SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  People sat along the wall in Shiloh Baptist Church and told about prison conditions. In the Camilla jail, eighty-eight women were in one room with twenty steel bunks and no mattresses. One woman who had been in jail for a week said: “I was in the Leesburg stockade with fifty-one other women. There was no place to sleep. The mattresses were wet and dirty.… They would put the food in a box, place it on the floor, and kick it into the cell.” It wasn’t so much the prison conditions that hurt these people deep inside, but the reason for it all. A young married woman who was a student at Albany State said: “I didn’t expect to go to jail for kneeling and praying at City Hall.”

  Shiloh Baptist Church was packed that first night after the prisoners came out of jail. People stood up and sang Freedom Songs. In front, leading the singing, holding hands, was a line of SNCC workers, among them several who would later become known throughout the nation as the Freedom Singers: Bernice Johnson and Rutha Harris of Albany, Bertha Gober, and Cordell Reagan. In the middle of the meeting, Joan Browning, the young white girl who had been arrested with the original riders from Atlanta, walked down the aisle to the microphone. She had just been released from jail, and was out of breath. She spoke briefly in her soft Southern accent: “First time I’ve ever been in jail. It’s a funny mixed-up feeling to hate being in a dirty place—but to be glad you’re there for a good reason….”

  The agreement that called off the demonstrations had left the Negro community with no visible victory, except the vague promise to be heard by the City Commission. But Albany would never be the same again; a hundred years of Negro silence and white complacency had now been shattered for all time. Anyone who sat in the Shiloh Baptist Church at that prayer meeting following the settlement could tell that expectations had been raised which would not be stilled without a change in the social patterns of the city. A Negro porter on the steps of an Albany church told me: “We’re just beginning. Just beginning.” And Irene Wright said, as we talked: “Anybody who thinks this town is going to settle back and be the same as it was, has got to be deaf, blind, and dumb.”

  Sherrod reported back to Atlanta:

  … the structure is being shaken to the very foundations…. It is no longer a matter-of-fact procedure for a Negro to respond in “yes, sirs” and “no, sirs.” The people are thinking. They are becoming. In a deep southwest Georgia area, where it is generally conceded that the Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect, at last, they sing, “We Shall Overcome.” There is hope!

  The December, 1961, truce soon collapsed. In January, eighteen-year-old Ola Mae Quarterman sat in a front seat on an Albany city bus. The driver came up to her, poked his finger in her face, and asked if she didn’t know where she was supposed to sit. She replied, “I paid my damn twenty cents and I can sit where I want.” The driver called a policeman. She was jailed, and then convicted in city court of using “obscene” language. The Albany Movement responded with an intensified boycott of city buses, and the bus company was forced out of business.

  Albany now began a new round of encounters between Negro demands and official intransigence. A few days after the bus incident, Sherrod and Charles Jones were arrested for sitting in the Trailways lunchroom. Shortly after that the City Commission turned down the Albany Movement’s petition for a redress of grievances. And in March the trial of the original “Freedom Riders” arrested on December 10 began.

  As Charles Sherrod entered the courtroom to attend that trial, he walked to the “white section” in the front, and was immediately knocked to the floor by Chief Deputy Sheriff Lamar Stewart, who then pulled him back to the rear of the courtroom. When Bob Zellner, Tom and Sandra Hayden, and Per Laursen sat down next to Sherrod in the “Negro section,” deputies pounced on them and dragged them out of the courtroom. Judge Carl E. Crow, watching all of this, told newsmen, “The officers were enforcing a rule of the court.”

  In April there was more trouble. Dr. Anderson, Slater King, Emanuel “Bo” Jackson, and Elijah Harris, four leaders of the Albany Movement, were found guilty of “disorderly conduct” for picketing downtown as part of a general boycott of stores which did not hire Negro employees. Also, Charles Jones, Cordell Reagan, and two others were sentenced to sixty days on work gangs for refusing to leave a drugstore lunch counter where they sat requesting service. And twenty-six more people were arrested in lunch counter sit-ins.

