SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  I explained to each one what I was doing in jail…. None of them seemed to comprehend. I told a number of them (including some in the neighboring cell) that I was the fellow who was shot in Dawson. But cigarettes were the issue, not integration…. One said, “You’ll be in serious trouble if you stay down here.” I said that we were already in serious trouble.… He said, “People hate the niggers down here.” I agreed. One drunk, who hoped I would be bailed out so I could bring him cigarettes, confided that he had stayed with “colored people” for three days once in Washington, D.C. He used the word “nigger” and “colored boy” intermittently. One thing struck me in my encounter with these men… that people are generally totally uninvolved. One man—who in the next cell had finally seen what I was talking about and had said, “Oh, that’s that nigger-mixing business”—called me Jack when I was put in a cell with him, and never brought “nigger-mixing” up…. On the fourth day, from the next cell: “You still think it’s worth it, Jack.” Answer, “Yes.” Sometime later, “I can’t understand you, Jack. What you gonna get out of this?”

  I learned something else: that whites are yanked in for flukey offenses; that whites are treated like dogs in jail; that whites hate whites. This appears of course to be a simple fact; but being bound up in a world like the world of the racial struggle in Southwest Georgia creates illusions—such as: things are extremely simple here, archetypes crawl about like flies, la la. You know of course the whole time that you are missing something, that there is something else in the human animal that you have missed; that things are not purely white versus Negro.… It is a story about human beings and there are nuances that you skip like puddles and little smatterings of humanness that you swat away like the cigarette smoke curling into your face because they mess things up….

  The reports coming out of Southwest Georgia to the Atlanta office were often long and eloquent, and Jim Forman smilingly said they showed a “Proustian influence.” Julian Bond wrote Bob Moses in Mississippi: “Sherrod is writing like a drunk Jack Kerouac and O’Neal and Chatfield write like drunk Sherrods.”

  One spring day in 1963, SNCC worker James Crawford, a young Negro fellow from Albany, took a Negro woman to the county courthouse in Leesburg, Lee County, to register. Deputy Registrar Sol Yeoman approached them. Crawford reported the following conversation later to Jack Chatfield, who sat outside in a car:

  YEOMAN: What do you want?

  CRAWFORD: I brought this lady down to register.

  YEOMAN (after giving the woman a card to fill out and sending her outside in the hall): Why did you bring this lady down here?

  CRAWFORD: Because she wants to be a first class citizen like y’all.

  YEOMAN: Where are you from?

  CRAWFORD: Albany.

  YEOMAN: Who do you work for?

  CRAWFORD: SNICK.

  YEOMAN: What is that?

  CRAWFORD: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

  YEOMAN: Who are you to bring people down to register?

  CRAWFORD: It’s my job… (Yeoman then asked him if he had heard about the boy in Mississippi who was shot in the head. James told him he had not.)

  YEOMAN: Suppose you get two bullets in your head right now?

  CRAWFORD: I got to die anyhow.

  YEOMAN: If I don’t do it, I can get somebody else to do it.

  No answer.

  YEOMAN: Are you scared?

  CRAWFORD: No.

  YEOMAN: Suppose somebody came in that door and shoot you in the back of the head right now. What would you do?

  CRAWFORD: I couldn’t do nothing. If they shoot me in the back of the head there are people coming from all over the world.

  YEOMAN: What people?

  CRAWFORD: The people I work for.

  The Negro woman filling out the card was trembling. She put “Sumter County” where she should have written “Smithville” and James told her to write “Smithville.” Yeoman got angry, and said to the woman, “Now you’re through.” As they left the courthouse, James turned and said to Yeoman: “I’ll be back Saturday. That’s what I’m here for—to die or to live.”

