Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  “We always said if we’re not going to do it and they are going to do it, at least we can support them. That is the philosophy we had behind it. That’s the way I thought about it, and many of the others, too,” said Mr. Campbell, who became a pastor in later years.

  The little house on Fourth Street became ours, and we dubbed it the “Freedom House.”

  Now we were ready for the trainees. Preparing for the larger campaign was very much like having troops in boot camp. Several local workers and attorneys participated with me in the orientation session, which was held at the Freedom House. If anyone had thought arriving in the South for the voter registration project would be like a summer camp, they were dispelled of that notion right from the start. The mood we set was businesslike and very serious. We began with the history of CORE and the basics of nonviolent philosophy: No matter what, the new workers were told, we were to be nonviolent. I knew it would take only one case of a CORE worker involved in a violent incident to unravel years of hard work and undermine the civil rights effort. Our foes could not wait to discredit us.

  I also told the newcomers that they had come to work, not to socialize. I heard later that some of the workers did not take me seriously on this point, because they apparently had sexual relationships with other CORE workers or community members without my knowledge. Some of them were enjoying the novelty of meeting men or women of another race, but since interracial socializing was such an explosive taboo in the South, I warned them that this kind of behavior would not be tolerated. I also said I would not tolerate people who randomly broke certain laws, such as those against speeding and smoking marijuana. Once, I was riding in a car with a white worker who lit up a marijuana cigarette right in front of me! I told her she’d better get rid of it and never do that again. Even while I was working so hard to change laws that I considered unjust, I have always believed that laws are very important, and I never broke any laws lightly. If we ignored drug and traffic laws like common criminals, it would greatly undermine our effectiveness. Later, I sent some volunteers home when they broke the rules.

  Rubin Kenon later told me he considered me “bossy,” but I can only emphasize that I knew these young people’s lives were my responsibility. I hadn’t needed the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner to tell me that we were in a life or death situation, and we had to behave that way.

  The CORE staff had to follow very strict guidelines about procedure as they worked. I didn’t want anyone to have to work alone; where possible, they worked in same-sex interracial pairs, with two people per county. Lawyers instructed them that if they were arrested, they should not resist, but they should let the police know that they understood there was a new law stating that an attorney should be present during questioning. We gave them telephone numbers for CORE’s general counsel in New York, Carl Rachlin; for NAACP Defense Fund lawyers Earl Johnson and Charles Wilson; and for the Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee in St. Augustine. If workers were leaving one location to go to another, they had to call headquarters to report their whereabouts. We also supplied numbers for offices of the FBI, because if anyone took longer than expected to reach their destination, or we did not receive a call, we would immediately report them missing to the FBI.

  I regret that I can’t remember the names of all the courageous young people who came to Florida to work that summer, but some of the people in our group were FAMU students Doris Rutledge, Sidney Daniels, and Ira Simmons (all of whom had been involved in previous civil rights activities). The white workers included Judy Benninger, a former military man named Scott McVoy from Gainesville, a student named Stu Wechsler, a student from the Northeast named Eleanor Lerner, and a University of Florida student named Mike Geison. Later in the summer and fall, other volunteers would arrive to help us out. One was James “Jim” Harmeling (the twin brother of Dan Harmeling, the white student from the University of Florida who had been arrested with Judy at the Tallahassee theater demonstration), and others included FAMU students Johnny Watson (who would one day teach math at my daughters’ high school in Miami) and Linda Dixie from Quincy, as well as a high school student from Madison County named David Dukes.

  Of course, we expected to be arrested, so we needed lawyers. Our lawyers came to Quincy to work in shifts, depending on how much time they had to volunteer. John coordinated the paper trail for the next attorneys’ shifts, so they could hit the ground running. Our lawyers that summer included Jeff Greenup and James W. Lamberton from New York and Dave Halperin from Chicago.

  After the orientation, some of the workers admitted that our warnings frightened them. Still others were frightened by experiences they had already had in the field and shocked at the level of hostility directed toward them. My attitude was It’s better for them if they’re frightened. The more careful they were, I reasoned, the less likely we were to suffer any tragedies like the one that was playing out in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the three workers were missing.

  If any of my workers thought I was being paranoid, they learned better by our next staff meeting, on an afternoon in mid-July. While we were all gathered at the Freedom House, trading stories and making plans, we suddenly heard a loud popping sound right outside. A front window shattered, and Scout began barking in the backyard. “Get down!” I shouted, and we all lunged to crouch behind the sofa and under the table. There were several more gunshots, and then we heard the sound of a car speeding off.

  Freedom Summer was officially underway in Gadsden County.

