Freedom Summer

by Bruce W. Watson

  But parents who could only sit and wait refused to sit and wait alone. By mid-July, parent support groups had formed across the country. Boston parents started a letter-writing campaign to the Justice Department. “Sometimes when I lie awake at night,” a mother said at one meeting, “I can’t get the picture of my child, either mutilated or dead, out of my mind.” Long Island parents gave $2,000 to a volunteer driven out of Moss Point in June. Returning to Mississippi, he handed the money over to COFO. And in a scene as removed from Mississippi as any American setting could be, parents began meeting at a lavish poolside home in Beverly Hills.

  At 8:00 p.m. on Monday, July 13, the meeting of the Parents Mississippi Emergency Committee, Los Angeles Area, was called to order. Parents in attendance were a diverse lot—a movie director, a janitor’s wife, a minister, a high school teacher, the head of the biology department at the California Institute of Technology—yet their fears were one. “We didn’t really know what we wanted to do when we got together,” one mother said, “except protect them somehow.”

  On one wall in the opulent living room, a sheet of cardboard displayed the latest news from Mississippi. That morning’s Los Angeles Times clipping—“Trussed Body Discovered in Louisiana River”—did not ease concerns, nor did a mother’s story from Hattiesburg. Speaking with tight control, she described how her son, David, had been with the rabbi everyone had seen in the papers. David now had a wide strip shaved from his scalp, and seven stitches. He was saving his bloody shirt as a souvenir. Other grim-faced parents shared their children’s letters—“I’m hot, I’m miserable and I can’t get my clothes washed. Would you please let me stay another month? ” Then the group got down to business.

  One father suggested a bail fund, and within minutes, parents wrote out checks totaling $2,150. The group then heard from a Bay Area mother whose parents’ group had talked to Mississippians arriving for the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Mississippi delegates had offered parents advice to pass on to their children—(1) leave; and (2) pray. After the Bay Area report, parents planned activities—a garden party and a picnic, a hootenanny and an art auction—with funds to go to COFO. Toward 9:30 p.m., the meeting broke up. Heading down freeways, blinking into blurred taillights, parents noted that in the firecracker towns where their crazy kids were spending the summer, it was nearly midnight.

  Ten days of naked violence had taken their toll. On July 15, thirty-four Freedom Summer workers were arrested. In the Delta’s “tough town” of Drew, two dozen were crammed into a stinking, twenty-by-twenty-foot cement jail, sweating, swatting mosquitoes, and singing themselves hoarse. Across Mississippi, volunteers were struggling to keep their spirits afloat. Since coming south, they had seen three men disappear, a hundred or more arrested, several churches burned, men beaten, women insulted and degraded. Some must have wondered whether coming to Mississippi had been a mistake. Others saw their faith in America turn to bitterness. “Where is the USA?” one wrote. “It is a violation of FEDERAL LAW to harass voter registration workers.” Another lashed out with resentment that would soon become a signature sentiment of the 1960s. Noting the rank injustice condoned by the “decent middle-class,” he shot back, “Crap on your middle class, on your decency, mister Churches man. Get out of your god-damned new rented car. Get out of your pressed, proper clothes. Get out of your unoffensive, shit-eating smile and crewcut. Come join us who are sleeping on the floor.”

  Midway through the third week in July, Fred Winn’s father came home, took off his tie, poured a drink, and sat down to read a letter postmarked Shaw, Mississippi. Because Fred’s handyman skills were needed in the bone-poor Delta town, the mustachioed carpenter had been transferred to Shaw, where he was “running my rear end off.” Though his eyes had been opened by the suffering of blacks in Ruleville, Fred was still naive enough to be appalled by the deeper squalor of Shaw. There he met children with bellies swollen by hunger and visited fetid shacks tilted and sinking into the soil. Sharecroppers in Shaw had given up hope, but whites seemed determined to drive them still harder. “Dad,” Fred wrote home, “the peoples’ way of thinking down here is absolutely stupid and un-American.”

