SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  With the whole Mississippi Voter Education Project staff clustered in Greenwood now—dozens of SNCC people, a few from CORE and SCLC—violence continued. A week after the shooting of Travis, a station-wagon pulled up near SNCC headquarters and someone blasted away with a shotgun into a parked car where Sam Block and three other young people were sitting. The car windows were smashed, but no one was injured. And on March 24, 1963, the voter registration office used by SNCC and the other civil rights organizations was destroyed by fire. All of the office equipment was ruined, records were burned, a phone was ripped from the wall—Greenwood police said there was no evidence of arson. With the owner urging them to leave, SNCC had to look again for another office. Two nights later, someone fired a shotgun into the home of George Greene, a SNCC worker whose family lived in Greenwood. Three children slept as the shots tore into the wall of their bedroom.

  Meanwhile, in other parts of Mississippi, there was more trouble. The windows in Aaron Henry’s drug store in Clarksdale were broken, as they had been many times before. Dave Dennis’ car was fired into in Jackson, three bullets boring through the windshield, but fortunately no one was in the car.

  The day after the shooting up of the Greene home, Wednesday, March 27, 1963, Bob Moses, Jim Forman, Willie Peacock, Frank Smith and six others were arrested leading a march to the county courthouse.

  Moses recalls:

  The march that took place in Greenwood was not planned.… Now the morning of the march we were at the church there and began singing. Forman came by; he was actually on his way out of town, he was driving. So he suggested that maybe we ought to go down to city hall and protest the shooting. We did not anticipate that the police would react as they did. We were simply going to the police station and request a conference with the police chief asking for police protection in light of the shooting. And they met us there with the dogs and with guns and so forth and I guess, as Jim says, they simply went berserk for a little while.…

  As about a hundred Negro men, women, and youngsters, singing and praying, approached the Leflore County Courthouse, the police appeared, wearing yellow helmets, carrying riot sticks, leading police dogs. One of the dogs bit twenty-year-old Matthew Hugh, a demonstrator. Another, snarling and grunting, attacked Bob Moses, tearing a long gash in his trousers. Marian Wright, a young Negro woman studying law at Yale, was on the scene that day:

  I had been with Bob Moses one evening and dogs kept following us down the street. Bob was saying how he wasn’t used to dogs, that he wasn’t brought up around dogs, and he was really afraid of them. Then came the march, and the dogs growling and the police pushing us back. And there was Bob, refusing to move back, walking, walking towards the dogs.

  Demonstrations continued around the county courthouse for the next few days, with more arrests. Comedian Dick Gregory joined the demonstrators. Moses, Forman, and the others were found guilty of disorderly conduct and given the maximum sentence, four months in prison and a $200 fine. They were released in return for a Justice Department agreement to postpone its suit against local officials.

  To the SNCC headquarters in Greenwood, through the spring and early summer of 1963, came a stream of reports of events happening all over the state: an explosive tossed into the window of NAACP leader Aaron Henry’s home in Clarksdale, then an explosion ripping into the roof of his drugstore, then bullets fired from a passing car into his home; firebombs thrown into the home of Hartman Turnbow, first Negro voter applicant in Holmes County, after which Bob Moses and three others were arrested on “suspicion of arson”; SNCC worker Milton Hancock clubbed by a Greenwood policeman; a sit-in student beaten and kicked at a Jackson lunch counter; an NAACP official clubbed to the ground at a demonstration in Jackson; and, on June 12, Medgar Evers murdered in the driveway of his home in Jackson.

  But the evidence began to appear, here and there throughout the state of Mississippi, that what Bob Moses had called the “Mississippi iceberg” was beginning to crack. The evidence was not yet in changes in the social structure of the state, but in the people who emerged slowly, as rocks appear one by one out of a receding sea.

  Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, forty-seven, married, the mother of two children, has been all her life a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi (Sunflower County, where James Eastland has his plantation). I spoke to her at a SNCC staff meeting in Greenville, Mississippi, in late 1963, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, over the noise of Negro boys practicing in a brass band, blowing trumpets and pounding on drums just outside the door. She told how she got into the movement:

  I went to a meeting at this church, and they announced about this important mass meeting, something we wasn’t used to, and they said James Bevel would be speaking that night. So I went to church that Monday night in Ruleville.… James Bevel did talk that night and everything he said, you know, made sense. And also, Jim Forman was there. So when they stopped talking, well, they wanted to know, who would go down to register you see, on this particular Friday, and I held up my hand.

  Mrs. Hamer is short and stocky, her skin like weather-beaten copper, her eyes soft and large; she walks with a limp because she had polio as a child, and when she sings she is crying out to the heavens. She told what happened after she went down to register.

  The thirty-first of August in ’62, the day I went into the courthouse to register, well, after I’d gotten back home, this man that I had worked for as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years, he said that I would just have to leave…. So I told him I wasn’t trying to register for him, I was trying to register for myself. … I didn’t have no other choice because for one time I wanted things to be different.

  After her eviction from the plantation, Mrs. Hamer stayed with a friend in Ruleville. Ten days later, a car drove by the house and sixteen bullets were pumped into the bedroom where she slept. She was out of the house that night, and no one was hurt.

  On June 9, 1963, Mrs. Hamer and five other people were returning to Greenwood from a meeting in South Carolina. The bus made a brief stop in Winona, Mississippi, and some of them went into the white waiting room. The police came and arrested all of them, including Mrs. Hamer, who had just stepped off the bus to see what was happening. They were taken to the Winona jail.

  One of the group was Annell Ponder, in her twenties, black-skinned and beautiful, very quiet, who worked on voter education in Greenwood for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (Annell graduated from Clark College in Atlanta, and her younger sister was a student of mine at Spelman.) After they got to the jail and were separated inside, Mrs. Hamer heard Annell screaming. “I knew Annell’s voice. And she was prayin’ for God to forgive them.…”

  Then they came for Mrs. Hamer. “I was carried to another cell where there was three white men and two Negro prisoners. The state trooper gave one of the Negroes the blackjack and he said… ‘I want you to make that bitch wish she was dead.…’” The prisoner beat her with the blackjack, all over her body, while someone held her feet down to keep her from moving. Then the blackjack was handed to another prisoner, who continued the beating. (Negro prisoners—threatened, bribed, desperate—have often been used against other Negro prisoners, as white prisoners have been used against whites in jails all over the nation.)

  The day after the arrest, a group of SNCC people, summoned by telephone, drove to Winona to see if they could help. One of them was Lawrence Guyot, a twenty-three-year-old native of Mississippi, a graduate of Tougaloo College, now a SNCC field secretary, of powerful frame, fair skin, and a voice that roars with passion at church meetings in the Delta. Guyot, trying to see the prisoners, was questioned by a state trooper, who became enraged when Guyot refused to say “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.” The trooper slapped Guyot repeatedly, then turned him over to a group of Citizens Council members. They beat him until he couldn’t lift his arms, hit him again and again in his face until his eyes were so swollen he couldn’t open them.

  Another SNCC worker in the group of visitors managed to get into th
e jail to see Annelle Ponder. She reported on her visit when she got back to Greenwood: “Annelle’s face was swollen…. She could barely talk. She looked at me and was able to whisper one word: FREEDOM.”

  Mrs. Hamer became a field secretary for SNCC after her eviction from the plantation. Just as Moses and the other “outsiders” had become insiders, now the insiders were beginning to become outsiders to the society they had grown up in. As Mrs. Hamer put it:

  You know they said outsiders was coming in and beginning to get the people stirred up because they’ve always been satisfied. Well, as long as I can remember, I’ve never been satisfied. It was twenty of us, six girls and fourteen boys, and we just barely was making it. You know I could see the whites was going to school at a time when we would be out of school… and most of the time we didn’t have anything to wear. I knew it was something wrong. … I always sensed that we was the one who always do the hard work, you know….

