162“inconsequential and fleeting”: Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (New York: Scribner, 2003), 139.
162“that made a believer out of me. Instantly”: Ibid. Readers may wonder why. Stokely told me years ago that it was the image of young people—people his own age—engaged in struggle that captured him. Until he saw the sit-ins on television and read about them in the newspapers, civil rights struggles seemed to be something that grown-ups did.
162“I remember my first reaction”: Courtland Cox, interview with author, January 6, 2013.
163“The Negro race, like all races”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today, ed. Booker T. Washington, facsimile reprint of the original 1903 book published by James Pott (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2008), 33.
163their intellectual and political energy was evident: So far, five “SNCC people” have been recipients of MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grants: Bob Moses, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Unita Blackwell, Maria Varela, and Marian Wright Edelman.
164“There will be no more discussion of protest”: This event was described to me in conversation with David Dennis, then a high school student on the campus along with Hubert “Rap” Brown. (Black universities often had schools on their campuses in those days.) Dennis would later become the CORE field director for Mississippi.
165“I was nervous about being under the leadership of any adult”: Lonnie King, interview with author, February 11, 2013.
165“Not long after we began sitting-in”: Ibid.
166“My daddy was a World War II veteran”: Ibid.
166dissolved the student government because of civil rights protests: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 116.
166“I understood why adults favored gradualism”: Lonnie King, interview with author, February 11, 2013.
166“We had the confidence of a Mack truck”: McCain, quoted in Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 83.
167“Something happened to me”: Anne Moody, The Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 235.
167“There was a clarity about everything”: Johnson, quoted in Emilye Crosby, “The Politics of Movement History,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, ed. Emilye Crosby (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 19.
167a voter-registration wing and a direct-action wing: Nashville, Tennessee, student leader Diane Nash headed the direct-action wing, and Charlotte, North Carolina, student protest leader Charles Jones headed the voter-registration wing.
168“was like a stop on the Underground Railroad”: Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, “Standing Tall,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow, ed. Holsaert et al., 168.
169“[Mama Dolly] had this big shotgun”: Charles Sherrod, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
169“When we slept at night”: Preacely, “Standing Tall,” 170.
170young black people emerged to help him: In rural Chisholm Mission, about twenty miles from McComb, Hollis Watkins was told that Martin Luther King had come to McComb and traveled there to meet him. He was directed to Moses and asked him if he was Reverend King. Moses told him no and explained that he was in town to work on voter registration. He asked Hollis and his friend Curtis Hayes, who had accompanied him to McComb, if they would be willing to help. Both said yes. Charles E. Cobb Jr., On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008), 283–284.
170a local nonviolent organization: The organization was the Pike County Nonviolent Movement. Hollis was president; Curtis was vice president.
171“I’ve been expecting you”: Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 49.
171“as you went to bed”: McDew, quoted in Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 60.
171almost everyone in Amite County seemed to know it was there: Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 114.
172“In the mythology of the Movement”: Jack Newfield, “From Liberty in Miss. to Justice in D.C.,” Village Voice, December 2, 1965.
172“Farmers came over and were very anxious to try and register”: Moses, quoted in Dittmer, Local People, 105.
172it quickly became apparent just how dangerous those places were: Dittmer, Local People, 108.
172Britt later reported to SNCC: Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 230.
173“Can we really keep doing this?”: Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, 51.
173sit-ins were not why they had invited them to McComb: Sit-ins were not why Moses had come to McComb, either. The student protests caught Moses, McDew, and others working on voter registration by surprise. McDew was in McComb at the time for Moses’s voter-registration effort. He commented that when he was confronted with the fact of student protest, “I thought about Gandhi when he saw his people massed for protest. ‘There go our people,’ he said. ‘We have to hurry and catch up with them.’” Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, 53.
173“had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet”: Moses, quoted in Taylor Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2013), 44.
174“I had become part of something else”: Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, 56.
174“If you went into Mississippi”: Robinson, quoted in 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: Avalon Publishing Group, 2006), 145.
175to be staffed largely by SNCC and CORE field secretaries: This effort was funded by the newly created Voter Education Project (VEP) based in Atlanta and funded with money from the Taconic Foundation. The COFO proposal for funding submitted in February 1962 was not approved until August. And although only $14,000 was granted for Mississippi, it enabled SNCC and CORE field secretaries to work on subsistence salaries for a year.
175Moses and SNCC targeted the Delta: The Delta was also the real center of white power in the state.
