SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  In Jackson that spring, Moses, with an enlarged SNCC staff, began to plan voter registration operations for the summer. The money that Tim Jenkins had spoken about was on its way, contributed by the Taconic and Field Foundations, administered by the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, through a new Voter Education Project. Money was going to SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC and the Urban League. Moses planned to set up voter registration projects in seven different Mississippi towns in a “crash program” for the summer months.

  Lester McKinnie was already working in Laurel, from where he wrote to James Forman in Atlanta: “Jim, the Negroes in Laurel are like many other cities, waiting until someone else starts something, and then if it is effective they will get on the band wagon. Every minister seems to be uncle Tomish; it’s absurd really. So I am working mostly with the common layman.…” And in June, Frank Smith, a wiry, agile Morehouse College student from Atlanta, set up shop in Holly Springs, where tiny Rust College, a Negro school, was a kind of haven. His first report back to Atlanta gives an idea of how a SNCC worker goes about his business when he arrives in a Deep South town:

  Two days were spent just loafing around in all sections of the County in an effort to find out just who the most trusted and respected leaders were.… On June 27, a letter was sent to seventeen people in Marshall County announcing a meeting. It was very vague and mentioned only slightly voter registration. Sixteen people came out and among them was Father Monley, who let us have the meeting at the Catholic School. It was quite a success and everyone was very enthusiastic. Mr. O. C. Pegues is a middle-aged man of about forty. He has seven kids and is renting a 200-acre farm. … He has a high school diploma and served three years during World War II. He has a very prosperous farm and a wonderful family. He is one of the few that is known by the white community as a “crazy nigger.” He doesn’t stand any pushing around…. The door-to-door committee was set into motion on July 8.… Transportation was provided for all persons and we contacted about 1000 people and got about 150 of them to take the voter registration test…. It did not take the sheriff and the police force long to discover that Smith was in town.… We are dealing with very subtle problems here, not one of shootings and hangings, but of lowering of cotton acreage allotments and the raising of taxes. The Chancery Court sells the land for taxes and the farmer is forced to move. In the meantime the banks refuse to give him a loan.… Here we have the problem of the sheriff riding by a place where meetings are being held and writing down the tag numbers. The next week, any person at the meeting who does public work is fired…. Perhaps something should be said about handicaps at this point. Perhaps the greatest one could be spelled out in one word, MONEY. … There were times when my buddy and I walked as many as fifteen miles per day, and we rode a mule for almost a week. These things were good psychologically for the community, but I don’t think they did the asses and the feet of two of us any good….

  Thus, the original nucleus that had gathered in McComb after the Freedom Rides had spread out in the summer of 1962 to Holly Springs, Laurel, and other places. Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins were in Hattiesburg; other staff members were in Greenville, Cleveland, Vicksburg, and Ruleville.

  But it was the city of Greenwood, seat of Leflore County, that was to become the focus of attention in Mississippi for the next year. To Greenwood came, in June, 1962, a twenty-three-year-old native of Cleveland, Mississippi, named Sam Block, the son of a construction worker, tall, black, gaunt, silent, who sings in a deep voice and looks at you with eyes large and sad.

  As Sam Block walked through the Negro section of Greenwood, knocking on doors, a police car followed him around and people were afraid to talk to him. The Elks Club gave him a meeting place, and people began to gather there around Sam. But he wrote to Jim Forman in mid-July: “We lost our meeting place at the Elks Club. The members did not approve of our meeting there and singing Freedom songs.” One day three white men beat Sam; another day he had to jump behind a telephone pole to escape a speeding truck.

  Willie Peacock, also from Mississippi, dark, muscular, handsome, who joined Block in Greenwood, spoke of their hard times together:

  We were hungry one day and didn’t have anything to eat and didn’t even have a pair of shoes hardly, and we went down and started hustling and a fellow gave me a pair of shoes. Then we had to ride a mule…. Didn’t even have transportation. But we kept begging for transportation. Came up to Memphis and had to stay five days and still didn’t get a car. But we’re not worryin’. We ain’t complaining. We just go on and raise hell all the time. We don’t have to ride, we can walk, we don’t care.