  I asked her if she was going to remain with the movement, and she responded with the words to a song: “I told them if they ever miss me from the movement and couldn’t find me nowhere, come on over to the graveyard, and I’ll be buried there.”

  Shortly after the Winona incident, a voter registration meeting held in a tiny church in the cotton-growing village of Itta Bena, just outside of Greenwood, was broken up by smoke-bombs. When forty-five Negroes marched to the town marshal’s office to protest this, they were arrested; the following week, thirteen youngsters working with SNCC, some of them from Itta Bena, were arrested in Greenwood.

  My wife and I were in Greenwood in August, 1963, when those fifty-eight people finally were freed on bond money supplied via the National Council of Churches. That night SNCC headquarters had the eerie quality of a field hospital after a battle. Youngsters out of jail—sixteen and seventeen years old—were sprawled here and there. Two of them lay on the narrow cots upstairs while a few of the SNCC girls dabbed their eyes with boric acid solutions; some dietary deficiency in jail had affected their eyes. One boy nursed an infected hand. Another boy’s foot was swollen. He had started to lose feeling in it while in the “hot box” at Parchman Penitentiary, and had stamped on it desperately to restore circulation. Medical attention was refused them in prison.

  Newspaper reports about demonstrators arrested in the Deep South have never conveyed fully the reality of a Black Belt jail. As we stood around in SNCC headquarters, three of the youngsters out of Parchman spoke of their arrest and their two months in jail. The first was Willie Rogers:

  … it was twenty minutes to one when the chief came out of his car and across the street in front of the courthouse. It was June 25—Tuesday. The chief said, I’m askin’ you-all to move on. We said that we were up there to get our folks registered.

  … He said I’m askin’ you to leave now. We said we came to get them registered and soon as they registered we would leave. So he started placing us under arrest one by one.… The judge sentenced us to four months and $200 fine for refusing to move on….

  We stayed in the hot box two nights. It’s a cell about six foot square, which they call the hot box. Long as they don’t turn the heat on—with three in there—you can make it. There’s no openings for light or air; there was a little crack under the door, but you couldn’t see your hand before your face less you get down on your knees. When they got ready to feed you they hand the tray through a little door which they close—and then you can’t eat unless you get down on your knees by the light comin’ in the door—then you can see how to eat. And they had a little round hole in the floor which was a commode. …

  Next to speak was Jesse James Glover, another teenager, who told of nine of them being put in the hot box one time, and thirteen another time.

  We were making it okay about thirty minutes with the fan off, breathing in this oxygen, letting out this carbon dioxide—and the air was evaporating on top of the building, and it got so hot the water was falling off the top of the building all around the sides like it was raining. … He let us out… we told everyone to keep quiet because we didn’t want to get in the hot box again. Then a few fellows were talking to each other. He came down and told Lawrence Guyot, “I’m going to put these niggers up to this damn bar if I hear any of this racket”—so they hung MacArthur Cotton and Willie Rogers on the bars—MacArthur was singin’ some Freedom songs.… Altogether, I was thirteen days in the hot box…. How did I get in the movement? I was at a mass meeting in Itta Bena. I’d been walkin and canvassin on my own. Bob Moses asked me, did I want to work with SNCC? I told him yes….

  Fred Harris spoke:

  … He came around and said, “You gonna move? you gonna move?” And he frightened the old people. And when we didn’t move he arrested us.… In all I spent 160 hours in the hole—the hot box that is…. I’m seventeen. I got involved with the movement back in 1960, when SNCC came up. I was fourteen then. Sam Block was talking to me about the movement. I told him, yes, I’d be glad to help, and I started from there on. … At first my mother didn’t want me to be in it. Then she realized it would be best for her and for me … she told me I could go ahead.

  The next afternoon we drove in two cars, with Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and several others, to Itta Bena. People came out of the cotton fields to meet in a dilapidated little church, welcoming back the Parchman prisoners, singing freedom songs with an overpowering spirit. One of the returned prisoners was Mother Perkins, fragile and small, seventy-five years old, who had just spent, like the rest, two months on the county prison farm for wanting to register to vote. Cars filled with white men rumbled by along the road that passed by the church door, but the meeting and the singing went on.

  Bob Moses spoke, told them that there were no jobs in Chicago or Detroit for white or black, that they must stay and wrench from the State of Mississippi what they deserved as human beings. Anyone who felt the urge got up to speak. An old man rose on his cane and said slowly, thoughtfully: “All these years, going along behind my plow, I thought some day things would change. But I never dreamed I’d see it now.”

  In the fall of 1963, the SNCC workers concentrated in Greenwood began to spread out all over the state in the most daring political action undertaken by Mississippi Negroes since Reconstruction. With Negroes prevented—by intimidation and reprisal—from registering and voting in the regular gubernatorial election (between Paul Johnson, segregationist Democrat, and Rubel Phillips, segregationist Republican), it was decided to give them a chance to vote for a Negro governor, Aaron Henry, in an unofficial Freedom Ballot.

  Henry, a forty-one-year-old pharmacist, army veteran, and NAACP leader, was from Clarksdale, Mississippi, and one of the pillars of the movement in the state. Running for Lieutenant-Governor on Henry’s ticket was a twenty-seven-year-old white minister, Edwin King, chaplain at Tougaloo College. King was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, educated at Millsaps College in Jackson, then went off to study theology at Boston University. He had been arrested four times since 1960 for various civil rights actions and was once beaten in a jail in Montgomery. The Henry-King platform stressed the subjection of poor whites as well as Negroes to the political and economic dictatorship that had so long run the state of Mississippi.

  All the civil rights organizations in the Council of Federated Organizations cooperated in the campaign, and Bob Moses of SNCC directed it, with ballot boxes placed in churches and meeting places throughout the state, where adult Negroes could come and vote. In October and November, hundreds of workers canvassed the State of Mississippi, aided by visiting white students from Yale and Stanford, organized by Al Lowenstein, a young political scientist. There were jailings, beatings, and shootings, but the campaign went on.

  In Rolling Forks, Mississippi, Ivanhoe Donaldson was canvassing along with Charlie Cobb. People were on their front porches, back from church, or in the back yard. As Donaldson describes one exchange:

  “Good afternoon, Ma’am. Have you voted in the election yet?”

  “No. What election?”<
br />
  “Well, Dr. Aaron Henry, a Negro from Clarksdale, Mississippi.…”A pickup truck with a white man in it careened onto the lawn.

  “Nigger, we aren’t going to have any more of this agitation around here. Niggers ‘round here don’t need to vote, so you and your damned buddy get out of here. God damn it, nigger: I’ll give you one minute to get out of town or I’ll kill you!”

  Another time, a policeman had Ivanhoe Donaldson in the back of a police car, and worked himself into a rage, pulling his pistol, cocking it, holding it near Donaldson’s head, shouting: “You and the other goddamn Moses’ niggers around here ain’t gonna git nuthin but a bullet in the haid! Black son of a bitch, I’m gonna kill you, nigger!” Another policeman came over and suggested this was not the time or place for a killing, and finally he was let go.

  Claude Weaver is a Negro student at Harvard College, very young-looking, mild-mannered, who plays the guitar and draws hilarious cartoons with charcoal (his greatest creation is “Supersnick,” a humble Negro janitor named Tom who turns into “Supersnick” at will and saves his brethren from Mississippi sheriffs). Weaver joined the SNCC staff in time for the Freedom Ballot campaign. He wrote from Mississippi:

  The Delta lies vacant and barren all day; it broods in the evening and it cries all night. I get the impression that the land is cursed and suffering, groaning under the awful weight of history’s sins. I can understand what Faulkner meant; it must be loved or hated … or both. It’s hard to imagine how any music but the blues could have taken root in the black soil around me.