  Judy Benninger was very much affected by the violent environment that summer and described her feelings in an essay she wrote later that year:

  Night has begun in Quincy, Florida. A car drives down the street. Is it really possible that I can tell the difference between a car driven by a white man and a car driven by a Negro? At night in Quincy, many learn to do this. If it is a Negro car, ears return to television. If white and slowing down, those sitting in front of the curtained window cringe within.… 3 A.M. and I hear a shot. Sleep and I struggle, and Pat hears, “My God, Pat, they are shooting at us now.” And she, “Child, how can I sleep if you’re going to be talking all night?” In the morning we will look for the holes in the screen.10

  Police responses to attacks at the Freedom House were slow, or nonexistent. I read a newspaper story where the police chief, J. W. Haire, smiled and told a reporter that the police followed us so much for our “protection,”11 and yet when we truly needed protection, police were hard to find. Once, we were literally pinned inside the Freedom House for nearly twenty-four hours, and Judy Benninger recalled that ordeal in beautiful detail during our 1990 interview: “As the sun went down, I could hear some black teenagers walking down the street, humming ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Then, as it got really dark, these people in pickup trucks were circling more than usual. I remember Jim Harmeling went out and hid behind a bush by the road, armed with a flashlight and pencil and paper, and his job was to take their license plate numbers. And Scott McVoy was out there, too, and the night riders must have seen the flashlight, so they stopped. Scott was an ex-Marine. These guys were both white. They were pretty good about their nonviolence. Anyway, these guys with rifles came toward Scott and Jim. And Scott had been trained to take the rifle away from someone in hand-to-hand combat. He just could have grabbed his rifle and hit that guy, but he didn’t. Finally, one of the guys just took his rifle and hit Scott across the head so badly that his face was just laid all open. He had to have stitches. That was the first thing. I got on the phone immediately. I called the mayor, I called the city police, I called the FBI. About an hour later, someone came by and started shooting into the Freedom House. And nobody came. The police didn’t come. The FBI didn’t come. No one came. And there we were.

  “That night, we slept in the back of the house. We took all of our mattresses—the men were all sleeping on the floor in the living room—and their suitcases, and they piled them up as high as they could across the front of the house, and went to s
leep on the floor. The next morning we got up and saw two things that, to me, were so typical of what was so meaningful about the civil rights movement: We found bullet holes all across the front of the house. We also found two huge pots of collard greens. And that couple next door came out of their house, a man and a wife, and the man stood there with a shotgun. It was such a wonderful feeling, not only the physical protection and the terrible danger they were putting themselves in, but also that support in bringing us food. We had really brought this down on their community.”

  The Negro man who lived next door to the Freedom House, a distant relative of mine through marriage named Arthur Jones, often appeared on his porch with his shotgun, looking for our attackers. “You all may be nonviolent, but I’m not. I have a family to protect,” Mr. Jones told us. To his credit, despite his worries for his wife, Modieste, and their six children, Mr. Jones never complained about our presence next door to him. He was another unsung soldier, and he and his wife live in the same house to this day.

  Can you imagine having no police response to an ongoing shooting attack in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood? That’s why it’s so hypocritical for police to claim they were trying to “protect” us during those days, and I think even some of our own out-of-town attorneys thought we were exaggerating about the threat, until they happened to be present during an attack. Like any foot soldiers in battle, we grew accustomed to working while under seige. The words to one of the freedom songs we distributed to our workers described it very well: “We are Soldiers in the Army. / We’ve got to fight although we have to cry. / We’ve got to hold up the freedom banner. / We’ve got to hold it up until we die.”

  Someone might get killed, but no one’s bullets were going to stop us.

  Voter registration in the rural South wasn’t as simple as going to churches, homes, bars, and fishing holes to encourage people to vote. Especially since our workers were sometimes sent out in interracial pairs, many prospective voters were nervous about being seen talking to us. Many doors were slammed in our faces, and we had to learn patience. Sometimes, the same person who slammed the door in your face today might welcome you tomorrow if you came by yourself, without a white companion.

  Another obstacle was the living arrangements of the poorer Negroes. These were tenant farmers who lived in virtual shacks set far back on much larger, white-owned farms. We usually had to wait until sundown to talk to them, since they were working in the fields during daylight hours. Then we had to tread carefully, because most white farmers did not welcome us.

  Vivian Kelly recalls that she and a white worker, Stu Wechsler—on a rare occasion when a black woman and a white man were paired, or vice versa—were approaching the homes of some Negro tenant farmers on a farm in Midway when suddenly she saw the white owner set his two large dogs on them. Barking angrily, the dogs charged. Mrs. Kelly and Stu turned and began to run. “Stu ran and lost his shoe. He had some tennis shoes on,” Mrs. Kelly recalls. “That was one of my most frightening experiences, because, see, I’m afraid of dogs.” (Luckily, the dogs didn’t catch them.) Stu wasn’t so lucky another time, when he arrived on the farm property of a Gadsden County commissioner with several other male civil rights workers to approach field hands. Stu was badly beaten that day, charged with trespassing, and sent to jail.12

  Reaching the voters was only the first problem. Because daily survival was more crucial than book learning for the poor, many of the Negroes were illiterate. They could not read the ballots, and we had workshops to show people sample ballots, illustrating where the candidates’ name would be placed. We never encouraged anyone to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, but we wanted them to know where to find their party’s box.

