Come early July, when Chris walked each morning past shacks and juke joints, waving, nodding to locals, he arrived at a frenetic office. Parked outside were a white Plymouth from SNCC’s “Sojourner Motor Fleet,” plus one volunteer’s VW and another’s Pontiac GTO. Inside, posters proclaimed “Freedom Now!” and “There is a street in Itta Bena called Freedom . . .” The radio blared a Memphis soul station. Aretha Franklin. Wilson Pickett. Marvin Gaye. Scurrying around the office were students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and the University of Chicago working on communications, legal affairs, and canvassing. Most days Chris studied canvassing routes or ran errands. Most evenings, after sharecroppers came home from the fields, he met them on their porches. Once a week, he went to the courthouse.
One afternoon, Chris sat in the cool, echoing corridor outside the Panola County registrar’s office. A few days earlier, he had canvassed Mrs. Gladys Toliver, convincing her to take the risk. Now he sat with the old woman and three other would-be voters on a hardwood bench. As the wait dragged on, Mrs. Toliver confided in the nice crew-cut white boy beside her. She didn’t think she could pass the test. All those questions, all those laws. Chris took out a copy of the registration form and was reviewing it with her when footsteps clicked down the hall. Chris looked up to see a short, beer-bellied man with horn-rimmed glasses, a badge on his chest and a gun on his hip. Sheriff Earl Hubbard.
The sheriff began ranting. Volunteers were “agitators . . . come to Mississippi to cause trouble.” Chris sat seething, stifling sarcastic replies. Finally, the sheriff told Chris to get out. A courthouse was no place for voting classes. “Did you hear me, boy? I said ‘Get out.’ ” Muttering “Goddamn motherfucker, pissed me right off!” Chris walked down the corridor past the “Whites Only” drinking fountain and stepped outside. Scalding air slammed him in the face. Alone on the steps, his confidence wavered. SNCC lore was full of attacks in such a setting. Bob Moses beaten at the courthouse in Liberty. Several struck down in Greenwood. Any minute now. . . . Finally, his friends emerged, followed by the sheriff, still ranting. “He said they ought to send me home and let my parents teach me how to behave,” Chris wrote home. “I just looked him in the eye and said nothing. He’s only a stupid old man.” Sheriff Hubbard gave the SNCC car a parking ticket. Back at the Mileses’ house, Chris enjoyed a big meal. “I have developed a real taste for Southern cooking,” he told his parents. That evening, the shotguns again came out as blacks stood guard. Some things were a long way from changing.
On Thursday, July 2, the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney spread to the Alabama border. Afternoon downpours continued to curtail the hunt. Rumors revived with word that a gas station attendant in Kosciusko had seen the three. Back in Philadelphia, agents were growing suspicious about Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. A middle-aged man with an eighth-grade education, standing six-two, weighing 240, Rainey was known as hard-drinking and “hard on the Negroes.” Everyone knew the sheriff had even killed two blacks, both while he was on duty, both unarmed. Mississippi sheriffs had enormous power—each was his county’s tax collector, prohibition agent, and, in some Klan-ridden counties, a proud member of the klavern. But Rainey claimed even more power. Once after pulling over a driver, he asked, “Nigger, do you know who’s running this county? Lawrence A. Rainey is running this county.” When the man mentioned the mayor, Rainey shot back, “Nigger, don’t come talking about no mayor, ’cause I’m the sheriff in this county.” Now the sheriff was becoming a suspect. The FBI had a list of seven names, submitted by a highway patrolman from Meridian. “I have no proof,” the man told agents, “but I bet you every one of these men was involved in this.” Among the names were Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. The FBI had already learned that Rainey had been in the pack that stormed the Mt. Zion Church meeting and beat Junior Cole unconscious. Reporters were asking Rainey about rumors that a white mob, waiting outside the jail, had abducted Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. He flatly denied them. On July 2, the FBI called the sheriff in for questioning.
