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P R O L OG U E
“ I C o m e t o Ge t M y G u n ”

e late-summer sun was broiling the already sunbaked floodplains of the

Mississippi Delta on August 31, 1962, when Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and
seventeen other men and women boarded an old school bus in front of the
Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in the little town of Ruleville.
e bus was normally used to haul day laborers to the cotton fields, but today
it was headed for the Sunflower County courthouse twenty-six miles away
in Indianola. e seat of Sunflower County, Indianola was also the birthplace
of the Citizens’ Council—the white-collar, white-supremacist organization of
prominent planters, businessmen, and politicians who professed to disdain
the hooded garb and violence of the Ku Klux Klan.
At the courthouse, Mrs. Hamer and the others intended to register to vote,
a radical and dangerous action for black people in Mississippi at the time,
especially in this river-washed fertile cotton plantation land of northwest Mis-
sissippi known as the Delta. Here, black people formed an overwhelming major-
ity of the population. If they gained voting rights, there was a very real
possibility that black power could displace white power in local government.
Local whites had proven themselves willing to fight that possibility in every
way they could. In the 1950s and ’60s, white-supremacist terror besieged black
communities in Mississippi and across the South. Black leaders had been
assassinated or driven from the state; new laws were put in place both to
maintain black disenfranchisement and to surveil the black community. Ku
Klux Klan membership expanded and included policemen and civic leaders.
At the courthouse, the men and women from Ruleville crowded into the
circuit clerk’s office and announced their intention. Cecil Campbell, the startled
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20 Prologue

and decidedly hostile clerk, stated that only two of them were allowed in the
office at the same time. Everyone except Mrs. Hamer and an older man named
Leonard Davis went back outside to wait their turn. Sullen white men, some
carrying pistols, milled about outside the courthouse; the group waiting to reg-
ister stood uneasily on the steps and under the portico. en, without giving
a reason, the circuit clerk suddenly closed his office.
Despite the danger Mrs. Hamer and her fellow would-be registrants were
facing, my coworkers and I were pleased that they had braved this hostile ter-
ritory—and that no violence had taken place. I had boarded the bus with the
group, and though I had only been in Mississippi for a few weeks, I was
already well aware of the dangers of challenging white power in the state. e
previous summer, SNCC had begun an intensive voter-registration effort in
Southwest Mississippi, and white supremacists had unleashed murderous vio-
lence against it.
I was a freshman at Howard University in Washington, D.C., during the
campaign in that region of Mississippi and did not plan to become part of
the voter-registration effort in the Delta in the summer of 1962. Instead, I
intended to participate in a civil rights workshop for young people organized
by CORE in Houston, Texas, aer finishing my spring semester. CORE had
invited me and given me money for a bus ticket because at Howard I had
been part of the sit-in movement.
I boarded a Greyhound bus for Houston, but when I reached Jackson,
Mississippi—the state’s capital—I decided to try to meet students there who
were sitting in at segregated public facilities. I could have disembarked in any
southern city and met student protesters, but Mississippi was so notoriously
racist and violent—wholly associated in my mind, and in the minds of many
in my generation, with the brutal 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett
Till—that it was difficult for me to imagine students anywhere in the state
being brave enough to sit in. Yet I knew students were doing just that in Jack-
son. I thought they must have some kind of special courage gene to be protest-
ing in Mississippi. As far as I was concerned, no place in the entire universe
was more oppressive and dangerous for a black person. Sit-in protests in the
segregated towns and cities of Maryland and Virginia were one thing; sit-in
protests in Mississippi were quite another, I thought. So I felt compelled to
meet them. I got off the bus and made my way to their headquarters.
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Prologue 21

