Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  “I would have gone anywhere,” one woman recalled. “I would have done anything he asked me to do, I trusted him so much.”

  After a few more comments, Moses slowly walked out. No one said a word, no one took the stage. Volunteers sat in the stillness. Finally from the back of the auditorium, a lone woman sang:They say that freedom is a constant struggle is a constant struggle

  They say that freee-dom is a constant struggle.

  Across the auditorium, people crossed arms, held hands, joined in.

  Many stayed up all night. A laundry room discussion lasted until 4:00 a.m. Others just wandered. A few stood in phone booths, arguing with parents. “If someone in Nazi Germany had done what we’re doing,” one woman shouted, “then your brother would still be alive!” A Long Island woman heard her father yell, “You’re killing your mother! Do you know what it takes to make a child?” But all Heather Tobis could think was, “Do you know what it takes to make a child in Mississippi?” The following evening, Tobis was on one of two buses heading south. Songs again paced the miles through Kentucky and into Tennessee. The buses reached Memphis at 5:00 a.m. Sunday. And there was Bob Moses to help them make connections to Greyhounds stopping in Clarksdale, Vicksburg, Ruleville. . . .

  A hot, syrupy haze hung above a sea of knee-high cotton when, at 2:00 p.m., the Greyhound pulled into Ruleville. On that crawling Sunday, the Delta town of 2,000 slumbered, but when twenty volunteers stepped out with luggage, boxes, and bedrolls, Ruleville awoke in a foul mood. Across from the bus station, several brawny white men, beer cans in hand, stared down the newcomers. Seconds later, a woman wearing pink hair curlers drove past the bus and waved her middle finger. The sheriff’s pickup pulled up with a German shepherd in back, snarling, tearing at his cage. Next came the mayor, a short, jowly man stepping from his car, wearing a straw hat. When several black families drove up, another standoff looked likely, but then Fannie Lou Hamer strode onto the scene. The sturdy woman directed host families to take everyone to her house. There they met volunteers who had arrived the previous Sunday. All enjoyed an enormous lunch, then cooled off beneath the billowing pecan tree out front. Filling Hamer’s lawn, fanning themselves in the shade, newcomers learned that voter registration was under way. Canvassers had been chased out of the “tough town” of Drew, but some locals had already gone to the courthouse in Indianola. And fifty kids had signed up for Freedom School.

  That evening, volunteers and locals gathered at the Williams Chapel, just around the corner from Hamer’s house. Four days earlier, a Molotov cocktail had charred the small church, but flames somehow missed plastic sacks of gasoline laid around the perimeter. The Ruleville fire department put out the blaze, leaving blackened concrete and a congregation feeling blessed. By the time Sunday’s mass meeting began, a hundred people were crammed into a single room. Bare bulbs cast thin shadows on a photo of Jesus and a banner reading “We Shall Overcome.”

  “Be strong and of good courage,” the preacher urged. “God sometimes likes us to feel we can’t go any further . . .”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “That’s because God only helps us with the impossible things we can’t achieve by ourselves . . .”

  “Yes, yes.”

  When the preacher finished, a volunteer from Illinois announced the FBI arrests in Itta Bena. The FBI had not acted “because it wanted to,” he said. “They did it because they had to. . . . The whole nation is watching you and admiring you, and you must keep on and you must stand up.” Then came the songs, swelling and surging. Uplifted faces, black and white, glistened as they sang.

  Nearly five hundred volunteers were now in Mississippi. A few would be gone within a week, leaving in terror or despair. The rest would stay on for what would be either a breakthrough summer or, as the New York Times now feared, a “racial holocaust.” That Sunday morning in Neshoba County, black parishioners prayed in makeshift pews beside the rubble of the Mt. Zion Church. FBI agents again piled into skiffs to drag the Pearl River. In Philadelphia, agents were preparing to question Sheriff Rainey. Posters with mug shots of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney below the words “Missing—Call FBI” were now posted all over the South. Rita Schwerner was on her way to meet President Johnson, while mayors throughout Mississippi talked of heading to Washington, D.C., to protest “the invasion.” At dusk, a candlelight vigil for the missing men marched in silence outside the White House. Back in Mississippi, a few more volunteers, having driven their own cars from Ohio, arrived in their towns. All the way down, one kept saying, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s still the United States of America.”

  Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.

  —Eudora Welty

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “It Is Sure Enough Changing”

  On his first full day in Mississippi, Fred Winn tore down an outhouse and turned it into bookshelves.

  The outhouse stood behind a two-room shack on a dusty road skirting Ruleville’s cotton fields. The road divided black sections of town whose names—Jerusalem and Sanctified Quarters—spoke of spirit, not scenery. The flatness of the Delta made the shack, the quarters, and the railroad tracks nearby seem like some tabletop model train set. Like many Mississippi shacks, this one looked as if no one had lived there since the birth of the blues. Four sunflowers leaned alongside a sagging porch. When the front door creaked open, cockroaches bigger than pecans scurried for cover. Inside lay musty rooms strewn with broken bottles, splintered furniture, and rusted box springs. Cobwebs draped corners. Walls wept with mildew. And out back stood the outhouse, angled like some ancient sundial in the morning glare.

  Twenty volunteers traipsed through the house that Monday morning, in shock or dismay. This was to be Ruleville’s Freedom School? This? But in a scene mirrored throughout Mississippi that week, women tied their hair back, men stripped off shirts, and all began swarming over the house like the insects swarming around them. Bearing brooms, buckets, and bottles of Lysol, they revived the dying shack. Women carried white rags inside, only to emerge holding shredded scraps as black as Delta topsoil. Men slick with sweat brought out armloads of debris. Soon several black women, their heads wrapped in bright bandannas, came with their own cleaning solutions. And sometime that morning, someone delivered boxes of books. Volunteers tore open the cardboard, finding childhood favorites or, to their dismay, college texts. The books were stacked in piles—“History,” “Reference,” “Language,” “Crud”—and the piles were still small when Fred Winn began talking about bookshelves. Local kids roamed the quarters, bringing back two-by-fours but no planks. Finally Winn, a short, burly man with a mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, noticed the outhouse. With the help of several laughing kids, he rocked and rocked until it toppled with a crash. The smell was paralyzing, but the boards were not as old as they looked, not once Winn grabbed a plane from his toolbox and skinned them clean.

  By the time a late-afternoon thunderstorm rumbled across the Delta, the Ruleville Freedom School was ready for classes. The rooms were still musty and the floorboards still creaked, but walls were tacky with fresh paint. A crib headboard found in the attic and spray-painted green had become a blackboard, and fully stocked bookshelves lined both classrooms. Walking through their new school, volunteers could hardly believe what they had accomplished, yet similar miracles were taking place in Vicksburg, in Clarksdale, in Hattiesburg . . . Ruleville’s Freedom School was scheduled to open that Friday. In the meantime, volunteers wondered where else they could tackle a century of despair.

  Throughout the first week of July, the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney dominated news from Mississippi. More searchers, more helicopters, more rumors. On Tuesday, a mutilated body turned up by the roadside a hundred miles north of Neshoba County. The man was about Mickey Schwerner’s age, wearing blue jeans and sneakers, but fingerprints ended all speculation. A day later, a cop spotted a goateed man
in a café near the Tennessee border. Mississippi newspapers plastered the news on front pages—the man looked “exactly” like Schwerner and had given the cop “dirty looks.” Next, COFO headquarters heard that the three bodies, chained together, had been dumped in the Ross Barnett Reservoir off the Natchez Trace Highway. The FBI tracked down each rumor, “running down all leads on the cranks,” Hoover told LBJ. And continuing to question residents, agents slowly pieced together the events of June 21.

  One woman told agents what she had seen that Sunday afternoon. A blue station wagon stopped on Route 16, east of Philadelphia, opposite the Dallas Garage. Two whites and a Negro, fixing a flat. A cop and two highway patrolmen looking on. Patrolman Earl Poe confirmed the story. He and his partner had been sweating in the shade along Route 16 when the blue wagon topped the rise and “let off it.” Seconds later, Deputy Cecil Price had raced by in his black-and-white ’56 Chevy, red light flashing. A crackle had come over the radio—Price asking for assistance. The patrolmen followed and found the station wagon pulled over, the pudgy deputy watching the black man change the tire. Then the two “white boys” got in Poe’s patrol car—the one with the goatee handed the cop the gun left in the backseat. The other patrolman rode with the “Negro boy” in the station wagon, and Deputy Price followed both cars to the jail.

