In May 1955, George Lee, a minister who had urged fellow blacks to register, was driving through Belzoni when shots rang out. His face blown off, Lee died en route to the hospital. The murder was reported in Jackson papers as an “odd accident.” That August, a black veteran was gunned down on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven. Two weeks later, teenager Emmett Till, having come from Chicago to visit relatives, flirted with a white woman in Money, Mississippi (pop. 55). No African American of “the Emmett Till generation” would ever forget the photo of Till’s monstrously mangled face in the casket his mother left open to let “the world see what they did to my boy.” More than one hundred reporters sat in the segregated courtroom where the sheriff greeted the black press—“Good morning, niggers”—and where the defense urged the jury, “every last Anglo Saxon one of you,” to find the killers not guilty. The jury complied in just over an hour. William Faulkner observed, “If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” A less eloquent white man proved more prophetic. “There’s open season on Negroes now,” he said. Within four years, ten more Mississippi blacks were murdered by whites; no guilty verdicts were rendered. The reign of terror also revived lynching. In the tiny town of Poplarville, Mack Parker, accused of rape, was dragged from jail and later found in chains, drifting in a logjam on the Pearl River. But the Emmett Till murder galvanized blacks more than whites. “From that point on,” Bob Moses’ mentor Amzie Moore remembered, “Mississippi began to move.”
And when it moved, the movement came from the bottom up. “It was the so-called dumb people,” a Holmes County farmer remembered. “. . . The school teachers, the educated people, they ain’t did a damn thang! The preachers ain’t neither. The so-called dumb people open the way for everybody. See, the table was set.” The Mississippi movement began with common laborers whose dignity would not be denied and with self-employed farmers whites could neither fire nor frighten. A chapter of the NAACP or the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a place to meet, and a coalition of the brave—these were the sparks. And Emmett Till’s face, printed in Jet magazine and passed from hand to hand, was the fan reminding blacks that little had changed in Mississippi, and that everything had to.
When vigilantes and the Citizens’ Council could not contain the movement, the state stepped in. In the wake of Brown, prospective voters were required not just to read but to interpret part of the Mississippi constitution, a document, as Senator Bilbo noted, “that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain.” The state constitution had 285 sections. Each “interpretation” was left open to the registrar. No appeal was allowed. Black teachers, doctors, and Ph.D.s routinely “failed” the test most whites did not have to take, and statewide black voting rolls fell from 22,000 to 8,000. In 1956, state legislators declared Brown “invalid, unconstitutional, and not of lawful effect.” The vote was 136-0. After voting, legislators sang “Dixie.” That same year, the legislature created Mississippi’s own KGB, the State Sovereignty Commission. Chaired by the governor, funded by taxpayers and private donations, the Sovereignty Commission spied, paid informers, tapped phones, and convinced newspaper editors to plant false stories and kill factual ones. The commission’s most extreme actions now seem comical, such as when investigators examined a baby born out of wedlock, checking its hair, nose, and fingernails to discover if he was part Negro. But other tactics seemed more appropriate for Khrushchev’s Soviet Union than for Eisenhower’s America.
During its first five years, the Sovereignty Commission spent much of its time fielding letters of support from segregationists across the nation. But members also found time to stir things up in Mississippi. The commission used black informers to imprison a man who tried to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi. It investigated NAACP leaders. Who were their friends? Were they Christian? What sexual habits might lead to their disgrace? Commission reports on racial violence inevitably blamed blacks and exonerated whites. Then Bob Moses came to Mississippi. An investigator interviewed Moses and concluded he was “working hand-in-glove with Communist sympathizers if not out-right Communist agitators. It is my opinion that Moses is himself a Communist.” Moses and SNCC deepened the siege mentality that set in across the state when, several years after the Montgomery bus boycott, the civil rights movement finally took hold in Mississippi.
By the summer of 1962, SNCC was building a “beachhead” in the most impoverished and explosive spot in America—the Mississippi Delta. Meanwhile in Jackson, blacks were boycotting segregated stores, sitting in at lunch counters, going limp as cops dragged them into paddy wagons. And across Mississippi, from the Delta south to the Piney Woods, blacks were lining up to register at county courthouses.
