Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  When asked in workshops why he had come, Fred spoke frankly about his father’s interracial affair. And on that Monday morning when Rita Schwerner told volunteers to write their congressmen, Fred wrote his, then fired off letters to the San Francisco Chronicle and to his mother, calling her a racist. Yet as the mood on campus turned funereal, his righteousness was tested. The disappearance had made it clear—“There were people in Mississippi who might murder me.” His roommate, a football player from the Midwest, went home, but Fred was determined to go to Mississippi. For a laugh, he recalled his father’s parting advice—“If the Klan gets a hold of you, yell ‘My father is a Mason!’ ” A Masonic code, he was told, prevents Masons from harming each other’s families. Armed with that and his tools, Fred Winn went to Mississippi, where it was midnight and he still could not sleep.

  Fred found nights in Mississippi “scarier than shit.” He had already faced down the food. He took one bite of pigs’ feet, one of pigs’ ear, no more. Okra gagged him—“It’s like eating sandpaper slugs”—but he would learn to like it. Yet he could not get used to the danger. In his first letter from Ruleville, he shared news of the disappearance. “Dad, I hope you realize that I may be in that same position in a few days. Do not worry and for shit’s sake don’t come running down here. We have a very good investigation division of our own.” His father read each letter over and over. Reminded of his own experiences as a green World War II enlistee who rose to the rank of captain, the elder Winn dutifully sent “Freddy” money, signed letters to LBJ, and worried. And each night his faraway son, after hanging screens, fixing toilets, and singing at mass meetings, made a pallet on the Freedom School floor, set his glasses beside it, and struggled to get some sleep. For protection, Fred had covered the school’s windows with corrugated tin, cutting off any breeze, turning his “bedroom” into a sweatbox. A volunteer from New Jersey was stretched out nearby, breathing deeply, but Fred just lay there thinking about his fractured family back home, thinking about his tasks the next day, wondering what he had gotten himself into. The room was pitch-black, and he listened to every car that passed.

  On Monday morning, June 29, Rita Schwerner and Bob Zellner were escorted into the Oval Office of the White House. Rita must have looked like a child standing before the president, more than a foot taller and more than twice her weight. LBJ stooped, shook her hand, and said he was glad to meet her. But convinced now that she was a widow—at twenty-two—Rita was brusque. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, this is not a social call,” she said. “We’ve come to talk about three missing people in Mississippi. We’ve come to talk about a search that we don’t think is being done seriously.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Miss,” the president replied.

  The conversation was brief. Rita demanded that five thousand federal marshals be sent to Mississippi. The president said everything that could be done was being done. When LBJ abruptly turned and left, press secretary Pierre Salinger chewed out Rita, saying one did not talk to the president of the United States that way.

  “We do,” Rita said, and left for a press conference.

  Throughout that second week, volunteers went about their business in black Mississippi. They readied Freedom Schools, opened community centers, sat on rickety front porches, shucking peas and getting to know their hosts. And white Mississippi went about its business—repelling the invasion. Perhaps due to the FBI arrests in Itta Bena, or perhaps because all America was watching, violence ebbed that week. Yet the “calm” did not calm anyone. The disappearance of three men had seeded Mississippi with omens. Each passing pickup, each hate stare, each sudden noise in the night, suggested the raw hatred lurking within striking distance. And each car of volunteers late for a scheduled return made another disappearance seem just a matter of time.

  To put fear in perspective, SNCCs shared stories of nearby “tough towns” that made their own sites seem tame. In the Delta, the tough town was Drew, where the first canvassers had been chased out by a mob. Batesville volunteers were told never to enter Tallahatchie County, where the mangled body of Emmett Till had washed up in the muddy river. Farther south, a primitive savagery was said to lurk in the broiling farmlands of Amite County, where Herbert Lee had been gunned down, and in Pike County, where mobs had beaten SNCCs outside city hall. But even with “tough towns” still off-limits, the threats, the harassment, the attacks, just kept coming. Check-in calls to the WATS line in Jackson, dutifully typed by the volunteer manning the phone, suggested white Mississippi as a coiled snake:

  In Greenwood, a white and a black woman were walking when a car swerved straight toward them. They bolted out of its path. As the car passed, they noted the sign in the rear window: “You Are in Occupied Mississippi: Proceed with Caution.” Listening to such stories, many lived in constant fear. “Violence hangs overhead like dead air . . . ,” a Ruleville volunteer wrote. “Something is in the air, something is going to happen, somewhere, sometime, to someone.” Adding to the fear was white Mississippi’s bare-faced rudeness. One volunteer would never forget—“to walk along the street and have some little old lady who looks for everything like your mother give you the finger.” Clarksdale volunteers watched with disbelief as the sheriff entered a courtroom and sprayed deodorant all around them. Females sometimes found the hostility sugar-coated.

  “You’re both purty gals,” a dough-faced man said to two in Canton. “Some of the purtiest I’ve ever seen. But I seen you the other day up at that nigger store talking to the worst nigger slum in the county. Why, that nigger slum can’t even count to ten.”

  “Yes, I’ve been talking to Negroes at the store,” one woman said with a smile. The other added, “And we’d be glad to come to your home and talk to your wife and you together.”

  “I wouldn’t let the likes of you in my house,” the man replied. “Why don’t you go home where you belong? ”

  But more often, no sugar-coating was applied. When a cop pulled over an integrated SNCC car, he eyed the lone white woman and snarled, “Which one of them coons is you fuckin’? ”

  Lyndon Johnson had vowed not to send troops “on my people”—if they cooperated. But would anyone in Mississippi cooperate? Despite all the violence, most whites had done their best to ignore the invasion, but throughout June’s Hospitality Month and on into July, only two offered southern hospitality.

  In Greenville, Hodding Carter III, editor of the Delta Democrat-Times, “broke bread with, drank whiskey with, and argued with about a dozen of the volunteers.” Long before Freedom Summer, the Carter family’s Democrat-Times had denounced the Klan and the Citizens’ Council, leading to threats, boycotts, and constant harassment. By 1964, Carter, an ex-marine who would later serve in President Jimmy Carter’s State Department, was keeping guns in his car, desk drawer, pocket, and bedside table. But fear did not deter him from meeting summer volunteers and arguing politics. “I was adamantly against much of the SDS-related rhetoric and some of the tactical approaches, which I thought were deliberately designed to spark violence,” he recalled. “They thought I was a young fogy, his mind clouded by knee-jerk anti-communism and simply out of it when it came to the winds of change. I was for LBJ; they thought he was a fascist, etc.” Carter watched in dismay as two of his reporters dated volunteers. And he occasionally allowed volunteers to swim in his pool.

  Mississippi’s other island of hospitality lay seventy miles from Greenville. During that first week of July, Holmes County volunteers were hosted by a pale, red-haired woman wearing a string of pearls. Hazel Brannon Smith, the crusading editor fresh from winning the Pulitzer Prize, welcomed volunteers into the white-pillared house she called Hazelwood. Other Mississippi newspapers were blasting these “race mixing invaders,” “leftist hep cat students,” and “nutniks.” And although most volunteers were as clean-cut as the sailors still searching the swamps, other newspapers described them as “unshaven and unwashed trash.” But Smith’s Lexington Advertiser proudly introduced “thirty college students who ar
e interested in human and civil rights.” Calling the summer project a “Peace Corps type undertaking,” Smith profiled volunteers, their colleges, majors, and interests. All over town, she had heard the grumbling, the idea “that if everyone would just leave us alone we would work out all our problems.” In her “Through Hazel Eyes” column, she answered back. “The truth is these young people wouldn’t be here if we had not largely ignored our responsibilities to our Negro citizens.”

  Yet Carter and Smith stood alone. Mayors throughout Mississippi, though deciding against protesting in the nation’s capital, condemned volunteers for “doing irreparable damage to the friendly relations that exist among our people.” Police found any excuse to arrest them—for speeding, reckless driving, even “reckless walking.” And rednecks, peckerwoods, “white trash,” used every brand of terror to drive them out. The actual number of homegrown terrorists may have been only a dozen in each town, but the rest, if they disapproved of the relentless violence, said nothing.

