Black men raised with an exacting terror—“jus’ one boy touch a white girl’s hand, he be in the river in two hours”—now met white “girls” whose gaze they did not have to avoid. And white women, suddenly the object of obsession and desire, were confused, flattered, charmed. A strange and enticing courtship dance sometimes began, driven as much by taboo as temptation. The dance accelerated when female volunteers wore makeup, earrings, and décolletage that marked them as “easy” in a state where men did not even wear shorts in public. Approached again and again, some surrendered to curiosity or a need to prove they were not racist. The result, Mary King recalled, was that some white women “fluttered like butterflies from one tryst to another.” For much of the summer, black women seemed to look the other way. The same could not always be said of black men. “All these black guys were dating the white volunteers,” one woman remembered, “and then one of the black girls . . . had one date one night with a white guy.” The next morning, four black SNCC men “were over at her house chewing her out.”
But beyond the novelty of interracial sex, how many fell in love during Freedom Summer? “I’m sure I wasn’t the only white woman to fall in love with a black man during that summer of 1964,” Pamela Allen (née Parker) wrote years later. Allen went on to describe “an innocent romance” of holding hands, holding each other, then bidding good-bye to the black man just transferred to McComb. In small-town fishbowls where they dared not be seen together in public, how many other men and women, black and white, courted, touched, dared to cross one line or another, then came home changed? “There’s a very good chance that a large number of white women had good friendships [with black men] that might have developed into something else in a different time,” Allen recalled. “But given the times, it didn’t. Still, that’s much more profound than whether or not you had sex. The heart connections are the ones you remember without ambivalence.”
Fran O’Brien speaks cautiously about her “heart connection” that summer. Like her, the black man she admired worked with children in the Vicksburg Freedom House. Like her, he had come from a college in the Northwest. She walked with him whenever possible, spoke quietly in quiet moments. More than once he stepped into her classroom to handle older children she could not control. He had written home, telling his parents about this woman he liked. This white woman. They warned him, and he told Fran about the warning. When she wrote home and mentioned the man she liked, she was afraid to reveal that he was black. Throughout the summer, Fran wanted more to happen between them. Nothing did. And nothing more was said. She never saw the man after the summer, but she never forgot him. In her memories, he remains the sweeter side of that summer, easily, fondly recalled. The savage side would prove harder to summon.
Fran had spent a rather quiet summer in Vicksburg. Despite all the threats, the flashes of violence, she had seen none of the bedlam that scarred the summer elsewhere. One afternoon, two white men barged into her classroom. Students froze. Fran hesitated. But the men just stood, glared, then walked out. By the time she deftly handled the bomb threat on the phone, Fran had become blasé about violence. She was too busy to worry. Her children loved her classes, especially chorus. One Saturday, her singers entertained the whole school with “This Little Light” and “America the Beautiful.” Fran found the latter “a trifle ironic,” but her students made the song their own, changing verses to honor Herbert Lee and Medgar Evers. And when children whose dreams had long been deferred came to the last verse—“O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years”—Fran realized, “we’re all dreamers or we wouldn’t be here.”
Evening conversations with Mrs. Garrett were teaching Fran more about children than she would ever learn in college. Each evening, Mrs. Garrett, her iron hair in a bun, her stout body resting comfortably in a housedress, welcomed Fran home. Over dinner, they talked about the day in class. About simple activities that worked. About “slow learners” only starting to make progress, and others so promising or so troubled. By early August, Fran had come to cherish these talks. Other volunteers might frequent juke joints or stay at the Freedom House long after classes had ended. But every evening, Fran caught a ride home in time for dinner and discussion. Back on her Oregon campus, she had imagined doing her part in the civil rights movement. She had not expected to make a lifelong friend.
With just two weeks left, Fran was thinking more about going home than about any danger. She planned to leave on Monday, August 17. She hoped to go through New Orleans and do a little sightseeing. “I could stay longer but there doesn’t seem much point,” she wrote her parents. “I wish we had done more for the kids.” Though complacent, Fran still recalled that morning in early July when she was confronted by cops after rushing out to her ride. She had never repeated the mistake. Each morning she waited inside with Mrs. Garrett until the SNCC car arrived. Each evening, she walked down the long driveway of the Freedom House in a group. Obeying SNCC rules, she could not imagine that Mississippi could concoct dangers impossible to foresee.
One evening, Fran and five others stood at the end of the driveway, waiting for the car to take them home. But when the car pulled up, it had seats for only five. Deferring as always, Fran let everyone else pile in. There would be room, she thought. But when she asked if she could squeeze in, the driver cut her off. They could not risk overloading the car, drawing attention, giving cops an excuse for another arrest. “Don’t worry,” she was told. “Someone else will be along in a minute.”
Standing alone, Fran felt a shudder, but told herself not to be such a baby. Another car would be along soon. And there it was, headlights beaming down the road, slowing, slowing, stopping. Eager to get home, Fran rushed past the twin beams. Before she could draw back, she saw four men inside—in white robes and hoods. She was not imagining this. She was not dreaming. She was in Mississippi, and the quiet of her summer had ended early.
Before Fran could turn and run, one hooded man leaped out. Clamping a beefy hand over her mouth, he dragged her into the car. It roared away. She was not imagining. She was not dreaming. Rumbling over the dirt road, the four men laughed and joked. Fran could barely see their eyes through the holes in their hoods. Look what they had captured, they seemed to say. A pretty little “invader.” A “little girl” who needed to be taught a lesson. Darkness had engulfed Mississippi by the time the car pulled into a vacant lot or empty field—Fran could not tell which. From that point on, terror veiled her memory. The car lurched and stopped. A deep, drawling voice barked in her ear.
“Now you just be a good little girl and do what we say. We’ve gotta teach you a little lesson so you’ll go home to your Mama and Daddy and mind your own business after this.”
Dragged out of the car, Fran tried to drop into a ball as she had been taught.
“No you don’t, little lady! You bend over that hood and don’t try any more funny business!”
Fran found herself shoved against the car. Somehow she recalled what Bob Moses had told female volunteers in Ohio—that their modesty was not as important as their lives. She clamped her hands over her head. Her cheek pressed against the warm hood. She inhaled the car’s odor of gasoline and dust.
“That’s a good little girl. Stay nice and still now, so we can whup you.” All four men laughed. One said they were going to make her sorry she had ever come to Mississippi. But if she got down on her knees, he said, if she begged forgiveness, they might stop. Any time she wanted. On her knees. Fran vowed she would be thrown in the Mississippi River first. She steeled herself, clenched her teeth, felt warm air on her legs as a hand lifted her skirt. Seconds later came the searing lash of a rubber hose. Breath seized in her throat. Her eyes stung. An acrid odor emerged from nowhere. The hose lashed out again. And again, each time harder than before. Her burning legs turned red, then blue, then purple. The blows continued as the men passed the hose around, taking turns. Time slowed and stopped. The world condensed to this empty lot, in Mississippi, on a quiet summer night. More lashes
fell. But there is a God, Fran knew, and so she was spared further suffering. Voices and laughter dimmed, the throbbing faded. The next thing Fran knew, she was lying in the driveway of the Freedom House. Scorching heat flushed her face and seared her body. Sitting up, she struggled for the dignity that had brought her this far. She checked herself, seeing bruises but no blood. Thinking she must have been gone for hours, she ran up the long driveway to find several people on the porch, talking and joking.
“Oh hi, Fran. I thought you’d left.”
Fran started to blurt out what she could—the ride . . . no room for her . . . another due any minute . . .
“You should have come back right away,” someone said. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to wander around alone at night? This is Mississippi, you know. A lot of things could happen.”
That was when Fran burst into tears. No words would come, not even when others gathered around.
“Her dress is all dirty.”
“Did she fall down the hill? ”
“There was a car circling around here about a half an hour ago—right after those other guys left. Was that it? ”
With her head bowed, Fran nodded but could say no more. Her secret remained inside, a private, purple horror. Even in Mississippi, where a lot of things could happen, no one guessed what had just happened to the shy teacher with the devout love of children. Finally, the woman whose children Fran had befriended on her first day in Mississippi returned the favor. Approaching Fran, putting an arm around her, Bessie whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
And in the care of another victim, it was okay not to say anything, not to feel anything, just to take deep breaths, to gather herself inside herself and begin the long night of suppression. Fran does not remember how she got home that evening, nor what Mrs. Garrett said about her late arrival. She remembers little of her remaining days in Mississippi. She only knows that she made a rock-firm decision not to tell anyone. She would not become an incident on a blackboard. She would not give newspapers another story. Hoping to recapture the warmth she had felt from her students, Fran kept quiet about her encounter with the Klan, quiet for twenty-five years while the terror of a quiet summer night crouched inside her. She would be leaving on August 17. She wrote home one last time, hiding her horror in vague language. She had decided not to go home through New Orleans, she told her parents. “After recent developments I don’t like the idea of traveling alone through southwest Mississippi. It’s always been the worst section and hasn’t improved this summer.” August 17. A Monday. Fran and her secret were also counting the days.
After a headline June, a lunatic July, and August’s endless lay-by time, Freedom Summer had arrived at its own crossroads. On the evening of August 19, three buses stood outside the COFO office on Lynch Street in Jackson. More than a hundred people stood around them, talking, singing, their faces reflected in bus windows beside the neon red signs of the Streamline Bar. At a press conference earlier that day, Bob Moses, though troubled by the word “success,” said the summer project had changed Mississippi. “The whole pattern of law enforcement of the past hundred years has been reversed,” he noted. “In some areas the police are offering protection where they never did before.” And Freedom Summer was not finished, Moses announced. Many volunteers were staying on to intensify voting drives in Panola and Tallahatchie counties, and to staff community centers, adult literacy programs, and mobile libraries in rural areas. But all that would only unfold after Freedom Democrats helped make Mississippi part of the U.S.A.
Since July 19, armies of canvassers had held Atlantic City aloft like some Promised Land. Now the Promised Land was just a bus ride away. Tallied in signatures alone, the Freedom Democrat drive had been disappointing. Moses had hoped for 400,000 names, then lowered his sights to 200,000, then 100,000. He had to settle for 63,000. But as delegates milled beside the buses, their hopes shone as brightly as that evening’s “We Shall Overcome,” belted out to the ring of a folksinger’s banjo. The Freedom Democrats would be on Atlantic City’s famous Boardwalk by Friday. They had followed Democratic Party rules explicitly. Papers had been filed. Affidavits and testimonies of terror were ready to be shared. After a summer of violence, could Americans deny that Mississippi was a blot on democracy? Could President Johnson, having signed the Civil Rights Act, turn them away? One by one, Freedom Democrats boarded the buses. Casey Hayden stood with a clipboard, checking off dozens of names. Arms waved out the window. Approaching the bus with his wife, Bob Moses was not as optimistic as the rest, but he was seen to smile.
At 10:00 p.m., the buses pulled out with a great cheer that broke into Freedom Songs. Instructions had been left in the COFO office—a delegate would call once the buses were safely out of Mississippi. Calculating the distance over winding roads, leaders said the call would come by 3:00 a.m. If no one checked in by 3:15, “begin action.” Singing, shouting out, marveling at the Promised Land where they were bound, delegates rolled north toward the Tennessee line. The call came at 3:02 a.m. The Freedom Democrats were on their way.
If you ask what my politics are, I am a Humanitarian.
—Tennessee Williams
CHAPTER TEN
“The Stuff Democracy Is Made Of ”
All 5,200 delegates descending on the faded resort of Atlantic City at the end of Freedom Summer were Democrats, and all were in a mood to celebrate. With Lyndon Johnson heavily favored to win in November, they looked forward to a political convention without politics. In lieu of debate, there would be parties, dinners, and perhaps a little hijinks. For one rollicking week, democracy would become a showcase. But for sixty-seven Mississippians stepping off buses, blinking in the morning sun, inhaling the salty air, democracy was no showcase; it was a matter of life and death.
The Freedom Democrats included two sons of slaves. Several were veterans—of World Wars I and II—and all were veterans of Mississippi. Many had bullet holes in their front doors, and one had them in his neck and shoulder. All bore the scars of Jim Crow—childhood memories of lynching, adulthoods rife with insults, lives trampled by constant intimidation. Their jobs, like their hometowns, were hardscrabble. Freedom Democrats were farmers and sharecroppers, barbers and undertakers, maids and cooks. Several were illiterate, but all had a seasoned wisdom no classroom could teach. Most were making their first trip out of Mississippi, some their first trips out of the counties where they had been born. Though more comfortable in overalls and housedresses, all had spent two nights on the bus in their Sunday clothes—suits and ties, porkpie hats, ironed skirts and blouses. Their faces were the colors of the mud from which they rose—Delta black and amber clay, brown loam and beige soil. And as proof that theirs was not a “nigger party,” four Freedom Democrats were as white as the Gulf Coast sands—one was a fisherman signed up by the White Folks Project in Biloxi.
Legally, they represented no one. The Freedom Democratic Party was not a legal party in Mississippi. Many expected to be arrested, or worse, when they went home. But morally, the Freedom Democrats represented the very idea of democracy. Their presence in Atlantic City challenged the most sacred American rhetoric. Was America a nation of “liberty and justice for all” ? Was voting a right or a privilege? Did democracy apply just to some, or did it extend from top to bottom, from mansions to shacks, from the halls of power to the broken porches of the powerless?
Their journey north had seemed eternal. Freedom Songs grew tiresome before the buses even reached the state line. Then, shortly after calling to say they were safely out of Mississippi, they were nearly ambushed in Tennessee. Spotting a Klan roadblock ahead—ten white hoods, ten men with rifles—passengers had ducked into the aisles. But a few were ready.
“They start anything, I have a gun,” Hartman Turnbow said. “And my wife—she got one, too. Baby, get out your gun.” Plump, moonfaced “Sweets” Turnbow reached in a paper bag and pulled out a pistol. “We gonna,” her husband drawled, “we gonna kill up a few of ’em.” The driver slowed, but a slim woma
n crept behind him, flicked a switchblade, and held it to his throat. “You better put your feet on the gas,” she said. At full speed, the buses scattered the Klansmen and rolled on. Being from Mississippi, Freedom Democrats had rammed through obstacles far more relentless than the Klan.
Many had been trying to “reddish” since the murder of Emmett Till. Only a few had succeeded. The rest had taken the parallel path to democracy. Five days before Freedom Summer began, all had been shut out of county conventions choosing Mississippi’s “official” Atlantic City delegation. Party leaders, alerted by the Sovereignty Commission’s Informant Y of “Negroes carefully picked and trained to crash the conventions,” had connived to exclude them. On June 16, blacks across Mississippi had arrived at designated halls to hear: the meeting is canceled; the meeting is over; the door is locked. “We can’t open the door! They called down and told us not to open the door! There are no precinct meetings here! We don’t know anything about precinct meetings!” In the few meetings they managed to “crash,” blacks saw jittery whites huddling, whispering, peeking around corners. The lily-white conventions chose a lily-white delegation of sixty-eight Democrats. Blacks were left to sign affidavits detailing their exclusion, affidavits they took to Atlantic City, where they would try to force democracy’s parallel paths to converge.
And so they had held their own conventions—in churches, community centers, under trees. Initially uncertain about regulations and rules of order, farmers and sharecroppers, maids and cooks had learned democracy by trial and error. Following SNCC’s instructions, they elected Freedom Party chairmen, secretaries, and delegates. These went on to a rousing state convention in Jackson. There, when Freedom Songs finally ended, when the Stars and Stripes and signs with county names stopped bobbing, 2,500 delegates heard from their lawyer that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party stood a good chance of being seated in Atlantic City. A summer of behind-the-scenes lobbying had gathered enough support to bring their challenge to the convention floor, and enough votes there to win. They could only be stopped by Lyndon Johnson, and he would not dare, not with the whole nation watching.
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