  Fred was in Shaw only a few days when he met the Bolivar County sheriff. A thin, dapper plantation owner and Citizens’ Council member, Sheriff Charlie Capps considered the volunteers “dirty” and “unclean.” “To me, their motives are unspeakable,” the sheriff said. But Capps, neither a bully nor a Klansman, had no desire for publicity or federal marshals, and he knew a murder could bring both to his county. “What happened in Neshoba might have happened in any county in Mississippi,” he remembered. To keep the peace, the sheriff deputized three dozen fellow World War II veterans. “We were a small town and we weren’t used to Yankees, certainly not that kind,” Capps said. “But I learned in the army that when you have massive fire-power, there’s not much gonna happen.” Calling Fred Winn and other volunteers into his office, Capps advised them to go home where they belonged. Local whites, he said, hated them with a fury no sheriff could contain. Then, seeing the volunteers would not leave, the sheriff said he would do his best “to keep a lid on things.” Yet as Fred’s father read his son’s letter, he sensed the lid boiling over.

  On Saturday night, July 11, volunteers had been relaxing in Shaw’s spruced-up community center, due to open that Monday. As blacks and whites talked, sang, and shared a watermelon, a local Negro boy rushed in. Stuttering, trembling, the boy said he’d just been offered $400 to blow up the building. Instantly, all lights were shut off. Everyone fled to the back office and sat in the muggy darkness. Earlier they had joked that with nothing whatsoever to do in Shaw, they were the white people’s “show” that Saturday night, but no one felt like joking anymore. Volunteer Len Edwards called his father, a California congressman. Don Edwards had been in the FBI and had just returned from Mississippi. He told his son he would call the bureau and get someone out there. Fred Winn phoned the San Francisco Chronicle, but the night desk was not interested. As minutes inched by, Shaw, Mississippi, began to seem like some lonely outpost on the edge of civilization. From inside the shadowy, sweltering office, volunteers could hear bullfrogs bellowing, crickets pulsing. Headlights slid across dingy office walls. Seated on sticky floors or rickety chairs, volunteers wondered if Shaw might soon be the Delta’s McComb, with bombs blasting in the night. Then, as stars and a sliver of a moon came out, lookouts ventured outside.

  One man climbed onto the roof. Scanning the dark cotton fields in one direction, Shaw’s lamplit quarters in the other, he spotted two police cars and six helmeted cops, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. The cops talked and joked while cars passed, heading for the Freedom House. From any vehicle might come a bomb, a flaming bottle, a shotgun blast. The wait continued. At 10:00 p.m., men still inside the Freedom House decided “the girls” should be evacuated. Over protest from a Radcliffe student who said women needed no special treatment, “the girls” held hands and walked to a nearby home where a plump, grizzled black man sat on the porch, a double-barreled shotgun in his lap.

  Toward 11:00 p.m., lightning flashed on the western horizon. One slowly ticking hour later the storm was upon them, whipping trees, drowning conversations with thunder and finally ending the Saturday night show in Shaw. Cars and cops headed home and so did volunteers, walking in the warm and drenching night. The FBI came at 1:30 a.m.

  In his posh San Francisco home, Fred Winn’s father thought again of World War II as he read an angry description of “our night of terror” written by another volunteer.

  I was and am furious. Here are youths who would be the glory of any nation, and they waited for a bomb to blow them out of this hostile land. . . . And this is in the land of the free. Here where millions have come seeking streets paved with gold, there have lived millions on streets drowned in mud. . . . Here in the beautiful land of the purple mountain’s majesty, we sat and waited for the bombers.

  I was born by the river in a little tent
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  And just like the river, I’ve been running ever since

  It’s been a long time coming

  But I know a change is gonna come.

  —Sam Cooke

  INTERLUDE

  “Another So-Called ‘Freedom Day’”

  7:00 a.m. (2) News; Weather

  (4) Today: Hugh Downs

  (7) Ann Sothern (re-run)

  7:30 a.m. (5) Meaning of Communism

  (7) Gale Storm (re-run)

  8:00 a.m. (2) Captain Kangaroo

  (5) Sandy Becker

  (7) Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse

  On Thursday, July 16, at 9:00 a.m., three black teenagers were joking on their way to summer school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Walking through the posh neighborhood, they passed a building superintendent hosing down the sidewalk. By accident or perhaps by design, the man sprayed the teens. Some would later say he shouted, “I’m going to wash the black off of you.” The teens chased the man inside and came out, laughing. Just then, an off-duty cop stepped out of a TV repair shop. Showing his badge, the cop ordered the boys to disperse. What happened next depends on whom one chooses to believe. The cop swore one teen came at him with a knife. Other onlookers said there was no knife, that the youth in question was not that kind of kid. The cop pulled his gun and fired. James Powell slumped to the pavement, dead. Within minutes, black kids were taunting police.

