Coming of Age in Mississippi (50 page)

About a half hour later, she walked back into the apartment with two big red apples in her hands. I was washing dishes. “Want one?” she asked. “Yes, thanks,” I said. She put my apple on the table and walked over to the sofa and sat down. As I continued to wash the dishes, she sat there watching me. She looked as though she wanted to say something and didn’t know how. Finally, as I finished the dishes, she asked, “What time is your graduation?”

“The baccalaureate sermon is at ten-thirty Sunday morning, and the commencement is at five,” I said. “Why?”

“Nothing.” Then she said, “I was thinking about coming. I think Junior might wanta come too.”

Now Adline looked as though she felt much better. She wasn’t crying any more. I didn’t think that she would really come to Tougaloo on Saturday but I felt better knowing that at least she cared, that someone in the family cared.

The next morning I was once again on Greyhound headed for Jackson, Mississippi. I arrived at Tougaloo just in time to eat in the cafeteria. I was glad because I didn’t have money to buy food or anything else. As soon as I finished dinner, I headed for the Kings’ place to find out what was going on in the Movement. I had lost all contact with the Movement people in Mississippi when I was in New Orleans. But I knew Reverend King would be part of everything that was going on.

When I walked up on his porch, his door was open as usual—always open to students and Movement people. I knocked and walked right in. The Kings were just finishing dinner. A couple of other students were having dinner with them. I sat at the table and had coffee with everyone and the talk went on for two hours about the Movement and what was going on in Mississippi and on campus.

“Don’t forget we have an occasion to celebrate tomorrow,” Reverend King said to me as I was leaving.

“Tomorrow?” I asked blankly.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. To be honest with you I had too, until you came.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember,” I said.

“Come on, Anne. The Woolworth’s sit-in. It will be a year tomorrow.”

“My goodness! That’s right!” I said. “But it seems to me like it was years ago.”

“It’s only that you have done so much since then,” Reverend King said.

At eleven the next morning, I was on my way with some other students to celebrate my “anniversary” by participating in another sit-in. This time our target was Morrison’s Cafeteria. A dignitary from India who was visiting Tougaloo at the time was part of our group. Reverend King had invited him to join in our celebration.

A couple of white students had been sent to the cafeteria ahead of us. They were to be inside the cafeteria when we arrived so they could keep an eye on what was going on as we attempted the sit-in. Our timing was off and the sit-in didn’t go as we had planned. We all arrived at different times and minutes too late. The cops were there waiting for us when we arrived and had barred the entrance to the cafeteria. By the time the car I was riding in pulled up, the dignitary from India had been arrested—a short time later, when his identity was discovered, they immediately released him. The rest of us gathered around Reverend King’s station wagon to decide whether or not to try the sit-in again. Finally we agreed to call it off. There was no bail money available for us if we were arrested and five of us were to take part in the graduation exercises on Sunday. So we all piled into Reverend King’s station wagon just as we had on May 28 a year before. However, there were no fresh ketchup and mustard stains to add to the old ones still in the car from last year’s sit-in.

———

The night before, when I was talking to Reverend King, I had become excited over what he told me about the Mississippi Summer Project. I was convinced that it was the best project yet proposed or introduced by the organizations. The Summer Project, which was sponsored by COFO, was a statewide program designed primarily to encourage qualified Negroes to register and vote. However, in addition to the voter registration drive, Freedom Schools and community centers were to be set up to teach courses in remedial reading, government, humanities, and other scholastic and vocational subjects. To assist the Summer Project, COFO was expecting about one thousand college students from all over the country. I was told by Reverend King that many ministers, lawyers, and other skilled persons had already volunteered their services.

Since Reverend King had to drop some of the students off in Jackson, I decided to stop in at the COFO headquarters and see for myself what was going on. When I walked in the office my head began to spin, there were so many people there. And everyone in the place seemed to be doing three things at once. The office was a total mess. Night riders had thrown bricks through the glass window that had previously covered the front of the office. There were fragments of glass littering the sidewalk and the entrance. A shipment of clothes had arrived, but there was nowhere to store them, so they were just left all over the place. Right outside the office, five or six boys were unloading a shipment of books that had just come. The books added to the clothes hardly left standing room. Behind a partition, two old dirty mattresses lay on the floor. This was where two of the new arrivals slept. Typewriters were going at full speed. Mimeograph machines were turning out stencils as soon as they were taken off the typewriters. Five or six telephones were being installed. FBI men were running around all over the place as though they were lost. “So this is the beginning of the Long Hot Summer,” I thought.

According to one of my old Movement friends, white
Mississippians were really preparing for it. The state was in the process of tightening legislative screws to try and outlaw practically all phases of the project. Six new laws had already been enacted in the state legislature, authorizing cities to pool manpower, personnel, and equipment to assist each other in riot control. I learned from my friend that an antiinvasion bill had also been introduced to prohibit entry into the state. Besides all the bills being passed, the state police force had been doubled and armed to the teeth. Among Mississippi Negroes, however, I had never witnessed such anticipation in all my life. It seemed that for once in the history of civil rights work in Mississippi something was actually going to be accomplished. I was so carried away that until Bob Moses came walking through the door, I had almost forgotten that I planned to see him to talk with him about the killings in Woodville. Somehow, with all of the excitement going on about the Summer Project and Bob directing it, I had expected a change in him, but I could see he was still the same quiet, slow-walking, eyeglasses-wearing Bob. I quickly cornered him and we talked for about an hour. He had been well aware of the killings. However, he hadn’t known that my family was involved.

From Bob, I learned that the man who had been killed in Liberty, Mississippi, was Louis Allen. Mr. Allen had witnessed the 1961 slaying of Herbert Lee, a voter registration worker, by E. H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi legislature. Hurst told a grand jury that Lee had threatened him with a tire iron, and Allen, fearing for his life at the time, identified the weapon at the hearing. But when Hurst was freed, Allen signed an affidavit stating that Hurst had killed Lee “without provocation.” After this, Allen’s life was threatened many times and once the sheriff of Liberty beat him up and broke his jaw. Bob said that Allen had asked the Justice Department for protection several times. However, the reply had always been, “We can’t protect every individual Negro in Mississippi.” At last Allen gave up and decided to move to Milwaukee. Less than twelve hours
before his departure, he was struck down in his front yard. Half of his head was blown off by a shotgun blast as he crawled under his truck to escape the assassin. Inside the house, his family heard the shots, but because shots had been heard several times outside the house at night, at first no one bothered to see what had happened. Later, during the night, noticing that the truck lights were still burning, one of Allen’s children went outside and discovered his body. The way Bob sighed after he finished telling me about Allen’s murder, I could detect in him a feeling of guilt, disgust, and helplessness. I also knew he could tell that I, too, felt guilty about my uncle’s death.

Bob’s theory was that the murder of my uncle and the other three persons in Woodville were just “terror killings.” That is, they were murdered to keep Negroes in their place and to keep civil rights workers out of the southwest during the summer. Some people had already been sent into Woodville to try and find out something about the killings but they weren’t able to get the Negroes to talk. Bob said that plans had been made to send civil rights workers in there to work, but they couldn’t find anyone willing to risk putting the workers up. However, the surrounding areas (Natchez, McComb, and Liberty) would be worked during the summer. This way he thought that the attention drawn to the other areas would make it possible to move into Woodville and Centreville later in the year.

After talking to Bob, I was really upset. He only confirmed what I had been thinking—that beyond focusing attention on the area, we, the civil rights organizations, were powerless when it came to trying to do something about the murders. Yet the United States could afford to maintain the Peace Corps to protect and assist the underprivileged of other countries while native-born American citizens were murdered and brutalized daily and nothing was done. “I guess Negroes aren’t even considered human,” I thought. “They’re just shot and butchered like hogs.”

