Freedom Summer

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Freedom Summer Page 40

by Bruce W. Watson


  41 “The whole public are tired out”: William C. Harris, The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 668.

  41 “Democrats Standing Manfully by Their Guns!”: Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1875.

  41 “A revolution has taken place”: Foner, Short History, pp. 235-36.

  42 “we could study the earth through the floor”: Aaron Henry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, with Constance Curry (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), p. 91.

  42 “Naught’s a naught”: Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 157.

  42 “jus’ as different here from other places”: Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 46.

  42 “the necessity of it”: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 73.

  42 “one of the most grotesque bodies”: Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1929), pp. 414, 448.

  42 “Rape is the foul daughter”: Ibid., p. 308.

  42 “was organized for the protection”: Ibid., p. 309.

  43 “The South needs to believe”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 448.

  43 “The problem of the twentieth century”: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 16.

  43 “What are the three largest cities in Mississippi?”: John Beecher, “McComb, Mississippi: May 1965,” Ramparts, May 1965; reprinted in Library of America, Reporting Civil Rights, p. 398.

  43 “worse than slavery”: David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), flyleaf epigram.

  44 “Never was there happier dependence”: David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 260.

  44 “the loveliest and purest of God’s creatures”: Hodding Carter III, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 30.

  44 “reckless eyeballing”: Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 37.

  44 “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun”: Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 70.

  44 “making such criticism so dangerous”: W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 93.

  45 “When civil rights came along”: Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 63.

  45 “The Negro is a lazy”: Curtis Wilkie, Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 57.

  45 “I am calling upon every red-blooded American”: Skates, Mississippi, p. 155.

  45 “Segregation will never end in my lifetime”: Carter, South Strikes Back, p. 13.

  46 “shocked and stunned”: Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 15.

  46 “We are about to embark”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 37.

  46 “to separate them from others”: Diane Ravitch, ed., The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 306.

  46 “The Citizens’ Council is the South’s answer”: Carter, South Strikes Back, p. 43.

  46 “the uptown Klan”: Hodding Carter quoted in James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 36.

  46 “Why Separate Schools Should be Maintained”: McMillen, Citizens’ Council, p. 242.

  47 “right thinking”: Carter, South Strikes Back, p. 34.

  47 “God was the original segregationist”: New York Times, November 7, 1987.

  47 “dat Brown mess”: Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 65.

  47 “And then there were the redneck boys”: Willie Morris, North Toward Home (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), pp. 21-22.

  48 “odd accident”: Dittmer, Local People, pp. 53-54.

  48 “the world see what they did to my boy”: Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 44.

  48 “Good morning, niggers” and “every last Anglo Saxon one of you”: Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), pp. 9-10.

  48 “If we in America”: Dittmer, Local People, 57.

  48 “There’s open season on Negroes now”: Ibid., p. 58.

  48 “From that point on”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 235.

  48 “It was the so-called dumb people”: Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center, Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, an Oral History (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), p. 59.

  49 “that damn few white men”: Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 37.

  49 “invalid, unconstitutional, and not of lawful effect”: Dittmer, Local People, pp. 59-60.

  49 “working hand-in-glove with Communist sympathizers”: Sokol, There Goes My Everything, p. 88.

  50 “Sorry, Cable Trouble”: Dittmer, Local People, pp. 65-66.

  50 “The following program”: Belfrage, Freedom Summer, 109.

  50 “Negro cow-girl”: Dan Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 101-3.

  50 “a veiled argument for racial intermarriage”: Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), p. 57.

  51 “intellectual straight-jacketing”: New York Times, June 18, 1964.

  51 “who will lynch you from a low tree”: Belfrage, Freedom Summer, p. 56.

  51 “private Gestapo”: Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 327.

  51 “Today we live in fear”: Silver, Mississippi, p. 39.

  51 “assdom”: John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 82.

  51 “Join the Glorious Citizens Clan”: McMillen, Citizens’ Council, p. 257.

  51 “goons” and “Hateists”: Ira B. Harkey Jr., The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman (Jacksonville, Fla.: Delphi Press, 1967), p. 126.

  52 “We hate violence”: Silver, Mississippi, p. 46.

  52 “The project is concerned with construction”: COFO letter to Mississippi sheriffs, May 21, 1964, Hillegas Collection.

  52 “communists, sex perverts”: Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 159.

  52 “It will be a long hot summer”: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Files, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss. (hereafter, MDAH) SCR ID# 9-31-1-43-1-1-1.

  52 “The white girls have been going around”: James L. Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), p. 91.