  Jack Chatfield and James Crawford took the woman home; then their car broke down, but finally they got a truck to pull them into Smithville to the home of Robert Burney, who had a phone. As they called Sherrod in Albany to tell him what happened, a black Ford with four white men in it carrying guns pulled up to the house. Then an Oldsmobile pulled up. A Negro man in the house loaded his shotgun. The man who owned the house asked the SNCC people to leave, tears in his eyes. It was getting dark. Chatfield and the other SNCC workers started across a field, then saw Sherrod’s car pulling up to the house. They raced back, got in, and Sherrod drove off. The Oldsmobile came behind, rammed them once. A Negro girl sitting near Chatfield began to cry hysterically. The Oldsmobile followed them a few minutes longer, then left. Writing his report on this incident, Chatfield concluded tersely: “A nice evening. Six people had applied for registration.”

  The small band of Northerners and Southerners, black and white, who formed the SNCC task force in Southwest Georgia from 1961 to 1964, were educating in the ultimate meaning of that word, bringing out from deep inside the Negro people of that area the muffled cries, the dreams so long kept to themselves. And in doing this they lifted, just a little, the membrane of fear that enclosed the Georgia countryside. Peggy Dammond, a Boston University student, tells of the sense of release at a gathering in Lee County: “Tears that had long since been clotted in dry throats gushed forth when another neighbor raised his hand at meeting to tell he’d been down to the courthouse to register, and next week all his family was going to be there.”

  Penny Patch, the girl from Swarthmore, spent one frightening autumn night in 1962 in the Albany Freedom House with Faith Holsaert, a girl from Barnard College. They were alone, and at midnight they heard a bottle broken outside, footsteps around the back yard, breathing outside the window near the bed. They phoned, and a friend came and took them somewhere else to sleep. Things always looked different the next day, and Penny wrote once to Atlanta: “It is now five o’clock in the morning, and the cocks are crowing. You know, Southwest Georgia is very, very beautiful. It just needs a little bit of fixing.”

  She compresses the problem: “I come up on a porch and an ancient lady, full of dignity in her world, says ‘Yes, mam,’ and offers me her chair. An enraged white face shouts curses out of the car window. Jack Chatfield walks up to a house and the lady on the porch shakes visibly. The voter registration team is greeted with fear at the door. ‘I didn’t know that colored people could vote!’ … And people ask why we are down here.…”

  And Peggy Dammond compresses the pride: “In the South, courage is a quiet thing. It may be born in a candle-lit farmhouse far back on a cornfield late one night over a pot of greens. Or one morning a man might wake up and decide to go down to the courthouse to register and because he doesn’t have a car he might walk the nine miles into town.”

  The SNCC workers came and went, left part of themselves in Georgia, and took part of the red earth back with them. Sherrod remained. “I remembered thinking about home, a thousand miles away, and fun—games, dancing, movies.…” He stayed through it all for two and one-half years, until people in Albany, old and young and little children, and people in Lee County and Terrell County followed him like a Pied Piper of Freedom. Sherrod’s favorite refuge was the home of Mama Dollie.

  Mama Dollie was speaking to me as I sat close to the heater in a little old house way back in the woods of Lee County, only eight country miles away from Shady Grove Baptist Church, burned down during the summer.

  This was “Mama.” Standing fine—fine, strong, resembling a proud Indian woman worn with the years but unbowed…. In spite of bomb scares, shootings, threats, we walked along lonely roads…. Mama was always there.

  When we came to Southwest Georgia in October, 1961, we offered before the people our minds and bodies. That was all we had. Three months later, nearly a thous
and bodies and minds were being offered before us….

  There is an indoctrination…. Negroes don’t stick together. … White is right.… Jail is a hammer…. But we broke the hammer of jail with another maxim: “A jail is just another house,” and with this lever we broke the other two. Eyes have been opened; men have become alive. Albany is the center; watch it!

  Memories will flash back. The days in December when we met in an old tent in Sasser where two churches burned, where we met in the rain, where we huddled together to keep warm. We will remember our headquarters in Albany, a three-room house where thirteen of us gathered for staff meetings and strategy sessions. We will never forget the all-night sessions in which we made bare our artificial defenses and shared our fears and joys and hopes and suffocations. …

  We stand together, black and white. Southwest Georgia is unknown now, but one day somebody will do as Mama Dollie said one day in Lee County: “Now, boy, you go to writing and write up a new day.”

