SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  At the Highlander meeting, it seemed for a while that an impasse had been reached between the “direct action” people and the “voter registration” people, and that SNCC might even split into two groups. Ella Baker, advisor to SNCC since it was founded at Raleigh in 1960, helped reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The result was a compromise. Two arms of SNCC were created: Diane Nash was put in charge of direct action projects. Charles Jones (from Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Rock Hill jail-in), fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and self-assured, was put in charge of voter registration work.

  In McComb, Mississippi, Bob Moses was already beginning voter registration schools when this decision was made, and about the middle of August, 1961, SNCC people began to converge on McComb. Moses recalls: “I became a member of the staff during a hectic hiring session in McComb in August, when staff hired staff or some such nonsense.”

  Money raised by Harry Belafonte began to come through now, and a number of people decided not to return to school in the fall but to go to work full-time for SNCC: Diane Nash, Charles Jones, James Bevel, Charles Sherrod, and others. With Ed King leaving the Atlanta office to go to law school (Jane Stembridge had returned to school earlier), the organization desperately needed an Executive Secretary. Diane Nash telephoned James Forman in Chicago and asked him to come to work for SNCC.

  Forman, a thirty-three-year-old teacher, was born in Chicago but spent part of his childhood in Mississippi. He served four years in the Air Force, received a degree from Roosevelt College in Chicago, did graduate work on Africa at Boston University, studied French at Middlebury College, and somewhere inbetween wrote a novel (unpublished). Forman also spent a year working with sharecroppers in Fayette County, and made occasional trips to Nashville, where he met Diane Nash and talked with her about the future of SNCC. She had been impressed by him, and so called on him now.

  Forman was just back from Monroe, North Carolina, where he had participated in demonstrations and been badly beaten. In Chicago, he was teaching school and thinking of doing some more writing; Diane Nash, James Bevel and Paul Brooks asked him to come to direct the SNCC office in Atlanta for sixty dollars a week. Forman (strongly built, handsome, with a big shock of curly hair, brown skin, an easy smile, and the features of an Indian) agreed to start working for SNCC in October.

  Thus, in August of 1961, SNCC was ready to move. The sit-ins and Freedom Rides had been successful in the Upper South. They had ground to a bloody halt in the Deep South, leaving the participants wounded but determined, the opposition unsettled, the nation expectant. The excitement of the Rides was still in the atmosphere. The students and ex-students in SNCC had a staff, a new Executive Secretary, and a vague idea of general strategy. Now, with their characteristic instinct for both challenge and danger, they turned towards the state of Mississippi.

  4. Mississippi I: McComb

  The hundred and fifteen students stopped in front of the city hall to begin praying one by one, Brenda first, and then Curtis, and then Hollis, and then Bobby Talbert and then finally all of us herded up the steps and into the city courthouse, and Bob Zellner, who was the only white participant, attacked on the steps as he went up, and then a mob outside, waiting, milling around, threatening. And inside, they brought the people down, the white people, the so-called good citizens of the town, one by one, to take a look at this Moses guy. And they would come down and stand in front of the jail and say, “Where’s Moses? Where’s Moses?”

  That scene is recalled by Robert Parris Moses, twenty-nine years old, of medium height and sturdy build, with light brown skin and a few freckles near his nose, who looks at you directly out of large tranquil eyes, who talks slowly, quietly, whose calm as he stands looking down a street in Mississippi is that of a mountain studying the sea. It took place in the fall of 1961, shortly after he arrived in Mississippi and threw state officials into great nervousness with the fantastic suggestion that Negroes should register to vote.

  Bob Moses was raised in Harlem, one of three boys in the family. He went to Hamilton College in upstate New York, majoring in philosophy, and then went to Harvard where he did graduate work in philosophy and received a Master’s Degree in 1957. He began teaching mathematics at Horace Mann High School in New York. Two years later there occurred the most cataclysmic event of his life, the kind against which perhaps all of the painful scenes he would watch later in the Delta of Mississippi might measure small: his mother, aged forty-three, died of cancer. It was a steep and sudden fall, for she and Bob’s father had just had their first real vacation, which he described:

  “Did I say vacation, no, our honeymoon. A beautiful bubble that the two of us floated in … the world locked outside that thin filament.… I would close my eyes and it would seem to me that we two would be singing.… But bubbles burst.”

