Added to her inherited bravado, the courage of local blacks gave Muriel a daring she had not known she possessed. She had learned to drive—in Mississippi. Having passed the state’s written test, she even had a Mississippi driver’s license. Now she was badgering others to “let me drive, let me drive!” Fortunately for her passengers, her ancient SNCC car would not go more than fifty, but once behind the wheel, Muriel bounced over rutted roads and careened alongside cotton fields. Her nemesis was the stick shift. One afternoon, she stalled the car on a slight rise, then watched in terror as a cop pulled behind her. Before she could get in gear, the car rolled backward and crunched the police car’s bumper. Storming out, the cop ranted, raved, cursed, but some smooth talking got Muriel back on the road with just a warning to “get the hell out of Issaquena County.” On she drove, covering fifty or more miles each day before hurrying home by sundown. Everyone had to know about Freedom Day.
Word from the first Freedom Day in another plantation fiefdom stirred the embers of Muriel’s fear. On August 4 in Tallahatchie County, blacks had emerged from the courthouse to find the street filled with whites, some brandishing shotguns. The mob stood stone-faced, rigid, staring bullets at the small black contingent. Finally one man shouted, “You niggers get away from the courthouse! You don’t have any business up here!” The sheriff soon came striding on the scene. Tallahatchie had just been served with an injunction resembling Panola County’s, barring all voter registration tests, but the sheriff told blacks to get out of town and not come back. Every night since, cars had roared past black homes, the drivers waving guns, flashing headlights. And now, Muriel had scheduled a Freedom Day for Sharkey County, where a crop duster had recently doused canvassers with DDT, where, as one cop had boasted, “they beat a nigger’s ass.”
Muriel had already rescued one volunteer from Sharkey County, a fellow Howard student she remembered from her geology class. Late one afternoon, after going porch-to-porch, the man had made a frantic call from a pay phone. Hurry, he shouted. He was being chased. Men with shotguns. Men with dogs. On the line, Muriel heard the dogs baying in the background. Racing from Greenville into the plantations, she and a friend roamed back roads until they found the man hiding in a drainage ditch. Taking him back to Greenville, they let him relax for a few days, then sent him back to the plantations. As Sharkey County’s Freedom Day approached, two volunteers were arrested for leafleting and held overnight in a squalid little jail. But by August 14, leaflets were spread across the county, registration classes had offered instruction, and Freedom Day was on. The morning arrived, blue and blistering. Blacks awoke, dressed, and prepared to risk their lives to vote. Everyone anticipated the worst. Stories of terror from Tallahatchie County were widely known, but as Muriel had seen all summer, “courage overcame fear.”
Throughout that Friday morning and into the afternoon, blacks approached the small brick courthouse in the county seat of Rolling Fork. They shuffled up the steps, smiled meekly at the registrar, filled out papers, filed out. No one was arrested. No one was threatened or chased out of town. Though it did not produce a single registered voter, Freedom Day in Sharkey County was an unqualified success. Merely by surmounting their terror and showing up at the courthouse, blacks raised under neo-feudalism and steeped in the local lore of lynching had shown they would no longer be intimidated, no longer be denied. Still, Muriel scheduled no more Freedom Days that summer. Instead, with less than a week left before Freedom Democrats headed for Atlantic City, she turned her attention to their challenge, signing up party members, driving the back roads, rooting herself in the Delta topsoil. One day Muriel took Shirley MacLaine to meet her friend Unita Blackwell. The sharecropper and the movie star spent hours on a porch overlooking the fields, drinking beer, and talking about the oppression of women, black and white.
While Freedom Day unfolded in Sharkey County, one hundred miles south in Hattiesburg, a Freedom School teacher helped five teenagers try to get cards at the whites-only library. Sandra Adickes and her students quickly learned another lesson—that in Mississippi, even librarians could be mean. “Look, close your mouth and open your mind,” the librarian snapped at the kids. “Try to act intelligent. You don’t really want to use the library.” When the students insisted, cops came and closed the library. When the students returned the next week, the Hattiesburg Public Library was closed indefinitely.