  “Come on, shoot another nigger!”

  “This is worse than Mississippi!”

  The confrontation continued till noon. That Saturday night, a CORE rally in support of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney erupted in a protest of police brutality. And after simmering for two days, Harlem burned. Before the summer was over, urban riots would scar Rochester, Jersey City, Paterson, Philadelphia . . .

  “History never turns a page,” an old saying has it. “Only historians do.” But if one had to find the page where the 1960s began—not the ’60s on the calendar but the raucous, rebellious, world-challenging ’60s—July 16, 1964, would be a good place to turn.

  A Thursday. An ordinary midsummer day, a day that seemed likely to change nothing. Since the war, there had been ample talk about change in America. John F. Kennedy had promised a New Frontier, Bob Dylan had sung his anthem, but on July 16, 1964, most Americans still clung to the comforts of the 1950s. Old radio shows transferred to television still aired opposite old movies starring Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, or Edward G. Robinson. The Beatles topped pop charts, but doo-wop and teen love songs were right behind them. The Yankees, heading for their fifth straight pennant, were still the best team in baseball. Each summer night, ’57 Chevys and ’59 Fords drag-raced on the outskirts of towns whose facades had changed little since the Depression. New interstate highways linked some cities, but less than half the system was finished. On that Thursday morning in midsummer, most Americans were satisfied with the status quo, hopeful that any coming changes would be incremental. And then . . .

  In Greenwood, SNCC had declared July 16 “Freedom Day,” but a wedding interrupted the preparations. The previous Monday, two volunteers were married in a makeshift chapel beneath the second-floor SNCC office. Bride and groom wore denim. Flowers and Freedom Day leaflets festooned the room. Because the bride was Jewish, the groom Christian, local kids had fashioned a red glitter cross and a Star of David. After the brief ceremony, Freedom Songs burst into the street. Black kids in long, twisting lines laughed and stumbled through their first hora. “Everybody stopped worrying for almost two hours,” one volunteer remembered. Then bride, groom, and guests went back to work. Freedom Day was approaching.

  On its front page, the Greenwood Commonwealth warned of “another so-called ‘Freedom Day.’ ” COFO expected five hundred to march to the courthouse. Freedom Day would also bring blacks to courthouses in Greenville and Cleveland, but Greenville and Cleveland, though just across the Delta, were a world away from the “long staple cotton capital of the world.”

  Ever since SNCC first entered the Delta, Greenwood had been, as one marcher remembered, “our Gettysburg, our Battle of the Bulge, and our Iwo Jima all wrapped up in one.” With Greenwood’s very existence propped on the stoop labor of sharecroppers, the threat of a black vote put an entire cotton empire at risk. And the slightest push toward full democracy sparked violence. In the summer of 1962, a mob ransacked SNCC’s office, sending staffers fleeing out the back window. Moments later, Bob Moses came in, lay down, and took a nap. The following spring, the office was hit with bullets and firebombs. One night on the flat straightaway that parted the sea of plantations, Moses and two others were driving when a white Buick pulled alongside. Its driver leveled a rifle and fired fifteen shots. Bullets lodged in Jimmie Travis’s shoulder, neck, and head. As the car swerved, Moses grabbed the wheel. After a frantic rush to the hospital, Travis lived to show his scars to volunteers in Ohio.

  But by Freedom Day, Greenwood’s homegrown terrorism was backfiring. When SNCC first arrived, blacks had crossed the street to steer clear of “the Riders.” Frightened elders warned teens that the SNCC office displayed photos of black and white men hugging. Then came the hungry winter when whites cut off sharecroppers’ federal food allotments, the ugly spring of fire and bullets, and the marches attacked by dogs and cops. Each assault galvanized another victim. Each bullet brought another family into the movement. “Get up and look out the window,” a high school teacher told her class, “and watch while history is being made.”

