SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  Two days later, John Hardy, twenty-one, from Nashville, where his father worked as a porter and his mother as a maid, was beaten with a pistol by the registrar of Walthall County and then arrested for disturbing the peace. With the aid of SNCC worker MacArthur Cotton (tall, husky, born in Kosciusko, Miss., a student at Tougaloo Southern Christian College) and others, Hardy had been running a voter registration school in Walthall County. Two people who attended the school said they wanted to go down to Tylertown to register, and Hardy said he would go with them.

  The next morning they stopped by for me between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M. Mr. Wilson, Mrs. Peters, MacArthur Cotton and I drove into town together in a pick-up truck… parked in the street down by the fish market, and I went in with Mrs. Peters and Mr. Wilson to the Courthouse…. I stood just outside the door to the inner office, about four or five feet away from the registrar’s desk. The registrar asked what they wanted. Mrs. Peters stated they had come to register to vote. Mr. Wood said he wasn’t registering anyone…. I stepped into the doorway to the inner office and looked at Mrs. Peters and asked her what the trouble was…. Mr. Woods said, “What right do you have coming down here messing in these people’s business, and why don’t you go back where you came from?…” He reached behind a desk … and pulled a gun from the drawer … and said, “I want you to get the hell out of this office and never come back…. I was frightened and turned and started to walk out of the office. … I felt a blow on my head. I can only remember being very dazed, and the next thing I knew Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Peters were helping me across the street and up an alleyway. I felt something running down my head and saw blood dripping on the ground….”

  Out on the street, Hardy was taken into custody by the sheriff and charged with inciting to riot and resisting arrest. The rest of the day, Hardy was in a prison cell, or being interviewed by the District Attorney and others. It wasn’t until 4:30 that afternoon that he was finally taken to a doctor at the Walthall County Hospital who pronounced it a superficial wound, said it required no stitches, and charged Hardy $3.00. He was held overnight in jail, then released on bond. Later, the Justice Department brought a successful suit to block Hardy’s prosecution, on the grounds that it constituted intimidation of voters under the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

  “Well, the Travis Britt incident, followed by the John Hardy incident… just about cleaned us out,” says Bob Moses. “The farmers in both those counties were no longer willing to go down. The people down in McComb were in an uproar over the sit-in demonstrations and the fact that Brenda Travis, a fifteen-year-old girl, was in jail. And for the rest of the month of September, we just had a tough time. There wasn’t much we could do.” The youngsters in jail on sit-in charges had $5000 bail hanging over them, and the chief problem now was to raise that money and get them out of jail, and then somehow figure out what the next set of steps would be. In the midst of this, a man was murdered. As Moses tells it:

  The boom lowered on September 25; Herbert Lee, a Negro farmer, was killed in Amite County. I was down at Steptoe’s with John Doar from the Justice Department and we asked Steptoe—was there any danger in that area—who was causing the trouble, and who were the people in danger? Steptoe told us that E. H. Hurst, who lived across from him, had been threatening people and that specifically people said that he, Steptoe, Herbert Lee, and George Reese were in danger of losing their lives. We went out, but didn’t see Lee that afternoon. That night, John Doar and the other lawyers from the Justice Department left. The following morning about twelve o’clock, Dr. Anderson came by the voter registration office and said a man had been shot in Amite County. They had brought him over to McComb and he was lying on a table in a funeral home in McComb and he asked me if I might have known him. I went down to take a look at the body, and it was Herbert Lee. There was a bullet hole in the left side of his head, just above the ear. He had on his farm clothes.

  Moses waited until it was dark, then went out with a few others into Amite County, riding past night-shrouded cotton fields from one Negro home to another until three or four in the morning, trying to find witnesses to the killing of Herbert Lee. They continued this four or five nights, driving through the darkness, fighting off sleep, waking up Negro families in the hours before dawn to try to piece together what happened.