  53 “where black and white will walk together”: MDAH SCR ID# 9-32-0-1-2-1-1.

  53 “carpetbagger” and “scalawag”: Carter, South Strikes Back, pp. 143, 191.

  53 “I know we’ve had a hundred years”: Von Hoffman, Mississippi Notebook, p. 3.

  53 “In my life span”: Jackson Clarion-Ledger, June 16, 1964.

  53 thirty thousand “invaders”: Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1964.

  53 Negro gangs were “ forming t
o rape white women”: Tupelo Journal, June 19, 1964.

  54 “This is just a taste”: Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1964.

  54 “Don’t do no violence”: Atwater, “If We Can Crack,” p. 18.

  54 “Guidelines for Self-protection and Preservation”: Hodding Carter, So the Heffners Left McComb (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 69-71.

  54 “This summer, within a very few days”: Don Whitehead, Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1970), pp. 6-8.

  54 “I hear that this summer”: Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty: A Biography (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005), p. 309.

  54 “increased activity in weapon shipments”: Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), p. 116.

  CHAPTER THREE: Freedom Street

  56 “unpleasant, to say the least”: Chris Williams, correspondence, June 21, 1964.

  56 “Impeach Earl Warren”: Frederick M. Wirt, Politics of Southern Equality: Law and Social Change in a Mississippi County (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), p. 136.

  57 “so big they could stand flatfooted”: Karl Fleming, Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2005, p. 361).

  57 “We’re gonna give you a hard time”: Williams, correspondence, June 21, 1964.

  58 “that you did not come down”: New York Times, June 21, 1964, p. 64.

  58 “Their demeanor, how they treated us”: Mulford and Field, Freedom on My Mind.

  58 “He thinks out his moves carefully”: Williams, correspondence, June 21, 1964.

  58 “something I had to live with”: Robert Miles memorial service, program.

  59 “on account of your father”: Congressional Record 111, pt. 10 (June 22, 1965): H 13929.

  59 “I don’t see why they don’t let us swim”: Williams, correspondence, June 30, 1964.

  59 “Y’all gonna hear”: Williams, personal interview, February 1, 2008.

  60 “Have you seen my girls yet?”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 51.

  60 “skinny” or “pretty”: Ibid.

  60 “We’re mighty glad” and “It’s a right fine Christian thing”: Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, p. 53.

  60 “There they is!”: Ibid., p. 50.

  60 “I’ve waited eighty years”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, p. 51.

  61 “There are people here”: Ibid., p. 61.

  61 “I could kick down”: Ibid., p. 64.

  61 “the most appalling example”: McAdam, Freedom Summer, p. 87.

  61 “a fiery and fast moving old woman”: Martinez, Letters from Mississippi, pp. 47-48.

  62 “I was really surprised”: Mulford and Field, Freedom on My Mind.

  62 “Greetings from Batesville, Miss.”: Williams, correspondence, June 21, 1964.

  63 “some good old southern bourbon”: Ibid.

  63 “Had Moses not wanted it to happen”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 287.

  63 “either an act of madness”: Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, p. 350.

  63 “We had worked so hard”: Watkins, interview, June 16, 2008.

  63 “This was Bob Moses talking”: Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, p. 350.

  63 “taken over the Jackson office”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 208.

  63 “a bunch of Yalies”: Ibid., p. 209.

  63 “If we’re trying to break down”: Zinn, SNCC, p. 188.

  63 “We don’t have much to gain”: Nicolaus Mills, Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 58.

  64 “get rid of the whites”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 129.

  64 “all black”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 287.

  64 “a question of rational people”: Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them, p. 129.

  64 “How large a force”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 208.

  64 “Too difficult,” “huge influx” and “sociological research”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  64 “You killed my husband!”: Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 510.

  64 “when you’re dead”: Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), Mississippi Black Paper: Fifty-seven Negro and White Citizens’ Testimony of Police Brutality (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 37.

  65 “For me, it was as if everything”: Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, p. 76.

  65 “other than to dedicate”: Bob Moses, personal interview, December 10, 2008.

  65 “The staff had been deadlocked”: Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, p. 76.

  65 “Notes on Teaching,” “Techniques for Field Work,” and “The General Condition”: SNCC Papers, reels 39, 40, 64.

  67 “Niggers . . . Beatnicks”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  67 “Would you please give”: SNCC Papers, reel 64.

  67 “ for the good work”: Ibid.

  67 “Robert Moses, 708 Avenue N”: Fischer, “Small Band,” p. 26.

  67 “I’m sorry it isn’t more”: SNCC Papers, reel 64.