  About this time, Walter Harris, a Negro cafe operator in Albany, was shot to death by a policeman who claimed Harris attacked him with a knife while resisting arrest. Southwest Georgia had a long history of policemen killing Negroes for “resisting arrest.” Twenty-nine adults and teenagers appeared in front of City Hall to protest the Harris shooting, and were arrested.

  In July, 1962, national attention came to Albany again when Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy, called back to stand trial for leading the parade in December, were found guilty in Recorders Court arid sentenced to forty-five days. Defense Attorney Donald Hollowell asked Judge Durden for legal citations on which his decision was based. The Judge said he didn’t have any, but that it was based on “general research of the law.”

  With King’s arrest, Washington officialdom got busy as it had never done before in the Albany crisis, and somehow, through the payment of the fine by an unidentified man, King and Abernathy were released. They had wanted to stay in jail to continue dramatizing the Albany situation, but now they reluctantly left. Abernathy told a mass meeting that night: “I’ve been thrown out of lots of places in my day, but never before have I been thrown out of jail.”

  Through July and August, 1962, while a battery of civil rights lawyers brought lawsuits against the city to integrate its facilities and to stop interference with peaceful protests, the Albany Movement kept up pressure against the barriers of the old order. Youngsters in SNCC led the way, seeking access to the city library, to lunch counters, to the Trailways terminal restaurant, to the park and the swimming pool, to the bowling alley. Arrests mounted into the hundreds.

  And violence increased. Mrs. Slater King, five months pregnant, and carrying a three-year old child, was knocked unconscious by a deputy sheriff as she visited some young people in the Camilla jail. (Several months later, the baby was born dead.) White SNCC worker Bill Hansen, put into Dougherty County jail for participating in a demonstration, had his jaw broken by a prison trusty. Albany’s only Negro attorney, C. B. King (brother of Slater King), was given a bloody beating with a cane by Sheriff Cull Campbell of Dougherty County (who later told me: “Yeh, I knocked hell out of the son-of-a bitch, and I’ll do it again. I wanted to let him know…. I’m a white man and he’s a damn nigger”). Sixteen-year-old Shirley Gaines, arrested for seeking access to a bowling alley, was dragged down stone steps by policemen, kicked again and again in her back and side.

  The pattern of Negro protest and police repression, of frustration and awakening, continued in Albany through 1963 and 1964. There were about 170 people arrested at various times in 1963 for picketing, distributing leaflets, sitting-in, attempting to use various segregated facilities. The city library was finally desegregated by court order, though the seats were removed to keep Negroes and whites from sitting together. Token integration began in the school system in early 1964, again by judicial demand. And the city removed all segregation statutes from its books and sold the swimming pool to a private corporation to avoid the constitutional prohibition against discrimination in public facilities.

  Through more than three years of conflict and pain in Albany, the national government failed again and again to defend the constitutional liberties of Negroes in that city. By restricting its activity to a few ineffective court appearances the Department of Justice left the right of Albany citizens in the hands of Police Chief Pritchett, who crushed them time after time, while managing to maintain his image in the national press as a prudent keeper of order in Albany.

  Through it all, Charles Sherrod was confident that important social change was taking place in Alba
ny. “The people are beginning to talk now… the knowledge of meetings is growing. People are registering to vote.” Five hundred Negroes were registered in Albany from the fall of 1961 to the summer of 1962, at a rate unprecedented in the history of the city. When Thomas Chatmon, a leader in the Albany Movement, ran for city commissioner, he polled 3000 votes, coming second in a field of three. In 1963, Slater King ran for mayor, and in 1964, C. B. King prepared to run for Congress.

  Most important of all, the lives of thousands of Negroes in Albany had been touched and changed in some way. Especially those of the young people. The forty students who were expelled from Albany State College for being in the demonstrations would never be the same again; Bernice Johnson, and Bertha Gober, and Annette Jones came out of that experience with a fire burning inside that would never be put out. And there were many more.

