support in the House; 149 members voted to seat them, while 276 backed the old-guard whites. But black Mississippians had begun to open up the Democratic party, paving the way for other minorities and women, who were also under-represented in that organization.
In altered form, many Freedom Summer projects continued after the summer volunteers had left. The Johnson administration provided funding for health clinics and school programs in rural Mississippi. The national preschool enrichment program known as Project Head Start evolved from Freedom Summer, and federal money for nutrition programs and legal aid took up where the Mississippi project left off.
Freedom Summer also presented a chance for black and white movement activists to work side-by-side. But for the first time, a serious rift developed between the white liberals and the black workers. Blacks began to question the motives of the whites who worked with them. Could they be trusted to go all the way, to never compromise their ideals? The racial tension and doubts culminated in the compromise at the Atlantic City Democratic Convention. Many of the black movement people felt that the liberal wing of the Democratic party had let them down.
While the MFDP delegates had struggled at the convention, the federal courts had issued injunctions against white school officials in three Mississippi counties, requiring them to admit black children. In Jackson, forty-three black elementary-school students registered at eight schools formerly open to whites only. In Biloxi, sixteen black youngsters enrolled at four such schools. These pushes toward integration resulted in many new private, segregated white academies.
The MFDP did not win its political challenge in 1964, but the party did reap a new sense of power and dignity. Black people who had never voted not only participated in the political process but took on the most powerful people in the country in front of television cameras and reporters. MFDP members were not savvy politicos trying to redirect Mississippi politics. They were sharecroppers and farm workers trying to direct and improve their own lives. And their efforts were not limited to politics; they organized schools, daycare centers, food banks, and farming cooperatives.
Perhaps the most notable personal metamorphosis of the time was that of Fannie Lou Hamer. The youngest of twenty children in a sharecropping family, her formal education stopped at the third grade. From an early age she worked on a plantation keeping track of other workers’ hours. Yet by 1966, Mississippi magazine identified her as one of six “women of influence” in the state. Two years after Freedom Summer, Fannie Lou: Hamer summed up the changes wrought by those times in this way: “There was no real civil rights movement in the Negro community in Mississippi before the 1964 Summer Project. There were people that wanted change, but they hadn’t dared to come out and try to do something, to try to change the way things were. But after the 1964 project when all of the young people came down for the summer—an exciting and remarkable summer—Negro people in the Delta began moving. People who had never before tried, though they had always been anxious to do something, began moving. Now, in 1966, even Negroes who live on the plantations slip off the plantations and go to civil rights meetings. ‘We wanted to do this so long,’ they say. When some of us get up and blast out at the meetings, these women go back home—these men go back home—and in the next day or two the kids come. They say, ‘My mother told us what you talked about last night.’ That’s great! To see kids, to see these people—to see how far they’ve come since 1964! To me it’s one of the greatest things that ever happened in Mississippi. An
d it’s a direct result of the Summer Project in 1964.”
Chapter Eight
Selma
The Bridge to Freedom
“I am 65 years old, I own 100 acres of land that is paid for, I am a taxpayer and I have six children. All of them is teachin’, workin’ … If what I done ain’t enough to be a registered voter … then Lord have mercy on America.”
A black man in Selma, Alabama, speaking to the voting registrar
On Sunday, March 21, 1965, 4,000 people left Brown’s Chapel in Selma and began the historic march to Montgomery.
Although the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had in 1870 prohibited racial discrimination in voting, nearly a century later few black southerners had ever been allowed to cast a ballot. In Mississippi, COFO’s efforts had helped somewhat—between 1962 and 1964 the number of registered blacks there increased from 5.3 percent to 6.7 percent of the voting-age black population, a small but significant improvement. In Alabama, prospective black voters fared little better. By 1962, some 13.4 percent of voting-age blacks were registered in that state.
Early in 1963, SNCC had only two workers in Selma, Alabama, a town of about 30,000 people in the central part of the state. There was little to indicate that Selma was about to become the center for a major civil rights protest as well as the focus of national attention. Blacks made up approximately half the voting-age population of Dallas County, within which Selma was located, but only one percent of voting-age blacks were registered to vote, in contrast to sixty-five percent of whites. Just 156 of Selma’s 15,000 blacks of voting age were on the voting rolls.
In February 1963, two SNCC workers began holding monthly voting clinics, showing people how to fill out the required forms. About forty blacks turned out for the first meeting, but the SNCC workers found that Selma’s blacks had reservations about registering and voting. “That’s white folks’ business,” some would say. One elderly woman remarked, “I ain’t got enough mind,” meaning she could not read or write. Several black preachers, fearing retribution from whites, were loath to host SNCC’s voter registration meetings in their churches. At even the smallest of such meetings, police often showed up to harass people. County sheriff James G. Clark, Jr., sent officers to record names; those who attended the clinics were threatened with economic retaliation. When SNCC workers clashed with law officers at the county courthouse, where voter registration was held, they were arrested.
Mayor Joseph Smitherman (left) with Sheriff James Clark at a press conference.
Local officials in Selma made it supremely difficult for those blacks brave enough to attempt to register. The registration office was open only on the first and third Mondays of each month, and the registrars were likely to arrive late, take long lunch hours, and leave early. The few blacks who managed to see the registrar usually “failed” the then-legal literacy tests.