  Gregory Moses wrote down for his sons what life had been like with their mother. He is a working man, and has been all his life, a remarkable man, grey-haired, handsome, soft of voice, with a keen intelligence and a gift for language which another world, another time, would have put to splendid use. But it was no waste to pour all of himself into the lives of his three sons.

  Gregory Moses recalls that Bob, as a baby, took all sorts of incredible risks cavorting on his high chair, “but somehow knew the laws of balance and never fell.” Today, after three years on the Mississippi high wire, with all the officialdom of the state tugging at it, Bob Moses still keeps his balance.

  It was only a few months after his mother’s death that the first sit-ins took place, and Bob Moses read about them in the newspapers. “I knew for sure I would have to come South to take a first-hand look.” During the spring break from his teaching job he went to visit his uncle in Hampton, Virginia. “I slipped into the crowd of students picketing and sitting-in at Newport News … my first introduction to the movement.” Back in New York, talking to Bayard Rustin about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Moses prepared to go South that summer.

  After arriving in Atlanta, Moses stuffed envelopes until he and Jane Stembridge decided that, on his own money (for SNCC had none), he would make a field trip to Mississippi, gathering people to go to the October conference which SNCC was going to hold in Atlanta. In Cleveland, Mississippi, he met a wise and rock-like Negro man named Amzie Moore, and that started a train of events that would leave Mississippi not quite the same. Moore was head of the NAACP in his town, and he and Moses sat down that summer of 1960 and planned a campaign to begin registering Negroes to vote.

  Anywhere else, such a campaign might mean a certain amount of leg-work, persuasion, and organization; in Mississippi it would require a revolution. While 50 percent of the voting-age whites in Mississippi were registered to vote, only 5 percent of the Negroes were registered. Negroes were 43 percent of the population of the state—but held zero percent of the political offices, zero percent of the political power of the state. The median income of Negro families in Mississippi (U.S. Census figures for 1960) was $1100. White family income was three times as high. Negroes were laborers, sharecroppers, farm laborers, maids, servants of various kinds. More than half of them lived in houses with no running water; for two-thirds of them there was no flush toilet, no bathtub or shower. They lived in tarpaper shacks and rickety wooden boxes sometimes resembling chicken coops. Most whites were also poor, though not so poor; Mississippi was a feudal land barony, in which a small number of whites controlled the political power and the wealth of the state, using a tiny part of this wealth to pay the salaries of thousands of petty local officials who kept the system as it was by force.

  Negroes had been sheriffs and judges and state legislators and even lieutenant-governors in those few years of Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War when Negroes, supported by federal troops, voted in Mississippi. They never dominated Mississippi politics, but in those years, linked to the economic power of Republican white Southerners like Governor James L. Alcorn, they had a voice, and their record as public servants was a good one, as historian Vernon
Wharton has pointed out in his study, Reconstruction in Mississippi. But the reform spirit that accompanied the Civil War vanished; the political leaders of the nation began to see greater advantage in an alliance with powerful Southern white Democrats than with poor Southern Negroes, and in 1877 the great Compromise was reached between Northern white politicians and Southern white politicians, at the expense of the Negro. It was agreed, among other things, that the Fourteenth Amendment, which wrote into supreme law that no state could discriminate among its citizens, would be considered dead in the Deep South. The national government would leave the Negro helpless in his semi-slavery now, as it had left him in slavery before the Civil War; it would not interfere with the desires of Southern politicians no matter what the Constitution said.*

  By 1890, Mississippi was to take the leadership of the Southern states in enacting a whole series of laws which legalized the system of segregation from the cradle to the grave. Negro voting was squeezed down to nothing. To any who violated the code, the punishment was swift (between 1890 and 1920, about four thousand Negroes were put to death in the South, without benefit of trial, and Mississippi accounted for a good part of these). With the threat of death, mutilation, or imprisonment at worst, economic destitution at best, the Negro was held down. Segregated Mississippi became as closed a society as slave Mississippi had been.