  The movement spread, by that invisible process in which ideas flow from individual to individual, to a sixteen-year old boy in Lee County, a few miles from Albany. He was Charles Wingfield.

  I wondered what it was like to live.… Countless nights I cried myself to sleep. Sometimes I could look at my mother and I could feel the pains her body was undergoing because of the hard work done each day to make ends meet…. Sometimes mother would see the tears falling from my eyes…. When she asked me what was wrong I told her that something stuck in my eyes or a bug was in them. I must have asked God why a thousand times but I never got an answer. Was nine of us kids in the family and we all had to work. I stayed out of school a lot of days because I couldn’t let my mother go to the cotton field and try to support all of us. I picked cotton and pecans for two cents a pound. I went to the fields six in the morning and worked until seven in the afternoon. When it came time to weigh up, my heart, body and bones would be aching, burning and trembling. I stood there and looked the white men right in their eyes while they cheated me, other members of my family, and the rest of the Negroes that were working. There were times when I wanted to speak, but my fearful mother would always tell me to keep silent. The sun was awful hot and the days were long…. The cost of survival was high. Why I paid it I’ll never know.

  Charles Wingfield one day put a petition on the wall in his school, the Lee County Training School, where he was an honor student. The petition asked for better equipment for the school. He was immediately expelled. Parents at the school met and voted to boycott the school, and over 1000 students (out of an enrollment of 1300) stayed out of school to protest the expulsion. But Charles Wingfield was never re-admitted. He became a SNCC worker.

  Through 1962 and 1963, the SNCC staff grew in Southwest Georgia. White and Negro students from Northern colleges, leaving school, came to work as field secretaries in the Albany area, drawn initially by compassion and kept there by courage. With Albany as a base, they moved in and out of Terrell, Lee, and other counties. The appearance of white students brought some inner turmoil to Negroes in the cotton country. One man in Lee County wrote:

  I referred to my white brothers as crackers, and I hated all of them. I wanted to build a machine that I could just wind my watch and it would destroy the whole human population. … I attended a voter registration meeting in Lee County and my whole opinion of white people was changed. I met Penny Patch and Ralph Allen and we became very close friends. They were just like a brother and a sister to me…. I also met Kathleen Conwell and Peggy Dammond. We spent a great deal of time working throughout Lee County. They would always tell me that I should love those who hurt me. Don’t allow yourself to become bitter, they said, or life will crumble. This puzzled me. I asked myself these questions over and over again. Are these kids crazy, or is it because they are from the North and just don’t know any better. How do they expect me to love those who have cheated me, robbed, killed, and beaten my people for all these hundreds of years.… But I found out that it is easier to love than to hate.…

  SNCC workers going into Terrell County knew they were in dangerous territory. It had a long history of brutality against Negroes. As recently as 1958, a Negro named James Brazier had been beaten to death by local police. A year later, Brazier’s widow was told by Terrell County Sheriff Zeke Matthews: “I ought to slap your damn brains out.” Matthews told a reporter: “You know, Cap, there’s nothing like fear to keep niggers in line.” A former mayor of Dawson, James Griggs Raines, told investigators for the Civil Rights Commission: “Matthews is unfit…. I’ve seen him beat a pregnant Negro woman.” (It was Matthews who struck Sherrod and told him, “There’ll be no damn singin’ and no damn prayin’ in my jail.”)

  Negroes are almost two-thirds the population of Terrell County, but in 1960, only fifty-one Negroes were registered to vote; 2800 whites were registered. The first Justice Department lawsuit against voter discrimination was filed in Terrell County and resulted in an injunction forbidding discrimination in 1960, but this was ineffective; economic reprisal and the threat of violence still kept Negroes from the polls.