On October 7, 1963, other SNCC workers came to Selma for a “Freedom Day.” The workers accompanied black would-be voters to the courthouse to help them register. By 11 A.M., 250 blacks were waiting in line outside the Dallas County Courthouse. But Sheriff Jim Clark was also there, backed by helmeted deputies armed with guns and clubs. Clark had a local photographer take pictures of every person in line and asked the people how their employers might react to the pictures. SNCC workers, carrying signs reading “Register To Vote” and “Register Now for Freedom,” were pulled from the steps of the federal government building and shoved into a police car. At 1:55 P.M., SNCC’s James Forman told Clark that he would be bringing water and food to the people in line. “If you do, you’ll be arrested,” said Clark, who forbade the people to get out of line. When two SNCC workers tried to hand sandwiches to the prospective voters, they were pummeled by Sheriff Clark’s deputies.
The police also attacked newspeople trying to get close to the action. Nevertheless, news stories and pictures reached Washington, as did reports that the photographs taken of blacks trying to register had been published in newspapers in an attempt to get the blacks fired by white employers. Congressmen also learned from the NAACP’s lobbyist in Washington, Clarence Mitchell, about the four-page form that would-be voters had to complete, and about the registrar’s irrelevant questions such as, “Does your employer know you are here?”
The Kennedy administration had always hoped to wipe out southern voting-rights discrimination through the courts rather than through Congress. But the administration crippled its own strategy by making mistakes in its appointment of federal judges in the South. In an effort to appease southern politicians, the administration did not carefully monitor the racial attitudes of its judicial nominees. Consequently, several of Kennedy’s early appointments turned out to be ardent segregationists with no intention of helping blacks gain access to the ballot. The civil rights bill sent to Congress in 1963 held great promise for ending discrimination in restaurants and other public accommodations, but it offered no comprehensive remedy for discrimination in voting rights. Throughout 1963 and the early part of 1964, Clarence Mitchell lobbied hard but in vain to have voting rights incorporated in a more substantive way into the Civil Rights Act.
After that bill’s passage in June 1964, Mitchell and other civil rights leaders asked President Johnson for further legislation securing the right to vote. Johnson asked Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to prepare a strategy memo on when and how the bill might be drafted. The Justice Department continued to research the issue, but for the moment, voting rights remained a low-priority issue for the president. Johnson felt the South needed time to adjust to the sudden presence of blacks in hotels and restaurants that had been open only to whites before the Civil Rights Act became law.
In Selma, SNCC responded to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act by trying to integrate all-white theaters and lunch counters. On July 4, when SNCC workers accompanied students to the Thirsty Boy drive-in and the Wilby Theater, they were attacked by whites and arrested for trespassing. The next day, at a voter registration rally at the courthouse, the police jabbed at the demonstrators with cattle prods. Afterwards, Circuit Court Judge James Hare issued an order forbidding blacks to meet publicly in groups of more than three people.
President Lyndon Johnson defeated Senator Barry Goldwater by a wide margin in the November, 1964, election. With the election over, civil rights workers hoped that Johnson would offer new legislation to address the issue of voting rights. For its part, the Justice Department began drafting several versions of a bill for submission to Congress.
Such legislation was badly needed in places like Selma, where blacks attempting to register were sometimes better educated than the registrars who challenged them. Amelia Platts Boynton, a Selma resident, remembers one occasion when an official had trouble reading the questions to a black teacher who wanted to register. “The teacher finally said, ‘Those words are “constitutionality” and “interrogatory.”’ The registrar turned red with anger,” recalls Boynton. “[The teacher] flunked the test and was refused her registration certificate.”
As one of the city’s few registered blacks, Boynton was called upon to vouch for the character of others trying to register, in accordance with an Alabama law. One day an elderly black man with a shaky hand asked Boynton to help him write his address as he stood before the registrar. “I can’t write so good,” he explained. The bureaucrat told the man to get out of line if he couldn’t write his own address. “Mr. Adkins,” the black man told the registrar, “I am 65 years old, I own 100 acres of land that is paid for, I am a taxpayer and I have six children. All of them is teachin’, workin’ … If what I done ain’t enough to be a registered voter with all the tax I got to pay, then Lord have mercy on America.”
Stories such as these reached the nation’s lawmakers through Clarence Mitchell and others. Even to those who did not want to listen, it was becoming obvious that black Americans were not allowed to register to vote in Selma. But neither Congress nor the White House took immediate action on the matter.
Despite
Washington’s hesitance, SNCC activists worked with the Dallas County Voters League, a local organization founded in the 1930s. They explained to the blacks who dared attend meetings that, through political action, black residents of Selma could get their streets paved, or see that their trash was picked up, or even force the school board to allocate more money to schools that were open only three hours a day and not at all when there was a crop to be planted or harvested. SNCC organizers promised that if blacks in Selma would take the risk of registering and voting, they could challenge the whites-only political system. If the segregationists tried to keep them from exercising their franchise, SNCC assured them, the federal government would step in.
“Our strategy, as usual,” SNCC’s James Forman later wrote, “was to force the U.S. government to intervene in case there were arrests—and if they did not intervene, that inaction would once again prove the government was not on our side and thus intensify the development of a mass consciousness among blacks. Our slogan for this drive was ‘One Man, One Vote.’ Who could deny the justice of [that]? [Sheriff] Jim Clark, of course.”
In December, Martin Luther King, Jr., traveled to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, calling himself a “trustee for the twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America who are engaged in a creative battle to end the night of racial injustice.” Birmingham’s Bull Connor, upon hearing of the award to his nemesis, said King didn’t deserve it and remarked, “Shame on somebody.”
Later that month, King announced his plans to go to Selma. “We will probably have demonstrations in the very near future in Alabama and Mississippi based around the right to vote,” he said. “We hope that, through this process, we can bring the necessary moral pressure to bear on the federal government to get federal registrars appointed in these areas, as well as to get federal marshals in those places to escort Negroes to the registration places if necessary.”
Eyes on the Prize Page 30