In Mississippi, the courthouse was more than a symbol of law and order—it was the heart of white society. Situated at the hub of each county seat, framed by a tidy town square, each courthouse was the oldest and best-preserved building for miles around. Each stood with towering cupola and an ornate brick facade. And on each courthouse lawn, a stone soldier stood atop a pedestal chiseled with the roll call of the Confederate dead. Every white birth, death, and marriage was recorded in the courthouse. And now as blacks came en masse to register, it was as if they were tearing a hole in these nostalgic portraits of the Old South. Because terror alone could not stop them, Mississippi barred its doors, locked its mind, and clung to the past that was not even past.
But preserving the status quo in the 1960s was not as easy as it had once been. A new invader, television, threatened to spread northern ideas about integration. Even if most Mississippi towns had just one or two TV channels, they had to be controlled. When novelist James Baldwin appeared on the Today show, he was not seen in Mississippi. NBC affiliates statewide showed an old movie. When NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall spoke on TV, WLBT in Jackson flashed the sign “Cable Difficulty.” The announcement “Sorry, Cable Trouble” soon became common on Mississippi TV. Newscasts were often preceded by a warning: “The following program is Northern-managed news.” Such control depended on media monopoly. The manager of WLBT was a Citizens’ Council director. So were the station’s owners, the Hederman family, which also owned Mississippi’s two statewide dailies, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. As with the rest of Jim Crow, opposition to “northern” media sometimes reached absurd heights. In the spring of 1964, rumors that the hit Western Bonanza would feature a “Negro cow-girl” led to a boycott of the show and its sponsors. A few months later, Mississippi’s ABC affiliates protested the new sitcom Bewitched, arguing that a show about a man marrying a witch might be seen as “a veiled argument for racial intermarriage.”
Blackouts, spies, vigilantes, cops cracking down, Citizens’ Council chapters lobbying the “right thinking”—all turned Mississippi into “The Closed Society.” And when Ole Miss history professor James Silver coined the term in 1963, he too became a target. Denounced by the governor, investigated by the university, Silver began sleeping with a shotgun by his bed. He never drove at night. Other moderates faced similar harassment. At Ole Miss, speakers were screened for their views on integration. The campus director of religious life was forced to leave. His crime? Hosting a black journalist. Protesting “intellectual straight-jacketing,” professors resigned one after another until a quarter of the faculty had quit. Clergymen also felt the pressure. In January 1963, twenty-eight Methodist ministers signed a statement urging church integration. Within a year, half had left the state.
Dick Gregory once joked that a Mississippi moderate was someone “who will lynch you from a low tree.” But despite the dangers, a few voices of reason remained, courageously crying out in what one called “The Magnolia Jungle.” Hazel Brannon Smith, publisher of the Lexington Advertiser, waged a one-woman campaign against the Citizens’ Council and its “private Gestapo,” the Sovereignty Commission. In her front-page column, “Th
rough Hazel Eyes,” Smith observed: “Today we live in fear in Holmes County and in Mississippi. It hangs like a dark cloud over us dominating every facet of public and private life. None speaks freely without being afraid of being misunderstood. Almost every man and woman is afraid to try to do anything to promote good will and harmony between the races.”
Smith was ostracized in her small town. Advertising dried up, her name was linked to Communists, her husband lost his job, and she was found guilty of libel for denouncing a white cop who had shot a black man. Yet Smith kept speaking out, and a month before Freedom Summer, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Farther south, in Petal, Mississippi, P. D. East, editor, publisher, ad salesman, reporter, and typesetter for the Petal Paper, denounced the spreading “assdom.” East ran mock Citizens’ Council ads asking readers to “Join the Glorious Citizens Clan . . . the Bigger and Better Bigots Bureau.” Like Hazel Brannon Smith, East was boycotted. The Petal Paper survived only on out-of-state sales. And still farther south, in the shipyard town of Pascagoula, publisher Ira Harkey Jr. had the audacity to remove the labels “nigger” and “colored” from his newspaper, then editorialize against local “goons” and “Hateists.” They responded by shooting into his house and burning a cross on his lawn. The hatred hardened, finally bringing on Mississippi’s greatest fear—the return of northern troops.