  8. Alabama: Freedom Day in Selma

  On the night of June 11, 1963, the Rev. Bernard Lafayette, ready to park at his home, was approached by a man who told him that his car had stalled across the street and he needed a push. “How much will you charge me for a push?” the man asked. “Nothing,” replied Lafayette, and lined up his car behind the other one. It was a scene that has taken place a thousand times in a thousand American towns. But this was different: the town was Selma, Alabama; Bernard Lafayette was a former Freedom Rider and a field secretary for SNCC; the man asking for help was white. When Lafayette bent to see if the bumpers matched, he was clubbed on the head, and he fell to the pavement, blood spurting over his clothes. Then he was hit twice more on the head, and the man drove off. He got to a doctor, who sewed up his wound with six stitches, and the next day he was back at his job, registering voters in Selma.

  Selma has an unreal air about it. It is as if a movie producer had reconstructed a pre-Civil War Southern town—the decaying buildings, the muddy streets, the little cafes, and the huge red brick Hotel Albert, modelled after a medieval Venetian palace. A mule draws a wagonload of cotton down the street. But cotton is just hanging on. At one time, 627,000 acres in the area grew cotton. Now it’s down to 27,000 acres.

  You walk into the Silver Moon Cafe. On the shelves facing you there are bottles of whiskey and boxes of corn flakes. At your feet, running the length of the counter, is a tin channel spittoon. Past a swinging door you can make out the murky interior of the Negro section of the cafe. In the white section, in a booth, sits a Mexican family, eating in silence (eighty-five Mexicans were brought in this year to pick cotton; they pick more cotton for less money than Negroes do, say the local whites). Two women sit at a table, drinking beer, looking up to curse the strangers sitting at the counter. You recall what Newsweek writer Karl Fleming was told in another Alabama city: “We killed two-year old Indian babes to get this country and you want to give it to the niggers.”

  Selma was a slave market before the Civil War. In one three-story house, still standing, four or five hundred Negroes were kept at one time to be exhibited and sold. The town became a military depot for the Confederacy. At the turn of the century, it was a lynching town. By the 1950’s, the lynching had stopped, but the threat of it remained. Selma became the birthplace of the Citizens Council in Alabama, wrapped tight in the rules of race.

  A little south of the geographic center of Alabama, Selma is about fifty miles due west of Montgomery, and downstream from it on the Alabama River. It is the seat of Dallas County, where, in 1961, 57 percent of the population was Negro, but only about 1 percent of the eligible Negroes were registered to vote, while 64 percent of the eligible whites were registered. The median income for Negroes is about $28 a week. With several new government buildings in the center of town, Selma has a trace of the twentieth century; but beyond it the Alabama countryside is an unpenetrated social jungle. In neighboring Wilcox County, for instance, where Negroes are 78 percent of the population, not one of them is registered to vote; their median income is about $20 a week.

  Bruce Boynton is a Negro attorney, now in Chattanooga, who grew up in Selma. (His mother, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, still lives there, a rock to whom the new freedom movement is anchored, a 1964 candidate for the U.S. Senate.) Mr. Boynton says:

  A Negro boy growing up in Selma lives a life that other Americans cannot easily understand. When he wakes up in the morning he looks outside the window and it is dusty, hot, wet, the street mired in mud. He is aware that his mother is away all the time, at work. He is aware of the jobs his mother and father have, how little they make, how much more the white folks make. Coming home from school he sees the sign on the bus directing him to the back. One of his first ideas is: I must get out of this town.

  In February of 1963, Bernard Lafayette and his wife Colia came to Selma to begin a voter registration drive for SNCC. It was slow, hard going. One of the first consequences was that thirty-two schoolteachers who tried to register to vote were fired. Arrests mounted, for minor or imaginary traffic offenses, for picketing at the county courthouse, for simply being seen downtown or riding in an automobile. Worth Long, a SNCC man, was beaten by a deputy sheriff in the county jail. John Lewis was arrested for leading a picket line at the courthouse. A nineteen-year-old girl was knocked off a stool in a store and prodded with a electric pole as she lay on the floor unconscious.