  68 “hooking people up”: Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, Dorothy Dawson Burlage, Penny Patch, Theresa Del Pozzo, Sue Thrasher, Elaine DeLott Baker, Emmie Schrader Adams, and Casey Hayden, Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 346.

  68 “The mass media are”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  68 “ for we think it is important”: Ibid.

  68 “a clear and present danger”: Ibid., reel 40.

  69 “I can say there will be a hot summer”: Congressional Record 111, pt. 10 (June 22, 1965): H 14002.

  69 “They don’t arrest white people in Mississippi”: Ibid., H 14003.

  69 “I was”: Ibid., H 14008.

  69 “incidents of brutality and terror”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  69 “nearly incredible that those people”: Dittmer, Local People, p. 239.

  69 “Sojourner Motor Fleet”: Lewis, Walking with the Wind, p. 259.

  69 “We’re sitting this one out”: Ibid., p. 249.

  70 “danger to local Negroes”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  70 “more convinced than ever”: Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: Quill/William Morrow & Co., 1987), pp. 226, 312.

  70 “lead people into the fire”: Ibid., p. 313.

  70 “No one can be rational about death”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  70 “is so deeply ingrained”: King, Freedom Song, p. 318.

  70 “When whites come into a project”: SNCC Papers, reel 38.

  71 “to take the revolution one step further”: Ibid.

  71 “We have a responsibility”: King, Freedom Song, p. 319.

  72 “It was so quick”: Tillinghast, interview, November 28, 2007.

  73 “I was petrified”: Ibid.

  73 “rather get arrested in Greenville”: Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates, p. 167.

  73 “Many Mississippi towns were predatory”: Tillinghast, interview, November 28, 2007.

  74 “Mississippi has a black and inky night”: Ibid.

  75 “said they knew nothing at all about the case”: SNCC Papers, reel 39.

  76 “Keep me informed of what happens”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER FOUR: “The Decisive Battlefield for America”

  77 “handle the niggers and the outsiders”: William Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi (New York: WCC Books, 1964, 1965), p. 132.

  77 “one of the wettest dry counties”: Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 18.

  78 “ folks yah met on the street”: Huie, Three Lives, p. 130.

  78 “We don’t bother no white folks”: Ibid., p. 140.

  78 “reddish to vote”: Raines, My Soul Is Rested, p. 260.

  78 “You don’t know me”: William M. Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, with Sheila Isenberg (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994), p. 140.
/>   79 “ for investigation”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 18.

  79 “lay low”: Williams, journal.

  79 “Mississippi is closed, locked”: Belfrage, Freedom Summer, p. 10.

  79 “There is an analogy”: Ibid., p. 11.

  79 “Yesterday morning, three of our people”: Ibid.

  80 “You are not responsible”: Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 363.

  80 “that Communist Jew Nigger lover”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 274.

  80 “ full of life and ideas”: Huie, Three Lives, pp. 46, 54.

  80 “More than any white person”: Ibid., p. 114.

  81 “I am now so thoroughly identified”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 259.

  81 “I would feel guilty”: New York Times, June 25, 1964, p. 18.

  81 “Mississippi’s best hope”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 261.

  81 “We’re actually pretty lucky here”: Woodley, “Recollection of Michael Schwerner,” p. 23.

  81 “I just want you to know”: “Interview with Civil Rights Activist Rita Bender,” in Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft, 2006).

  82 “You must be that Communist-Jew”: Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid, p. 274.

  82 “That Jewboy is dead!”: Ball, Murder in Mississippi, p. 32.

  82 “a marked man”: Huie, Three Lives, p. 81.

  82 “I belong right here in Mississippi”: Ibid., p. 117.

  82 “Mickey could count on Jim”: Ibid., p. 95.

  82 “Mama,” he said, “I believe I done found”: “Mississippi—‘Everybody’s Scared,’ ” Newsweek, July 6, 1964, p. 15.

  83 “a born activist”: Carolyn Goodman, “Andrew Goodman—1943-1964,” in Erenrich, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 321.

  83 “Because this is the most important thing”: New York Times, June 25, 1964.

  83 “I want to go off to war” and “a great idea”: Carolyn Goodman, “My Son Didn’t Die in Vain!” with Bernard Asbell, Good Housekeeping, May 1965, p. 158.

  83 “We couldn’t turn our backs”: New York Times, June 25, 1964.

  83 “I’m scared”: Carolyn Goodman Papers, SHSW.

  84 “Don’t worry,” he told them: Mills, Like a Holy Crusade, p. 103.

 

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