  And now, in the summer of 1960, two Negroes, one a Mississippi farmer, the other a New York school teacher, sat in a farmhouse in the Delta and planned a campaign to dismantle, stone by stone, the prison that was Mississippi.

  After his talks with Amzie Moore, Bob Moses returned to Mississippi the following July, 1961, now as a SNCC staff member. An NAACP leader named C. C. Bryant in the city of McComb, in Pike County, read in Jet Magazine about Moses’ voter registration plans, and wrote to him suggesting McComb as a place to work. Pike County was in Southern Mississippi, just north of the Louisiana border. Moses came to live in McComb, went around town getting Negro ministers and storekeepers to agree to supply room, board, and transportation expenses for ten students to come to McComb to work on voter registration.

  In the meantime SNCC was meeting at Highlander Folk School, and deciding to work on voter registration in the Deep South, along with “direct action” projects. Through Harry Belafonte and others, money was being raised to hire SNCC’s first field secretaries. And students who had been in the Freedom Rides were coming out of jail. Somehow, they began, little by little, to drift into McComb. Two of SNCC’s first field secretaries now came in to help Moses: Reggie Robinson from Baltimore, slim, dark, animatedly cheerful; and John Hardy, of the Nashville student movement. On August 7, 1961, the first voter registration school was opened in Pike County and Negroes, in a slow release of resolve bottled up for a hundred years, began to study the complexities of registering to vote in Mississippi.

  Mississippi law requires that a person wanting to vote must fill out a twenty-one—question form. He must interpret any section of the Constitution of Mississippi chosen by the registrar, who has complete authority to decide if the interpretation is correct—there are 285 sections in the Mississippi Constitution. But in the schools people patiently went over the questionnaire and the Constitution, and the first Negroes made the trek to the county courthouse.

  Sixteen Negroes went down to the county seat of Magnolia to register, and six passed the test. Word got out to two neighboring counties, Amite and Walthall Counties, and people began to ask for schools in their areas. Three Negroes from Amite County—an old farmer and two middle-aged ladies—decided to go to Liberty, the county seat, to register. Bob Moses went with them.

  We left early morning August 15. It was a Tuesday. We arrived at the courthouse about 10 o’clock. The registrar came out. I waited by the side, waiting for either the farmer or one of the two ladies to say something to the registrar. He asked them: What did they want? What were they here for? In a very rough tone of voice. They didn’t say anything. They were literally paralyzed with fear. So after a while I spoke up and said they would like to come to try to register to vote. So he asked: Who are you? What do you have to do with them? Do you want to register? I told him who I was and that we were conducting a school in McComb, and these people had attended the school, and they wanted an opportunity to register. Well, he said, they’ll have to wait.… Our people started to register, one at a time. In the meantime a procession of people began moving in and out of the registration office: the sheriff, a couple of his deputies, people from the far office, the people who do the drivers’ licenses—looking in, staring, moving back out, muttering. Finally finished the whole process about 4:30; all three of the people had had a chance to register—at least to fill out the form. This was a victory.

  As the four drove back on the road to McComb, a highway patrolman whom they had seen in the registration office flagged them down. Moses got out of the car to find out what was wrong and was told by the policeman to get back in. He wrote down the name of the patrolman, who then pushed him back, saying, “Get in the car, nigger,” and ordered all of them to follow him to McComb. There Moses was placed under arrest on a charge of interfering with an officer, but was given a quick trial and a suspended sentence with a five-dollar fine after they heard him complaining on the telephone to the Justice Department in Washington. He described the incident later: “Well, I refused to pay … since I was obviously not guilty. I was taken to jail then—this was my first introduction to Mississippi jails.”

