Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "bob-moses"

Here is a useful map of Mississippi.

https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

It is a truism of the era that the further south you travel the more intense grows the racism, the worse becomes the poverty, and the more brutal is the repression. In the mental geography of the Freedom Movement, the South is divided into zones according to the virulence of bigotry and oppression: the "Border States" (Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and portions of Maryland); the "Upper South" (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Texas); and the "Deep South" (the Eastern Shore of Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana). And then there is Mississippi, in a class by itself — the absolute deepest pit of racism, violence, and poverty.

Duing the post-Depression decades of the 1940s and 1950s, most of the South experiences enormous economic changes. "King Cotton" declines as agriculture diversifies and mechanizes. In 1920, almost a million southern Blacks work in agriculture, by 1960 that number has declined by 75% to around 250,000 — resulting in a huge migration off the land into the cities both North and South. By 1960, almost 60% of southern Blacks live in urban areas (compared to roughly 30% in 1930).

But those economic changes come slowly, if at all, to Mississippi and the Black Belt areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. In 1960, almost 70% of Mississippi Blacks still live in rural areas, and more than a third (twice the percentage in the rest of the South) work the land as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers. In 1960, the median income for Afro-Americans in Mississippi is just $1,444 (equal to a bit over $11,000 in 2013), the median income for Mississippi whites is three times higher. More than four out of every five Mississippi Blacks (85%) exist below the official federal poverty line.

Education for Blacks is totally segregated and severely limited. The average funding for Afro-American schools is less than a quarter of that spent to educate white students, and in rural areas the ratio is even more skewed. In 1960, for example, Pike County spends $30.89 to educate each white pupil and only $0.76 cents per Black student. It is no surprise then that only 7% of Mississippi Blacks finish high school, and in the rural areas where children are sent to the fields early in life, functional illiteracy is widespread.

Mississippi is still dominated — economically and politically — by less than 100 plantation barons who lord it over vast cotton fields worked by Black hand-labor using hoes and fingers the way it was done in slavery times. They are determined to keep their labor force cheap and docile. The arch-segregationist Senator James Eastland provides a good example of the economic riches reaped by racism in Mississippi. His huge plantation in Sunflower County produces 5,394 bales of cotton in 1961. He sells that cotton for $890,000 (equal to almost $7,000,000 in 2013 dollars). It costs Eastland $566,000 to produce his cotton for a profit of $324,000 (equal to a bit over $2,500,000 in 2013). The Black men and women who labor in his fields under the blazing sun — plowing, planting, hoeing, and picking — are paid 30 cents an hour (equal to $2.34 in 2013). That's $3.00 for a 10-hour day, $18.00 for a six-day, 60-hour week. The children sent to labor in the fields are paid even less.

This system of agricultural feudalism is maintained by Jim Crow laws, state repression, white terrorism, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Afro-Americans. Overall, whites outnumber Blacks in Mississippi, but the ratio of Blacks to whites is higher than any other state in the union. And in a number of rural counties, Blacks outnumber whites, in some cases by large majorities. Given these demographic realities, the power-elites know white-supremacy can only be maintained if they prevent Afro-Americans from voting. And in that they are ruthless — using rigged "literacy" tests, white-only primaries, poll taxes, arrests, and economic retaliation. And also Klan violence, and even assassinations, which over decades have become an accepted part of Mississippi's southern way of life. On average, six Blacks have been, and are, lynched or killed in racial-murders every year in Mississippi since the 1880s.

According to the 1960 Census, 41% of the Mississippi population is Black, but in 1961 no more than 5% of them are registered to vote. In many of the Black-majority counties not a single Afro-American citizen is registered, not even decorated military veterans. Across the state, of those few Blacks on the voter rolls, only a handful dare to actually cast a ballot. This systematic denial of Black voting rights is replicated in the Black Belt areas of Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, and Southwest Georgia (Mississippi 1-3).

Back in the summer of 1960, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, and other local Black leaders in Mississippi told Bob Moses that they needed help with voter registration more than demonstrations against segregation. He promised he would return in the summer of '61, and in July he begins voter registration work in McComb. Staunch, long-time, Movement supporters such as Harry Belafonte and many of SNCC's student leaders also believe that SNCC should focus on voter registration rather than direct action such as sit-ins and Freedom Rides. They argue that poor, rural Blacks have no money for lunch counters or other public facilities and what they need most is political power that in Mississippi has to begin with winning the right to vote.

Other SNCC leaders — many just released from Parchman Prison and Hinds County Jail — argue that the Freedom Rides and other forms of direct action must continue. The protests are gaining momentum and bringing the Movement into the darkest corners of the Deep South, raising awareness, building courage, and inspiring young and old. They are deeply suspicious of Kennedy's demand that they switch from demonstrations to voter registration, and they are unwilling to abandon the tactics that have brought the Movement so far in so short a time.

In August, the issue comes to a head when SNCC meets at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. After three days of passionate debate, SNCC is split right down the middle — half favor continuing direct action, the other half favor switching to voter registration. Ella Baker proposes a compromise — do both. Her suggestion is adopted. Diane Nash is chosen to head direct action efforts and Charles Jones is chosen to head voter registration activity. Both groups send activists to join Bob Moses in McComb.

Amid the fires of the Freedom Rides and the heat of debate, SNCC as an organization is rapidly evolving away from its campus/student roots. More and more SNCC activists are leaving school to become full-time freedom fighters. With money raised by Belafonte, first Charles Sherrod, then Bob Moses, then others are hired as SNCC "field secretaries," devoting their lives to the struggle in the rural areas and small towns of the south. In September, James Forman becomes SNCC's Executive Director to coordinate and lead far-flung projects and a growing staff. Increasingly, it will be the SNCC field staff from projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Virginia and Maryland who will shape and lead SNCC in the years to come (Direct 1-2).

Black voter registration in the Deep South is entirely controlled by the white power-structure. For decades they have maintained a savage system of oppression, repression, retaliation, and legal restrictions to keep Blacks politically disenfranchised. The "Jim Crow" schools and school attendance laws systematically and deliberately keep Blacks illiterate and ignorant of government and their political rights while at the same time literacy and civics are made the essential requirements for voter registration through the so-called "literacy tests." Brutal violence, often deadly, and swift economic reprisal are used to deter and punish Black men or women who dare attempt to gain the political franchise.

Voter registration procedures in the Deep South — which vary from state to state and county to county — are based on a voter application and a so-called "literacy test" that prospective voters must pass in order to be registered. The system is designed to allow the county Voter Registrars (all of whom are white, of course) to rig the outcome however they wish. Whites are encouraged to register regardless of their education (or lack thereof), while applications from most Blacks are denied even if they answer every question correctly.

In McComb, for example, the "literacy test" consists in part of the Registrar choosing one of the 285 sections of the Mississippi constitution and asking the applicant to read it aloud and interpret it to his satisfaction. He can assign an easy section, or a dense block of legal baffelgab that even law professors cannot agree on. Then it is entirely up to the Registrar to decide if the applicant's reading and interpretation are adequate. Voters are also required to be of "good moral character," and again the Registrar has sole authority to decide who does, or does not, posses sufficient "moral character."

Blacks who attempt to register in defiance of the white power-structure are harassed and threatened. They are fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes. Many are beaten. Some are murdered. …

In urban areas of the Deep South, a few token Blacks — usually ministers, teachers, doctors, and other professionals — are allowed to register, but never enough to affect the outcome of an election. In the rural counties, particularly those with large Black populations, only a handful — or none at all — are permitted to register (Voter 1-3).

With 12,000 residents, McComb is the largest city in Pike County, Mississippi. … Financed by a wealthy oilman, Klavern #700 of the United Klans of America has over 100 members. McComb's mayor is Chairman of the White Citizens Council, the police chief heads the local chapter of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR), a virulently racist white-supremacy organization, and the county sheriff participates in their meetings.

According to the 1960 Census, Blacks comprise 42% of McComb's 12,000 residents. The railroad, now part of the Illinois Central, is still a major employer of both Blacks and whites, and because they are protected by union contract, Black railroad workers cannot be summarily fired for opposing segregation or advocating Black voting rights. From these union ranks emerge activists and leaders of the Pike County Voters League and the local NAACP chapter.

In July of 1961, NAACP leader Reverend C.C. Bryant invites Bob Moses to begin a voter registration project in McComb. Moses is soon joined by SNCC members John Hardy of the Nashville Student Movement and Reginald Robinson from the Civic Interest Group in Baltimore. Webb Owens, a retired railroad man and Treasurer of the local NAACP chapter introduces the SNCC organizers to people in the Black community and urges them to support the voter-registration project with donations of food, money, and housing for the civil rights workers. He takes them to the South of the Border Cafe owned by Aylene Quinn, "Whenever any of [the SNCC workers] come by, you feed 'em, you feed 'em whether they got money or not" he tells her.

Before beginning work, Bob Moses writes to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asking what the federal response will be if Blacks are prevented from registering. In line with the Kennedy administration's promise to defend voting rights if the students will turn away from direct action, the DOJ replies that it will "vigorously enforce" federal statutes forbidding the use of intimidation, threats, and coercion against voter aspirants (McComb 1-2).

Bryant, a brusque, energetic man with a high-pitched voice and a warm handshake, was one of the stalwarts of the Movement. He ran a barbershop in front of his house in Baertown, a small black community the city fathers had deliberately zoned outside the town limits. He also operated a loading crane for the Illinois Central, whose tracks, along with the Gulf, Western & Ohio, cut right through the heart of McComb. On the west side of town were paved streets; a few blocks of retail stores, and the white suburbs, spread out under a canopy of shade trees and embroidered with flowers. On the east, Burgland, the all-black town with its shabby stores, ramshackle houses, and dirt roads. The general air of grinding poverty was broken by the occasional brick house of somebody who worked for the railroad (Heath 4).

C. C. Bryant wasted no time plugging Moses into McComb’s black community. One of the first people he introduced Moses to was retired railroad man and NAACP membership chair, Webb Owens. Every morning for the rest of July, Webb picked Moses up and took him around town, introducing him to key figures in the community. They secured enough support from McComb’s Black community—in $5 and $10 contributions—to support the project.

House to house canvassing began at the start of August. Some honor students from the local high school that Webb had recruited accompanied Moses as he worked his way through McComb’s neighborhoods (Bob Moses 1).

At first, children stopped playing hopscotch and huddled together as I walked by. "He's a Freedom Rider," they whispered. Their wary parents would pass me on the road without meeting my eyes, but I could feel their stares and questions jabbing into my back. Many were frightened; I meant nothing but trouble. I would tell them, "Get ready, the Movement is coming your way," but that wasn't anything they wanted to hear. One man stooped down behind the tomato plants in his garden to avoid me. Another time, a little girl came to the front door and said, "Mama say she not here" (Heath 5).

He often introduced himself as “C. C. Bryant’s voter registration man.” At each house, he would show a voter registration form and ask if the person had ever tried to fill it out. Then, as a way to cut through people’s fear about registering, Moses asked if they wanted to try filling it out right there in their home (Bob Moses 1).

People listened and gave what they could--a nickle, a dime, a quarter--to support a handful of SNCC workers. Soon I was joined by John Hardy, Reggie Robinson, Travis Britt, and a few others who had been in jail in Jackson for taking part in the Freedom Rides. Also, several of the local students got involved. One in particular, Brenda Travis, always bright-eyed and brimming with questions, would sit on a family's porch talking to them for hours if necessary until they were convinced of the need to register. Thanks to Curtis Bryant, who, in addition to being head of the local NAACP, a deacon in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a scoutmaster, was also a high official in the Freemasons, we were able to set up a Freedom School in the Masonic Hall over the Burgland grocery store. Saint Paul's Methodist Church, across the street, agreed to let us hold meetings there too.

The people flocked to our school. All 21 questions on the application form have to be understood. All 285 sections of the Mississippi constitution have to be mastered. When we explained the power of the vote, they squirmed in their chairs and glanced at each other. One heavyset woman up front fanned herself harder every time I mentioned the word freedom. Within a few days we sent several students to the Pike County courthouse in Magnolia. When they learned that they had passed, we held a party that lasted long into the night. It seemed for the moment as if everything would be easy. Then the local paper, the Enterprise-Journal, ran an article on what we were trying to do. Whites became alarmed. The next day, the registrar rejected our students, and that evening one of them, in an incident apparently unrelated to voter registration, was shot at. As the news spread, I noted the panic in people's eyes; they saw a connection. Fewer and fewer came to the Freedom School. (Heath 6-7).

More SNCC workers arrive in McComb direct from the Highlander meeting: Ruby Doris Smith, Marion Barry, Charles Jones, and others. In late August, after training in the tactics of Nonviolent Resistance by the SNCC direct action veterans, two local teenagers — Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes (Muhammad), both of whom go on to become SNCC field secretaries of renown — sit-in at the local Woolworth's lunch counter. They are arrested (McComb 3).

News of the voter registration efforts in McComb spread, and farmers from neighboring Amite and Walthall County reached out to Moses about starting voter registration schools in their areas. These rural areas of Southwest Mississippi were notoriously violent and poor. The Ku Klux Klan was stronger here than in any other part of the state. Many locals in McComb feared SNCC workers would be killed and tried to discourage SNCC from attempting a voter registration campaign. But Moses felt like he had little choice: “You can’t be in the position of turning down the tough areas because the people, then, I think would lose confidence in you” (Bob Moses 3).

Rev. Bryant introduced Moses to Amite County NAACP leader E.W. Steptoe, and the project spread to cover Amite and Walthall Counties. On August 15, Moses accompanied three local people to the Amite County courthouse in Liberty. The registrar forced them to wait in the courthouse for six hours before they were allowed to fill out the forms. As the group drove from the courthouse, a highway patrolman followed them, pulled them over, and arrested Moses. While in custody, Moses placed a loud collect call to John Doar in the U.S. Justice Department and then spent two nights in jail for refusing to pay $5 in court costs.

Two weeks later, Billy Jack Caston, the cousin of the local sheriff [and son-in-law of E. H. Hurst the State Representative], attacked Moses with the blunt end of a knife after he accompanied two more people to the courthouse (Voter Expands 2).

"I remember very sharply that I didn't want to go immediately back into McComb because my shirt was very bloody and I figured that if we went back in we would probably frighten everybody," he recalls. So, Moses washed up before heading back to McComb. He later required eight stitches to close his head wound (Lake 2).

Steptoe didn’t even recognize Moses, when he returned bloodied to the farm with three gashes in his head that required eight stitches. The next day, in an unprecedented move, Moses pressed charges against Caston. Caston was quickly acquitted, but the case drew even more attention to SNCC’s work. White people underestimated the power of Black organizing when SNCC first arrived in McComb. But by the end of August, they realized that SNCC’s campaign wasn’t about helping a handful a Black people vote but ushering in systemic change that would upset the white power structure (Voter Expands 2).

That night in McComb, more than 200 Blacks attend the first Civil Rights Movement mass meeting in the town's history to protest the arrest of the students and the beating of Moses. They vow to continue the struggle.

Brenda Travis, a 15 year old high school student in McComb, canvasses the streets with the SNCC voter-registration workers. To awaken and inspire the adults, she leads other students on a sit-in. For the crime of ordering a hamburger, she is sentenced to a year in the state juvenile prison. She is also expelled from Burgland High School. In response, McComb's Black students form the Pike County Nonviolent Movement — Hollis Watkins is President, Curtis Hayes is Vice President.

The Klan, the Citizens Council, and racist whites in general react violently to Blacks beginning to assert their rights. White "night riders" armed with rifles and shotguns cruise through the Black community at night (McComb 4).

… more SNCC activists came to Southwest Mississippi as the line between direct action and voter registration blurred. SNCC activists like Ruby Doris Smith, Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones, and Marion Barry, many fresh off of a prison stint from the Freedom Rides, recruited high school students and began training them in non-violence. With these young people, the Movement in McComb grew to include direct action protests as well as voter registration.

But those SNCC workers in the rural areas focused solely on voter registration and that work only became more dangerous. A week after Moses’s beating, a white man attacked SNCC’s Travis Britt at the courthouse Amite County, choking and punching him “into a semi-conscious state” as he and Moses took people to register. Two days later, the Wathall County registrar smashed a pistol against the head of John Hardy in his office, and when Hardy stumbled outside, law enforcement arrested him for disturbing the peace (Voter Expands 3).

In late September in Amite County, Herbert Lee, a local volunteer working with Moses. was murdered.


Works cited:

“Bob Moses Goes to McComb.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and uke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/citation-copy...

“Direct Action or Voter Registration?” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...

Heath, William. “The Children Bob Moses Led.” The Washington Post. Web. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...

Lake, Ellen. “Bob Moses.” The Harvard Crimson. December 4, 1964. Web. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/19...

“Mississippi — the Eye of the Storm.” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...

“The McComb Project.” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...

“Voter Registration & Direct Action in McComb MS (Aug-Oct).” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...

“Voter Registration Expands in Southwest Mississippi.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and uke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/voter-...

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

Who was Bob Moses?

With an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and a job teaching mathematics at the prestigious Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York, I was a part of what W. E. B. DuBois termed "the talented tenth"--a black man who could succeed in the white world playing by white rules. I had had an elitist education since I was eleven, passing a citywide competitive exam to attend Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan. President of my senior class, I received an academic scholarship to Hamilton, where I was one of three black students at the college.