  A profile of Leflore County is very much a profile of the rural Deep South. The county in 1960 had about 50,000 people, of whom approximately two-thirds were Negro. Whites owned 90 percent of the land and held 100 percent of the political offices; their median income was three times that of Negroes. (But most whites were poor; thirty-six white families made over $25,000 a year, earning a total amount of money greater than the 3600 poorest families.) Of 168 hospital beds in the county, 131 were reserved for whites. Ninety-five percent of the whites of voting age were registered to vote; 2 percent of the Negroes of voting age were registered.

  Soon after his arrival in Greenwood, Sam Block became interested in a police brutality case. Late in July, the police picked up a fourteen-year-old Negro boy and accused him of breaking into a white woman’s house. The boy told them: “I go to the cotton field all the time and back home,” but they took him to the police station, where they forced him to strip and beat him with a bull whip as he lay naked on the concrete floor. They kicked him, beat him with fists, a billy club, and a blackjack until knots and welts were raised all over his body. When someone came near, a buzzer was sounded, and a television set was turned on to drown out the boy’s screams. Finally, his father came for him. Police told him to stop crying, wash his face, dress, and go to the courtroom. He entered the wrong room, and a policeman struck him on the head, pushed him into the courtroom, saying: “That room, nigger.”

  Sam Block took affidavits from the boy, took photos of his wounds, and dropped them into the bottomless, bucketless well of the Justice Department. “From then on,” says Bob Moses, “it was Sam versus the police.” Sam’s courage began to be contagious; more people began to show up at the SNCC office at 616 Avenue I in Greenwood, and to go down to the county courthouse to register. The newspapers now reported that a voter registration drive was being organized among Negroes in town, and gave the address of the office.

  On August 17, 1962, Bob Moses was in Cleveland, Mississippi, when a collect telephone call came at midnight from Greenwood. Sam Block, Luvaghn Brown and Lawrence Guyot were working late in the second story SNCC office there. It was Sam Block on the line:

  Sam said there were some people outside, police cars, about twelve o’clock at night… white people riding up and down the street, and they felt something was going to happen. I told him to keep in touch with us, hung up, called a member of the Justice Department. We gave him Sam’s number and he had some instructions about calling the local FBI. And Sam called back again. The police had gone, and white people had come in their cars, were standing outside the office. He was crouched in the office, looking out the window, talking on the phone in a very hushed voice, describing people downstairs with guns and chains, milling around down there, outside his office. He had to hang up.… We didn’t know what to do…. Willie Peacock and I decided then to drive over to Greenwood. We got there about three-thirty or four. The office was empty, the door was knocked down, the window was up, Sam was gone, so was Guyot and Luvaghn. Well, the next morning when they came in they told us what had happened. People had charged up the back stairs, had come into the office and they had escaped out the window, across the roof to an adjoining building, and down a TV antenna into somebody else’s home.

  Sam Block went to Hattiesburg the day after that incident, and returned to Greenwood to find the SNCC office a shambles. The owner told him he co
uldn’t stay there any longer. For the next two nights he slept in a junkyard on the seat of a wrecked auto. Then he found a room to sleep in. It would be five months before they could find another office, but he and Willie Peacock stayed in town, visiting people every day. They were, as Moses put it, “breaking down the psychological feeling on the part of the Negroes that these boys are just coming in here, they’re going to be in here for a short time, and then they’re going to leave, and we’re going to be left holding the bag.”

  One day, while taking Negroes down to register in Greenwood, Block was stopped by the sheriff, and the following conversation took place:

  SHEBIFF: Nigger, where you from?

  BLOCK: I’m a native of Mississippi.

  SHERIFF: I know all the niggers here.

  BLOCK: Do you know any colored people?

  (The sheriff spat at him.)

  SHERIFF: I’ll give you till tomorrow to get out of here.

  BLOCK: If you don’t want to see me here, you better pack up and leave, because I’ll be here.