But when I told them I was on my way to a civil rights workshop in

Texas, Lawrence Guyot, a student at Tougaloo College, rose from his seat
and gave me a stern look. He was about to head up into the Delta and
become part of SNCC’s beginning efforts there. In 1964, he would become
chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). “Civil
rights workshop in Texas!” he scoffed. “What’s the point of doing that when
you’re standing right here in Mississippi?” Guyot (as we most often called
him) was a big, intense guy, and his tone was disdainful, almost bullying,
conveying without further words what was at once a challenge and a
demand: So you’re down here just to chatter about civil rights, are you?
That’s pretty useless. If you’re serious, stay and work with us. Jessie Harris,
another of the young Mississippi activists, chimed in: “You’re in the war
zone here.”
I got the message. e Greyhound le without me; I never completed my
journey to Texas and instead became a part of SNCC’s effort in the state.
When summer ended, I remained in Mississippi as a SNCC field secretary
instead of returning to school. I was nineteen years old.
Although it had happened almost a year before I arrived in Mississippi, I
was aware of the September 25, 1961, murder of Herbert Lee, a small farmer
and NAACP leader in Amite County. Lee had given strong support to SNCC’s
efforts in Southwest Mississippi, and his killing—which occurred in broad
daylight—was a frightening reminder that death could find you anywhere in
the state. It was a lesson I remembered at tense moments, like the one at the
Sunflower County courthouse in late August of 1962.
at day, I could feel the tension in the air outside the courthouse. Every-
where in the state, politicians and newspapers were whipping whites into a
frenzy over the possibility that in a few weeks James Meredith could become
the first black person to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Like school
desegregation, voting rights was an explosive issue—the armed white men
on the steps of the courthouse were a living testament to that fact.
On the way to Indianola, the fear on the bus had been palpable, but Fan-
nie Lou Hamer had gone a long way toward easing it. She lived a quiet, simple
life as a sharecropper and timekeeper on a Sunflower County cotton planta-
tion, and we had neither noticed nor anticipated her strength until she raised
her powerful voice in songs of faith and freedom on that bus. Soon her
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22 Prologue

strength and boldness would make her a legendary figure in Mississippi’s Free-
dom Movement.
What happened to Mrs. Hamer aer this attempt at voter registration is
fairly well known. She returned to the plantation where she and her husband,
Perry “Pap” Hamer, had lived and worked for eighteen years. Word of her
attempt to register had gotten back to the plantation before she did, and
William David “W. D.” Marlow, the plantation’s angry owner, was waiting for
her. He demanded that she withdraw her application and promise never to
make such an attempt again; otherwise, she was to get off his land immediately.
Mrs. Hamer’s reply has entered Freedom Movement lore: “I didn’t go down
there to register for you,” she informed Marlow. “I went down there to register
for myself.”
Mrs. Hamer’s story has become familiar, but the retaliatory violence that
soon descended on Ruleville’s black community is not so well-known. On Sep-
tember 10 night riders drove through town shooting into the homes of people
associated with the voter-registration effort, including the home where Mrs.
Hamer had found refuge aer her expulsion from Marlow’s plantation. In
another Ruleville home, that of Herman and Hattie Sisson, located in a black
section of town called the Sanctified Quarters, two young girls were wounded:
e Sissons’ granddaughter Vivian Hillet and her friend Marylene Burks, who
were visiting before heading off to college. Hillet’s arms and legs were grazed by
rifle shots, and Burks was more seriously injured by shots to her head and neck.
Another of the homes attacked by the night riders was that of an elderly
couple, Joe and Rebecca McDonald, neighbors of the Sissons. I was staying
with the McDonalds along with two other SNCC workers, Charles “Mac”
McLaurin and Landy McNair, but as it happened, none of us was in the
McDonalds’ house when the shooting occurred. I was in town, however, and
in a tiny place like Ruleville (population 1,100 then), gunshots fired anywhere
could be heard everywhere, especially in the still of a Mississippi Delta night.
I immediately raced back to the Quarters and was told that two girls had
been wounded, so I rushed to the North Sunflower County Hospital where
they were being treated. I began to ask about their condition and sought to
find out, from the Sissons and others, exactly what had happened. Ruleville’s
mayor, Charles Dorrough, was also at the hospital, and he ordered me
arrested for interfering with the investigation by “asking a lot of silly ques-
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tions.” Ruleville’s town constable, S. D. Milam (the brother of one of the men
who had murdered Emmett Till), put me next to a police dog in the backseat
of his car and hauled me off to Ruleville’s jail.
Mac, Landy, and I had first encountered Mayor Dorrough a few weeks
earlier. We had just come to town and were walking down a dirt road in
Ruleville’s Jerusalem Quarters—named for a church—when a car suddenly
stopped beside us. A white man jumped out and, waving a pistol, announced
angrily, “I know you all ain’t from here, and you’re here to cause trouble! I’m
here to tell you to get out of town!” He was Mayor Dorrough, who sometimes
engaged in police patrols. In addition to owning the town’s hardware store
and broadcasting agricultural news on the local radio station, he was presi-
dent of the local Citizens’ Council.
Holding us at gunpoint, Dorrough barked, “You niggers get into this car!”
Mac asked why, and the mayor responded, “’Cause this pistol says so!” We
got in his car, and he drove us to Ruleville’s city hall, where he acted not only
as mayor but also as justice of the peace. He accused us of being New York
City communists and “troublemakers,” shouting that we should get out of
Ruleville and go back to New York. In the Mississippi of those days, the Civil
War and the Cold War were oen conflated, and except for those in Russia,
China, and Cuba, New York City communists were considered the worst kind
of communists in the world. Mac and Landy were native Mississippians;
when Mac explained that “we” were all from the state, I was relieved at being
included and kept my Washington, D.C., mouth shut.
Mayor Dorrough seemed to be from another planet, and he certainly ran
Ruleville as his own fiefdom. On one occasion SNCC workers were picked up
for violating the town’s curfew, enforced only on blacks if enforced at all. One
of the SNCC workers told the mayor that the Supreme Court had ruled cur-
fews for adults unconstitutional. His response sums up what Mississippi was
like at the time: “at law ain’t got here yet.”
Now, in the wake of the shootings in the Quarters, and on the basis of
what could be called Ruleville law, Dorrough came up with another reason
for arresting me at the hospital. He claimed that the shooting that had
wounded Hillet and Burks was a “prefabricated incident” designed by Bob
Moses (SNCC’s Mississippi project director), McLaurin, Landy, and myself
to generate publicity for a failing political effort in the state. “We think they
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24 Prologue

did it themselves,” he told a local reporter, claiming that a “reliable source”

had informed him that a civil rights worker had purchased shotgun shells a
few days earlier. is accusation and my arrest were so ridiculous that even
Dorrough could not hold me for long, and I was released the next morning.
Back at the McDonald home aer my release from jail, I found that Dor-
rough had confiscated Joe McDonald’s shotgun, using my arrest as an excuse.
Mr. Joe, as we called him, worried aloud about what he would do without it.
Like most of the black people in Ruleville and Sunflower County, he was poor,
and he depended on a garden in the backyard and his gun to put food on his
table, especially now that three young guys were part of his household.
We told Mr. Joe that he had a right to his gun, that the U.S. Constitution
gave him that right. He asked us if we were certain. Yes, we told him, and
we had a history book with a copy of the Constitution in it. I went and got
the book and then read the Second Amendment out loud. “You see,” Mac
told Mr. Joe for emphasis, “that’s where it says so right in the United States
Constitution.”
Mr. Joe told me to fold over the page I had just read and then took the
book from me. A little while later, we noticed that Mr. Joe was not around
and we asked his wife, Rebecca, where he was. “He went to get his gun,” she
told us. “You said it was all right.”
We were stunned and fearful. One of our constant concerns in the violent
Deep South of those days was that local people would get hurt or even killed
for behavior we had encouraged. Herbert Lee’s murder leaped into my mind;
Mr. Joe going to get his gun raised the terrible possibility that he would be
killed too.
We were about to run aer Mr. Joe when we heard the familiar rattle of
his old truck pulling up. He was back from city hall. We rushed outside.
“What happened?” we asked. Mr. Joe said he had leaned into the doorway of
city hall and simply told Dorrough, “I come to get my gun.” e mayor replied
that he didn’t have a right to his gun, but Mr. Joe held up the history book he
had taken from us, opened it to the page he had asked me to fold over, and
told the mayor, “is book says I do!”
It was exactly the sort of action that could get a black man hurt, jailed,
or killed in the Delta or anywhere in Mississippi; certainly Emmett Till had
been murdered for less. And Dorrough was such an inveterate racist that
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none of us could have imagined that he would easily return the shotgun. But
we had misjudged the mayor, Joe McDonald, and the entire culture of guns
in the Deep South. For now, as Mr. Joe stepped out of his truck, he was tri-
umphantly raising the shotgun above his head.