  By July 1964, mass meetings were drawing hundreds, singing, shouting, chanting “Freedom Now.” With its summer project in full swing, SNCC had just moved its national headquarters from Atlanta to Greenwood. As Freedom Day approached, the SNCC office resembled a high school classroom when the teacher has stepped out. Kids ran in and out, dodging trunks, boxes, and adults more frenzied than usual. Two kittens, one named Freedom, the other Now, slept in corners near guitars no one had time to play. From the ringing of phones to the clacking of typewriters to the meetings around rickety tables, all energy was focused on Freedom Day. Students at the Greenwood Freedom School could talk about little else. Their school newspaper—two mimeographed pages—noted that whatever might happen on Freedom Day, “We will not let it stop us.” Freedom Day signs in storefront windows urged everyone to the courthouse. “Everyone?” Stokely Carmichael shouted to mass meetings. And crowds roared back—“Every-one!” All through the quarters, blacks goaded each other to stand up, to come out, to register. In the SNCC office, volunteers drew lots to see who would test Mississippi’s new antipicketing law. Some were relieved to be spared the honor, others excited to be chosen. “I want to go to jail,” a volunteer from Berkeley said. “I’m honest. I’ve never been.” Finally, Freedom Day arrived.

  The morning of July 16 was overcast in the Delta and cooler than usual. The coffee-brown Yazoo River, flowing past cotton fields on one side, the towering cupola of the courthouse on the other, set the pace for another slothful summer day. Then toward 9:00 a.m., battered old cars began parking across the street from the courthouse. Black women in flowered dresses and men in weathered suits and fedoras shuffled toward the courthouse steps. On the sidewalk, volunteers and SNCC staffers took up picket signs. Standing in a rigid row, helmeted cops hefted their nightsticks. Across the street, a bus waited to take the arrested to jail. As picketers began their slow, steady march, a tall stick of a man with pinched eyes addressed the crowd through a bullhorn. “You are free to go and register,” Police Chief Curtis Lary buzzed. “No one will interfere with you if you want to stand here to register but we will not allow any picketing.” The chief gave picketers two minutes to disperse. Then the roundup began.

  Cops descended, escorting some, yanking others. Several protesters went limp and were dragged along the pavement, cracked with nightsticks, shoved into the bus. At each window, black and white fingers gripped the wire mesh. The vehicle soon swayed, rocking to the clapping rhythm of a chorus:Oh, Freedom

  Oh, ohhhh, Freedom

  Ohhhh, Fr
eedom, over meee . . .

  More picketers were arrested, including a pregnant woman yanked and prodded while her sister screamed. Back across the street, blacks waited in line. Inside the courthouse, three at a time patiently filled out forms and endured the “hospitality” of registrar Martha Lamb, whose rudeness was the stuff of local lore. The sun burned through the clouds as a second wave of pickets began to march. Chief Lary lifted his bullhorn. “You are free to go and register. No one will interfere . . .”

  Elsewhere in the Delta, Freedom Day was less chaotic. In Greenville, several COFO cars broke down, delaying trips to the courthouse, but by noon, the line outside the registrar’s office stretched to the street. Picketing proceeded without incident. Greenville cops watched but made no arrests. In Cleveland, dozens of volunteers had come from throughout the Delta. Many came from Shaw, where memories of Saturday night’s bomb threat still lingered, where calls were going out to parents of prisoners still sweltering in the black-hole lockup in nearby Drew. Expecting the worst, Shaw volunteers had given nonviolence classes to locals, but the lessons proved unnecessary. At the courthouse, volunteers lined the sidewalk, chanting “Jim Crow . . . Must GO!” Across the street stood three dozen deputies with shotguns—Sheriff Charlie Capps’s “massive firepower”—keeping angry whites at a safe distance. At 11:00 a.m. a crop duster veered from nearby fields to buzz the treetops, but otherwise Bolivar County’s first Freedom Day was off to a peaceful start. When the courthouse closed for lunch, blacks and whites shared sandwiches beneath the trees. Three cars filled with young white men circled the integrated picnic. Volunteers asked deputies to keep them away. The cars were not seen again.