Wearing his cowboy hat, his chaw in his cheek, his gun on his hip, the sheriff swaggered into Room 18 of the Delphia Courts Motel. With him was a county attorney, ready to rise to his defense. Rainey was shown pictures—the goateed Schwerner, the kindly Chaney, the doe-eyed Goodman. Never seen the men before, the sheriff said. Then, punctuating his answers by spitting tobacco juice, he detailed his whereabouts on the night of June 21. He had visited his wife in the hospital, then had dinner with relatives. After dropping by his office to pick up clean shirts, he had returned to relatives, watched Candid Camera and Bonanza, then made it back to Philadelphia before midnight. Stopping at the jail, he had learned about the arrest and release of the three. Then he went home. Agents listened. Agents took notes. Then one asked Rainey if he was a Klansman. He denied it, then denied that Neshoba County even had a Klan. Listening to the sheriff, the attorney found his denial strange and incredible. Hadn’t a Klan recruitment flier, earlier that spring, been posted down the hall from Rainey’s office for days on end? The back-and-forth continued until an agent blurted out, “Now come on sheriff and tell us what you did with those people.” The sheriff said nothing and was allowed to leave. Agents began checking his story. Rainey was shocked that the FBI even called his wife in the hospital. Two days later, the attorney, still stunned by what he had heard during the interrogation, told agents that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey should be their “number one suspect.”
Agents were also suspicious about Deputy Price. A high school dropout like his boss, Price hid a dull rage behind a goofy demeanor. When first approached by the FBI, he had shrugged off all accusations, then popped the trunk of his patrol car and offered the agent a swig of moonshine. Agents had since investigated Price’s story about June 21—the arrest, the release, the taillights disappearing. Much of it checked out, but his whereabouts from 10:40 to 11:30 p.m. could not be confirmed. Adding to their suspicions, the Neshoba County jailer said she normally received the car keys of suspects in jail. But Price had given her no keys for the three. Nor were keys ever mentioned. Agents also found it unusual that local cops, like the sheriff, refused to be questioned without an attorney present.
While the FBI questioned Price and Rainey, the first two Freedom Schools opened. In Clarksdale, students listened as a white woman read from James Baldwin’s “Talk to Teachers”: “Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets . . . I would try to make them know—that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him.”
As if such frankness were not startling enough, the teacher then encouraged students to talk. Sparked by Baldwin’s fire, they opened up on Mississippi, discussing cops, a recent shooting, and why one student no longer ate watermelon because it was “nigger food.” After a rousing chorus of Freedom Songs, students headed home. It was a start. That same afternoon in Holly Springs, students met under the low, leafy branches of a sweetgum tree to hear a teacher call them the “leaders of tomorrow.” And that evening, tomorrow came early.
Shortly after 7:00 p.m., all network programming was interrupted. In living rooms across the nation, President Johnson urged Americans to “close the springs of racial poison.” Then the president began signing the Civil Rights Act, using seventy-two different pens, handing them to congressmen and to Martin Luther King, standing behind him. The first major civil rights bill since Reconstruction had been introduced by John F. Kennedy just hours before Medgar Evers was killed. The bill had survived massive resistance, including southern senators droning through the longest filibuster in congressional history. LBJ had thrown his enormous powers of persuasion behind the bill, finally twisting enough arms to end the filibuster and win approval. Now came what the president called the “time
of testing.” Johnson had barely given away the last pen when a blazing cross lit the sky in central Mississippi. The town’s name—Harmony.
All that holiday weekend, the testing continued. Blacks sat beside whites at lunch counters in Montgomery, Alabama, but were beaten with baseball bats in Bessemer. Blacks integrated hotels and theaters in Birmingham, but three attempting a “wade-in” at Lake Texarkana were shot. “Occupied Mississippi” braced for the worst. The Jackson Chamber of Commerce urged businesses to comply with the law, but the Clarion-Ledger advertised “tear gas pen guns,” and Governor Paul Johnson predicted “civil strife and chaotic conditions.” Across the state, whites swore “Never!,” blacks tried to be hopeful, and volunteers bore witness. “People here in Clarksdale know all about that bill,” one volunteer wrote home, “but tomorrow and Saturday, the 4th of July, they will still be in the cotton fields making three dollars a day. . . . They’ll still be starving and afraid.” SNCCs had decided against testing the law and had to talk locals out of open confrontation. A Greenwood woman kept saying, “Ah’m going swimmin’ in that pool. Ah’ve waited a long time.” Several convinced her to wait a little longer. The long holiday weekend was just beginning.
