Freedom Summer
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
BOOK ONE - Crossroads
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE - “There Is a Moral Wave Building”
CHAPTER TWO - “Not Even Past”
CHAPTER THREE - Freedom Street
CHAPTER FOUR - “The Decisive Battlefield for America”
CHAPTER FIVE - “It Is Sure Enough Changing”
CHAPTER SIX - “The Scars of the System”
INTERLUDE - “Another So-Called ‘Freedom Day’”
BOOK TWO - A Bloody Peace Written in the Sky
CHAPTER SEVEN - “WalkTogether, Children”
CHAPTER EIGHT - “The Summer of Our Discontent”
CHAPTER ONE - “Lay by Time”
CHAPTER TEN - “The Stuff Democracy Is Made Of ”
CHAPTER ELEVEN - “Give unto Them Beauty for Ashes”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ALSO BY BRUCE WATSON
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream
The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made
VIKING
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Bruce Watson, 2010 All rights reserved
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Watson, Bruce, date.
Freedom summer : the savage summer that made Mississippi burn and made America a democracy / Bruce Watson. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-19018-0
1. African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History—20th century. 2. African Americans—Suffrage—Mississippi—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. 4. Civil rights workers—Mississippi—History—20th century. 5. Mississippi—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title.
E185.93.M6W285 2010
323.1196’0730762—dc22 2009047211
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For all the teachers and the volunteers giving of their time, compassion, and spirit
A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it.
—William Faulkner, “An Odor of Verbena”
By the summer of 1961, Herbert Lee was a wealthy man by local standards—local black standards. After thirty years of farming in the deepest corner of the Deep South, Lee had a small dairy farm, a modest home, nine children, and a road or two that did not seem like a dead end. So one day that scorching summer, when a young, bespectacled black man from New York showed up on his porch wearing bib overalls and speaking softly about his right to vote, Lee decided he could take a few risks. He agreed to drive the stranger around Amite County. To friends and family, Lee’s decision suggested a death wish.
Blacks did not vote in Mississippi—never had as long as anyone could remember. “Niggers down here don’t need to vote,” one cop said. “Ain’t supposed to vote.” Entire counties where black faces far outnumbered white had not a single black voter. Seventy-some years had passed since Mississippi had crafted a clever combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other legalistic voodoo that, within a decade, slashed black voting rolls from 190,000 to just 2,000. Ever since, whenever a Negro had dared to register, terror had taken care of him. A trip to the courthouse registrar landed his name in the newspaper. Soon the “uppity nigger” was beaten, fired, thrown off a plantation, or left trembling in the night by a shotgun fired into his shack. Herbert Lee knew the risks, but when he decided to face them, he did not know he was risking his life.
On the morning of September 25, 1961, Lee was rattling along dusty back roads toward the tiny town of Liberty, Mississippi. Looking in the rearview mirror of his old pickup, he saw a newer truck. Lee pulled into the parking lot of a cotton gin. The other pickup, its tires popping the gravel, pulled alongside. Lee recognized the driver, a burly white man with jug ears and a broad, shiny forehead, pink from the summer sun. Lee had known “Mister Hurst” all his life, had even played with him as a boy. The two men’s farms were not far apart. Perhaps Mister Hurst just wanted to talk. Then Lee spotted the .38 in his neighbor’s hand.
Through the window of his pickup, Lee shouted, “I’m not going to talk to you until you put the gun down!” Hurst said nothing, just bolted out of his truck. Lee frantically slid across his seat and scrambled out the passenger door. Hurst circled, gun waving.
“I’m not playing with you this morning!” the hulking white man said. Before Lee could run two steps, Hurst put a bullet in his left temple. Lee fell facedown in the gravel. The new pickup sped away. The parking lot fell silent. The body, encircled by onlookers, lay in a pool of blood for hours beneath the sizzling sun. Blacks were afraid to move it, and whites refused.
No one knew how many black men were murdered in Mississippi in 1961. No one could remember the Magnolia State ever convicting a white man of killing a black man. At the coroner’s inquest, Hurst spun a story about a tire iron Herbert Lee had brandished. His gun, Hurst said, had gone off by accident. A witness was coerced into swearing he saw the tire iron, too, the same one “ found” under Herbert Lee’s body. State legislator E. H. Hurst never went to trial. But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of fire-crackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring, that it redefined freedom in America.