  What happened in jail was revealed by a man who had been in an adjacent cell. He told of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney being placed in segregated lockups. Schwerner had asked permission to call his wife. The jailer offered to make the call herself, but Schwerner politely declined. The man remembered Schwerner and Goodman as being calm, telling him they expected to be in jail several days. The details gave the FBI a start, but the forty hours between Sunday night and Tuesday’s discovery of the smoldering station wagon remained a blank slate. And while a few locals had talked, most were still enraged by the FBI’s invasion. They knew nothing. They had seen nothing. If the three were dead, several added, they “got what was coming to them.” That week, a hearing on James Chaney’s arrest for speeding was scheduled in the Neshoba County courthouse. Chaney did not show.

  While whites talked—or refused to talk—blacks in Philadelphia opened up to the press. Mrs. Junior Cole told the New York Times how a white mob had gathered outside the Mt. Zion Church on the evening before it burned. The elderly woman trembled as she described emerging from a church meeting with her husband. Suddenly, a man with a gun had stepped in front of their car. Seconds later, the road was filled with white men, rifles across their chests. One shone a flashlight in Junior Cole’s face, asking about the church meeting. When Cole replied that it was just a routine gathering, the white man barked, “You a damn liar. You having an N-double-A-CP meeting out here, ain’t you? ” Yanking the old man out of the car, the mob pummeled him to the ground, thrashing and kicking. Mrs. Cole dropped to her knees in the gravel.

  “Lord, don’t let them kill my husband.”

  “If you think prayer will do any good, you’d better pray.”

  As fists and a pistol butt thudded in the darkness, Mrs. Cole lifted both arms to heaven. “Father, I stretch my hands to Thee,” she said. “No other help I know.” The words seemed to calm the men. Leaving Junior Cole in a heap on the ground, they got into cars and pickups and drove off. A few hours later, an orange glow lit the night sky from off toward the church.

  While the FBI investigated and the public feasted on rumors, 450 volunteers stifled their fears and settled into Mississippi. Bob Moses had once written to a “Friends of SNCC” chapter, explaining how that was done.

  You dig into yourself and the community to wage psychological warfare; you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings, and possible mob violence; you stymie, by your mere physical presence, the anxious fear of the Negro community . . . you organize, pound by pound, small bands of people . . . a small striking force capable of moving out when the time comes, which it must, whether we help it or not.

  The time had come. The first week of July 1964 was an American Rubicon. On July 2, President Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act, banning segregation in all public facilities. And all that holiday weekend, blacks would test the waters—ordering breakfast from white waitresses, getting haircuts from white barbers, checking into hotels where just a week before they had been welcome only as maids and kitchen help. But just offstage at this revolution, blacks and whites scattered across Mississippi won smaller victories. They signed papers on porches, learned together in Freedom Schools, played together at picnics, and shared the most integrated Fourth of July in American history.

  Deepening its denial, white Mississippi continued to sneer at the invaders. “While professing to believe in ‘equality,’ ” a Jackson Clarion-Ledger columnist wrote, “these self-appointed reformers evidently regard themselves as mentally and morally superior to Mississippians. What the students think of us is not very important . . . because the invaders couldn’t possibly think less of us than the majority here thinks of them and their sponsors.” In his home overlooking his cotton fields, Senator James Eastland echoed the denial that was becoming the common wisdom among Mississippi whites. “I find more resentment on the part of Negroes than white people to this effort in our state,” the bald, bespectacled senator told reporters. But Eastland did not know the 40 percent of his constituents who had never been allowed to vote. “It’s the best thing that’s happened since there ever was a Mississippi,” one black man said. “I just love the students like I love to eat. . . . If more come down here, I’d get out of my bed for them and sleep on a pallet in the tool shed. They’re doing things we couldn’t do for ourselves in years on end. . . . A lot of bad smells are getting out to the outside world that never did before. And we got out-of-state FBI in here, and federal lawsuits. It’s all changing, it is sure enough changing, right this summer.”