  That he wasn’t murdered on the spot is something of a miracle. The next day, Sam Block took some more Negro men and women down to the county courthouse to try to register.

  As the stream of voting applicants in Greenwood increased (though in Block’s first six months there, only five Negroes were actually declared by the registrar to have passed the test), the economic screws tightened on the Negro community. Winters were always lean in the farming towns of Mississippi, and people depended on surplus food supplied by the Government to keep them going. In October, 1962, the Board of Supervisors of Leflore County stopped distributing surplus food, cutting off 22,000 people—mostly Negro—who depended on it. By mid-winter, conditions were desperate. Willie Peacock and Sam Block wrote to Jim Forman in Atlanta:

  Saturday, January 19, 1963… these people here are in a very, very bad need for food and clothes. Look at a case like this man, named Mr. Meeks, who is thirty-seven years old. His wife is thirty-three years old, and they have eleven children, ages ranging from seventeen down to eight months. Seven of the children are school age and not a one is attending school because they have no money, no food, no clothes, and no wood to keep warm by, and they now want to go register. The house they are living in has no paper or nothing on the walls and you can look at the ground through the floor and if you are not careful you will step in one of those holes and break your leg.

  From Atlanta, the word went out to the cities of the North, to college campuses, wherever SNCC had friends, that food and other supplies were needed in Mississippi. People began to respond. Two Negro students at Michigan State University, Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor, drove a truck-load of food, clothing and medicine a thousand miles to the Mississippi Delta during Christmas week. They were stopped in Clarksdale, arrested, charged with the possession of narcotics, and held in jail under $15,000 bond. The bond was reduced after nationwide protests, and after they had spent eleven days in jail they were released. Their cargo was confiscated. The “narcotics” in the shipment consisted of aspirin and vitamins. After that Ivanhoe Donaldson became a one-man transport operation; twelve times he drove truckloads of supplies the thousand miles from Michigan to Mississippi.

  Bob Moses had written from the Delta to Martha Prescod, a pretty Negro coed at Ann Arbor:

  We do need the actual food.… Just this afternoon, I was sitting reading, having finished a bowl of stew, and a silent hand reached over from behind, its owner mumbling some words of apology and stumbling up with a neckbone from the plate under the bowl, one which I had discarded, which had some meat on it. The hand was back again, five seconds later, groping for the potato I had left in the bowl. I never saw the face. I didn’t look. The hand was dark, dry, and wind-cracked, a man’s hand, from the cotton chopping and cotton picking. Lafayette and I got up and walked out. What the hell are you going to do when a man has to pick up a left-over potato from a bowl of stew?

  In January, Sam Block reported to the Atlanta office:

  Dear Jim,

  Man, I am so glad we now have transportation here in Greenwood.… We carried five people down to register. In addition to that we are now able to get around to these people who have been cut off from the surplus food deal, and some of them will make you cry to see the way they have been trying to live. We went to about ten people’s houses who lived up in little nasty alleys, it was cold, cold outside, and some of them were sitting beside of the fireplace with a small amount of wood burning trying to keep warm. They had little babies that had no shoes to put on their feet in that cold, cold house. … We found out that the people… had to tell their kids that Santa Claus was sick and that he would be able to see them when he gets well.

  The food drive turned out to be a catalyst for the voter registration campaign in Mississippi. It brought the SNCC workers into direct contact with thousands of Negroes, many of whom came forward to help with the distribution of food, and stayed on to work on voter registration. Thus SNCC became identified in the minds of Negroes in Mississippi not simply with agitation, but with direct aid. The more food was distributed, the more people began to go down to the courthouse to register. Eventually, federal pressure led Leflore County to resume the distribution of surplus food.

