Toward noon, the president summoned his press secretary. He had ordered a helicopter to stand by, he said, ready to take him to Atlantic City. There he would read the speech he had just drafted: “The times require leadership about which there is no doubt and a voice that men of all parties, sections, and color can follow. I have learned after trying very hard that I am not that voice or that leader.”
LBJ’s press secretary tried to remain calm. “This would throw the nation in quite an uproar, sir,” George Reedy replied.
For the next few hours, the president wavered between his conscience and his worst fears. He acknowledged the Freedom Democrats’ moral case. “These people went in and begged to go to the conventions,” he said. “They’ve got half the population and they won’t let ’em [vote]. They lock ’em out . . . But we’re going to ignore that. We’re going to say [to Mississippi], ‘Hell yes, you did it. You’re wrong. You violated the ’57 [civil rights] law and you violated the ’60 law, and you violated the ’64 law, but we’re going to seat you—every damn one of you. You lily-white babies, we’re going to salute you.’ ” Georgia senator Richard Russell told his old friend to “take a tranquilizer and get a couple of hours’ sleep.” But John Connally called to again predict “a wholesale walkout from the South” if the Freedom Democrats were seated. And Georgia’s governor was complaining, “It looks like we’re turning the Democratic party over to the nigras . . . it’s gonna cut our throats from ear to ear.” LBJ, though his threat may have been a ploy, continued to insist he would step down. “By God, I’m gonna go up there and quit. Fuck ’em all!” Only his wife could talk him out of it.
After watching her husband brood in a dark room, Lady Bird Johnson wrote him a note. “Beloved,” she began. “You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. . . . To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. . . . I love you always, Bird.”
All that Tuesday, the Freedom Democrat vigil continued on the Boardwalk. Beneath a forest of picket signs, hundreds sat in silence outside the convention hall. Backs ached and hours crawled at a Mississippi Delta pace. To rally spirits, Dick Gregory and Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell spoke to the crowd. When protesters got word of the proposed two-seat compromise, they passed it on in whispers. No one could be certain what was afoot, but volunteers manning the phones at the Gem Hotel already suspected the worst.
“Is the Credentials Committee meeting tonight? ”
“They adjourned because we had enough support, and they have to figure out how to screw us.”
Shortly before 2:00 p.m., Joseph Rauh was told to call his boss, UAW president Walter Reuther. At LBJ’s urging, Reuther had taken a red-eye flight to Atlantic City, arriving to convince Humphrey that the two-seat compromise was the only possible solution. On the phone, Reuther now said the same to Rauh. Two seats, at large, given to a party with no legal standing was “a tremendous victory,” Reuther said. Rauh balked. He had been expressly told that Freedom Democrats would never accept the two seats, yet now he said they might. He needed to talk to Aaron Henry. Reuther applied pressure, Detroit style—Rauh would march straight to the Credentials Committee and accept the compromise, or he would no longer work for the United Auto Workers. Feeling decidedly screwed, Rauh headed for the committee room, hoping to filibuster until he could talk to his other bosses. But Freedom Democratic leaders were busy.
By 3:00 p.m., the challenge was unraveling on both sides of North Mississippi Avenue. In an upstairs room at the convention hall, Rauh faced the Credentials Committee, arguing desperately for a recess, struggling to be heard above cries of “Vote! Vote!” Across the street, Hubert Humphrey had called another meeting at the Pageant. This time, there would be no tears, no conciliation, no scenes in black and white. There would be only flaring tempers, pressure politics, and trickery. From the meeting’s first moments, blacks sensed the tightening pincers. When Martin Luther King balked at the compromise, Walter Reuther reminded him that the UAW had bankrolled King’s campaign in Birmingham. “Your funding is on the line,” Reuther said. King came around quickly. When the Reverend Edwin King, recommended with Aaron Henry as a delegate at large, said he would give his seat to Fannie Lou Hamer, Humphrey refused. “The President has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.” And toward 3:30 p.m., when a TV was wheeled in, announcing that the Mississippi challenge had been resolved, that the Credentials Committee had just approved the compromise, Bob Moses lost the composure that had made him a legend.
Three years ago that week, Moses had been beaten with a knife handle outside the courthouse in Liberty, Mississippi. A friend had taken Moses’ T-shirt and “wrung out the blood.” A week later, Moses took more blacks to the courthouse. As he had labored on in McComb, in Greenwood, in Jackson, the brutality of an entire state had not destroyed Moses’ faith that American democracy could work, even in Mississippi. SNCC had stockpiled reams of affidavits chronicling every assault. SNCC and Moses had sued county registrars and the federal government. Moses, his coworkers, and his summer disciples had visited thousands of shacks, preaching democracy. In its name, blood had been shed all summer. Three men murdered and buried beneath a dam. Torsos washing up in the river. Churches reduced to ashes. Heading to Atlantic City, Moses had not allowed himself to be swept up in the euphoria. But after Hamer’s speech, after all the Boardwalk rallies, he had shed his caution. The Democratic Party would not refuse Freedom Democrats, he said, “if they really understand what’s at stake.” Now America had slapped Bob Moses in the face. Now he saw what he had perhaps suspected all along—that naked coercion, arm twisting, and sneaky backroom deals were also “the stuff democracy is made of.”
Certain that Hubert Humphrey had called Freedom Democrats to his suite to keep them from arguing their case where it mattered, Moses shouted, “You cheated!” Then he stood, strode out of the crowded suite, and slammed the door.
The echo was the sound of SNCC slamming the door on the American political process. Moses soon declared he would never again trust politics. Other SNCCs agreed. James Forman: “Atlantic City was a powerful lesson. . . . No longer was there any hope, among those who still had it, that the federal government would change the situation in the Deep South.” Ella Baker: “The kids tried the established methods, and they tried at the expense of their lives. . . . But they were not willing to wait and they had paid a high price. So they began to look for other answers.” Freedom Democrats described their own dismay.
“Stokely,” Hartman Turnbow asked. “So this is what y’all calls democracy?”
“No, Mr. Turnbow,” Carmichael replied. “It’s politics—as usual.”
“Well now, sure t’ain’t the same thing, now is it? ”
“No, suh, it sure ain’t.”
At 4:00 p.m., when demonstrators seated on the Boardwalk learned that the two-seat compromise had been approved, they stood in silence. A call had just gone back to SNCC headquarters in Greenwood, Freedom Democrats asking for the latest violent incidents so “they can use the info in pleading their case.” But suddenly it became clear that no evidence—not four filing cabinets filled with names, not stacks of affidavits, not the most heart-searing testimony—would do any good. As they stood in the breeze off the ocean, so far removed from cotton fields and Piney Woods, volunteers and SNCC staffers felt the same gut-wrenching fury they had known each day in Mississippi. Tourists passed. Waves crashed on the beach. Seagulls circled overhead. It was August 25. A week remained before college classes absorbed volunteers, but the summer that had begun in innocence on an Ohio campus, burst onto front pages, then trudged on through fear and Freedom Songs, finally bringing all its idealism before a national audience, was over.
That evening on the convention floor, the compromise was explained and adopted in less than a minute. With tears in his eyes, Joseph Rauh, fresh from a meeting where Freedom Democrats formally voted down the compromise, marched to
the podium to turn in two badges labeled “at large.” But the compromise included more than two seats. It also promised that future conventions would never again seat all-white delegations. (They never did.) And it required Mississippi’s official delegation to swear allegiance to the Democratic ticket. Mississippi delegates were outraged. Their state had been “cowhided and horsewhipped,” subjected to “cheap, degrading insults.” How dare they be required to prove themselves loyal Democrats! On orders phoned in by Governor Johnson, delegates began packing. Since Reconstruction, the governor declared, Mississippi had owed a great debt to the Democratic Party. Now, “that debt is paid in full.” And he had “no intention of ever working for President Johnson at any time.” The convention continued with four loyal Mississippi delegates seated—alone in rows of empty chairs. They soon had company.
Tuesday night’s program was proceeding with the usual speeches when reporters noted a commotion. NBC’s John Chancellor shouted that the Freedom Democrats were marching into the convention hall. Racing to catch up, Chancellor followed the flow, past New Jersey state troopers and onto the floor. As some Freedom Democrats entered, others left, carrying floor badges borrowed from sympathizers, badges they handed to delegates outside. One volunteer, feeling “like Mata Hari and the French Resistance and the Underground Railroad all rolled into one,” made several trips. Inside, first ten, then twenty or more Freedom Democrats took the seats denied them. All sat proudly, as if their mere presence proved their first-class citizenship. Back in the White House, LBJ ordered the Freedom Democrats removed, but an aide sensed the outcry if cops were seen struggling with blacks on the convention floor. One delegate was taken out, but the rest stayed. “All we want,” Fannie Lou Hamer told a reporter, “is a chance to be a part of America.”
The following morning, Freedom Democrats gathered again to reconsider two seats at large. The previous evening, the Union Temple Baptist Church had overflowed with bitterness. Moderate black leaders had told the delegation that two seats amounted to victory, that more progress would come. But SNCC leaders vehemently disagreed. “We’ve shed too much blood,” John Lewis said. “We’ve come much too far to back down now.” Fannie Lou Hamer “told it” better. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she said. “All of us is tired.” But on Wednesday morning, with the compromise now formally adopted by the convention, moderates made one last plea for unity. LBJ needed their full support. A Goldwater presidency would be disastrous for civil rights. “You have made your point,” Roy Wilkins told Hamer, “but you don’t know anything and should go home to Mississippi.” Talk spiraled into argument and argument into resentment. Freedom Democrats found themselves split by class. Aaron Henry and the few other white-collar delegates supported the compromise; Fannie Lou Hamer and the rest stood firm. Martin Luther King wavered. “Being a Negro leader, I want you to take this,” he admitted, “but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.” Then Bob Moses rose. For much of the meeting, he had stared at the floor, seeming to be somewhere else, as if beyond politics now. Moving to the podium, reminding one onlooker of “Socrates or Aristotle,” he summed up the exhausting week in a single sentence. “We’re not here to bring politics into our morality,” he said, “but to bring morality into our politics.”
Moses made no recommendation on the compromise. That was for Mississippi’s unofficial delegation to decide. Toward noon, delegates were left alone to vote. At stake was all their name now implied, all Freedom Summer stood for. As Democrats, they should back their party and its compromise. But as Freedom Democrats, they had a certain principle to uphold. When one eighty-year-old sharecropper spoke for the compromise, Hamer and others cried out. “When they got through talking and hoopin’ and hollerin’ and tellin’ me what a shame it was for me to do that,” Henry Sias said, “I changed my mind right there.” Finally, the vote was taken. SNCCs filed back into the room to learn how well they had taught their lessons. The sharecroppers and maids, barbers and cooks, seasoned by their introduction to democracy, had again rejected the compromise.
On Wednesday night, all chairs marked “Mississippi” were removed from the convention floor, but several Freedom Democrats were allowed to stand. And throughout Thursday night’s long tribute to JFK, Bob Moses and others stood in a silent circle, holding hands. No one inside the convention hall seemed to care. The Mississippi challenge now seemed as dated as the huge photos of FDR and Harry Truman looming above the platform. That night, an ebullient Lyndon Johnson came to Atlantic City to accept his party’s nomination. He and Hubert Humphrey linked hands in triumph. Fireworks blazed above the Boardwalk, some even forming a portrait of LBJ. With all the noise, Fannie Lou Hamer needed a microphone to be heard as she stood before exhausted Freedom Democrats and their supporters, belting out one last chorus of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” As always, Hamer’s eyes looked skyward, numbed by fatigue but swept up in song and spirit.
The following morning, sixty-seven Freedom Democrats filed onto buses. Perhaps a few took final glances at the pale blue above the shoreline, at the ghetto surrounding their hotel, at the Ferris wheel spinning slowly in the distance. Then the buses pulled out. Across America, the compromise was being hailed in the press—“a significant moral and political victory” (Los Angeles Times); “a triumph of Moral force” (New York Times); “nothing short of heroic” (Washington Post). But Freedom Democrats did not feel victorious. They were headed back to Mississippi, where sharecroppers would soon return to the fields and volunteers would be gone, taking with them the nation’s attention. “You don’t know how they goin’ to do us!” a black man in Greenwood said. “It’s goin’ to be hell when you leave!” The Freedom Democrats continued their long, sad return, west across Pennsylvania and Ohio, then south through Kentucky and Tennessee, heading home.
The last departing volunteers also went home that weekend. The summer of solidarity, of songs sung with hands clasped, heads swaying, ended with young men and women, battered and exhausted, slipping one by one out of the state. Most left unnoticed, but one was spotted on a bus out of Clarksdale. A woman seated beside her noticed her midwestern accent and asked if she had been part of the summer project. When the volunteer nodded, the Mississippi native turned somber. “I just want you to know,” the woman said, “that some of us have really done our best, and we’ve educated the people who have worked for us and have lived with us, and we care about them.” Then the bus crossed the Mississippi line.
Sometime during that final week of Freedom Summer, a Sovereignty Commission investigator went to Batesville to check out voter registration in Panola County. Parking behind the courthouse, the man spotted several black women beside a young white man. All were discussing how to register.
Stepping inside the courthouse, the investigator found his way to the registrar’s office and asked how the voting drive was progressing.
“Fine,” the registrar answered.
And how many Negroes had been registered that summer?
“Something over seven hundred.”
The investigator was shocked. “My country man!” he said. “What has happened that could justify that many Negroes qualifying in the last sixty days to vote in this county? ”
“Well, you know, I’m under an injunction.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that but I still can’t see how that many could qualify in so short a period of time.”
The registrar wearily explained. It seemed some clerks had taken the federal injunction very seriously. They were actually helping Negroes fill out forms. Pointing out mistakes. Allowing them to be corrected. The investigator tried to contain his anger. This was not what the injunction intended, he said. But the registrar insisted—he did not want to be subpoenaed again. Another trip to federal court might bring an even harsher ruling.
Shaking his head, the investigator walked down the hall. In the district attorney’s office, he heard worse news. The COFO drive had “snowballed,” the DA said. It had gone “completely out of contr
ol.” Negroes were coming in from all over the county. Nothing seemed to stop them. They just kept filling out forms, dozens each week, all passing without a test, all approved as voters. This was bound to spread to the whole Delta. Tallahatchie was already under an injunction, and more would surely come. What could be done? The investigator said he would take up the matter with the state attorney general. He would be back on Friday. On his way out, he saw more blacks coming, walking up the steps, out of the heat, into the coolness of the courthouse.
However beautiful the golden leaves may be, they will have to decay and become manure for the future of civilization. But it is only the seed persons that really count. And it is those you should look for.
—Victoria Gray Adams
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Give unto Them Beauty for Ashes”
For the rest of the twentieth century, Mississippi struggled to put the past in its proper place. The lessons were bitter, and some refused to learn them. In the years following Freedom Summer, rancor and hatred reigned. Torn between nonviolence and a surging militance, blacks split into factions, arguing about everything, even funding for child care. Marches continued, and cops continued roughing up marchers. The Klan rallied in public, plotted in private, and made a last-ditch stand for its ludicrous lost cause of white supremacy. But with time, the state haunted by the Civil War surrendered to the inevitable future. Old customs died out with old people, and new generations found neither the energy nor the hatred needed to prop up Jim Crow. The past, in defiance of William Faulkner’s cautionary adage, came to be past. Like some cantankerous grandfather, Mississippi’s cruel legacy of war and Reconstruction, segregation and lynching, night riding and shotgun justice, was relegated from the kitchen table to the back porch. There it no longer required constant vigilance, let alone violence.
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