  Volunteers who had been in Mississippi since the first day of summer were getting used to the place. Now the fresh arrivals struggled with each new annoyance. One woman hated the gnats that swarmed everywhere, even up her skirt. Another couldn’t believe how he took a shower, dried off, and within minutes had damp armpits, a sticky shirt, and a halo of sweat. A third bristled when his host family treated him “as if I was some strange god, and I mean a dangerous one as well as a good one.”

  For carpenter Fred Winn, the hardest thing to get used to was midnight. Daytime kept him busy, building bookshelves, reviving rotting shacks, but each midnight he lay awake on the floor of his new home—the Ruleville Freedom School. Two weeks earlier he had been in his native San Francisco, where nights were deliciously cool. Now he lay in the muggy dampness, mulling over how one thing had led to another, leading finally to Mississippi.

  Fred had learned of the summer project when SNCC’s spring speaking tour came to his college in Marin County. Many students had given SNCC money, but friends were dumbfounded when Fred Winn decided to give his summer. A gregarious twenty-year-old whose Sausalito apartment was a notorious “party pad” hardly seemed a likely civil rights worker. Only a few friends knew that behind Fred’s firm handshake and salty speech was a family secret. A year earlier, Fred’s father, a respected San Francisco lawyer, told his family he had another child—a black child. Fred’s mother threw her husband out. Siblings wanted nothing to do with the four-year-old girl, but Fred met her and was charmed. Suddenly the color line between the Winns and their black maid had blurred. And all his father’s lectures about never using “that word” to describe Negroes made sense. “Now it wasn’t just these ‘Negroes’ or ‘coloreds’ or whatever everyone was calling them, but people to whom I’m related,” Fred recalled. “That’s a consciousness changing thing.”

  Fred’s father, worried that he and his party-loving son had nothing in common, was pleased by “Freddy’s” decision to go to Mississippi. Fred’s mother called the college president and threatened, if anything happened to her son, to sue for allowing SNCC on campus. The president called Fred into his office, but there was nothing an acad
emic or a mother could do—Fred’s father had signed SNCC’s permission form. During the next two months the college “court jester” became insufferable, arguing on the quad about civil rights, signing his letters “We Shall Overcome.” Some friends said Fred was crazy to go, others called him heroic, but he just felt righteous anger, tempered by the first cold feelers of terror. Having heard SNCC’s stories, he knew what might happen to him in Mississippi. He was not sure he could take a beating without fighting back. The idea of rolling into a helpless ball while being kicked and hammered went against his every instinct. And who knew what else Mississippi had in store? Shortly before leaving for Ohio, Fred sat down to write his will. After designating who should have his car, books, and other belongings, he signed, “My spirit lives on. Wherever there is a fight of equality, whenever a person is deprived of something that is his, I will be there. The truth is behind me—We shall overcome.”

  Other volunteers brought white-collar expertise to Mississippi, but Fred Winn brought tools. SNCC had asked for handymen, and Fred, though a lawyer’s son, had always felt an affinity for the building trades. So a few days after writing his will, he packed a toolbox, then threw in paper and crayons for Freedom Schools, his father’s Bible, and a first aid kit. Boarding a Greyhound, he crossed the Sierras and rode on toward Ohio. En route, he cracked the books SNCC had recommended to volunteers—Black Like Me, The Mind of the South, The Souls of Black Folk. But three books could scarcely prepare him for the culture clash ahead. Naive and untested—“a young twenty-year-old”—Fred had never been to the Deep South, never slept with a woman, never thought much about black and white in America. He would spend the summer like a boy turning over rocks. On his first night in training, he watched in anger as a black man approached a white woman on a dance floor, pressing closer and closer until she shoved him away. That just wasn’t how a man approached a woman in San Francisco. Yet as the week went on, Fred met SNCCs and other volunteers, “broke the ice and things got better.”