Mississippians thought they knew how to handle any Negro who tried to enroll at Ole Miss. The first, in 1958, was sent to a mental institution. But in 1962, James Meredith’s pending enrollment threw the charming old town of Oxford into an uproar. “Dixie” blared on radio stations. Confederate flags flew. Rebel yells sounded in the streets, and whites from as far south as the Gulf Coast poured into Oxford armed for battle. Federal marshals arrived on troop trucks. On September 30, as darkness descended on campus, bricks smashed cars and windows. Mississippi highway patrolmen withdrew, enraging Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who sent in more marshals. All night the rioting continued, leaving two dead, twenty-eight shot, hundreds beaten, cars burned, buildings gutted. The next morning, federal troops escorted Meredith through the rubble and into class. “We hate violence,” one student said, “but we are determined to keep our way of life. Nobody can take it away from us, and I would die for it.”
Federal troops stayed on the Ole Miss campus until the following August. Come 1964, three years after the centennial secession parade, the Civil War remained an open sore, the Oxford “occupation” had rekindled smoldering hatreds, and Mississippi had become a pressure cooker. In March, news of the summer project sent tremors through the state. Freedom Summer planners announced, again and again, that volunteers coming to Mississippi would not march, sit in, or protest. In a letter to all county sheriffs, planners explained, “The project is concerned with construction, not agitation.” Yet that spring, the Mississippi legislature passed a spate of laws doubling the number of state police and banning picketing, leafleting, and assembly.
While the state legislature met in emergency session, Mississippi’s KGB made its own preparations for Freedom Summer. Throughout April and May, the State Sovereignty Commission held clinics for sheriffs and cops, advising them of new state laws for handling the incoming wave of “communists, sex perverts, odd balls, and do-gooders.” The agency also hired two black spies it called Informant X and Informant Y. X’s job was to travel with civil rights workers. “It will be a long hot summer in Mississippi,” X reported back, “because they are going to demonstrate in the streets of Jackson until the ‘walls of segregation’ come tumbling down.” Attending the Ohio training, X reported, “The white girls have been going around with the Negro boys and Negro girls going with the white boys.” While X traveled, Y infiltrated the Jackson headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group of civil rights agencies in Mississippi.
COFO headquarters would be the nerve center of Freedom Summer. Located on Lynch Street in the black section of Jackson, COFO shared a low brick building with the Streamline Bar and Billiards. As Freedom Summer approached, the office was far busier than the adjacent bar. Phones rang incessantly. Women sat at typewriters clacking out letters, lists, solicitations, and a stream of reports on all aspects of the summer project. Meetings in smoke-filled back rooms went on past midnight. Boxes of books and clothes—donations from around the country—piled up in corners. Moving freely through the clutter was Informant Y. Along with stealing key documents, including lists of all volunteers with their home addresses, Y also sent fanciful reports to the Sovereignty Commission. Apparently the COFO office was thick with Communists and even a “queer.” Photos of Khrushchev and Lenin adorned the wall, Y reported, Marxist literature was everywhere, and talk was of a new world “where black and white will walk together and where Communism will dominate. They do not talk of love but only of sex to satisfy the body.” As the summer unfolded, Informant X would continue to file dry reports while Informant Y would tell the State Sovereignty Commission just what it wanted to hear.
By June 1964, Mississippi’s past was digging in against the onslaught of the present. All but a few moderates had been silenced or exiled. Pascagoula publisher Ira Harkey had sold his crusading paper. Frank Smith, the lone Mississippi moderate in Congress, had been defeated for reelection. P. D. East had moved to Alabama, and William Faulkner was dead. Unfettered, Confederate pride resurged with a vengeance. Reconstruction-era insults—“carpetbagger” and “scalawag”—were common. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger was running a Civil War column—“This Week in 1864”—recounting atrocities by Union troops. Behind the scenes, softer voices pleaded for understanding. “I know we’ve had a hundred years,” a Hattiesburg doctor said. “I know that, and I’m ashamed to ask it, but we need more time. If we had more time, we’d work it out.” To most Mississippians, however, it was too late for pleas. “In my life span, I have never felt so compelled to stand up for God and our country,” a Jackson man wrote the Clarion-Ledger. “I ask both white and colored not to let Mississippi turn into a small New York.”