175“My position”: Bob Moses, interview with author, April 25, 2013.
177“Steptoe and other people [in Amite County] chided me a lot”: Ibid.
177“Daddy wanted to put a gun in the car”: Eldridge W. Steptoe Jr., transcript of interview with Jimmy Dykes for the University of Southern Mississippi Oral History Project, November 14, 1995, 10, University of Southern Mississippi Oral History Collections, Hattiesburg.
177“I asked a local man to fire on anyone”: Peacock, quoted in Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 311–312.
178Both sides argued their positions passionately: The quotations in this paragraph from the discussion about nonviolence come from King, Freedom Song, 314.
179“Don’t you see?”: Guyot, quoted in Taylor Branch Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Touchstone Edition, 1999), 331.
179“At a mass meeting two nights after the last shooting”: Harris, quoted in Mary King, Freedom Song, 312.
180“My instructions were that nobody was to have guns”: Charles Sherrod, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
180in the rifles sight of an angry young black man: Shirley Miller Sherrod, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
181“Mrs. Brewer asked me what did SNCC mean”: Block, quoted in Umoja, We Will Shoot Back, 83.
181“spilling gas everywhere”: Block, quoted in ibid., 111.
182“When I saw Red had a rifle”: Bernard Lafayet
te, interview with author, March 1, 2013.
183“Things happened so fast”: Sales, quoted in Cobb, On the Road to Freedom, 243.
183began purchasing large quantities of ammunition and some weapons: Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), 102–103.
183“Wal, in this county”: Strickland, quoted in Carmichael, Ready for Revolution, 458.
183“and Stokely wasn’t inside the house”: Ivanhoe Donaldson, comment to author.
184“I got three guns from Mr. Steptoe”: Chuck McDew, interview with author, March 23, 2012.
184“there really wasn’t any lengthy discussion”: Ibid.
185“The fire chief said the bomb was meant for us”: Dorie Ladner, interview with author, May 30, 2013.
185“I didn’t think about white people and violence”: Ibid.
186“I am not a violent person”: Ibid.
Chapter Six: Standing Our Ground
187recalls being in the courtroom of the county courthouse: David Dennis, interview with author, March 9, 2013.
188“There are only two bad sons of bitches”: Noble, quoted in ibid.
188“Every white man in that town”: Mateo Suarez, “An Oral History with Matt Suarez,” interview with Harriet Tanzman, October 25, 2003, Civil Rights Documentation Project, University of Sothern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, www.usm.edu/crdp/html/transcripts/manuscript-suarez_matt.shtml.
189“was always fearless”: Mamie Chinn, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
189“He was raised to believe”: Clarence Chinn, interview with author, October 30, 2012.
189“Nowhere was there a pamphlet”: Emily Stoper, “The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Rise and Fall of a Redemptive Organization,” Journal of Black Studies 8, no. 1 (September 1977): 16.
189“meet the anger of any individual or group”: Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 20.
190“[Chinn] believed we were doing the right thing”: Mateo Suarez, interview with author, June 26, 2012. Although C. O. Chinn is celebrated in Canton today as “father” of the civil rights movement, it must be noted that he lost virtually everything he owned because of his movement commitment. He also served several years in jail.
190“Whenever we have a meeting”: Dave Dennis, interview with author, March 9, 2013.
192“Don’t stop for anything and, if forced to stop, shoot”: James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 252.
192“[Education] was needed to cement the relation”: Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 189.
192“I value my life even more”: Carter, quoted in Bob Adelman, “Birth of a Voter,” CORE reprint, www.crmvet.org/info/63_core_adelman_voter.pdf; first published as “Birth of a Voter: Louisiana Parish Registers 1st Negro in 61 Years,” Ebony, February 1964, 88–98, www.books.google.com/books?id=zjhihJmXoMcC&pg=PA88&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false.
193“a nickel’s worth of red beans”: Long, quoted in Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 44.
194“but most people nevertheless lived in abject poverty”: “The town was little more than an appendage to a sawmill—crude shacks storing the human machinery of industry,” writes historian Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 12.
196their “freedom house”—their living quarters and operational headquarters: Sometimes CORE and SNCC organizers stayed with families, and sometimes, as was the case in Jonesboro, they were given or rented houses from which they operated. These houses were known as “freedom houses” and were often targets of attack because they were generally unarmed.
196“was unbelievably supportive”: Fred Brooks, interview with author, June 30, 2013.
197“What happened,” Brooks related: Ibid.
197“If we had a picket line”: Ibid.
