Growing up in D.C., Muriel rarely encountered the dark racism of the Deep South. But she remembered a visit to Florida where she was told not to even touch the clothes in a department store, and never to try them on. And closer to home, she had often met racism’s lighter-skinned cousin. Like the old spiritual turned into SNCC’s anthem, she had been “ ’buked and scorned” more times than she cared to count. Her sophomore class had been the first to integrate D.C.’s Roosevelt High School, facing down the hatred of the principal and student body. Each affront gave Muriel a steely strength hidden in a slight frame. By the time she reached Howard, meticulous and driven, she was a natural for NAG’s nonviolent protests. But as an urbanite who knew the Deep South only in legend and in Movement lore, was she ready for Mississippi? As a woman who had not yet learned to drive, was she prepared for harrowing chases down back roads? And as a black woman who chose not to straighten her hair, instead letting it grow into an Afro long before the style became popular, could she stand up to the relentless bigotry she was about to encounter?
Muriel knew Mississippi only as “a distant well of human woe,” yet human woe had been beckoning. During the winter of 1963, when Delta officials cut off federal food allotments, she had collected enough clothes and food to fill half a semitruck, then found a teamster willing to arm himself and drive it to Leflore County. A year later, she had again reached out to Mississippi when NAG members began calling isolated SNCCs there, offering solidarity, friendship, human contact. Muriel recognized one name on the list—Charlie Cobb in Greenville. Cobb had been a fellow Howard student and NAG member. His aunt had also been Muriel’s fifth-grade teacher, so she called him up unannounced. Cobb soon became her “Sunday call.” “He would tell me about what they were doing, their daily work which was mostly staying alive.” As plans for the summer solidified, Cobb began telling this kind female voice on the phone about the upcoming project.
Some volunteers had agonized about going to Mississippi. Others had leaped at the chance. For Muriel, Mississippi was simply the next logical step. Her mother, having taught school in Mississippi, was “beside herself” over her daughter’s decision, but Muriel did not consider it a decision. “At NAG meetings, I was informed around February that something was going on in Mississippi that summer and the attitude was, ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’ As we got into May, it was, ‘The bus is leaving at such and such a time—you’re going to be on it, right?’ ” On June 12, NAG members left Washington, D.C., for Ohio. Seated beside her battered blue suitcase filled with more books than clothes, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Tillinghast was on the bus.
Once on the Ohio campus, Muriel did not concern herself with the tension between staff and recruits. As she had all her life, she got down to business. Her experience with NAG immediately moved her from volunteer to SNCC staffer, privy to all the endless meetings, strategies, and concerns. Becoming “a sponge” of information, she pestered Charlie Cobb and other veterans for survival tips. She learned how she would have to walk in Mississippi—a slow rural pace that did not call attention to her. She learned how she would have to address people, and how she could organize small, quarreling communities into cohesive armies united in the fight. SNCC’s horror stories “brought us to the stark reality that some of us were not going to come back,” but Muriel tried not to think about that. Instead, she called on her inherited strength, her organizational skills, the solidarity she had learned at Howard, and prepared to take them south. Courage had nothing to do with it. “It was esprit de corps. These were my friends and they were going and I was going with them.”
Suddenly there were just two days till departure. Volunteers wrote to President Lyndon Johnson, asking, “As we depart for that troubled state, to hear your voice in support of those principles to which Americans have dedicated and sacrificed themselves.” Bob Moses had already written LBJ requesting federal protection for the project. Neither Moses nor volunteers heard from the president.
Buses would head south on Saturday afternoon, entering Mississippi on Sunday under cover of darkness. As if to highlight the danger, the media began to swarm over the campus. Final workshops unfolded before TV cameras. Volunteers were interviewed again and again. “Are you scared?” “Do you really think it will do any good?” “You are scared, aren’t you?” Besieged by reporters, volunteers tried to explain their motives. “Part of it is the American dream, you know, and part is shame,” one told the Saturday Evening Post. “I feel a very real sense of guilt. But I hope I’m not going down there to get my little red badge of liberalism.” Berkeley student Mario Savio told the Los Angeles Times, “The injustices to the Negro in Mississippi are also an infringement upon my rights.” Newspapers alerted the country—Mississippi was in for “a long, hot summer,” a “racial explosion.” Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop feared “guerilla war.”