It was at Hamilton, thanks to my French professor, that I discovered Camus. I read The Rebel and The Plague and began asking hard political questions: "Can revolution be humane?" "Can the `victim' overthrow the `executioner' without assuming his office?" For a time I believed that the only change worth working for was a change of heart, and so I joined a group of campus Pentecostals who traveled on weekends to Times Square to testify to the coming of the Kingdom. I considered becoming a preacher like my grandfather, but my father had his doubts. "That's not just any job," he said. "You've got to be called." …

In the fall of 1956 I began graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. … Before long, however, I tired of thinking about thinking and the meaning of meaning. In that remote realm of tautologies, indexes, and surds, I was in danger of forgetting that the meaning of life was no abstract speculation but my immediate and concrete concern. …

Then in the spring of 1958 my forty-three-year-old mother died of cancer; my father was so distraught he had to be hospitalized at Bellevue for several months. I dropped out of Harvard, accepted a job teaching math at Horace Mann High School, and moved back to Harlem to look after him. My father and I had always been close; we used to have long talks about what America denied and offered. Like many of his generation, he had been hamstrung by the depression. Intelligent, articulate, and handsome, he sacrificed his talents for the sake of his family, accepting a low-paying job as a security guard at Harlem's 369th Division Armory. He and my mother scrimped and saved to ensure that my brothers and I would get ahead. The stress and strain took their toll: my mother once suffered a minor breakdown, and my father would sometimes slip into fantasies that his name was not Gregory Moses but Gary Cooper--a man brave enough, in spite of his cowardly town, to stand up for what was right.

My only civil rights activity at that time was to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools that Bayard Rustin sponsored in Washington. Then, one day in February 1960, I saw a picture in the New York Times of the sit-ins that had just begun in Greensboro, North Carolina: a row of neatly dressed black students sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter, while a crowd of white toughs in duck-tails and sleeveless T-shirts waved a Confederate flag and shouted at their backs. Some of the students tried to read books, others stared calmly at the camera. I was struck to the core by the determination on their faces. They weren't cowed, and they weren't apathetic--they meant to finish what they had begun. Here was something that could be done. I simply had to get involved.

Over spring break, I visited my father's brother, a teacher at Hampton Institute in Virginia. One day I saw some students picketing stores in Newport News. I slipped into the line of march and suddenly felt a great release. All my life I had repressed my resentments and played it cool. Now the sense of affirmation and the surge of energy that came from this mere gesture at protesting were exhilarating. I had had a taste of action and wanted more. That evening I went to a mass meeting where Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke. He talked about the need to collect money to defend the Reverend Martin Luther King from legal harassment, mentioning that Bayard Rustin was directing a fund drive in New York.

When I got back to Harlem, I volunteered my services to the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, and so every day after school, I devoted time to organizing a Harry Belafonte fundraising rally at the armory where my father worked. But I didn't feel right licking envelopes while others were putting their lives on the line. I confided my discontent to Bayard Rustin, whose advice I respected.

"Go down to Atlanta, Bob," he told me. "I'll write to Ella Baker to tell her you're coming. She and Martin will find something for you to do."

As soon as my teaching duties were over for the summer, I packed my bags and took a bus headed south (Heath 1-3).

“The sits-in woke me up,” recalled Harlem, New York-native Robert “Bob” Moses, discussing how his involvement with southern struggle began. When he first arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960, there was no student movement in the state. Moses was sent by Ella Baker to find students from the Deep South to participate in a SNCC conference that October in Atlanta. SNCC’s voter registration efforts began when Bob Moses met Cleveland, Mississippi NAACP president Amzie Moore, one of the people Miss Baker had put him in contact with. Moore decided to attend the October conference and placed the idea of voter registration on SNCC’s table.

Moses learned of the denial of Black voting rights from his discussions with Amzie Moore. “I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe; I never knew that there was denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.” Moore also told Moses that he wanted to use the energy of the student activists in SNCC for voter registration. The young math teacher promised to come back the following summer after his classes at the Horace Mann school were out.

When Moses returned in 1961, Moore told him he was not quite ready to begin organizing in the Delta and sent him to his NAACP colleague, C.C. Bryant, in McComb. There, with other local community leaders, Bob Moses began SNCC’s first voter registration organizing effort.

What SNCC workers learned while working in that small Southwest Mississippi city, and the surrounding rural counties, forever shaped SNCC’s organizing style. Moses nurtured the development of local grassroots leaders, and he recognized the untapped potential power and unheard voice of locals who spoke up at meetings and participated in voter registration efforts. ‘‘Leadership is there in the people,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are, how are we going to get some leaders…If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge” (Bob Moses 1-2).

Herbert Lee

A Wisconsin Republican, John Doar had been asked to stay on in the Kennedy Justice Department partly because he had pioneered a go-out-and-poke-around-for-yourself approach to civil rights lawsuits, which made him unusual among Washington desk-bound lawyers. With Moses, Doar visited Negro farmers who were afraid to come to registration meetings because of the intangible reality of rural life—ominous messages maids and sharecroppers were hearing—and several were particularly worried about signs of anger on the part of E. H. Hurst, a state representative of local influence, against Herbert Lee, an NAACP farmer who attended Moses’ registration meetings. Doar promised to drive out to Lee’s farm on his next trip, but he found waiting at his office the next day a message from Moses that Hurst had just shot Lee to death in full public view outside the Liberty cotton gin (Branch 50-51).

Herbert Lee had played a key role in supporting the Amite County voter registration movement. He helped found the Amite branch of the NAACP along with E.W. Steptoe in 1953, and he was an active member even after law enforcement began cracking down on the organization in 1954. As a prosperous independent dairy farmer, Lee could sell his goods across state lines where he would get a better price and protect himself from the economic pressures from local whites for his civil rights work. When SNCC came to Amite to help Steptoe register blacks to vote, Lee offered to ferry activists around the county as they canvassed the area to recruit registration applicants. Because of his economic independence, Lee had the freedom to openly fight the area’s oppressive racial policies, but this would draw the ire of his white neighbors (Ramsey-Smith 68).

Herbert Lee was the first local person to be killed because of his involvement with SNCC. On September 25, 1961, Lee drove to the cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi. State legislator E.H. Hurst approached Lee with a gun in his hand saying he wanted to talk. “I won’t talk to you unless you put the gun down,” Lee said. Hurst ran towards Lee’s truck and shot him.

The murder took place in broad daylight in front of a dozen people. “Lee’s body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in,” Bob Moses remembered. Hurst claimed that Lee had attacked him with a tire iron, and the sheriff coerced the Black witnesses into corroborating his story. Hurst was acquitted by an all-white coroner’s jury that same afternoon.

Lee and Hurst lived on adjoining farms and played together as boys. Through adulthood they maintained a cordial relationship. At one point, Hurst had helped Lee apply for a loan for his farm. Hurst’s affections towards Lee changed when he started attending voter registration classes and driving Bob Moses around the county. His association with SNCC made him a target.

The murder was devastating to SNCC. At Lee’s funeral, his wife approached Moses and said, “You killed my husband! You killed my husband!” “I had no answer,” he remembered, “It is one thing to get beaten, quite another to be responsible, even indirectly, for a death.”

Lee’s death forced SNCC to confront its inability to protect local people from white retaliatory violence. Before Lee was killed, the Department of Justice sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to Amite County. E.W. Steptoe and Bob Moses spoke with Doar and told him that Hurst had threatened Lee because of his involvement with the Movement. The Department of Justice refused to offer Lee any protection.

After Lee’s death, Doar asked the FBI to open a federal investigation. The local FBI rejected his request three times before they finally looked into Lee’s death. Meanwhile, SNCC tried to find a witness who could testify in a federal case. A man named Louis Allen recanted and offered to testify against E.H. Hurst. But word got out about Allen’s offer. For three years, Allen faced harassment and economic reprisals for his willingness to testify and on April 7, 1964, the night before he planned to leave Mississippi, he was killed outside his home (Herbert 1-2).

Interviewed several years later by Eyes on the Prize, Moses said: … the Citizens Councils and the Klans in Mississippi, they were in back of the action which resulted in those kind of murders. Because what we knew was that there were meetings in Liberty drawing cars and license plates from all across the southern part of Mississippi, and on up into the middle part of Mississippi. People coming and sitting down talking, what are they going to do about this voter registration drive. Now, we don't know what they planned, but we do know that after the meetings there's violence began to break out, direct attacks on us as the voter registration workers and then these murders. First Herbert Lee and then a couple years later Lewis Allan, both killed right there in Liberty, Mississippi (Interview 2).

One girl in particular was affected by Moses’ condition, as he wrote, “At the mass meeting, a young girl kept staring at me… I think the sight of my battered and bandaged head registered some great outrage in Brenda [Travis].” The next day, August 30th, high school student Brenda Travis, along with recent graduates Bobbie Talbert and Ike Lewis, organized a sit-in at the white section of the Greyhound bus terminal in McComb. Just as in the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter, police quickly arrested the young activists and sent them to jail for roughly one month (Ramsey-Smith 67).

On October 2, the NAACP and the SCLC paid for the bond of the five young activists, including the high school students Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis. While Watkins, Hayes, and the others could risk their safety by continuing their civil rights work, Travis and Lewis wanted to further organize their classmates to build a larger nonviolent student movement. This presented a difficult problem for the black Burglund High School, where school administrators had little appetite for the chaos that would be brought on by open civil rights work. The murder of Herbert Lee made the issue especially sensitive, as students would no doubt use him as a symbol to continue rebelling. Commodore Dewey Higgins, principal of the high school, expelled the two students in hopes that the rest of the student body would be too afraid to continue organizing with SNCC (Ramsey-Smith 70).

… more than 100 Black high-school students led by Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes ditch school and march in McComb to protest Lee's killing and the expulsion of Brenda Travis. When they kneel in prayer at City Hall, they are arrested, as are the SNCC staff who are with them. Bob Moses, Chuck McDew, and Bob Zellner (SNCC's first white field secretary) are beaten. The SNCC workers are charged with "Contributing to the delinquency of minors," a serious felony.

More than 100 students boycott the segregated Burgland High School rather than sign a mandatory pledge that they will not participate in civil rights activity. SNCC sets up "Nonviolent High" for the boycotting students with Moses teaching math, Dion Diamond teaching science, and Chuck McDew teaching history. Nonviolent High is one of the seeds from which grow the "Freedom Schools" that spread across the state three years later in the summer of '64.

Late in October, an all-white jury convicts the SNCC members on the "Contributing" charge. Their attorneys appeal, but bail is set at $14,000 each (equal to $107,000 in 2012 dollars). Unable to raise such a huge amount, they languish in prison. With their SNCC teachers in jail, Nonviolent High cannot continue, and the boycotting students are accepted by Campbell Junior College in Jackson.

Meanwhile, arrests, beatings, and shootings continue. CORE Freedom Riders are brutally attacked by a white mob when they try to integrate the McComb Greyhound station. Paul Potter and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are dragged from their car and beaten in the street when they come to McComb to support the Movement. Shotgun blasts from a Klan nightrider almost kill Dion Diamond and John Hardy.

Despite their repeated promises of protection for voter registration, Kennedy, the Justice Department, and the FBI do nothing. The DOJ's legal efforts are feeble and ineffective. The arrests, the reign of terror, and the brazen murder of Herbert Lee by a state official, all take their toll. The McComb-area voter registration drive is suppressed — for the moment.

Finally, in December, SNCC manages to raise the bail money and the jailed SNCC staff are released on appeal.

In a narrow sense, McComb is a defeat for SNCC — the project is suppressed and driven out by arrests, brutality, and murder. But in a broader sense it is an important milestone; the crucial lessons learned in McComb form the foundation for years of organizing to come, not just in Mississippi but in hard places across the South — places like Selma Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In McComb they discover that courage is contagious and that local people — particularly young people — will respond to outside organizers. They discover that as student activists they have much to teach, but also much to learn from the community, and that if they respect the community the community will in turn protect, feed, and nurture them. And from the community will come new leaders and new organizers to expand and sustain the struggle.

Bob Moses wrote: One of the things that we learned out here [in Amite County] was that we could find family in Mississippi. We could go anyplace in Mississippi before we were through, and we knew that somewhere down some road there was family. And we could show up there unannounced with no money or no anything and there were people there ready to take care of us. That's what we had here in Amite. One of the things that happened in the movement was that there was a joining of a young generation of people with an older generation that nurtured and sustained them. ... It was an amazing experience (McComb 4-7).

Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).


Works cited:

“Bob Moses.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-mo...

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters. Digital Education Systems. Web. https://library.duke.edu/digitalcolle...

Heath, William. “The Children Bob Moses Led.” The Washington Post. Web. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/...

“Herbert Lee Murdered.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/herber...

“Interview with Bob Moses.” Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries. May 19, 1986. Web. http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/t...

“The McComb Project.” Civil Rights Movement History 1961. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.h...

Ramsey-Smith, Alec. “A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg”: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Local Voting Rights Activism in McComb, Mississippi, 1928-1964. Department of History, University of Michigan. Web. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstr...

“Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." Say It Loud, Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

After being released from jail in December of 1961, Bob Moses and the other SNCC organizers analyze the successes and failures of the McComb voter registration campaign. It is clear that racist opposition to Black voting rights in Mississippi is so ferocious, so violent, so widespread, that only by uniting all of the state's civil rights organizations into a coordinated effort is there any hope of success.

Moses and Tom Gaither of CORE circulate a memo proposing formation of a coalition. They are determined not to repeat in Mississippi the unproductive conflicts between national civil rights organizations that have so often occurred elsewhere. Statewide NAACP Chairman Aaron Henry agrees with them. In February [1962], representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP, along with local community leaders, create the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to be a vehicle through which civil rights organizations working in Mississippi can work together. The name is taken from an earlier coalition effort to support the Freedom Riders. A grant request to fund COFO voter registration activities is submitted to the Voter Education Project (VEP).

The national leaders of the three organizations initially oppose the idea out of fear that each will lose visibility within it — with consequent loss of northern funds. But the local activists and leaders on the ground in Mississippi, those who are closest to the suffering of the people and the necessities of the struggle in that state, insist that success — indeed, survival — require organizational cooperation rather than competition.

In August, a meeting is held in Clarksdale to formalize COFO. Attending are Moses, Jim Forman and a dozen other SNCC workers, Dave Dennis of CORE, James Bevel of SCLC, and others. NAACP leader Aaron Henry is elected President, Rev. R.L.T. Smith is named Treasurer, attorney Carsie Hall becomes Secretary, and Bob Moses is appointed the COFO state-wide Project Director. An agreement is made that CORE will focus its registration efforts in Mississippi's 4th Congressional District centered around Meridian and Canton, SNCC will work the other four districts including the Delta region around Greenwood and the Pearl River area around McComb. For their part, SCLC will continue its Citizenship school program throughout the state, and the NAACP will concentrate on the judicial aspects of the struggle.

In September, VEP funds COFO organizing projects in the Mississippi Delta counties of Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, and Sunflower where SNCC field secretaries are already working. Over the following year VEP gives more than $50,000 (equal to $380,000 in 2012) to a number of voter registration projects in Mississippi (Council 1-2).

When the arrested SNCC field secretaries are finally released from jail in Pike County, they join other SNCC organizers — many newly hired with VEP money — in resuming voter registration work. Bob Moses, Paul & Catherine Brooks, James Bevel & Diane Nash (newly married), and Bernard Lafayette in Jackson; Lester McKinnie in Laurel; Charles McLaurin, Dorie Ladner, and Colia Lidell in Ruleville; James Jones in Clarksdale, Mattie Bivens in Cleveland, Frank Smith in Holly Springs; Emma Bell in Greenville; and Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins in Hattiesburg.

Sam Block, a young Mississippi native and SCLC Citizenship School teacher, is assigned to Greenwood, the seat of Leflore County and the unofficial capitol of the Mississippi Delta. Here, cotton is still king, 800,000 bales pass through Greenwood each year. For the most part the work is still hand-labor, plantation-style — but under the urging of the White Citizens Council, land owners are now bringing in machines to replace and displace Black field-hands. With the rise of the Freedom Movement and increased Black assertiveness, "Negro-removal" is now the strategy of Mississippi's white power-structure. Between 1950 and 1960, some 200,000 Blacks are forced to leave the Delta, by 1964 the number of Black sharecroppers is roughly half of what it was six years earlier. Most of those forced off the land migrate to the urban ghettos of the North.

Those who still remain endure grinding poverty and unyielding oppression. According to the 1960 Census, annual median income for rural Blacks in the Delta is just $452 (equal to $3,800 in 2017). On average, white children in the Delta receive 10 years of public schooling, Blacks less than 5 years in schools that are so ill-equipped that few are accredited. Segregation remains absolute and the effects are stark.

For Blacks, segregation, exploitation, and abuse permeate every aspect of life. Though almost two-thirds of the county is Black, 131 of the county's 168 hospital beds are reserved for whites-only. More than 80% of Blacks live in dwellings rated "sub-standard," but their tar-paper shacks with a single light bulb are charged more for electricity than whites living in modern homes.

In Leflore County, almost 100% of whites are registered to vote, compared to just 268 Blacks (2%). In the seven years since the Brown decision, only 40 Blacks have been allowed to register (compared to 1,664 whites (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 1-2).

In 1961, Mississippi-native Sam Block was stationed at an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, as Freedom Riders streamed into Mississippi. He watched them excitedly. “I just wanted to be part of it,” recalled Block, “to be part of a movement that was doing something to eradicate the conditions that I was forced to live in all my life but wasn’t able to do anything about.”

After leaving the Air Force, he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Mississippi and soon ran into an old family acquaintance and movement stalwart, Amzie Moore. “Get involved with the Movement,” Moore urged Block. With Moore’s help, Block, then 23-years-old, quietly set up a group of semi-underground citizenship schools around town.

This work caught the attention of SNCC’s Mississippi project director Bob Moses, who was planning to expand SNCC’s voter registration efforts into the Delta region. He asked Block where he would like to work. “Greenwood, Mississippi,” Block responded, thinking back on the lynching of Emmett Till in nearby Money, Mississippi. Moses asked again if Block was sure that he wanted to work in Greenwood, a bastion of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council. Again, Sam said yes.

He entered the cotton processing city without an established network of contacts. He remembered “hanging out in the pool halls, wherever people were, the Laundromat, run around the grocery stores,” to meet people. He also went from door-to-door “sort of testing the pulse of the people.”