  Then, after all of that, if someone finally did decide they would take the step of registering to vote, we often had to provide transportation. We rented cars for our project, but we suffered so much vandalism and so many acts of violence in those cars that the rental companies stopped renting to us. Because registrar J. Love Hutchinson also ran the Gadsden County Times newspaper, voter registration in Gadsden County was at the Times office, a part of the white establishment most Negroes would never consider venturing to on their own. It was open only one day a week, on Mondays, and then, of course, the potential Negro voters faced the surveillance of nearby police or other intimidation. Mrs. Kelly recalls being so afraid that she was shaking the day she registered to vote there. She tried to put her hand on her hip, but it slipped because she was trembling so much. One county literally tried to close its books rather than register the growing number of Negro voters.

  Every day brought a new struggle.

  To Doris Rutledge, working in Florida was a compromise, because she’d originally hoped to do voter registration work that summer in Mississippi. Her mother was very relieved when she ended up in Florida, Doris says, but she was still far from safe. Doris was paired with a white woman named Eleanor Lerner, and they were both assigned to the small Florida town of Live Oak, in Suwannee County. Doris and Eleanor ran into a problem after their first day together. Residents from various counties had written to us to express interest in housing registration workers, and a local Negro schoolteacher had volunteered his home to Doris and Eleanor. They spent only one night there. In the morning, as they were dressing and preparing for another day in the field, they heard a knock at their door. Sheepishly, their host told them that he was getting harassed because Eleanor was white, so he asked them to leave.

  He helped them find another candidate, a woman from his church. She agreed that Doris and Eleanor could move in with her. For the first couple of days, everything was fine. Then, another problem arose. “We noticed that she didn’t go to work one day, and so we said, ‘Well, that’s her day off,’ ” Doris recalls. But by the next day, when the woman stayed at home again, they realized something was wrong. “The lady tried not to tell us she had been fired.”

  After that, a local eighty-five-year-old minister, Rev. Jenkins (Doris cannot remember his first name), offered his house instead. Rev. Jenkins was very strong-minded, and he not only owned his home, but also much of the property on that particular street, so he felt he could offer the workers more protection. After some time, someone actually posted a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster in Live Oak, bearing Doris’s name and photo. Sure enough, at one point, someone fired a gun at Doris while she was standing in front of Rev. Jenkins’s house. She recognized the man who’d fired the shot, so she called the FBI and reported him. She remembers a dismissive FBI agent telling her, “Well, it might have been blanks, you know.”

  “Yeah, and we might have been dead,” Doris said.

  The dangers and indignities were clear, but the rewards were much greater for us. On July 27, registration fever swept through Gadsden County on an unplanned Freedom Day. When the registrar’s office opened at 9:00 A.M., twenty Negroes had already lined up to register, and there was a constant line all day long. In one day, 350 Negroes registered, which was more than during the entire month of January, when our project was new. Because the sun was so hot, we provided beach umbrellas, cold water, and soft drinks to cool people off as they waited. The line was quite a sight. Even when the office closed, there were still seventy-five Negroes waiting. The growing crowds of registering Negroes in Gadsden County brought our total countrywide number to 1,900.13

  The greatest joy came for us at 2:45 P.M., when two CORE workers arrived in a car from Chattahoochee, which was twenty-six miles away. The workers opened the passenger-side door and carried out a very elderly Negro woman, who told us she was 109 years old. “I was born a slave,” she announced. “It’s ’bout time I registered to vote.”

  The woman’s name was Mrs. Pearlie Williams, and she had allowed herself to be driven into Quincy with strangers because she wanted to vote in her first election. When she arrived in her black Sunday dress with her hair pinned up, wearing a CORE button on her lapel, she buoyed all of our spirits. Mrs. Williams could remember slavery, and she had
come to register. We had reached her.

  Mrs. Williams told us there were other people in Chattahoochee who wanted to register, including her ninety-year-old daughter, but they were afraid.

  “They say if I come back alive, they’ll come register too,” she said.

  Frail Pearlie Williams was like Harriet Tubman that day, leading her people to freedom.

  Twenty-Two

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “If I die or am killed … you may rest assured that what I’ve already set in motion will never be stopped.”

  —Malcolm X

  By August of 1996, not long after my mother and I began our work on the civil rights book in earnest, we learned that another quiet hero had died.

  Witt Campbell, who had provided much-needed shelter for my mother and other civil rights workers during Freedom Summer, passed away at the age of eighty-five. When we learned of Mr. Campbell’s death, Mom and I decided to go to the funeral in Quincy and conduct research while we were there, by searching the archives of FAMU, Florida State University, and the newspaper morgue at the Tallahassee Democrat. Mr. Campbell’s death only emphasized for Mom, perhaps for both of us, how these strands of history are yanked so easily out of reach, giving us a sense of an urgent deadline.

  That might explain why, even though there was no rhyme or reason to the timing, we decided we had to interview Dad at 8:00 P.M. on Thursday, the night before our departure, when both of us should have been making preparations for the trip. All of us were heading in different directions. Dad was on his way to Washington, D.C., to appear with other attorneys and advocates before the Justice Department on behalf of Haitians being deported from Miami. With the recent crash of TWA flight 800 and the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta a week and a half later, we were all living with the sense that we didn’t know what would happen next. Dad answered questions for two hours on videotape, under the hot light in Mom’s home office.