  They found three Negro farmers who had seen the shooting and who told essentially the same story. They had been standing at the cotton gin early in the morning when Herbert Lee drove up in a truck with a load of cotton. E. H. Hurst was following directly behind in an empty truck. (This truck, incidentally, was owned by Billy Jack Caston.) Hurst got out of the truck and came up to Lee, who was sitting in the cab of his truck, and began arguing with him. Hurst gesticulated, pulled a gun from under his shirt. Lee said he wouldn’t talk to Hurst unless he put the gun away, and Hurst put the gun under his coat. Then Lee slid out of the cab on the side away from Hurst. Hurst ran around in front of the cab, took his gun out, pointed it at Lee and fired.

  “This was the story that three Negro witnesses told us on three separate nights as we went out, in Amite County, tracking them down, knocking on doors, waking them up in the middle of the night.” These witnesses also told another story: that the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, and some white people in town had put pressure on them to say that Lee, who was about five feet four, had tried to hit Hurst, who was about six feet two, with a tire tool.

  Only at one point in Bob Moses’ detailed, quiet recounting of the killing of Herbert Lee did his voice show emotion:

  Lee’s body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in. No one in Liberty would touch it. They had a coroner’s jury that very same afternoon. Hurst was acquitted. He never spent a moment in jail…. I remember reading very bitterly in the papers the next morning, a little item on the front page of the McComb Enterprise Journal said that a Negro had been shot as he was trying to attack E. H. Hurst. And that was it. Might have thought he’d been a bum. There was no mention that Lee was a farmer, that he had a family, nine kids, beautiful kids, and that he had farmed all his life in Amite County.

  One of the three Negro witnesses to the murder of Herbert Lee was Louis Allen, who shortly after the murder was whisked from the scene by a white man, driven to the coroner’s jury hearing, and told what to say to the jury: that Hurst was right in claiming he had killed Lee in self-defense. The coroner’s jury accepted Hurst’s story. A month after the killing of Lee, a federal grand jury met to consider indicting Hurst. Louis Allen drove to McComb to tell Bob Moses that he had lied at the coroner’s jury hearing, that he wanted to tell the truth at the grand jury hearing, but wanted protection.

  Moses says: “We called the Justice Department in Washington. We talked to responsible officials in that department. They told us that there was no way possible to provide protection for a witness at such a hearing and that probably in any case it didn’t matter what he testified—that Hurst would be found innocent.” Allen gave the grand jury the same story he had told the coroner’s jury, and Hurst was exonerated, the grand jury deciding there was insufficient evidence to indict. About six months later a deputy sheriff told Allen he knew he had told the F.B.I. that his story about the killing was a fie. The deputy hit Allen with a flashlight and broke his jaw. Moses says: “It’s for reasons like these that we believe the local F.B.I. are sometimes in collusion with the local sheriffs and chiefs of police, and that Negro witnesses aren’t safe in telling inside information to local agents of the F.B.I.”

  That was not the end of the affair. On a Friday night, January 31, 1964, Louis Allen was found dead in his front yard. Three shotgun blasts had killed him.

  The force of SNCC revolutionaries in McComb grew. Chuck McDew, with his powerful frame and ever-present look of deep thoughtfulness, came into town. So did Bob Zellner, a college student from Alabama, SNCC’s first white field man, whose job was to work among white college students in the South, but who couldn’t stay awa
y from the Negro community. About ten days after the slaying of Herbert Lee, 115 high school students in McComb marched through town to express their feelings about the expulsion of their classmate Brenda Travis and the killing of Herbert Lee.

  Bob Moses and the other SNCC people went with them, through the Negro neighborhoods, into downtown McComb, where they stopped and began to pray on the steps of City Hall. White men in shirt sleeves stood by and watched. The street was thick with cars circling the block continuously. The police asked them to leave, but they refused, and were arrested one by one. Marching up the steps to be booked, Bob Zellner was attacked by a white man. Moses and McDew were hit also, then dragged into the station by police. Moses, McDew, Zellner, and six other SNCC people, charged with “contributing to the delinquency of minors,” Moses recalls, were brought downstairs into a large room to be questioned.