  Between September 15 and October 2, 1963, over three hundred people were arrested in Selma in connection with voter registration activities. The Federal government filed suit, but its mild efforts left the constitutional liberties of Selma citizens in the hands of Sheriff Jim Clark. Clark augmented his regular force of deputies with several hundred ordinary citizens, armed them with clubs and cattle prods, and stated that he was convinced that all this voting activity was part of a world communist conspiracy. In May, when Jim Forman came to Selma to address the first mass meeting at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the posse surrounded the church. Those inside waited, long after the meeting was over, until they felt it safe to go home.

  “Do you know any white man in Selma—just one even—who is sympathetic with your cause?” I asked three young Selma fellows as we talked in Mrs. Boynton’s home. “Not one,” they said. “Well, maybe one,” one of them added. There was a Jewish storekeeper for whom his mother worked, and the man would sit and talk with the boy in the back of the store, telling him, “Keep up the good work.” Later that night, I saw a list of Citizens Council members who signed a proclamation in the local paper; the storekeeper’s name was near the top of the list. There are over a hundred Jews in Selma, many of them businessmen, many of them—through conviction or through fear—members of the Citizens Council.

  The only white man who openly helped the Negro movement was Father Maurice Ouillet, a thirty-seven-year-old Catholic priest in charge of St. Edmonds Mission in Selma. Father Ouillet was called in once by a group of white leaders of the city and advised to leave town for his own protection, told he might be killed. He received abusive phone calls. Once, he told Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger, as he visited demonstrators at the jail, someone called him a “adjective, adjective nigger-lover.”

  With John Lewis and seven others still in jail in October, 1963, with Sheriff Clark’s posse armed and on the prowl, with people afraid to go down to the courthouse, SNCC decided on a large-scale offensive. They had discovered elsewhere that fear decreased with numbers. It was decided to set October 7 as the day to bring hundreds to the county courthouse to register. As Freedom Day approached, mass meetings were held every night, and the churches were packed.

  On October 5, Dick Gregory came to Selma. His wife, Lillian, had been jailed in Selma while demonstrating. He spoke to a crowded church meeting that evening. It was an incredible performance. With armed deputies ringing the church outside, and three local officials sitting in the audience taking notes, Gregory lashed out at white Southern society with a steely wit and a passion that sent his Negro listeners into delight
ed applause again and again. Never in the history of this area had a black man stood like this on a public platform, ridiculing and denouncing white officials to their faces. It was a historic coming of age for Selma, Alabama. It was also something of a miracle that Gregory was able to leave town alive. The local newspaper said that a “wildly applauding crowd” listened that night to “the most scathing attack unleashed here in current racial demonstrations.”

  Gregory told the audience that the Southern white man had nothing he could call his own, no real identity, except “segregated drinking fountains, segregated toilets, and the right to call me nigger.” He added, “And when the white man is threatened with losing his toilet, he’s ready to kill!” He wished, Gregory said, that the whole Negro race would disappear overnight. “They would go crazy looking for us!” The crowd roared and applauded. Gregory lowered his voice, and he was suddenly serious: “But it looks like we got to do it the hard way, and stay down here, and educate them.”

  He called the Southern police officials “peons, the idiots who do all the dirty work, the dogs who do all the biting.” He went on for over two hours in that vein; essentially it was a lesson in economics and sociology, streaked with humor. “The white man starts all the wars, then he talks about you cuttin’ somebody…. They talk about our education. But the most important thing is to teach people how to live….”

  Later, Jim Forman spoke to the crowd, making the last preparations for Freedom Day. “All right, let’s go through the phone book. You’ll know who’s Negro, because they won’t have Mr. or Mrs. in front of their names! You got to get on the phone tonight and call these people and tell them to come down to the courthouse tomorrow, that it’s Freedom Day. You take a boloney sandwich and a glass of cool water and go down there and stay all day. Now get on that phone tonight. Who’ll take the letter “A”? …”