It did not take long for his presence to become known. His landlady received threatening phone calls and asked Block to move. He lived out of an abandoned car for a time and had difficulty finding enough food to eat. But he was committed. “If I got a chance to do anything to help people, especially black people, then I was gonna do it.” (Sam 1-3).

Sam is soon joined by Rust College graduate Willie (Wazir) Peacock, and then Luvaugn Brown, and Lawrence Guyot.

Sam Block: I canvassed every day and every night until I found about seven or eight people to carry up to register ... We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and he asked me, he said, "Nigger, where you from?" I told him, "Well, I'm a native Mississippian." He said, "Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you from? ... I know you ain't from here, cause I know every nigger and his mammy." I said, "Well, you know all the niggers, do you know any colored people?"

He got angry. He spat in my face and walked. So he came back and turned around and told me, "I don't want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack your clothes and get out and don't never come back no more." I said, "Well, sheriff, if you don't want to see me here, I think the best thing for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, 'cause I'm here to stay, I came here to do a job and this is my intention, I'm going to do this job."

White racists attack the SNCC office, and the SNCC organizers barely escape over the roof tops. The building is trashed, and the frightened landlord evicts them. The fear is so intense that people cross to the other side of the street rather than walk past Sam or Wazir and risk whites observing them in proximity to the "race-mixing agitators." It is months before anyone else in the Black community will rent space intended for voter registration work.

Sam and Wazir dig in deep, and hold on. They continue organizing in Greenwood without an office. Fear is pervasive among Greenwood Blacks. Fear of being fired. Fear of being evicted. Fear of beatings, bombings, and murder. Fear that the SNCC workers will stir up trouble and violence and then leave. But gradually, week by week, month by month, as Sam and Wazir hold on, trust is built and their courage inspires first the young students and then their parents (Mississippi Voter 3-4).

About defying white Greenwood police, “They knew we were Mississippians, and to see us facing up to them and standing up to them, they couldn’t understand what had happened, what had gone wrong,” Peacock remembered (Willie 1).

As Block sunk his roots into Greenwood’s Black community, he recognized that there was a hidden anger and desire for change. Local people “were looking for someone who could give form and expression to ideas and thoughts they had had for years,” reflected Block (Sam 3).

Wazir Peacock: Greenwood was so organized — there was not one block that we couldn't have — it was like guerrilla war, we could stop anywhere and duck out of sight, go into somebody's house. At every block in the Black neighborhood. So that's one thing that kept us alive 'cause they would see us at night and the cops would think it was an opportunity to get us, speed up and try to turn around. When they turned around we'd be watching out a window somewhere, see them come back to try to find us.

A new office is finally rented, a church dares to open its doors for a voter registration meeting, and the community begins coming together. Slowly, one by one, two by two, a few Leflore County Blacks begin to make the dangerous journey down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. But in the first six months, only five Blacks of the dozens who try are actually registered (Mississippi Voter – Greenwood 5).

Jackson is Mississippi's capitol and most significant urban area. In 1960, 40% of its 150,000 residents are Black, and Blacks are a clear majority in the surrounding rural areas of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties. Jackson is totally segregated, and Blacks are restricted to the lowest-paid menial jobs in the public and private sectors. Jackson is a White Citizens Council stronghold and the Council dominates the local political scene. Mayor Allen Thompson is a rabid segregationist, as are the Governor and state legislators. A miasma of fear lays heavy over the Black community, ruthless police brutality is common, and Klan terrorists lurk in the shadows ready to strike down anyone who challenges the racial order.

In the fall of 1961 and into early 1962, SNCC organizers try to organize protests and register voters in Jackson, but make little headway against police repression and the grip of fear. SNCC moves its main focus into the Mississippi Delta region around Greenwood where there is more hope of success. This leaves the NAACP as the main civil rights organization with an ongoing presence in Jackson. But the Jackson NAACP is largely moribund, most of its Youth Councils are dormant, and only the heroic efforts of NAACP State Field Director Medgar Evers keeps the organization barely alive.

The NAACP's national leadership shun direct-action protests in favor of lawsuits in federal Court, but unlike Alabama where Federal Judge Frank Johnson often rules in favor of civil rights, Mississippi Federal Judge Harold Cox (appointed by President Kennedy) is an ardent segregationist. He almost always rules against the NAACP, forcing them to appeal each case to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans, a process that slows and limits progress.

The national NAACP also emphasizes voter registration, but unlike SNCC who work with the masses of Black sharecroppers, maids, and laborers, the NAACP concentrates their efforts on the small Black elite — ministers, professionals, teachers, business owners. But in Mississippi, the Black elite are vulnerable to the economic terrorism of the White Citizens Council. With some notable exceptions, in 1962 most of them are still unwilling to risk attempting to register.

Back in the fall of 1961, Tougaloo student Colia Lidell (later Colia Lafayette) and Tougaloo teacher Hunter Bear (John Salter) began reactivating and rebuilding the North Jackson NAACP Youth Council (NJYC). By early 1962 it has slowly begun to make headway against the palpable fear (Jackson 1-3).

Hunter Bear was the product of a racially mixed marriage. Adopted by a family named Salter, Hunter’s father was essentially a full-blooded Indian of the Northeast. His mother was an Anglo, mostly Scottish. He had experienced extreme racism while being raised amongst the Navaho in Arizona. Following the Freedom Rides, wanting to immerse himself in civil rights work in the South, possessing a master’s degree in Sociology, he had sought a teaching position at a Black college in the South and had been hired to instruct at Tougaloo College near Jacksonville. Colia Lidell, a student, had heard him give a speech about American government and “how we needed to become involved in the world outside the campus.” Colia invited him to give a speech in North Jackson about the Interstate Commerce Commission and the meaning of its desegregation order.

I went off to that evening and I spoke. And it was a well-prepared speech. The Interstate Commerce Commission had just issued an order desegregating interstate bus traffic as a result of the Freedom Rides. And on the basis of that there was a little chink [in the social walls of segregation] here and there, but there wasn't much. Mississippi's approach, and that of much of the hard core South, was to just ignore things. But anyway, that was my pioneer voyage into the Mississippi civil rights waters, and everybody was very pleased. So pleased that Colia asked if I'd be the adult advisor to the North Jackson Youth Council. And I said I would.

Medgar Evers, — who I had not yet met, — had expressed great pleasure to Colia that I agreed to do it. He'd heard of me, knew something about my labor background, things like that. I hadn't yet met him. So he was all for it. Before long I met him, and we became good friends and remained close colleagues, comrades you would say (Interview 2-4).

When school resumes in the fall of 1962, they are joined by Tougaloo student Betty Anne Poole, expelled Jackson State students Dorie and Joyce Ladner who have transferred to Tougaloo, and white exchange students Karin Kunstler and Joan Trumpauer. The NJYC continues slow but steady growth, moving their meetings from living rooms to the attic of Virden Grove church. Made up mainly of students from Tougaloo and Jackson State and from Lanier, Hill, and Brinkley high schools, along with some school dropouts and young professor Hunter Bear as their "adult" advisor, they begin distributing the North Jackson Action, a mimeographed newsletter [printed in Memphis and smuggled into Jackson] (Jackson 4).

You know, things occurred that certainly gave the measure of Mississippi's intransigence. The shooting of Corporal Roman Duckworth, Jr. at Taylorville, — Black corporal, military police, five children, wife getting ready to give birth to the sixth child in Laurel. He was asleep in the bus when it crossed from Tennessee into Mississippi. And in Tennessee you could sleep fairly safely in the front of the bus. And the only reason he did that, I think, was a space thing, but in Mississippi, — He was sound asleep in the front of the bus, and they went all the way down and pulled into Taylorville, where a marshal named Kelly shot him to death in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses.

The Free Press, pioneered in that story and many others stories. But these things were happening with a dreary frequency.

At the same time, Meredith, — James Meredith — was making his bid to enter 'Ole Miss. And that was beginning to heat up. I mean, the word was that he just might make it

When we looked at things in late September of '62 we saw that the state was inflamed by the imminent admission of Meredith. People were being knocked off, — Blacks, — in such things as cars hitting them at night when they were walking along the road, — things of that sort. It was a very dangerous time. I mean, these weren't accidents, this was deliberate murder (Interview 4-6).

In early October, Jackson hosts the annual state fair, a major harvest festival. It is completely segregated, the first week is for "whites only," followed by 3 days for "colored." The NJYC calls on Blacks to boycott the "second-hand fair." Any public demonstration, such as picketing, will result in immediate arrest and there is no money for bail. Anyone caught distributing boycott leaflets will also be jailed. Like resistance fighters in occupied territory, the word has to be spread secretly, through clandestine meetings and passing flyers covertly from hand to hand. A telephone tree is organized and sympathizers are asked to call their friends. October 15 is the first day of the "Negro Fair." The boycott is 90% effective, Black fair goers are few and far between to the financial discomfort of white vendors and concessionaires.

Buoyed by the success of the fair boycott, the NJYC and the revived Tougaloo NAACP chapter begin organizing a Christmas boycott of Jackson's downtown merchants (all white, of course). They adopt four key demands:

1. Equality in hiring & promotion

2. End segregation of restrooms, water fountains, lunch counters

3. Courtesy titles such as "Miss," Mrs," "Mister"

4. Service on first-come first-served basis

Medgar Evers tries to negotiate with the merchants but they refuse to meet with him. The boycott targets 150 white stores including all the "downtown" stores. The plan is to start with a small group of pickets whose inevitable arrest will dramatize the boycott, and then follow up with a campus meeting to mobilize support. Despite pleas by Medgar — who is NAACP state Field Director — the national NAACP leadership is unwilling to provide any bail funds. But enough bond money for six protesters is contributed by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), NY attorney Victor Rabinowitz, and Dr. King's Gandhi Fund.

On Saturday December 12, the first civil rights demonstration in Jackson since the Freedom Rides takes place on Capitol Street, the main drag of the downtown shopping district. Led by Hunter Bear, the six pickets raise their signs and a swarm of 50 cops immediately arrest them (Jackson 5-6).

There seemed to be good sentiment for this if we could actually show that we were serious. And to show that we were serious, we decided we had to do two things. We had to distribute masses of leaflets, which like the sale of the Free Press was a "subversive" activity, punishable by arrests and fines and things of that sort. [Under Mississippi law it was a crime to boycott, or advocate boycotting businesses].

And we also had to put ourselves on the line publically. And so Eldri and myself and four Black students [decide] to picket on December 12th in front of the Woolworth's store on Capitol Street (Interview 8).

The mass meeting is held on the Tougaloo campus that night. The next day the NJYC and Tougaloo and high school students begin clandestinely distributing leaflets through Jackson's Black neighborhoods and to Blacks in Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and Yazoo counties. But the end of December, 15,000 flyers have been passed from hand to hand. The telephone tree is activated, speakers are assigned to address church meetings, and "undercover agents" (Black students posing as shoppers) patrol Capitol Street quietly informing out-of-area Black shoppers about the boycott.

Enough bail money is raised for a second team of pickets — Tougaloo students Dorie Ladner and Charles Bracey — to be busted on Capitol Street on December 21. That night, Klan nightriders fire into Hunter Bear's home narrowly missing his baby daughter. Armed guards are posted on the Tougaloo campus (Jackson 7).

At night somebody shot up our house. A bullet missed my daughter Maria, went through her crib, just barely missed her. There was no point depending on the Madison County Sheriff's office for anything other than trouble, and so a number of us stood armed guard on the Tougaloo campus, something which we were to do on a number of occasions. There were points where we even fired a shot or two, — in fact, we fired more than a few shots. But we didn't publicize that part of it Interview 9).

NY attorney William Kunstler (father of Tougaloo exchange student Karin Kunstler), Gandhi Fund lawyer Clarence Jones, and local Jackson attorney Jess Brown devise a new legal strategy. Pointing out the obvious fact that civil rights demonstrators cannot possibly receive a fair trial in segregated state courts that only allow whites to serve on juries, they petition to have the picket cases transferred to federal court under an old Reconstruction Era statute. The racist Federal Judge Harold Cox denies their petition and they appeal his ruling to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. While the case is working its way through the judicial system, the pickets are free on bail and their trials are postponed. The removal petition eventually succeeds, setting a precedent for transferring civil rights cases from all over the South to federal court where they enter a legal limbo and are never brought to trial.

The Christmas boycott is surprisingly effective, honored by roughly 60% of the Black population. And once the pressure of providing Christmas gifts to children is past, the boycott gains strength as it continues into 1963. In tacit admission of the economic hardship being suffered by the white merchants, the City waives the annual property taxes for businesses being boycotted. But despite their economic losses, the white business owners refuse to negotiate with Blacks or make any changes in segregation. And the White Citizens Council stands ready to foreclose mortgages, stop supplies, and mobilize a white boycott against any merchant who wavers in steadfast support of segregation (Jackson 8-9).


Works cited:

“Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Formed in Mississippi.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.htm

“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm

“Jackson MS Boycotts.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Mississippi Voter Registration – Greenwood.” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Sam Block.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/sam-bl...

“Willie Peacock.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/willie...

Here is a useful map of Mississippi. https://socketize.com/7124/no7141/

Defying generations of white-supremacy, a small trickle of Leflore county Blacks continue to show up at the courthouse even though they know they won't be allowed to register. For sharecroppers and farm laborers in the Mississippi Delta, winter is the lean time, the hard time. With no work and nothing to eat, they rely on federal surplus food commodities for survival. The White Citizens Council strikes back — at poor people in general, not just the few Blacks trying to register. The Council controls Greenwood politics, no politician can win election without their support, and as winter closes in they order the County Board of Supervisors to stop distributing federal food aid to 22,000 Leflore County citizens — most of them Black, a few poor white or Choctaw.

In this era before Food Stamps, the federal "commodity" programs staved off starvation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided basic food commodities — bags of flour, rice & beans, boxes of canned goods, dairy products, and so on — to states, counties, and private welfare agencies who distributed them to poor and hungry families. …

By mid-winter, conditions are desperate. Sam Block and Wazir Peacock inform SNCC headquarters in Atlanta:

Saturday, January 19, 1963. ... these people here are in a very, very bad need for food and clothes. Look at a case like this man, named Mr. Meeks, who is thirty-seven years old. His wife is thirty-three years old, and they have eleven children, ages ranging from seventeen down to eight months. Seven of the children are school age and not a one is attending school because they have no money, no food, no clothes, and no wood to keep warm by, and they now want to go register. The house they are living in has no paper or nothing on the walls and you can look at the ground through the floor and if you are not careful you will step in one of those holes and break your leg.

…

SNCC sends word to its supporters on college campuses and in Friends of SNCC chapters throughout the country — and people respond. Comedian Dick Gregory charters a plane to deliver emergency food supplies to Greenwood. He becomes a Movement stalwart, raising funds, participating in demonstrations, enduring beatings and arrests in the cause of Freedom.

Michigan State students Ivanhoe Donaldson and Ben Taylor drive a truckload of food, clothing, and medicine 1,000 miles down into the Mississippi Delta over the Christmas holidays. The local cops are tipped off — perhaps by some federal agency — and the two are busted in Clarksdale for "possesion of narcotics." The supposed "narcotics" are actually aspirin and vitamins. They are held on $15,000 bail (equal to $115,000 in 2012). After 11 days in jail, a nation-wide protest gets them released, but the confiscated food, clothing, and medicine mysteriously disappears from police custody before it can be returned to them. Ivanhoe is not intimidated, in the following months he delivers a dozen truckloads of food to embattled Greenwood and goes on to become a SNCC field secretary.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration and U.S. Department of Justice do nothing effective to protect the voting rights of Black citizens. With legal support provided by Dr. King, SNCC sues Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in January of 1963 demanding that they enforce existing federal voting rights laws. Rather than performing their Constitutionally-required duty to protect the rights of all citizens, federal lawyers quash the suit.

But violence, intimidation, beatings, arrests, and federal dereliction, all fail to halt the growing movement. And the food blockade backfires.

Whenever we were able to get a little something to give to a hungry family, we also talked about how they ought to register. The food was ...identified in the minds of everyone as food for those who want to be free, and the minimum requirement for freedom is identified as registration to vote. — Bob Moses (Greenwood Food 1-2).

In late February, an anonymous caller warns that the new office SNCC was finally able to rent is going to be destroyed. Four adjacent Black businesses are burnt in a bungled arson attempt, but they miss the SNCC office. When Sam [Block] describes the fire as "arson" at a mass meeting he is arrested for "statements calculated to breach the peace." It is his seventh Movement arrest in Greenwood (Marching 1).

Over one hundred local Black people angrily packed the courthouse. “They were drinking out of the [white] water fountain. They really had their chests stuck out. They came to get Sam out of jail,” recalled SNCC’s Willie Peacock. Part of their anger was caused by the devastating impact of the cut-off of the commodity supplemental food program in retaliation for the growing voter registration campaign. As Bob Moses noted, “For the first time they were seeing the connection between political participation and food on their table (Sam 3).

More than one hundred Black protesters show up at City Hall on the day of Sam's trial — the first mass protest by Greenwood Blacks in living memory. Sam is sentenced to 6 months in jail and a $500 fine. The Judge offers to suspend the sentence if Sam agrees to leave town and halt efforts to register Black voters. Replies Sam: "Judge, I ain't gonna do that." He is released on bond pending appeal, and that night addresses a mass meeting of 250 people — the largest mass meeting to date (Marching 1).

… throwing me in jail and holding me like that and charging me with arson [Sam Block recalled] people came from everywhere, out of the cotton fields with dirty boots on. And they had my trial in a little kangeroo court … And that is when the movement really began to take off. … I refused to leave. And that again instilled the faith in the people that were there around me (Interview 42).

On Tuesday, February 26, more than 200 Blacks line up at the Courthouse to register to vote. They know they will not be allowed to register, but attempting to do so has become for them a symbol of both pride and defiance. And the white power-structure recognizes it as such. The police order them to disperse. They hold their ground, remaining in line. The Registrar delays and evades, admitting only a few to fill out the application and take the so-called "literacy test." Those few who manage to take the test are rejected. But in Leflore County fear is beginning to lose its grip.