BOOK ONE
Crossroads
And the problem of living as a Negro was cold an
d hard. What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this hate come to be?
—Richard Wright, Black Boy
Prologue
In the fall of 1963, America was suffused with an unbearable whiteness of being. Confident and assertive, the nation rode an unprecedented wave of prosperity. The engines of the American economy were at full bore; the young, handsome president was well liked and respected. The enemy was unmistakable—a mushroom cloud, a bald bully banging his shoe at the United Nations, a worldwide threat that had to be contained. Americans drove two-thirds of the world’s cars and held half the world’s wealth. Cars were big and beefy, with fins, flamboyant taillights, and loud engines under expansive hoods. Jars of Miracle Whip and loaves of Wonder Bread were in most kitchens; Marlboros and Kents were advertised on TV, and half of all adults smoked a pack or more a day. Only one or two cities had enclosed malls. Ninety-nine percent of homes had TVs—almost all black and white—yet none received more than seven channels. These featured “a vast wasteland” of Westerns, medical shows, and silly sitcoms. Not a single program showed a dark face in any but the most subservient role. In the halls of Congress and in city halls across the nation, all but a few politicians were as white as the ballots that elected them. Yet from this ivory tower, the future could be spotted.
That fall in Southeast Asia, American advisers sent back discouraging reports, causing President Kennedy to consider ending involvement in Vietnam. College students strummed folk songs, their younger siblings danced to syrupy pop music, but off in England a shaggy-haired rock band was riding a wave of frenzy that would soon sweep across the Atlantic and sweep away old mores. Across the South, blacks were marching into police dogs and fire hoses, demanding decency and human rights. But the most significant signpost in the autumn of 1963 arose in the nation’s poorest state. There, on a November weekend shortly before events in Dallas began to change everything, thousands of bone-poor citizens gave America a long-overdue lesson in democracy.
Mississippi’s official ballot listed Republican and Democratic candidates for governor. Yet in a southern state still voting as if Lincoln headed the GOP, the election was never in doubt. Everyone knew Democrat Paul B. Johnson, following in his father’s footsteps, would be the next governor. White voters admired how, as lieutenant governor, “Paul Stood Tall Last Fall,” blocking a black man’s entry to the state university. White voters relished Johnson’s sneers at the most hated politicians in Mississippi, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, whose federal troops, so the story went, had incited the integration riots at “Ole Miss.” White voters sniggered at Johnson’s joke that NAACP stood for “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums.” And on November 5, white voters comfortably elected “Tall Paul.” But that Tuesday, whites were not the only voters in Mississippi.
From the buff sands of the Gulf Coast to the cotton fields of the Delta, a parallel election was held, a black election, a “Freedom Election.” In little wooden churches with majestic names, whole congregations rose from the pews. While gospel choirs chanted—“We-ee shall not, we shall not be moved”—men and women slipped “Freedom Ballots” into wooden boxes. In cafés sweetened by the smell of cornbread, withered hands marked Xs beside “Aaron Henry—Governor” and “Reverend Edwin King—Lt. Governor.” On teetering porches, black men in overalls and black women in gingham spoke with students from Yale and Stanford recruited for this prelude to “Freedom Summer.” Nodding politely, calling their clean-cut guests “sir,” lifelong sharecroppers learned that voting did not have to remain “white folks’ business.” And thousands, forging raw democracy out of Mississippi’s red clay, cast “Freedom Votes” in beauty parlors and grocery stores, in barbershops and pool halls. Yet thousands more were far too terrified to risk anything so dangerous as voting.
Throughout that weekend, fear had quickened the pulse of Mississippi. Much more than a governorship was being decided. In a “closed society” where segregation ran as deep as the fertile soil of the Delta, black and white agreed on little, yet both knew that voting equaled power. Elsewhere in the South, blacks had begun to register—44 percent in Georgia, 58 percent in Texas, 69 percent in Tennessee—but in Mississippi just 6.7 percent could vote. So long as they remained “second-class citizens,” blacks knew they would remain powerless. And whites knew that if “our colored” registered en masse, or worse, if they were led to courthouses by “goddamned NAACP Communist trouble makers,” all the nightmares recounted by grandparents would return. Just as during Reconstruction, “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums” would run Mississippi, sweeping away white power and all the peculiar institutions of segregation on which it rested. “Citizens,” remembered an unrepentant Klansman, “not only have a right but a duty to preserve their culture.” In 1963, no one needed to explain this in Mississippi. The brutality that fall weekend was swift, spontaneous, and as blunt as a fist in the face.
On Halloween night, a Yale student stopped for gas in Port Gibson. A century earlier, Union troops had entered Mississippi through this same small town whose gorgeous mansions General Ulysses Grant found “too beautiful to burn.” Now in the eyes of locals, another invasion had begun. The “goddamn Yankee” was easy to spot—a white blond-haired stranger in the same car as a black man and woman. Ordering the white man out of the car, four men pummeled him to the pavement, then circled, fists coiled, kicking, pounding. Heads turned, but no one intervened. When the bloodied man climbed back in the car, the thugs followed it for miles along dark roads. Two days later, the same strangers—the men only—were spotted again.
On a warm Saturday morning, the two Freedom Election workers headed north out of Natchez to distribute campaign fliers. Suddenly, a shiny green Chevy Impala pulled behind them. In his rearview mirror, the driver saw two white faces. He made a U-turn, but the Chevy followed, riding his bumper. Heading south past farms and fields, the two cars sped up. Twice the Chevy pulled alongside, but twice the lead driver, who had raced hotrods in high school, roared ahead. The Chevy stayed right on his tail. Engines groaning, gravel flying, the cars soon topped one hundred miles an hour. Finally, the Chevy pulled even and forced the strangers’ car into a ditch. This time the locals had a gun. Ordered out of his car, the driver paused—then punched the accelerator. The car lurched back onto the road. A bullet shattered the rear window. Another tore into a side panel. A third grazed the rear tire. Running red lights, weaving into oncoming traffic, slowing as the tire lost air, the driver finally ducked down a side road as the Chevy roared past.
All that weekend, similar welcomes met “agitators” throughout Mississippi. Up north in Tate County, shots narrowly missed a Freedom Election worker. Down south in Biloxi, a rock-throwing mob broke up a Freedom Election rally. In Yazoo City, gateway to the Delta, cops closed down another rally. Before the weekend ended, seventy election workers had been arrested. Charges ranged from disturbing the peace to driving cars too heavy for their license plates. Roughed up or just told to get out of town, the students got a strong taste of how the law worked in Mississippi in 1963.
The terror nearly succeeded. Organizers had hoped 200,000 blacks would cast Freedom Votes. Not counting ballots confiscated by cops, 82,000 did. Organizers hoped to use the parallel ballots, legally binding under a Reconstruction-era law, to challenge the official election. No one expected the challenge to succeed, but each Freedom Vote signaled a change in Mississippi. Centuries of bowing and scraping, centuries of pleasing “Mr. Charlie,” centuries of “yassuh” and “nossuh,” had come to their final days. But the Freedom Election also stirred embers as old as the Civil War, or as it was still called in Mississippi, “the War for Southern Independence.” Come 1964, Mississippi would be swept by a racial firestorm. The long and vicious year centered around what organizers called the Mississippi Summer Project. The rest of the nation came to call it Freedom Summer, and it would pit the depth of America’s bigo
try against the height of America’s hopes.
Ten weeks before Mississippi elected its new governor, a quarter million people had flocked to Washington, D.C., to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak of his dream. As the multitude gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, pollsters had fanned out across the country. The Harris Poll on race, taken during a summer of shocking violence across the South, suggested how remote King’s dream remained. Along with the stark income gap—blacks earning just 56 percent of what whites earned nationwide—a sizable majority of whites disliked, distrusted, and struggled to distance themselves from blacks. Some were cautious: “It’s a rotten, miserable life to be colored.” Others were blunt. “We don’t hate niggers,” a smiling San Diego woman said. “We just don’t want them near us. That’s why we moved from Chicago.”
While King’s soaring baritone described his dream that “one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” 71 percent of whites said, “Negroes smell different.” While crowds cheered King’s hope that someday his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” half of those polled claimed, “Negroes have less native intelligence.” And as King rose to a crescendo, dreaming of a time when “all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands,” 69 percent said, “Negroes have looser morals,” three of every four said, “Negroes tend to have less ambition,” and 90 percent said they would never let their daughter date a Negro.