  I was again very quiet all the way down.… I remember when I went in, the room was very tense; all of the people were sort of sitting around on the edges, on benches, in the dark, and the sheriff was standing, and at one point threatened me about saying “Yassuh” and “Nossir,” and I remember that I finally just answered the questions without saying “yes” or “no”.

  The prisoners slept on a concrete bunker and on the floor before being assigned to cells. In jail, their spirit was high. They sang. McDew and Moses made a chessboard on the floor, shaping chess pieces out of cigarette butts. They swapped stories and told jokes until they were let out on bond a few days later.

  Over a hundred high school students in McComb, in response to their principal’s demand that they pledge not to participate in demonstrations, stayed out of school. The principal gave them an ultimatum: return to school by 3:00 P.M. on October 16 or be expelled. At a quarter of three on that day, 103 students returned to school, turned in their books, and walked out. “Nonviolent High” opened up in Pike County to take care of their education, with Moses teaching algebra and geometry, Dion Diamond teaching physics and chemistry, and McDew teaching history, until several weeks later Campbell Junior College in Jackson agreed to take the students. It was just in time, for in late October the SNCC staff in Pike County was found guilty of the charges connected with the march in McComb, and spent the next few months in jail, unable to raise the $14,000 required to keep them free pending appeal. In November, Bob Moses managed to slip a message from his jail to a local Negro who got it to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta:

  We are smuggling this note from the drunk tank of the county jail in Magnolia, Mississippi. Twelve of us are here, sprawled out along the concrete bunker; Curtis Hayes, Hollis Watkins, Ike Lewis and Robert Talbert, four veterans of the bunker, are sitting up talking—mostly about girls; Charles McDew (“Tell the story”) is curled into the concrete and the wall; Harold Robinson, Stephen Ashley, James Wells, Lee Chester Vick, Leotus Eubanks, and Ivory Diggs lay cramped on the cold bunker; I’m sitting with smuggled pen and paper, thinking a little, writing a little; Myrtis Bennett and Janie Campbell are across the way wedded to a different icy cubicle.

  Later on, Hollis will lead out with a clear tenor into a freedom song, Talbert and Lewis will supply jokes, and McDew will discourse on the history of the black man and the Jew. McDew—a black by birth, a Jew by choice, and a revolutionary by necessity—has taken on the deep hates and deep loves which America and the world reserve for those who dare to stand in a strong sun and cast a sharp shadow.…

  This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis is leading off with his tenor, “Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluia; Christian brothers don’t be slow, Alleluia; Mississippi’s next to go, Alleluia.” This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg—from a stone that the builders rejected.

  Out of jail finally in December, Moses and the others pondered their next moves. They had learned something in the flurry of events centered in McComb that summer and fall of 1961. Direct action ran head-on into the stone wall of absolute police power in Mississippi. After the beatings of Moses and Britt and Hardy, and the killing of Herbert Lee, there had been continuing violence in the city of McComb: in October, two young white men, Paul Potter of the National Student Association and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society, were dragged from their car and beaten in the street; in November, four CORE people were brutally beaten by a mob of whites when they tried to eat at the lunch counter of the Greyhound bus terminal (this was a week after the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling went into effect, but FBI men merely stood by taking notes as the beating took place); also that month, someone fired a shotgun into the bedroom of Dion Diamond and John Hardy; in December, four white men attacked three newspapermen in the street, and three more CORE people were attacked at the Greyhound bus terminal.

  Voter registration was presumably a milder form of activity than a sit-in or a march downtown or a Freedom Ride, but here the SNCC people found more frustration. In all of Amite County, there was one Negro officially registered. But, as McDew said wryly: “We haven’t been able to find him.” Negro ministers, Negro businessmen, those people in the black community who had the most resources, were also most vulnerable to economic pressure from the white community, and they could not be counted on to give anything but undercover help. It became clear that the only way to carry on voter registration campaigns was, as Moses put it, “to build a group of young people who would not be responsible economically to any sector of the white community and who would be able to act as free agents.”