  Even before the Albany crisis began, in November, 1961, Sherrod and Reagan began working to register voters in Terrell County. They stayed with Mrs. Carolyn Daniels, a young Negro woman who operates a beauty shop in Dawson, and whose home was to become a center for SNCC activity in Terrell. In the spring of 1962, Sherrod was jailed briefly in Terrell. That summer, a white student from Trinity College, Connecticut, Ralph Allen, began working there. He was beaten again and again; a truck tried to run him down, and a man drew a knife and threatened to kill him.

  On July 25, 1962, a voter registration meeting at Mount Olive Church in Terrell County was invaded by Sheriff Matthews and a dozen other white men. About forty Negroes from the area were at the meeting; also Sherrod and Charles Jones, Ralph Allen, and Penny Patch, a nineteen-year-old Swarthmore college student. Sherrod was reading from the scriptures as the white men burst in. Sheriff Matthews told reporters: “We are a little fed up with this voter registration business … we want our colored people to live like they’ve been living for the last hundred years—peaceful and happy.” Six weeks after this incident, Mount Olive Church was burned to the ground.

  Arrests and beatings of SNCC workers continued in Terrell County. On December 8, 1963, shots were fired into the home of Mrs. Daniels, and a bomb was thrown into her front bedroom, wrecking the front half of the house.

  SNCC people registered a handful of voters here, another handful there. But their most important accomplishment was to break through the frozen crust of the social order in Terrell County, and show to increasing numbers of Negroes there a glimpse of the future. Sherrod, speaking in Terrell, told men just out of the fields, women just come from white women’s kitchens, and children without shoes:

  All our lives we’ve had to bow and scrape, laugh when there was nothing funny and scratch our heads and say “yes, sir.” We want to change that; we want to be men; that’s what the power of the vote can do.… It’s people like you, with faith in God, who are going to change this country. And we’ll do it together.

  Canvassing in Dawson one day, Ralph Allen was picked up by the police chief and taken to Sheriff Matthews office, where he was interrogated by a deputy. He reported the dialogue:

  DEPUTY: Who sent you here? Did President Kennedy send you here? Did Bobby Kennedy send you here?

  ALLEN: Indirectly. I am working on voter registration for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

  DEPUTY: What nationality are you?

  ALLEN: I do not know exactly. I have never considered nationality relevant enough to find out my origins. I am a human being, and that is all that is important to me.

  DEPUTY: You nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch. Why do you have to come down here to register voters?… Lock him up.

  Carver (Chico) Neblett, nineteen, a tall Negro student from Illinois, came into Terrell County, and reported back to Atlanta:

  My first impression in the Deep South was fear. I almost forgot my fears… until a white post office worker in Dawson threatened to send Jack Chatfield home in a box. How does on
e get it across to the people that we are not alone, when all around them white men are killing, and getting away?… I tell them they can’t get away with it. Then they start saying yussa and nossa, You sho is rite, boss, etc. No matter what you say, they still say yussa. Where do we go from here?…

  But Chico Neblett had better moments:

  I talked with a blind man who is extremely interested in the civil rights movement. He has been keeping up with the movement from the beginning. Even though this man is blind he wants to learn all the questions on the literacy test. Imagine, while many are afraid that white men will burn our houses, shoot into them, or put us off their property, a blind man, seventy years old, wants to come to our meetings.

  The SNCC worker whom the Dawson post office employee threatened to send home in a box was Jack Chatfield, a roommate of Ralph Allen’s at Trinity College, who lived in Vermont and had gone to military school in Virginia. In September, 1962, that threat to Chatfield was almost made good. Night riders fired into the home of Mrs. Daniels in Dawson and hit Chatfield in the arm. If he had turned slightly at the time, he would have been dead. Sometime in Jack Chatfield’s second year at college, after insisting, “There is nothing but the self,” he had come to believe that “There is nothing but other people.”

  One day Chatfield was arrested on the street in Albany by Chief Pritchett. His three days in the Albany city jail with other white prisoners tell something important about the South, something easily missed in the heat of a conflict which takes the form of race hatred, but which, as he suggests, ultimately transcends the issue of black and white: