Freedom Summer
Page 39
Four names in particular stand out from my list. To Chris Williams, Muriel Tillinghast, Fran O’Brien, and Fred Bright Winn, I offer my deepest thanks. Each put up with two long interviews followed by innumerable nit-picking questions that surfaced from out of nowhere on their e-mail queues. And each responded with more thought and detail than I had any right to expect. Along with my admiration for their courage in going to Mississippi, each has my thanks for looking back over so many years to dredge up memories both joyous and painful.
To my mother’s best friend, dedicated teacher Georgie Cooper, I owe heartfelt thanks for getting me started with a detailed reading list from her native Mississippi. Sadly, Georgie passed away before I could show her all she had taught me. I will never forget her enthusiasm, her accent, or her passion for life and literature.
Thanks also to Jan Hillegas, a Freedom Summer volunteer who has lived in Mississippi since 1964. Jan opened her sizable archive of COFO documents, notably the complete WATS line reports that gave me access to hourly events throughout the summer. Jan’s work to preserve COFO records continues, including the revival of the long-abandoned COFO headquarters on Lynch Street, which will soon open as an educational center.
Though I have never met her, I offer special thanks to Elizabeth Martinez, who began compiling volunteers’ letters moments after Freedom Summer ended. Her book, Letters from Mississippi, was of invaluable help. It is also the most moving compilation of historical letters I have seen on any subject. Thanks also to ex-volunteer Jim Kates, whose Zephyr Press rereleased Letters from Mississippi, and who offered advice early in my research.
Thanks to my patient and wise editor at Viking, Wendy Wolf, for allowing me to give my own touch to another American story. And to my agent, Jeff Kleinman, for his continued help in negotiating the Manuscript Jungle. Two friends and former civil rights activists—Bob Winston and Sue Thrasher—provided encouragement along the way. Bob also offered kind comments on the initial draft. And as always, I owe more than I can express to my wife, Julie, and our two children, for allowing me to head south three times in a single year, and for trying the grits I brought back.
Finally, to the people of Mississippi who spoke freely with me during my visits there, I owe more than gratitude. Freedom Summer was not their beloved state’s finest hour, but Mississippians continue to treat it with remarkable frankness. Their honesty and hospitality made each trip to Mississippi a genuine pleasure. In particular, thanks to Dr. Stacy White for sharing stories of her great-aunt, Irene Magruder, for giving me a tour of Freedom Summer sites in Indianola, and for inviting me back for the Sunflower County Civil Rights Reunion. Thanks to Robert Miles Jr. for inviting me into the Batesville home of his courageous father, and to Neil White for insights and hospitality over coffee in Oxford. Former sheriff Charles W. Capps Jr., retired after a long career in the state legislature, demonstrated true Mississippi hospitality when he agreed to be interviewed on an hour’s notice about a time he would probably rather forget. And thanks to Gary Brooks, who came all the way from New Orleans to show me around his hometown of McComb. These memories, and not the scars of the Jim Crow system, are the Mississippi I know, convincing me that more Americans should go to the Magnolia State. It’s a wonderful place, to which I hope to return again and again.
Notes
Book One
1 “Niggers down here don’t need to vote”: Eric Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 118.
2 “I’m not going to talk to you”: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 122.
2 “I’m not playing with you this morning!”: Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 511.
Prologue
6 “Paul Stood Tall Last Fall”: New York Times, July 5, 1964.
6 “Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums”: “Mississippi: Battle of the Kennedys,” Newsweek, August 19, 1963, p. 24.
6 “white folks’ business”: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 205.
7 “goddamned NAACP Communist trouble makers”: Ivanhoe Donaldson, “Southern Diaries,” in Mississippi Freedom Summer, ed. John F. McClymer (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2004), p. 90.
7 “not only have a right but a duty”: Jackson Clarion-Ledger, June 12, 2005.
7 “too beautiful to burn”: Port Gibson Heritage Trust Web site, http://www.portgibsonheritagetrust.org/port_gibson.
8 “the War for Southern Independence”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 112.
8 “It’s a rotten, miserable life” and “We don’t hate niggers”: “How Whites Feel About a Painful America,” Newsweek, October 21, 1963, pp. 44-51.
9 “Negroes are oversexed,” and “I don’t like to touch them”: Ibid., p. 50.
9 “There is no state with a record”: Henry Hampton, dir., “Mississippi—Is This America?” episode 5 of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement (Boston: Blackside, 1987).
9 “During the past ten years”: Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 42.
9 “Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn”: “Mississippi Goddam,” The Nina Simone Web, http://boscarol.com/nina/html/where/mississipigoddamn.html.
10 “Foreign Mail”: “Mississippi Airlift,” Newsweek, March 11, 1963, p. 30.
10 “as common as a snake”: Roy Torkington Papers, Civil Rights Collection, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi (hereafter, USM).
10 “the long staple cotton capital of the world”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 129.
10 “America’s Most Beautiful Street”: Cardcow.com, Vintage Postcards and Collectibles, http://www.cardcow.com/48738/grand-boulevard-greenwood-us-state-town-views-mississippi-greenwood/.
10 “neckid, buck-barefoot, and starvin’”: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, Harvard University (hereafter, SNCC Papers), reel 40.
11 “makes it clear that the Negroes of Mississippi”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 206.
11 “Before the Negro people get the right to vote”: “Mississippi: Allen’s Army,” Newsweek, February 24, 1964, p. 30.
11 “invasion,” “invaders,” and “dastardly scheme”: Richard Woodley, “A Recollection of Michael Schwerner,” Reporter, July 16, 1964, p. 23.
12 “We are going to see that law and order is maintained”: Marilyn Mulford and Connie Field, dirs., Freedom on My Mind (Berkeley, Calif.: Clarity Film Productions, 1994).
12 “This is it”: “Mississippi: Allen’s Army.”
12 “We give them everything”: Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: Nation Books, 2006), p. 193.
12 “our way of life”: Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), WATS line report (hereafter, WATS line), August 12, 1964, COFO documents, Hillegas Collection, Jackson, Miss.
12 “nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi”: Howard Ball, Murder in Mississippi: United States v. Price and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 55.
12 “dedicated agents of Satan”: Famous Trials: U.S. vs. Cecil Price et al. (“Mississippi Burning Trial”) Web site, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Klan.html.
12 “Get your Bible out and PRAY!”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 265.
13 “Nobody never come out into the country”: Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 233.
13 “Mississippi changed everything”: Gloria Clark, personal interview, October 3, 2007.
CHAPTER ONE: “There Is a Moral Wave Building
”
16 “At Oxford, my mental picture of Mississippi”: Elizabeth Martinez, ed., Letters from Mississippi (Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2006), p. 186.
17 “I may be killed and you may be killed”: New York Times, June 17, 1964.
17 “They—the white folk”: John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 249.
17 “They take you to jail”: New York Times, June 21, 1964.
18 “A great change is at hand”: John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/003POF03CivilRights06111963.htm.
18 “cannon fodder for the Movement”: Bob Cohen, “Sorrow Songs, Faith Songs, Freedom Songs: The Mississippi Caravan of Music in the Summer of 1964,” in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, ed. Susie Erenrich (Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1999), p. 178.
18 “honor the memory” and “carry out the legacy”: Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 48.
18 “Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear”: Ibid., p. 30.
18 “possess a learning attitude”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.
18 “John Brown complex”: John Fischer, “A Small Band of Practical Heroes,” Harper’s, October 1963, p. 28.
18 “A student who seems determined”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.
19 “an unmistakable middle-class stamp”: New York Times, June 17, 1964, p. 18.
19 “I don’t see how I have any right”: New York Times, July 11, 1964, p. 22.
19 “You’ve deserted us for the niggers”: Alice Lake, “Last Summer in Mississippi,” Redbook, November 1964; reprinted in Library of America, Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1963-1973 (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 234.
19 “Absolutely mesmerized”: McAdam, Freedom Summer, p. 56.
19 “Surely, no challenge looms larger”: Ibid., p. 46.
20 “You didn’t run into many situations”: Chris Williams, personal interview, October 9, 2007.
20 “to actually do something worthwhile”: Ibid.
20 “The Birmingham church bombing had occurred”: Williams, interview, November 23, 2007.
20 “do-nothings”: Greenfield Recorder-Gazette, June 26, 1964.
21 “like I was the nation’s most wanted criminal”: Chris Williams, journal, Summer 1964, p. 7.
21 “That government which governs best”: Ibid.
21 “a homosexual,” “a car full of hoods”: Ibid.
21 “and the whole Mississippi adventure began”: Williams, interview, October 9, 2007.
21 “I realized Mississippi was more educational”: Ibid.
22 “the hairy stories”: Williams, journal, pp. 8-9.
22 “When you go down those cold stairs”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 22.
23 “That man beat me till he give out”: Ibid., pp. 24-25.
23 “It just scared the crap out of us”: Williams, journal, pp. 8-9.
23 “I turned down a chance to work”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 11.
23 “I just ran until I was really tired”: Williams, journal, p. 9.
23 “We don’t know what it is to be a Negro”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 5.
24 “They would argue with a signpost”: Cheryl Lynn Greenburg, ed., A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 143.
24 “beautiful community,” and “a circle of trust”: Ibid.
24 “cracking Mississippi,” “beachheads,” and “behind enemy lines”: James Atwater, “If We Can Crack Mississippi . . . ,” Saturday Evening Post, July 25, 1964, p. 16; Calvin Trillin, “Letter from Jackson,” New Yorker, August 29, 1964, p. 105; Dittmer, Local People, p. 198.
24 “To be with them, walking a picket line”: Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 1-2.
24 “because I met those SNCC people”: Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 70.
24 “group-centered leadership”: Daniel Perlstein, “Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 298.
25 “He is more or less the Jesus”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 19.
25 “the Masters’ degree from Harvard”: Atwater, “If We Can Crack,” p. 16.
26 “Before, the Negro in the South had always looked”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 17.
26 “words are more powerful than munitions”: Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” in The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace, ed. Howard Zinn (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 73.
26 “We were immensely suspicious of him”: Payne, I’ve Got the Light, p. 105.
27 “uncover what is covered”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 235.
27 “a tree beside the water”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 28.
27 “There’s something coming”: Ibid., p. 41.
27 “rural, impoverished, brutal”: Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 24.
28 “You the nigger that came down from New York”: Ibid., p. 48.
28 “Boy, are you sure you know”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 49.
28 “Dr. King and some other big people”: Hollis Watkins, personal interview, June 14, 2008.
29 “No administration in this country”: New York Times, June 21, 1964; Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 30.
29 “It’s not working”: Tracy Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates: A Summer in Mississippi (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), p. 8.
29 “No one should go anywhere alone”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.
29 “We have talked about interracial dating”: “The Invaders,” Newsweek, June 29, 1964, p. 25.
30 “You should be ashamed!”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 243.
30 “The flash point”: Mulford and Field, Freedom on My Mind.
30 “Ask Jimmie over there what he thinks”: “Mississippi—Summer of 1964: Troubled State, Troubled Time,” Newsweek, July 13, 1964, p. 20.
31 “The crisis is past, I think”: William Hodes Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter, SHSW).
31 “When you turn the other cheek”: Nicholas Von Hoffman, Mississippi Notebook (New York: David White, 1964), p. 31.
31 “You must understand that nonviolence”: Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, p. 28.
31 “Your legs, your thighs”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 33.
31 “I got me a twen’y foot pit out bay-ack”: Muriel Tillinghast, personal interview, November 28, 2007.
32 “morally rotten outcasts of the White race”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.
32 “We were renegades”: Tillinghast, interview, November 28, 2007.
32 “NAG’s local Mississippi”: Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 337-48.
32 “I did not come out of a family”: Tillinghast, interview, November 28, 2007.
32 “no bigger than a match stick”: Ibid.
33 “a distant well of human woe”: Ibid.
33 “He would tell me about”: Ibid.
33 “At NAG meetings, I was informed”: Ibid.
34 “a sponge”: Ibid.
34 “brought us to the stark reality”: Tillinghast, interview, October 31, 2007.
34 “It was esprit de corps”: Ibid.
34 “As we depart for that troubled state”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 239.
34 “Part of it is the American dream”: Atwater, “If We Can Crack,” p. 18.
34 “The injustices to the Negro in Mississippi”: Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1964.
35 �
��a long, hot summer,” and “racial explosion”: “Mississippi Girds for Its Summer of Discontent,” U.S. News & World Report, June 15, 1964, p. 46.
35 “guerilla war”: Joseph Alsop, “The Gathering Storm,” Hartford Courant, June 17, 1964.
35 “The guy from Life was a real jerk”: Williams, journal, pp. 10-11.
35 “Look magazine is searching”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 22.
35 “Now get this in your heads”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 31.
36 “real heroes”: New York Times, June 20, 1964.
36 “What are you going to do”: Len Holt, The Summer That Didn’t End (New York: William Morrow, 1965), p. 50.
36 “We can protect the Vietnamese”: National Observer, n.d., Hillegas Collection.
36 “We don’t do that”: Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, p. 370.
36 “Dear People at home”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 10.
37 “Before You Leave Oxford”: New York Times, June 21, 1964.
37 “We hit the Mississippi state line”: Tillinghast, interview, November 28, 2007.
CHAPTER TWO: “Not Even Past”
38 “more or less bunk”: Justin Kaplan, ed., Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 499n.
38 “The past is never dead”: William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 81.
39 “Mississippians don’t know”: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ric Burns, and Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 212.
39 “Meridian, with its depots”: Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative—Fredericksburg to Meridian (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 926.
39 “Chimneyville”: John Ray Skates, Mississippi: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 108.
40 “Things was hurt”: Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863- 1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 86.