  With youngsters from the towns and countryside of Mississippi clustering now in growing numbers around the handful of SNCC staff people, and with perhaps one courageous businessman, one minister or farmer in the Negro community willing to take risks, they might move. McComb, with all its bitter legacy, was a beginning for SNCC in Mississippi. “We had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet,” Moses said. They now moved north, deeper into the Delta.

  5. Mississippi II: Greenwood

  Leaving McComb in early 1962, the winter in Mississippi not yet over, Bob Moses wrote to the Atlanta office:

  The movement from the rural to the urban is irresistible and the line from Amite to McComb to Jackson straight as the worm furrows. Accordingly, I have left the dusty roads to run the dusty streets. In short, I’m now installed in Jackson—subject to reproval or removal—and am duly reporting. Jackson is to be the center for a new newspaper, the Mississippi Free Press. … A group of Jackson businessmen are backing it. … The third and fourth congressional districts are to see Negro candidates for Congress, and I’m up to be the submerged campaign director for the Rev. R. L. Smith, who is running for the fourth district… we will scuffle like hell to get as many poll taxes paid as possible in the next six weeks, while the hunting season lasts. After the hunting comes the killing and if we’re all dead, I want to be cremated and snuck into the next sun-circling satellite for my last rites….

  A group of SNCC staff people had rented a house in Jackson, and Moses stayed there, with Paul Brooks and his wife, James and Diane Nash Bevel (newly wed), Lester McKinnie and Bernard Lafayette. With his old friend Amzie Moore, Moses went on a field trip through the state. With Reverend Smith, the candidate for Congress, he visited a session of the Mississippi state legislature and tried to sit in the white section of the gallery, but was turned away. With Tom Gaither of CORE, a plan was drafted for CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and NAACP to carry on a unified voter registration program in Mississippi, joined together in a Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Moses wrote,

  “Most of the winter was lean. We were just hanging on in Jackson … laying foundations, getting ready for the next drives in the summer.” Meanwhile, Mississippi continued in its ways. To Jackson in February came the story told to SNCC people by a young Negro woman, Bessie Turner, aged nineteen, who lived in Clarksdale:

  About four o’clock Sunday afternoon, January 21, two policemen came to my house, one short and stocky with silver teeth at the bottom, and a tall slender policeman. They told me to get in their car and they carried me to the
City Hall into a small room and began questioning me about some money they said I had taken…. The short policeman told me to lay down on the concrete floor in the jail and pull up my dress and pull down my panties. He then began to whip me.… He then told me to turn over…. He hit me between my legs with the same leather strap.… He told me then to get up and fix my clothes and wipe my face, as I had been crying….

  In May, Diane Nash Bevel was tried in Jackson for teaching the techniques of nonviolence to Negro youngsters; the charge was “contributing to the delinquency of minors” and she was sentenced to two years in jail. Four months pregnant, she insisted on going to jail rather than putting up bond, saying: “I can no longer cooperate with the evil and corrupt court system of this state. Since my child will be a black child, born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not he will be born in prison.” After a short stay in prison, she was released.

  Two Negro students from Jackson were in the courtroom during the trial of Mrs. Bevel. One was Jesse Harris, tall and serious, who had attached himself to SNCC ever since James Bevel came to Jackson in the Freedom Rides. The other was seventeen-year-old Luvaghn Brown. They refused to move to the “colored” side of the courtroom and were arrested. En route to jail, Harris was beaten by a deputy. Out on the prison farm, both were singled out for special attention. A guard ordered other prisoners to hold Jesse Harris while he whipped him with a length of hose. At another time, he was beaten with a stick, handcuffed and removed to the county jail where he was put in the “sweatbox” on a bread and water diet. Brown was also beaten. After forty days of such treatment, they were released.