That night, KKK nightriders ambush a SNCC car on the road, firing 13 rounds from a .45 caliber machine gun at Jimmy Travis, Bob Moses, and VEP Field Director Randolph Blackwell. [Travis had been driving] Jimmy is hit twice, in the neck and shoulder [Moses had had to take the wheel], and has to be rushed to the nearest hospital willing to treat Black freedom fighters. From around the nation demands for protection and enforcement of federal voting rights laws are sent to Washington. The Kennedy administration takes no noticeable action (Marching 1-2).

Sam Block narrates:

Bob and Randolph and Jimmy came over from Greenwood and about 8:30 or 9:00 that night Bob and Randall and Jimmy decided that they would leave and go back to Greenville. … Bob had noticed this car circling the block prior to their leaving but he didn't tell us. So they left and stopped at the 82 Grill to get something to eat and the car trailed them and it was then Bob called Willie and I back to tell Willie and I that we should close up the office and try to go on home immediately because he had noticed this white car with four men in it wearing dark shades circling the office quite frequently and he didn't know what they were up to.

So they left and they took a back road into Itta Bena going on to Greenville. And just as I understand they got, approached Itta Bena, the car pulled up aside them, went by them at a high speed and recognized them and went up the highway and turned around and came back and fired at the car with a submachine gun. …

So we went to the hospital and by the time Willie and I got there Jimmy was lying on the table and I understand they refused to wait on him because they said they didn't have proper facilities. But one of the persons who was there said one of the reasons was they really didn't want him there anyway. And we had to take him to Jackson. So we didn't have any money to get an ambulance. We had to wait until the next morning. The man wouldn't transport him to Jackson, it was a black ambulance driver, unless we had the funds or something. Anyway the next morning we took him to Jackson and that is where Jimmy was operated on (Interview 30-31).

After Travis was stabilized and transferred to Jackson University Hospital, the doctor there told the twenty-year-old Travis that he had barely survived the bullet lodged in his spinal cord (Jimmy 2).

COFO calls on all voter-registration workers in Mississippi to concentrate on Greenwood to show that Klan terror cannot halt a growing freedom movement. By early March, dozens of SNCC organizers, plus some CORE field secretaries and SCLC staff members are working out of the Greenwood SNCC/COFO office in defiance of Klan terror, police repression, and Citizen Council economic retaliation. Whites shoot at a car containing Sam, Wazir, and local students working with the movement (Marching 1-3).

Sam described the incident.

So this particular night [March 6] -- I had asmatha, I am an asmathic-- we are at the church and I said, "Look I have to have my medicine." Peacock said, "Man, do you have to have it right now." I said, "Yes, I have to have it right now." So we got in the car with his girlfriend and my girlfriend--they were two sisters. I was driving, we drove back to the office across the tracks over to MacLaurin. And my girlfriend said, "Sam, look don't get out of the car, please don't get out of this car." I said, "Why?" She said, "I just feel that something is going to happen." I said, "Look, I have got to have my medication."

And I went to open the door of the car and six white men drove up in a station wagon and fired into the car shooting deer slugs at close range. Shot directly through the front window and the bullet went into a house and there was a lady and a baby lying in bed there and it went directly into the mattress. Had the shots been fired just an inch or so higher they would have killed those people because the deer slugs did not spread until they got out. But Peacock hit the floor and I hit the floor and said I had been hurt, been shot. I just had glass and stuff in my face.

Anyway we called the police. And one thing, the first policeman to arrive was Captain Usser and he told Peacock' girlfriend,, said, "Essie, you know I know you." She said, "Yes sir, I know you do." "Don't you know these two niggers right here are going to get you killed?" She aid, "Well, yes sir, I see now." "You had betterstop hanging around these two niggers right here. If you don't you are going to end up dead."

So the police came then and instead of taking us to the hospital they wanted to take us to jail because they accused me of plotting the shooting to receive cheap publicity. So we went to the hospital and the glass was removed from my face and we came back and continued to work and people began to give out the food and stuff and people were going down to the courthouse then in mass droves (Interview 27-28).

… gunfire punched 27 holes in the car. Peacock jumped out of the vehicle and began throwing bricks at the car that had attacked them as it sped away. They later discovered that a local policeman, who worked with one of the women in the car, had fired at them (Willie 3).

Though he knows full well who is responsible, Greenwood mayor Charles Sampson denies that white racists are the perpetrators. He falsely accuses SNCC of faking the attack to garner support. On March 24th the Klan finally succeeds in fire-bombing the office. It is destroyed. The Movement continues.

... Dewey Greene takes a leading role in encouraging voter-registration, son George and daughter Freddie are leaders among the local students. On the night of March 26, the Klan shoots into the Greene home, narrowly missing three of the children. The Greenes are a well- respected family in Greenwood's Black community and instead of intimidating people the shooting does just the opposite.

“Now the morning of the march we were at the church there and began singing. [James] Forman came by; he was actually on his way out of town, he was driving. So he suggested that maybe we ought to go down to City Hall and protest the shooting. We did not anticipate that the police would react as they did. We were simply going to the police station and request a conference with the police chief asking for police protection in light of the shooting. And they met us there with the dogs and with guns and so forth and I guess, as Jim says, they simply went berserk for a little while. ...” — Bob Moses

The marchers — men, women, and children — are singing and praying as they approach City Hall. Suddenly, they are attacked by police dogs and beaten by club-wielding cops. SNCC leaders Bob Moses, Jim Forman, Wazir Peacock, Frank Smith, and six Greenwood activists are arrested. …

The Greenwood Movement is not intimidated by dogs or cops or arrests. Where a year earlier local Blacks feared to be seen in the company of Sam Block or Wazir Peacock, now a thousand or more are involved in the Movement in one way or another — protesting, canvassing, trying to register, attending meetings, housing and feeding organizers, providing bail money, and so on. By 10am the next morning there are 50 Blacks lined up at the courthouse to register, by noon more than 100. A small army of helmeted police confront them. Again they attack with dogs and clubs. SNCC field secretary Charlie Cobb reports:

With the events of the morning of the 28th, the issues in Greenwood broadened beyond voter registration and became more basic. The issue now was, Did people have a right to walk the streets which they had paid for, with whomever they please, as long as they are orderly and obey all traffic laws? The city's answer was, Not if you're a nigger! There was a very direct link between this issue and voter registration, because for years attempting to register to vote for Negroes meant preparing alone to suffer physical assault while making the attempt, economic reprisals after the attempt, and sometimes death. To go with friends and neighbors made the attempt less frightening and reduced the chances of physical assault at the courthouse, since cowards don't like to openly attack numbers. It also reduced the chance of economic reprisal, since the firing of one hundred Negro maids would put the good white housewives of Greenwood in a bind ('tis a grim life for Miss Ann without Mary, Sally, or Sam).

Photos of police dogs savaging nonviolent protesters and news describing denial of basic voting rights flash across the world, embarrassing the Kennedy administration on the world stage and undercutting his "Free World" diplomacy at the United Nations. Moses and the others arrested on the 27th are convicted of "disorderly conduct" and given the maximum sentence, four months in prison and a $200 fine. Hoping to force the Department of Justice to file suit against the county's interference with the right to vote, they refuse to pay the fine or pay bail while the case is appealed.

But the Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert Kennedy cuts a deal instead. Eager to halt the embarrassing news stories coming out of Greenwood, the Feds agree not to file a voting rights suit against local officials. In return, the Greenwood power-structure agrees to release Moses and the others without bond while their case is appealed, and to stop using police brutality against Blacks trying to register. The county also agrees to resume food distribution so long as it is paid for by the federal government (in other words, the Feds supply not only the food, but also pick up the distribution costs which everywhere else in the nation are carried by the county). This allows Leflore politicians to assure their segregationist supporters that local taxes are not being used to "reward uppity Blacks" with free food (Marching 4-7).

Sam Block continues his story.

What happened after Jimmy's shooting I got on the road a lot and began to raise money, spent a lot of time around Chicago and New York and California speaking to raise money for the movement and to try to get other people involved.

…

I wanted to be in Greenwood. But they thought too and felt that I had become battle fatigued. I had almost been killed by a speeding truck, I had to jump behind a telephone poll to escape death. Oh, I had been beaten in the genesis in Greenwood real bad, been pushed under a car and left for dead .... {Short break} The people themselves did not want me to leave but it was a necessity. They felt that if anyone could tell the story about what was going on in Greenwood it was me because it was my project, I was the first to go into Greenwood. From there, as you know, we got Dick Gregory and Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and others began to pull food into Greenwood. And the mass marches really began to take place then (Interview 32, 33).

With the cops no longer attacking Blacks trying to register to vote, embarrassing photos stop coming out of Greenwood, which relieves the Kennedys. But the deal only halts police repression. The KKK continues to threaten Black voters with terrorist violence and the Citizens Council continues to coerce Blacks with economic terror, firing and evicting those who try to register. And without federal voting rights enforcement, the Registrar is free to continue rigging the application and "literacy test" to prevent most Blacks from actually registering. In the following months, 1500 Blacks risk life and economic survival by journeying to the courthouse, but only a handful are added to the voting rolls. By the end of 1963 there are only 268 Black voters in Leflore County compared to 10,000 white voters, even though 65% of the population is Black (Marching 4-8).

After the Greenwood cops agree to stop assaulting Blacks trying to register and LeFlore county resumes food distribution, voter registration organizers once again expand outward into surrounding counties. Greenwood becomes the hub of activity for the Delta counties of LeFlore, Holmes, Carroll, Tallahatchie, Sunflower, and Humphreys. And organizers return to the areas around Laurel, Meridian, Hattiesburg, Holly Springs, and Vicksburg.

White resistance remains vicious. In Holmes county, Hartman Turnbow, a farmer, is one of the first Blacks to try to register since the end of Reconstruction. He leads 12 others to the county courthouse. Klan nightriders surround his home, firebomb it, and then shoot at him, his wife, and daughter when they try to escape the burning building. Turnbow grabs his rifle and returns fire, driving them off. The county Sheriff arrests Turnbow, accusing him of firebombing his own house and shooting it full of holes to win sympathy from Northern movement supporters. Bob Moses and three other SNCC organizers are also arrested. A local court convicts them — without a shred of evidence — but the charges are eventually dismissed when appealed to federal court.

The Movement carries on, and people of courage respond. In Sunflower County, Fannie Lou Hamer, 46 years old, mother of two children, a sharecropper and plantation worker all her life, steps up to register after talking to SNCC organizers and attending a voter registration mass meeting. She and almost 20 others go down to the courthouse in Indianola. The cops stop the old bus they are using, and arrest the driver because the bus is "the wrong color." When Mrs. Hamer returns home she is fired from her job and evicted from her home of 18 years. Klan marauders shoot up the house of a friend who gives her shelter. Fannie Lou Hamer is not intimidated, she commits her life and soul to the Freedom Movement, first as an SCLC Citizenship School teacher, then as a SNCC field secretary and MFDP candidate for Congress (Voter Registration 1-2).


Works cited:

“Greenwood Food Blockage (Winter).” Civil Rights Movement History 1962. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis62.h...

“Interview with Sam Block.” Digital Education Systems. December 12, 1986. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_...

“Jimmy Travis Shot in Greenwood.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/jimmy-...

“Marching for Freedom in Greenwood (Feb-Mar).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement History and Timeline, 1963 Jan-June. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.h...

“Sam Block.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/sam-bl...

“Voter Registration Movement Expands in Mississippi.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement History and Timeline, 1963 Jan-June. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.h...

“Willie Peacock.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/people/willie...

Don't call me the brave one for going
No, don't pin a medal to my name
For even if there was any choice to make
I'd be going down just the same
—Phil Ochs, “Going Down to Mississippi” (Allen 1)

For nearly a century, segregation had prevented most African-Americans in Mississippi from voting or holding public office. Segregated housing, schools, workplaces, and public accommodations denied black Mississippians access to political or economic power. Most lived in dire poverty, indebted to white banks or plantation owners and kept in check by police and white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. African-Americans who dared to challenge these conditions were often killed, tortured, raped, beaten, arrested, fired from their jobs, or evicted from their homes.

SNCC and CORE leaders believed that bringing well-connected white volunteers from northern colleges to Mississippi would expose these conditions. They hoped that media attention would make the federal government enforce civil rights laws that local officials ignored. They also planned to help black Mississippians organize a new political party that would be ready to compete against the mainstream Democratic Party after voting rights had been won.

More than 60,000 black Mississippi residents risked their lives to attend local meetings, choose candidates, and vote in a "Freedom Election" that ran parallel to the regular 1964 national elections. Several hundred African-American families also hosted northern volunteers in their homes.

Nearly 1,500 volunteers worked in project offices scattered across Mississippi. They were directed by 122 SNCC and CORE paid staff working alongside them or at headquarters in Jackson and Greenwood. Most volunteers were white students from northern colleges, but 254 were clergy sponsored by the National Council of Churches, 169 were attorneys recruited by the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, and 50 were medical professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

Administratively, the project was run by the Council of Federate Organizations (COFO), an umbrella group formed in 1962 that included not just SNCC and CORE but also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others. SNCC provided roughly 80 percent of the staff and funding for the project and CORE contributed nearly all of the remaining 20 percent. The Mississippi Summer Project director was Bob Moses of SNCC and the assistant director was Dave Dennis of CORE (What 1-3).

Veteran activist Tom Hayden says a key to Moses's success as an organizer was his hunger to learn from local people. "Bob listened," Hayden wrote in The Nation. "When people asked him what to do, he asked them what they thought. At mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he mostly spoke last. He slept on floors, wore sharecroppers' overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, went to jail, dug in deeply" (Speech 1).

For Moses, the idealism of Freedom Summer was inseparable from the practical task of making it work. In 1962 SNCC and a group of civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had joined together to form The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

A year later in the fall 1963 Mississippi state elections, COFO aided by Yale and Stanford students staged a symbolic “freedom vote” to show that if blacks could go to the polls without fear of reprisals, they would do so in record numbers. At unofficial polling booths set up in black communities across Mississippi, more than 80,000 blacks cast their protest votes for COFO’s candidates for governor and lieutenant governor candidates, Aaron Henry, the president of the Mississippi NAACP, and Ed King, a white chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College in Jackson.

Intrigued by out-of-state college students working as volunteers in a Mississippi election, the media gave the freedom vote campaign the kind of publicity SNCC had not received in its earlier voter registration efforts.

In the summer of 1964 Moses sought to build on the fall freedom-vote campaign. This time a presidential election, not simply statewide elections, would be at issue, but the publicity the freedom vote had won earlier was not all that led Moses to favor the Mississippi Summer Project, despite the doubts many in COFO had about the values of bringing large numbers of white college students to Mississippi.

The response of the white South to the 1963 March on Washington was a new wave of racial violence. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 was the event that got the most public attention in this period because it resulted in the deaths of four black girls who had been attending Sunday school.

Like everyone in the civil rights movement, Moses was horrified by the killings in Birmingham, but he was equally shaken by the death months later of Lewis Allen in January 1964. Allen was an eyewitness to the fatal 1961 shooting of Herbert Lee, a black farmer from Amite County who had been helping Moses with voter registration. The shooter was E. H. Hurst, a white state representative who was never indicted by a coroner’s jury after he claimed he was defending himself against Lee.

Allen offered to testify against Hurst, but when Moses asked the Justice Department to give Allen protection, Justice Department officials refused to do so, paving the way for Allen’s death. Moses believed such civil rights-inspired murders would continue to go unpunished in Mississippi if the victims were black, and he saw Freedom Summer as one antidote to that problem.

Moses was candid in 1964 about his motives for bringing white students to Mississippi at a time when so much of the country was indifferent to the killing of blacks in Mississippi. “When you come south, you bring with you the concern of the country—because the people of the country don’t identify with Negroes,” Moses told the predominantly white summer volunteers during their June training sessions at Oxford, Ohio (Mills 4-6).

For many whites in Mississippi, like Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson, the prospect of hundreds of mainly white volunteers coming to the state signaled a second “War of Northern Aggression.” And as Mayor Thompson put it, “They won’t have a chance.” So before the summer began, the number of state troopers doubled. The state legislature passed dawn-to-dusk curfews, and Ku Klux Klan numbers expanded. The legislature tried to outlaw planned Freedom Schools. Crosses were burned in 64 of the state’s 82 counties on a single night (Freedom 1).

Moses was right about the impact of so many white college students going to Mississippi. On June 21, three Mississippi Freedom Summer workers—James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white New Yorkers—disappeared shortly after arriving in Meridian, Mississippi, from Oxford, Ohio. Their disappearance became national news (Mills 6).

Heather Tobis Booth … was among those at the University of Chicago who answered the call for volunteers.

“I had been brought up to believe we were in a society that should treat people equally,” she says. Her parents had taught that “we shouldn’t just say the words—we should work to make it happen.”

…

Looking back, alumni [of the University of Chicago] involved in Freedom Summer say it deepened their commitment to social justice and shaped their lives in lasting, if not always straightforward ways. They formed bonds with black civil rights activists and gained additional respect for the bravery of everyday people trying to claim their rights. Leaving Mississippi, “I felt we had accomplished a great deal,” says Peter Rabinowitz …

…

Once in Mississippi, volunteers like Booth and Rabinowitz were tasked with registering new voters, staffing community centers, and educating high school students in “Freedom Schools.”

These peaceful activities made volunteers targets of local law enforcement and violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Arrests and fire bombings were a regular part of life for civil rights workers in Mississippi. SNCC organizers carefully screened applicants to the summer project to find those with the maturity to handle the heavy responsibility of the work.

Rabinowitz, whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer, had been involved with the movement since junior high. He was tasked with teaching in a Freedom School, but had no idea what he would be asked to teach.

What he found was a group of high school students hungry to learn material that was not available in their segregated schools. Somewhat to his surprise, Rabinowitz’s students asked to study French.