  Bob Moses wrote, on February 24, to thank the Chicago Friends of SNCC, who, with the aid of Dick Gregory, had sent food and clothing and medicine to Mississippi:

  … we have been on a deep plateau all winter, shaking off the effects of the violence of August and September and the eruption that was Meredith at Old Miss…. You combat your own fears about beatings, shootings and possible mob violence; you stymie by your mere physical presence the anxious fear of the Negro community, seeded across town and blown from paneled pine and white sunken sink to windy kitchen floors and rusty old stoves, that maybe you did come only to boil and bubble and then burst out of sight… you create a small striking force capable of moving out when the time comes.… After more than six hundred lined up to receive food in Greenwood on Wednesday, 20 February, and Sam’s subsequent arrest and weekend in prison on Thursday, 21 February, over one hundred people overflowed city hall to protest at his trial, over two hundred and fifty gathered at a mass meeting that same night, and on Tuesday by 10:30 A.M. I had counted over fifty people standing in silent line in the county courthouse; they say over two hundred stood in line that day. This is a new dimension…. Negroes have never stood en masse in protest at the seat of power in the iceberg of Mississippi politics…. We don’t know this plateau at all. We were relieved at the absence of immediate violence at the courthouse, but who knows what’s to come next?

  The evening after he wrote that letter, about 10:00 P.M., Bob Moses left the SNCC office in Greenwood and got into an automobile with two other men, heading for Greenville. One was Randolph Blackwell, of the Voter Education Project in Atlanta, tall, of powerful build and voice, who was doing a tour of the voter registration areas. The other was Jimmy Travis, twenty years old, a native Mississippian and a former Freedom Rider, who had come out of the Rides to join the SNCC staff.

  A 1962 Buick with no license tags had been sitting outside the SNCC office all day, with three white men in it—nothing unusual for SNCC. As they pulled away, the Buick followed. They stopped at a filling station for gasoline, and the Buick followed and circled the block. Then they headed out on the main highway toward Greenville, all three sitting in front: Jimmy Travis at the wheel, Bob Moses next to him, Blackwell on the outside. It was about 10:30 P.M., and there was a good deal of traffic on the road. As the traffic began to thin, the Buick pulled up alongside and then came the deafening sound of gunfire. Thirteen 45-calibre bullets ripped through the car shattering the front left window, missing Bob Moses and Randolph Blackwell by inches, smashing through the window on the other side. Two bullets hit Jimmy Travis. The Buick sped off, and Moses grabbed the controls to pull the car to a stop as Travis crouched in his seat, bleeding.

  They drove to a hospital, and phoned the news
to Atlanta. Ruby Doris Smith sent wires the next morning to SNCC workers in the field: “Jimmy Travis was shot in the Delta last night. Twice in shoulder and neck. Will be operated on today to remove bullet which is lodged behind spinal cord.” Travis lived, but the doctor said that if the bullet had penetrated with just slightly more force, he would have died instantly.

  From Jackson, David Dennis, who came out of the Freedom Rides to be CORE’s representative in Mississippi, wired Attorney General Kennedy asking for “immediate action by the federal government” to protect voter registrants and civil rights workers. The head of the NAACP in Mississippi, Aaron Henry, also issued a statement of protest. Jim Forman wrote to President Kennedy from Atlanta, requesting protection. But, as in all other acts of violence in Mississippi, the national government carefully confined its work to the filing of occasional lawsuits, and left the police power of the state of Mississippi to its own devices.

  One immediate consequence of the shooting was that Wiley Branton, the civil rights lawyer in charge of the Voters Education Project in Atlanta, asked registration workers all over Mississippi, from all civil rights groups, to move into Greenwood immediately. (Branton, a very fair-skinned Negro, was, coincidentally, a descendant of the remarkable white millionaire slave-owner Greenwood LeFlore, after whom both the city and the county were named, who built a mansion styled after the palace of Empress Josephine, and who supported the Union from his plantation in the Delta all through the Civil War, dying on his front porch with four grandchildren holding Union flags above him.) For the next year, Leflore County was to be the point of concentration for all civil rights work in Mississippi. Said Branton: “The State of Mississippi has repeatedly thrown down a gauntlet at the feet of would-be Negro voters…. The time has come for us to pick up the gauntlet. Leflore County has elected itself as the testing ground for democracy.”