Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "sam-block"
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1962 -- Movement Leaders Refuse to Quit
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...
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...
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi Early 1963 -- Violence and Death in and near Greenwood
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...
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...
Civil Rights Events -- Mississippi 1963 -- The Murder of Medgar Evers
By the time Medgar Evers was 28, he had lost a family friend to a lynch mob. He had been turned away from a voting place by a gang of armed white men. He had been denied admission to a Mississippi law school because he was black. Nevertheless, Medgar Evers loved Mississippi. He fought in World War II for the United States “including Mississippi,” he told people. And he returned from overseas with a commitment to steer his home state toward civilization.
That determination and a great deal of personal courage would carry him through many trials during the next nine years. Evers became the first NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, and he spent much of 1955 investigating racial killings. Evers’ research on the murders of George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till and others was compiled in a nationally distributed pamphlet called M is for Mississippi and for Murder.
There was immense danger and little glory attached to civil rights work in Mississippi—even for the NAACP’s highest state official. Medgar Evers was the one who arranged the safe escape of Mose Wright after the elderly black man risked death to testify against the white killers of Emmett Till. It was Medgar Evers who counseled James Meredith through the gauntlet of white resistance when Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When there were no crises to respond to, there were long hours on the road organizing NAACP chapters (Bullard 1-2).
The Evers family lived under constant threat of violence. I can recall that, in the days just preceding the Meredith-Oxford crisis in September, 1962 -- all sorts of legal maneuvers were going on in the Federal district and Fifth Circuit courts -- my wife and I [Hunter Bear] went one Saturday night to the Evers home. We knew Medgar was probably in New Orleans where the Fifth Circuit was then grinding away, and we thought we should see his wife, Myrlie. We parked, went to the door, and knocked. Medgar's police dog was barking in the back yard (fenced up). There was no answer to our knock and I knocked again. Then the door opened, only a crack, and I could see a gun. I called my name and Medgar opened the door, instantly apologetic. He had come to Jackson for the weekend. Inside the Evers home, furniture was piled in front of all of the windows. At least a half dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen. The children were in bed and Medgar and his wife and Eldri and myself visited for a good while. The barricaded nature of the Evers home was not uncommon for a civil rights person in Mississippi; what was uncommon was the fact that both Medgar and his wife were mighty calm. It was a very pleasant visit -- unusually so considering the fact that, next perhaps to Meredith, no one was any more prime a target in the Deep South at that time than was Medgar.
… he was cool: I recall leaving Greenwood with him one night at midnight -- and we left at 90 mph -- with Medgar casually talking about a rumor he'd heard to the effect that a segregationist killer outfit in Leflore Co. had installed infra-red lights on the cars, which could allow them to see the highway, but which couldn't be spotted by whoever they were following. By the time he finished discussing this, we were going about 100 mph! But he was driving easily and well and his talk was calm in tone, if not in content.
But Medgar did not take chances, and no one could seriously accuse him of consciously or unconsciously seeking martyrdom. … Medgar always insisted on people not standing in the light; he, himself, stayed in the shadows -- took every safety precaution. …
No matter how discouraged he might feel, Medgar was always able to communicate -- or at least made a hell of an effort to communicate -- enthusiasm to those with whom he was working. In the early days of the Jackson Movement, our "mass" meetings were tiny affairs, yet Medgar always functioned as though the meetings were the last crucial ones before the Revolution broke in Mississippi: he met each person on an equal to equal basis, smiled, joked, gave them the recognition of human dignity that each human being warrants; by the time the meeting began even the little handful of faithful felt it was worth holding. …
But Medgar Evers could, privately, get discouraged. In his neighborhood for example, lived many teachers. Most would scarcely talk to him -- they were scared to death to even see him. Many of the clergymen in Jackson were afraid to exchange words with him. One evening Medgar came out to our home at Tougaloo; he'd spent the day trying to draw some teachers into the NAACP. They had turned thumbs down on it; had even told him, in effect, that the state's Negro community would be better off without him. He had had it that day and, I recall, talked then -- as he always did when he got discouraged -- about giving up the NAACP field secretary job and getting into the Ole Miss law school in the fall. … He'd get discouraged, privately -- never publicly, but a day or so later, he'd be back in form.
…
As the boycott went on into the spring, we broadened it into an all-out desegregation campaign -- picketing, sit-ins, massive marches. This was in May and June, 1963. It was the first widespread grassroots challenge to the system in Mississippi -- was the Jackson Movement -- and there was solid opposition from [Governor] Barnett right on down. Mass arrests and much brutality occurred each day; lawmen from all over the state poured into Jackson to join the several hundred Jackson regulars, the Jackson police auxiliary, state police, etc. Hoodlums from all over the state -- Klan-types, although the KKK as an organization was just formally beginning in Mississippi -- poured into Jackson. The National Office of the NAACP, which had reluctantly agreed to support our Jackson campaign, became frightened -- because of the vicious repression and because it was costing money -- and also the National Office was under heavy pressure from the Federal government to let Jackson cool off. A sharp split occurred on the strategy committee. Several of us, the youth leaders, myself, Ed King and a few others, wanted to continue, even intensify the mass demonstrations; others, such as the National Office people and conservative clergy wanted to shift everything into a voter registration campaign (meaningless then, under the circumstances.) There was very sharp internecine warfare between our militant group and the conservatives. Medgar was caught in the middle. As a staff employee of the National Office, he was under their direct control; as a Mississippian, he knew that only massive demonstrations could crack Jackson. (And we knew if we cracked Jackson, we had begun to crack the state.) The stakes were high and everyone -- our militant faction on the strategy committee, the conservative group, the segregationists, Federal government -- knew it.
The NAACP National Office began to cut off the bail bond money; and also packed the strategy committee with conservative clergy. It was a hell of a situation. Despite everything that I and Ed and the youth leaders could do, the National Office was choking the Jackson Movement to death. It waned almost into nothing in the second week in June.
I saw Medgar late one afternoon, Tuesday, June 11. He was dead tired and really discouraged -- sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but too much a staff man to openly challenge it. … We had a long talk and, despite the internal situation, an extremely cordial one. But he was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be. Later that evening, we were all at a little mass meeting… it was announced by the National Office people that the focus of the Jackson Movement was now officially voter registration -- no more demonstrations. The boycott, out of which it had all grown, would continue -- but no more demonstrations. NAACP T-shirts were being sold. It was a sorry mess. Medgar had no enthusiasm at all; said virtually nothing at the meeting; looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die (Bear Letter 1-7).
On the night of June 12 President Kennedy announced that he would be sending to Congress legislation that would make it illegal to refuse service to people of color at any "public accommodations," including hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment. "It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service … without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street," Kennedy told a nationwide television audience. "[W]hen Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. … Next week," he declared, "I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law" (O’Brien 2-4).
Interviewed in 1986 Sam Block stated: Medgar had just left us, you see, the same night that he was shot. He bid us farewell and told us that he had just stopped by, he had heard about all of the great things that were going on here in Greenwood and he stopped by to let us know that he was 200 percent with everything that was going on and if there was anything to do just let him know and he will come running anytime day or night and he would be there. He let us know that he loved us and keep up the good work. It was a short speech and he left and went into Jackson and later on that same night ... I guess he had just gotten home (Interview Block 51).
Evers watched the presidential address with other NAACP officials. Greatly encouraged, they held a strategy session lasting late into the night. When Evers finally arrived home, it was after midnight. He pulled into his driveway, gathered up a pile of NAACP T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go,” and got out of his car.
Myrlie Evers had let her children wait up for their father that night. They heard his car door slam. “And in that same instant, we heard the loud gunfire,” Mrs. Evers recalled. “The children fell to the floor, as he had taught them to, and I made a run for the front door, turned on the light and there he was. The bullet had pushed him forward, as I understand, and the strong man that he was, he had his keys in his hand, and had pulled his body around the rest of the way to the door. There he lay" (Bullard 4-5).
The bullet had struck Evers in the back, just below his shoulder blade.
Across the street on a lightly wooded hill, another man jumped … in pain. The recoil from the Enfield rifle he had just fired drove the scope into his eye, badly bruising him. He dropped the weapon and fled (Medgar 1).
Neighbors lifted Evers onto a mattress and drove him to the hospital, but he was dead within an hour after the shot.
…
Myrlie Evers had often heard her husband counsel forgiveness in the face of violence. But the night he was killed, there was only room for grief and rage in her heart. “I can’t explain the depth of my hatred at that point,” she said later. The next night, with newfound strength, she spoke before 500 people at a rally. She urged them to remain calm and to continue the struggle her husband died for (Bullard 5-6).
Interviewed later, Hunter Bear provided this information.
Our role was clear. Our militant group met immediately. We were up all night and into the next day. The national office people came back, but for the moment we had the momentum. We began having very substantial demonstrations. And all of this was pointing ultimately toward a funeral, which would be held on Saturday, June the 15th.
On one of the demonstrations the police charged several of us who were standing there. Most of the demonstrators were Tougaloo students of mine or Youth Council kids, or their parents. It was on Rose Street. I was standing right next to them. The police charged me particularly, and several people with me, but not the demonstrators, who had been arrested. Several people who were with me at that point ran, but I refused to run … I faced them, they surrounded me and clubbed me into unconsciousness in a bloody mud puddle on Rose Street.
… I was thrown into a paddy wagon, and there was a kid in there who wanted to try to escape and I said don't do it, they'll kill you. And so I kept him from doing that, which would have been very foolish, — ill timed.
… And lots of people were arrested in that Rose Street march. The police had turned out en masse, and so as they were arresting [the marchers], you also had this flying wedge of cops who focused on me. And we all wound up together in the fairgrounds.
An odd thing happened. I was lying in the paddy wagon and they turned the heat up, closed the windows, turned the heat up as high as it could go. And a man came and opened the door to let air in. It was M.B. Pierce, the chief of detectives. And he said to me very quietly, he said, "Professor, I'm sorry about this whole thing." And this was the first indication that something was reaching the other side. …
I was then taken to a hospital and later to the city jail and bonded out pretty quickly, — many stitches and bloody shirt. I made a very dramatic entrance at the Blair Street AME Church and spoke briefly to a cheering throng. But the real action occurred in the pastor's study, when Bill Kunstler and I called Martin King and asked if Dr. King could come to the funeral. And Dr. King said he could and would.
…
On Saturday, I picked up Dr. King at the airport. Kunstler rode with me and Dr. King, and I think Ralph Abernathy was in our car. Wyatt Walker and some others were in another car. We were given a grudging police escort, it was two miles to the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street where the funeral was being held. Jackson was inflamed, the whole state was inflamed, everything was ablaze, so to speak in that sense. Metaphorically.
As I drove my little Rambler with Dr. King sitting on the front seat, I was struck by how cool he was, — how cool we all were. The police hated us with a passion. The escort was very grudging. Snipers could be anywhere. We had a very interesting, matter of fact conversation. We might have been driving from say, Salina Kansas to Abilene or something like that. So we were all very cool. What else could we be?
So I let Dr. King off at the Masonic Temple, and the street was full of Black people going in. I let him and his party off, and Kunstler and so forth, and I went down a ways and parked and came back. By the time I got there, there was no space for me. I went upstairs, where a number of our militant wing of the strategy committee were gathered in a kind of attic that could look down and so we could see the situation. What we didn't see was this deplorable scene where the NAACP national officers tried to keep Martin King off the platform. … eventually they had to let him go up there.
So it was a dramatic funeral. As it developed, there were 5,000-6,000 people who had come from all over the state. Many notable luminaries from afar, — Ralph Bunche was there, others. We had a march then for about two miles, from the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street. It was very hot, there were police at every intersection, every juncture.
… it was a legal march. The Mayor had grudgingly, — the day before, — announced that he'd give a parade permit.
We marched for two miles, there are many photos of it. I was in one of the very first ranks, Dr. King was pretty much right in front of me. And Kunstler behind. I'm wearing bandages from the police beating. It was very hot. When we went through the Black neighborhoods, people were out in force. Some joined the march. They certainly were not intimidated by what was happening.
When we went through the white neighborhoods, the people watched up from their porches, — they were scared, frightened. For our part, we were a well-dressed group of people, there just happened to be five or six thousand of us marching through Jackson, Mississippi.
We got to the Collins Funeral Home and people had massed in front. Space was limited on Farish Street, but there were people on all the side streets. Nobody wanted to go home. Bill [Kunstler] came up to me and said Dr. King had to get back to where he was, and so Bill borrowed my car and took King and the others to the airport. It was obvious that there wasn't going to be any chance of his joining us. [Bear believed that the national NAACP had put pressure on him to leave].
… we stayed. It was very hot. You had several thousand people gathered there and it was very hot. You had the police all around the edges.
We started to sing, "Oh Freedom," and then everyone began to sing. And then one large group broke from the mass, and we, — I say "we," because I was part of it, — left and went down Farish Street toward Capitol Street. Now we moved down toward Capitol Street, with the police running from our demonstration, running...
Away from us, — they were scared. The police were running and then they massed down there. When we had crossed Capitol in the funeral march, the police were massed on both sides so we couldn't turn onto Capitol Street, — they were afraid of that. And in this second demonstration there was a great deal of interaction. There was very little violence in the mass crowd. There were hundreds, — there may have been much more than that, — I can only give you a sense that there were a hell of a lot of people but not the whole group that had been in the funeral march. And the police were heavily massed down there in all kinds of blue helmets, brown helmets, this and that, and so forth. We had a large, singing, surging demonstration.
[Rev.] Ed King, who'd been actively involved in things was there. The police massed down there, and they began to start pushing us back. They couldn't arrest everybody, they picked out 29 people, including me and Ed King, and 27 others and threw us in the paddy wagons. So from the paddy wagon I was able to look out this little barred window and had a bird's eye view of what was occurring.
I saw hundreds of police coming now back up Farish Street to regain lost ground. I watched police dogs, — which were inflamed, — biting the policemen. Tear gas was all over, the cops were firing shots. All sorts of things were happening. It was not a riot on our part. Non-violence had been preserved even if by the barest of threads sometimes, but we encouraged non-violence, and fought for tactical non-violence. We certainly didn't want people to play into the hands of our enemies who were only too happy to have a Sharpeville if they could have had it. That's what they wanted. [In 1960 police in the South African township of Sharpeville opened fire on a peaceful protest march and killed 69 men, women, and children.]
… The police accused me of inciting to riot and things of that sort. When we got out early in the evening and got back to Tougaloo, we learned that there had been an emergency strategy meeting, which the national office had nominated. And I had been blamed, along with Ed King and some other people, of inciting the "riot."
… all that had happened had been that a few kids had thrown some stones at the police. At that point Doar had come forward in something that was later grossly exaggerated to his advantage, and quote "calmed the throng" unquote. All this had been just a few rocks thrown by some angry kids. No matter what anybody may say to the contrary, that was it, — it was not a riot. And the kids were throwing rocks only after people had been beaten and slugged right and left. And horribly mistreated, and as far as they knew, people had been shot, I mean, it could have happened. I don't think it did, but given the shooting that was going on, it was only by a miracle.
So Doar persuaded people to disperse and go home. And from that point on, it was clear that we had profoundly serious problems. Many people were afraid of what happened, the Governor sent the National Guard into Jackson that night, and they were patrolling the streets along with the other hordes of folk, — enemies. There was an uneasy strategy committee meeting on Monday, where we heard about Federal involvement very openly, — that the President and the Attorney General were going to become involved (Interview Bear 22-29).
Leading the investigation, the local police immediately found the rifle and determined that it had been recently fired. Back at the station, a fingerprint was recovered from the scope and submitted to the FBI (Medgar 2).
On June 23, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder (NAACP 4).
With the obvious motive, his fingerprint on the weapon, the injury around his eye, his planning, and other factors, Beckwith clearly appeared to be the killer (Medgar 2).
During the course of his first 1964 trial, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.
All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith’s guilt, allowing him to escape justice.
In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others [such as how he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers]. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly excellent state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the murder. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January of 2001 (NAACP 4-5).
The horrific murder, after Kennedy's impassioned plea for reason and civility, stunned the nation. Evers's funeral attracted more than 5,000 mourners and hundreds more greeted his body in Washington, DC, where it had been transported by train for a hero's burial at America's final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. Evers had been a decorated soldier in World War II, and his widow, Myrlie Evers, had been coaxed by NAACP officials into allowing him to be buried in that most hallowed of spaces to make a statement about the vast injustices being committed on American soil.
It was on the very day that Evers was laid in the ground that President Kennedy sent his civil rights legislation to Congress, leveraging whatever empathy that moment inspired to make good on his promise from the week before. The next day, he invited Evers' widow and her children to visit him at the White House to express to them personally his sympathies for the loss of their beloved husband and father. He handed Mrs. Evers a copy of the just-delivered bill, which would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (O’Brien 3-4).
A year before his death, Evers told an interviewer why he devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights: “I am a victim of segregation and discrimination and I’ve been exposed to bitter experiences. These things have remained with me. But I think my children will be different. I think we’re going to win” (Bullard 7).
Works cited:
Bear, Hunter. “Letter to Ms. Polly Greenberg, New York September 27, 1966.” Medgar Evers: Reflection and Appreciation. Web. http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm
Bullard, Sara. “Medgar Evers.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...
“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm
“Interview with Sam Block.” Digital Education Systems. December 12, 1986. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_... pages 51-53
“Medgar Evers,” FBI, History. Web. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-ca...
“NAACP History: Medgar Evers.” NAACP. Web. https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-m...
O’Brien, M. J. “Medgar Evers & Civil Rights Act of 1964 Linked.” Clarion Ledger. July 1, 2014. Web. https://www.clarionledger.com/story/j...
That determination and a great deal of personal courage would carry him through many trials during the next nine years. Evers became the first NAACP Field Secretary for Mississippi, and he spent much of 1955 investigating racial killings. Evers’ research on the murders of George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till and others was compiled in a nationally distributed pamphlet called M is for Mississippi and for Murder.
There was immense danger and little glory attached to civil rights work in Mississippi—even for the NAACP’s highest state official. Medgar Evers was the one who arranged the safe escape of Mose Wright after the elderly black man risked death to testify against the white killers of Emmett Till. It was Medgar Evers who counseled James Meredith through the gauntlet of white resistance when Meredith became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When there were no crises to respond to, there were long hours on the road organizing NAACP chapters (Bullard 1-2).
The Evers family lived under constant threat of violence. I can recall that, in the days just preceding the Meredith-Oxford crisis in September, 1962 -- all sorts of legal maneuvers were going on in the Federal district and Fifth Circuit courts -- my wife and I [Hunter Bear] went one Saturday night to the Evers home. We knew Medgar was probably in New Orleans where the Fifth Circuit was then grinding away, and we thought we should see his wife, Myrlie. We parked, went to the door, and knocked. Medgar's police dog was barking in the back yard (fenced up). There was no answer to our knock and I knocked again. Then the door opened, only a crack, and I could see a gun. I called my name and Medgar opened the door, instantly apologetic. He had come to Jackson for the weekend. Inside the Evers home, furniture was piled in front of all of the windows. At least a half dozen firearms were in the living room and kitchen. The children were in bed and Medgar and his wife and Eldri and myself visited for a good while. The barricaded nature of the Evers home was not uncommon for a civil rights person in Mississippi; what was uncommon was the fact that both Medgar and his wife were mighty calm. It was a very pleasant visit -- unusually so considering the fact that, next perhaps to Meredith, no one was any more prime a target in the Deep South at that time than was Medgar.
… he was cool: I recall leaving Greenwood with him one night at midnight -- and we left at 90 mph -- with Medgar casually talking about a rumor he'd heard to the effect that a segregationist killer outfit in Leflore Co. had installed infra-red lights on the cars, which could allow them to see the highway, but which couldn't be spotted by whoever they were following. By the time he finished discussing this, we were going about 100 mph! But he was driving easily and well and his talk was calm in tone, if not in content.
But Medgar did not take chances, and no one could seriously accuse him of consciously or unconsciously seeking martyrdom. … Medgar always insisted on people not standing in the light; he, himself, stayed in the shadows -- took every safety precaution. …
No matter how discouraged he might feel, Medgar was always able to communicate -- or at least made a hell of an effort to communicate -- enthusiasm to those with whom he was working. In the early days of the Jackson Movement, our "mass" meetings were tiny affairs, yet Medgar always functioned as though the meetings were the last crucial ones before the Revolution broke in Mississippi: he met each person on an equal to equal basis, smiled, joked, gave them the recognition of human dignity that each human being warrants; by the time the meeting began even the little handful of faithful felt it was worth holding. …
But Medgar Evers could, privately, get discouraged. In his neighborhood for example, lived many teachers. Most would scarcely talk to him -- they were scared to death to even see him. Many of the clergymen in Jackson were afraid to exchange words with him. One evening Medgar came out to our home at Tougaloo; he'd spent the day trying to draw some teachers into the NAACP. They had turned thumbs down on it; had even told him, in effect, that the state's Negro community would be better off without him. He had had it that day and, I recall, talked then -- as he always did when he got discouraged -- about giving up the NAACP field secretary job and getting into the Ole Miss law school in the fall. … He'd get discouraged, privately -- never publicly, but a day or so later, he'd be back in form.
…
As the boycott went on into the spring, we broadened it into an all-out desegregation campaign -- picketing, sit-ins, massive marches. This was in May and June, 1963. It was the first widespread grassroots challenge to the system in Mississippi -- was the Jackson Movement -- and there was solid opposition from [Governor] Barnett right on down. Mass arrests and much brutality occurred each day; lawmen from all over the state poured into Jackson to join the several hundred Jackson regulars, the Jackson police auxiliary, state police, etc. Hoodlums from all over the state -- Klan-types, although the KKK as an organization was just formally beginning in Mississippi -- poured into Jackson. The National Office of the NAACP, which had reluctantly agreed to support our Jackson campaign, became frightened -- because of the vicious repression and because it was costing money -- and also the National Office was under heavy pressure from the Federal government to let Jackson cool off. A sharp split occurred on the strategy committee. Several of us, the youth leaders, myself, Ed King and a few others, wanted to continue, even intensify the mass demonstrations; others, such as the National Office people and conservative clergy wanted to shift everything into a voter registration campaign (meaningless then, under the circumstances.) There was very sharp internecine warfare between our militant group and the conservatives. Medgar was caught in the middle. As a staff employee of the National Office, he was under their direct control; as a Mississippian, he knew that only massive demonstrations could crack Jackson. (And we knew if we cracked Jackson, we had begun to crack the state.) The stakes were high and everyone -- our militant faction on the strategy committee, the conservative group, the segregationists, Federal government -- knew it.
The NAACP National Office began to cut off the bail bond money; and also packed the strategy committee with conservative clergy. It was a hell of a situation. Despite everything that I and Ed and the youth leaders could do, the National Office was choking the Jackson Movement to death. It waned almost into nothing in the second week in June.
I saw Medgar late one afternoon, Tuesday, June 11. He was dead tired and really discouraged -- sick at what was happening to the Jackson Movement, but too much a staff man to openly challenge it. … We had a long talk and, despite the internal situation, an extremely cordial one. But he was more disheartened than I had ever known him to be. Later that evening, we were all at a little mass meeting… it was announced by the National Office people that the focus of the Jackson Movement was now officially voter registration -- no more demonstrations. The boycott, out of which it had all grown, would continue -- but no more demonstrations. NAACP T-shirts were being sold. It was a sorry mess. Medgar had no enthusiasm at all; said virtually nothing at the meeting; looked, indeed, as though he was ready to die (Bear Letter 1-7).
On the night of June 12 President Kennedy announced that he would be sending to Congress legislation that would make it illegal to refuse service to people of color at any "public accommodations," including hotels, restaurants and places of entertainment. "It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service … without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street," Kennedy told a nationwide television audience. "[W]hen Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. … Next week," he declared, "I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law" (O’Brien 2-4).
Interviewed in 1986 Sam Block stated: Medgar had just left us, you see, the same night that he was shot. He bid us farewell and told us that he had just stopped by, he had heard about all of the great things that were going on here in Greenwood and he stopped by to let us know that he was 200 percent with everything that was going on and if there was anything to do just let him know and he will come running anytime day or night and he would be there. He let us know that he loved us and keep up the good work. It was a short speech and he left and went into Jackson and later on that same night ... I guess he had just gotten home (Interview Block 51).
Evers watched the presidential address with other NAACP officials. Greatly encouraged, they held a strategy session lasting late into the night. When Evers finally arrived home, it was after midnight. He pulled into his driveway, gathered up a pile of NAACP T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go,” and got out of his car.
Myrlie Evers had let her children wait up for their father that night. They heard his car door slam. “And in that same instant, we heard the loud gunfire,” Mrs. Evers recalled. “The children fell to the floor, as he had taught them to, and I made a run for the front door, turned on the light and there he was. The bullet had pushed him forward, as I understand, and the strong man that he was, he had his keys in his hand, and had pulled his body around the rest of the way to the door. There he lay" (Bullard 4-5).
The bullet had struck Evers in the back, just below his shoulder blade.
Across the street on a lightly wooded hill, another man jumped … in pain. The recoil from the Enfield rifle he had just fired drove the scope into his eye, badly bruising him. He dropped the weapon and fled (Medgar 1).
Neighbors lifted Evers onto a mattress and drove him to the hospital, but he was dead within an hour after the shot.
…
Myrlie Evers had often heard her husband counsel forgiveness in the face of violence. But the night he was killed, there was only room for grief and rage in her heart. “I can’t explain the depth of my hatred at that point,” she said later. The next night, with newfound strength, she spoke before 500 people at a rally. She urged them to remain calm and to continue the struggle her husband died for (Bullard 5-6).
Interviewed later, Hunter Bear provided this information.
Our role was clear. Our militant group met immediately. We were up all night and into the next day. The national office people came back, but for the moment we had the momentum. We began having very substantial demonstrations. And all of this was pointing ultimately toward a funeral, which would be held on Saturday, June the 15th.
On one of the demonstrations the police charged several of us who were standing there. Most of the demonstrators were Tougaloo students of mine or Youth Council kids, or their parents. It was on Rose Street. I was standing right next to them. The police charged me particularly, and several people with me, but not the demonstrators, who had been arrested. Several people who were with me at that point ran, but I refused to run … I faced them, they surrounded me and clubbed me into unconsciousness in a bloody mud puddle on Rose Street.
… I was thrown into a paddy wagon, and there was a kid in there who wanted to try to escape and I said don't do it, they'll kill you. And so I kept him from doing that, which would have been very foolish, — ill timed.
… And lots of people were arrested in that Rose Street march. The police had turned out en masse, and so as they were arresting [the marchers], you also had this flying wedge of cops who focused on me. And we all wound up together in the fairgrounds.
An odd thing happened. I was lying in the paddy wagon and they turned the heat up, closed the windows, turned the heat up as high as it could go. And a man came and opened the door to let air in. It was M.B. Pierce, the chief of detectives. And he said to me very quietly, he said, "Professor, I'm sorry about this whole thing." And this was the first indication that something was reaching the other side. …
I was then taken to a hospital and later to the city jail and bonded out pretty quickly, — many stitches and bloody shirt. I made a very dramatic entrance at the Blair Street AME Church and spoke briefly to a cheering throng. But the real action occurred in the pastor's study, when Bill Kunstler and I called Martin King and asked if Dr. King could come to the funeral. And Dr. King said he could and would.
…
On Saturday, I picked up Dr. King at the airport. Kunstler rode with me and Dr. King, and I think Ralph Abernathy was in our car. Wyatt Walker and some others were in another car. We were given a grudging police escort, it was two miles to the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street where the funeral was being held. Jackson was inflamed, the whole state was inflamed, everything was ablaze, so to speak in that sense. Metaphorically.
As I drove my little Rambler with Dr. King sitting on the front seat, I was struck by how cool he was, — how cool we all were. The police hated us with a passion. The escort was very grudging. Snipers could be anywhere. We had a very interesting, matter of fact conversation. We might have been driving from say, Salina Kansas to Abilene or something like that. So we were all very cool. What else could we be?
So I let Dr. King off at the Masonic Temple, and the street was full of Black people going in. I let him and his party off, and Kunstler and so forth, and I went down a ways and parked and came back. By the time I got there, there was no space for me. I went upstairs, where a number of our militant wing of the strategy committee were gathered in a kind of attic that could look down and so we could see the situation. What we didn't see was this deplorable scene where the NAACP national officers tried to keep Martin King off the platform. … eventually they had to let him go up there.
So it was a dramatic funeral. As it developed, there were 5,000-6,000 people who had come from all over the state. Many notable luminaries from afar, — Ralph Bunche was there, others. We had a march then for about two miles, from the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street. It was very hot, there were police at every intersection, every juncture.
… it was a legal march. The Mayor had grudgingly, — the day before, — announced that he'd give a parade permit.
We marched for two miles, there are many photos of it. I was in one of the very first ranks, Dr. King was pretty much right in front of me. And Kunstler behind. I'm wearing bandages from the police beating. It was very hot. When we went through the Black neighborhoods, people were out in force. Some joined the march. They certainly were not intimidated by what was happening.
When we went through the white neighborhoods, the people watched up from their porches, — they were scared, frightened. For our part, we were a well-dressed group of people, there just happened to be five or six thousand of us marching through Jackson, Mississippi.
We got to the Collins Funeral Home and people had massed in front. Space was limited on Farish Street, but there were people on all the side streets. Nobody wanted to go home. Bill [Kunstler] came up to me and said Dr. King had to get back to where he was, and so Bill borrowed my car and took King and the others to the airport. It was obvious that there wasn't going to be any chance of his joining us. [Bear believed that the national NAACP had put pressure on him to leave].
… we stayed. It was very hot. You had several thousand people gathered there and it was very hot. You had the police all around the edges.
We started to sing, "Oh Freedom," and then everyone began to sing. And then one large group broke from the mass, and we, — I say "we," because I was part of it, — left and went down Farish Street toward Capitol Street. Now we moved down toward Capitol Street, with the police running from our demonstration, running...
Away from us, — they were scared. The police were running and then they massed down there. When we had crossed Capitol in the funeral march, the police were massed on both sides so we couldn't turn onto Capitol Street, — they were afraid of that. And in this second demonstration there was a great deal of interaction. There was very little violence in the mass crowd. There were hundreds, — there may have been much more than that, — I can only give you a sense that there were a hell of a lot of people but not the whole group that had been in the funeral march. And the police were heavily massed down there in all kinds of blue helmets, brown helmets, this and that, and so forth. We had a large, singing, surging demonstration.
[Rev.] Ed King, who'd been actively involved in things was there. The police massed down there, and they began to start pushing us back. They couldn't arrest everybody, they picked out 29 people, including me and Ed King, and 27 others and threw us in the paddy wagons. So from the paddy wagon I was able to look out this little barred window and had a bird's eye view of what was occurring.
I saw hundreds of police coming now back up Farish Street to regain lost ground. I watched police dogs, — which were inflamed, — biting the policemen. Tear gas was all over, the cops were firing shots. All sorts of things were happening. It was not a riot on our part. Non-violence had been preserved even if by the barest of threads sometimes, but we encouraged non-violence, and fought for tactical non-violence. We certainly didn't want people to play into the hands of our enemies who were only too happy to have a Sharpeville if they could have had it. That's what they wanted. [In 1960 police in the South African township of Sharpeville opened fire on a peaceful protest march and killed 69 men, women, and children.]
… The police accused me of inciting to riot and things of that sort. When we got out early in the evening and got back to Tougaloo, we learned that there had been an emergency strategy meeting, which the national office had nominated. And I had been blamed, along with Ed King and some other people, of inciting the "riot."
… all that had happened had been that a few kids had thrown some stones at the police. At that point Doar had come forward in something that was later grossly exaggerated to his advantage, and quote "calmed the throng" unquote. All this had been just a few rocks thrown by some angry kids. No matter what anybody may say to the contrary, that was it, — it was not a riot. And the kids were throwing rocks only after people had been beaten and slugged right and left. And horribly mistreated, and as far as they knew, people had been shot, I mean, it could have happened. I don't think it did, but given the shooting that was going on, it was only by a miracle.
So Doar persuaded people to disperse and go home. And from that point on, it was clear that we had profoundly serious problems. Many people were afraid of what happened, the Governor sent the National Guard into Jackson that night, and they were patrolling the streets along with the other hordes of folk, — enemies. There was an uneasy strategy committee meeting on Monday, where we heard about Federal involvement very openly, — that the President and the Attorney General were going to become involved (Interview Bear 22-29).
Leading the investigation, the local police immediately found the rifle and determined that it had been recently fired. Back at the station, a fingerprint was recovered from the scope and submitted to the FBI (Medgar 2).
On June 23, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder (NAACP 4).
With the obvious motive, his fingerprint on the weapon, the injury around his eye, his planning, and other factors, Beckwith clearly appeared to be the killer (Medgar 2).
During the course of his first 1964 trial, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.
All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith’s guilt, allowing him to escape justice.
In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others [such as how he had bragged about killing Medgar Evers]. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly excellent state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the murder. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January of 2001 (NAACP 4-5).
The horrific murder, after Kennedy's impassioned plea for reason and civility, stunned the nation. Evers's funeral attracted more than 5,000 mourners and hundreds more greeted his body in Washington, DC, where it had been transported by train for a hero's burial at America's final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. Evers had been a decorated soldier in World War II, and his widow, Myrlie Evers, had been coaxed by NAACP officials into allowing him to be buried in that most hallowed of spaces to make a statement about the vast injustices being committed on American soil.
It was on the very day that Evers was laid in the ground that President Kennedy sent his civil rights legislation to Congress, leveraging whatever empathy that moment inspired to make good on his promise from the week before. The next day, he invited Evers' widow and her children to visit him at the White House to express to them personally his sympathies for the loss of their beloved husband and father. He handed Mrs. Evers a copy of the just-delivered bill, which would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (O’Brien 3-4).
A year before his death, Evers told an interviewer why he devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights: “I am a victim of segregation and discrimination and I’ve been exposed to bitter experiences. These things have remained with me. But I think my children will be different. I think we’re going to win” (Bullard 7).
Works cited:
Bear, Hunter. “Letter to Ms. Polly Greenberg, New York September 27, 1966.” Medgar Evers: Reflection and Appreciation. Web. http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm
Bullard, Sara. “Medgar Evers.” Teaching Tolerance. Web. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-r...
“Interview: Hunter Bear (John Salter).” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/hunteri.htm
“Interview with Sam Block.” Digital Education Systems. December 12, 1986. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/js_block_... pages 51-53
“Medgar Evers,” FBI, History. Web. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-ca...
“NAACP History: Medgar Evers.” NAACP. Web. https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-m...
O’Brien, M. J. “Medgar Evers & Civil Rights Act of 1964 Linked.” Clarion Ledger. July 1, 2014. Web. https://www.clarionledger.com/story/j...