That same Friday, the Neshoba County Fair drew to a close. Many left disappointed. As expected, the storytelling and singing had lasted till dawn. The smell of kerosene had wafted above the aroma of cotton candy and moonshine sold by strolling vendors. But “Mississippi’s Giant House Party” had long been known for its rousing political speeches kicking off campaigns. (Ronald Reagan would start his presidential campaign there in 1980.) In the summer of 1964, however, the stigma of speaking just two miles from a triple grave had scared politicians away. Barry Goldwater Jr. and George Wallace canceled appearances, leaving crowds to settle for their own governors. Ex-governor Ross Barnett joked about summer volunteers needing “Mr. Clean.” Paul Johnson praised the “law-abiding” people of Neshoba County and blasted Freedom Summer. “The white people of Mississippi know that the vast majority of the colored people of this state have turned their backs on the motley crew of invaders of our state,” the governor said. “We will not permit outsiders to subvert our people and our rights.” In midweek, the Klan leafleted the fair, a small plane dropping billows of brochures calling Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney “Communist Revolutionaries, actively working to undermine and destroy Christian Civilization.” Fairgoers were in no mood. Most simply stepped over the white trash littering the fairgrounds. Following a Friday of harness races and Grand Ole Opry shows, the fair closed just after midnight. By then, the lull following the discovery of three bodies had ended. That weekend, a human firestorm swept across Mississippi.
COFO’s blackboard dutifully charted each incident, but there was no more order to the mayhem than there was to the weather. Starting with a midnight bomb shattering windows and gouging a gaping hole outside a supermarket in McComb, the weekend spiraled into chaos. Shots echoed down the mean streets of Jackson, the quaint streets of Canton, the embattled streets of Greenwood. A bomb meant for the Natchez Freedom House ignited a tavern next door. A mob in Laurel brandished baseball bats. In Greenwood, volunteers were closing the SNCC office when someone shouted, “They’ve shot Silas! They’ve shot Silas in the head!” Peacemaker Silas McGhee, sleeping in a car outside a restaurant, had awoken just in time to see a pistol aim, a spark flash. When the car door was opened, Silas tumbled into the gutter. Frantic SNCC staffers tore off their shirts to soak up the blood, plugged the hole in Silas’s jaw with their fingers, then rushed him to a hospital, where he lay on a gurney in a hall, waiting for the “colored doctor.” Though his jaw was shattered, Silas survived after surgery. Laura McGhee, now even more legendary after decking a cop with a right hook, kept the bullet.
Elsewhere in Mississippi, a pickup rammed a SNCC car in some little hamlet where everyone knew everyone and everything had been peaceful before the invaders came. Then there were arrests for no sane reason, a mindless beating or two, four random shootings that missed. And to cap the madness, at precisely 10:00 p.m. Saturday night, a hundred crosses blazed across southern Mississippi and into Louisiana. Flames wafted smoke into the sky. Six crosses burned in Jackson, one a block from the COFO office, drawing volunteers to study this century-old symbol of hate burning in August 1964. Before the chaos ended, two dozen cops had raided the McComb Freedom House, ostensibly looking for liquor but rifling through papers, reading letters, enraging SNCCs, who responded by scheduling Pike County’s first Freedom Day. And it took a cop to sum up the weekend. The cop was standing on a street corner in Gulfport when a man rushed up. “I got me one,” he said, rubbing his knuckles after pummeling a volunteer. Then the man asked the cop whether he was “the law.” The officer replied, “We don’t have any law in Mississippi.”
With th
e Atlantic City convention looming, SNCC had become a well-oiled machine, churning out position papers, brochures, lists of delegates to be lobbied. The president of the United States, however, was not sleeping well. For weeks, LBJ had been sitting up nights brooding about the Freedom Democrats. To some, their challenge appeared quixotic, but Johnson knew that if Freedom Democrats came before the full convention, and if, moved by a summer of horror stories from Mississippi, delegates seated them and snubbed Mississippi’s white power elite, the “Solid South” would be solidly incensed. On August 6, Johnson and his advisers met in the Oval Office to discuss this “ticking time bomb.” A week later, they were still seeking a solution. “There’s no compromise,” the president said. “You can seat one or the other. You can’t seat both of them because if you do, then the other one walks out.” And the walkout, LBJ knew, would not be limited to Mississippi. “If we mess with the group of Negroes that were elected to nothing, that met in a hotel room . . . and throw out the governor and elected officials of the state—if we mess with them, we will lose fifteen states without even campaigning.” With just a week left until the convention, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther agreed with Johnson—if the Freedom Democrats did not drop their challenge, “We’re going to lose the election. . . . We really think that Goldwater’s going to be president.”