It was a point of pride for students who had been told they would never need the language. “French was something that was taught in white schools but not in the black schools,” he explains. “This was something that had been kept from them.”

Rabinowitz taught his students elementary French and exposed them to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, he hoped to “convince them they were just as smart as anybody else.”

Booth spent the summer traveling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi to register new voters. Many of the people she met lived under extreme poverty. Still, “they opened their homes and their hearts to us,” she says.

…

Throughout the summer, Northern volunteers were sheltered by the Mississippi black community. They stayed with black families, worked with black leaders of SNCC and other local organizations, and, for safety reasons, rarely ventured into white parts of town.

The culture shock could be intense. Goldsmith [another University of Chicago student] remembers a seasoned SNCC organizer taking him aside after he ate a sandwich in front of other workers and volunteers. He was told that in some impoverished parts of Mississippi, “you never eat in front of somebody else, because you don’t know if they’ve eaten today.”

From the student volunteers to the experienced SNCC organizers to the local families supporting the cause, everyone involved in Freedom Summer was united by the shared danger they faced.

The murder of three Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—reminded everyone of the high stakes of their work.

Rabinowitz knew both Goodman and Schwerner personally. He had chosen a project in Meridian, Miss. specifically to work with them. Learning of their disappearance “didn’t give me pause, but it sure terrified me,” Rabinowitz said. …

Traveling in integrated cars posed a constant risk. Booth remembers hiding on the floor of a car to avoid being seen with black volunteers. She was briefly arrested early in her stay in Mississippi and spent several hours in jail before being released.

Yet Booth argues the dangers faced by Freedom Summer volunteers were far less severe than those faced by the new voters they registered.

“It was an act of courage and bravery and commitment to vote when they knew their lives might be threatened, their jobs might be threatened, they might be beaten,” she says.

“They weren’t going back to a safe place at the end of the summer” (Allen 2-7).

Chude Allen was 20 years old when she made the trek to Mississippi.

“I volunteered because I understood that the struggle to end segregation and racism in the South was one that was as important for White people as it was for Black people. This was my fight as well as other people’s fight,” says Allen. “I believed that racism was wrong and that segregation and the discrimination against African Americans was unjust and that unjust laws were to be challenged.”

On the first day of Freedom Summer, the student volunteers learned that Chaney, 21, Goodman, 20 and Schwerner, 24, were missing. The three had traveled to Neshoba County, Miss., to investigate the bombing of a Black church. They never returned. Organizers feared the worst. This was Mississippi after all. Missing, says Allen, meant they were dead.

“When I volunteered, I knew I might die,” says Allen, who worked in Freedom Schools in Holly Springs, Miss. “White people in the U.S. didn’t care if Black people died, but they cared if White people did and that is what happened. They would never have looked for them if it had just been James Chaney and two of his friends. No one would have cared” (Joiner 2).

The postcard looks ordinary enough. It's a message written from a 20-year-old to his parents, informing them that he'd arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi for a summer job.

"This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here," Andrew Goodman wrote to his mom and dad back in New York City. "The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."

The card was postmarked June 21, 1964. That was the day Andy Goodman was murdered (Smith 1).

The ten weeks that comprised the “long hot summer” centered around several goals: to establish Freedom Schools and community centers throughout the state, to increase black voter registration, and to ultimately challenge the all-white delegation that would represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in August.

…

Freedom Summer included more than 44 projects, grouped by congressional districts across the state. These projects ranged in size and scope. For example, Hattiesburg had more than 50 volunteers and staff while some projects had as few as two workers. Most projects built upon existing movement activity and relationships with local Black leaders.

Yet other aspects of the summer project, such as the establishment of Freedom Schools marked a new element in the Mississippi Movement. In a state where funding for white schools sometimes quadrupled the amount spent on Black schools, all but three summer projects had Freedom Schools. Work-shop style courses ranged from basic reading and math, civics, African-American history to modern Africa and French.

…

Midway through the summer, the project’s emphasis shifted from voter registration towards challenging the Mississippi Democrat’s all-white delegation. Local people began attempting–without success–to attend delegate selection meetings. A Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been formed in April and a delegation of MFDP members was selected to challenge the so-called “regular” delegates at the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in August.

By the end of Freedom Summer, there had been 6 known murders, 35 known shootings, 4 people critically wounded, at least 80 volunteers beaten, and more than 1,000 people arrested (Freedom 1-4).

On June 13 the first group of Freedom Summer volunteers began arriving at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for their training session. “If we can crack Mississippi, we will likely be able to crack the system in the rest of the country,” said John Lewis, today a long-serving Democratic congressman from Georgia, in 1964 chairman of SNCC.

…

The lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early ’60s had already made ending desegregation a dramatic issue for the nation. The aim of Freedom Summer was to build on that momentum by giving an explicitly political focus, centered on the right to vote, to the civil rights movement (Mills 2).


Works cited:

Allen, Susie. “”Remembering ‘Freedom Summer.’” The University of Chicago. Web. https://www.uchicago.edu/features/rem...

“Freedom Summer.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedo...

Joiner, Lottie L. “Mississippi Closes The Case On Freedom Summer Murders.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/mississ...

Mills, Nicolaus. “The 1964 Miss. Freedom Summer Protests Won Progress At a Bloody Price.” Daily Beast. June 21, 2014. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-196...

Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...

“"Speech on Freedom Summer at Stanford University." American RadioWorks. Web. http://americanradioworks.publicradio...

“What Was the 1964 Freedom Summer Project?” Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Reco...

Andy Goodman's fateful journey to Mississippi began in Manhattan, where he grew up in an upper-middle class family on the Upper West Side. His younger brother, David, says Andy was focused on fairness from an early age - whether it was protecting a little sibling from bullies or protesting social injustices around the country. As a teenager, Andy would take his younger brother to Woolworths, where people demonstrated against school segregation in the south.

"He just said ... it's unfair that because of the color of your skin, you should go to a lousy school," David Goodman (Andy’s brother) said. "It was an issue of fairness to him" (Carter 1).

Carolyn Goodmen, Andy’s mother, said later: All we knew is he was going to go and be trained, and we gave him permission. Why? Because we couldn’t talk out of two sides of our mouths. We couldn’t say, “This is a horror,” and then say, “Well, it’s okay for other kids. And it’s certainly okay for black kids. But not for my white, middle class son. I don’t want anything to happen to him. I don’t want him to be beaten, I don’t want him to be ending up in jail,” and so on. So off he went to Ohio (Mississippi 3).

That sense of social justice led Andy Goodman to Ohio in June 1964. It was there, at a training session for the Congress of Racial Equality, that the Queens College student would meet James Chaney, a black 21-year-old from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner, a white 24-year-old from New York. [They were working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in nearby Meridian, Mississippi] They were training hundreds of other volunteers on how to handle the racial turmoil and potential harassment awaiting them in Mississippi (Carter 2).

Chaney, a plasterer, had grown up in Meridian in nearby Lauderdale County, and even as a young student had been interested in civil rights work. Schwerner, a Jewish New Yorker, came south to Meridian to set up the COFO office because he believed he could help prevent the spread of hate that had resulted in the Holocaust, an event that had taken the lives of his family members. Chaney volunteered at the Meridian office, and the two young men began to make visits to Neshoba County searching for residents to sponsor voter registration drives and freedom schools (Murder 1).

On Memorial Day 1964, Schwerner and Chaney had spoken to the congregation at Mount Zion in rural Neshoba County about setting up a Freedom School, a type of alternative middle and high school that helped to organize African Americans for political and cultural engagement (Carter 1).

Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi, [had] sent word in May, 1964 to the Klansmen of Lauderdale and Neshoba counties that it was time to "activate Plan 4." Plan 4 provided for "the elimination" of the despised civil rights activist Michael Schwerner, who the Klan called "Goatee" or "Jew-Boy." Schwerner, the first white civil rights worker based outside of the capital of Jackson, had earned the enmity of the Klan by organizing a black boycott of a white-owned business and aggressively trying to register blacks in and around Meridian to vote.

The Klan's first attempt to eliminate Schwerner came on June 16, 1964 in the rural Neshoba County community of Longdale. Schwerner had visited Longdale on Memorial Day to ask permission of the black congregation at Mount Zion Church to use their church as the site of a "Freedom School." The Klan knew of Schwerner's Memorial Day visit to Longdale and expected him to return for a business meeting held at the church on the evening of June 16. About 10 p.m., when the Mount Zion meeting broke up, seven black men and three black women left the building to discover thirty men lined up in military fashion with rifles and shotguns. More men were gathered at the rear of the church. Frustrated when their search for "Jew-Boy" was unsuccessful, some of the Klan members began beating the departing blacks. Ten gallons of gasoline were removed from one of the Klan members' cars and spread around the inside of the church. Mount Zion Church was soon engulfed in flames (Linder Trial 2-3).

While in Ohio, Schwerner got word to the church burning. He and Chaney needed a volunteer to help them investigate the fire and they were quickly impressed by the level-headed Goodman. The three men drove down to Mississippi on June 20 … (Smith 2-3).

On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman drove from Meridian to Neshoba County to talk to the church members at Mount Zion (Carter 2).

At 3 p.m. the three in the highly visible blue Core-wagon, set off to return to Meridan, Ms. Stationed at the Core office in Meridian was Core worker, Sue Brown, who was told by Schwerner if the three weren't back by 4:30 p.m., then they were in trouble. Deciding that Highway 16 was a safer route, the three turned onto it, headed west, through Philadelphia, Ms, back to Meridan. A few miles outside of Philadelphia, Klan member, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, spotted the CORE wagon on the highway (Montaldo 4).

In 1964, Cecil Price, at age 27, was "a younger and less formidable copy" of Sheriff Rainey. The former dairy supplies salesman and then fire chief was said to lack Rainey's friendliness. He was tight-lipped and suspicious of everybody.

Price, a Klansman, seemed to derive great pleasure from terrorizing Neshoba County blacks. One night he showed up at a roadhouse popular with young blacks, drew his six-shooter and shouted "All you nigger men get your hands on the wall, and all you nigger women do the Dog" (Linder Cecil 1).

Not only did Price spot the car, but he also recognized the driver, James Chaney. The Klan hated Chaney, who was a black activist and a born Mississippian. Price pulled the wagon over and arrested and jailed the three students for being under suspicion of arson in the Mount Zion Church fire (Montaldo 5).

Despite the fact that the schedule of fines for speeding was posted on the wall, Price said the three men would have to remain in jail until the Justice of the Peace arrived to process the fine. Schwerner asked to make a phone call, but Price denied the request and left the jail. In Meridian, CORE staff began calling nearby jails and police stations, inquiring about the three men -- their standard procedure when organizers failed to return on time. Minnie Herring, the jailer’s wife, claimed there was no phone call on June 21, but CORE records show a call to the Philadelphia jail around 5:30pm (Murder in Mississippi 2).

Carolyn Goodman made this public plea. As the parent of one of the boys who are missing, I am making this plea to all parents everywhere, particularly to the parents of Mississippi. I want to beg them to cooperate in every way possible, in the search for these three boys, and to come forward with any information of any kind which will help in the search.

Michael Schwerner’s wife Rita declared: … if all the federal authorities are at the beck and call of the government are unable to do so, I as just one individual will attempt to do so. If this means driving every back road, every dirt road, every alley in the county of Neshoba, I will do it.

Former governor Ross Barnett had this to say:… we’re sorry for any children, any youngsters whose parents do not insist that they stay away from other states, trying to tell people of other states how to conduct their affairs. Because they do not know what it’s all about. And it’s pitiful that parents have not trained their children in the way that they should have. They ought to stay at home and work. They ought to stay at home and tend to their own business. (Mississippi 5, 7).

The FBI investigating the disappearance of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964 were finally able to piece together the events that took place because of Ku Klux Klan informants who were there the evening of the murders.

When in the Neshoba County jail, Schwerner asked to make a phone call and the request was refused.

Price contacted Klansmen, Edgar Ray Killen, and informed him that he captured Schwerner.

Killen called Neshoba and Lauderdale county Klansmen and organized a group for what was referred to as some "butt ripping." A meeting was held at a drive-in in Meridian with local Klan leaders.

Another meeting was held later when it was decided that some of the younger Klan members would do the actual killings of the three civil right workers.

Killen instructed the younger Klan members to purchase rubber gloves and they all met at 8:15 p.m., reviewed the plan on how the killings would take place and drove by the jail where the three were being held.

Killen then left the group to attend a wake for his deceased uncle.

Price freed the three jailed men around 10 p.m. and followed them as they drove down Highway 19.

A high-speed chase between Price and the CORE group ensued, and Chaney, who was driving, soon stopped the car and the three surrendered to Price.

The three men were placed in Price's patrol car and Price, followed by two cars of young Klan members, drove down a dirt road called Rock Cut Road (Montaldo 5-8).

It is not known whether the three were beaten before they were killed. Klan informants deny that they were, but there is some physical evidence to the contrary. What is known is that a twenty-six-year-old dishonorably discharged ex-Marine, Wayne Roberts, was the trigger man, shooting first Schwerner, then Goodman, then Chaney, all at point blank range. (FBI informant James Jordan, according to a second informant present at the killings, Doyle Barnette, also fired two shots at Chaney.) The bodies of the three civil rights workers were taken to a dam site at the 253-acre Old Jolly Farm. The farm was owned by Philadelphia businessman Olen Burrage who reportedly had announced at a Klan meeting when the impending arrival in Mississippi of an army of civil rights workers was discussed, "Hell, I've got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them." The bodies were placed together in a hollow at the dam site and then covered with tons of dirt by a Caterpillar D-4 (Linder Trial 7).

At 12:30 a.m., Price and Klan member, Neshoba County Sheriff Rainey met.

On August 4, 1964, the FBI received information about the location of the bodies and they were uncovered at the dam site at the Old Jolly Farm (Montaldo 8).

Here is a different version of the killings.

As they were passing through Philadelphia, Mississippi, they were pulled over by a deputy sheriff and arrested for speeding. They arrived at the jail at 4 p.m. and were released around 10 p.m. that night. The activists were followed by a lynch mob of at least nine men, including a deputy and a local police officer.

When the Klansmen caught up to Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, they forced the men into one of the mob’s vehicles and drove them to a secluded county road. Chaney, a black man, was beaten with chains, castrated, and shot while Schwerner and Goodman, the two white activists, were forced to watch. When Schwerner cradled Chaney in his arms … a Klansman asked, “Are you that n***** lover?” When Schwener replied, “Sir, I understand your concern” he was shot in the heart. Goodman attempted to run and was also shot. The bodies were then taken to a farm pond where Herman Tucker was waiting. Tucker used a bulldozer on the property to cover the bodies with dirt. An autopsy revealed that Goodman was likely buried alive since there was red clay dirt in his lungs and in his grasped fists. Evidence at the burial site appears to show he was trying to dig his way out (Carter 2-3).

At 12:30 A.M., concerned activist leaders placed a call to John Doar, the Justice Department's point man in Mississippi. Less than a week earlier Doar had been in Oxford, Ohio warning Summer Project volunteers that there was "no federal police force" that could protect them from expected trouble in Mississippi. Doar feared the worst. By 6:00 A.M., Doar had invested the FBI with the power to investigate a possible violation of federal law (Linder Trial 8).

“Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi to investigate a church burning in Neshoba County,” project director Bob Moses informed an auditorium of volunteers on June 22, 1964. They were planning to work in Mississippi that summer and were being trained at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. “They haven’t come back and we haven’t heard from them.”

The assumption of movement workers was that they were dead (Bodies 1).

The morning after the civil rights workers' disappearance, the phone rang in the office of Meridian-based FBI agent John Proctor. (In the movie "Mississippi Burning," the character played by Gene Hackman is loosely based on Proctor.) Within hours, Proctor was in Neshoba County interviewing blacks, community leaders, Sheriff Rainey, and Deputy Price. Proctor was a Alabama native who had successfully cultivated relationships with all sorts of people, including local law enforcement officers, who might aid in his investigations. After his interview with Cecil Price, the Deputy slapped Proctor on the back and said, "Hell, John, let's have a drink." Price went to his car and pulled contraband liquor out of his trunk.

By the next day, June 23, Proctor had been joined by ten newly arrived special agents and Harry Maynor, his New Orleans-based supervisor (Linder Trial 9).

Because two of the three missing men were white with important northern connections, their disappearance quickly captured America’s attention. “The other Philadelphia” made front page headlines as scores of journalists and FBI agents flocked to the state. Within days, marchers were picketing federal buildings in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Rita Schwerner [Michael’s wife] had no allusions about the ugly truth that was motivating the search for her husband. “I personally suspect that Mr. Chaney, who is a native Mississippi Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, that this case, like so many others that have come before, would have gone completely unnoticed,” she told the press.

In the coming weeks, more than 150 FBI agents and 200 sailors from the Meridian Naval Air Station descended upon the state, yet federal policy towards the protection of civil rights workers in the South did not change. President Johnson, convinced that the entire incident was merely a publicity stunt, worried that if he started “house mothering each [volunteer’s family] that’s gone down there and that doesn’t show up, that we’ll have this White House full of people every day asking for sympathy” (Bodies 1, 4-5).

What the KKK had not counted on was the national attention that the three civil rights workers disappearance would ignite. … President, Lyndon B. Johnson put the pressure on J. Edgar Hoover to get the case solved. The first FBI office in Mississippi was opened and the military bused sailors into Neshoba County to help search for the missing men (Montaldo 5).

[On June 23] FBI agents found the [burned, still smoldering] remains of the car driven by the activists near a river in northeast Neshoba County. … [Shortly thereafter, Joseph Sullivan, the FBI's Major Case Inspector, arrived on the scene]

Fearing the men were dead, the federal government sent hundreds of sailors from a nearby naval air station to search the swamps for the bodies. Although they didn’t find the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the Navy divers who dragged the river discovered two other young black activists, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore; a 14-year-old named Herbert Oarsby, found wearing a CORE T-shirt; and five other black men who remained unidentified. (Carter 4-5).

It soon became apparent to Inspector Sullivan the case "would ultimately be solved by conducting an investigation rather than a search." It turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult investigation. Neshoba County residents, many of whom either participated in the conspiracy or knew of it, were tight-lipped. Proctor found that some of his most useful information came from kids, so he would stuff candy in his pockets before setting out for a day's schedule of interviews. A promise of $30,000 in reward money finally brought forward information, passed through an intermediary, concerning the location of the bodies.

(Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter with Meridian's Clarion Ledger, reported in a 2010 story that highway patrolman Maynard King told Sullivan the location of the bodies. Mitchell also reported that the FBI's promise of a $30,000 reward was made after the FBI learned the location of the bodies and was part of a strategy to increase finger-pointing and suspicion within the Klan.) On August 4, 1964, John Proctor was at the Old Jolly Farm to take photographs of the bodies as they were uncovered at the dam site. Inspector Sullivan invited Price to the dam site to help in the removal of the bodies. Sullivan was interested in observing the reaction of the Deputy, who was by then under heavy suspicion. Proctor noted that "Price picked up a shovel and dug right in, and gave no indication whatsoever that any of it bothered him" (Linder 10-11).

The digging began early on the morning of August 4, six weeks after the men had first gone missing. After several hours of digging and 14 feet and 10 inches deep into the earth, the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were finally discovered lying face down, side by side.

An integrated burial in Mississippi was out of the question. Chaney was buried on a hilltop outside of Meridian, and the bodies of Schwerner and Goodman were flown to New York (Bodies 5-6).

David Dennis, Jr., son of the CORE leader who co-supervised the Freedom Summer project with Bob Moses, wrote an interesting article August 30, 2017, for Still Crew. Excerpts follow.

As Mississippi director for the Congress of Racial Equality, my dad, David Dennis, Sr., sent Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner to Longdale, MS to investigate a bombing at the Mount Zion church. What my father didn’t know at the time, but is sure of to this day, is that the KKK perpetrated the bombing to lure the three workers out and kill them. The Klan also prioritized Mickey Schwerner as a target. The young, fiery organizer was a dynamo at rallying black people to register to vote. Schwerner offended the Klan most of all because he was white. A traitor. And he was Jewish.

The three activists were taken out of that station wagon and shot. Evidence indicates Andrew Goodman was buried alive next to the bodies of Chaney and Schwerner, in pre-prepared graves. There are also variations of the story that indicate that Schwerner and Goodman were shot once in the heart and died immediately and that James Chaney was tortured before being killed. The murders were a culmination of a thoroughly planned conspiracy that started with the burning down of Mt. Zion. A plan that went from the sheriff all the way down to local high school kids. …

My father planned to be with the three men when they took the trip to investigate the church bombing. He was supposed to be riding with them when they were murdered. However, his bronchitis got in the way and the three men convinced him to just go home and take care of it. So he reluctantly drove to Shreveport, LA to be with his mother and recover. That was the last time he saw them. My father awaited phone calls about the workers’ whereabouts as standard procedure any time he dispatched someone for an assignment. As soon as he learned the men hadn’t checked in, he knew they were dead. Everyone did. White and black.

However, the lynch mob that murdered the men hid the bodies under a dam built on the property of one of the Klansmen, turning the crime into a missing persons story. And since two of the missing men were white, it became national news.

For 44 whole days, a country speculated on the whereabouts of the three slain workers. What haunts my father as much as anything else that happened with the three workers is the fact that during the search, more bodies turned up. Slain black men, lynched by the Klan. Local Klan members and even J. Edgar Hoover, who in May stated that “outsiders” coming to Mississippi for Freedom Summer would not be protected by the FBI, fanned the flames of conspiracy, insinuating the three men were Communists who were either killed by their own or fled to Cuba. It seemed likely that the bodies would never be found. If not for [comedian and celebrity civil rights activist] Dick Gregory.

… he immediately met with James Farmer, the head of CORE. Gregory, Farmer and a caravan of 16 cars headed to Philadelphia to try to find the men. Gregory, like everyone else, knew those men were dead.

… Gregory’s caravan was stopped before being able to conduct a full search, but he was granted an audience with Sheriff Rainey. …

…

Gregory noticed a nervousness in the meeting with the Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who was a top conspirator to the murders, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, who was part of the lynch mob, the Chief Investigator of the State Highway Police and a city attorney. Also, he noticed the city attorney would pipe in and answer all of the questions. Gregory cut the meeting short. He had all he needed. It became clear this was a government-sponsored lynching perpetrated by Neshoba County law enforcement.

Later, Gregory would say that he put his finger in Rainey’s face and said, “You know you did it. And we’re going to get you!” Gregory presented a singular problem for Rainey and his boys: he was a “nigger” they couldn’t make disappear.

Gregory knew that there wouldn’t be an investigation in earnest, so he had a plan.

I told Farmer, “Jim, I’ve got the wildest idea.” He said, “ What?” I said, “You know, the only way we’re gonna get it out is with large sums of money. If you’ll put up $100,000, we’ll break this case in one week.”

The comedian wasn’t able to get the full $100,000 but he was able to get $25,000 thanks to a phone call to Hugh Hefner. …

Gregory drove to Meridian and announced a $25,000 reward for any information on the location of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. The next day, the FBI put out their own $30,000 reward. However it was Gregory who would receive a tip. “I received a letter quite some time ago that practically pinpointed the spot where the bodies were found,” he continued to tell Mississippi Eyewitness shortly after the bodies were found. “I gave this letter to the FBI and the FBI denied that the letter was any good. But they never denied the location stated in the letter.”

As far as many civil rights activists are concerned, it was the pressure Dick Gregory put on the FBI that led to the discovery of the three workers’ bodies. Anyone in Mississippi, my father included, believe the FBI always knew where the bodies were and only revealed where the bodies were after finding out Gregory also had that information. The importance of the discovery of those three bodies can’t be overstated as it revealed, once again, the hellish hatred resting in the heart of Mississippi for black people simply trying to get access to vote. The discovery of the bodies killed conspiracy theories and propaganda that wanted to convince the public that the three men had fled or weren’t victims of racial violence. And the revelation that the men were murdered provided the final straw, creating enough fervor for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to pass Congress (Dennis 1-11).


Works cited:

“Bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Discovered.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. Web. https://snccdigital.org/events/bodies...

Carter, Joe. “9 Things You Should Know About the ‘Mississippi Burning’ Murders.” TGC, the Gospel Coalition. January 13, 2018. Web. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/ar...

Dennis Jr., David. “How Dick Gregory Forced the FBI to Find The Bodies of Three Civil Rights Workers Slain in Mississippi.” Still Crew. August 30, 2017. Web. https://stillcrew.com/how-dick-gregor...

Linder, Douglas O. “Cecil Price.” Famous Trials. Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...

Linder, Douglas O. “The "Mississippi Burning" Trial: An Account.” Famous Trials, Web. https://famous-trials.com/mississippi...

Montaldo, Charles. "The Mississippi Burning Case." ThoughtCo. Oct. 25, 2018. Web. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-mississ...

“Mississippi Freedom Summer Claims Three Young Victims.” nbclearn.com. Web. http://www.nbclearn.com/finishing-the...

“Murder in Mississippi.” American Experience. Web. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe...

“The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.” Mississippi Civil Rights Project. Web. https://mscivilrightsproject.org/nesh...

Smith, Stephen. “‘Mississippi Burning’ murders resonate 50 years later.” CBSNews. June 20, 2014. Web. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississi...

To locate these two communities (Greenwood north of Jackson and McComb south of Jackson) access this map: https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/natio....

On July 2nd, President Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In some Movement battlegrounds segregation of public facilities begins to collapse. The St. Augustine business community defies Klan threats by agreeing to end "white-only" policies. In Albany, Blacks are served instead of arrested, and SCLC holds its convention in Birmingham with Dr. King and other Black ministers staying at the brand-new Parliament House hotel. But in Selma, whites violently attack young Blacks who dare to defy the color-line, in Jackson the Robert E. Lee hotel converts from a public facility to a "private club" rather than admit Blacks, and across the South deeply entrenched customs of racial segregation remain in place until they are directly challenged. As the old saying goes: "Where the broom don't sweep, the dirt don't move."

Greenwood

In many ways, Greenwood is the epicenter of Freedom Summer activity. It is the heart of the Delta where the majority of projects are located, and SNCC's national office is temporarily relocated there from Atlanta. Here, the strategic priorities are clear — voter registration, community organizing, and building the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] towards the challenge at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Human and financial resources are stretched desperately thin. Sit-ins to test the new Civil Rights Act divert organizer time and attention, cost bail money, and inevitably result in activists languishing in jail. Mississippi whites are already enraged over the "invasion" of "race-mixers" and "agitators," to say nothing of Blacks socially interacting with white activists, particularly young white women. Movement leaders fear that direct-action protests for hamburgers and library cards will intensify both violent retaliation and police repression. But "freedom is in the air," courage is contagious, and the daily humiliations of "white-only/colored-only" cry out for defiance (McGhees 53).

From the beginning, with the first voter-registration effort in McComb after the Freedom Rides SNCC's Mississippi strategy has been based on two premises: First, that the primary goal must be achieving political power for Blacks, which requires voter-registration. Second, that most Afro-Americans in the state cannot afford to patronize white restaurants or theaters, so integrating them is at best merely symbolic. But there is a long-standing disagreement between those who argue that integration efforts provoke so much white violence and state repression that voter-registration is crippled, and those who believe that defiant action by young people awakens courage in adults, helps them rise above their fears, and encourages them to register. That may be true, argue others, but staff and volunteers languishing in jail cells can't canvas or organize and diverting desperately need funds to bail them out weakens the central effort.

But after passage of the Act, young Blacks across the state are eager to defy segregation and exercise their new rights. They want to "spit in the eye" of white racists by integrating hamburger joints and movie theaters. Three years of Movement activity have filled them with courage and now they believe the law is on their side.

Whites, however, are already enraged by the mere existence of Freedom Summer and further inflamed by Johnson signing the Act. In Greenwood and other communities, carloads of armed thugs prowl the streets looking for trouble, some are members of the Sheriff's posse, some are outright Klan. One of these "auxiliary" deputies is Byron De la Beckwith, and everyone in Leflore County, Black and white, know that he murdered Medgar Evers.

The question is thrashed out in meeting after meeting. The majority of SNCC staff agree with Bob Moses that they have to remain disciplined, stick to the plan, and not let themselves or the Movement become distracted. But some staff and some summer volunteers argue that it was the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the early 1960s that sparked and energized the Movement and that if the Civil Rights Act is not tested and enforced immediately it will wither away and become just another unenforced law. By and large, adults in the community agree that now is not the time for integrating lunch counters. But young activists not yet old enough to vote are restless, in some communities they take independent action on their own, and when they are arrested or beaten a portion of Movement time and resources has to be diverted in response. Yet at the same time, their courage and defiance does encourage and inspire their elders.

The issue is most acute in Greenwood which has been a center of Freedom Movement activity since early 1962. It comes to a head after national NAACP leaders swoop into town accompanied by reporters and FBI agents. They integrate a few upscale establishments to great media acclaim and then drive off. Afterwards, no one, not even SNCC, can restrain Greenwood's Black youth from direct action at "white-only" establishments (Direct 27-29)

Silas McGhee, 21, is Chair of the Greenwood NAACP Youth Council's Testing Committee. His brother Jake is Assistant Chair. On July 5th, Silas walks three miles from his family's farm to the Leflore Theater in Greenwood. Defying a century of rigid segregation, he takes a seat on the "whites-only" main floor rather than the "Colored" balcony. He is attacked and harassed. The cops haul him home with a warning. When his brothers ask why he went by himself he tells them, "Well, you wasn't nowhere around when I decided to go. I just went."

Greenwood is a small town and word of his attempt to break the color-line spreads through the Black community — and among whites as well. On July 16, Silas observes Freedom Day from across the street. He is not one of the 111 people arrested. As he walks home alone, three Klansmen ambush him and force him at gunpoint into their car. They beat him with clubs and try to lock him in a shed, but he manages to break free. He evades their pursuit and reaches the FBI office Greenwood. Agents arrest the three attackers under the new civil rights law — the first case of its kind in Mississippi.

The McGhees are a tight-knit family and they're not known for backing down. Silas's mother and brothers join him in action and the cops discover that arresting the McGhees just makes them more determined.

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) narrates: “The rest of July was a running battle between the McGhees, the theater, the mob, and the cops. ... Silas and his brother Jake kept going back to the theater. Five or six times. Each time when they tried to leave, a mob greeted them. ... Another night Jake and Silas went back to the movies, but this time when the mob formed, a towering (6'8"), linebacker-built paratrooper in full dress uniform appeared and faced down a member of the mob. Turned out it was their older brother, Clarence (Robinson), a decorated Korean War veteran on active duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A trained American fighting man, taking leave to come defend freedom, democracy, the Constitution, and his younger brothers in his hometown. Then he got himself jailed for assault.”

On Monday evening, August 15, after being released from jail, Silas is resting in a car outside of Lulu's Cafe on Avenue H in the Black community. Rain is pouring down and the night is dark. Two white men in a car drive slowly by, they shoot Silas in the head and speed off. SNCC field-secretary Bob Zellner and summer volunteer Mark Winter strip off their shirts to try to stop the bleeding. With volunteer Linda Whetmore Halpern, they rush Silas to the segregated Greenwood public hospital. Cops at the hospital won't let them in because they're using the "wrong" entrance. They drive around back to the other door, but the cops again bar them — this time because Bob and Mark are not wearing shirts. Linda has to go in alone, her blue dress drenched red with blood. She gets a stretcher and brings Silas inside.

The white doctors in this tax-financed hospital won't treat a wounded Black man, so Dr. Jackson — the only Black MD in Greenwood — is summoned. While he works to save Silas's life, officer Logan of the Greenwood police department tells another cop "Well, they finally got that nigger Silas!" Other cops make it clear that if Silas doesn't die on the operating table he'll be killed during the night. As soon as Silas is stabilized, Movement leaders arrange to have him transferred to a hospital in Jackson (McGhees 54-56).

While white Mississippi mobilizes to defend the "Southern Way of Life" with billy clubs and jail cells, guns and bombs, the White House and Justice Department do nothing. Despite repeated pleas from civil rights leaders, they refuse to condemn or criticize the hate and hysteria being whipped to fever pitch in Mississippi. They refuse to issue any public statement or give any private signal that violence or state repression against nonviolent voter registration efforts will be prosecuted as required by federal law. They refuse to even acknowledge that registering voters and teaching children are neither criminal acts nor subversive plots. FBI Director Hoover does, however, tell the press: "We will not wet-nurse troublemakers."

In early June, just before the [Freedom Summer] project is to begin, a Black delegation [had traveled] … from Mississippi to Washington to warn of impending violence and beg for protection. The President [had been] … out of town. The Attorney General [had been] … unavailable. Congress [had been] … uninterested in holding any hearings. The FBI [had rebuffed] … them as subversives and Communist dupes.

Desperate for someone to hear their pleas, the delegation [had held] … a conference at the National Theater, addressing a volunteer panel of writers, educators, and lawyers, along with several hundred ordinary citizens. Fannie Lou Hamer [had described] … the brutal police beating in Winona MS, Mrs. Allen [had testified] … about the recent murder of her husband, a boy of 14 [had told] … of police brutality against peaceful pickets, and SNCC worker Jimmy Travis [had talked] … of being shot in Greenwood and [had asked] … for federal marshals to protect voter registration workers. Legal scholars [had described] … the statutes allowing — in fact, requiring — the federal government to enforce the law, make arrests, and protect the rights of voters. The transcript [had been] … sent to President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There [had been] … no response.

At the volunteer-orientation in Oxford Ohio, DOJ official John Doar [had addressed] … the volunteers who are about to go down into Mississippi. They [had asked] … him: "What will be the role of the federal government in protecting our lives?" He [had replied] … that so far as their government is concerned they will have to take their chances with a hostile state — defenseless. They will be in the same situation that southern Blacks have endured for generations. The volunteers [had booed] …, but Bob Moses [had stopped] … them, saying, "We don't do that." He [had told] … them that Doar is just being honest (Washington 12-14).

Greenwood's Black community is enraged. More than a dozen young Black men armed with rifles ask SNCC field-secretary Wazir Peacock about invading North Greenwood — a white neighborhood — and retaliating in kind. He tells them that it wouldn't be right to attack whites who had nothing to do with the shooting. He also understands that doing so would bring down a wave of violent repression against the entire Black community. The Klan is known to have been stockpiling military-type weapons, and it's possible that the shooting of Silas is intended to provoke just such a war. The young men agree to concentrate on defending the Black community from further KKK attack.

The shooting of Silas McGhee halts neither the McGhee family nor the work of the Freedom Movement. Voter registration and building the MFDP continue, as do efforts to implement the Civil Rights Act (McGhees 57)).

McComb

Back in the Fall of 1961, the McComb voter-registration project — SNCC's first — was temporarily suppressed by Klan violence, the brutal murder of Herbert Lee, economic retaliation, the expulsion of more than 100 high-school student protesters, federal indifference, and the incarceration of the SNCC staff on trumped up charges. But SNCC has neither forgotten, nor abandoned McComb. In the Fall of '63, SNCC workers briefly return to mobilize support for the Freedom Ballot, and again in January of '64 for voter-registration classes. But Klan repression is unrelenting, threats and intimidation are constant, night-riders shoot up Black homes and businesses, and on January 31st Louis Allen who witnessed Herbert Lee's murder is assassinated.

As they begin planning the Summer Project in early 1964, SNCC activists are determined to re-establish a permanent Freedom Movement presence in McComb. They know with dead certainty that doing so means a showdown with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America, the two KKK factions who have turned the Pearl River area of Southwest Mississippi into "Klan Nation."