Muriel Tillinghast barely noticed the media, but Chris Williams was incensed. “The guy from Life was a real jerk,” he wrote in his journal. “The TV men were a pain in the neck as well with their big grinding cameras. They loved Non-Violent Workshops because that was where the action was. It was the closest thing to actual violence they could find. Sadists!” Volunteers wrote to parents, telling Mom and Dad to look for them in print or on TV. “Look magazine is searching for the ideal naïve northern middle-class white girl,” one wrote. “For the national press, that’s the big story. And when one of us gets killed, the story will be even bigger.” Two days left.
On Thursday, volunteers learned of their legal rights and how little they would mean that summer. Chris met attorney William Kunstler, later famous for defending the Chicago Seven, who was handling his case in North Carolina. Kunstler’s daughter, Karin, was among the volunteers. That morning, a graying man puffing a cigar stepped before the group. Jess Brown, one of four black lawyers in Mississippi, pointed a bony finger at the sweep of faces before him. “Now get this in your heads and remember what I am going to say!” Brown began. Mississippi sheriffs, cops, and highway patrolmen already knew their names, their hometowns, their full descriptions. “All I can do is give you some pointers on how to stay alive. If you are riding down the highway—say, on Highway 80 near Bolton, Mississippi—and the police stop you and arrest you, don’t get out and argue with the cops and say, ‘I know my rights.’ You may invite that club on your head. There ain’t no point in standing there trying to teach them some constitutional law at twelve o’clock at night. Go to jail and wait for your lawyer.” In Mississippi, Brown warned, they would be classified into two groups—“niggers and nigger-lovers. And they’re tougher on nigger-lovers.” That night, Muriel Tillinghast gathered more survival tips; Chris Williams took another midnight run.
On Friday morning, volunteers heard from the Department of Justice. In the field of civil rights, John Doar was as close to a hero as anyone at the federal level. As assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Doar had filed lawsuits against the fat registrar in Forrest County and elsewhere. He had worked closely with Bob Moses, taking his collect call from jail in Liberty, coming to Amite County to investigate threats against Herbert Lee, only to learn back in D.C. of his murder. At Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson, Doar had helped calm angry marchers, averting a riot. Now he praised the volunteers as “real heroes.” But when someone asked, “What are you going to do to enable us to see the fall?” Doar answered, “Nothing. There is no federal police force. The responsibility for protection is that of the local police.” Boos filled the auditorium. Shouts erupted. “We can protect the Vietnamese, but not the Americans, is that right? ” Finally, Moses stepped beside his friend. “We don’t do that,” he cautioned. The room fell silent. Doar was just being honest, Moses said. The session left volunteers feeling more vulnerable than ever. Back in Massachusetts, Jean Williams felt her son’s fears in a letter arriving that afternoon.
Dear People at home in the Safe, Safe North,
June 17
Mississippi is going to be he
ll this summer. We are going into the very hard-core of segregation and White Supremacy. . . . I’d venture to say that every member of the Mississippi staff has been beaten up at least once and he who has not been shot at is rare. It is impossible for you to imagine what we are going in to, as it is for me now, but I’m beginning to see. . . .
Love,
Xtoph
On the last night in “the Safe, Safe North,” the singing again began after dinner. Crossing arms and holding hands, volunteers sang the songs they now knew well, songs of jail, of picket lines, of endurance. Despite all the truth told about Mississippi, idealism still trumped fear. SNCC staffers had a term for such spirit—“freedom high”—and it kept the singing going till midnight. Between songs, some shared the news they had just heard on the radio. LBJ’s civil rights bill had finally passed the Senate. Now the South would be forced to desegregate. And they would be in Mississippi to see history happen. After midnight, most volunteers tried to sleep. A few stayed up drinking beer, talking, trying to imagine the mysterious places they were headed—Tchula, Mississippi. Moss Point. Itta Bena. At 3:00 a.m., a station wagon crammed with two trainers and six volunteers left for Mississippi to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County. No one saw them drive away.