  By early July, the nerve center of Freedom Summer was run ragged. With its air-conditioning broken, the COFO office in Jackson sweltered. Sweat ran down foreheads, soaked clothes, dripped off chins. Dogs roamed freely through the clutter of old newspapers, boxes of books, and empty RC Cola bottles. A sign on one wall read, “Nobody Would Dare Bomb This Place and End This Confusion.” Each day seemed to pile on the tasks—always more bail to raise, more reports, lists, and letters to type, another volunteer’s hometown press to contact. Then there were visitors in need of couches to sleep on, rides to arrange, calls to raise more money. And now that everyone had settled in, the time had come to harvest democracy, shack by shack.

  The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party waited in the wings. The MFDP’s bold challenge at the Democratic National Convention was still seven weeks away. To unseat Mississippi’s all-white delegation, Freedom Democrats would need as many registration forms as possible for their parallel party. But in early July, both Atlantic City and late August seemed as far off as distant countries. There would be time to sign up Freedom Democrats—later. With so many eager faces suddenly swarming through project offices, SNCC’s immediate goal was getting blacks down to their county courthouses in numbers no one could ignore. Freedom Days, focusing the energy of entire offices on one-day voting drives, were planned for Greenwood, Greenville, Cleveland, Holly Springs . . . To get would-be voters out, volunteers took to the streets.

  Like the resurrection of so many decaying buildings, the scene was repeated all over Mississippi that week. A gravel road. A row of cabins. Men and women slumped on porches, numbed by twelve hours of cleaning, cooking, or toiling in the fields. As the western sky reddens, up the road come the “Riders,” clipboards in hand, hair neatly combed, white shirts and pastel blouses spotless and starched. Some in white pairs, others racially mixed, they stride onto each porch, introduce themselves—Len and Bill, Chris and Pam—then talk about the summer project, the registration process, the dream of voting. A few blacks say “Yes, sir” or “Yes’m,” but most just sit and stare. Canvassing is like conversation, volunteers are learning—something of an art. They all know how to converse, but how do you converse with someone too terrified to say “No,” too tired to say much else? Fortunately, volunteers were being taught by masters.

  SNCC’s canvassing handbook was explicit. “Know all roads in and out of town.” “If a person talks but shows obvious reluctance, don’t force a long explanation on them. Come back another day to explain more.” Don’t overwhelm people with possibilities—focus on a single hope. A registration class. A mass meeting. A trip to the courthouse. But Mississippi native Lawrence Guyot saw canvassing in simpler terms. Canvassing was “surviving and just walking around talking to people about what they’re interested in. And it didn’t make any difference. If it was fishing, how do you turn that conversation into ‘When are you gonna register to vote?’ If it was religion, that was an easier one to turn into registering.” Guyot’s cardinal rule was common sense. “You don’t alter the basic format that you walk into. Let’s say you’re riding past a picnic and people are cuttin’ watermelons. You don’t immediately go and say, ‘Stop the watermelon cuttin’, and let’s talk about voter registrations.’ You cut some watermelons.”

  As summer progressed, canvassers would see doors gently closed and doors swiftly shut. They would have men nod and swear they would “sure enough” show up for registration classes and then never appear. They would hand pamphlets to old black men, only to realize the men could not read a word. And every now and then they would be welcomed inside a sharecropper’s shack. There they would try not to stare, try not to cry. Blinking back waves of heat radiating from tin roofs, they saw walls patched with yellowed newspaper, bare bulbs hanging from frayed cords, barefoot children playing on the floor—with bottle caps. Many homes had a single picture—of Jesus, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. “The whole scene,” one volunteer wrote, “was from another century.” One in twenty locals might open their homes. The rest stayed on porches, scratching salt-and-pepper whiskers, furrowing washboard brows.

  “I just can’t get my mind on all that. I just never voted and I’m too old now.”