I was so mad after talking to Bob that I walked the three
and a half miles to the Maple Street apartments to see Dave and Mattie Dennis. From Dave I learned that the following day Canton was having a big “Freedom Day.” He said that he would pick me up at eight o’clock the next morning. Then I left and went back to the COFO’s office to try and bum a ride back to Tougaloo. I got back to campus about twelve-thirty that night. I was so tired that I just made it to the bed and fell across it. Then I was dreaming down about being back in Canton and seeing Mrs. Chinn and George and all of the teen-agers again.

On Friday, May 29, 1964, I was again headed for Canton, Mississippi. When Dave drove up in front of the Freedom House, the first person I saw was Mrs. Chinn. I jumped out of the car before it came to a complete stop and ran to her. “Anne! Anne! Anne!” she kept saying as we hugged each other. A minute later, I was hugging Mrs. Devine, then George, and it went on and on from one to the other for about thirty minutes. It was like I had come home to a family that I hadn’t seen in a long time. Actually it was only six months ago that I’d left Canton. As soon as I walked into the Freedom House, I was thrown a magic marker and was asked to help write freedom slogans. Within an hour, we had turned out about three hundred posters.

Mrs. Devine told me that they were expecting about five hundred adults to march. If the adults were not allowed to march, they had about eight hundred high school students ready to demonstrate at the courthouse. It was hard for me to believe that this was the same Canton, Mississippi.

After we talked awhile, Mrs. Devine and I walked down to the church. We got there just as the march started. I stood
in the street and watched as three hundred adults piled out of the church. I just didn’t believe it. I felt like running up to them and touching them to see if they were real.

The entire street was lined with cops. Just about every hick in the county had been deputized. Some of them wore faded-out jeans and guns hanging off their hips like cowboys. The marchers were allowed to go about a block before they were stopped by a barricade of armed policemen, and asked to turn around or they would be arrested. Reverend Cox, a CORE field secretary who was the leader of the march, led the group in a silent prayer and then they all returned to the church.

Just as I watched the first marchers enter, all of a sudden I realized which church they were returning to. It was the church of that big number one Uncle Tom. So, finally he had given in, I thought. I hurried inside myself to see how many of the other big-shot ministers were around. As I walked in, Reverend Cox was leading the adults in “Oh, Freedom.” It was so moving that I forgot about the ministers and joined in the singing. I stood there singing with tears in my eyes as I listened to those old wrinkled-faced adults. Every time I heard them sing, they brought tears to my eyes. Then I knew that there was something to singing, suffering, and Soul.

“All right! Sisters and brothers! I can just listen to y’all sing twenty-four hours a day,” Reverend Cox said. “We are goin’ to
sing our way to freedom yet. Let’s sing a few more verses and decide if we are goin’ to jail or not.”

I went outside to see if the high school students were going to demonstrate at the courthouse. I passed Mrs. Devine on the church lawn and asked her about the teen-agers. “Oh, I’m on my way over to Asbury now to deliver a message,” she said. “Why don’t you go with me? They have lots of kids over there.”

On our way to the church where the teen-agers were, a police car drove up behind us. I spotted my pet cop. The one that wanted to beat me up so bad. The car followed behind us slowly. Mrs. Devine and I acted as though we didn’t even know it was there.

As Mrs. Devine and I walked into the church, the high school students were ending a song. It seemed as though everyone was in a singing mood. Sometimes it seemed that, without the songs, the Negroes didn’t have the courage to move. When I listened to the older Negroes sing, I knew that it was the idea of heaven that kept them going. To them heaven would end their troubles. But listening to the teenagers, I got an entirely different feeling. They felt that the power to change things was in themselves. More so than in God or anything else. Their way of thinking seemed to have been “God helps those that help themselves” instead of “When we get to heaven things will be different, there won’t be no black or white,” which was what my grandmother thought.