  On the farm of an Amite County NAACP leader, Mr. E. W. Steptoe, a school was set up, and on August 29, Bob Moses again accompanied two persons to Liberty. There he was attacked on the street by Billy Jack Caston (cousin of the sheriff and son-in-law of a state representative named E. H. Hurst) who proceeded to hit Moses again and again with the butt end of a knife. “I remember very sharply that I didn’t want to go immediately back into McComb because my shirt was very bloody and I figured that if we went back in we would probably frighten everybody.” So Moses and the two men with him went back to Mr. Steptoe’s farm, before going anywhere else. He washed up, and they made their way to McComb. Later, Moses had his head wound sewn up with eight stitches.

  McComb was at this time in a state of excitement. The two arms of SNCC (voter registration and direct action) had begun to move, hardly days after the decision at Highlander. Marion Barry, one of the “direct action” advocates, arrived in McComb on August 18 and began to hold workshops on nonviolent action. Three days before the beating of Moses, two eighteen-year-olds, Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, sat-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in McComb—the first such act of defiance in the area’s history. They were arrested on a charge of breaching the peace and sentenced to thirty days in jail. The evening that Moses returned to McComb two hundred Negroes attended a mass meeting, where they heard James Bevel speak, and made plans for further sit-ins and registration attempts. “We felt that it was extremely important that we go back to Liberty immediately so the people wouldn’t think we’d been frightened off by the beating.”

  Now McComb, Mississippi saw another “first”: a Negro—Robert Moses—filed charges of assault and battery against a white—Billy Jack Caston.

  Well, it turned out that… we did have his trial, that they had a six-man Justice of the Peace jury, that the courthouse in a twinkling was packed. That is, the trial was scheduled that day and within two hours farmers, all white, came in from all parts of the county, bearing their guns, sitting in the courthouse. We were advised not to sit in the courthouse except while we testified—otherwise we were in a back room. After the testimony was over the sheriff came back and told us that he didn’t think it was safe for us to remain there while the jury gave its decision. Accordingly he escorted us to the county line. We read in the papers the next day that Billy Jack Caston had been acquitted.

  Meanwhile, there were more sit-ins in McComb. A fifteen-year-old Negro girl named Brenda Travis had walked the streets from noon to five every afternoon with the SNCC people, under
the hot sun, had become exasperated with the apathy or the fear shown by Negroes in McComb, and decided they needed to be awakened. She and five other high school students sat-in and were arrested. Her companions were sentenced to eight months in jail for “breach of peace.” Brenda Travis was turned over to juvenile authorities and sentenced to a year in a state school for delinquents. Her high school principal immediately expelled her from school.

  More SNCC workers were arriving in McComb. One of them was Travis Britt, a student from New York City. Not long after his beating, Bob Moses went with Britt and four Negroes eager to register to the county courthouse in Liberty. “It was around the fifth of September,” Moses recalls,

  and I stood around and watched Travis get pummeled by an old man, tall, reedy, and thin, very very mean with a lot of hatred in him…. Travis and I had been sitting out front of the courthouse and then decided to move around back because people had started to gather around front. Finally about fifteen people gathered around back and began questioning Travis and myself. My own reaction in all those instances is simply to shut up, to be silent. I get very, very depressed. The people were talking to Travis … asking him where was he from and how come a nigger from New York City could think that he could come down here and teach people how to register to vote.…

  Travis Britt reported the incident as follows:

  I reached into my pocket and took out a cigarette. A tall white man… wearing a khaki shirt and pants stepped up to me and asked: “Boy, what’s your business?”—at which point I knew I was in trouble. The clerk from the hallway came to the back door … with a smile on his face and called to the white man. … At this point, the white man whom they called Bryant hit me in my right eye. Then I saw this clerk motion his head as if to call the rest of the whites. They came and all circled round me and this fellow Bryant hit me on my jaw, then my chin. Then he slammed me down … I stumbled on to the courthouse lawn. The crowd followed, making comments. Bryant… just kept hitting and shouting, “Why don’t you hit me, nigger?” I was beaten into a semi-conscious state. My vision was blurred. … I heard Bob tell me to cover my head.… Bryant released me. Moses then took me by the armand took me out to the street….