Saturday: packing, a lingering lunch, long good-byes. At makeshift barbers’ chairs, lines were three deep as men had hair trimmed, beards shaved. “Before You Leave Oxford,” a sign announced, “Write Your Congressmen Asking Them to Act to Insure Your Safety.” The afternoon was as bright and sunny as the day the students had arrived. Beside green lawns, two rattletrap charter buses waited, but no one seemed eager to board. Encircled by TV cameras and reporters, volunteers and staffers again joined hands and sang. They had been two groups when they arrived; they were one now.
Finally, the call came to depart. Black and white sang one last chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” Then volunteers piled duffel bags, suitcases, and guitars in the back of each bus and crammed into seats. Some hung out windows to clasp hands with staffers who were staying to train the next group. Others just stared blankly, eyes fixed straight ahead. From inside the buses came sad voices singing SNCC’s woeful anthem, “We’ll Never Turn Back”:We have walked through the shadows of death,
We’ve had to walk all by ourselves.
We have hung our head and cried
For those like Lee who died. . . .
And the buses pulled away.
Across the cornfields of southern Ohio, where fugitive slaves had first tasted freedom, the singing continued. In the Cincinnati bus terminal, charter buses were exchanged for Greyhounds while students sang “Freedom Train.” Filled with song, two buses crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky. Volunteers stopped for dinner in Louisville, saw a livid red sun disappear behind the hills, and continued into Tennessee. Nashville, then through the warm night to Memphis. Looking out the bus window, Chris Williams spotted the “little guy” from Life and knew the press was still following. He tried to read but fell asleep. In the bus farther ahead, Muriel Tillinghast was wide awake. All her confidence, all her take-charge spirit, were beginning to wither. In the black southern night, she felt fear mounting. Leaving Memphis, Muriel’s bus was still rocking, singing. “We hit the Mississippi state line at midnight,” she recalled, “and the bus went silent. There was no turning back now.” Through windows, some volunteers spotted a billboard depicting an antebellum mansion, a sailboat, and a flowering magnolia beside tall pines. Above the bucolic scene were the words “Welcome to Mississippi.” Beyond the billboard, lined up along the highway, stood several highway patrol cars. A welcoming committee.
Ours is surely the black belt. It is all very well for Cheyenne or Schenectady or Stockholm or Moscow, where a black-faced visitor is a day’s wonder, to exclaim: “There is no race problem! Southerners are barbarians and brutes.” There never is a race problem until the two races living in close contact approach numerical equality.
—William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee
CHAPTER TWO
“Not Even Past”
Shortly after rain clouds parted on a spring day in ’61, Confederate troops marched through downtown Jackson. Five thousand proud Rebels, their double-breasted topcoats starched, their Enfield rifles shouldered, their mustachioed faces as stiff as statues, tramped along the glistening streets. Brass bands blared out sparkling renditions of “Dixie,” and teeming crowds sang along. Women in long floral dresses blew kisses from beneath parasols. Boys could not take their eyes off the officers on horseback, the glint of bayonets, the unfurling stars and bars. Flanking the governor’s mansion, where the governor waved from between white pillars, the troops marched on in a rippling ribbon of gray. Confederate flags were everywhere, waving in defiance of the Union. The parade, said to be the largest in the history of Mississippi, continued for hours. Then everyone got in their cars and went home. For this Confederate glory, this celebration of Mississippi’s secession from the United States of America, took place not in 1861 but in 1961.
The old cliché about history—that it is “written by the winners”—has always been, as Henry Ford said of history itself, “more or less bunk.” Countries defeated in war always write their own versions of history, versions that turn defeat into a noble cause and suffering into martyrdom. These unofficial versions soothe consciences and salve war wounds, yet with tragic regularity, they lead to more violence. Consider Germany after World War I. France after its revolution. The Balkans. The South.