With Freedom Summer just a week away, rumors verged on panic. Not just a few hundred but thirty thousand “invaders” were on their way! In Jackson, word that Negro gangs were “forming to rape white women” led to a run on gun shops. Mississippi police stockpiled tear gas, riot guns, and electric cattle prods. Cops took riot training. The Klan announced it had 91,000 members in Mississippi and was actively recruiting. In this spreading alarm, violence became common currency.
Early one June evening, two cars stopped in front of COFO headquarters in Jackson. Two young white men stepped out. Each calmly pulled out a gun, aimed at the office, and fired. Windows shattered. Screams came from inside. The men drove off. Six days later, a bomb hit the Freedom House in Canton. That same day in volatile southwest Mississippi, whites mauled three journalists. “This is just a taste of what you Northern agitators will get,” one attacker said.
With the days melting away, Mississippi braced for the “long, hot summer.” Chambers of commerce shared strategies. Stay calm. Discourage the Klan in your area. Trust the police. Stonewall the press. In southwest Mississippi, two new organizations began meeting. The Americans for the Preservation of the White Race urged peaceful defiance. “Don’t do no violence,” a preacher told the group. “The day we kill three or four, they’d be martial law in Mississippi.” In McComb, the neighborhood watch group Help, Inc. organized block captains and mailed out “Guidelines for Self-protection and Preservation.” Among them: “Know where small children are at all times. . . . Look before unlocking door to anyone. . . . Learn alarm codes. . . . Temporary alarm to be three blasts from a shotgun or car horn.” And in klaverns dotted throughout Mississippi, Klansmen steeled themselves. “This summer, within a very few days, the enemy will launch his final push for victory here in Mississippi,” the Klan’s shadowy Imperial Wizard announced. “We must use all of the time which is left to us in these next few days preparing to meet this attack. Weap
ons and ammunition must be accumulated and stored. Squads must drill. . . . And a solemn, determined spirit of Christian reverence must be stimulated in all members.”
On the last day of spring, as volunteers boarded buses in Ohio, Jackson’s huge armored tank waited at police headquarters. Nearby, the county fairgrounds had become a holding camp big enough to house thousands of prisoners. After months of rumors and threats, Mississippi hunkered down for the worst. In Jackson, Eudora Welty wrote a friend, “I hear that this summer all hell is going to break loose.” The State Sovereignty Commission reported “increased activity in weapon shipments.” From towns carved out of the clay to those rising from cotton fields, Mississippi waited. Then shortly after midnight on the first day of summer, young men and women rode buses south from Memphis, singing as they approached the state line. When a blood-red sun rose that Sunday, Mississippi was again engulfed in the wars—between white and black, between North and South, between tolerance and intolerance—that had never really ended.
“Why doesn’t everybody love each other?” “Do what?” “Love each other. Why don’t they love each other?” “Say, what are you anyhow? Some kind of a nut?”
—Shelby Foote, Jordan County
CHAPTER THREE
Freedom Street
The land was a pool table of green, the sky was bigger than Montana’s, and the asphalt was long, straight, and empty when eight volunteers and two SNCC staffers were dropped by the side of a highway somewhere in Mississippi. They knew the date—June 21, 1964. They knew the time—5:00 a.m. But where were they?
The last sign had read, “Batesville—Corp Limit,” but there was no town in sight. Other than the felt fields and skinny two-lane, there was nothing in sight except a vacant Greyhound bus station and, across the highway, a squat brick building stamped with the words “Mississippi Highway Patrol.” Chris Williams, still bleary from the bus ride, found this “unpleasant, to say the least.” Where the hell was Batesville? Back in Ohio, they had learned the rudiments of Mississippi geography—the Delta cotton fields, the low central hills, the matchstick Piney Woods farther south—but standing by the road near Batesville, the group saw no cotton, no hills, no woods, just a sweep of emptiness filling them with a vague terror that something had gone very wrong.
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