I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, With a New Preface

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom

A CENTENNIAL BOOK

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Founded in 1893

CHARLES M. PAYNE

I’ve Got the Light

of Freedom

The Organizing Tradition and the

Mississippi Freedom Struggle

With a New Preface

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

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First Paperback Printing 1996

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Payne, Charles M.

I’ve got the light of freedom : the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle, with a new preface / Charles M. Payne.

p.    cm.

A Centennial book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-520-25176-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century.   2. Civil rights workers—Mississippi—History—20th century.   3. Afro-Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi.   4. Mississippi—Race relations.   5. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—Greenwood—History—20th century.   6. Greenwood (Miss.)—Race relations.

I. Title.

E185.93.M6P39  2007

323′.09762—dc22

Printed in the United States of America

15  14  13  12  1l  10  09  08  07

10   9   8   7  6  5   4   3   2   1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For my grandparents,

William Smith from Claxton, Georgia,

Anna Mae Smith from Fitzgerald, Georgia,

and Rachel Payne

from Cambridge, Maryland

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE 2007 EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE

SETTING THE STAGE

TWO

TESTING THE LIMITS

Black Activism in Postwar Mississippi

THREE

GIVE LIGHT AND THE PEOPLE WILL FIND A WAY

The Roots of an Organizing Tradition

FOUR

MOVING ON MISSISSIPPI

FIVE

GREENWOOD

Building on the Past

SIX

IF YOU DON’T GO, DON’T HINDER ME

The Redefinition of Leadership

SEVEN

THEY KEPT THE STORY BEFORE ME

Families and Traditions

EIGHT

SLOW AND RESPECTFUL WORK

Organizers and Organizing

NINE

A WOMAN’S WAR

TEN

TRANSITIONS

ELEVEN

CARRYING ON

The Politics of Empowerment

TWELVE

FROM SNCC TO SLICK

The Demoralization of the Movement

THIRTEEN

MRS. HAMER IS NO LONGER RELEVANT

The Loss of the Organizing Tradition

FOURTEEN

THE ROUGH DRAFT OF HISTORY

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY:

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY

NOTES

INTERVIEWS

INDEX

PREFACE TO THE 2OO7 EDITION

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,

it is time to pause and reflect.

MARK TWAIN

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom was published a year after John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Illinois, 1994) and at about the same time as Adam Fairclough’s Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Georgia, 1995). In retrospect, the publication of the three books relatively close together marked a turning point of sorts in civil rights scholarship. In different ways, all three works represented a departure from what Julian Bond calls the Master Narrative of the civil rights movement. That narrative, so familiar as to constitute almost a form of civic religion, goes:

Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. Many Southerners were very prejudiced against Blacks. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and Freedom Rides. The nonviolent protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Reverend Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue. Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where Blacks could not have voted ten years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.

One college student recently came up with an even briefer version. One day, a nice old lady, Rosa Parks, sat down on a bus and got arrested. The next day, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up, and the Montgomery bus boycott followed. And sometime later, King delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and segregation was over.¹

The last decade has witnessed a remarkable flowering of movement scholarship, much of it trying to dismantle the mainstream narrative, assertion by assertion. Scholars are questioning the top-down and triumphal underpinnings of the narrative; the overemphasis on the South as a site of struggle; the extent of nonviolence; the character of white resistance, including the idea that it was mostly a problem of the South; the continued marginalization of women; the chronology; the role of liberals; the equation of Black Power with the end of the movement; the separation between civil rights history and labor history; and the related tendency to underemphasize the economic goals of the movement. Even the language used to describe the movement is a point of contestation. Was it segregation or white supremacy? The civil rights movement or the freedom struggle? Mind you, all of this is argument among magi; popular understanding of the movement continues to be organized around Kennedy and King, around nonviolence and that speech.²

Still, even if we don’t know who is listening, the scholarly literature has expanded and changed in ways that could not have been foreseen just a decade ago. Ideas which were oppositional then have a hint of a new orthodoxy about them now. Reviewing that literature is too large a task to attempt here, but we can look at some of the subsequent work on the rural South, situating Light of Freedom in the work that came after (although just doing that now can be seen as controversial).

Among the many works which argue that the movement’s beginnings need to be sought long before Brown or the Montgomery bus boycott, Paul Ortiz’s Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (California, 2005) is especially interesting because he couches the point in a study of a largely forgotten struggle, the post-World War I fight for the franchise and better economic conditions in Florida. He makes a very strong case for the salience of historical memory. He attributes much of the vibrancy of the Florida movement to the ability of activist leaders to ritually mobilize memories of successful Black struggle in the context of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He also stresses the importance of networks, not so much church-based groups as women’s clubs, fraternal organizations, labor unions, and mutual-aid societies. Only a wave of state-sanctioned violence, in the context of utter national indifference, brought the movement to an end.

Looking at the movement in rural Louisiana over a seventy-year period, Greta De Jong’s A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (North Carolina, 2002) finds that the activists there always had a conception of goals broader than the Master Narrative envisions. At all points, they were concerned with economic independence, political participation, education, and safety from violence. In the 1960s, CORE activists coming into the parishes she studies found people who were not so much interested in desegregating local facilities as in economic justice and the right to vote, an experience similar to that of SNCC in Mississippi. As in Mississippi, the most receptive people tended to be land-owning farmers and young people, and the most reluctant, teachers and preachers. Fraternal orders like the Masons and Knights of Pythias, which were crucial to the campaign Ortiz describes in Florida, were also significant in Louisiana. Individuals who were interested in working with CORE were not necessarily interested in its message of nonviolence: The most common response of African Americans to the numerous drive-by shootings and bombings carried out by white supremacists in black neighborhoods was to reach for their firearms (p. 189).

In Let The People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movemerits in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986 (North Carolina, 2004), Todd Moye demonstrates that, even within a single county, the course of the movement could be very different from one town to another. He also contends that the movement almost certainly saved the county from economic disaster by creating a climate that made business investment possible. In the course of telling that story, he also tells the story of Jack Harper, a former leader of the Citizen’s Council who has been repeatedly elected to public office in a Black majority county, apparently by delivering a high level of service to constituents he once tried to keep from voting. We are only beginning to think about how Southern white people understand their own adjustments to a post-movement world, a story which needs to be told at multiple levels. Joseph Crespino’s In Search of Another County: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, forthcoming) tells one part of the story, detailing the ways political elites, after early legislative and judicial losses, began learning to cut their losses, in part by taking strategic advantage of racial antipathies in the rest of the country, saying in effect that they would desegregate the schools of Mississippi one day after the schools of New York desegregated. This kind of analysis is part of a larger, ongoing effort to see the defenders of white supremacy as something more than one-dimensional, cardboard racists.

It seems somehow fitting that white supremacists and black radicals are both being, if not rehabilitated, then at least considered through more complex lenses. The emerging literature on Black Power sees its advocates as more than hate-filled nihilists; rather, they were rational political actors whose work grew naturally out of the earlier movement and helped reshape the American political landscape, including the character of Black leadership.³ Part of what is involved in the reconsideration of Black Power is a reexamination of the idea that Civil Rights and Black Power represented fundamentally different movements, the one to be lionized—at least in retrospect—the other vilified. This involves an ongoing reexamination of the meaning of nonviolence. Rather than seeing attitudes toward violence as one of the sharpest differences between the two phases of the movement, the new scholarship emphasizes the continuities, arguing that philosophical commitment to nonviolence was always rare and became more so over time; that support for self-defense was always widespread; and that, in the South, many movement participants saw little tension between nonviolence as they understood it and self-defense.⁴ Worth Long, a SNCC activist quoted by Todd Moye, may have said it best: Black people, were, by and large, unviolent (p. 232).

The new Black Power literature intersects with what may be the most interesting revisionist theme, a call for more attention to African American movements for racial justice outside of the South.⁵ As soon as one does that, the Master Narrative is pretty much done for. Now one has to rethink the role of the church, the nature of militance, the role of left radicalism, and how McCarthyism reconfigured the movement. Looking at the North gives us a different way to think about the limits of liberalism, and of antidiscrimination as the end-all of racial policy. Some of the most interesting work, including Rhonda Williams’s The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (Oxford, 2004) and Felicia Kornbluh’s A Right to Welfare? Poor Women, Professionals, and Poverty Programs, 1935–1975 (Pennsylvania, forthcoming), focuses on the struggles of low-income urban women around welfare or public housing. They raise questions that fundamentally challenge our conception of what it means to be a citizen. What works for the sharecropper doesn’t work for them. In modern America, does citizenship entail a right to some minimum level of consumption? Can you be a citizen without access to some kind of credit?

While there is no doubt that some of the most interesting work will come from this Up South school, the Southern vein is hardly mined out. A recent work which demonstrates that is Emilye Crosby’s A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (North Carolina, 2005). The movement in Claiborne County, where Crosby grew up, started later than in much of the rest of the state, largely after the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Using over 140 interviews, in addition to the files of the Sovereignty Commission (Mississippi’s state agency for the defense of white supremacy), FBI files, and local police files, as well as, one imagines, her personal knowledge of the county, she is able to perform the rare feat of analyzing the evolution of a complex social movement in both the white and Black communities and of doing it at the level of personality, comparable in this respect to William Hinton’s Fanshen. One can see Black people growing more confident, partly in response to the leadership of Rudy Shields, a remarkable organizer even by the standards of the Mississippi movement, and white people growing more frustrated and uncertain. One can see that at all points in the process there are divisions among both Blacks and whites that do not become part of the public transcript. Crosby offers one of the most extensive discussions available of the price individual Black people paid for their activism and of the thoroughness with which movement opponents were able to turn instruments of government to their ends, even in a county where the sheriff was relatively even-handed and respected by both sides.

There is a real temptation for bottom-up history to sing praises to the agency, courage, and wisdom of the poor and look no further. In fact, it is probably a good idea to assume that people are formed by the society they struggle against and carry some of its flaws within them. By far, the chapter of Light of Freedom which has been least commented upon by reviewers is chapter 12 with its discussion of various corruptions within the movement. To its credit, there are no plaster saints in A Little Taste of Freedom. The movement in Claiborne County relied heavily on boycotts, and Crosby describes in detail the way activists enforced discipline against Black people who failed to support the boycotts, ranging from ostracism to physical violence. That the way Black activists enforced group discipline paralleled the way the Citizen’s Council enforced it was an irony lost on few. At the same time, Crosby is able to say something about how boycott violators understood what they were doing. Claiborne County is in the part of the state in which Charles Evers was most influential, and no one better reflects moral ambiguity than Evers—able to command intense loyalty from his constituents while steadily enriching himself, setting himself up as an autocrat willing to rule with force and intimidation when charisma wouldn’t do, and all the while maintaining cozy relationships with the defenders of white supremacy.

Perhaps no idea was dearer to the young people who worked in Mississippi in the 1960s than the idea that they were building for the long haul, doing work that would continue in some form long after they themselves were no longer around. In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy (Chicago, 2004), Kenneth Andrews argues that experience shows they were largely right. Comparing those Mississippi counties which developed a high level of movement infrastructure in the 1960s to those which did not, he finds that, two decades later, Blacks from movement counties still enjoyed a higher level of some public goods—more political participation, more Black officeholders, more influence over social welfare policies.⁶ In the face of resistance, movements built infrastructures and propelled changes in an array of local institutions and those efforts have had an enduring legacy in Mississippi (p. 200).

What can be said at this point about work currently in the pipeline is that it will definitely put the Southern movement more closely in dialogue with struggles in the rest of the country, not all of them African American. It will focus on what happened in the South after national attention turned elsewhere, which will include a reevaluation of the role of federal government and market forces, as well as a reevaluation of class tensions within Black communities. If the previous wave of revisionism pushed discussion of the movement’s origins back before the mid-fifties, the next will challenge the idea that the movement ended in the mid-sixties. There will be continued interest in the role the movement played in pushing the country’s political center rightward. (Recall that Lyndon Johnson, signing the Voting Rights Act, commented sadly that he was signing the country over to the Republicans for the foreseeable future.) Hasan Jeffries’ forthcoming work on the Alabama movement promises to be an extensive analysis of how the rural movement shaped Black Power. One hopes, with all the forthcoming work on Black Power, that it will not just use the movement as a way to think about relationships between Blacks and whites, but as a way to think about relationships among Blacks. That is one way to step outside the terms of received discourse. There is growing interest in how memories of the movement are constructed—see, especially, Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Georgia, 2006)—but little of that interest has yet focused on Black Power in any depth. Once we get beyond describing the obvious ways in which the movement was distorted, this is another very promising avenue of analysis.

In his interview with me, Bob Moses noted that part of what was important about SNCC is that it provided a context and a culture in which young people could grow.⁷ The women of SNCC are currently preparing a collection of essays (Hands on the Plow, edited by Martha Prescod Norman and Judy Richardson) that will illuminate the processes of growth. It is a remarkable collection, lyrical and self-critical in a way that memoirs seldom are, and very much in the tradition of African American humanism.

It is still true that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing. Bottom-up analysis carries its own temptations, beyond the temptation of seeing only virtue in the oppressed—or, for that matter, seeing only oppression in the oppressed. Every historical parallel isn’t a case of historical continuity. There really was something special about the period from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, if only in the degree of attention paid to race nationally and in the changed nature of acceptable public discourse. Thinking from a purely bottom-up perspective makes sense only for a limited number of questions. Understanding the consequences of the movement requires understanding national actors and institutions.⁸

All that acknowledged, it remains true that scholars trying to understand the world through the eyes of its subaltern classes do not bear primary responsibility for the fact that most Americans profoundly misunderstand the nature of the movement. Partly because of that misunderstanding, teaching movement history as a critique of the Master Narrative is a profoundly rewarding experience. Students of all backgrounds come away with an awareness of how perspectives embedded in the way they understand the past affect their understanding of the present. Black students, in addition, say that this kind of history makes them think differently about their forebears. They mean that they learn to think more respectfully about previous generations of Black people. They have absorbed images about the past which imply—and are more powerful because they imply, rather than state—the historical irrelevance of Black people, their massive passivity. A history that challenges that is, of course, useful, but doing that doesn’t require any embellishment. Hagiographic history is going to be attacked sooner or later. As James Baldwin noted: To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.⁹ Giving young people a history that they can use doesn’t require any bending of the record. Quite the contrary. The more precisely and complexly we can render the history, the longer it will be useful.

Durham, North Carolina

August 2006

1.   Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. xiii.

2.   One exception is the growing interest in Southern states in civil rights tourism. As this is written, a discussion is taking place in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on setting up a museum about the murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, raising obvious questions about the balance between opportunism and commemoration.

3.   See Peniel Joseph, The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights—Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). See also Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Of course, the best earlier literature anticipated some of the points being made in the new Black Power literature; see William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Although it is not specifically about Black Power, Steve Estes I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) raises questions about the masculinist underpinnings of the entire movement which will be crucial to future analyses of Black Power. Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography makes several contributions to this discussion; see Carmichael with Ekweume Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003). As to the attitude of SNCC toward Malcolm X, an issue raised in the bibliographic essay in this volume, Carmichael/Ture treats him as an exemplar in every respect. In terms of questions about intellectual gatekeeping and the shaping of historical memory, it is important to note that almost every one of the mainstream media that reviewed Carmichael’s book chose a white reviewer to do it.

4.   Christopher Strain, Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Akinyele Umoja, 1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003), pp. 201–226; Akinyele Umoja, ‘We Will Shoot Back’: The Natchez Model and Paramilitary Organization in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Journal of Black Studies 32 (January 2002), pp. 267–290; Emilye J. Crosby, ‘This Nonviolent Stuff Ain’t No Good—It’ll Get Ya Killed’: Teaching about Self-Defense in the African American Freedom Struggle, in Julie Buckner Armstrong et al., eds., Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song (New York: Routledge, 2002); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Lance E. Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

5.   The clarion call is Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Matthew Countryman, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); but see also Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

6.   The pattern does not hold for school desegregation. There, counties with more movement infrastructure saw less desegregation over time, presumably a function of the fact that stronger movements generated stronger opposition in an area where the federal government wasn’t going to intervene. Whether Black office-holding is in fact a collective good for Blacks, is, of course, a point of contestation.

7.   For the Moses interview, see Charles Payne and Stephen Lawson, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

8.   Let us note, too, that some criticism of bottom-up theory and of work on the Southern movement tries to hold that work accountable for questions it is not trying to address.

9.   James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), p. 368.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS and activists have helped make this book possible. Earlier drafts or sections of it have been read by Mary Boothe, Clayborne Carson, Noel Cazenave, Tom Cook, Arlene Daniels, John Dittmer, Arnold Feldman, David Garrow, George Greene, Lawrence Guyot, Carol Heimer, Bob Jackall, Christopher Jencks, June Johnson, Jody Kretzmann, Joyce Ladner, Ray Mack, Doug McAdam, Silas McGhee, James Moore, Mrs. Susie Morgan, Aldon Morris, Bob Moses, Martha Prescod Norman, Wazir Peacock, Niko Pfund, Thomas Rush, Fannie Rushing, Bruce Thomas, Pat Tremmel, Arthur Vidich, and Hollis Watkins. Several people read more than one version, and several gave me painstakingly detailed responses, packaged with encouragement and guidance.

I thank Janet Moses for sending me to June Johnson. June Johnson’s family is well known for housing civil rights workers, and I am grateful to June and the others for extending that kindness to me and for helping me to track down many movement people. I thank the staff at the Highlander Research and Education Center for giving me a key to their library and letting me lose myself in it. One of the things I found there was Guy Carawan’s remarkable tape recordings of mass meetings. Tom Dent allowed me to make extensive use of his interviews from the Mississippi Civil Rights Oral History Project, 1976–86, the best such interviews with grassroots organizers I have seen. Robert Jackall’s help went beyond all claims of friendship or collegiality. I am grateful to Kathleen Bethel at Northwestern University for bibliographic help. Northwestern and the National Endowment for the Humanities provided financial assistance for the research. North-western’s Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research provided some much needed time to write. I am indebted to Dan Lewis and Stephanie Shaw for editorial advice and to Jerral West and Nancy Bennett for help in preparing the manuscript. Ellen Stein’s editing substantially improved this book.

If it captures a portion of the eloquence and the insight of the people I have interviewed, this book will be worth something. The process of doing the interviews was instructive in itself. One doesn’t actually interview SNCC folk. The process is much more interactive, with them often asking more questions than they answer. Above all, they make one question one’s own framework by constantly pointing out hidden assumptions and tacit theories buried in questions most people would think innocent. In their ability to look beneath the surface of things, we get a glimpse, I believe, of what an intellectually refining experience SNCC must have been.

Local people could also be very astute at picking up on a wrong-headed question—and far gentler about pointing it out. What I remember most about talking to them, though, is their predisposition to assume without evidence that I was doing something good and worthwhile, a reflection of the same expansive sense of community they brought to the movement, transforming it.

I am deeply grateful to everyone who shared stories and arguments.

INTRODUCTION

We have the record of kings and gentlemen ad nauseum and in stupid detail; but of the common run of human beings, and particularly of the half or wholly submerged working group, the world has saved all too little of authentic record and tried to forget or ignore even the little saved.

W. E. B. DU BOIS¹

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to Your Father who is in heaven.

MATTHEW 5:16

I’ve got the light of Freedom, Lord,

And I’m going to let it shine,

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

TRADITIONAL

AS LATE AS 1960, FEWER than two percent of Mississippi’s Black adults were registered to vote. During the early summer of 1962, a handful of youthful organizers fanned out across the state to stimulate voter-registration drives. Seldom more than two or three to a county at first, they went into towns that few Americans had ever heard of—Greenwood, Hattiesburg, Holly Springs, Ruleville, Greenville. The organizers represented a coalition of civil rights groups, but most owed their primary allegiance to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced snick), the organization that had, under the watchful eye of Ella Baker, grown out of the sit-ins of 1960.

Wherever they were sent, the civil rights activists found that their initial reception by local Blacks was less than enthusiastic. The movement was generally dismissed as dat mess. Reprisals were virtually certain. Those who were even thought to be interested in the movement might lose their jobs. Those who did join could expect to be shot at and to have their churches bombed and their homes targeted by arsonists. People who were able to survive the winter months only because of surplus commodities from the federal government could expect to lose them. Farmers who needed loans to get their crops started in the spring could expect their credit to be withdrawn. People who needed medical care could expect it to be refused. As one white landowner said, with completely unintended irony, to a Black family as he kicked them off his land, Your food, your work and your very lives depend on good-hearted white people.²

Nonetheless, a significant number of the Black residents in towns across the state eventually chose to cast their lot with the movement. The first organizers to come to Greenwood, near the heart of the Mississippi Delta, had to sleep catch-as catch can. Within a year, the level of movement activity was sufficient to bring the normal functioning of the city to a virtual standstill. Within two years, Black Greenwood was so much behind the movement that it could have slept a small army of civil rights workers (and did). It was one of the decade’s earliest successful campaigns in the rural South.

In part, this book is an examination of that campaign. How was it possible, within a few years, to move large numbers of dependent and, to all appearances, apolitical people—none of them having any semblance of legal rights at the local level, all of them vulnerable to violence—how was it possible to move these people to a position of actively working to change the conditions of their own lives? What did the movement do to them and they to it? In the quotation that prefaces this Introduction, Du Bois reminds us that social history has tended to ignore or forget the record of ordinary people. A great deal has been written about the various national civil rights organizations and their leaders. The sheer volume of material written from a top-down perspective implies that the dynamism of the movement is to be understood in terms of these national leaders and national organizations. But the more closely one looks at the history, the less comfortable one becomes with reducing the tens of thousands of people across the South who participated in local movements to faceless masses, singing, praying, and marching in the background. Historian David Garrow contends that

what the carefully-scrutinized historical record shows is that the actual human catalysts of the movement, the people who really gave direction to the movement’s organizing work, the individuals whose records reflect the greatest substantive accomplishments, were not administrators or spokespersons, and were not those whom most scholarship on the movement identifies as the leaders. Instead, in any list, long or short, of the activists who had the greatest personal impact upon the course of the southern movement, the vast majority of names will be ones that are unfamiliar to most readers.³

Many of the young leaders who spread across Mississippi in 1962 were carriers of a particular tradition of social struggle, and this book is also an examination of that tradition. Bob Moses, himself responsible for much of what made the Mississippi movement distinctive, even among SNCC projects, has written that the civil rights movement can be thought of as having two distinct traditions.⁴ There was what he labels the community-mobilizing tradition, focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events. This is the tradition of Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington, the tradition best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King. This is the movement of popular memory and the only part of the movement that has attracted sustained scholarly attention.

The Mississippi movement reflects another tradition of Black activism, one of community organizing, a tradition with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized, Moses argues, by the teaching and example of Ella Baker—and, I would add, by that of Septima Clark. That tradition, and placing the history of Greenwood within it, is the second major theme of this book.

The book’s structure is partly chronological and partly topical. Chapters 1 through 3 argue that in fact the initiative that made change possible was far more widely dispersed in Black communities than we ordinarily realize. The first chapter is partly a reminder of how utterly vicious the old system in Mississippi was and partly an outline of some of the systemic changes that made challenges to that system increasingly possible after 1940. The next two chapters are concerned with continuity; organizationally and intellectually, the well-known movement of the early sixties was predicated on the activism of an earlier, socially invisible generation. Chapters 4 through 9 examine the way the activists in the sixties built on and elaborated that legacy, concentrating on Greenwood between 1962 and 1964 and on the role that local people there played in the process. The period before mid–1964 is special because it marks a time when the Mississippi movement had only the most minimal resources. The federal government was still criminally lax about protecting the lives of civil rights workers, there were no large numbers of volunteers from outside the state, no consistent interest from the national media even when civil rights workers were killed, no particular reason to believe that the movement was ever going to achieve anything to justify the sacrifices it required. Those who became a part of the movement in that period really were trusting themselves to the air. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1964 Freedom Summer Project signaled a shift to a different kind of movement. Chapter 10 discusses that shift. Chapters 1l and 12 look at Greenwood in the middle to late sixties, finding that the experience of the early years was sufficiently transformative—empowering, if you will—that local people who had become active in that period were able to create and sustain several movement-related institutions, even in the face of decreasing help from the outside organizers who had first brought many of them into political motion. Their very success contributed to the erosion of the climate of relationships that had helped energize the pre–1964 movement. The two final chapters deal with the decline of the organizing tradition and its relative invisibility in both activist communities and popular media. The bibliographic essay discusses the same issue as it applies to scholarship.

I’ve got the light of Freedom is a line from This Little Light of Mine. A staple of Black church music, This Little Light of Mine is an appropriate symbol of the movement’s rootedness in the cultural traditions of the rural Black South. Depending on tempo and emphasis, it can carry a variety of messages. In the small sanctified church in which I was raised, it was sung during collection, presumably signifying that whatever one had to give mattered to the Lord. In Mississippi particularly the song became an anthem of the movement and a special favorite of Fannie Lou Hamer’s. One activist wrote: It was sung in churches, in freedom schools, on marches, on picket lines, at jails and in Parchman [prison] where hundreds of demonstrators were jailed. The song became a force.⁵ The idea that everyone had some part of freedom’s light was close to the heart of the message that organizers both carried into the Delta and found there.

There are heroes and, emphatically, heroines enough in this history. Yielding to the temptation to focus on their courage, however, may miss the point. Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. If we are surprised at what these people accomplished, our surprise may be a commentary on the angle of vision from which we view them. That same angle of vision may make it difficult to see that of the gifts they brought to the making of the movement, courage may have been the least.

Unreferenced quotations are from my own interviews with the person named. Several of the people interviewed have changed names since the sixties. I have followed a practice of using whatever name an individual was or is using at the time referred to. Idiosyncratic spelling and grammar in quotations have been retained except where they might interfere with clarity. Finally, within the movement, Ella Baker was always Miss Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer always Mrs. Hamer. Southern Blacks had to struggle for the use of courtesy titles and thus often had a different appreciation for them. More particularly, the use of titles was self-consciously a token of the respect and affection that women like Miss Baker and Mrs. Hamer commanded even from young men and women who were frequently contemptuous of social convention. I have followed their usage.

One

SETTING THE STAGE

The show has been put on the road. . . . Three wars, increased migration. . . . radio and television have played their parts in creating in [Mississippi] Negroes a dissatisfaction with the status quo. The studied efforts to keep them poor and ignorant have broken down under their own weight.

RUBY HURLEY

NAACP¹

EVERYTHING THAT TOOK place in Mississippi during the 1960s took place against that state’s long tradition of systematic racial terrorism. Without some minimal protection for the lives of potential activists, no real opposition to the system of white supremacy was possible. Lynching is only one form of racial terror and statistics on it virtually always underestimate the reality, but between the end of Reconstruction and the modern civil rights era, Mississippi lynched 539 Blacks, more than any other state. Between 1930 and 1950—during the two decades immediately preceding the modern phase of the civil rights movement—the state had at least 33 lynchings.²

The first victim was Dave Harris, shot to death in 1930 by a crowd of 250 white men who believed Harris had killed a young white man near Gunnison, Mississippi. The second and third victims were Pig Lockett and Holly Hite. Arrested for robbery, they were taken from the law enforcement officers by a mob, which hung them. In 1931, Steve Wiley was accused of attempting to assault the wife of a grocery-store owner while he was drunk. She shot him three times. A mob hung what was left of him from a railroad trestle. A week later, in Vicksburg, Eli Johnson, also accused of an attempted assault on a white woman, was lynched. In November of that year, the body of Coleman Franks was found hanging from a tree limb near Columbus. He had been charged with shooting and wounding a local white farmer. There were no lynchings in 1932, but two in 1933. In July an unnamed Negro man in Caledonia, Mississippi, was hung, accused of insulting a white woman. In Minter City that September, Richard Roscoe got into a fight with a white man. A mob shot him to death, tied his body to the rear of the sheriff’s automobile, and paraded it through town before dumping it in front of his home.

Nineteen-thirty-four saw three killings. In Bolivar County, a mob overpowered sheriff’s deputies and seized Isaac Thomas and Joe Love, who had been arrested for an alleged attack on a white woman. The men were hung from a railroad trestle. Less than two months later, in Pelahatchie, Mississippi, four white men beat seventy-year-old Henry Bedford to death. A tenant farmer, he was accused of having spoken disrespectfully to one of the whites in the course of a dispute about land rental. The sheriff arrested four whites—for which he suffered some criticism—but no indictments were ever handed down. About a month later, Robert Jones and Smith Houey were hung from a tree near Michigan City. They were accused of killing at least one white man.³

There were seven killings in 1935, three in the month of March alone. On March twelfth, Ab Young was hung from a tree in a school yard near Slayden. Young was wanted in connection with the shooting death of a white highway worker. When he was captured, the mob had an argument about whether to burn him or turn him over to the sheriff in Holly Springs. The brother of the murdered man had made a plea that Young not be mutilated. While the argument was still going on, a group of about fifty went off to hang him. He was allowed to sing a hymn, which he was able to do in a clear, unfaltering voice, apparently unnerving some of his captors. After he was dead, several in the crowd used his swinging body for target practice. When the lynchers got back to town the burn-him or give-him-to-the-sheriff argument was still going on.⁴ Ten days later in Lawrence County, R. J. Tyronne was shot to death, apparently by neighbors who thought he had become too prosperous. On the thirtieth of the month, the body of Rev. T. A. Allen, weighted down with chain, was found in the Coldwater River. Allen had been involved in an attempt to organize sharecroppers. In June, R. D. McGee in Wiggins was both hung and shot for his alleged attack on an eleven-year-old white girl. In July, Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, both young farmers, were hung near Columbus, also for an alleged attack on a white woman. Bodie Bates was hung from a bridge in August for the same reason. In September, a mob in Oxford, site of the University of Mississippi, hung Ellwood Higginbotham, who was being tried for the murder of a white planter.

In 1936, J. B. Grant, seventeen years old, was shot over a hundred times by a mob, tied to an automobile, and dragged through the streets of Laurel before being hung from a railroad trestle. What he had done to deserve this is not known. It was a record fifteen months before the next killing, but that one proved particularly brutal: Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack McDaniel, both in their mid-twenties, were accused of murdering a white man and were taken from the sheriff by a mob. Three or four hundred people, including women and children, took them to a clearing in the woods near Duckhill, where they were chained to trees. According to one report, the mob turned on McDaniels first. A blowtorch was applied to his chest until he confessed, after which he was shot. The blowtorch was applied to Townes for as much as an hour; it was used to burn off his fingers and ears individually. While he was still alive, brush and wood were piled at his feet and fired with gasoline, finally burning him to death.⁵

During the first half of 1938, there were no lynchings anywhere in the South, perhaps in part because, in the wake of the Duckhill slayings, federal anti-lynching legislation was gaining new support. In the second half of the year, there were seven lynchings, four in Mississippi, in which the NAACP estimated a total of six hundred people took part. Only a few were involved in the murder of Wash Adams, who was beaten to death in Columbus for failing to pay the ten-dollar balance on his wife’s funeral bill. In the Delta town of Rolling Fork, a blacksmith named Tom Green refused to do some work ordered by the plantation manager. Green was fired and then got into an argument with R. Purdy Flanagan, the plantation owner, about who owned which tools. Shooting started; Green was wounded but Flanagan was killed. Green holed up in his cabin where he was killed after a fifteen-minute gun battle with a mob of three hundred. His body was dragged by car to the place where he had killed Flanagan, doused with gasoline and burned, then dragged into town and burned again. That was near the beginning of July. Near the end of the month a mob in Canton shot and killed Claude Banks as he was driving home. In November, a mob of perhaps two hundred killed Wilder McGowan in Wiggins. McGowan was accused of assaulting a white woman.

Where we have more than fragmentary details about these cases, it is often because of the work of NAACP investigators, usually native white southerners. Their work repeatedly demonstrated that the underlying stories were much at variance with reported versions. Stories about sheriffs being overpowered by mobs often turned out to be cases of collusion between sheriffs and the mobs—although they also found cases where law-enforcement people did everything they could to protect their prisoners, sometimes successfully. Of course, investigators frequently found that the actual reasons victims were selected had no relationship to their alleged transgression. The crowd at Duck Hill may have seized Roosevelt Townes partly because he was a bootlegger in a part of the state where that occupation was thought a white man’s prerogative.

Wilder McGowan was probably killed because he had trouble grasping the whole idea of white man’s prerogative. On November 20, a Mrs. Murray reported that at about eight P.M. she had been attacked and robbed by a light-skinned colored man with straight hair. The seventy-four-year-old Mrs. Murray was a member of one of the area’s prominent white families. A posse estimated at two hundred men descended upon the local Negro quarters and ordered that no one leave. One woman, thinking the order applied only to men, tried to leave for her job; she was hit on the head with a pistol butt and told to git back. Bloodhounds led the posse through a rooming house. Learning that one resident, Wilder McGowan, age twenty-four, was not there, the mob became interested in him. When he returned home, he was taken into the nearby woods and hung.

In many respects, McGowan was an unlikely choice. Several witnesses could have accounted for his whereabouts during the time the crime was committed. He was dark-skinned, so he didn’t fit Mrs. Murray’s description. He was never taken before Mrs. Murray for identification. The NAACP investigator concluded that McGowan was selected because he had had several altercations with whites:

On one occasion when he refused to run as other Negroes did when ordered to do so by some armed whites in an automobile, he was attacked but beat his assailants and took a revolver from one of them. Recently, he was suspected of having slashed with a knife one of a group of whites who visited a Negro dance hall looking for some good-looking nigger women. It is known that he was one of two or three young Negro men who resented the slur on their women and had a fist fight with the whites. He called for the lights to be put out and in the darkness the whites were badly beaten and one cut on the arm.

After they had Linched him, McGowan’s uncle wrote the NAACP a year later, they claim that they caught the right negroes But still Wilder is dead. In a larger sense, Wilder was the right Negro.⁶

The McGowan case was closer to the rule than to the exception. Southwide, allegations of rape were made in about one-sixth of all lynchings (but probably in one hundred percent of all southern speeches about lynching). Immediately after it was founded, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) made an attempt to find out how many of the charges of rape had any validity:

These investigations showed that white men, determined to get rid of a certain Negro, would accuse him of an attempted sex crime. They knew that officers would approve without question their action for this offense. . . . While in some instances the weight of the evidence supported the charge of attempted rape, investigations of many lynchings indicated so strongly that white women . . . were merely a front for lynchers that no report of a lynching for the protection of a white woman could be accepted as true until it was verified.⁷

Of course, mobs had their own understanding of what constituted assault; looking a white woman in the eye could be enough.

Near the end of the thirties, Canton, Mississippi, had two killings, both of which, according to an NAACP investigator, reflected, in different ways, a trend toward quieter lynchings. In July of 1938, a white man named A. B. McAdam visited the city to see his daughter who was hospitalized there. After he left the hospital, he was, he claimed, attacked and robbed by a Black man. Law-enforcement officers and citizens decided to blockade the part of town where the incident was supposed to have taken place. At the same time, Claude Banks, twenty-two-year-old son of a prosperous Negro funeral home owner, was driving home from a party. As he drove by the blockade, members of the mob opened fire with pistols and shotguns, apparently making no effort to stop the car. Witnesses said that both deputies and police officers were among those doing the shooting. Banks was killed. His companion, Willie Jones, was arrested and roughed up before being released with the warning that if he ever said anything he would catch sudden pneumonia—that is, be killed. Canton’s mayor did what he could to keep the story quiet, refusing to cooperate with a photographer who wanted to get a picture of the body—a departure from the older tradition in which murderers, smiling and grinning, posed with the bodies of their victims or pieces thereof, for photos that were sometimes turned into postcards. Claude Banks’s father did what he could to keep the issue alive. He went to the mayor and requested the city render some form of compensation for his son’s death and then asked a local judge if there were any legal avenues of redress. Both told him that nothing could be done.

Joe Rodgers was killed in Canton in 1939. Active in community affairs, a deacon and choir member at Mount Zion Baptist Church, Rodgers was employed at Dinkman Lumber Mill. He was asked to move into company-owned housing but refused, since that housing was more expensive than what he already had. On Saturday, May 6, there was an extra deduction from his pay. He was told that the deduction was for rent on a company house. The following Monday, Rodgers raised the issue with a foreman. Things ended with the foreman striking Rodgers with his fist and then grabbing a spade. Rodgers took the spade away and hit him with it before a friend of Rodgers’s separated the two men. It is not known what happened immediately after that, but Joe Rodgers was never seen alive again. That Thursday, a constable found his body in the Pearl River, bound hand and foot and beaten to a pulp. He had been tortured with hot irons. The Madison County Herald never mentioned his death, and local residents were ordered not to discuss it.⁸

By the end of the thirties, NAACP officials and members of the ASWPL thought howling mobs were becoming passe. Small groups of men were doing quietly what large crowds used to do publicly. Kangaroo courts and charges of killed while resisting arrest were giving racial murder a quasi-legal air. Even when large groups were involved, there were more attempts to suppress news of murders—this in a state where lynchings had previously been announced in the newspapers a couple of days in advance in order to give the country people time to get to town.

World War II brought new possibilities of racial tension. On the one hand, whites worried that those Blacks who served in the armed forces would come back with biggity ideas. On the other hand, some whites felt that not enough Black men were going to war. Blacks were more likely to be excluded from service for reasons of health or illiteracy, leaving some whites feeling that there were too many Black men around. Nonetheless, the state’s lynching rate did not change much during the war years; there were three in 1943, one more in 1944.

The 1943 killings were only a week apart, separated by only a few miles. The first involved two fourteen-year-old boys, Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, arrested for attempting to rape a thirteen-year-old white girl near the small town—population fourteen hundred—of Quitman. The sheriff claimed the boys had confessed. On October 12, a small group of men supposedly overpowered the constable at the jail and took the boys. They were found hanging from a beam of the bridge where the incident had taken place. The bridge was a traditional site for lynching in Clarke County. In 1918, four Negroes, two of them pregnant women, had been hung there for alleged complicity in the death of a local dentist.

Subsequent investigation of the 1943 killing by the NAACP again raised doubts about just what had happened. The girl and the two boys were friends, and they frequently played together, often around the bridge. On that day, according to the report of the NAACP’s Madison Jones,

they were running and jumping when the girl ran out from under the bridge and the boys behind her. A passing motorist saw them and the result you know. The boys were mutilated in the following fashion. Their reproductive organs were cut off. Pieces of flesh had been jerked away from their bodies with pliers and one boy had a screw driver rammed down his throat so that it protruded from his neck.⁹

The Quitman killings may have inspired the killers of Howard Wash, killed just five days later about thirty miles away. Wash had been tried and found guilty of murdering his employer, a local dairy farmer. He had pleaded self-defense, and the fact that the jury that convicted him refused to recommend the death penalty may indicate that some of its members found some validity in his claim. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but a crowd broke into the jail and seized and hung him.

In 1944, the Reverend Isaac Simmons was farming 295 acres of land in Amite County. For a couple of years, a group of white men had been trying to get him to sell the land, but he had no interest in that. Simmons, sixty-six years of age, went to a lawyer to make certain that there would be no trouble about transferring the property to his children. Word of his visit to the lawyer got out. On the morning of March 26, six armed white men picked up Simmons and one of his sons and drove them to a thicketed area where Simmons was told to get out of the car. He tried to run, but two shotgun blasts caught him in the back. The killers then reloaded the shotgun, walked over to where he had fallen, and shot him a third time. His son, who had been forced to watch, was beaten and given ten days to get off the land. When the son returned with friends to reclaim his father’s body, he found that all of his father’s teeth had been knocked out with a club—presumably after he was already dead—and his arm broken and his tongue cut out.¹⁰

Such mutilations—parading dead bodies around the town, shooting or burning bodies already dead, severing body parts and using them for souvenirs, using corkscrews to pull spirals of flesh from living victims or roasting people over slow fires—were as much a part of the ritual of lynching as the actual act of killing. They sent a more powerful message than straightforward killing would have sent, graphically reinforcing the idea that Negroes were so far outside the human family that the most inhuman actions could