With Harry Belafonte’s cash, SNCC had chartered buses to leave for the Democratic Convention on August 19. As the days dwindled, canvassers accelerated their last-ditch drive. Register. Sign here. “Help make Mississippi part of the U.S.A.” Because sharecroppers were no longer in the fields, Greenwood volunteers set up tables in the quarters. Whites drove past, glaring, threatening, but signatures piled up. The trick, SNCC had taught volunteers, was to link the political to the personal. Tired of trudging dirt roads? Join the Freedom Democrats, and someday your streets will be paved. Fed up with senators like John Stennis, mouthpiece of Delta planters, and James Eastland, a Delta planter himself? “If we can get enough people to register, we can throw out Senator Eastland’s party at the big National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. . . . Yes, Mr. Jackson signed. No, no one sees these forms except us, and we take good care of them.” Register. Sign here.
Freedom Schools also did their part. Teachers continued to canvass on weekends, and some even sent their older students door-to-door. The teens were appalled to meet elders who insisted they did not care about voting or “just didn’t have the time.” “I just stood there wondering why he kept saying ‘I don’t have the time,’ ” a student wrote, “because all he was doing was just sitting there doing nothing. . . . As I walked away, my mind kept wondering, ‘Why? Why?’ ”
Back in class, Freedom Schools continued to surpass all expectations. A thousand students had been expected; twice that many were now enrolled. Some schools remained little more than shacks lit only by curiosity. Others met in dingy church basements or in the ample shade of chinaberry trees. Yet regardless of the setting, each school dared Mississippi to dampen its spirit. Hands flew in the air, waved, begged to be called on. Backyard games were as lively as dances. Coming back to class, teachers and students together, rare was the pale hand that did not hold a smaller, darker one. Classes relied more on enthusiasm than on textbooks. Moss Point students dramatized the Dred Scott decision. Ruleville students piled onto the floor to reenact slavery’s Middle Passage. Several schools held formal debates on nonviolence, and many did role-playing, with students playing the parts of Barry Goldwater, Senator Eastland, or members of their hometown Citizens’ Council. And almost every Freedom School published a newspaper. Typed by teachers onto mimeograph sheets, decorated with the students’ line drawings, the Ruleville Freedom Fighter, the Shaw Freedom Flame, and the Meridian Freedom Star featured poetry, essays on civil rights, and news of the Freedom Democrat drive.
No matter how upbeat teachers remained, however, they could not hide one harsh truth known to all students—that when the summer ended, Mississippi would be waiting for them. To keep freedom’s flame burning, students were encouraged to question Mississippi, to question their lives, to question, to question, to question.
“Why did Harriet Tubman go back into the South after she had gotten herself free in the North? ”
“Why doesn’t Mrs. Hamer stay in the North once she gets there? ”
“Who do you think the Movement is proving right—Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois? ”
“And what comment on your own upbringing is made by the fact that you knew all about Booker T. Washington but most of you had never heard of W. E. B. DuBois? ”
One afternoon at the Harmony Freedom School, twelve-year-old Ida Ruth Griffin read her latest poem:I am Mississippi fed
I am Mississippi bred
Nothing but a poor black boy.
I am a Mississippi slave
I shall be buried in a Mississippi grave.
Nothing but a poor, dead boy.
The class was soon tangled in debate.
“We’re not black slaves!”
“We certainly are!”
“Can your father vote? ”
“Can he eat where he wants to? ”
At another school a boy refused to believe what his teacher said about the proud civilizations of Africa. “I think you’re lying,” he said, and burst into tears. The teacher also cried.
By mid-August, students were already lamenting the imminent end of Freedom School. A teacher in Canton noticed the change: “Some of them are beginning to realize, now that we’re talking about the end of school and our departures, that we’re not saviors and we’re not staying forever and we’re not leaving any miracles behind.” But not all teachers were so discouraged. In Shaw, in Ruleville, in Hattiesburg, teachers knew they would be sending students back to their regular schools, fired up, demanding more. And each morning when students rushed to greet them, each evening when a gray old man read his first words, most teachers knew their summer had been worth all the sweat, the fear, the occasional chaos. “We’re giving these kids a start,” one said. “They’ll never be the same again. This isn’t something anyone can just snap off when the summer ends.”
Holding hands, dancing, sharing meals, teachers and students broke racial taboos. But outside the Freedom Schools, in crowded project offices and cluttered community centers, racial harmony was proving more elusive in August than it had been in June. As long as three men were missing, race had been just another cog in Freedom Summer. Black and white were working together, missing together, equally likely to be arrested, beaten, killed. But once Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found, mourned, eulogized with “bitter vengeance,” black and white were suddenly that again—black and white. And everyone on every project knew that within a few weeks, black would be staying in Mississippi, and white would be gone.
With equal alarm, blacks and whites noticed the rising tension. SNCC had integrated prior to Freedom Summer. Bob Zellner and Mendy Samstein, Sandra “Casey” Hayden and Mary King, had pioneered a small white contingent. But Freedom Summer had inundated SNCC offices with whites, and by August, their enthusiasm was wearing thin. “I saw the rug pulled out every day,” Holmes County project director Hollis Watkins recalled. “Suppose we needed some paper to make fliers. Mr. Local may have been going into town and could have brought it back. But a volunteer would say, ‘Oh no no, I’ll run and get it.’ Local people who had felt pride in operating mimeograph machines now saw that taken away. In meetings, very vocal volunteers automatically shut down a number of people who were struggling to come forward and talk.”
Recent news from the North was driving another wedge between the races. Profiling Freedom Summer, magazines such as Look and the Saturday Evening Post focused on whites, especially white women, making blacks feel their own struggles hardly mattered. And then there were the riots. The day after Harlem erupted, staffers and volunteers sat on the lawn outside the Holly Springs Freedom School discussing the news. With few exceptions, whites deplored the riot, but bl
acks said it was “about time something happened to force America to wake up to racism in the North.” Teacher Pamela Allen was shocked. Though she said nothing, she saw that “the project was polarized. I found it didn’t matter that I never condemned the riots. I hadn’t supported them. And I was white.”
Yet nothing was eroding racial harmony more than sex. From their first day in their sites, volunteers who had never thought much about interracial sex found Mississippi obsessed with it. All summer long, white terror of “mongrelization,” dating to slave days, had surfaced at every encounter. A Jackson cop asked a medical student if he had come south “to give abortions to all them white gals pregnant by nigrahs.” A white woman invited to visit a project office responded, “And get raped?” SNCC recruiters had tried to weed out whites who expressed sexual interest in blacks, and vice versa. In Ohio, Bob Moses had warned against pursuing “My Summer Negro” or “the white girl I made.” Yet all summer blacks and whites had worked together, gotten drunk together, faced danger together, suffusing the summer project with a wartime sexual tension. And the fact that it was 1964, with mores changing, birth control pills available (though not in Mississippi), and hundreds in their early twenties suddenly on their own far from the strictures of home . . .
Many have speculated on the sexuality of that summer. One observer claimed, “Every black SNCC worker with perhaps a few exceptions counted it a notch on his gun to have slept with a white woman—as many as possible.” But others remembered Freedom Summer as far too chaotic for sex. “I didn’t see any white women being victimized by black men,” volunteer Sally Belfrage recalled. “We were just too busy and crowded. I can’t even work out where they did it, where people went to be victimized. My greatest problem in Greenwood was the absolute impossibility of being alone.” Fred Winn offered tacit agreement in a letter: “Now, Dad, I know the I.C.C. might object to you sending certain things in the mail but would it be possible for you to send a local S.F. girl? ” Nonetheless, in late July, a visiting doctor had warned volunteers of venereal disease spreading through the ranks of SNCC and COFO. And although how much went on behind closed doors will never be certain, many volunteers were startled by a sexual frankness unknown back home.
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