197“Many of these guys were older people! Old people!”: Ibid.
198had, in fact, been born in Natchez, Mississippi: Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 341.
198had studied engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans: Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South (New York: Basic Books 2001), 36.
198“The concept that we are going to go South”: Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 341.
198“They were looking for some black policemen to do their dirty work”: Thomas, quoted in Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 32.
199an armed escort for Moore and Lesser as they drove back to Monroe later that night: Ibid., 34–35.
199The police chief also ordered two of the protesters’ mothers arrested: Ibid., 36–37.
199“there was going to be some killing going on”: Thomas, quoted in ibid., 37–38.
200Jackson’s wife had opened fire on them: Ibid., 40.
201“I got out of the car and realized that I was surrounded”: Fenton, quoted in ibid., 43.
201“Fenton was the one”: Fred Brooks, interview with author, June 30, 2013.
202“I hope that they will become a civic organization”: Fenton, quoted in Fred Powledge, “Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro Unusual Town,” New York Times, February 21, 1965.
202“We were telling [CORE’s national leadership]”: Dave Dennis, interview with author, June 24, 2013.
202“The Deacons have the effect”: Haley, quoted in Roy Reed, “Armed Negro Unit Spreads in South,” New York Times, June 6, 1965.
204“I think it’s best to discuss the controllable things”: Moses, quoted in Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 318.
205“CORE nonviolence—never a way of life, but only a strategy—ended”: James Farmer, introduction to Inge Powell Bell, CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence (New York: Random House, 1968), v; see also Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 69.
205“four tiers of membership in the Jonesboro Deacons”: Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 54.
206forming a women’s auxiliary—”Deaconettes”: Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 111.
206“A number of these men were church-going folk”: Dave Dennis to author, June 23, 2012.
206“Let’s call ourselves the Deacons”: Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Pete Seeger, and Jeanne Humphries, Ballads of Black America, 1972, Smithsonian Folkways, Archive Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC, sound recording.
207On March 8 students organized a boycott of the high school: United Press International, March 29, 1965.
207“Men, take firing positions”: Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3; see also Fred Brooks, interview with author, June 30, 2013.
207into other parts of Louisiana, and then into a few other parts of the South: How large or wide this expansion was remains unclear. It was certainly not to the fifty-five chapters later claimed by the Deacons.
208an entirely new segment of the black population in the South: In the urban North, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (formed in Oakland, California, in October 1966) had a similar effect, as did the NAACP branch organized in Monroe, North Carolina, by Robert Williams, although that branch was not organized for the specific purpose of self-defense, as the Deacons were.
208“no redeeming touch of grace, beauty, or elegance”: Howell Raines, My Soul I
s Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 416.
208“segregated from cradle to coffin”: Quoted in Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 348.
209“tagged as integrationists”: Strain, Pure Fire, 101.
209legislation aimed at destroying the NAACP: These laws required that the names and addresses of all NAACP members and officers be revealed to the state government and required the organization to file an annual affidavit that none of their officers or of any out-of-state parent corporation (such as the national NAACP in New York) was affiliated with any communist, communist-front, or subversive organization, as defined by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When the NAACP refused to file the affidavit, the state attorney general obtained an injunction barring it from “doing any business or acting as a corporation in Louisiana.” See “Louisiana Moves to Oust N.A.A.C.P.,” New York Times, March 2, 1956.
210“We have better things to do”: Quoted in Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 354.
210“My husband could never go out”: Valeria Hicks, quoted in Paul Pederson, “Deacons Prevented Violence Against Black Struggle in ’60s,” Militant 76, no. 11 (March 19, 2012); also see Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 92–93.
211“Up to that point I embraced nonviolence”: Miller, quoted in Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 96–98.
210the Klan attack never took place: “I knew the men he wanted me to call because the names had already been placed on the wall by the telephone for times and situations we knew would soon come,” says Hicks’s daughter Barbara Hicks Collins. “My father had to prepare his children for the times.” E-mail to author, January 27, 2014.
211Charles Sims, an insurance salesman and a legendary brawler: “I’ve been in jail 27 times,” Sims told an interviewer: “Three cases of speeding, about twenty cases of battery.” Quoted in Philip Ardery, “Charles Sims, Silhouette,” Harvard Crimson, December 10, 1965, www.thecrimson.com/article/1965/12/10/charles-sims-pif-youre-white-and/.
212“It takes violent blacks to combat these violent whites”: Thomas, quoted in Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 357–358.
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