It was a Fourth like many. A million people jammed the boardwalk at Coney Island. At Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle hit a three-run homer to beat the Twins. The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” went to number one, and fireworks went off everywhere. Yet it was also a Fourth unlike any in memory. In Atlanta, several SNCCs, black and white, entered a rally for George Wallace. A mob descended with fists, chairs, and lead pipes until a white stranger dragged the intruders to safety. Outside Radio City Music Hall, demonstrators carried black-bordered signs in memory of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. At the World’s Fair in New York, SNCCs urged a boycott of the high school band from Greenwood, Mississippi. And in Greenwood, in Vicksburg, in Batesville, volunteers celebrated freedom with those for whom it remained a dream.
So far, most volunteers had met just their host families and a few neighbors. From these few, they had learned that black Mississippi was stronger than its shacks. They noticed how black women always referred to each other with the deference whites denied them—Mrs. or Miss. They learned who in “the quarters” could be trusted and who were the “Judas niggers.” They met practitioners of jobs they thought had vanished—midwife, fortune teller, bootlegger—and they learned about folk remedies, superstitions, and how to survive on three dollars a day. On Sundays in church, they saw how faith and song held lives together. But the Fourth of July introduced volunteers to the local heroes.
Today, when the civil rights movement is mentioned, the same names surface—Rosa Parks and Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Dr. King. . . . The names of everyday people in Mississippi—Bob Moses’ “striking force,” who marched, registered, risked everything in the name of freedom—remain unknown. But volunteers were learning the names and meeting the people they would never forget. “What have I done in my life?” a graying Fred Winn asked, looking back more than forty years. “Well, I’ve done a little of this, a little of that. But I ate at the table of Fannie Lou Hamer, in her home and she called me by my name and we were friends.” Cops called the local heroes “troublemakers” and “uppity niggers.” Most were unknown outside their towns, but legends within, legends passing the potato salad that holiday afternoon.
Shortly after midday, in temperatures one volunteer guessed to be 110, people began pouring onto a farm near Hattiesburg. All afternoon, whites and blacks went on tractor-pulled hayrides, sought shade beneath moss-draped live oaks, and ate mountains of potato salad, watermelon, and catfish fried in huge kettles. Many wondered who was hosting the picnic. A rugged man in a pith helmet seemed in charge, tending the catfish, talking with everyone, but he looked white, and what white Mississippian would host a SNCC gathering? Questioning revealed that this was Vernon Dahmer. A gentle, ruddy-faced farmer white enough to “pass” yet proud of his black ancestry, Dahmer had housed the first SNCCs to work in Hattiesburg. Now he welcomed volunteers, including a group of teachers just arrived from a final training in Memphis. Everyone at the picnic had a great time until a pickup with a rifle rack passed. Dahmer and his son, on leave from the marines, went into the house and came out with rifles. The pickup passed again but drove on. The picnic continued until dusk, when volunteers scurried home before another night fell.
In Cleveland, Mississippi, the man to see—on the Fourth and throughout the summer—was still Amzie Moore. Standing over six feet tall, with a thick neck and bald head, Moore projected power and serenity. A father figure to Bob Moses, Moore now played the same role to volunteers. By early July, his home overflowed with college students sharing the spaghetti dinners he threw together while telling his own story. Moore had picked cotton into the Depression before landing a job as a janitor in a post office. During World War II, he had fought in a segregated unit in the Pacific, then returned to the Delta, hoping to buy land and get rich. But one winter day he visited a destitute woman in her shack and saw her fourteen children dressed in tatters. “I kinda figured it was a sin to think in terms of trying to get rich in view of what I’d seen,” he remembered. Holding on to his post office job and opening a gas station, Moore joined the NAACP and quickly headed the local chapter. In 1961, when Bob Moses showed up at his door, he was ready. Three summers later, volunteers heading north through the Delta used Moore’s home as a sanctuary. Though awed by his courage, some were shocked by his arsenal. Once, as two volunteers lay down to sleep in his living room, Moore set a loaded Luger on the night table “in case of emergency.” When they said they were not likely to use the gun, he removed it. “Just as you say. Good night.”
In Clarksdale, volunteers flocked to the picnic at “Doc” Henry’s place. Aaron Henry had succeeded his friend Medgar Evers as black Mississippi’s leading spokesman. His lengthy boycotts of Clarksdale businesses resulted in the bombing of his home and pharmacy. Arrested on a trumped-up morals charge, he had worked as a garbage collector and on a chain gang at Parchman Farm. Undaunted, Henry finally returned to his Fourth Street Drug Store, where his front window displayed the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. Conservative and cautious, Henry bristled at SNCCs’ overalls and T-shirts and disapproved of many SNCC tactics, but he backed Freedom Summer from the first day. On the Fourth of July, volunteers ate hot dogs and strummed guitars at “Doc’s house.”
Not all local heroes were men. At each holiday picnic, volunteers met strong, inspiring black women. SNCC had always welcomed women, and from its first days in Mississippi, they were marching to courthouses, rallying neighbors, singing at mass meetings that were often two-thirds female. Together, they formed an army of support, but volunteers saw some standing out from the ranks. In Greenwood, proud and defiant Laura McGhee, enraged by the shooting of her brother, had opened her small farm to SNCC in 1962. McGhee became a legend a year later when, knocked down by a cop, she yanked away his nightstick. All that summer, McGhee’s son Silas would lead black Greenwood’s defiance.
At the Dahmer picnic in Hattiesburg, volunteers met Victoria Gray, already a mother of three running a cosmetics business and teaching literacy when she decided to register. “When I raised my hand,” Gray remembered, “I knew the rest of my life would not be the same.” Within a year she was a SNCC field secretary, and within two she was running for Congress on the parallel Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) ticket.
But the most celebrated of all local heroes was the powerhouse who hosted her own Independence Day picnic in Ruleville. The twentieth child of sharecroppers, Fannie Lou Hamer had been working in the cotton fields since the 1920s, unaware she even had the right to vote. All her life she had bristled at how Mississippi treated her. Growing up barefoot, hungry, wishing “so bad” that she was white, she had helped her mother roam the Marlowe plantation “scrapping” cotton shreds to sell. She had watched her father save to buy wagons and farm tools, only to have an envious white man poison his
mules. Worn down by field work, Hamer had two stillborn children, then adopted two daughters. In 1961, she entered the hospital with “a knot on my stomach” and came out sterilized without her consent. Something had to change. She attended her first SNCC meeting in the summer of 1962. If enough blacks registered, James Forman announced, they could vote racist politicians and sheriffs out of office. When Forman asked for volunteers, Hamer’s hand went up first. “Had it up as high as I could get it,” she recalled. A few days later she was on a bus heading for the Sunflower County courthouse. The registration test asked her to explain de facto laws. “I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day,” she later said. She failed. When she came home, she heard the “boss man” was “raisin’ Cain.” Mr. Marlowe told Hamer she would have to withdraw her registration because “we’re not ready for that in Mississippi.” If she refused, she would have to leave the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years as a timekeeper.
“I didn’t try to register for you,” Hamer replied. “I tried to register for myself.”
Thrown out of her shack, Hamer moved to a neighbor’s where her bedroom was soon riddled by sixteen shots fired late one night. Yet she dug into herself and into the movement, becoming, as she called it, “a Snicker.” James Forman said of Hamer, “She was SNCC itself.” Hamer sometimes seemed a force of nature. When she threw her head back and sang, it was said you could hear her all over Sunflower County. When she spoke, she lifted audiences off their feet. When she moved, black Mississippi seemed to move with her. She often discounted the risks. “The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that just a little bit at a time since I could remember.” A deeply religious woman, Hamer saw the movement in biblical themes. Bob Moses’ name, she often said, was no coincidence. Beatings and jail were crosses to bear. Summer volunteers were Good Samaritans, and freedom was her own Promised Land.
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