  “I don’t want to mess with that mess.”

  “I can’t sign no paper.”

  And if a volunteer said, “Negroes have to do something to—”

  “I ain’t no Negro. I’m a nigger. The Boss Man, he don’t say nothing but ‘nigger girl’ to me. I’m just a nigger. I can’t sign no paper.”

  On to the next shack. A black snake slithers across the road. A train whistle floats by. The sinking sun serves as both time clock and barometer of their mood. If one in twenty invite them in, only one in a hundred decide that voting is worth risking a job, a home, a life. Registering to vote had always carried grave risks in Mississippi, but Freedom Summer saw those risks stalk the streets. Canvassers were often followed by a police car, inching along, shotgun on display, tires popping the gravel. One look at a cop was enough to send weary bodies scurrying inside. Volunteers loathed the police on their tail, but a cop could ward off other dangers.

  Outside Batesville, Jay Shetterly and Geoff Cowan were canvassing along the Tallahatchie River as it flowed past cotton fields. Speaking to field hands with hoes propped on their shoulders, the two wondered why the men just stared. Cowan talked about voting. The men stared. Shetterly talked about the need to unite. Nervous grins. Finally, the two turned around to see a pickup, a tight-lipped white man, a shotgun on the rack behind him, a pistol on the seat.

  “Did that nigger invite you in here? ”

  Cowan and Shetterly, both articulate Harvard students, said nothing.

  “Did you know Mississippi law allows me to shoot trespassers? ”

  No, they did not know.

  “Are you gonna get off this plantation? ”

  The men left without a word. The pickup roared off.

  Numbers alone made the canvass worth the frustration. If a dozen teams went out for a dozen days in a dozen towns, even one out of a hundred added up to lines at courthouses. And all that first week of July, shack by shack, canvassers dragged the bottom of Mississippi and came up with just enough hope to keep them going. The lone exception to this harsh law of averages was in Panola County, where Chris Williams was the youngest canvasser in Mississippi.

  During his two weeks in the state, Chris had grown confident, even brash. He had spent languid afternoons tracing lines of dirt across his skin. He had sat up nights reading the novels of Richard Wright. And most evenings he had canvassed with “a somewhat neurotic redhead” from the University of Michigan. Older volunteers were amused to hear this mere teenager, when angered by white Mississippi, spout a phrase common in his Massachusetts high school—“Goddamn motherfucker, pissed me right off!” Fellow volunteers found Chris “kind of goofy, kind of crazy—we could always depend on him to be funny.”

  Chris and other Batesville canvassers had an advantage in going shack to shack. In 1961, t
he Panola County Voters League had filed suit, charging racial bias in registration. The case dragged on for two years before a judge ruled in favor of the county, but just a month before Freedom Summer, the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans overturned the decision. The court issued a one-year injunction suspending the requirement that registrants—black registrants, at least—interpret the state constitution. The injunction also voided the onerous poll tax, equal to a sharecropper’s daily wage, that had to be paid up for two years before one could vote. Suddenly, SNCC had twelve months to register as many as possible. Before the injunction, only one Panola County Negro was registered, and he had been on the books since 1892. Then, during the first week of summer, SNCC held nightly registration classes. Assistant Attorney General John Doar came from the Justice Department to check on things. Canvassers went door to door, and fifty blacks went to the courthouse. Forty-seven were registered. It was all changing, sure enough, that summer.

  Chris was living with Mrs. Cornelia Robertson and her grown daughter, Pepper, in a two-room shack with no running water and bullet holes in the front screen. But both women rose early to work, so Chris made his own breakfast, showered in the sun beneath buckets of cold water, then hustled to the project office. The office had gotten off to a slow start. The man Chris called “our great leader” had spent most of his time talking to local girls. Then he was replaced by Claude Weaver, a black Harvard student with a serene face and a deft sense of humor. (Weaver also drew cartoons, circulated widely among project offices, featuring a humble black janitor who, when danger threatened, burst out of his overalls to become—ta-daa—Supersnick.)