The forces of white-supremacy are of the same opinion. Pike County sheriff R.R. Warren tells a meeting of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) that he expects a "long hot summer" and that he may need to recruit their assistance if law enforcement is unable to suppress the COFO "threat." Rumors swirl through the white community that Black men identified by white bandages on their throats have been specifically assigned to rape white women. Parents are warned to know where their small children are at all times. Sales of guns and ammunition spike upward, and Klan membership soars. The oilman who financially backs the Klan has easy access to dynamite, and on the night of June 22nd — 24 hours after the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman — explosions blast through the Black community, damaging the home of NAACP leader C.C. Bryant who grabs his rifle and fires back at the bomber's car.

Initially, COFO leaders judge Southwestern Mississippi too dangerous for the highly visible northern white students, so the McComb and Natchez projects are put on temporary hold until the situation stabilizes. By early July, FBI agents have flooded into the state and the news media is providing extensive coverage of the search for Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman so COFO decides to risk restarting the McComb project. Led by SNCC organizer and former McComb activist Curtis Hayes (today, Curtis Muhammad), the first contingent of Freedom Summer workers arrive on July 5th.

They open a COFO freedom house on Wall Street in the Black community. Two nights later a dynamite bomb damages the house, injuring Curtis Hayes and volunteer Dennis Sweeney. The FBI "investigates" and does nothing. Over the following days, Black churches are burned in Pike and Amite counties, SNCC field secretary Mendy Samstein is attacked and beaten on a McComb street, and the home of C.C. Bryant's brother is bombed. With no protection from police or the federal government, local Blacks active with the Movement stand armed guard each night against Klan bombers and night riders.

Except for a core of dedicated and courageous activists like the Bryants, Aylene "Mama" Quin, Webb Owens, Willie Mae Cotton, Ernest Nobles, Joe Martin, and a handful of others, fear is pervasive in McComb's Black community. No churches are willing to open their doors for mass meetings, voter-registration classes, or Freedom Schools. The few Blacks who dare the short trip to the county courthouse in Magnolia on voter-registration days face threats of violence and economic retaliation. COFO canvassers are hard pressed to find any willing to take that risk.

But as it was back in '61, it's the Black youth who stand up and move forward. With no church or other building open to it, the McComb Freedom School meets in the dirt yard of the bombed freedom house. Joyce Brown (16), a Freedom School student-teacher pens The House of Liberty, a poem addressed to the community's adults that reads in part:

I asked for your churches, and you turned me down,
But I'll do my work if I have to do it on the ground,
You will not speak for fear of being heard,
So you crawl in your shell and say, "Do not disturb,"
You think because you've turned me away,
You've protected yourself for another day.

— Joyce Brown.

Young activists and COFO organizers circulate her poem throughout the Black community and the elders respond. A church opens its doors to the Freedom School and soon more than 100 students overflow the space — some of them the younger sisters and brothers of the those who had protested and been expelled from Burgland High three years before. "The Freedom School is inspiring the people to lend a hand in the fight," reports school director Ralph Featherstone. "The older people are looking to the young people, and their courage is rubbing off."

Ten Black businessmen secretly gather in Aylene Quin's South of the Border cafe. Inspired by Joyce Brown's poem, they form a movement support committee and contribute $500 (equal to $3,700 in 2012) towards buying land and materials for a community center that will become a movement headquarters. Soon churches open their doors to mass meetings and attendance begins to grow. Local families contribute food and money to support the COFO staff and volunteers.

…

The McComb Movement calls for a mid-August "Freedom Day," an attempt to get as many people as possible to attempt to register at the courthouse in Magnolia. Klan opposition is fierce — crosses are burned, threats of violence and economic retaliation increase, and two dozen cops raid the freedom house in the middle of the night — looking for "illegal liquor" they claim [McComb is a "dry" city]. Back in 1961, the 2nd floor of the Black-owned Burgland Market was used for "Nonviolent High," the precursor freedom school for the expelled high-school students. On August 14, 1964, the building is bombed. Undeterred, several hundred Blacks attend a Freedom Day rally in McComb, and on August 18th, 23 Black men and women manage to take the voter- test at the courthouse in Magnolia. Their applications are denied by registrar Glen Fortenberry. None are registered to vote.

The following week, local activists, SNCC staff, and summer volunteers head north to Atlantic City for the MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention. On the night of August 27-28, as the betrayed MFDP delegates are bitterly making their way back to Mississippi, a bomb explodes near the home of Willie and Matti Dillon in McComb. She is active in the MFDP, two of their children attended the Freedom School, and Willie repaired a COFO car.

Sheriff Warren warns them, "If you don't cooperate with us more than the COFOs, more then [the bombing] is going to happen to you." Warren and FBI agent Frank Ford accuse the Dillons of planting the bomb themselves, then arrest Willie Dillon for "operating a garage without a license" (for fixing the COFO car) and "stealing electricity" because he had rigged a temporary flood light in defense against Klan night riders. He is quickly tried without a lawyer and sentenced to a $600 fine (equal to $4,400 in 2012) and nine months in jail.

By the end of August, the Black community in McComb has endured more than a dozen bombings since the start of Freedom Summer in late June …. As August ends, most of the summer volunteers return to school and with their departure media interest declines. The FBI takes the opportunity to reduce their 16 agents to 4. This further emboldens the Ku Klux Klan who rest secure in the certainty that they are immune from arrest by both local and federal law enforcement.

But SNCC organizers Jesse Harris, Mendy Samstein, and Cephus Hughes, the Rev Harry Bowie from the Delta Ministry, and several summer volunteers remain in McComb. Along with local leaders like the Bryants and Aylene Quin, they are determined to keep the movement moving forward.

Mama Quin is kind and good to everyone, but more than that, she is a towering figure of strength. She can't be intimidated. Three years ago she was one of the first to welcome Moses and lend him and the SNCC workers her support. Her cafe has always been open — despite the threats. And this summer, again she leads the community. She serves Black and white, night after night.

On August 30, the cops plant illegal liquor in Mama Quin's cafe and then arrest her. The white landlord evicts her, and the cafe is closed. Violence and beatings continue. Unable to intimidate Movement leaders, the Klan expands their terror campaign to Blacks who have never been involved in civil rights activities, bombing their homes and businesses to turn them against the Freedom Movement. SNCC writes to Washington, pleading for federal intervention. The Justice Department does nothing.

On the night of September 20, a bomb shatters Aylene Quin's home injuring her children. A second dynamite blast destroys the wood-frame Society Hill Baptist Church which had opened its doors to freedom meetings (when the congregation reconstructs the church they build it with fire-proof brick). Several hundred angry Blacks, many of them armed, pour into the streets, throwing rocks at the cops and threatening retaliatory violence. Only the desperate efforts of COFO organizers and local activists to calm the crowd avert a blood-bath as 100 heavily armed Mississippi State Trooper swarm into town.

Sheriff Warren accuses Mama Quin of planting the bomb that destroyed her home and almost killed her young son and daughter. Dozens of Black leaders, activists, and students are arrested. Many are charged with "criminal syndicalism" — a new state law that prohibits public speaking and political organizing by "subversive" groups. Almost 150 state troopers — one-third of the entire state force — are stationed in McComb. They are an occupying army sent to suppress the Black community. The number of Blacks arrested on various bogus and illegal charges tops 200. The number of Klansmen arrested for terrorism and bombings remains at zero.

With money from the National Council of Churches, SNCC/COFO sends Mama Quin, Matti Dillon, and Ora Bryant — all bombing victims — to Washington to meet with officials and the national press. The Justice Department brushes off the three women with their usual, "doing all we can," platitudes. But news reports and their meetings with members of Congress generate enough pressure that President Johnson meets with them privately. He's in the middle of his campaign against Goldwater and reluctant to take any action that might stir up more resentment among southern white voters, but he also fears that some dramatic escalation of violence in McComb — the assassination of civil rights workers or a violent confrontation between armed Blacks and the Klan/cops — could damage his reputation. He expresses his concern but makes no promises.

Meanwhile, more bombs explode at Black churches and homes in Pike County. The Delta Ministry mobilize clergymen from around the country to come to McComb. Over the next three months almost 100 ministers respond, and with them comes renewed attention from the national media. A dozen visiting ministers are among the 30 people arrested at a second Freedom Day at the courthouse in Magnolia and more are jailed for voter-registration efforts.

… the Black boycott of white businesses, the general sense of violence and tension, and renewed attention from the national media is depressing economic activity. The shopping district is deserted as both whites and Blacks avoid McComb stores. … Business leaders begin meeting to discuss the economic importance of perhaps expanding their concepts of "law and order" beyond suppressing Black protests to include the radical idea of halting KKK bombings.

On September 29, a rumor flashes through the state's white power-structure that the federal government may be on the verge of declaring martial law in McComb. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson immediately meets with local officials. He informs them that he is going to mobilize the state National Guard into McComb to forestall federal action. The McComb and Pike County leaders ask him to hold off for two days to give them a chance to end the violence. Within 24 hours, Klan members are being arrested for the bombings. Within a day, 11 of them are in jail and huge amounts of explosives, weapons, and ammunition have been seized. Obviously, local, state, and federal law enforcement knew all along who the bombers were.

As described by author John Dittmer in Local People, the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, a sweet-heart plea bargain is quickly granted to the terrorists:

... they pleaded either guilty or nolo contendere to charges ranging from attempted arson to bombing. Under Mississippi law the maximum penalty was death, yet the presiding judge, W.H. Watkins, gave the defendants suspended sentences and immediately released them on probation. In justifying his leniency, Judge Watkins stated that the men had been "unduly provoked" by civil rights workers, some of whom "are people of low morality and unhygienic." The bombers, on the other hand, were from "good families..." That afternoon, thirteen COFO staff members were jailed on charges of operating a food-handling establishment (the freedom house, where they lived) without a permit. On the same day federal judge Sidney Mize rejected Willie Dillon's appeal to have his trial removed to federal court. Judge Mize ruled as he did because "there is no hostility among the general public in Pike County to the Negro race."

Despite "punishments" that don't even amount to the mildest slap on the wrist, the sudden arrest of the Klansmen does accomplish three things. First, it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the authorities knew who the bombers were all along and could have stopped them at any time. Second, it puts the Klan on notice that the white power-structure wants the bombings to stop — and it does. The dynamiting of Black homes, churches, and businesses comes to an abrupt halt. Third, talk of martial law in McComb ceases. The press trumpets a great victory over the KKK.

But segregation, denial of voting rights, poverty, exploitation, and virulent racism still persist in McComb and Pike County and the Freedom Movement carries on. Dynamite has failed to break it, arrests haven't halted it. The struggle for justice in "Klan nation" continues. In November, McComb Blacks participate in another mock Freedom Vote to protest denial of voting rights and lay the foundation for a MFDP Congressional Challenge (McComb 58-66).


Works cited:

“Direct Action and the Civil Rights Act.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...

“McComb — Breaking the Klan Siege (July '64-March '65).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...

“The McGhees of Greenwood (July-Aug).” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...

“Washington Does Nothing.” Mississippi Sumer Project. Civil Rights Movement History: Mississippi Freedom Summer Events. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm...

Despite years of Freedom Movement struggle, suffering, and sacrifice, few Black voters have been added to voting rolls in the Deep South. Blacks who try to register face legal barriers, so-called "literacy tests," terrorism, economic retaliation, and police harassment. By the end of Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, after lynchings, shootings, beatings, jailings, evictions, and firings, only 1,600 new voters have been registered in that state — barely .004 of the unregistered Blacks.

While Blacks have deep and bitter knowledge about denial of voting rights, it is only in the aftermath of Freedom Summer, the lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman, and the MFDP Challenge to Democratic Convention that awareness of this as a national issue has begun to slowly emerge among white northerners. (And there is little appreciation that similar issues apply to Latinos in the Southwest, and Native Americans in many areas.)

So far as the Johnson administration is concerned, voting rights are not on the agenda for now. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Dr. King meets with the president in December of 1964. Johnson assures King that he'll get around to Black voting rights someday, but not in 1965. LBJ tells King that 1965 is to be the year of "Great Society," and "War on Poverty" legislation — not civil rights. "Martin," he says, "you're right about [voting rights]. I'm going to do it eventually, but I can't get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress" (Situation 1).

In Selma, Alabama, the seat of Dallas County, in the heart of the state’s black belt (agriculturally and racially speaking), attempts to register black residents to vote have been almost entirely thwarted. “In Dallas County, where SNCC organizers Bernard and Colia Lafayette had started a voter-registration project back in early 1963, no more than 100 new Black voters have been added after two hard years. As 1964 ends, total Black registration in Dallas County is just 335, only 2% of the 15,000 who are eligible” (Black Belt 1).

Passage of the Civil Rights Bill in July 1964 brought hope to Dallas County. It is swiftly dashed.

On Saturday, July 4, four Black members of the literacy project — Silas Norman, Karen House, Carol Lawson and James Wiley — attempt to implement the new law by desegregating [in Selma] the Thirsty Boy drive-in. A crowd of whites attack them, and they are arrested for "Trespass." At the movie theater, Black students come down from the "Colored" balcony to the white-only main floor. They are also attacked and beaten by whites. The cops close the theater — there will be no integration in Selma, no matter what some federal law in Washington says.

Sunday evening there is a large mass meeting — the first big turnout in months. Sheriff Clark declares the meeting a "riot." Fifty deputies and possemen attack with clubs and tear gas. Monday, July 6, is one of the two monthly voter registration days. SNCC Chairman John Lewis leads a column of voter applicants to the Courthouse. They hope the new law will offer them some protection, but Clark herds 50 them into an alley and places them under arrest. As they are marched through the downtown streets to the county jail, the deputies and possemen jab them with clubs and burn them with cattle prods.

On July 9, Judge James Hare issues an injunction forbidding any gathering of three or more people under sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC, or DCVL [Dallas County Voter’s League] as organizations, or with the involvement of 41 named leaders including the SNCC organizers, the Boyntons, Marie Foster, Rev. L.L. Anderson, Rev. F.D. Reese, and others. In essence, this injunction makes it illegal to even talk to more than two people at a time about civil rights or voter registration in Selma Alabama. And because it is an injunction rather than a law, Judge Hare can jail anyone who — in his sole opinion — violates it. And he can do so without the fuss, bother, and expense of a jury trial.

Activists and their attorneys file appeals. They know that on some bright day in the distant future, the blatantly unconstitutional order will eventually be overturned by a higher court. But here and now it paralyzes the Movement. Neither DCVL nor SNCC have the resources — human, financial, legal — to defy the injunction with large-scale civil disobedience. The weekly mass meetings are halted — for the remainder of 1964 there are no public Movement events in Selma, Alabama. The bravest of the local DCVL leaders continue to meet clandestinely; SNCC organizing is driven deep underground, and a pall of discouragement saps voter registration attempts (Selma Injunction 1-2).

SNCC had been the primary civil rights organization in Selma that had worked with the local Dallas County Voter's League (DCVL) in 1963 and 1964. Most of SNCC resources — organizers, money, leadership, focus — however, had been concentrated in Mississippi, first for the Summer Project and then for the MFDP Congressional Challenge.

Back in September of 1963, when four young girls were killed in the Birmingham bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church, Diane Nash Bevel and her husband James Bevel drew up a "Proposal for Action in Montgomery" — a plan for a massive direct action assault on denial of voting rights.

…

Their draft plan called for building and training a nonviolent army 20-40,000 strong who would engage in large-scale civil disobedience by blocking roads, airports, and government buildings to demand the removal of Governor Wallace and the immediate registration of every Alabama citizen over the age of 21. When she presents the idea to Dr. King, she tells him, "... you can tell people not to fight only if you offer them a way by which justice can be served without violence." Rev. C.T. Vivian and SNCC & CORE activists support the idea, but King and most of his other advisors do not consider it feasible.

A month later, Diane and James Bevel again raise the plan, later called the "Alabama Project," at an SCLC board meeting. The general concept of some kind of "March on Montgomery" some time in the future is supported, but no date is set, no specific plans are made, and there is no consensus around the idea of militant direct action and massive civil disobedience. Instead, SCLC's attention is focused on continuing the struggle in Birmingham and the situation in Danville VA (Alabama Project 1-2).

Ultimately, the “Alabama Project” idea is put on the shelf until after the 1964 Presidential Election.

In November 1964, with the Civil Rights Act passed and Goldwater defeated, the Bevels again raise the "Alabama Project," arguing that the time has come to move on voting rights — which cannot be won without national legislation that eliminates "literacy tests" and strips power from county registrars. Such legislation, they argue, can only be won through mass action in the streets (Alabama Project 4).

Rev. F.D. Reese of the Dallas County Voter’s League (DCVL) recalled: “In late 1964, SNCC's finances were dwindling. This organization was also beginning to experience internal differences regarding philosophies. The organization's effectiveness was waning in Dallas County. ... Those of us who had the vision knew the Movement in Dallas County had to be elevated to another level.” The DCVL leadership decided to “formally invited SCLC and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma.”

DCVL becomes the SCLC affiliate in Selma and SCLC commits to a voting rights campaign in Alabama with an initial focus on Selma and then expanding into rural Black Belt counties.

…

Saturday, January 2, 1965, is set as the date for defying the injunction and commencing a massive direct action campaign. There are no illusions. Selma, Dallas County, and the Alabama Black Belt are bastions of white-supremacy and violent resistance to Black aspirations. Everyone understands that when you demand the right to vote in Alabama you put your life — and the lives of those who join you — on the line (Alabama Project 5).

Major differences now separate the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Both nationally and in Selma, relations between SNCC and SCLC are tense. SNCC staff have been working and organizing in Selma for two years, enduring hardship, danger, brutality, and jail to slowly build an organizational foundation. They deeply resent SCLC coming in to use that foundation for a kind of large-scale mobilization that they distrust. SCLC counters that Selma's local leaders have asked for their help because the injunction has halted progress for six months.