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” Faulkner was not referring to the rest of America, where time gradually turned the butchery of the Civil War into a period piece. In the North, where a single town in Pennsylvania had seen the face of battle, the war was remembered in aging monuments, in daguerreotypes, in medals displayed on mantels but finally stored in attics. Yet across the former Confederacy, and especially in Mississippi, the War for Southern Independence was woven into the fabric of life. Every southern boy, Faulkner wrote, could easily summon the dreamlike moment at Gettysburg just before Pickett’s Charge, before the war became a slaughterhouse and defeat became inevitable. Faulkner wrote this in 1948, eighty-five years after Gettysburg. He wrote it in the present tense. And he wrote it in Mississippi, where the war, living on in laments, eulogized by sons and daughters of Confederate soldiers, still defined every reaction. Such was the century-long enshrinement of the Civil War in Mississippi, a state invaded, occupied, driven to its knees.
From the moment Northern troops crossed its border in 1862, Mississippi spearheaded Confederate suffering. It was the first Confederate state to be looted and burned, the first under siege, the first to see its capital destroyed. Northerners could not deny Mississippi’s bravery. “Mississippians,” one said, “don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender.” After routing Grant at Holly Springs, Mississippi soldiers defeated Sherman at Chickasaw Bluffs. At Vicksburg, they held off Grant again, making the entire South salute. But after a forty-eight-day siege that saw townspeople burrow into caves and survive on dead dogs and rats, Vicksburg fell, and total war swept across the land. William Tecumseh Sherman, before he cut his famous path through Georgia, practiced his savagery on Mississippi, where his men burned mansions and cotton fields, sacked small towns, and tortured the earth. After tearing up Meridian, Sherman boasted, “Meridian, with its depots, store-houses, arsenal, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonment, no longer exists.” Battleground Mississippi saw its rivers patrolled by Union gunboats, its railroad depots crammed with rotting corpses, and its capital so devastated that survivors called it “Chimneyville.” The day Vicksburg fell, news came from Gettysburg, where the proud Mississippi Greys, 103 students from Ole Miss, had led Pickett’s Charge. Every last one had been killed. And when the war was over, Mississippi had achieved another first. Its 78,000 soldiers—the Benita Sharpshooters, the Oktibbeha Ploughboys, the Tullahoma Hardshells, and others—had suffered 28,000 dead and 31,000 wounded, th
e highest per capita casualty rate in either South or North. In 1866, one-third of Mississippi’s budget was spent on artificial limbs.
Before the war, Mississippi had been America’s fifth wealthiest state—although most of that wealth was measured in muscle, the monetary value of 436,631 slaves, more than half the state’s population. In the wake of the war Mississippi became, and has been ever since, the nation’s poorest state. Rising from the ashes of Carthaginian destruction, Mississippians made a vow—never to forget. Yet for every Civil War horror, more painful memories followed. Wartime battles had been brief compared to the struggle to repel the occupation historians term Reconstruction and Mississippians came to call “The Tragic Era.” Here, too, Mississippi led the South—in resistance. Ranging from simple election fraud to a full-blown race war, the reaction tainted American democracy right through to Freedom Summer. Following four years of total war and a dozen of occupation and guerilla fighting, moderation in Mississippi became like snow, something occasionally in the air, especially farther north, but which vanished whenever the heat was turned up. As one freed slave observed, “Things was hurt by Mr. Lincoln gettin’ kilt.”
Lincoln was barely in his grave when the power struggle began. Four months after Appomattox, Mississippi crafted a constitution that would earn readmittance to the Union. But the hastily drawn accord, coupled with “Black Codes” denying freed slaves any vestige of citizenship, did not fool Congress. Refused statehood, Mississippi was occupied as part of the Fourth Military District. Only in 1870 did the Magnolia State again become a state. With former slaves voting freely, Mississippi sent America’s first black senator to Washington, D.C. Freedmen never dominated Mississippi politics, but an ex-slave was elected mayor of Natchez, another became police chief in Vicksburg, and still others served as judges, sheriffs, even secretary of state. At one point, nearly half the legislature was black. In less than a decade, the social system of an entire state had been plowed up, turned over, and replanted with the flimsiest of roots. The uprooting was soon termed “redemption,” and like the war, its ennobled savagery would scar Mississippi for a full century.
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