Once close allies in the southern struggle, the two organizations are now on divergent paths. Dr. King and SCLC are still deeply committed to nonviolence, integration, multiracial activism, and appeals to the conscience of the nation. But after years of liberal indifference, federal inaction, and political betrayal, many in SNCC now question, and in some cases explicitly reject, some or all of those concepts.

SNCC is oriented toward building grassroots community organizations led by those at the bottom of society. Rather than seeing themselves as leaders, SNCC field secretaries view themselves as community organizers empowering local people to take control over their own lives. For its part, SCLC maintains that the community is already organized around the Black church, an institution that has sustained and shepherded Blacks through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, two world wars, and the modern era of school desegregation and bus boycotts. As they see it, Black ministers are, and always have been, the accepted community heads, and that the focus should be on moving those churches and preachers into social-political action. SNCC argues back that the ministers and congregation leaders are primarily concerned with issues affecting the Black elite and they do little for the sharecroppers, maids, and laborers who fill the pews. SCLC responds that splitting Black communities into rival camps weakens everyone and aids no one.

SNCC field secretaries toil anonymously in the most dangerous areas of the South with little or no media coverage or recognition, and they deeply resent the flood of publicity and adulation bestowed on Dr. King when he visits locales where they have been working for years. Some SNCC members express that bitterness by referring to him in a mocking tone as "De Lawd."

Though King accepts such derision with easy grace, other SCLC leaders and staff bristle with hostility. In SNCC's view, local Black communities can provide their own leaders and that media-centric, "big-name" outsiders like King not only hinder that process but are unnecessary. To SCLC, nationally-recognized spokesmen who can articulate the Freedom Movement to the world are essential, and some openly scoff at what they see as SNCC's over-idealization of local activism, noting that whenever King speaks in a Black community it is those very same local people who flood the aisles to overflowing.

In SCLC's view, the only way to substantially change the lives of those at the bottom of society is to win transformative national legislation like the Civil Rights Act. SNCC sees little value in federal laws that are weakly enforced and that, in any case, do not even attempt to address the grinding poverty of the great majority of the Black population. …

…

In order to win legislation at the national level, SCLC has to influence and maintain ties with the Johnson administration and the northern-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But LBJ and those same liberals betrayed the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City and SNCC wants nothing more to do with them. Instead, they have turned toward building independent Black-led political organizations outside the Democratic Party … (SCLC 1-3).

On December 28, Dr. King convenes a … meeting where he presents the SCLC plan, now called the "Project for an Alabama Political Freedom Movement." The proposal is to break the Selma injunction on January 2, engage in mass action and voter registration in Dallas County, and then spread out into the rural counties of the Alabama Black Belt. By spring, the campaign is to evolve into a freedom registration and freedom ballot campaign similar to what SNCC/COFO organized in Mississippi, culminating on May 4 in a direct action and legal challenge to the seating of the entire Alabama state legislature on grounds similar to those of the MFDP Congressional Challenge.

Bob Moses and Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC argue against the SCLC proposal. Instead, they urge support for the MFDP congressional challenge. But local leaders and activists from Selma and elsewhere in Alabama strongly endorse SCLC's plan and commit themselves to it. The ministers of Brown Chapel, Tabernacle, and First Baptist courageously pledge their churches for meeting space in defiance of the injunction.

…

Inside city hall and over at the county courthouse, the white power-structure cannot agree on how to handle the direct action campaign that SCLC has just publicly announced. Newly elected Mayor Smitherman, a local refrigerator salesman, is a "moderate" segregationist. He hopes to attract northern business investment — Hammermill Paper of Pennsylvania is considering Selma as the location for a big new plant, but they will shy away if "racial troubles" shine a spotlight of negative media on the town. Smitherman has appointed veteran lawman Wilson Baker to head the city's 30-man police force. They and their supporters believe that the most effective method of countering civil rights protests (and avoiding bad press) is to "kill 'em with kindness" as Police Chief Laurie Pritchett did in Albany GA.

Short-tempered Sheriff Jim Clark and arch-segregationist Judge Hare furiously disagree. They and their hard-line, white-supremacy faction are committed to maintaining southern apartheid through brutal repression. As they see it, billy-clubs, electric cattle-prods, whips, jail cells, and charging horses, are what is needed to keep the Coloreds in line — and if Yankee business interests don't like it, they can take their investments elsewhere.

These two factions are at war with each other. Baker narrowly lost to Clark in the sheriff's race, carrying the (white) city vote but not the rural areas. Now they angrily spar over jurisdiction. Baker's cops patrol the city except for the block where the county courthouse sits, which Clark and his deputies control. Outside the city limits, Clark and his volunteer posse reign supreme.

In the mid-1960s, more than 200 men belonged to the Dallas County Sheriff's posse. Some of them were also members or supporters of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan or National States Rights Party. Possemen wore cheap badges issued by Clark and semi- uniforms of khaki work clothes and plastic construction-site safety helmets. They were armed with electric cattle-prods and a variety of hardwood clubs including ax-handles. Some were mounted on horseback and carried long leather whips they could use to lash people on foot. Originally formed after World War II to oppose labor unions, under Clark the posse's mission was to defend white supremacy and suppress all forms of Black protest. And not just in Dallas County. In 1961, the posse formed part of the mob that beat the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, they participated in the mass violence when James Meredith integrated 'Ole Miss in 1962, and Bull Connor called them in to help crack the heads of student protesters during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 (Selma 1-4).

The January 2nd date is chosen because Sheriff Clark will be out of town at the Orange Bowl football game in Miami. Chief Baker has stated that city police under his command will not enforce Judge Hare's illegal injunction, and without Clark to lead them, there is little chance that sheriff's deputies will break up the mass meeting on their own.

Rev. F.D. Reese recalled: “The day before the scheduled Mass Meeting it snowed. On 2 January 1965, the first Mass Meeting since July 1964 was held at Brown Chapel. … Around 3:00 p.m. on 2 January 1965 we thought no one was going to show for the mass meeting. ... Slowly the people started coming into the church. The Courageous Eight had given every indication that we were ready to go to jail. Law enforcement officers were present to see how many people would turn out. More people turned out than the city authorities expected. They did not arrest us. There were too many Black people inside and outside of Brown Chapel to be confined to the Selma City Jail.”

The mass meeting is a huge success, some 700 Black citizens from Selma, Dallas County, and the surrounding Black Belt fill Brown Chapel to overflowing. They are determined to defy the injunction, determined to be free. Also in the audience are numerous reporters and both state and local cops. Clark is not yet back from Miami and no effort is made to enforce the injunction.

… Now that the injunction has been defied without arrests or violence, the focus turns to the demand for voting rights. The voter registration office at the courthouse is only open on alternate Mondays — the next date is January 18. That gives two weeks to recruit, organize, and train voter applicants to show up en masse to register.

On Sunday the 3rd, King leaves for speaking engagements, fund-raising events, and meetings to organize national support. Diane Nash Bevel coordinates SCLC and SNCC staff, now operating in pairs, who fan out through Selma's Black neighborhoods, canvassing door-to-door to talk about voter registration. Though fear is still pervasive, a few courageous souls step forward. On Thursday, January 7, evening meetings and workshops with prospective registrants are held in each of Selma's five electoral wards. Sheriff's deputies barge into some of the meetings to "observe." Bevel electrifies the 50 participants at the Ward IV meeting in Brown Chapel by ordering them out of the building. They leave. The next day, some 200 students attend a youth rally. On Tuesday the 12th, ward meetings of up to 100 begin electing block captains.

Bernard Lafayette, SNCC's first Selma organizer who has close ties to both SNCC and SCLC, arrives from Chicago to help ease friction between the two organizations. Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC are now in Selma. SNCC and SCLC field staff reinforcements begin to arrive. …

King returns to Selma on Thursday, January 14, to address a large mass meeting at First Baptist. He declares Monday a "Freedom Day" when direct action is to commence with a mass march to the courthouse by voter applicants. "If we march by the hundreds, we will make it clear to the nation that we are determined to vote." Volunteers will also apply for "white-only" city jobs, and integration teams will attempt to implement the Civil Rights Act by demanding service at segregated facilities — the first such action since students were beaten and arrested the previous July.

…

On Monday morning, January 18, Black citizens gather at Brown Chapel. After freedom songs, prayers, and speeches, Dr. King and John Lewis lead 300 marchers out of the church in Selma's first protest action since the injunction. Some are courageous adults determined to become voters, others are students for whom freedom is more important than attending class. They walk two-by-two on the Sylvan Street sidewalk (today, Sylvan Street is Martin Luther King Street). Police Chief Wilson Baker quickly halts the line. They have no permit for a "parade," but he agrees to allow them to walk in small groups to the courthouse. In other words, he is not enforcing Judge Hare's "three-person" injunction, but neither is he allowing Blacks to exercise their Constitutional right to peacefully march in protest.

Judge Hare and Sheriff Clark are furious at Baker's "betrayal." Clark, his deputies, and his posse, wait at the courthouse where they — not Baker — have jurisdiction (Marching 1).


Works cited:

“The Alabama Project.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

“The Black Belt, Dallas County, and Selma Alabama.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

“Marching to the Courthouse.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

“SCLC & SNCC.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

“The Selma Injunction (July).” Effects of the Civil Rights Act. Civil Rights Movement History 1964 July-Dec. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64c.htm...

“Selma on the Eve.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

“The Situation.” Selma Voting Rights Campaign (Jan-Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.h...

The suddenly released prisoners are tense. … SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet. Ruby Sales recalls:

It was afternoon. And the street was very eerie. There was a quietness over that downtown area that made us feel really, really eerie. ... What really prevailed that day was that we were thirsty and needed — wanted something to drink. And so we decided that everybody shouldn't go to the store just Morrisroe, Daniels, me, and Joyce Bailey. ... As we approached the store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman. At that time I didn't know his name; I found that out later. I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But my mind kind of blanked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.

[Daniels yanks Ruby out of the line of fire.] Jonathan was behind me and I felt a tug. The next thing I knew there was this blast, and I had fallen down. I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I heard another shot go off and I looked down and I was covered with blood. I didn't realize that Jonathan had been shot at that point. I thought I was the one who had been shot.

Morrisroe was running with Joyce Bailey ... he's holding her hand and he's not letting it go for nothing. And he's running with her, and he did not let go of her hands until he was shot in the back, and she kept running and he fell. ... I made a decision that I would just lie there, and maybe if I lie there, then Coleman would think that I was dead and then I could get help for the other people. He walked over me and kicked me and in his blind rage he thought I was dead.

Joyce Bailey had escaped and she ran back around the store to the side near an old abandoned car. ... very close to where I had fallen. And to her credit she did not leave until she could determine who was alive and who was dead. So she started calling my name, "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby." I heard her and I got up. I didn't stand up, I crawled, literally on my knees, to the side of the car where she was, and when I got to her, she picked me up and we began to run and Coleman realized that I wasn't dead. At that point, he started shooting and yelling things, ... because you have to understand that this man's rage was not depleted. [He] is over Morrisroe's body, standing guard over this body, because [Morrisroe] is calling for water and he'll be damned if he's gonna let anybody give him water. Jimmy Rogers comes over and tries to give Father Morrisroe water, and the man threatens to blow his brains out. So he is not finished. He is on a rampage.

It was a setup. They turned us out of jail knowing that somebody was going to go to that store. It was a setup (Ambush 1-3).

The rest of the group scattered and ran, knocking on doors as they passed homes. “Nobody would let us in; people were so terrified,” Sales said (Schjonberg 7).

Thomas Coleman, a 55-year-old road-construction supervisor, part-time deputy sheriff, and a member of one of the oldest white families in Lowndes County then strolled to the county courthouse where his sister is Superintendent of Schools and calls his friend Al Lingo, head of the State Troopers in Montgomery. "I just shot two preachers. You better get on down here" (Ambush 3).

A black doctor with combat experience saved Father Morrisroe’s life, removing his lung and spleen in an 11-hour operation. It took two years before Morrisroe could walk again—and he still feels pain daily (Troy 6).

When other SNCC workers went to look for Daniels’ body, they could not find it, Sales said. “The streets had been swept clean, and you could not tell a murder had taken place.”
Meanwhile, back in Keene that morning, Daniels’ mother, Constance, did not know that her son had even been in jail. She worried when the day’s mail did not include a birthday card for her from Daniels, who never forgot such things. Aug. 20 was her 60th birthday.

Two months before his murder, Daniels wrote this about living with and advocating with blacks in what was known as the so-called Alabama Black Belt: “I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I have truly been baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

President Johnson ordered a federal investigation of the shooting. The next day, his chief civil rights aide, Lee White, told Johnson that Daniels’ mother was having a hard time getting her son’s body returned from Alabama. Johnson told White to handle the transportation of Daniels’ corpse.

Carmichael traveled to Keene for Daniels’ funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, the parish that sponsored Daniels for ordination. Carmichael and a group of mourners sang a tearful We Shall Overcome at Daniels’ grave near his father’s at the edge of the Monadnock View Cemetery.

King called Daniels’ death “brutal and bestial,” but said that he had performed “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”

Alice West, with whom Daniels and Upham lived in Selma, said that Daniels had been a part of her family. “We all loved him and trusted him,” she told a website for veterans of the civil rights movement. “He taught my family all about the wonders of God’s love. His death took a toll on my family as well as all the black people in Selma, Alabama” (Schjonberg 7-9).

In less than 12 hours Coleman is released on minimal bail. An all-white Lowndes County grand jury charges Coleman with manslaughter rather than murder. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a racial "moderate" and a political foe of both George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, calls the manslaughter charge "shocking," and assumes charge of the prosecution. But as the trial date approaches, a flood of death threats dissuades Flowers from personally showing up in Lowndes County. He sends a deputy to Hayneville rather than appear in court himself.

The short trial takes place on Wednesday, September 29, little more than a month after the shooting. The Hayneville courthouse is crowded with Coleman's friends and supporters, among them Imperial Klan Wizard Robert Shelton, Grand Dragon Robert Creed, and the three Klansmen who murdered Viola Liuzzo. Circuit Judge Werth Thagard denies the motion from Flower's deputy to raise the charge to murder, denies the motion to change the trial venue out of Lowndes County, and denies the motion to delay the case until Father Morrisroe is recovered enough from his wounds to testify (since the jury trying Coleman will be made up entirely of white men, Flowers considers Morrisroe, the only surviving white witness, crucial to his case). Thagard then removes Flower's deputy and assigns local prosecutor Arthur Gamble — a personal friend of Coleman — to handle the prosecution.

Coleman admits he brought his loaded shotgun to the store that day, but claims he killed Daniels in "self-defense" after the seminary student threatened him with a knife. White friends of Coleman allege that Morrisroe was armed with a pistol, Daniels had a knife, and that "unidentified Negroes" stole the weapons from the crime scene after the shooting. With steadfast courage, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales defy intimidation from the hostile crowd and testify that Coleman murdered Jonathan Daniels and tried to kill Father Morrisroe without any cause or justification.

Most civil rights activists familiar with the events are convinced that the shooting was a planned ambush. They believe that the abrupt eviction of the incarcerated protesters out of the jail into the street was not a coincidence, but rather an action pre-arranged between Coleman and the jailors. When he was ready with his loaded shotgun, they set up his targets. As soon as he saw the mixed group of Black and white, he charged out of the store and opened fire. But the possibility of police collusion and conspiracy is not raised or explored in the trial.

The jury confers in front of the Confederate soldiers monument across from the courthouse. Despite the nonviolent history of Daniels and Morrisroe, the obvious fact that there was no way prisoners just released from jail would have had access to any weapons and that no weapons were found at the scene, they accept Coleman's "self-defense" lie and quickly return a verdict of "Not Guilty." All 12 jury men then shake Coleman's hand and congratulate him.
Nationally, the verdict is roundly condemned by political leaders and the major media as a perversion of justice. And in a sign that at least some change is finally coming to the Deep South, the Birmingham News describes it as "an obscene caricature of justice," and the Atlanta Constitution, which had refused to even cover the The March to Montgomery 6 months earlier, writes that the verdict "has broken the heart of Dixie." Attorney General Flowers is blunter, stating that the verdict represents the, "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement. ... now those who feel they have a license to kill, destroy, and cripple have been issued that license. Die-hard white racists agree with one thing he says, they plaster "License to Kill" bumper stickers next to their Confederate flag plates. (Trial 1-2).

“I would shoot them both tomorrow,” Coleman insisted years later. After all, they were “outsiders from the North.” (Troy 6).

Then-Presiding [Episcopal] Bishop John Hines said that what Coleman’s acquittal showed “about the likelihood of minorities securing even-handed justice in some parts of this country should jar the conscience of all men who still believe in the concept of justice in this land of hope.”

Instead of attributing Coleman’s release to the price a free society pays for the jury system, Hines said it was “the fearful price extracted from society for the administration of the system by people whose prejudices lead them to sacrifice justice upon the altar of their irrational fears” (Schjonberg 9).

Looking back, Stokely Carmichael related: Jonathan's murder grieved us. His wasn't the first death we'd experienced. But it was in some ways the one closest to me as an organizer. I'd thought they might have been gunning for me that night when they shot Silas McGhee in my car. That brother survived. But this one. ... Now I knew the kind of pressure I'd watched Bob Moses endure. I don't mean I understood or sympathized. Everyone had understood. But, now I felt what Bob must have been feeling, the pressure, the weight of the responsibility, the sorrow. But we couldn't let that stop the work. That's precisely what the killers intended. However, from then on, a little too late, the project staff took the strong position, nonnegotiable, that to allow whites in would be tantamount to inviting their deaths. That became our policy. And we armed ourselves (Trial 3).

Today, America’s Colemans are disgraced, while people like Daniels are canonized. The ESCRU launched a campaign, Operation Southern Justice, to integrate Southern juries. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, the Episcopal Church added Jonathan Daniels to the Church Calendar, marking his martyrdom every Aug. 14 (Troy 7).


Works cited:

“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...

Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/...

“The Trial of Tom Coleman.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...

Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonatha...